The Nuclear Druid Read online

  Dhjerga caught his arm. “Wait. Could you build us a spaceship?”

  Colm felt like throwing the stepladder at him. He set it down by the wall. “It’s not that easy.”

  “If I fetched you all the materials and tools, could you do it?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Come outside. No, come on.” Colm was too despondent to resist. Dhjerga dragged him back to the turbine hall. The door stood open. The snow outside was littered with bodies. Hralf the caretaker and his family were on the far side of the patio, struggling with the abandoned power cart. Dhjerga hauled Colm outside and pointed up. “See that?”

  The cold wind sliced Colm’s face. He shaded his eyes. The sun was still just peeking over the horizon; it did not seem to have moved. The gas giant sat on the hilltop behind the dam, a pale ghost in the daylight. “What?”

  “The moon.” It looked like a tiny green-tinged soap bubble on the gas giant’s pale face. “That’s Atletis.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the Magistocracy’s headquarters. There’s only one power source up there, and it belongs to the Magus. When we visit HQ, we’re not even allowed to go outside. We’re gloved from the minute we arrive until the minute we leave. We can’t surprise him … But if we had a spaceship, we could.”

  “Maybe,” Colm said indifferently.

  “So build a spaceship for us! Help us kick the Magus’s face down his throat.

  “Who is this Magus, anyway?” The word felt like a rock in his mouth.

  “He’s the one that started the war, back when I was a kid.” The first Ghosts had appeared on Earth’s colony worlds twenty-five years ago, when Colm was a kid. He and Dhjerga were about the same age. It fit. “Kill him, and the war ends.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” Dhjerga walked to the nearest corpse and rolled it onto its back. He straightened out the limbs, folded the fast-cooling hands on the chest, closed the eyes. “We’re born to die. But there’s too much dying among us these days. Everyone’s tired of it.”

  “They’re only slaves,” Diejen said. Colm had not seen her behind him. Dryjon was there too.

  “It has to end,” Dhjerga said.

  “You’re just making more work for the caretakers,” Diejen said.

  Dhjerga straightened up. “Back on this world called Juradis, Colm freed all the faeries’ slaves. He risked his life to liberate aliens! It was fantastic.” He spun to face Colm. “Can you refuse to do the same for us? For them?” He gestured at the dead. The men Colm had killed. Just copies, just … “People like you?”

  “Oh, damn,” Colm said quietly. He rubbed his knuckles over his mouth. “If I build you a spaceship …”

  “Then we’ll help you get home, of course,” Dhjerga said with a quick glance at his brother and sister.

  Colm stiffened. He searched Dhjerga’s face to see if he was serious. “There’s a way? You can help me get back to Earth?”

  Dhjerga grinned. “Where there’s a will …”

  Colm sagged, realizing Dhjerga had no idea how he could get back to Earth, either. He was just hoping something would turn up.

  “No, no,” Dryjon said. He strode forward, sticking out his right hand. “We can do better than that.” His open, earnest brown eyes met Colm’s. “Help us save our homeworld … and we’ll help you save yours.”

  Colm thought glancingly about the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of building a spaceship on a planet where technological progress had not even got as far as steam engines. But he had to give it a shot, didn’t he? Even if they could not help him return to Earth, maybe they could help Earth. The Ghosts had started the war; Ghosts could end it.

  “All right, you’re on.” He stuck out his hand. Dryjon clasped his forearm in the odd gesture favored by the Ghosts. Dhjerga and Diejen joined the clasp. They stood there for a moment among the corpses.

  “So,” Dhjerga said. “A spaceship. What do you need?”

  CHAPTER 11

  BARJOLTAN, THE THIRD AND smallest of the Big Three terraformed planets orbiting Betelgeuse, was a shipyard.

