A Sword Cuts

© 1994 Stephen Hunt (UK)

Print this one out? Approx 25 pages of A4 text

Imagine a world.

 Paint it an ash gray, as dead as the bones of a beached whale, and trace her a sickly orbit around a no-star just as murdered.

 A stillborn sun and a sepulchral graveyard of worlds, a necklace of skeletons spinning to the distant song of a pulsar dirge.

 Imagine Nivias.

"Imagine that," the guardsman said, shifting the weight of his shoulder slung puncher. "Rekliss walked into the Palatine's hall and there they were, bold as brass and giving him the eye. Five of them, dressed as neat as a line of The Machine's own; nothing at all like the ones Rekliss had to grow up with."

 Roco's companion slowed by the dome's window, staring out at the ossified forest, a brittle carpet of petrified trees which stretched as far as the Mountains of Dust on the distant horizon line.

 "Annoyed, was he?"

 "Annoyed?" The armsman said. "Rekliss was hopping like he'd do for the lot of them. And he would have too, if the Palatine's Third-shiny hadn't been there, punchers at the ready and fixing to shoot someone. You know the shiny, they don't give a rat's piss who, just as long as they get to put a few holes in something. Sliders or Rekliss, it was a close call and that's the truth."

 His companion started to move down the corridor again. "They wouldn't have done for him. Not Rekliss. Nobody can do for him. Crooners make songs about Rekliss in places he's never even going to visit. A few of the Lord's shiny would just be breakfast to a man like that, and the Sliders should know what they've got coming from him by now.

 "You know what the sarge said? About how Rekliss seems to glow sometimes. Said Rekliss gets dreams from The Machine itself, talking to him just as fine as a duty pass; tells Rekliss where he's got to take his boys."

 "Dreams," the soldier laughed. "My old gran says she has seeings from the Machine, and it tells her where to go shopping on market day."

 "Think how the - "

 Both armsman stumbled to a halt. Ahead, under the shadows left by the intermittently placed light-tubes, a barely visible huddle of rags lay against a rusty steel wall.

 "Top level," the soldier said, swinging the weight of his puncher level with the corridor. "Luck of the cursed, we're on the damn top level, aren't we?"

 "Shut it down, just shut it down" whispered the other guardsmen. "I can't see a thing along there. Check it out, anything moves I'll burn it fit to bloody black."

 Moving towards the bundle, the soldier pulled his rifle in tight as he mouthed a desperate prayer. "I walk in the Machine's light, its logic is my shield, its devotion is my strength, its - "

"Lord's sake, shut it down," said his comrade. "I want to bloody listen."

 He moaned. "It is. It's another one, look at it. There is something up here with us. We're on the top level."

 By the armsman's boots a crumpled body hugged the floor, arms spread out like the corpse had been trying to flap its hands in a mad attempt to fly.

 "Where's his head gone?" the soldier shouted. "He should have a head, everybody should have a he - "

 He turned around. He was alone, the heavy silence interrupted only by the rhythmic hiss of an air cycler back down the passage.

On the floor sat the other soldier's knife, laid out with perfect precision as if waiting a kit inspection, standard armsman issue save its wicked serrated edge. The voice came drifting back to him. 'You could take a man's heart with a blade like this, you could.'

 Crying out in rage he swirled around, sending a magnetic ram-field burning down the passage. He turned his puncher in the opposite direction and the rifle kicked again and again, packets of energy slamming into the corner-turn at the end of the corridor.

 Drawn by the scream of the echoing bursts, a squad of gray uniformed guards double-timed their way through the labyrinth of Nivias City's surface level.

 They found the soldier's rifle fused on the floor grating - the perfect symmetry of its angle marred only by its burning energy magazine, an orange gas cloud with the stench of bad eggs smouldering into the shadows.

 Of the armsmen there was no sign.

The stained glass window spilled hot yellow light out into the dead void of Nivias space, distant stars crawling past as a man-made kraken swam her way through the long night. On the other side of the super-tensile glass a group of green uniformed fleet-men had gathered, steely figures decked in emerald green.

 More wiry than the rest, one of the crew was bridling from the stiletto sharp slights of his rat-faced colleague.

 "I say, that's a very fine pelt cloak you do have there friend." He tipped a knowing look to the others. "Perhaps we should check with the galley after the briefing. They may be missing some of their best mousers."

 The target of the group's sarcasm made to move forward, his grey eyes glittering with a temper that should have warned his tormentors they had overstepped an unspoken mark.

 Dé Sparta felt a restraining hand grip his shoulder. Turning he found himself facing the heavy bulk of K'an. "By tradition such matters are settled on land-leave," K'an told Dé Sparta. "Leaving the Gloriana an officer short during operations has a tendency to leave the perpetrator responsible dancing ugly from the noose."

 K'an's tone was as calm and controlled as the casual violence he and his fighters could inflict with such devastating effect. Before morning duty Dé Sparta often found time to climb down to the training chambers to watch K'an and his brother-sergeants lead the Vacuum Devils in their slow, graceful dance-like forms of movement.

 With a hypnotic grace which belied its violent nature, the ship's Commando would practice with cutlass or empty hand, using the soft flowing moves of an ancient art devised specifically for low gravity environments.

 Called Pa Kuais, it enabled its practitioners to grapple in the confined corridors of a Slider boat with the same ease they married the reaction of a puncher fired in vacuum to twist in to a sudden strike.

 Like K'an and many of the Gloriana's other Vacuum Devils, the art had had been born in the worlds on the eastern reach of the Humanitum. Arid systems home to solemn peoples - pallid and narrow eyed, fighters that practiced a fiercely unyielding worship of The Machine.

 When not honing these supple, fluid killing strikes, the Gloriana's soldiers could be found in the ship's chapel towers, silently practicing techniques said to have been passed to their predecessors by The Machine, mental forms which helped warriors concentrate their vital energy, producing extraordinary feats of strength and resistance.

 It was their enemies who named the Gloriana's Commandoes the Vacuum Devils. It had been the warriors themselves who adopted that name as their own, stealing it with the same pride they used when stripping a Slider of some biological war trophy.

 Dé Sparta stepped back, but the anger in his eyes told K'an that land-leave wouldn't come soon enough for the new officer.

 "The entire crew is on edge," K'an explained, by way of making peace. "The system we're approaching has no sun, and there's too many on board who believe that to be an ill omen; an extremely old superstition among fleet-men.

 "It makes it worse that many on the Gloriana are from my system - there we write the script for light and The Machine the same. They believe The Machine's presence will not touch them if they have to fight here."

 Dé Sparta shook his head. "How can we visit a land where there is no sun, how do the people see to travel there?"

 "They carry their own light," K'an said. "As do we. One of the scientechs told me there was a sun here once, long ago. But it was going to explode, so the inhabitants cooled it down, and before it died they moved their cities underground, stealing the sun to take with them under their land. She said this occurred even before the coming of the Humanitum."

 "An interesting enough tale," Dé Sparta said. "But we will be shielded from misfortune - my uniform's cloak is cut from the fur of a Diablo-cat, and their eyes shine like jewels at night. To take one is to be protected in the long dark."

 K'an grunted.

 "They are incredibly difficult to kill, I had to stalk this one for a week," Dé Sparta added.

 "I have no doubt. But here such items mark a man as different. The fleet takes people from all over the Humanitum, many places. But the ones that come from the hi-tec tend to look arrogantly on those from our lands."

 "People like your friend over there possess none of what my people know as shi: moving to the cycle of creation. Men like that can only shudder through life, in violent jolts."

 Dé Sparta pushed the orange pelt back over his shoulder. "I had noticed in the mess that many of the Commando seem overtly fond of their grand titles. There must be a great deal of imagination used in their worlds, to have crafted so many fine names."

 K'an laughed. "No accident. Men do not always come here purely to serve, or from any sense of tradition. But because it often makes for less trouble to pack off the young cubs before they start growing antlers to clash.  

 "Too many royal sons at home brooding over their misfortune in not being first-born can make for damn ugly wars. With us they will learn what it is to serve The Machine, and who knows, they may come back wiser too, though that's probably too much to hope for."

 "I hadn't considered that," Dé Sparta said. "You know I had a great many cousins, and my family were bond-high for all the territory from Hykr's seas to Kord; almost as much as the King himself."

 "It is of no consequence," said K'an. "Such thoughts are as the breeze. With the fleet a farmer's son is bound to the same circle as the prince's nephew. My old master at the Hokkaido temple had a saying: it is one hand that washes the other."

 "There's many wonders on the Gloriana. But sometimes I just wish I was worldward, trailing Diablo-cats and tumbling sea cotter's maids."

 Dé Sparta placed his hand on his cutlass, wishing it was the familiar weight of an armsman's dirk, something else he'd abandoned when he took The Machine's oath of service. "But there's still honour."

 "Ha," the Vacuum Devil roared. "Yes there is still that. You see, understanding that you hold more knowledge than all the hi-tec. Do you know what it means to be highborn in your friend's hi-tec land? We visited it once. Skulking around sunless ant-hills, hiding in dirty streets with punchers drawn, plotting with lowlife street braves just to keep their toilets going and the lights running in a city-mountain where they have to build on their ancestors dinner remains. They don't breed Commandoes there, they raise sewer rats.

 "Not that they can't hold their own in a tumble. But if the Gloriana ever makes land-leave at your home think twice before introducing him to any of your sisters."

Inside the briefing centre the Gloriana's fleet-officers sat in circles, thronging a darkened amphitheatre that could easily have been a gladiator's pit had it not been for the projector floating off the floor.

 "Officer on deck."

