Second Death of Daedalus Mole Read online




  About the Author

  Niall Slater lives in London and mouths off about library closures for a living. Most of his stories are set in space because he can’t drive and, unlike cars, you can just lie about how spaceships work and very few people will email you about it.

  The Second Death of Daedalus Mole is Niall’s first published novel and was longlisted for the inaugural Bath Novel Award. If you disliked this novel and would like to scold the author for writing it, you can reach him on twitter at @Niall_Slater.

  The Second Death of Daedalus Mole

  Niall Slater

  Unbound Digital

  This edition first published in 2018

  Unbound

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  All rights reserved

  © Niall Slater, 2018

  The right of Niall Slater to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN (eBook): 978‑1‑912618‑33‑0

  ISBN (Paperback): 978‑1‑912618‑32‑3

  Design by Mecob

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

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  Founders, Unbound

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  Lisa Quattromini

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  Oliver Slater

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  Contents

  About the Author

  Dear Reader Letter

  Super Patrons

  Terminus

  Out-of Characters

  In the Wrong Grass

  Pastry-induced Comfort

  Fly Casual

  No Place Like

  The Taste of Splinters

  Ashes

  Annex of Self

  Behind Bars

  The Fall

  Breaking Bars

  Fishing

  Hanging on Threads

  Monitor

  Disturbance

  Unstable Circumstances

  No Domestics

  It All Goes Wrong

  Sandpit

  Memory

  Facts and Opinions

  The Second Death

  Lost

  ?

  Rough Hands

  ? br />
  A Difference in Scale

  Traumas of Unknown Origin

  Smell the Coffee

  Old Birds and New Tricks

  Like A Thunderclap

  Are We Learning?

  Domestics

  White Shores

  Acknowledgements

  Patrons

  Terminus

  Juno

  Echyras-Termina channel

  Nineteen years ago

  Along a narrow channel of unusual space travelled a long, pointed ship the colour of midnight. It moved at poorly-understood velocity through a light-years-long tube of not-quite vacuum, and a few metres to either side of it rushed a screaming white wall that threatened molecular deconstruction at the slightest contact.

  Inside, at the controls, Juno sat still. She wasn’t afraid. After forty years as a woman, twenty as a police officer and four as a freelancer, there weren’t many kinds of ugliness left in the galaxy that she hadn’t already found and kicked in the teeth. Now that both the Republic and the husband had lost her trail, there really wasn’t much she worried about.

  She flexed her middle finger, touching the silver ring behind her knuckle. The main reason she was the one doing the kicking, and not the one losing her teeth, was because she treated space with the respect it deserved. Most people came from planets. Planets with oceans. They grew up thinking of things as ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’, and saying ridiculous things, things like ‘what goes around comes around’, and ‘what goes up must come down’. People thought that if you started running and didn’t stop, just kept running, you’d eventually end up back where you started. Juno wasn’t most people. Juno had been born in space. She knew that space was not an ocean. Juno knew that what went around rarely came around, and what went up would likely keep going up at exactly the same speed, having no concept of ‘up’, or, indeed, of ‘speed’, and would not stop until something compelled it to, usually at the great expense of both.

  People also liked to say things like ‘empty space’, which Juno thought was particularly naïve. There was no such thing. Space was big and it was dark, but it was full of hidden things, and Juno knew that no matter how big or dangerous your secret, you’d only have to fling yourself into the dark and you would probably never be found again.

  That is, of course, until someone hired Juno to find you. And today someone had. A blacksmith, furious about a stolen roll of daggers and a real, working firearm. Juno hadn’t seen a gun in months, and good, solid steel was back in fashion. Things were getting rough, like they’d been when she was a child.

  A light on her dashboard pulsed in green. She had a few moments to prepare before the end of the channel – a great black circle – rushed forward to meet her. She reached one mottled green hand up to flick down her bronze visor, keeping two more braced against the control panel and her final free hand resting on the throttle. She heard a whine from the engine compartment behind her. The panelling under her feet buzzed and shook. When the alert sounded she eased the throttle downwards until it clicked, and the Kestrel dropped out of the channel with a jolt and a screech as the engine switched gears. Then Juno was in darkness. There were no stars.

  She moved quickly, tapping out sequences and tripping switches on the panel. The cockpit filled with little lights as the target-finders started up. The radio antenna came back to life with a bing, followed by the glowing overlay on the viewscreen, populating the dark expanse in front of her with green dots.

  Juno heard a blip as the target-finders picked up her quarry again and showed it on the overlay: a fat little freighter trying to haul itself away from the channel as fast as it could. She selected it with a finger and keyed the communicator.

  ‘Hailing mid-class freighter at position fourteen-sixteen-minus-two. This is Juno of the Kestrel,’ she said. ‘You’ve done it this time, Amphitryon. Stop running.’

  Her hail was met with silence. The Kestrel powered forward and swooped towards its prey, closing the distance quickly. Juno reached for a switch on her left and hovered over it.

  ‘Cut your engines,’ she said. ‘I won’t ask again.’

  The reply was inaudible, thick with interference. Juno frowned. The ship kept going, so she flicked up the plastic guard under her thumb and fired. A blazing white spot flashed out from beneath the Kestrel’s nosecone, leaving a white trail as it hurtled forwards. Half a second later there was a bright splash as it shorted out the freighter’s main thruster, bringing it to a juddering halt as the inertia controls kicked in.

