The Changeling Game, Chapter 78

78.
Empires of the Dead

This, Riddick found himself reflecting, was more like the girl he’d expected to find.

“To be fair,” Jack said, her expression turning damned pert the moment the doors closed, “this place is scary as shit. You know how many worlds these guys have burned down?”

“I do now,” he told her, reining in a smirk for the moment, “thanks to your memories.”

He wondered how upset she would be about that. He couldn’t think of a more intimate act he’d ever engaged in with anyone. There was a real possibility that she’d feel violated when she realized just how deep into her memories he had gone.

“Which are all back in my head now, too.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Almost all of them.”

She didn’t seem bothered at all. Interesting.

“What’s still missing?” He had some strong suspicions, but if he was right about what, and why, he wasn’t going to clue her in.

“Well, among other things, I still don’t know what ‘Donna Noble has left the library’ means or what it has to do with Kyra.”

There was a soft rustle from the vaulted ceiling above them. “Sounds like your sister thinks you should let it be,” he said, sidestepping the issue of what had happened to Kyra for the moment. The phrase, itself, was opaque to him.

Jack’s sister. There was a crazy, twisted thought. The girl had gone out and adopted herself four siblings… an esper older brother named Todd, an older sister that he still needed to tell her had died… a telepathic crustacean…

…and an eldritch horror.

Excuse me? But he could hear amusement in the creature’s mental voice.

C’mon, he told Her. You know human beings can’t even look right at you without it breaking their brains a little.

But it was, he thought, a perfect example of who the girl in front of him, no longer afraid of him, truly was. Confronted with members of a mind-bending transdimensional species that most people would instinctively want to flee from or kill, she’d done the most purely Jack thing of all…

She’d made friends with them.

He couldn’t entirely fathom how she did that. With them, or with members of humanity. There was a wellspring of trust within her that hadn’t stopped flowing despite every dire situation she’d found herself in and every genuine monster she’d faced. And she’d been confronted by some nasty ones.

She’d also stayed friends with the Apeiros after they had lifted memories from her mind on multiple occasions and even puppeteered her body. Maybe that was why she seemed so nonchalant about what he and the Quasi-Dead had done.

“I’m trying to let it be,” Jack said, pulling him back out of his musings. “But, I mean… could you?”

“I’m not the one who’d probably go off half-cocked if she knew too much,” he told her. “Even you agreed to have those parts of your memory wiped, when you knew what was in them.”

The girl was frowning at him. “Do you know?”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t especially thrilled about it. But he wasn’t going to derail everything. For now, at least.

“So everybody knows but me,” she grumbled, finally looking irked.

Riddick shook his head, starting to remove his armor. He might not need to wear it every time he left his chambers anymore, now that he had a truce with the Moribund in place…

…or he might. The last Lord Marshal had apparently never stepped out of the rooms without his on.

But then again, back then, the Moribund hadn’t cared how much intrigue, debauchery, or backstabbery its—

His, the nameless one interjected.

—his vassals had engaged in, as long as they obeyed his commands.

“Hardly anybody knows, Jack.” he looked over at her as he set pieces of armor on his desk, weighing her reactions. “Most of the people who figure it out die… at least, the ones who are too good to stand by and let it all keep going.”

She frowned at him. “So, what, you can know because you’re not good enough? That’s bullshit, Riddick.”

There you are. She still believed in him. They just might have a fighting chance to get through this. “Maybe ‘altruistic’ would be a better word. You’re the one who tried to throw herself into a swarm of flying piranhas to save Shazza, not me. Maybe none of us want to see you succeed at that kind of suicidal fuckery.”

Jack was, he was glad to see, considering his words. After a moment, she sighed and nodded. “Yeah, you probably don’t have ‘impulse control problems,’ right?”

“Most of the time? No.” Done removing his armor, he sat down in his chair, watching her. “So here’s the thing. You got too many bulls-eyes all over you for me to just cut you loose. Almost as many as me. Toombs. The Federacy. The Quintessa Corporation. They’d all want to use you. Use you up.”

She nodded. Poor kid didn’t look thrilled, but she seemed to accept what he was telling her.

“Might just be that this is the safest place for you to be right now.” Not to mention that he didn’t want to let her go…

“That’s a really disturbing thought,” she said, glancing around his chambers. He hadn’t made a whole lot of changes to them since he’d taken them over; about the biggest “change” he’d made was pulling down a few hangings depicting bizarre acts of torture and wrapping them around a gruesome statue that couldn’t be removed without a jackhammer. The place was grim, someone’s dark, twisted fantasy—

Oh yeah. That’d help her some.