 The company rose to their feet as the Gloriana's first officer entered the dimly lit room - hawk nose jutting out of a pinched patrician face, hard in the half-light - tight eyes sweeping the assemblage.

 "Here is the situation," Lash said, brushing formality aside. He pointed towards the iron orb and the system locality coalesced into view. "For the last eighty-seven years there have been papers of treaty drawn up between the Humanitum and the Slider state of Slytrack.

 "This has met policy because Slytrack has been acting as a buffer towards the more hostile Slider nations to the periphery, while Slytrack's primes have used the cease-fire to consolidate their own previously tenuous hold against a swarm of far larger rivals.

 "This pax has been no easy matter though, with Slytrack turning a blind eye to raiders crossing their space, and naturally our own border systems have been issuing letters of marque, ostensibly to recover losses suffered."

 There were a few rough laughs from the audience.

 Lash nodded. "The fact remains no significant Slider warfleet has since crossed Slytrack. Ships that three hundred years ago were tied down protecting this sector are now free. Free to face the Humanitum's newest enemy."

 "The Shimmer," spat a crewman, using slang for the strange entity which was pushing against the Humanitum's spinward possessions.

 Lash continued. "Here is the world which is causing most the current difficulties, Nivias. Her Governance prince has been at the forefront of the wave of privateers plaguing this sector. He's taken to issuing letters of marque as if they were local baronies for his cronies. All actions we take will be hampered by the fact the Humanitum declared Nivias an open system when the pax was signed in their system. You will note they have missed few opportunities to flaunt their autonomy.

 "Beside the fact Nivias' bully-boys have been making free with merchants - extracting tithes of passage and the like - the Slytrack Prime is now on her death-bed, with her Slider warrior caste ready to treat any further Humanitum raiders as mercenaries and a pretext for invasion. We can not afford this sector to fall into anarchy, we can't afford the squadrons that would need to be detached."

 "So we're off to molly-coddle a swarm of Sliders," said a Petty Officer.

"It sits no easier with me," Lash grinned. "But Nivias has been overstepping the mark. Their hire-ships are reportedly the worst scum to slide stellar this side of Sol. If they're going to make it easy for us by huddling in one system, by damn we're not going to miss the opportunity to fly the Imperial."

"We have been charged to convince Lord Nivias of the error of his ways. Our very arrival should be enough to make most his hire-scum seek employment elsewhere. And when Nivias retracts his license from the rogues, we'll chase out any free companies that haven't had the sense to slink away into the night. All specific orders for the operation are to be issued by the master-at-duty."

From the duty chart Dé Sparta saw that accompanying him down to the surface would be the Gloriana's aging bull-necked archive officer, Ballard, a figure feared and held in reverence in equal measures by the crew.  

 Feared for the best of all reasons, because he had once belonged to the terrible body of The Machine's proctors. Now old age had retired the dour flatlander, although many whispered he'd been forced to resign from his position for reasons no-one would voice.  

 Held in reverence because he was the Gloriana's own living icon. An insurance against the scuttlebutt which surfaced on fleet worlds, tales of ship's crew infiltrated in the terrifying insanity of the Tzone or corrupted by the strangeness of alien worlds and artifacts. Stories of crews hunted down one-by-one in their own ships by colleagues possessed.

 With Ballard on the ship, one of the few among the Humanitum's countless trillions to have gazed upon The Machine, the crew reasoned the products of their nightmares would think twice before daring to enter the Gloriana.

Haunted by the wraith-like shadows of over thirty generations of Lord-Captain, the Gloriana's bridge was a solemn echoing space. The Gloriana's current Lord-Captain seemed nearly a phantom herself, silver haired and white of face, she hadn't taken land-leave for more than forty years.

 "Trim for battle, Mister Lash," ordered Lady Citroen-nissan from the command throne. "Open system or not, no ship of the Humanitum will lay orbital with these jackals, not without our claws in sight."

High on a walkway the first officer pulled down a box and sounded three peals, the scream echoing down the volumous halls outside the bridge. "All hands rig for war, all hands rig for war. Officers check your stations."

With the call to arms still vibrating across the cathedral-like spaces of the Gloriana, an array of new sounds chased the alarm: a clatter of running feet; small arms clinking off wooden bunk posts; the whine of puncher mounts cycling into firing position; a sibilant hiss as plasma lava-flows bubbled through kilometres of drive ducts.

 Snatching at helmets, armoured figures slid down their ladders, easing themselves behind the muzzles of titanic cannons, barrels pitted from the scouring solar winds' detris.

 To the ship's rear, midshipmen scurried across a kilt-work pattern of platforms in their drive room - the fiery valley of machinery leant a hellish cast by smoke misting off two-thousand reactor coolants, every steel monster easily as big as the sleepy farm silos the crew had left behind in another life. Across this satanic landscape gangs rolled drum-like crystallite fuses into their burnout clips, sweating furiously in their green uniforms.  

 From the galley-rats locking down the Captain's jewelled plates to the Watch Tower crew, their faces made demonic by hologram light, the smooth cogs of one of the Humanitum's huge metal meteors of war were sliding into place.

 Against the muted crackle of the central power well far below decks, steady voices broke the silence that had settled across the bridge.

 "Master of the Battery - port guns aye."

 "Master of the Battery - starboard guns aye."

 "Officer of the Rail-room - tubes standing clear."

 "Chief of Thrusters - plasma reaction aye."

 "Officer of the Shield - screens ready to lift aye."

 Lash turned smartly and saluted his captain. "The Gloriana stands ready for war, my lady."

 She didn't bother rebuking Lash for his failure to address her by crew title. She knew what the inhabitants of her miniature world thought, crewed in the main from Gloriniax Tau and it's surrounding worlds.

 My liege-lady first and foremost.

 Every shipman and woman in the fleet was conditioned to die for their captain, to sacrifice themselves for The Machine and the Humanitum without a thought. What the first officer meant was they hadn't need the neural rewrite. For them it would always be a matter of course. Blood honour.

 Lady Citroen-nissan ran her leathery fingers along the command throne. "Check for any stupid enough to be registered and reckless enough to be flying colours the same."

 A cadet whose station was linked with the Watchtower called out the list of hostiles, starting with the minnow-like unknowns and saving the largest known vessels till last: "I read, that is I have The Black Mandy and The Dark Viking."

 A hush filtered out along the bridge.

 "Who else," said Lady Citroen-Nissan. "So we have some legends in orbit. The worst and the best of scum."

 The bridge crew gazed on the twin holos filling the central dome, wondering at the nature of their foe. The Dark Viking had written its own chapter in fleet legend. Captain Rekliss, who had been bonded as a child and grew into brutal manhood as a drive room rat on a Slider warliner. Rekliss with the hatred that a whole planet of ice wouldn't burn out, he escaped his captors only after murdering the Slider shipmaster, then clawed his way back to the world and Humanitum Lord who'd sold his parents and a thousand other families into hell.

 That Lord's future - drastically shortened by Rekliss's homecoming - became a mere footnote in the history of the charismatic, darling of the Humanitum who was to emerge. One who mysteriously disappeared with his cruiser during the last Slider campaign.  

 Vanished when peace broke out; they thought him lost in the Tzone, until rumours started carrying back to the dusty heart of the Humanitum. Slider traders floating stripped in space, warliners drifting dead in the vacuum. Rekliss in the violent heart of Slider space; raiding and killing, bringing his own personal war to an enemy that had once been human itself.

 Technically a deserter with a price on his head, more than one Humanitum man of war had developed scanner problems when The Dark Viking was spotted edging her way out of a client system.

 While Rekliss's ship hung above Nivias like a golden crown, proud and hard, stained glass windows large as training grounds and glittering in the colourful mosaics of past conflict, the other vessel caught in the Gloriana's holo-dome was silhouetted dark against Nivias.

Bloated and pitted, it twisted slowly, the strange geometry of the Black Mandy's lines lending the craft an ominous, huddled appearance - a scorpion with her sting drawn back. No ship from the forge stations of Neptune.

 No ship from any world touched by the logic of The Machine. Yet one manned - at least in part - by men, and led by one who was said to be human, if a mere DNA spiral defines a human spirit. Cold Jaque, Harlianstair to the Sliders - the Night that Moves.

 Like his ship, where Cold Jaque came from was a matter of speculation and where he was going was a matter of survival - at least for the locals laying in his path.

The fleet's Dolphins had given up the use of their coral-based Tarot in trying to second-guess the Black Mandy's position. Not through impatience or lack of talent, for those of the powerful Cetacean Kingdoms moved to the strange beat of Tzone-time and by any measure were masters of their craft.

 But because there was a far simpler way.

 'Take any sector,' said a Humanitum Dietman during a public banquet. 'Then take the vilest of its worlds, find a conflict which has lasted for a dozen generations and involves every atrocity known to man with it's cause stemming from every perversion that isn't. There you will discover Cold Jaque.'

 The Imperium Departax Governance took him at his word, and they hadn't come up short for taking the advice.

 The irony was the Black Mandy has never even been officially cited for piracy. She spun across the outer hub of the Humanitum's stellar mass, from civil war to feud raid to local coup d'etat, from one semi-legal local commission to the next. And ships just had a habit of vanishing in her wake.

The Gloriana's gig was a converted small troop-unit lander, so she still held space a-plenty for the complement of Vacuum Devils Lash was taking along. Nivias's Lord should have been wise enough to know that lying under the guns of a ship of the Line was not the safest place in the Humanitum to be; but when they were going to twist the arm of a man who was used to having life and death authority over an entire world - all the universe as far as most its inhabitants are concerned - it never hurt to bring down a little personal reminder of The Machine's might.

