Tyche's Crown Read online

  The doctor paused the recording then, turning to Nate. “Do you know what she means?”

  No one spoke for a moment, then Chad said, “There is only one black blade I’ve ever seen. Metal doesn’t come out that color as a general rule.”

  Nate curled his fingers, wanting to reach for that sword because it would be nice to hold onto something solid. He’d left it in other, more capable hands on the Tyche. He didn’t say anything.

  “Interesting that the most powerful tool in a war against the Ezeroc would be given to a fallen member of the Emperor’s Black,” offered Karkoski. “While the Emperor sent off the remains of his military to fight a damn fool war while the rise of a Republic was … imminent. It wasn’t a Republic then. Just a bunch of people who didn’t want to serve under an Emperor they hadn’t voted for.”

  “House Fergelic was good,” said Nate. “Dom was a good man.”

  “Dom and Annemarie were Intelligencers. The first of their kind,” said Karkoski. “Near as we know. And also, near as we know, it flows in all their family. Some a little better than others. But it’s engineered, like green eyes or brown hair or a big nose. All it takes is a little training.”

  Amedea was looking at Nate, her eyes piercing. She looked like she wanted to walk towards him if only she could remember how. “Brother,” she said. “Black metal. Black secret.”

  “Well, hey now,” said Nate. “No. Hey. No. Definitely not.”

  “There are only a few who would know the truth,” said Karkoski. “A few who knew who the bastard brother of the Emperor was. Who was sent away so someone would live as the rest of the House fell.”

  Nate took two steps back, because it was crazy. His legs hit the side of a chair and he fell into it. “Dom was … my friend.”

  “No friend gives a sword that can save the whole human race to an ordinary man,” said Karkoski. “They might give it to their child, or their lover, or … their brother.”

  “My father’s name is Chevell,” said Nate, like it was an excuse.

  “The man who raised you?” said Chad. “Sure. He’s a Chevell.”

  “You’re all crazy,” said Nate.

  “We’d be crazy if there wasn’t proof,” said the doctor.

  “You what?” said Nate.

  “Dominic Fergelic, of House Fergelic, Emperor Prirene IV, was ruler of all humanity. His life was documented down to the last detail,” said the doctor. “Those records are a matter of record. Even his medical records, which show his genetics. We could remake his body tomorrow if we wanted. We also have,” he tapped on his console, shifting the holo of Amedea aside, “your DNA, Captain.” The doctor pulled up two twisting helixes on the holo, a set of coded markers floating between them. “Here.”

  “What am I looking at?” said Nate.

  “Familial match,” said the doctor. “You are related to Dominic Fergelic. Annemarie, too, as it happens. Which is no surprise, since they are brother and sister. You are their half-brother.”

  “I need a beer,” said Nate. He’d never needed a drink more in his life.

  “Yes,” said Karkoski. “It’s a lot to take in. But when the dust has settled, humanity will need a little leadership, Nate.”

  “Hell no,” said Nate.

  She laughed. “Don’t panic. No one person will ever have that power again. But a figurehead? That’s a useful thing, don’t you agree?”

  Nate thought about it for two or three whole seconds, then he stood up. “Fuck all this shit. I’m going to get my girl.”

  “Ah,” said Karkoski. “Now you see why you can’t go, right?”

  “What?”

  “We toyed with the idea about locking you up, Captain. But that wouldn’t work. So, we — Admiral of your Navy, and Chad here, head of your Intelligencers — figured we’d just lock your ship to the side of the Torrington. To stop you dying. To save humanity. How does that sound?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SHE COULD NEVER remember being so thirsty.

  She couldn’t remember her name.

  Darkness. Not total darkness, not the smothering of the womb, but close to it. A low, ruddy glow infused the room around her. Everything looked like it had been soaked in blood and left to dry, the wind chapping at it until it became close to black. Close to dead.

  So very thirsty.

  Across from her was a man. He looked familiar, and she knew she had been on a voyage with him. A comrade, at her side, to help her through. She couldn’t remember his name either. The man was awake, his eyes open, swiveling in their sockets, roaming, glinting in the red light. She thought he looked—

  Pain/terror/run/trapped/run/fear.

  —scared, frightened of something he’d seen, or experienced. Or perhaps something that had not yet come to pass. The man was encased around his arms and legs and a part of his torso in a chunky material, something that looked like globs of resin or fat or growing tumors. She was sure that wasn’t what had made him so frightened though. On top of his head was a thing that looked like a spider, an oversized daddy longlegs, with a wide, thin body and legs like needles. They were so thin they were hard to see in the red light. It was poised over the man’s head, those thin, terrible legs holding it upright.

  Even that wouldn’t be the thing that would make this man scared. She was sure he’d faced down horrors before. This man had done things that would make normal people run screaming. No, a spider on his face wasn’t the thing that made him scared. It was that the top of his skull was gone, his brain visible to her in the low light, and the spider was walking over the spongey material. Inserting a long limb here, another there. There was a halo of blood around his skull where the bone had been removed. There was no sign of the missing part of his skull, no pile of hair and bone on the ground, just … nothing. Half his head was gone, and he wasn’t getting it back.