  ‘Consider yourself under arrest,’ said Juno. ‘I’ll be coming aboard in two minutes. Don’t make me kill you, please.’ Juno unbuckled her seatbelt, dumped her helmet on the console and ambled from the cockpit to the weapons cabinet above her bunk, where she selected a short sword from the rack and tucked a dagger into her belt. By the time she returned, the Kestrel had drawn to a halt alongside her quarry.

  A hiss from the radio made her pause. The view beyond the main screen was dark. Termina had no planets, no stations and no townships. Had Amphitryon run here thinking it would be easier to hide somewhere quiet? Juno checked the main readout again. A barren asteroid field, some debris from a long-lost battle, and the freighter. Otherwise, this place was empty.

  ‘Amphitryon,’ Juno said. ‘Shut off your scrambler.’

  There was no response but white noise.

  Juno furrowed her brow. Then she pulled a heavy lever beneath the control panel, causing a jolt. The docking tube inflated and jumped the gap between ships, clamping onto the freighter’s flank with a loud thunk. Juno thumbed the edge of her sword and walked out.

  Four minutes later she ran back into the Kestrel alone, leaving bloody footprints behind her. She cleared the airlock and hit the manual release with an elbow, cutting the cord between the ships before reaching the cockpit and searching the readout again. Still nothing.

  The hissing was louder now, and it wasn’t coming from the speakers. She’d just seen Amphitryon lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of his cockpit, frozen at the moment of death, clutching his face in agony, and the interference was coming from nowhere. She hit the radio.

  ‘Surrender,’ she said, to anyone who could hear. ‘I’m armed. Present yourself and yield your weapons or I will kill you.’

  The hissing intensified. The sensors showed nothing, but her neck itched. She didn’t feel alone.

  Then space ceased to be empty. Juno didn’t see it arrive; there was no landing flash, no hint to announce that something had come. It simply moved into view, like a person stepping out of shadow. It looked like a great wall of bright red flesh, soft and glistening in the glare of the Kestrel’s floodlights. It beat and pulsed in time to some silent rhythm as she watched, and shining, black, many-legged parasites skittered across its surface. They tore at it, drawing blood and sending it drifting from the surface in perfect spheres.

  Juno had seen many things, but there was no memory she could use to comprehend what she was looking at. Phantom spiders ran across her skin and blood rushed in her ears. Her head-crest stood on end. She slowly stretched out a hand for the weapon controls.

  Outside, a wall of lighter pink flesh slowly drew upwards, revealing a sliver of green beneath. Juno watched. It continued creeping upwards until it became clear what she was looking at.

  A taste of metal bloomed on her tongue. Juno touched a finger to her lip. It came away red. A rivulet of blood ran from her nose and dripped onto the leg of her flight suit, mingling with old smears of engine oil.

  Juno grunted in pain, clutching her skull and squeezing her eyes shut, but she could still see it – a great green eye. It seeped inexorably in, burning as it went. Her head felt like it was about to crack. Images from somewhere else forced their way inside her, clamouring for space: Juno saw trees hammered by black rain; a stony, overgrown ruin with a moat of tar; a tattered box of books. Pictures and sounds and smells assaulted her from a hundred places at once, scalding.

  Th
en she saw, clear as a mirror, a white ship screaming through the channel to Termina.

  In her head she heard it, spoken from somewhere close.

  I a– am fe… Fear. Cry help, little one.

  A jolt of pain shot through her knee as it hit the deck, and Juno could see again. Her throat was raw, as if she had been screaming, and she was on the floor, clinging to the arm of the pilot’s chair, in silence. There was nothing outside.

  Juno realised two things: that her headache had vanished, and – with surprise – that she’d had a headache for weeks. She felt, for some reason, like she had lost something, and that some feeling of belonging she’d had was now gone, like a pulled thread that jumps out of the weave and disappears, falling faster than your eyes can track.

  Then, as the Kestrel buzzed a warning, she realised one more thing: the Republic hadn’t lost her trail after all. A white ship showed up on the viewscreen, enveloped in smoke as if it had just let fly a single missile. In the moment before impact, Juno touched the ring on her finger.

  Out-of Characters

  Daedalus

  Aphiemi Station, the Cloud

  Present day

  In a bustling way-station a long way from the remains of Earth, a greasy-haired man leaned out over a rooftop. His long brown coat billowed about his legs, threatening to pull him over. The street far below was starting to fill with people going to work: broad-shouldered petradons ploughing through crowds of smaller creatures, stossven clattering about with their hard edges and faulk slipping through the mass with long bobbing strides.

  The air was thick and hot. Cold breezes whistled by occasionally, sharp and thin, but it only made the heat harder to ignore. It pressed in, drawing out sweat and letting it sit on the skin. A drop ran down the man’s nose and itched, then fell. It jostled back and forth through the air, dragged down fast by the heightened gravity, before bursting against the pavement. He tilted forwards.

  ‘Daedalus,’ said a voice from under his coat, ‘I can see you.’

  Daedalus lifted his hand and scratched his jaw, which was patchy with stubble. The little purple locket over his heart buzzed, demanding an answer.

  ‘I –’ he tried. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m fine.’