With thrusters burning, the comparatively tiny gig exited the hulking particle-pitted mass of the Gloriana and fell towards the ash gray surface of Nivias.

 Dé Sparta wondered why the ride down was so smooth now. When he had first left his home the drops of the tiny but magical ships of space were terrifying affairs. Shaking and slamming in the air, with the air growing unbearably hot, the sight of the ground shooting towards the ship like a mad dream of falling. Of course with Nivias's atmosphere long since bled away, the gig had no trouble sliding towards the docking lights of Nivias's only city.

 Of Nivias City, all that was visible of the construct were the few lights dotted across the barren plain they were cruising over. After all the strangeness Dé Sparta had been subjected to since leaving the simplicity of home, he'd thought he might be growing immune to the causally miraculous. He'd glimpsed Capital ships floating alongside the Gloriana in high-dock, the men-of-war eclipsing small moons, titanium griffins carved in their side leering across the black emptiness the fleet swam through. He'd taken land-leave on worlds where local armsmen rode insects that sung brutal war songs, seen Barons make bestial genetically altered tigers their allies on a planet called Calcutar.

 But to see mankind daring fate by living in such a dead inhospitable place, what manner of people could possibly made their home on Nivias and remain sane?

 When the gig had swung around to scrape a landing on the City's main platform, the iron floor shuddered and started to lower itself down into the black heart of Nivias. Once retracted, two doors cycled shut overhead with a grinding clang and the four columns supporting the platform vibrated to a slow stop.

 Warm air pumped into the vacuum and spotlights clashed into life overhead, illuminating the grimy chamber the ship had been drawn into. From the gig's port window Dé Sparta looked on as the Lord of Nivias's guardsmen filed in with wide high-sweeping steps, a line either side of the lander, their bronze breast-plates gleaming under the arc-lights.

 "Fire and Earth," one of the Devil's called. "It's an army out there."

 Lash looked out the nearest port. More guardsmen were marching into the landing chamber without sign of let, a sea of shining armour enveloping the Gloriana's gig. "By damn they're trying to intimidate us. The Machine's own Commando and they're trying to intimidate us!"

 At last, with the chamber full to bursting point, the tide of men stopped, a party of dignitaries walked in to halt at the stand where the gig's ramp would fall.

 Lash turned to his Vacuum Devil sergeant, anger smouldering in his eyes. "You know I don't approve of your warrior's heathen ways."

 K'an smiled and snapped a salute, understanding the first officer's meaning. "Yes sir."

 Spouting a hissing head of steam the Imperial gig lowered her boarding ramp across the official's stand. There was a moment of silence followed by complete still. On the stand officials exchanged nervous glances. Why was nobody coming out? They waited for a minute, the purple jacketed man at the head - obviously the congregation's leader - tapping his foot in annoyance. Had the Gloriana no more manners than to send a drone down first?

 Then suddenly the Vacuum Devils started to come down the ramp in two lines. They marched using a slow stamping gait, humming an eery high-pitched tune - the noise seeming to drift in and out of audible focus. Not being in Humanitum Lingua, only an inhabitant of the Vacuum Devil's native world would have recognised the words as a honour song. Some of the guardsmen shifted nervously, the alien noise seeming to cut straight into their consciousness.

 At the top of the ramp Dé Sparta followed Lash down with the Gloriana's scientech archiver, Ballard, slowing before they exited to explain: "They're singing at a special pitch which sets human nerves on edge, like a Oronto tree snake uses sound to paralyse birds. Just ignore it and remember they're on your side."

Dé Sparta nodded and kept on going, the sound a drill thrumming into the side of his head.

 Below, a purple jacketed official stepped forward and bowed to Lash, stopping two inches short of the height required to a visiting Humanitum Official. A calculated insult. "I am Proko, chancellor of the High Palatine Nivias, first of all Nivias, and I give his most cordial greetings to you. This is indeed a weighty honour for the people of our land.

 "It is seems far too infrequent an affair these days that we have opportunity to entertain one of the mighty ships of the line. But with so many Sliders nearby I expect such caution forms a valuable part of the policies that come out of the core."

 With a measured salute Lash ignored the chancellor's barbs. "First officer Lash of the most Humanitum battleship Gloriana, on special directive from the admiralty board. I would ask to speak to the Palatine at his earliest possible convenience."

"Convenience, yes," chancellor Proko nodded. "So it is the Gloriana that lays above us. An interesting choice on the part of the Humanitum, for what must be a delicate mission. Tell me is your Lord-captain still the same?"

 At this Lash's chisel-featured face went red, hand tightening on the hilt of his cutlass. A second passed and his eyes cleared of fury. " My men will be about their business."

 Proko smiled. "Yes of course, I will take you and your officers to your quarters."

 Behind the Vacuum Devils Dé Sparta lent close to the ship's librarian. "Why did the the First let the Palatine's man fluster him? It didn't seem anything."

 "With courtiers words are used like daggers, not one of your bloody great long-dirks."

 "What he was referring to," the poe-faced K'an explained, "is the Lady Citroen-Nissan's captaincy. There is a religion on Gloriniax Tau which worships the ruling family there as a form of god-head. When she was younger the church leadership fell under militant control and Lady Citroen-Nissan accepted the fleet as voluntary exile, rather than betray her oath to The Machine, or risk being made a pawn and have the real church smash her home trying to crush the heresy."

 Ballard shook his head. "Best not to mention that around Lash or any other of the high officers. They were mostly her men in that land, and the matter prickles still."

 "Proko is a fool," said K'an. "If Lash wasn't here on charge of the fleet he'd have split the chancellor in half for mocking the Lady's loyalty to The Machine."

 Ballard looked at the Palatine's men left behind in the chamber. "You forget they are used to their independence in the Felloe systems, they have grown brittle and sullen living under the shadow of the unknown.

 "Speak to any of the locals here, they see us as fops who amble by every ten years or so to impose the latest Humanitum policies, then disappear into the safe centre while they remain to stare nose-to-knife with the Slider border swarms.  

 "Surviving out here breeds an easy arrogance in people, did you see in the mission crystals what the local name for this place is?"

 Dé Sparta paused a moment. "Nivias Tan Tander Sort."

 "A corruption of the language they spoke in this area of the far night, during the collapse," noted the scientech. "It literally means balancing on the abyss. And they have been balancing out here for such a very long time. People on Nivias and many of the Felloe Landers - all the Humanitum's outer worlds - have taken to believing being here is sacrifice enough. Without feeling the core's hand too frequently."

 K'an looked with disgust at the white faced armsman lining the entrance corridor. "There's no such thing as sacrifice, except in a weakling's imagination. There is opportunity to serve The Machine, and the person who overlooks it robs themself. Would you call the sun's light sacrifice?"

 Ballard pointed sadly out of a dome window. "Yes, but where is the sun for Nivias?"

"It has been a long time since a ship has visited," Palatine Nivias said, his gaze wondering across his council chamber's copper fountain, a spout of water being sucked hypnotically back into the mouth of a water mammal - the creature extinct long before Nivias's sun boiled into nothingness. "Will they bring me gifts, do you think?"

 Chancellor Proko slipped forward and put his hand on the Palatine's throne, its hard surface abandoned as royal support in favour of a heavily cushioned ladder-back sitting to the left of the official seat. "They will bring instructions your majesty. They will bring orders to lay down and let the Sliders wash blood over our people."

 "I like wine," said Lord Nivias. "Not that slop your farms grow. Real grapes grown in real soil under a good sun. We see so few traders these days, so little to drink."

 "The Slider ships," Proko whispered. "We receive no traders and neither do our allies nearby. That is why we need the privateers in orbit, to protect us, you remember."

 Nivias lay back in the chair, fingering the oak whorls on the side. "Rekliss, Rekliss. He brought me that bottle back yesterday, from a Slider Prime's burning cellar. So many tales. He's in the navy isn't he, he wears the fleet uniform, with the black sun. Not like that other one, the one who brings me nothing. I am the Palatine am I not?"

 "Focus, your majesty," Proko hissed. "They'll want you to withdraw your letters of marque from our ships. You said you will do nothing that will endanger your people. If we let them chase off our mercenaries we'll be at the mercy of the Sliders."

Nivias smiled and patted Proko's hand "People, my people. They cheered me on the Downing-Day, when I waved. I waved, waved."

 Proko angrily abandoned the throne, and motioned his aides in close to converse. "Call me when the High Service come squealing for their audience, and devil's blood, find the Palatine some more of that yellow-haired privateer's claret if it keeps him quiet."

In the rooms allocated to the fleet-men, Dé Sparta watched the ship's Library officer stare morosely at their table. With Lash still smarting over the chancellor's needles a bad humour had infected much of the complement. The only exceptions were K'an and his Commando. Dispersed across a number of connect ed bunk rooms they fell easily into the rituals of maintenance, introspective paths which encompassed both weapons and their altered bodies.

 Though well lit by a purple tinged cast, the rooms themselves did nothing to help the feeling of oppression. All of Nivias City was ancient, an obscenity burrowed into the heart of a world using technology which was lost long before the construction of The Machine. People lived in Nivias like spectres haunting their own former greatness, living on a planet which should have died when their sun fizzled away into nothingness.

 Now, where the sun had been, Nivias orbited an artificial worm hole, spinning around the grave of something that had once warmed men's faces and danced on the sae, sparking birds into song.

 "There was something wrong with the soldiers in the chamber above," Ballard said, twisting his long white beard in thought.

 "Right straight die, those bastards brought out near half their guard to nerve us," said a Vacuum Devil.

