Haze and the Hammer of Darkness (75 page)

He ignores the genuflections that accompany his departure.

 

lxvi

Martel debates but a moment before drifting through time and space to meet the Grand Fleet before it nears the new orbit of Aurore, which is now merely a planet, albeit a technically impossible one with a slightly tilted axis and a too-circular orbit.

Should I have given it a greater axial angle than a mere seven and a half degrees?

He shrugs. For all the powers he has mastered, he has never learned orbital mechanics, nor the mathematics necessary. As for the distance from the sun that should be planetless … that was merely the matching of energy flows. The “year” will be longer, much longer, and the architecture will have to change with the introduction of nights, cold winds, seasons, and chill.

Aurore will lose much of its attraction as the resort of endless day and home of the gods and source of gods and demigods. Two called gods remain, and Martel knows he is not a god, but merely an immortal with godlike powers in some limited areas.

Gods are omniscient and omnipresent, and Martel is neither. That is why he must crush the Grand Fleet before it splits, and before either the Marshal or the Viceroy realizes he is the last defender of Aurore.

Space fleets are not awe-inspiring. The longest line of battle cruisers, cruisers, corvettes, and scouts, even with all screens flaring, flooding the emptiness of the night sky beyond Aurore with squandered energy, is less than a needle in that sky.

All the energy contained in the metal and composite hulls of the Grand Fleet is less than a small percentage of that represented by the smallest sun, and the combined life spans of the captains and commanders and subcommanders and officers and crews are but a fraction of the life span of the briefest star. And all the energy marshaled by one immortal called a god is insignificant against the total energy of even a small corner of a small galaxy.

Nonetheless, large enough to render a certain large fleet less significant,
thinks Martel, guarding his thoughts while recognizing that few are left with the power to monitor them, and none with the power to stop him.

Old habits die hard.

Martel waits in darkness beyond the new orbit of the still-impossible planet of Aurore, waits and watches, perceptions extended, as the Grand Fleet emerges from its subspace tunnel and wedges toward the FO star that is the ships' destination.

A thousand ships, fifty thousand men and women, and all because you play games with the Viceroy you created.

Martel acknowledges the debt, wondering how he can avoid the slaughter that looms before him.

The obvious strikes him.

What's good for gods …

He waits … waits as the Grand Fleet regroups.

Two basic formations, those are the options the Marshal for Strategy must consider: the Force Wedge or the Flying V to a Point.

Both formations have advantages. The wedge concentrates defense screens and firepower at a relatively localized point in space, while the Flying V brings all the Fleet elements together at the last possible moment for such concentration, and thus requires any enemy to spread his defensive forces.

Since the number of gods on Aurore must be finite, reflects the Marshal, and since the power he had already seen can be terribly concentrated, he advises the Fleet Commander of his recommendation, the Flying V to a Point, and his reason.

CONCUR
, prints the screen from the command bridge, and the decision has been made, and the Grand Fleet spreads from its subspace breakpoint.

Marshal Reitre feels a chill wind at his back, dismisses it as imaginary, but rechecks his laser sidearm all the same.

The lead scouts sprint toward the growing image of the star, toward the star and its single planet, where waits a god of darkness in darkness.

Here's where the myth came from!

The far lead scout sees the blackness, the darkness deeper than that through which it travels, and attempts to reverse its momentum.

“Captain! No indications ahead!”

“Full reverse!” commands the Lieutenant, but as he does the stars in the scout's screens wink out.

A black-shaded rainbow coruscates across the controls and is gone.

The stars, rather another set of stars, reappear on the screens.

Buzz!

“Navigation null!”

The Lieutenant scratches the back of his head. The star on which they are closing is not the FO type on which the
Bassett
had been centered instants before.

The navigation banks contain enough data to reconstruct virtually any locale within ten thousand lights of Karnak and have come up blank.

The Lieutenant wipes his forehead.

“Proceed,” he creaks out, hoping they can discover where they are, somehow.