“Tell me about the Tenth Crusade,” he said, hiding a smile when her expression turned quizzical.

“In real life, there’s never been one,” she said. “I mean, there were a lot more than ten crusades in the Middle Ages on old Earth, but the ones that were numbered only officially go up to eight. Some historians call Lord Edward’s Crusade the Ninth Crusade, though. But no Tenth Crusade ever happened… so a lot of stories were written about one happening.”

“The ship, though.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She shrugged and sat down on the foot of the bed. “You need a second chair.”

“Liked to keep everybody I had to let in here standing. But yeah. I’ll get you one. So. The ship.”

“It’s one of the three missing Phase I Star Jumpers from the early days of Federacy colonization. But you probably remember that from my memories if nowhere else.”

So she did know what he’d done. Odd that she was so casual about it, especially given some of what she had to know he’d seen. More than seen, really.

“I saw ’em, and I probably still have ’em in my head, but I have to go digging for ’em in a way I don’t with my own memories. How ’bout you fill in the details from yours?”

He could tell that she still wondered why he was so interested, but she shrugged it off and started talking. “This Allsense-VR game designer from the late twenty-first century got super rich off of a game he’d named Emperoi Thanatou, which he mistranslated into English as ‘Empires of the Dead’ even though it actually meant ‘death dealers.’ Huh…”

She frowned for a second before continuing.

“It was set in early fourteenth century Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, and players could take on roles as knights, lords, and pilgrims, or the non-European equivalents. Everybody’s goal in the game was to get control of a city called Jerusalem, which had just been made part of the Mediterranean Interdiction Zone about half a decade before the game came out, and nobody could even visit anymore.”

“So his game was about a fictional Tenth Crusade, to a place people had only just been barred from accessing in reality?”

“I guess. He never called it that, but yeah. The game ran for more than a decade, one of those worldwide bestsellers with almost five billion user accounts, but then it got banned by more than a dozen major nations because it was ‘radicalizing’ players, and there were some incidents in which people who played on opposing sides in-game attacked each other in real life. But he was already a trillionaire from it, and he decided he was going to use his money to build a ship and get a colony charter, and go where no Earth government could tell him what to do ever again.”

Riddick realized, suddenly, that he knew a piece of the story that Jack didn’t, that nobody had let preteen Audrey MacNamera read about when she was composing her report. He’d heard of that game, and it had been popular for a reason that had nothing to do with its medieval setting: registered adult accounts could activate a module, for an additional monthly fee, that allowed their “knights” and “lords” to have lifelike Allsense-VR sex with NPC “ladies” and peasant women. Dozens of watchdog groups had been up in arms within a year of the setting’s introduction, after discovering that the sex didn’t have to be consensual and that many players were sacking villages just so they could rape NPCs. The game still existed, and Riddick had encountered more than one “club” of malcontents that still played “unlocked” editions of it for that sole purpose. But that part wouldn’t have been in any of the history books a grammar school girl had access to, especially somewhere like Deckard’s World.

“What was this trillionaire’s name?”

“Chapman Marshal.”

“Hmm.” That made sense. “So he built a ship?”

“He had to get some other trillionaires involved to get the funds together, but yeah. They got a charter to terraform and colonize Kepler-186-f. The Quintessa Corporation had just announced Star Jump Drives, and they commissioned their ship to have one but realized that, since they’d beat the terraforming equipment to Kepler-186 if it flew out on a sublight drive, they’d need to take it with them. That didn’t leave them with a whole lot of room for people.”

“Especially with how primitive cryo was back then,” Riddick mused. The ship Kyra had taken hadn’t used cryo at all, and her memories of life on it, relayed to Jack, had been cold and claustrophobic. “How’d this Marshal guy handle it?”

“He decided to get a second Star Jumper just for the terraforming equipment, and sent it ahead, but that meant they needed a shit-ton more funds than if they’d sent it out with a traditional sublight drive. He put out a call to players of his game, inviting them to ‘join the crusade’ for a fee. The ship’s captain, Bernard Covu, had already been hired, and a famous scientist, Patricia Oltuvm, was put in charge of life support and cryo. They were the only ones who didn’t have to pay… in the first round, anyway. And they were the only ones outside of Marshal and his trillionaire buddies who would be Royals on their new world.”