 Gloriana's scientech shook his head. "No. They were too scared."

 "With some cause," said Dé Sparta.

 "Not of us, their fear was directed outwards."

 "What could frighten them? There must have been close to five-hundred of them in that chamber. I talked to one of the city men, he said locals call them the Third-shiny, they're the Lord Palatine's own palace troops. What could skitter a bunch of brutes like that?"

"I can smell fear, lad. And theirs was strong when they met us, and it disappeared the deeper we went into the city. There's something near the surface of Nivias which the people of this city have no desire to meet."

Far above, on the bridge of the Gloriana, a cadet looked upon the face of another tomb. On his screen he had brought a slowly spinning mass into focus. The flashing tracking indicator traced a path which would take it far from Nivias and any danger of Astrogation it might prove to the Humanitum man-of-war.

 He murmured a short litany of mode transference and the console's audio circuits changed the screen to mass detection, blue icons flickering across his monitor and tabulating the relative size and distance for the object or objects. The magnitude of the answer shocked him.

 Suddenly he sensed a presence behind him and the cadet looked around. Lady Citroen-Nissan stood there, her normally pale lined face flushed by the orange light of his monitor.

 "I have a reading, madame Captain," he stammered. "But the size of it..."

 "Nothing that shouldn't be there boy," she said. "Didn't the fleet board teach you history?"

 Seeing his face she shook her head in disgust and leant over the fleet cadet to amplify the screen resolution. "Pipe it through the entire ship," she ordered. "This is something everybody should see."

 Monitors throughout the cavernous Gloriana flared into life and crew stopped to gaze up at them, from craftswomen lasering hull plates in the cluttered but ordered bustle of the workshops to petty officers sweating in the heat of control rooms, stations buried far inside the shafts of the battleship's vast weapon generators.

On-screen a thousand strong swarm of hulks tumbled around each other, held together solely by the faint force of their mutual gravity. Each individual shape just visible as a ship, burnt and wrecked, twisted superstructure jutting from the hulls and clawing out at the void like the rib bones of a decaying carcass.

Drifting through vacuum this vast graveyard of craft continued its final voyage, accompanied only by a debris cloud of shattered vessels and the frozen bodies of dead fleetmen.

 "It was here," Lady Citroen-Nissan's voice echoed throughout the Gloriana, "that the traitor Danyal Quicksmith's main fleet was broken. Though outnumbered in this part of space, and with most of the loyal fleet commanders destroyed in one of the blackest acts of treachery recorded in the Humanitum's history, our people never forgot their oath to The Machine.

 "When the harried remanents of the Terran and Centurai fleet joined together here, they tricked Quicksmith's host of ships, stung the black-hearts into pursuing them into Nivias and manoeuvred them onto the singularity which rotates at the heart of this grim place. Let the darkness consume and crush them in one of history's greatest acts of natural justice.

 "If there ever comes a time when you enter battle and feel fear creep into your hearts, you remember this place. You damn well remember what it means to take an oath of fealty. You remember that of all The Machine's servants that gathered here just four ships made it home."

 Throughout the Gloriana the crew looked on, imagining the stories that slowly spinning image on their screens could tell.  

 Voices little different from theirs screaming over the radio as burning men-of-war shattered in two, spilling men and women into the satin cold; half-decapitated drivesman in the smoke filled ruin of a dreadnought, looking out at the closing enemy and seeing only the image of a brook a million light-years distant, throwing a switch and hearing the whine of terminal overload. I have you, his last thought, before the nova cleanses all his dreams; Four traitors surrounding a dog soldier, the massive beast standing alone guarding the body of its headless captain and a pile of midshipman, corpses scattered left and right in the fury of boarding action. The creature brushing blood out of it eyes and howling in fury at the armoured turncoats.

Lash marched in front, the others behind, flanked by the armoured figures of the Vacuum Devils. A sneery faced minion of the Chancellor leading them to their appointment with the Palatine, through the maze work corridors which formed a large part of the Humanitum Governor's underground palace.

 Suddenly six shocks hit the corridor, knocking Chancellor Proko's underlings to the ground and staggering the others. Three groups of two, clustered in quick succession.

 "Earthquake," squealed the Chancellor's man, huddling on the floor. For the warren-living inhabitants it was clear that this was one of their worse nightmares.

 "Get up you idiot," said Lash, hauling the man to his feet. "Some damn fool hanging orbital's just gone and fired a salute."

 "If it was aimed planetward, then you would really have felt a shockwave." K'an told the shaking official. "Our rail-guns would crack this city open like an egg."

 His sneers vanished, the chancellor's lickspittle hustled ahead, verbally flaying his armsmen escort forward.

Palatine Nivias held court under the ultraviolet brilliance of his favourite spot, one of the few green spots left on Nivias outside the dowdy rows of hydroponic food farms which kept her people fed.

 No columns of nutrient tanks for the ruling nobles - across a vault which could have supplied half the City with food, landscaped streams flowed while waterfalls pumped from hidden pipes. Neatly trimmed emerald grass rustled in a cool breeze, the petty Nivias noblesse clustering around the Palatine's canopy.

"A dead land," K'an said as the party were escorted across the lawns. "A corpse of a wind, a graveyard turf, and an artificial sky. This place has no light on the hills at dawn."

 Lash's party jolted to a stop at the sight of the Palatine. Beside the ruler a group of proud men were immaculately turned out in crimson uniforms, their high collars, beasts and sleeves decked with gold piping. On the jackets they wore the black sun, but faint patches had been left where the gold leaf of fleetmen had been removed. The meaning was clear. Serving The Machine, but not the fleet.

 On the other side of the Lord's pavilion a motley collection of privateers: hard-faced human stock with a spattering of creatures from other races. At their head a barrel-bodied man with a beard that would have shamed many a flatlander, his sallow eyes pierced by strange, platinum-coloured pupils.

 It could only be Cold Jaque.

 From the ship crystal images Lash also recognised the Governance representatives from the nearby rim systems. The same systems supporting Nivias in its unofficial activities against their common enemy, the Slider swarms

 "A private audience," said Lash, his voice finding it hard to keep the anger out.

 Proko stepped forward. "Come now, we are going to discuss the future of our friends here. Is it beyond courtesy that we not include the other border worlds in our talks?"

 "There will be no discussion," Lash nearly shouted. "Under special directive from the Humanitum Naval Board you and your neighbouring Governors are ordered to discharge all mercenaries currently in your employ. Every letter of marque you have issued is to be rescinded, every last one. You have brought this entire area to the brink of an unsanctioned war the Humanitum doesn't want, your actions here border on the treasonous."

 Chancellor Proko shook his hand at the first officer. "How very easy it is for you to speak of these things. We live in an armed camp and suffer the thrusts of the Slider swarms while your Naval Board sits warm in its orbital fortresses and slop wine imported from Earth."

 Palatine Nivias rolled over on his carpet of pillows, his failing eyesight focusing on the Naval officers. "A gift for me? Real wine, real is it?"

 "We will of course obey your very lawful commands," Proko interrupted, ignoring his Lord. "But without Nivias's license, our good protectors here hardly fall under the command of the City anymore. What say you rogues on the matter?"

 Cold Jaque stepped forward looking the Gloriana's party up and down with his dead eyes. A small but arrogant gesture. "Without your money... we are gone."

 "Without the dubious legality of a local letter of marque, what you are is unregistered and lying under the guns of a Humanitum man-of-war," said Lash.

 Cold Jaque turned to go back to his men. "There are places other than the Humanitum. Not the sort of darks you would wish to follow us into."

 From the cluster of brightly uniformed crimson officers a blonde giant stepped forward. He sported a pony tail tied with a ribbon as crimson as his stiff uniform, and though clearly in his middle-years his face still retained the fresh look of adolescence. Hearing him speak with the resonant tones of one who is used to command - almost hypnotic in intensity - they knew they were facing the legend Rekliss. "My directives come from a higher authority than the Naval Board."

 "If that's the case sir, then I am afraid we remain unaware of them," Lash said.

 "They are The Machine's own, no others. I am It's hand and the Dark Viking It's instrument. I will sleep tonight and when It comes to my dreams... I shall see what is It's will. If it pleases The Machine to do so, the Dark Viking will depart as you require, to continue It's war elsewhere."

 Lash nodded, angry at having to think to consciously stop himself from addressing this man as Captain. "Pray that is the case."

 "It would be unseemly for ship brothers to turn their rail-guns on each other, when there so many real enemies nearby," Rekliss said.

 "There you see," Proko called. "We will need a few days to cancel all the letters of marque and supply our ex-protectors for their departure, but I think you will - "

 Chancellor Proko's insincere diatribe was interrupted by a far clearer command. Storming towards the pavilion was a red-haired women, the pretty willowy body at firm odds with the fuming anger on her face.  

 Behind the lady a unit of armsmen marched, identical to the ones circling the pavilion, save their shoulder badge was that of a rearing lion rather than the skull favoured by the palace guards. "Why was I not informed this meeting had been arranged?"

 "Mere details being discussed, really mere details," Proko said.

 Lash noticed Cold Jaque's pirates had subtly removed themselves out of the potential line of fire between the two palace units, their soldiers glaring at each other across the artificial park. Cold Jaque's privateers obviously knew more of the local situation than the fleet-men did.

 "Details I would best be privy to, Proko. You will be well advised to keep me informed on these things."

 "My daughter," called the old ruler. "It is you, isn't it, Nineen?"

 "Yes father." She walked forward towards her parent, the woman's soldiers shifting their aim onto the courtiers and chancellor Proko's guardsmen. "You will be removing the presence of these killers." This directed at Lash.