Back in another time, Martel refocuses the tunnel that he has willed into existence and picks off the rest of the lead scouts.

Leaves 985 to go.

On the command bridge far out from the FO star in question, the screen makes the reports, one after the other, sometimes separated by moments, sometimes by close to half a standard hour.

LOCALIZATION AT
10.0.
ABNORMAL ENERGY CONCENTRATION OBSERVED AT TARGET.

PROCEEDING. RATE
1.5
AND CONSTANT.

PROCEEDING. TARGET AT
9.5
RATE
1.5
AND CONSTANT.

SPATIAL DISCONTINUITY, CLASS
8.
INBOUND RADIAN
0.

Marshal Reitre raises his bushy eyebrows. Class-eight discontinuities were only theoretical. Six is the greatest ever observed outside an actual nova. Reitre wonders whether the Fleet Commander understands what he is getting into.

The second advance line consists of three spread chevrons of corvettes, 120 in all, and Martel prepares to spray them all into the past after the scouts.

TARGET AT
8.5.

SPATIAL DISCONTINUITY. CLASS
9.

SQUADRON
7.
REPORT.

SQUADRON
7
DOES NOT REGISTER ON MASS DETECTORS. RADIATION NIL. DRIVE DISCONTINUITIES NIL.

REGROUP AND CLOSE LINE.

REGROUPING COMPLETE.

PROCEEDING. TARGET AT
7.0
RATE
1.5
AND CONSTANT.

SQUADRON
5
DOES NOT REGISTER ON MASS DETECTORS. RADIATION NIL. DRIVE DISCONTINUITIES NIL.

PROCEEDING. TARGET AT
6.0.

SQUADRON
4
DOES NOT REGISTER ON MASS DETECTORS …

Marshal Reitre's hand reaches for the commweb.

ABORT MISSION
, he signals, knowing the Regent will have his position and possibly his head for the override of the Fleet Commander. But the transmission from the command bridge screen tells him what he does not want to see.

NEGATIVE. CLOSING AND CONTINUING
, the signal returns.

Reitre sighs, wonders if he should use the sidearm on himself, hopes against hope that something, somehow, somewhere will save the Grand Fleet, for the squadrons are disappearing faster than the screen can script, and of the Fleet the Viceroy has dispatched to Aurore nothing will return to Karnak. Of that the Marshal is absolutely certain. He returns his eyes to the screen to watch what he fears will happen.

The remaining flanks of the Grand Fleet are beginning to curl away from Aurore, and for that reason Martel concentrates his attention on the right flank, the heavy cruisers commanded by the Duke of Trinan, who certainly would not have minded being the next Viceroy.

You can be Viceroy wherever you are. No one will be there to tell you no.

Martel does not count, only continues his tunnels to the past until a single ship remains, waits until the light cruiser
Eltiran
turns and reenters its subspace tunnel back to Karnak.

The critics were right. A thousand ships didn't fall across the skies of the past. Only 999, and none of them before the time of the first flight from old Home. That would not have been fair.

Martel pauses.

Though who's to say what's fair?

He has one other task, perhaps the hardest, yet to do.

Martel hangs in the darkness, suspends himself, juggles his thoughts and the long-buried feelings he knows churn beneath.

He turns toward Aurore. His planet. His impossible planet and the home of his impossible dreams.

 

lxvii

Midnight cloaks the Petrified Boardwalk … true midnight, moonless, for Aurore has never had a moon, with the stars only for light. For who had ever thought to provide outside lights for a planet that had never seen darkness?

The polished stone walks are deserted, and Martel can sense the fear. For darkness was accepted only when it was rare and isolated, but now that night has fallen, truly fallen, not a few of his worshipers are having second thoughts.

Let them.

He shrugs and surveys the low waves that still break across the night-silver sand.

Tonight there is no Emily to rescue you.

Nor Rathe.

Nor even a Marta Farrel to recall.

