They are sitting in the deepest corners of nothing, the blackest, emptiest parts of a system, missiles pointed at the worlds they are commanded to destroy, should that order ever be given.
Furthest out from its target is a ship called the MMVDestiny.Its weaponry is pointed at a world by the name of Okopuatji. Thepeople of Okopuatji are blessed with a dense, bright star and a solar system steeped in mineral and gaseous resources, which resources generate regular interplanetary traffic that criss-crosses through the dark. Thus, the MMVDestinylurks on the furthest edge, away from the steady flow of pioneers and speculators. A missile fired from theDestinywould take nearly two weeks to reach its primary target, but to guarantee impact, the ship carries an ordnance of over two hundred city-killers, and would launch, at command, at least four weapons per target, curving each on mildly different trajectories that could arrive any time between three weeks and two months after initial firing, to minimise the possibility of interception and keep any military counter-astronomers on their toes.
Each missile is not much taller than a person from a medium-gravity world standing upright with arms raised above their head, and most of that is fuel for the acceleration and course-adjustment, rather than fissile material. The body of the missile is black-body-shielded, almost impossible to detect by electromagnetic observation. Once fired, there is an auto-destruct on board in the unlikely event that a cancel command is given. No one really believes that such an order would ever be sent. You do not fire a missile that will kill millions upon millions in order to test the diplomatic waters. These things are either meaningless, pointless posturing between great powers proclaiming “But I can destroy you”/“No, but I can destroyyou!” or they are the end of everything, the death of a great many worlds.
The MMVDestiny, like the rest of the blackships, was connected to the broader military network of the Shine through its Titan interface.
The Titan was wired into the skull of the Pilot, who groaned and cried out and jibbered and jabbered with the constant calling of the dark, the relentless, cruel whisper of another place, a place where up was down, in was out and the mind could not look for too long if it ever hoped to again find peace.
The Pilot of the MMVDestinywas called Kegh.
Kegh had been born into debt, and never escaped it.
At school, he didn’t really understand the way in which he was meant to learn. Things other children found easy, he found hard. Not all things – not at all. He could create visual representations of ideas that captured extraordinary detail, sweeping emotion in a few strokes of a pen. He could manipulate three-dimensional objects in his head with an ease that others found baffling; draw a perfect circle with his eyes shut, capture and replicate any tune on just one hearing.
But these were not skills his Venture valued, and so Kegh was told that he had failed, that he was of no use to anyone, and the only work he could get was being shouted at in the fish market when irate customers tried their luck gaming the automated tills and failed. All it took was one disaster – a medical bill, perhaps, or a malfunctioning heater in his flat – for everything in his life to fall off a cliff, and it did.
“Calling, calling, hold – hold!” cries out Kegh to the dark, as the whispers of the other ships ring through the void, as commands are sent and received, a constant babble of noise, a constant whispering out between the stars. “Report status. Report. Report. Status: normal. Normal. There is a crab crawling along the beach, it crawls sideways, how does it see, how does it see, its eyes turn inwards, and inwards there are only stars, it crawls but the stars do not move. They do not move, they do not move: prepare! Prepare! Hold. Hold and prepare. Hold and prepare to. To hold and prepare.”
Kegh’s debt was sold to the military, and the military had only one use for him.
“13-58-92-84. The laugh flew upwards into the open sky, the birds picking up the song of merriment, 78-01-03-49.”
The only good thing that may be said for Kegh’s position, strapped into the Pilot’s chair, is that as his mind leaches away to nothing, as his soul is pulled from his body and his brain turns to mulch, at least he is not alone.
Four hundred and fifty-one other voices cry out, the Pilots of the blackship fleet. They reach out for each other, never quite touching, cry out are you here, are you here, can you see me? I am lost, I am lost, help me, I am lost!
The Pilot at blackship command only ever survives a couple of days at most. The Shine likes to use military defectors for this role. Soldiers who refused to fire; officers who grew a conscience. The admirals believe that a militarily trained mind lasts a little longer, is a little more resilient against the madness, the breaking, the falling-apart. There is no evidence to support this. It is pure vindictiveness and spite; nothing more.
I did not need to put on the Titan interface.
Did not need to sit in a Pilot’s chair on a nameless battleship somewhere in the black.
The quans already had everything they needed, their infiltration hard-wired into the system that Riv Fexri had built.
I wanted to be there anyway. It seemed important, perhaps, to be with the Pilots as they died.
When I tried to interface with the Tryphon, all was noise, chaos, screaming, a ripping-apart and clawing of skin. I was never meant to be there, constantly flung through the dark.
Not so with the Titan.
I reached into the void, and at once the voices fell silent, attentive, listening to me.
Hello, I breathed.It’s all right now. It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right.
Kegh was the first to die.
He died from an Okopuatji missile, fired nine hours previously from a ship that had been drifting on an approach course for three months, all engines cut, heat signature reduced to a void-black chill. The MMV Destiny never saw it coming, and the payload ripped a hole across multiple decks big enough and drastic enough that no emergency hull seal or breach shield could keep the ship from venting every deck in fifteen seconds or less.
Thus Kegh’s life ended, twenty-three years and four months after it began.
The rest of them died over the next three hours, gunned down by missiles that had been in transit for up to a week and a half in the case of the MMVRighteous Flag, or by a swarm of attack ships that dropped out of arcspace, weapons already blazing, right on top of the MMVIndustrious.
A few tried to run.
They did not run because they knew what was happening. They were oblivious to the deaths of their fellow blackships, hundreds of light years away. They could not know the scale of the coordinated attack against their systems, nor understand just how they had been compromised. Instead, they ran because of the silence, because of the failure of command. They wound up their arcspace engines, began to accelerate to jump speed – but too late, far too late.
Three fired their payloads.