 "That is our intention," replied the first officer.

 "Then perhaps our people will now be able to walk the corridors without being raped and robbed, or worse."  

 "Minor incidents; a few bar brawls, such blatant distortions," Proko said. "My Lady might more appropriately direct her concerns to what will happen when they are gone and our brave navy returns home. When the Sliders see how highly the Humanitum values her most distant possessions."

 "There's worse than tavern fights going on, even if you and your silk spined sluggerbacks won't talk of it," Nineen said.

 Lash looked at Proko. "What is this?"

 "Child's tales," the Chancellor wheedled dismissively. "Ever since the City was built, the proles have believed there are creatures outside which have survived the death of our sun. Changed things waiting to burst into the tunnels and carry them off. There is of course nothing outside, though we do not always proclaim this. We find it makes the citizenry more properly appreciative of the keepers of the environment systems. As you can see, my lady is not always fully cognisant of the political realities."

 "The Machine forgive me," Nineen spat. "But my father's not going to live forever Proko. The day I accede the throne is the day I'll throw you out of the City and you'll be able to discover the truth of the matter for yourself."

 "May you have a city left under your rule for you to throw me out of," Proko said.

 Nineen threw a look of loathing at the Chancellor and walked away from the pavilion, her guardsmen stepping back and covering the Chancellor's thugs with their punchers.

"Such a difficult child," Proko oozed. "I fear there will be awkward times ahead for Nivias. She would have been better suited as a clothes horse, rather than caretaker of one of the Humanitum's systems."

 Courtiers laughed nervously, the strain of the encounter clearly having rubbed badly on their delicate sensibilities.

 "It is the Humanitum's territory still," Lash announced loudly for the privateers' benefit. "You take that to heart and remember you all have a single Nivias-standard revolution to clear outer orbit and begin departure. Any vessel maintaining the fiction they're still employed here one second after that time will be fired upon by the Gloriana, without let or challenge."

 On this threat by the hawk-nosed officer the various interest groups splintered apart, Proko and his favourites staying put, the others making for the numerous exits dotting Nivias's artificial gardenscape.

 With the Gloriana's detail moving out Dé Sparta sensed that Ballard had halted behind him. He looked around and found his senses had played true. On their tail were the privateer party from the Black Mandy, Cold Jaque walking at the head of the ruthless pack.

 Ballard and the pirate commander exchanged an indecipherable look, then Cold Jaque nodded in their direction and moved his killers off onto a parallel path.

 "You know him?" Dé Sparta asked.

 "Before I came to the fleet there were always creatures like him," Ballard said. "Wherever there's pain and suffering you will find a Cold Jaque willing to squeeze profit from it. "Come, the air has turned bad."

Dé Sparta walked Nivias's dirty corridors with K'an and a handful of Vacuum Devils, patrolling their immediate vicinity as a matter of course. On most Humanitum worlds it would have been a serious slight to their hosts. In this instance Lash judged the senile Governor to be beyond taking offense even if their actions were reported; Proko's palace guardsmen beyond trust; and considered their volatile situation far beyond the dictates of politeness.

 Turning a corner the fleet commandoes nearly tripped over their boots. There was a sudden flurry of action as the soldiers brought up their punchers. Before them a disparate group of palace guardsmen and Sliders scattered or brought up their own weapons with a clatter of bolts being drawn back.

 An armsman officer threw himself to the head of the alien detail, arms frantically waving. "Diplomatic party, don't shoot, it's a diplomatic party."

 K'an motioned his soldiers back, the Devils falling aside in a disciplined formation. The Sliders were a strange group, bestial faces over identical chitinous armour, tan leather belts dangling with organic devices. The mixture of human and insect-like features was terrifying, all the more so since it was the deliberate result of their genetic masterplan - incomprehensible after thousands of years of an evolution prized away from humanity's. He had never seen one in the flesh before, but from what Dé Sparta remembered from the ship crystals warrior caste Sliders were meant to be conformist creatures, initiative concentrated in their officers.

 As the Sliders passed penned in by the palace soldiers, one of them clacked its ivory-like mandibles at K'an, human words coming from it's razor toothed mouth. "Without thiz Escortz, our bladez would have ripped your fleshy framez."

 K'an replied with a series of throaty clicks, the Slider detail stepping back uneasily at the sound of those ugly sounds spilling from the mouth of a human.

<Your pincers have been dulled by eating seeds>

< I would rip your monkey throat if it were not so scrawny> The creature's reply was viciously measured, suggesting irony that the Slider should have to converse with a human in a language that its race had scientifically developed to eliminate the last vestiges of human emotion from their altered minds.  

 <Your heart organ would I gut without thought, if it were not rotten as spoilt dung pile> K'an said.

 < Where did this creature high-ugliness learn to speak we Tongue?>

 < From such mouths of countless corpses as dead vermin of yourself> K'an replied.

< That a flat tooth such as you can urinate on we Tongue is miracle. Your toothless Queen-King awaits our fast words now. Without meat we fall on your area>

< This Swarm would first feast on your nation's marrow>

 The officer Slider bowed carefully towards K'an, and the strangely dressed detail moved forward in column.

 "What did they say?" Dé Sparta asked.

 "They are going to meet the Palatine, lodging complaints about the privateers provocations," said K'an. "By the inflection, the one I talked with was one of their Daimyo, a favoured bodyguard of the ruling Slider Prime."

 "You learn a lot from a handful of clicks."

 "To fight and win you must first learn to become your enemy," K'an said. "Sliders no longer think as we do. Their brains are different inside. Slider fighters are not ruled in turn by the head and heart. Their thoughts and emotions run like one river; to think is to to do and to feel is to be. Those ones will be eager to rely on their thinker caste to cut orders for them.

 "keep your eyes open while you are here, the Sliders are always breeding new sub-races and tool creatures. If we can bring back fresh information on them it will prove very valuable to The Machine."

Ballard had walked off to examine the uppermost levels of the ancient City, and trusting the flatlander scientech's nose for trouble Dé Sparta had decided to accompany him. All that was waiting for the others fleetmen and women was an invite to the Proscenium Act, Nivias's annual celebration of some heroic event that should have been rendered mote when the population had to retreat into the depths of their planet merely to survive.

 The nearer the two Gloriana crewmen got to the surface the more deserted the corridors became. By the time a shuddering lift unit dropped them off at the ground floor not a single inhabitant of the City was in evidence, although armsmen patrolled, stopping bandits from taking permanent residence.

 Jutting out at strange angles, half hidden machines filled the air with alien noises, humming and sliding; Nivias's forefathers having concentrated their life recycling machinery at the top during the early stages of construction. Gases vented seemingly at random, and some of the corridors they peered down were filled with swirling mists, steam rising to hide their legs in others - the pair cutting through these passages like seagoing vessels.  

 Many corridor runs were claustrophobic in the extreme, while a few led on to enormous vaults or artificial trenches packed with groaning technology.

 Travelling this labyrinth Ballard would sometimes stop to look at plastic signs and read the legends on machinery. It was in no language Dé Sparta recognised, even though as a noble of his primitive world he had been one of the few to benefit from letters. Sometimes a character caught his eye and he could almost see a resemblance to a character in the Humanitum's Lingua alphabet.

 It was in one of the long echoing passages that Ballard and Dé Sparta came upon the first sign of life. By a wide window Nineen stood gazing out at the wastes, as if searching for the twisted creatures she believed had survived the heat-death of Nivias. Dé Sparta was amazed to see the Palatine's daughter had no escort.

"My lady, this is hardly a safe place for you," called Dé Sparta.

 "Nobody comes to this floor anymore," Nineen said without glancing around. Had she caught their reflection in the glass? "It is so peaceful out there, don't you think? You can get away from everyone up here."

 Without sunshine there was little detail visible in the landscape, the coy energy of distant stars revealing a chain of mountains in the distance. In the foreground, light from a scattering of unoccupied top-level windows fell across the fossilised forests, frozen by cold and preserved in a clawing leafless perfection after Nivias's atmosphere had bled away.

 "Yes. As peaceful as a graveyard," Ballard said.

 "We should take you back to the palace," Dé Sparta said. "Bandits use this level as a refuge."

 Nineen shook her flaming red hair. "Even they don't use this floor anymore. They use the side tunnels now, the ones the mechanicals create when they need to bring in new ore to repair their broken friends."

 "That's as may be, but - " Dé Sparta began.

 "If you're searching for something I can help you," Nineen said. "I have the knowledge of all these corridors. It's something every royal child is made to learn."

 "Stay then," Ballard said.

 Dé Sparta started to argue but saw the look the ship's scientech gave him.

 With the Palatine's daughter in tow they set off again, Ballard navigating his secret course. Sometimes Nineen would suggest a turning, or tell them of a shorter way, almost as if she knew where the scientech wanted to go - which was at least more than Dé Sparta did.

 Occasionally Ballard would stop and ask her a question about some bulky artifact, and Nineen would answer if she knew, or hazard a guess if she didn't.

For hours they made their way across the empty plain of devices, crossing narrow bridges suspended across deep wells which would suddenly flare into dancing bright chessboard patterns. The machines moved to a purpose as seemingly incomprehensible as Ballard's own.

 In a structure which reminded Dé Sparta of an iron barn Ballard drew them to a halt.

 "What is it?"

 "There is something up ahead," Ballard said.

 Dé Sparta reached out with his huntsman's senses. "I hear nothing."

 "That is because you're listening with your ears," said the scientech.

 They waited a minute, then, against the low thrum of machines, Dé Sparta caught the sounds of footsteps. "Human enough to wear boots." Dé Sparta began to slide his puncher from its holster.

