Light of Impossible Stars by Gareth L. Powell

Author:Gareth L. Powell [Powell, Gareth L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

SAL KONSTANZ

I had joined the House of Reclamation out of a sincere desire to make the universe a better place. Recriminations and grief followed the Archipelago War, with blame on all sides. I spent nights awake, crying impotent tears, overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, my insides twisted into knots of sick, helpless anger. Terrible wrongs had been perpetrated in our names, and now couldn’t be undone. And, with the exception of a few scapegoats, those responsible would largely escape retribution for the decisions that had thrown the Human Generality into its worst and bloodiest civil conflict. I watched anger and bitterness eat up friends. The best minds of my generation were consumed by madness. They raged at each other on the communication nets, using quotes from Ona Sudak’s poems to express their existential fury at the unfairness of it all. And for a time, I was one of them. I didn’t know what else to do. In the aftermath of such murderous stupidity, I felt helpless. I hadn’t wanted the war, I hadn’t voted for it. More than a billion people had died in the conflict, and yet nothing much had been decided. The Conglomeration and the Outward still cleaved to their respective ideologies; the extent of their respective territories remained largely unchanged; and their various antagonisms still simmered beneath all the half-hearted diplomacy and talk of reconstruction. Had we been through that attritional nightmare of self-destruction for nothing? Had we fought and suffered and died simply to prove a political point?

In my helpless resentment, I had felt unable to continue wearing the uniform of the Outward Navy. Although I had commanded a medical frigate, I had seen first-hand what happened when men and women surrendered their individuality to the state—when they allowed themselves to become pawns in someone else’s game. And so I resigned. I joined the demobilised personnel who stood in the cold night wind beneath the lights of every spaceport, wondering whether they could face going home to their old lives after enduring so many years of dehumanising violence. Alva Clay decided to come with me—but I had no inkling of where we would go or what we would do, until I chanced to meet George Walker in a favela tea shack on the edge of a desert, on a backwater planet whose name I can’t remember even now.

“Come to Camrose,” he said. “Enlist in the House. That’s what we did.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

He smiled. He had grey hair and kind eyes. “Me and the ship. You might have heard of her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Trouble Dog.”

“I can’t say I have.”

“She’s a Conglomeration Carnivore. She fought at the Battle of Pelapatarn.”

“A lot of ships fought at Pelapatarn.”

“Yes, but she’s the first one to resign.”

I blinked. “She resigned?” I’d never heard of a warship doing such a thing. Sometimes they went nuts and had to be retired, but none had ever simply downed tools before.

George smiled, causing the skin around his eyes to crinkle. “Yes. I think she’s growing a conscience.

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