  It did not have a shipyard on it, or in orbit around it. It was a shipyard. Every inch of the surface had been strip-mined, or turned over to heavily polluting industrial processes. Pit-head refineries and sprawling factories delivered materials to the fab clusters scattered over the planet’s two landmasses, which produced components ranging from 5-nanometer semiconductors to 500-meter hull plates. The actual ships—as well as drones, satellites, and the semi-sentient weapons known as Walking Guns—were put together at the assembly plants ringing two large spaceports, one on each landmass.

  It had been easy for Dhjerga to find the place.

  He already had a fix on Juradis, and after that it was just a matter of looking for another blazing big power source nearby.

  The hard part was finding what he needed.

  He had discarded his own clothes and borrowed a uniform from a human. Not a copy. A human. There were a lot of them about, now that they’d occupied this world along with its two sister worlds. The uniform, a coverall with the blazon HRF GROUND SUPPORT on the back, fit all right, and the weirdly soft dark blue fabric did not show the bloodstains.

  He had not wanted to kill its prior owner, but he had got so used to killing that he did it without thinking.

  He blamed the Magus, who had trained and shaped him into a killer.

  He also blamed the Magus for the feelings of confusion and inferiority that assaulted him as he wandered through the shipyard. It had been bad enough on Juradis, which was a colony world like other colony worlds—farms, power sources, people to be killed. This was different altogether. His people had nothing like this. We are primitives, he thought. Peasants who know one thing and do it well. These people know everything.

  He walked purposefully along corridors where the walls breathed and the floors shivered, and loitered as long as he dared in the vast workshops where the humans congregated in the glare of faerie lights. He was trying to overhear any word or phrase that might point him in the right direction. The humans gave him puzzled glances—not, he thought, because he looked wrong, for he did not look wrong. He was wearing the coverall, pretending to be one of them. No, what puzzled them was the fact that he carried a piece of paper, on which Colm had written down a long list of things he needed. No one carried paper here. They all had faerie books.

  Colm had told him to get a faerie book. He could start there.

  The things proliferated in here like rats in a granary—squatting upon desks, riding on people’s belts, swinging from their lanyards, or clutched in the palms of soft plump hands, puffing melty fireworks into the air. He walked around a cavern where faerie machines thumped like thunder, hammering pieces of metallic stuff into impossibly delicate shapes. He saw a large faerie book sitting on an unattended desk. He took it.

  There was a distinction between taking and fetching, which Dhjerga had tried to explain to Colm without success. When you fetched things—or people—their originals stayed at home. But the resulting copies were, well, copies. Never quite as good. Liable to break. Which didn’t matter in general, because they were copies; you could always make more.

  But this time, it did matter. Betelgeuse was so far from Kisperet. It had taken him so long to get here. And it would take just as long again to fetch a replacement if this faerie book broke, because it was a copy and subtly flawed.

  So he took the original. Who cared if they noticed it was missing? They’d just put it down to their own carelessness.

  Ambling past the desk, he aimed a glance at the big, C-shaped faerie book upon it, tracing with his eyes the lifeline that ran to the power outlet in the floor. He snorted up some of the power under the floor. The faerie book vanished, lifeline and all. A small flurry of dust settled to the desk. Dhjerga wandered on, feeling a bit better.

  They had no notion of security, these Earth humans. Power ran through the assembly plant like blood through a living body. It was not just t
hat they didn’t guard their power sources. This plant—this whole spaceport—was a power source, with lifelines woven through the walls and floors, every building studded with energy nodes that made the horse-powered and water-powered generators back home look like candles. All right, blame the faeries; but the humans were just as bad. When he was in the Kuiper Belt, he’d seen Earth from a distance, blazing like a bloody bonfire. They were asking for it.

  That’s what the Magus said.

  Dhjerga shivered, and quickened his steps. He was done with letting the Magistocracy tell him what to think. He had believed the Magistocracy when they said that the humans from Earth were all copies … they acted like copies, and poor-quality ones at that, neither following orders, nor doing anything interesting … but that didn’t matter! They were humans, just like him. He would not kill any more of them.