 "A time for everything," said Ballard, placing his hand on the pistol butt and pushing it back.

 Startled, Dé Sparta saw that rounding the corner was the weasel-faced Chancellor, Proko - alone.

 "What in the sun's name are you doing here," Nineen called angrily.

 "I might ask you the same thing," the Chancellor whined. "I had left the Proscenium Act for a rest in my bedroom, and when I wakened it was to find myself in a room on this level."

 "You expect us to believe that," spat Nineen. "How many guardsmen do you have surrounding your quarters to stop one of your sugar boys from creeping in and slipping a blade between your ribs?"

 "I believe this was your arranging," retorted Proko. "Who else on Nivias has the influence at the palace to get to me?"

 "Be quiet," Ballard ordered. "Such things have a way of revealing themself. We keep moving."

 Their numbers swelled by chancellor Proko, the party continued across a room flooded ankle-deep with oily foaming water. While they continued to see machines Dé Sparta knew they must still be close to Nivias city's highest floor, though the sight of glass looking out onto the dead surface became rarer and rarer as they progressed.

 On Ballard's course walls seemed to grow more rust ridden, machines more decrepit - as if there were a decaying centre to this maze. They were crossing a corridor covered in luminous green moss - one of the few wild forms of life to flourish in the city - when Nineen stopped them. "This way is blocked ahead. There is a stone door off a passage near here we can use instead."

 Backtracking to a T-junction the group came to the door in less than a minute.

 Crossing the threshold the bile rose in Dé Sparta's throat as he saw what lay on the other side.

It was in Nivias's largest chamber that the Proscenium Act was being held, an immense concrete space known simply as the Glissade, once intended to hold almost all of the City's population. Rows of chairs ran across the floor inside the capacious artificial valley, each zone separated by a path the Fleet Commando could have used to house one of their lumbering war mechanicals. Now stained green and cracked, the towering walls were lined with pipes recycling the city's air, using the chamber as a core area where the ancient machines could keep the stale air moving.

 When it was constructed the main platform had been intended for political debates and hologram images of the Nivias senators floated high in the air above for all to see. Now the concept of democracy on Nivias was as dead and forgotten as the ancient Greeks who had conceived it, the projectors had rusted to silence, and those that had them brought eye glasses to view the stage, though the sound system still worked across most the chamber.

 K'an strained his neck to look up the Glissade's height, wisps of condensation drifting under the ceiling barely visible above. "This chamber must stretch near all of the City's two hundred levels."

 "These courtesies rub on my nerves," whispered Lash, oblivious to the emmensity of their surroundings or his sergeant's feelings. "And now we must kick our heels while Proko's rogues slope off. I trust that snake no further than my puncher could blow him."

 "We are not diplomats," said K'an.

 Around them the audience clapped their applause, laughing as the hero of the play re-entered the stage. K'an and the Gloriana's first officer sat among a sea of petty nobility and their favourites, well forward of the mass of town people crowding out the rest of the seats.

 "Damn all this inaction. By the larger you live, the smaller you die," said Lash. "Isn't that something I have heard you and your Commando mouth before images of The Machine."

 "It would be very hard to feel large among all this," K'an said.

 On the stage, the actor brandished a sword and waved it at the audience with false gusto.

 "I walked, with other souls in pain,

Within another ring.

 And was wondering if this man had done

A great or little thing."

 Giving a wave the armoured hero pranced over to an actor dressed in black, his face a deformed mask obviously meant to portray evil.

"When a voice behind me whispered low,

'That fellow's got to swing'

 The crowd roared in appreciation as the two actors began their staged duel. Among the crowd behind there was another cry, mirroring the player's amplified dialogue. Lash turned around to look.

 By one of the distant walls a group of people were smashed to the floor in their chairs. Lying on top of them was the broken bloody corpse of a teenager dressed in rich clothing.

 A man behind them started to shout. "Look the galleries, look, in the galleries."

 Screams fell down to the stalls below. Then a dozen stories above more people were falling from the Glissade chamber's higher levels. Royal armsmen appeared at the high balconies, distant shapes in bronzed armour, and started firing down into the noble's section.

 "Proko," shouted Lash. "Where is he, damn his soul. He was over there when this started."

 A screaming women, overweight in a blue gown, stumbled back towards them then fell silent as a yellow ram-field slapped her off her feet.

 K'an's Vacuum Devils had drawn guns, waiting in two disciplined lines for their orders. A rain of fire hammered into the seats around them but still they stood as motionless as statues.

"Defensive," Lash cried to be heard above the screams of the stampeding crowd. "Enfilading fire."

 In space the Vacuum Devils used lasers, their recoilless nature necessary for low or zero gravity combat. But for Nivias the honour guard had drawn punchers from the limited numbers racked in the Gloriana's armoury - favouring the raw stopping power of their magnetic ram fields.

 In two lines the Devils fell back towards the burning stage, each row loosing a crackling burst of fire before stepping behind their brother Commandoes and then repeating the manoeuvre.

 Where every burst fell a cluster of armsmen crumpled, their bronze armour ripped to shreds by the rapid firing punchers. More armsmen had now entered the Glissade at ground level, joining the troops in the gallery in cutting down the panicked mob. K'an raised his own weapon, a rail-gun side arm, and a guard officer dropped attempting to gun down a fleeing family - a single neat hole drilled into his forehead.

 A centre of serenity among the violence, an image of another world drifted into K'an's mind. Standing duty over Lady Citroen-nissan on a febrile tropical continent. "Watch," their strutting host, a local prince, had told them, placing a line of crystal goblets on a table.

 His bodyguards had swung their primitive machine rifles up and the crystals and table disappeared in a haze of gun smoke. Laughing arrogantly as he placed another line on the table and motioned K'an and his colleague to match them. A subtle nod from Lady Citroen-nissan, and both Vacuum Devil's hands danced a twin blur. Two rail-pistols in a single harmony under the shade of that monstrous jungle. One glass one shot, one glass one shot; not one of them falling over. Glint of sunshine dancing off the last goblet as steaming alcohol boiled out of the hole he had created, the perfection of the moment etching itself in his conscious.

Perfection shattered in the present as a confused noble rushed the unit with his duelling pig sticker, thinking them part of the massacre. Feeling no hate K'an deflected his blade and used the man's momentum to break his arm, then reversed direction to snap a leg using the Pa Kuais mode of the diving bird.

"Raise the Gloriana," said Lash to the Vacuum Devil carrying their up-link. "Advise them we have an internal military action by local forces. Probable palace coup, forward forces as yet unconfirmed."

 "How shall we intervene, sir?" Asked K'an.

 "By damn, I'll have a sewerage scrubber on the throne if they'll follow the Humanitum's damn directives. I'll have one for sure to keep that snake Proko from it."

 Across the titanic space the confusion was dying down with the Nivias dwellers spilled out the numerous exits. Near the front, where the barrage had been concentrated across the noble's enclosure, bodies were scattered like a bleeding carpet. Bent over seats and piling the floor corpses lay where they had fallen.

 "Command line, sir," called a Vacuum Devil. "Message reads 'Secure Palatine and family. Endit. If possible seize and secure remaining privateer leaders and all allied Humanitum Governors. Endit. Gloriana Commandoes assaulting main Nivias entry chamber. Endit.' Message finishes, sir."

 Lash knelt behind a smouldering seat as smoke from the burning stage began to drift across the chamber. Random shots still burned the air above. "So we move on the palace, the family could be anywhere in this damn warren, but we can at least link up with the Gloriana's force there."

One of the objectives in Lash's plan had alOne of the objectives in Lash's plan had already escaped the chaos on the surface, moving to the beat of his own obsessive mission with the certainty only a fanatic could possess, or perhaps one granted a hidden vision.

 Rekliss leant forward in his command throne, his glassy blue eyes fixed on the main observation window. "I can smell them out there. Lived with that smell for so long. Give me tactical sweep."

 "Nivias's orbital epicycle has crossed into extreme conjuncture to the wormhole, sir," said a console-woman. "I'm getting a no-read across scan on the mass detectors, just heavy distortion."

 Rekliss rolled his head in the throne. "So much pain. I can feel their hearts filling the void with darkness, feel it. Tzone chamber, hear me."

 "Tzone chamber on bridge link," a voice replied, high-pitched over the translator.

 "Give me your third eye old friend. Find the door they used to breach the system, find me the Sliders."

 Deep in the Dark Viking's armoured belly, protected from the violence of all but the most fatal of physical contacts, the Dolphin rolled in its tank - willing itself into half-trance, a waking dream. In its mind's eye a sea of energy currents bubbled across Tzone Space, lattices of wicked blue light crashing through the emptiness of the Tzone.  

 Somewhere out there was its goal, if only it could focus its subtly altered senses to the level of precision required. Adjusting its vision using glands no human would ever possess, the Dolphin dived through candy clouds of star sparkle and swam the ethereal currents, searching, seeking. Through a rush of dream images given form and the Dolphin suddenly stumbled across the shape it was seeking; a cyan spiral screaming and twisting into nothingness in the realms of Tzone space.

 The Dolphin knew Slider Tzone drives were unsophisticated monsters compared to the Humanitum's subtle engineering. For all their biomechanical advances, as Slider drives bullied their ships back into normal space the hulking field manipulators ripped singularities in space, almost instantly healed as the two universes snapped back into line, but not before a needle of normal matter was sucked into Tzone, forming a dancing twisting pollution of normality that was slowly diluted inside the shifting Tzone currents.

