The Lords of Silence by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2018-07-18T14:20:45+00:00

Chapter Twelve

For a while the two ships drift alongside one another in silence. It is an odd configuration – two giants of the deep, both armed to the gunwales, holding position with their cold thrusters yawning and empty. The Ayamandar runs with constant light, a strobe of reds and oranges along its spiked hull. Solace is quieter, dripping with darkness, its blurred outline a haze of vegetative greens and greys. All around them the void fizzes and blinks as if electrified, and strange shapes part-form in gasps of smoke, short-lived and misshapen.

Dantine sees none of this. He is more mobile than before, limping from chamber to chamber, driven now by a curiosity that outweighs his fear. He estimates that there are thousands of men and women like him on this ship – probably tens of thousands. Few of them ever speak to him. As far as he can tell, few of them ever speak to one another. They seem strangely content, stumbling across the decks, just as he does. Some have tasks, most do not appear to. This is a listless ship.

And yet it functions, somehow. On a Naval Grand Cruiser, this level of lassitude would have seen the captain executed and the ratings given heavy beatings. The commissariat would have come in, sweeping level by level, restoring fear and efficiency, getting the chains of command pulled taut again.

The people here are not afraid. Some are sick, very badly sick. Most are carrying obviously terminal diseases, and their bodies are falling apart, but they are not afraid. Dantine begins to realise it has been a very long time since he has been among people who do not possess fear. He resists the urge, the dangerous urge, to think of this as a good thing.

It is likely, he reflects as he wanders the decks, that this ship, this Solace, has a self-perpetuating community, much as a big Imperial starship does. There will be children born in the bilges, raised in the sticky darkness, learning a trade in the shadows. There will be strange hierarchies – the upper decks, unimaginably far off and prestigious; the gun gangs and ammunition-haulers, an aspiration; the shit-shovellers and slop-servers, the likeliest occupation for any who survive the knife fights of the under-deck. They brawl with one another, and jostle, and protect, rut, perhaps even love. Then they die.

All is done in the stink, the dark, the heat. This is an alien world, as alien as Dantine has ever encountered. The filth is phenomenal, burned deep into every surface so that it feels less like an encrustation and more like the very matter of the world around them, and yet these souls persist here, against all odds, eking out short and strangely fecund lives before the phages bite, after which their superannuated bodily remains are scraped into boiling vats and served up to the next, unknowing generation.

He tried to speak to them, a while back. He thought it might help, if he exchanged a few words. Deep

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