  Half an hour later, he had to kill a woman who tried to prevent him from leaving the assembly plant. Then some more people came running, so he flitted a few hundred miles to Barjoltan’s other landmass. He wound up in a sun-bleached scrapyard, coughing on hot, nearly unbreathable air. He flitted again to the inside of the faerie mound whose chimneys he could see in the distance. This seemed more promising: no humans, just loads of machines making bits and bobs and ferrying them to a shipping center. But he still didn’t know where to find what he was looking for. He prowled around the shipping center, comparing the labels on boxes to the words on Colm’s list, without success. All this flitting around had taken it out of him, and he had now killed two people without getting any closer to his goal. He sat down on an empty pallet and put his head in his hands.

  A querulous growl snapped his gaze up.

  The shipping center was built around a semicircular loading dock, where machines transferred things onto the motorized carts called, Dhjerga knew, trucks. A different kind of cart, the kind that they called car, had just pulled up at the loading dock. A five-foot furry alien, wearing clothes, stood on its hind legs behind the car’s open door.

  Dhjerga knew this alien, unless it was a different one of the same kind.

  “Am I going to have to kill you, too?” he said to it.

  “You left a fine mess over on Parsimine,” the alien said, referring to the other landmass. “All the humans are running in circles, imagining sentrienza treachery. But when I saw the camera footage, I realized it was only you.”

  Dhjerga groaned. He had forgotten about the all-seeing eyes called ‘cameras.’ “And I thought I was being so fucking clever, disguising myself.”

  “Have you come alone this time?”

  Dhjerga knew this was a reference to his visit to Juradis. He now also knew that this was the same alien. “Yes. Sorry about your castle, by the way.” He and his lads had wrecked it.

  The alien dipped his head. “It was old, and needed redecorating.” He closed the car door, revealing a pistol in one of his middle claws. Even odds whether Dhjerga would have been able to reach him before he got off a shot around the car door.

  The alien holstered his weapon and undulated towards Dhjerga on his two rearmost sets of feet, with the rest of him raised off the ground—an oddly elegant gait. It was hot in the shipping center, the air full of dust, not much better than outside. The alien let out a prim, cat-like sneeze. “Excuse me. What brings you back to the Betelgeuse system?”

  Dhjerga decided to ask the alien for help. He hated asking for help, or admitting to ignorance about anything. But if the alien tried to nobble him, he’d simply flit. “This.” He extended Colm’s list.

  “‘All types of sensors,’” the alien read aloud. “‘Gyroscopes. Inertial dead reckoning platform. Vernier controls. Don’t bother trying to steal sheets of aluminium, or anything else we can make here. Tools to make tools: an electron beam furnace, a hot isostatic press …’” Further down the page there was another heading, Engine. “‘Combustion chamber. Niobium alloy engine bells, not the titanium alloy ones, they’re rubbish.” The alien turned the paper over. “Drugs. Anything you can find. Cocaine. Morphine derivatives. But what I really need is tropodolfin …’” The alien’s voice caught. “Who wrote this?”

  “Someone you’ll remember,” Dhjerga said.

  The alien dropped the list. The paper fluttered to the floor. “Colm is alive?”

  “He is,” Dhjerga said.

  “Where?”

  “On a colony world,” Dhjerga said evasively. “I can’t tell you exactly where.” This rule of the Magistocracy’s seemed wise to observe. An alien, after all, was an alien. “But he’s very much alive, I promise you.” He hoped it was still true.

  “Oh, my friend,” the alien said quietly. His black eyes shone. “He’s somewhere safe, then?”

  Dhjerga grimaced. “Is there anywhere safe?”

  “Too true. Too true.” The alien picked up the list with a hindclaw and transferred it to a front one. “This looks like a list of spaceship components.”

  “It is.” Dhjerga did not mention where the spaceship would be flying to, if they got it built.

  After a moment, the alien dipped his head. “What can I do to help? I have already taken the precaution of disabling the cameras in this facility.”