 Marking the position it relaxed its mental hold and dropped back into the material universe. Feeling out for the distant point at system edge where the Slider craft had exited Tzone, the talented Dolphin refocused its will into a mode few of its brethren would live long enough to master, even by their strange years. It was Rekliss's reputation that had drawn the very best to his ship, from every discipline in the fleet.

 Down to the very lowest molecular plane the cetacean's perceptions plummeted, levels the finest scientists on Saturn would find impossible to measure, shifting normal space for the small eddies of Tzone which would have been sucked through in the Slider drive's backwash - a faint trail drawn out like like a chain of breadcrumbs in a fairy-tale.

 "Four two thirty, mark three seven four," the Dolphin croaked into its tank's speak-box, the translator straining to find human words after the dolphin had lived another universe.

 "Resolution," cried Rekliss on the bridge, almost jerking out from the command throne.

 In the central dome of the bridge the optical instruments of the Dark Viking panned across to target the area pin-pointed by their Dolphin, the vessel's calculating machines enhancing the fuzzy picture: a rag-tag collection of organic shapes grown in monstrous orbital vats, two huge cannons jutting out from the craft.

 "Slider configuration lines confirmed," said a warrant officer stating the obvious. No other race threw their craft together with lines of such deadly anarchy. "Design structure comparable with one of our Senator class men-of-war."

 Rekliss waved a fist in the warm air of the bridge. "Target acquisition. Rail-room stand to ready."

 By the ship's nose an initiate of the scientechs' foundation thrust his face from a tunnel that could have easily swallowed one of the ship's maglev trains.

 He blinked in the thin light, the stench of the stabilisation fluid used to keep the rail-gun projectiles in stasis rising up to make him gag. "The Machine take you, this one's Lorenz field wouldn't accelerate a rusty spanner. The circuits burned straight through."

 "Shut it down and divert the intensity to tubes two through four," shouted an officer below.

 Behind the fleet-man a detail of sweating dog men manhandled a Tzone torpedo from the chamber's central turntable. Loading the missiles onto manually controlled crane arms, the discs were swung across into the yawning tunnel mouth - projectiles locking onto greasy electromagnetic rails while iron hatches clanged into place behind them. At the end of the rail-gun tubes, launcher tunnels moulded as dragon-heads jutted into vacuum, baring their fangs at the enemy hanging distant above Nivias.

 "We have acknowledgement requests in standard embassy code, captain," said a comms-officer on the bridge. "Watch Tower indicates the Slider's have made a visual sighting."

 "Reply the same pattern using laser, Mister," ordered Rekliss. "But spread that signal so it's unreadable. Rail-room, status?"

 "One tube down sir, three loaded and armed."

 The rogue naval commander growled an expletive. "Watch Tower, I'm switching torpedo launch through your boards. Keep the enemy drive under probe and release when you detect shield ignition."

 "We may not be able to detect shield ignition here captain," Watch Tower reported back. "There's just too much background scream all across this cursed system."

 "You now have the board, officer of the Watch. Release when their shield generators fire up."

 Fleet-men and women exchanged nervous glances from their chairs. In their eyes Rekliss had been touched by The Machine, but there had to be limits, even to their charmed existence.

 "Give me range Mister," said Rekliss.

A young cadet counted out the distance. "Mark two-six-nine, mark two-six-eight, mark two-six-seven - "

 "Their main turret is traversing," said the first officer. "Your orders sir?"

 "Can you feel them?" Rekliss said. "I can. From here, like a demon twisting in my stomach."

 "We have optimal range," repeated the first officer. "What are your orders sir?"

 Rekliss remained in his command throne like a life-size gargoyle that had been cast with the chair. "We do Its will now. They can't be allowed to survive, not one of them."

 "We have strike range Captain Rekliss, their shields are down," insisted the first officer, sweating heavily. "Please sir, what are your orders."

 With a flurry of cracks, the image of the Slider ship floating inside the Dark Viking's holo dome flickered briefly then reformed. In the darks outside, three blazing disks accelerated away from the battleship, cutting the vacuum at an incredible velocity.

 "There is It's will, there, it is the Humanitum's hammer," said Rekliss.

 "Three released and running," piped the Rail-room. "Shield ignition detected."

 "They're raising sir, they're raising."

 Rekliss brought his hand down on the throne. "Evade left damn your eyes, steady for broadside."

 Above Nivias three dark flowers bloomed, the matter fields of the multiple torpedo explosions cutting into the Tzone, mingling Tzone Space with normal matter. There could be only one result, like the splitting of the atom in mankind's infancy; black lightning lanced out from an explosion storm of darkness, shockwaves of accelerated matter engulfing the Slider ship and washing out into the ether, bouncing the titanic bulk of the Dark Viking - now dangerously close to the epicentre.

 On the bridge officers and crewmen tumbled over as wave after wave of raw energy slapped into their battleship's shields.

 With the fury slowly diffusing, the Watch Tower crew tore off their sensor links. Outside - across the electromagnetic spectrum - space screamed into their phones as normal matter flowed back into place. In radio and microwave, in ultraviolet and X-ray, the universe howled in protest that her body should be violated so.

 In their holo-dome the Slider ship was - amazingly - still visible, her shields partially raised during the projectile detonation and then immediately burnt out in the unnatural furnace. Her ugly prow was blasted into non-existence, and the remaining ruin started to slide slowly towards Nivias, tumbling peacefully into her gravity field without a protest.

 Breaking into a thousand pieces, the atmosphereless eastern hemisphere of Nivias welcomed the first rain she'd felt in a millennium. She would never have another.

 "The Machine's work is finished here," said Rekliss. "Stand down from station and plot a course for system jump."

Nineen stepped back from Dé Sparta, Ballard and the Chancellor. In front of them was a circular room crowned with a dome of some clear crystallite substance. Lonely under the black sky the Palatine - ultimate ruler of Nivias - stood with two huge guardsmen wearing Nineen's lion crest on their helmets. Out of standard uniform the two guards waited stripped to the waist, enormous red swords with curved blades cross-strapped on their bare chests.

 More horrific than the two soldier's lifeless faces, on their sides decapitated heads stared empty eyed into space, dried blood staining the spears they'd been mounted on.

 "My lord Palatine," Proko said surprised. "What are you - "

 "Proko," the old man interrupted, rubbing his tired eyes. "Is that you? I can't see you, attend me."

 "Don't - " Ballard begun, reaching out to stop the Chancellor. With the speed of a toad tongue capturing a fly, the reigning Palatine sprung forward to snatch the purple clad official, wrenching him high above his own bent body. "I am the Palatine am I not?" He cackled. "Some wine for me. Body wine!"

 Proko screamed as the Palatine slowly twisted his body like some dog worrying a child's rag doll. There was a series of terrible snapping sounds and a sickening wet thud as the body dropped to the stone floor. "So senile, so senile, wine for the poor old dotard. Now you understand who was the ruler here." Nivias turned to Ballard. "And now you know too."

 "Nineen," Dé Sparta implored the ruler's daughter.

 A look of pain was stuck on her face. "My mind, he's in my mind, I'm sorry."

 Ballard looked straight at the grinning face of the old ruler, the ex-proctor's fierce eyes hard and deadly. "So your daughter was part of your compact."

 "Oh she's powerful," the Palatine said. "I hid her so silent from all your Humanitum, hid her away just for me. Made her go out to bring back my offerings . Now, now there shall be more sacrifices."

 Dé Sparta looked at where the Palatine was pointing. Behind a glass wall dim at the other end of the domed room was the Slider Officer, glaring at them. It stood in a horrific pile of mangled chitinous shells and gray meat, entrails smeared across the window in terrible patterns, all that remained of his embassy retinue.  

 Unbowed by the massacre of its people the Slider ground its mandibles and stared pure hatred at the old man, too brave or too stupid to fear for its life.

 "With this one executed and your mission dead the Slider swarms will fall across the sector in vendetta, raiding and destroying. The Other will sweep across here soon also. So much peace and blackness in its wake. Life dirty and crawling burnt from every surface, clean and empty."

 Ballard pushed the Palatine's daughter to one side. "So the Shimmer would like the Sliders to scour us away into oblivion is it? I had wondered. Which one of the Shimmer's aspects have you been making deals with, Nivias?"

 "Oh so powerful," Nivias reached out and closed his fist. A field of shimmering black motes vaulted from the Palatine's hand and enveloped the scientech. "Stunted little man, I will show you what peace there is in dissolution."

 Moving his hand in quick circles a quivering yellow light surrounded Ballard, breaking the black cloud into a thousand wheeling shards. "Any first year student could do better than that, sell-soul. Come, show me what price you have bought with your children."

 Dé Sparta moved to the side as inside the dome a maelstrom of psychic energies beat across the stale Nivias air. Both Lord Nivias and Ballard seemed to convulse with tremors as they strained their mental defenses, across a myriad invisible planes the two men battered at each other, the exchange of pirouetting lights and pulsing energies a mere byproduct.

 Obviously not willing to wait for their master to finish Ballard and dispatch his companion, the two hulking armsmen closed in on Dé Sparta.

 Dé Sparta knew more of the armsman remained in him than fleet-man when he abandoned his pistol in its leather holster, sliding out his cutlass instead with a fierce relish. He swept his fur cloak off and held it in his left hand, feeling the familiar pressure of a beserker fury building.

 Silently the two brutish guardsmen rushed the young noble, moving their strangely curved swords in a series of practiced windmill motions.  

 Raised in a city state where children got half-dirks with their first cut of clothes, Dé Sparta hadn't needed the Gloriana's sharp arm practice sessions. He danced to the left with a ballet-like side stepping flourish, twirling the orange cloak in a move that would have been familiar to any of the ancient matadors from old Terra.