  It had been eaten by something, she was sure of it. She wasn’t sure what, though.

  That was what made him scared: that he was being analyzed, taken apart, and that there didn’t look to be a way back from it. With a good med bay—

  A starship. You know the smiling face of luck.

  —and enough time, you could grow a man’s head back, or put a metal plate over the top. Here, in the—

  Hard black. An asteroid. A ship made of stones.

  —place they were, there was no chance he would make it. They didn’t even have a helmet between them. There was no escape. No, he was a lab animal, and they’d work on his body until there was nothing left. She didn’t know why they started with his brain. Was it a mercy? End the person and then start on the meat?

  He was a … friend of someone she knew, someone dear to her.

  Why couldn’t she remember?

  Just a drink of water. Her throat felt like it was made of sand.

  She wanted to shake her head to clear it, but she couldn’t move. Her face was held by something that felt like rock, if rock could flex a little. Porous. Fibrous. Sticky. She made to lick her lips, but her tongue was swollen. Dry. Like thick paper in her mouth.

  The man across from her spoke, his voice a rasp. “It’ll be okay.” He said it in a way that said he didn’t believe it, but he wanted her to.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “I don’t remember,” he said. His face jerked in a spasm as the spiderling probed his brain with a limb. She’d heard somewhere the brain had few actual pain receptors in it. It might not hurt much. But having your brain probed with a needle? It was bound to leave an impression. “I … who are you?”

  “I don’t remember either,” she said. Then, because it felt like a favor she needed to return, she said, “It’ll be okay.”

  “Not for me,” he said. The spiderling's leg dipped in again, and he said, “Giraffe! He sings, but it is stone.”

  “They’re … pulling us apart,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re pulling me apart. You, I think. I think. They have. Something different. A plan.”

>   “I’m thirsty,” she admitted.

  “I’m dying,” he agreed. “They have a test.”

  “What is it?”

  “You must free me,” he said. “I don’t understand.” The leg dipped into his brain again, and he coughed, almost a squawk. “With your mind. Do you know your mind?”

  “I don’t know my name,” she said. “How can I know my mind?”

  “If you free me with your mind, we can both go home,” he said. “They want you to touch the resin around my arms. Tear it off.”

  She struggled against her bonds for a moment. “I … can’t get loose. I can’t get to you.”

  “With your mind,” he said. “Your mind is … stronger than your body. Faster. You do instinctively what the rest must concentrate to manage. They promised. If you do this, we both live.”

  Why couldn’t she remember her name?

  • • •

  Darkness. Low, red light bathing every surface around her.

  She had slept, and now she was awake. Just like that. She could remember a scent, like an animal, like coffee. It made her hungry. It made her sick.

  Oh, God, just one drop of water. Just one. She would say anything for a drink. A tiny sip. She would even take dirty water, foul, warm, muddy. It could taste of piss, it could be mixed with bile. A thimbleful is all she needed.

  Please.

  The man across from her was dead. She was sure of it, his sightless eyes no longer roaming the room. Much of his brain was missing, his head lolling forward on a neck gone slack. The interior of his head was being emptied by small insects that looked like ants. They were ferrying pieces of brain up towards a hole in the roof. A little piece here, snipped out, and then carried up.

  She could feel something on her head. A long, thin leg passed in front of her vision for a moment, so quick she figured she’d imagined it. Or hoped she’d imagined it, because the alternative was sitting on the other side of the room. A man, his head torn open, his brain removed. Dead.

  This wasn’t the manner she’d chosen for her own death. She was sure of it.

  A long-limbed spiderling crawled down from the roof towards the corpse across from her. It bunched those long limbs around itself as it cozied into the now empty brain cavity of the man. It probed deep with those thin legs, and the body jerked a few times. Then the head rose, eyes still sightless, but the mouth opened and closed. The chest expanded as it sucked in some air. Then it spoke. The voice it used was familiar, but the tone was wrong. The man was gone, replaced by a monster. “The second test. Speak.”

  “What have you done with him?”

  “Using your mind,” the body said. “Your lips are the vehicle of a dumb animal. Your mind is pure.” The chest worked again, breathing out, breathing in. A gross approximation of life.

  “You…” she searched her memory. “Assholes?”

  “If you. Animal. If you talk like one. Treat you like one.” The lips quivered on the face, drool escaping, red with the light or blood or both. “The others like you. For them it is hard. What you do. Easy. We fix the rest. Make you better. Speak. Your mind. Use it.”

  She felt like it wanted something she couldn’t do. That she’d never been able to do. She wasn’t sure how she could do a thing that was impossible. It was like … what? Like trying to climb a tree if you were a fish. With a lot of time, and technology, you could make a fish tank with mechanical legs, or wings, but she was stuck to a wall by resin and with the only other human within—

  You traveled across a vast sea of space to get here. Hundreds of light years.

  —a very long distance dead, she felt like she was out of options to make better fish tanks.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I know what you mean, but … I’ve never been able to.”

  Just like the mongrel you are, said her father. Even when your life depends on it.

  “Not now, Dad,” she said. How did she know it was her father when she couldn’t even remember her name? Was her father alive or dead? Was this a dream or something else?