This was why he didn’t like people much. All those shits who wanted to turn themselves into kings. And all those dipshits who enthusiastically abetted them.

“The prices were crazy. For a billion Old Euros,” Jack continued, “you could be a ‘Lord of the Fleet,’ stay awake during the journey, have a small stateroom on the ship instead of going into cryo, and have a castle fabricated for you during colonization. For a hundred million, you could be a ‘Knight of the Legion,’ get a spot in the newest and safest kind of cryo, and have a manor fabricated for you. For ten million, you could be a ‘Gentleman of the Realm,’ travel in regular cryo, and have a cottage in one of the villages. And for one million, you could be a ‘Vassal of the Imperium,’ travel in regular cryo, and have a place in one of the Royal palaces or Lords’ castles, or be a peasant in one of the villages, at the end of the journey.”

“He get a lot of takers?” People were insane. The idea of shelling out a million Old Euros to go become a feudal serf to some random medievalist gamer…

“Yeah, but there was a problem. His game’s popularity had dropped off in a huge way with women after some big scandal hit. I couldn’t find any details about that,” Jack admitted.

Good.

“Almost everybody who signed up was male and single. There were only going to be three or four paying women on the voyage, and they were already married to other passengers.” Jack rolled her eyes. “So the demographic balance you need for a successful colony didn’t exist. At all.”

“Sounds like a problem. How’d they fix it?” It just figured that players of that game would have assumed that women would be provided for them as an amenity, rather than planning to buy passage for a female companion they already knew. Assuming they knew any women who wanted them within a hundred meters. Demme had warned him away from the game and the groups that played it, years ago, telling him that it was the kind of thing that would make it harder for him to ever bond with a real woman.

“Things got pretty sketchy,” she told him. “The charter members were asked if they wanted to pay to ‘reserve a space’ for a Lady for their household, so they’d have someone to marry and have kids with, and were told there probably wouldn’t be one if they didn’t. Some of them dropped out but most of them decided to do it. Marshal then offered the reserved spaces for free to ‘mail order brides’ trying to get out of the Second Soviet Union, as long as they agreed to marry one of his paying passengers upon arrival. That was another big scandal when that angle came out, about Marshal buying ‘brood mares’ or ‘breeders—’”

And there it was. Baked in from the beginning. Its meaning had changed over time—there had been plenty of brothels on the Armada’s ships with male “breeders” in them before this day had ended them all—but the exploitative relationship had been there from the start.

“—but they loaded up and took off for their new world just after Christmas 2101.”

“And were never seen again.”

“Yeah. They were supposed to drop beacons after each Star Jump, for future navigational purposes and as a way of verifying the success of their journey,” she continued. It must’ve been a hell of a presentation when she’d given it to her grammar school class. Erudite kid. “They dropped their last known beacon on July 1, 2102, halfway to their destination. The next one should have dropped on July 18, 2102, but it never activated, and none of the remaining beacons did, either. A probe was sent to Delubrum—sorry, that’s what they’d officially named Kepler-186-f on their charter, Delubrum—ten years later, and the terraforming had happened, so that Star Jumper had arrived, but there were no signs of any settlements. The charter was dissolved on January 12, 2203, because the standard rule is that a full century has to pass between the time a colony ship was supposed to arrive and the time that the planet’s charter is made available again.”

She frowned at that. He suspected she was thinking of the New Christy Standoff, and the fact that the New Dartmouth Settlement had stolen a chartered world out from under its rightful owners, gotten away with it, and then gotten away with massacring all but half a dozen of the people they’d robbed. Justice, of a kind, had finally been served… just far too late. If Kyra Wittier-Collins were still alive and in a position to collect, she’d nearly be a billionaire herself, thanks to the fines and settlements the Federacy had mandated three years earlier.

“Anybody ever settle on Delubrum?” he asked, shying away—again—from the subject of Kyra.

“Yeah, about fifty years later. One of the last orbital survivor groups to leave the Solar system after the Great Asian War, a group of Dutch Moluccans and Moluccans from Ambon on old Earth. They even kept the name, and after the whole New Christy Standoff, they announced that they would ‘make sure to keep seats at the table’ for the people on the Tenth Crusade if they ever arrived.”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” he told her. “We’re on the Tenth Crusade right now, so it’d be a bad day for everybody if it ever showed up there.”

The shocked look Jack gave him was priceless. He’d been waiting to see her make that face again for…

Six damned years…

“Holy fuck.” Jack looked around, sliding back off the foot of the bed and walking over to one of the walls to touch it. “That explains… Riddick, this whole ship is straddling ’verses.”