 One of the guards met air where he had expected flesh, and the other barely managed to ward off Dé Sparta's lunge.

 Both had more muscle than Dé Sparta, but the barbarian fighter had the speed and he knew where to place it. The tallest of the ugly pair threw his weight behind a blow that would have cut an oak table in half, then found his vision obscured by a ticklish furry blanket, gasped as a sharp length of steel pierced his gut. Darkness was whipped away from his face and he saw Dé Sparta's blade buried to the hilt in his oiled chest.

 Dé Sparta swore silently as he realised the second guard's thrust was going to decapitate him before he could slide out the trapped cutlass. He pirouetted and whipped the heavy cloak around, slapping into the remaining bodyguard's leg and circling it with the momentum. In that single moment of tautness Dé Sparta pulled and jerked the soldier off his feet. The guard was a hardened fighter and controlled his fall perfectly, but halfway through the roll Dé Sparta was on him with his boot knife.

 Viciously the armsman butted Dé Sparta in the stomach with his plumed helmet, twisting to try and find position to bring his massive strength to bear. Under the cold starless night of Nivias the two soldiers struggled, rolling across the hard granite floor as above them an exchange of aberrant energies burned between creatures who were both more and less than they seemed.  

 With a street fighter's fluid precision the armsman veteran caught Dé Sparta's knife hand and carefully dislocated his wrist. The blade clattered across the paved floor and the fleet-man found himself enveloped in a bone crushing bear hug. Writhing, trapped in this enormously powerful human vice, Dé Sparta felt his side begin to cave in, inkblots of darkness beginning to encroach across his vision.

 With what was left of his conscious mind he knew in five seconds he would be dead. Floating in that pool of burning delirium his brain focused on the dark splatter pattern of dots fireworking across his retina. The dots became the darkness of one of the Gloriana's training vaults, gasping for air on a springy rubber mat, narrow eyed figure bowing to him so tall above. It seemed important to recall who that man was. There was something else to remember among the flowing darkness, hands forming pincers, a cleverness of jabbing. A throat, a Vacuum Devil.

 Suddenly the pain was released like a grenade of relief exploding. Dé Sparta remembered; it had been the mode of the clawing jaguar, and as big as he was, the armsman was going to be slack and stunned for all of a second.

That second was long enough to draw his puncher around, still strapped within its engraved holster. Dé Sparta fired through the leather and ripped a cauterised hole in the giant's chest, knocking the armsman backwards into the air. He walked three more shots across the brute, the last smashing into the soldier's plumed helmet and finally bringing him to the ground.

 Coughing blood, Dé Sparta painfully turned himself over to look at the battle raging between Ballard and the touched ruler of Nivias.

 Trembling feverously Ballard was on his knees, his weathered face looking like his Flatlander's soul was being lashed raw by the first mate's cat. Across the room from him Lord Nivias was swaying on his feet, his extravagantly tailored clothes soaked by exertion. The ex-proctor was obviously slowly crumbling under the Palatine's assault, the Flatlander's golden nimbus being eroded as Nivias loosed a black rainbow of cancerous light towards him.

 With a cry of undiluted hatred the Flatlander's psychic field faded into the air, then reformed briefly by an act of pure zeal. Drained at last Ballard dropped to the floor and the Palatine moved on him, his malicious face transfixed with a spite that Dé Sparta hadn't thought possible in a living creature - even one that had traded his humanity away for the Shimmer's favours.

 "Such a weak little man," rasped the pale faced Palatine. "I'll take your skull for my collection, little half-man, and dine on your tongue."

 Using his shattered gun hand Dé Sparta fumbled the puncher out and placed its barrel sight on Lord Nivias, knowing in his heart the deformed man could shrug off a puncher field like salt water flowing off a seabird.

 Squeezing the trigger Nivias collapsed, but Dé Sparta hadn't had time to fire off a shot. Now on his bony knees the Governor shook like a possessed man in a fit, his demented eyes rolling in their sockets. A translucent silver fire raked the length of Lord Nivias.

 By the doorway the source of the fire stood, Cold Jaque's beard quivering in the backblast of the ethereal force flaming from his outstretched hands.  

 In his brutal platinum-coloured pupils Dé Sparta caught something that the pirate hadn't allowed to surface before: the iron volition only a fanatic possessed, a look he had only seen in the eyes of The Machine's proctors.

 Weakened by his hostilities with Ballard, the ruler staggered back and tripped over the corpse of one of his bodyguards. On the ground Nivias twisted like a landed fish, the silver fire burning into his black heart. Coiled into a shape that was barely recognisable as human Nivias slowly stopped convulsing, a single arm clawing out and twitching into stillness.

 Ballard tried to raise himself from the floor, and Dé Sparta limped over to help him. "I don't und- "

 "He was right, you are weak, old man. The core should have thrown you out of the great game decades ago," Cold Jaque said, ignoring Dé Sparta's question. "You didn't have the stomach for it when the Master of the Invisible College absolved you of your vows, and you're still every bit as soft.

 "Now, there is only one loose end."

 Cold Jaque raised his puncher towards the fleetmen. Trying to lift Ballard, Dé Sparta looked straight at the dark bearded pirate. Stupid, his pistol in his left hand, his shattered gun hand supporting the Flatlander - he had let Cold Jaque get the drop on them and at that moment all he could think of was the level of craftmanship that must have gone into the ornamentation on the rogue's silver-plated puncher.

 Cold Jaque's pistol spat crimson fire and the window behind the fleet-men exploded, the gun's magnetic ram-field slamming the Slider officer off its feet and into the wall behind. With the field playing over the shark skinned creature for three long seconds of continuous discharge, the Slider slumped to the floor a smoking ruin as the puncher flickered off.

 Dé Sparta stared incredulously a moment. Realising what the pirate had done he jerked his own puncher onto Cold Jaque, only to have Ballard slap it down, scarring the floor with a sudden high intensity burst of energy.

 "Are you insane?" coughed Dé Sparta. "He's murdered the prime's hand. When the Sliders find out their party's been murdered the swarm will tear apart every system on the rim."

 Ignoring the two fleetmen, Cold Jaque walked out of the dome roofed room, turning before he finally stepped out of sight. "Your taste in colleagues hasn't got any more intelligent with time, has it old man? You might as well tell him about the Invisible College. He's seen too much already, and partial knowledge would be more dangerous than his very obvious ignorance.

 "And boy, as you value your life, forget what you hear. There's nowhere you would be safe from us."

 "What does he mean?" Dé Sparta had to stop himself from shouting.

 Ballard got to his feet and wearily leant against the wall. "It doesn't suit The Machine's purpose to have all Its servants walk around brazenly flying the colours, lad. Sometimes you need people to walk within the shadows and find what's lurking there; and to get into the shadows it often helps if you're wearing an appropriate cut of clothes."

 "But the fleet," Dé Sparta pointed to the Slider Officer's corpse. "We can't afford the ships that will be needed to put down a Slider invasion, not with the Shimmer encroaching into the Humanitum."

 Ballard sighed. "Every sector in the Humanitum's been stripped to the bone for ships to fight the Shimmer, lad. There's nothing left to control the felloe worlds. It was to take advantage of that fact that in two weeks time a council of border Governors from this area was going to convene, meeting to declare succession from The Machine.

 "When the Slider invasion begins it will soak up most the Rim systems' forces, stop them from expanding their rebellion and remind every would-be traitor why their ancestors took their original oath to The Machine, why it's safer to be inside the Humanitum rather than out."

 Dé Sparta shook his head, overwhelmed by the implications of what he was hearing. "You are telling me we actually came here to start a war, not stop one? But the Shimmer, how are we going to spare ships to retake the border when the lords beg for re-admission? How are we going to stop the swarm from destroying the entire sector like that thing wanted?"

 Ballard glanced at the broken body of Lord Nivias, with what Dé Sparta would later swear was almost a look of sadness. "He really thought he was working against the Humanitum. So very powerful. So stupid.

 "When the border swarms invades, their most powerful Slider allies will turn on them, the very same ones that their prime cowed into submission over the years of their pax with the Humanitum. War on two fronts, and border swarms will fall to take her turn as the underdog again. It's a very old story, the balance of power, and the Imperium Departax Governance have had a very great deal of practice."

 "You are sure of this?" Dé Sparta asked. "The border swarms will be betrayed by the other Sliders."

 "Oh yes," Ballard said. "They'll be someone in the shadows working very hard to make sure of that. Somebody like Cold Jaque, or The Machine forgive me, somebody like me."

 Ballard bent over to feel Nineen's temple, the Palatine's daughter still huddled unblinking in a corner.

 "Will she recover?" Dé Sparta asked.

 "I think so, her mind was trying to resist Nivias as we were walking through the corridors. She hasn't even had training, do you have any idea how difficult it is to be able do that without training?

"This fight would have been like watching a rocket explode an inch from her face and not knowing how to close her eyes. But she is strong, she'll come out of the coma. The Humanitum always need ones like this," Ballard added. "So much night, and so few sighted to tread the shadows. Yes, she'll be taken to The Machine, and never have to see what happens to the land she expected to inherit.  

 "She won't see how many corpses a Slider prime demands for an atrocity like this, how easy it is to smash into a fragile place like Nivias and impale families until the gutters of this cursed warren flood under the weight of blood. But one day, when they've moulded her into something we won't even recognise, she'll be standing somewhere like this in all but name and then she will know the cost."

 The lo-tec fleet-man wrapped his cloak around Nineen and gently lifted her up. "We had better be going then."

 "Yes," Ballard said. "This whole damn planet