  The body across from her twitched again. “Together. Must be. We begin.”

  “Begin what?” she said, then felt those tiny points of legs against her skull. At least she still had a skull. Right?

  The pain, when the sawing started, made her scream, and scream, and scream.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “WHY’S MY SHIP on lockdown?” said El, arms crossed, expression tired and pissed off at the same time.

  Nate considered the question. A fair one. Where to start? They were in the ready room on the Tyche, the ship getting emptier by the moment. His girl — his saving Grace — was gone, taken from under his nose by a bunch of twice-damned insects. His deckhand, October Kohl, had gone down, out for the count, because he’d taken shrapnel through his spine. Kohl had managed to save Grace. Nate hadn’t even made it that far, just standing on the wrong side of a door with a worthless plasma cannon.

  “It’s not your ship,” said Hope, looking down. She looked threadbare. She’d been working harder than any of them, what with pulling data out of Station Echo 9’s memory crystals, and the special project Nate had given to her. “It’s not my ship either.”

  “You’re saying it’s his ship?” said El.

  “It’s our ship,” said Hope. “Our Tyche.”

  There was a moment of silence, then El said, “I can live with that.”

  “So, there’s been a few developments,” said Nate. “What we’ve got here is a basic clusterfuck.”

  “Walks like a duck, talks like a duck,” agreed El.

  “There’s … a few things I’m having trouble processing, but it’ll be great if I could just lay ‘em out for you before you interrupt with a bunch of questions I can’t answer,” said Nate. “Okay?”

  “You’re the captain,” said El, meaning, I’m curious now.

  “I met with Karkoski and Chad,” said Nate.

  “How are they?” said Hope.

  “Interruptions,” said Nate.

  “Sorry.”

  “So, so. Karkoski. Uh, Chad,” said Nate. “The thing is. Uh…”

  “This story going to take a long time?” said El. “Only, we’ve got a crew member out on the edge of space we need to be getting to.”

  “Yeah,” said Nate. “Karkoski has this wild theory. Crazy, okay? She says I’m the bastard half-brother of the Emperor Dominic Fergelic. She said they had proof, which they showed me, and I didn’t understand half of it, or even a little bit of it, but that’s not important.”

  “It seems important,” said El, leaning forward, frame stiffened with surprise.

  “It kinda is,” said Hope.

  “The important part is that they want to make me some kind of figurehead for a new Empire. After the smoke has settled. Nice banquets, I guess, a bunch of meetings with people. Kissing babies, opening new space ports by cutting a ribbon. You know the drill. The net effect of this is that they do not want me, and they were specific on this particular point, to go racing off across the galaxy to rescue one of my crew.”

  “They offer an alternative suggestion about how we get Grace back?” said El.

  “They did not,” said Nate. “I’m kinda surprised you’re not more taken aback by the whole related-to-the-Emperor thing.”

  “So, what are we going to do?” said Hope. Meaning, of course, about Grace.

  “We’re going anyway,” said Nate.

  “Good,” said Hope.

  “Ship’s still on lockdown,” said El.

  “Yeah, well, about that,” said Nate. “I think we need to solve that particular problem.”

  “You’re the Emperor?” said El.

  “What? No!”

  “Good,” she said, “because I can barely get around calling you, ‘Captain.’ ‘My Lord,’ or, hell, even, ‘sir, will be a reach.”

  “Thanks for your support,” said Nate.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Here’s what we’re goin
g to do,” said Nate.

  • • •

  When he and El made the med bay, they were met by a contingent of Marines. Five strong, tough looking men and women wearing armor and hard stares. Nate was flattered. Five Marines. For little ol’ me. “You fellas weren’t here before,” said Nate.

  Not a muscle twitched. No one moved. Which meant no hands on blasters.

  “I figure you’re here to stop me extracting October Kohl,” said Nate.

  “Sir,” said one. “Yes, sir.”

  “Carry on then,” said Nate, to the surprise of the Marine.

  “We brought the man chocolate,” said El, holding up a box. They’d procured it from the Torrington’s commissary. “That okay?”

  The Marine who’d spoken moved aside. “Go ahead.”

  They moved on by the Marines, navigating towards Kohl’s bed. Kohl was awake, eyes bleary. “Cap,” he said. “El.”

  Nate pulled up a chair next to Kohl. “I need to bring you up to speed,” he said.

  “What’s in the box?” said Kohl.

  “Chocolate,” said El.

  “Great,” said Kohl. “Hospital food sucks balls.”

  “Before we get to the chocolate, we’ve got ourselves a bit of a thing,” said Nate. “Short version or long?”

  “Never been much for the long version.”

  “Turns out I’m the half-brother of the dead Emperor. We’re being held in … protective custody on the Torrington. Grace is out in space somewhere and we need to go get her.”

  “You’re the fucking emperor?” said Kohl. “That figures.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Natural at givin’ orders, is all,” said Kohl, in a way that suggested it wasn’t all. “So what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to get Grace.”

  “Fucken A,” said Kohl. “You know I’m in, like, the hospital?”

  “Yes,” said Nate.