“And your friend the Moribund lives in its basement.” He almost added that it lived in the wreckage of the original engine room, but that was something Jack couldn’t know yet.

Panic crossed her features for a split second before he watched her force herself to relax. Not that he could blame her. The Moribund had tried to murder her, after all. Based on the timing, he suspected it had been in retaliation for him killing the old Lord Marshal, but he wasn’t positive. It—he—had been going on about the Apeiros stealing something from him when he’d attacked Jack, and Riddick wasn’t sure how that figured in.

“Well, I will just stay out of the basement, then,” she said, swallowing. Good. He’d struck a truce to protect her, but if the Moribund bore her any lingering hostility, it’d be better not to provoke him. “What do you think happened to it all?” Her voice had become awed again, as she looked around his chambers and contemplated their origins.

“My theory? Their Level Five Incident opened them up to being used by the Moribund.” Not that he actually could blame the creature, considering… “It—sorry, he,” he glanced up at the shadowed area where Jack’s sister perched, “took control of them, and they spun up a whole religion about him. ‘Lord Marshal’ became a kind of title, but the first one to wear it was some guy named Covu, probably that pilot you mentioned, so I’m thinking the bigwig wannabe-Royals who funded the trip didn’t survive very long. But you already picked up on how much their icons and stories are soaked in that game almost all of ’em played.”

You would be correct, the unnamed creature said. We were aware of what he was doing, but couldn’t do anything about it. It is only in the last five and a half years, by human reckoning, that we have been able to speak to humans, ourselves. For more than a day or two, anyway.

How many times, he wondered, had they tried to start such conversations with sufferers of Threshold Syndrome, only to have those humans die on them? And then two confused teenaged esper girls wandered into their starfield…

“You know,” he said, glancing up at Her for a fraction of a second before She began to overwhelm his visual cortex and he had to look away again, “talking to you would be a whole lot easier if you had a name.”

He was keeping Her and Her separated in his head, but if even one more nameless, powered female took it into her head to show up—

“Her name was stolen from Her,” Jack said.

“A ceremony that never happened, right? What’s it entail?” A mixture of confusion and sadness from above him was the only response. “You never knew what it was, did you? Can you be given a name? The way Jack here named your species?”

Perhaps. Do you have a name in mind?

“I do, yeah. I think it’s one that suits where you come from.” Hopefully it would tell her that he knew exactly what was going on, what was being hidden from Jack, and that he was—against his better judgment—joining the fucking cause. Not just to rein the Moribund and his Necromongers in, but to bring an end to the atrocity that had sent the mock-god on his vengeance quest in the first place.

And when someone like me calls something an atrocity…

“What is it?” Jack asked.

He grinned. Now for a bit of verbal sleight of hand. The girl knew way too many old twentieth-century Earth songs; she’d know this one.

“Picture yourself on a boat, on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies”

Jack looked completely astonished… and delighted. She joined in, harmonizing with him as he continued the first verse.

“Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes…”

Damn, he’d forgotten how much fun it could be to sing with someone else. It was something he hadn’t had a chance to do since he’d been a little kid. Before she could launch into the second verse, however, he switched gears, pointing up at her as-yet-unnamed sister and belting out the chorus.

“Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Ahhhhhhh!”

Jack had dissolved into delighted laughter. He could feel “Lucy’s” amusement from above him.

Very circumspect of you, Riddick. The name is, indeed, appropriate. He knew only he could hear her words at the moment. She understood the real meaning he intended, and why he’d veiled it the way he had. Good. Jack didn’t need any more holes in her memory.

And, he noticed, she had stopped calling him Lightbringer and was using his name. Was that for his benefit or Jack’s?

“So, what do you think?” Jack asked Lucy, smiling the very smile he’d been hoping to see since he’d found her.

I accept. I will be Lucy.

“That’s settled then,” he told Jack with a grin. “Now, there are a few things I need to do to finish making this armada safe for both of you. You think you can try not to blow anything up while I’m gone?”

“While you’re making everything safe for me, can I get a shower and maybe a change of clothes?” Jack asked.

“Shower’s through there,” he said, pointing to door leading to the over-luxurious ensuite bathroom. “Clothes… I dunno. Explore the drawers and closets. The old Lord Marshal had six Ladies-in-Waiting who slept here with him. Six, for fuck’s sake… maybe one of them left something behind.”