Hollie and Gates Devero shipped back to Halston, what—nine standard centuries ago? They're doubtless dust, or buried in some family vault.

On Karnak waits Kryn. Or Emily, if you wish to open that issue. You're an Immortal, perhaps the last who can claim godhood, or what passes for it. Now that the field of Aurore, flickering glittermotes and all, is gone, who is left?

Emily, the answer comes. Or Kryn, for they are one and the same, and both are older than Martel. Far older.

“Are they, really?” he asks the breakers in a low voice.

The waters mumble back the answer, which he cannot hear because he has lifted his eyes to the brightest star in the east.

Martel does not address a question to the star, instead drops his head and looks across the dark jumbles that are homes and shops and taverns where darkness and fear are being rediscovered again, and yet again.

A stone rattles, displaced by a cat.

Odd, a cat that has not known darkness. Does she see as well?

Martel tries to follow the small beast with his thoughts, but he is too late, and cannot locate that particular feline.

Do we seem that indistinguishable to whatever gods there are?

He smiles a hard smile as he asks himself the question, then lets his cloak flutter in the night breeze. The sea wind bears a saltier tang than it used to.

Martel takes three steps northward, recalling another night when it was night only by the clock, and perpetual day by the light. With another step, he recalls the second night like the first.

The images mix, and on top of them comes another, a young woman, dark-haired and dressed in blue leathers. And all three are the same.

Truly a goddess you are, Dian. Or Emily. Or Kryn.

He snorts, a rough bark that causes three cats and a dorle to jump from their respective perches. The third cat pounces on the dorle, but before she can dispatch the hapless songbird, Martel throws a handful of darkness at the pair and separates them.

Do you dare to hope, Martel? Or are you still refusing to act? Turn the universe upside down on principle, but don't make the last move?

He shakes his head and observes the northward hills, his eyes centering on a space where he knows a building of white marble stands. Has stood a good millennium or longer.

Silence drops like a second darkness on the Petrified Boardwalk.

Shortly, a large raven flaps toward a white villa, dark, unlit, and deserted now for some time, though visited once by a recently created ancient god.

Martel roams from room to room, from chamber to chamber, from porch to portico, as he waits for the dawn.

Even you, last god, bringer of darkness, cannot bring the dawn quicker.

The rose color of the eastern horizon is only the first of a handful of dawns since the re-creation of Aurore. Martel sits on the columned wall above the ravine, dangling his black-booted feet over the edge.

The dampness of the dew lends a sharpness to the corel blooms that cascade from the overgrown garden and across the far end of the same stone wall on which Martel sits.

Corel … Emily's villa, and Kryn's scent. Can you separate them?

He reflects upon his twists in time, letting his feet drum against the stone.

Can you put them back together again? Should you?

A dorle chitters with the first ray from the rising sun.

So much smaller than on Karnak the sun was, and yet the heat was the same. Should be, since he'd planned it that way, but the visual sense was different, a touch of strangeness, with the high sky a greener shade, holding a hint of green, green seas.

In the early-morning light, the villa is still vacant, emptier now than when the white marble had stood gray in the predawn darkness.

Martel gathers his own blackness and casts it, extending himself throughout the villa and the grounds, letting time flow around him as he becomes one with the deserted structure.

As he touches the stone, reinforces it, repairs it, he rejects time itself. As he changes half the marble from white to black. As he wills the gardens back into their formal states, and the emerald grass back into the lawns, and the rose trees back into their guards. As he adds black roses among the white. As he hopes …

If not, someone will be most amazed.

His last effort is to bind a corner of time around what he has wrought, letting the villa sleep immaculate and untouched, until he returns. If he returns.

Once more, the raven spreads wing and departs, this time to cross the Middle Sea toward the White Cliffs.

Atop the White Cliffs the raven alights, still a black bird that perches above a smooth circular pool of whitestone. Three black footprints, inked into the white rock, yet lead to the circular stone depression that resembles nothing so much as a petrified pool.