  “Thanks.” Dhjerga pointed at the list. “Well, I’m not exactly sure what a hot isostatic press is…”

  CHAPTER 12

  THAT NIGHT, AN AUTOMATED inventory scan detected 193 separate items missing from the shipping center. The losses were not connected with the unexplained murders on Barjoltan’s other continent.

  By that time Dhjerga Lizp was far away.

  And Gil was back in his car, on his way to see Axel Best, bursting with his news.

  Axel had been seconded to the team managing the Barjoltan shipyards. The Fleet needed to build as many new ships as possible within the next three years. The nearest sentrienza system to Betelgeuse was Rigel, 18 months away by FTL—add in the time for drones to carry the news there, and you had a tight timeframe. The mood now was tense, but cautiously optimistic. They had beaten one sentrienza fleet. Perhaps they could beat a second one.

  Civilian experts had been plucked out of the refugee masses and were working to master the sentrienza assembly processes. Gil found Axel in a towering vehicle assembly building, listening to a group of engineers explain the theory behind the antiquark drives used in sentrienza ships. Overhead, an almost-complete drive module hung in its cradle. The doors of the assembly building stood open; Betelgeuse shone in. Dry wind whipped the dangling lines and cables, and deposited dust on Gil’s fur.

  Axel said to the engineers, “OK, let me see if I’ve got this straight. It heterodynes the Q-field and the gauge field, flipping half of the down quarks in a given chunk of matter into down antiquarks. When that happens, the neutrons in the said chunk of matter decompose to an up quark and pure energy. Correct?”

  Gil raised himself onto his hind legs. “In fact, you are considerably over-simplifying it. But yes, that is how it works. Antiquark power is superior to nuclear fusion on all key performance metrics, with the single exception that it is not easily weaponized. That is why the sentrienza continue to rely on nuclear bombs for anti-personnel applications.”

  “Hello, Gil,” Axel said. “So you’re an expert, too? ”

  Gil gazed up at the drive module. Like all sentrienza machines, it looked half-organic, like a cross between a giant geode and a termite nest. That lumpy shell contained some of the galaxy’s most arcane applied physics. However, he had no doubt that the humans could reverse-engineer it. There was a reason the sentrienza had fast-tracked them as a future slave race: their minds were as sharp as claws. And if they ran into trouble, there were several queazel engineers in the group. “I suggest you let them get on with it,” he said gently to Axel.

  “What he meant to say,” Axel told the engineers, “is that I’m due for a coffee break. Don’t blow us all up while I’m gone.”

  “Fine, we’ll wait until you come back,” said the lead engineer.

  “Screw you
,” Axel grinned. “I’ll see if I can find any of those algae cookies.” He and Gil walked across the assembly floor, between other modules waiting to be triple-checked before they were lifted into space. “I just can’t help trying to understand everything,” Axel said, ruefully pushing at his fringe.

  Gil had observed the banter. The engineers had been laughing with Axel. Formerly, they would have been laughing at him. Axel had loosened up, got better around people, and Gil thought he knew why. “How is Meg?”

  “Grouchier than a rattlesnake,” Axel sighed. But a smile spread from his eyes to his mouth. “At least she’s over the morning sickness. But now she’s starting to show, you know? Which means we’re gonna have to tell the Rat. She didn’t want to tell anyone. I’m like, honey, people are going to notice … But hey, taking maternity leave might be better than dancing attendance on the faerie princess. She hates that assignment.”

  Axel led the way into a break room with a claustrophobic low ceiling. Exhausted technicians sprawled on the overstuffed sentrienza furniture. A coffee machine stood on a side table. Coffee was one of Gil’s healthier human vices. Axel pushed the button and filled two disposable cups. Gil remembered drinking coffee with Colm in the Uzzizellan embassy on Gna. The memory always brought a shiver of nostalgia. Now excitement tempered the sadness. He hugged his news, savoring the anticipation of telling Axel.