One of them undoubtedly had; they had all accompanied him back to “his” new quarters that first night, and one of them—a woman with a shaved head, and wasn’t that fucking Freudian of him?—had attempted to seduce and assassinate him. It might have even had a chance of working if he’d actually been enjoying the sex instead of struggling with his sudden, incredible disgust and horror, and hadn’t spotted her reaching for a knife. Moments later she was dead—and he’d have let her live if she hadn’t kept trying to kill him, but there was only so long a fight could go on before he no longer gave a fuck who she kind of resembled or what they’d been doing before she’d tried to stab him—and Zhylaw’s other concubines were banished from not merely these rooms, but the Basilica as a whole. While he’d given the five survivors a chance to take their things with them as they left for other ships and other Lords, he’d never gotten around to dealing with, or throwing out, what they’d left behind. The rest of his would-be assassin’s clothes were probably still somewhere in these rooms.

A few of his nightmares, about finding Jack in the worst possible places, had involved gazing down on the corpse of the woman who’d tried to murder him and realizing that the shaved head above the slashed throat wore her face. That was among the things that he would never, ever tell Jack about, along with—

“What if nothing fits?” she asked, rescuing him from his ruminations. She had a point; the Ladies of the court had a penchant for the tight and the form-fitting. He doubted they could loan each other their outfits.

“I’ll ask your friend, Dame Vaako, who makes her dresses,” he told her, “and have them come see you.”

“Shit. Do I have to wear dresses here?”

Of course she’d hate that. She might have worn jalabiyas sometimes while staying with the Meziane family, but she’d mostly lived in pants, in defiance of the conventions of her homeworld and the Holy Man’s attempts to control her. It was, honestly, hard to imagine her in dresses, although he’d seen her wear a few in her memories… including one or two, in the last year, that he wouldn’t have minded helping her out of. The tight numbers Dame Vaako and the other Court Ladies favored were wrong for a trained fighter, anyway, especially one who wanted to kick easily.

He had the sudden intense urge to have a sparring session with her, see for himself how thoroughly Michael had trained her and whether she’d gotten at all rusty during her year of cold storage.

“Nah,” he told her. “But since that’s probably all that’s here, you tell the tailor to make whatever you want.”

Kyra had been wearing leggings, as he recalled—

He wasn’t ready to talk to her about Kyra yet. It was going to break her heart, just as the fate of the al-Walids probably would despite how they’d treated her.

But if Kyra had been wearing leggings, Jack would be able to wear them, too. He thought. There was a lot about Court culture he still hadn’t learned, hadn’t wanted to know or care about, that might be important to someone who wasn’t standing at the very top of the heap. He needed to make sure she was as close to the top as possible, herself.

You know exactly how to make sure of that, he told himself. He just didn’t know if she’d go for it.

Except, of course, that he knew how she’d spent many of her nights on Deckard’s World, once she was legally old enough to, and he knew who she’d been trying to see, trying to evoke, when she looked at almost half of the men she’d spent them with. And he had no idea why the idea of bringing all of that up, including his far too decent proposal, was making him so reticent. Tongue-tied, even.

Except that he was, in all of his past dealings with women, accustomed to playing, running a game… and this situation, this girl—

She’s almost nineteen. Really gotta start thinking of her as a woman if I’m gonna make this offer.

—needed absolute truth. No games, no lies, not even lying with the truth, as she had apparently become adept at doing under General Toal’s tutelage.

Maybe once all the pieces were in place, he’d be ready for that aspect.

Jack was studying his face. “You okay in there?”

It wasn’t time to make things messy. Not yet. He smiled at her instead. “Always. Now, I’m gonna handle some business out in the audience room, so I’m gonna close you in here. You okay with that?”

She rolled her eyes, smiling to take the edge of her reaction off. “I’ll find a way to survive.”

She was already heading for the bathroom when he closed the doors. Fortunately, he did have business to conduct, or he might have been tempted to follow her. He wasn’t sure either one of them was quite ready for that.

I really need to arrange breakfast for us, he reminded himself as he crossed the sitting room. It had been, as near as he could tell, more than a day since either of them had eaten.

“Any of my guests arrive yet?” he asked, opening the outer doors. The guards on either side, probably still feeling cowed about letting Dame Vaako slip past them, nodded and pointed to a woman in full armor standing nearby.

Well, well, well.

“Officer Lola,” he said, a genuine smile spreading across his face. “C’mon in.”