Solaris Rising 1.5 by Ian Whates Read Free Book Online Page A

snatches of family stories that were almost folk-tales: the greater, stronger part of the former Dai Viet Empire; the pale-skinned people of the outer planets, a civilisation of graceful cities and huge habitats, of wild gardens on mist-filled hillsides, of courtly manners and polished songs.
    She was surprised, therefore, by the woman who disembarked onto The Tortoise in the Lake . Rong Anh was indeed paler than she was under her makeup, but otherwise ordinary looking: though very young, barely old enough to have bonded to a ship in Nam society, she bore herself with a poise any warrior would have envied. “You have something for us.”
    Dong Huong made a gesture, towards the walls of the room: the seething, ever-shifting mass of calligraphy; the fragments of poems, of books, of sutras, a perpetual reminder of the chaos underpinning the universe. “I... apologise,” she said at last. “I’ve come to bring one of your ships back to you.” To appease them, her commander had said. To avoid a declaration of war from a larger and more developed empire, a war which would utterly destroy the Nam.
    Anh did not move. “I saw it outside. Tell me what happened.”
    “It was an accident,” Dong Huong said. The Two Sisters in Exile —a merchant vessel from the Northerners’ vast fleet—had just happened to cross the line of fire at the wrong time. “A military exercise that went wrong. I’m sorry.”
    Anh hadn’t moved; but the ceruse on her face looked less and less like porcelain, and more and more like bleached bone. “Our ships don’t die,” she said, slowly.
    “I’m sorry,” Dong Huong said, again. “They’re as mortal as anyone, I fear.” The vast majority of attacks on a ship would do little but tear metal: a ship’s vulnerable point was the heartroom, where the Mind that animated it resided. Unlike Nam ships, Northerner ships were large and well-shielded; and no pirate had ever managed to hack or pierce their way into a heartroom.
    But fate could be mocking, uncaring: as The Two Sisters in Exile passed by Dong Huong’s military exercise, a random lance of fire had gone all the way to the heartroom on an almost impossible trajectory—searing the Mind in its cradle of optics. They’d heard the ship’s Mind scream its pain in deep spaces long after the lance had struck; had stood in stunned silence, knowing that the Mind was dying and that nothing would stop that.
    Anh shook her head; looked up after a while, and her mask was back in place, her eyebrows perfectly arched, like moths. “An accident.”
    “The people responsible have been... dealt with.” Swiftly, and unpleasantly; and firmly enough to make it clear this would be not tolerated. “I have come to bring the body back, for a funeral. I’m told this is the custom of your people.”
    Nam ships and soldiers didn’t get a funeral, or at least not one that was near a planet. They lay frozen where they had fallen—stripped of all vital equipment, the cold of space forever preserving them from decay, a permanent monument; a warning to anyone who came; a memory of glory, which the spirits of the dead could bask into all the way from Heaven. It would be Dong Huong’s fate; The Tortoise in the Lake ’s fate, in a few years or perhaps more if Quan Vu, God of War, saw fit to extend His benevolence to them both. Dong Huong had few expectations.
    “It is our custom.” Anh inclined her head. Her eyes blinked, minutely: it looked as if she was engaged elsewhere, perhaps communicating with her own ships. “We will bring her back where she was born, and bury her with the blessing of her descendants. You will come.”
    It wasn’t a question, or even an invitation. “Of course,” Dong Huong said. She hesitated, then said, “The military exercise was under my orders. If you want to clear my blood debt...”
    Anh paused, halfway through one of the ship’s dilating doors. “Blood debt?” Her head moved up, a fraction, making her seem almost inhuman.