A Brotherhood of Crows.

After two days, of exhausted sleep, Zularna woke up in pain.

That pain had not abated by the time she left her flat in Leith - noting the curious number of cats on her doorstep, who watched her beadily as she closed the door - nor had it died by the time she arrived at her lectures at Old College, and settled, painfully, into her usual seat in the final row. That morning, a look in the mirror had revealed an enormous, angry purple bruise running from her right hip to her armpit - where she’d been hit the night before. A lump had arisen on the back of her head, and her arms had been perforated at several points where she’d been cut by hands (claws). Painkillers had not made the pain go away, and the last thing she needed was a fractured rib. Her fellow students had gotten used to seeing unexplained cuts and scratches on her face and arms, but there was only so long she could use “LARP,” as a viable excuse.

But the pain in her body didn’t bother her as much as her mind did. She’d slept badly. Dreamt of ghostly shapes writhing outside her front door, of eyes filled with fire and teeth made of smoke. It bothered her. She hadn’t had a nightmare since she was twelve. To start having them now would be a set back she couldn’t afford.

And yet there was something else to, she thought - ironically as her lecturer droned on about Festinger and Carlsmith’s work into cognitive dissonance - that bothered her. She had started out chasing a man, and yet that thing in Waverly had not been a man. And that frightened her more than any old nightmare.

But perhaps the thing that bothered her the most was this: as the lecture finished, and she gathered up her things, she realised that for the first time in her adult life, she had a blind spot.

The nature of her ability to see the pasts of others had gotten some getting used to. She had built up means of filtering out most of the bombardment of information, in the same way most of us filtered out background noise on a crowded street. To do anything otherwise would have driven her insane from sheer information overload. But at some level, she had always been aware of those background memories, those smells, and sights and tastes and images going on around her. It formed the tapestry of her world, and now, for the first time, there was a hole in it.

She exited the building into the courtyard. Here, the sense of a blind spot was more palpable. It felt like...fog. A small, distinct patch of fog on an otherwise clear day, one that seemed to be moving through the crowds of students. She felt a twinge of fear - her axe and crossbow were hidden in her locker - too risky to carry them openly - and the closest thing she had to a weapon was her pen.

That fog - that absence - moved again, heading for the eastern entrance to Old College, out onto South Bridge. She followed, folders in one hand, her pen gripped like a dagger in the other. She felt the muscles in her arm tensing up, ready to strike if necessary. As she walked out on South Bridge, she saw nothing out of the ordinary; students, pedestrians, buses lumbering past. A light haze of rain began to fill the air. Where was it, that blindspot? She’d been certain she’d been following it -

Just behind her, there as a sharp snick.

She jumped, and almost stabbed wildly out of reflex. Behind her, leaning against one of the great grey stone pillars that made up the facade of Old College, was a man. He was tall, wrapped up against the cold in a large, grey greatcoat that almost made him look like part of the stone. He wore a flat cap, pulled down over his brow, and a keffiyeh scarf wrapped around his neck. Dangling from his lips was a thinly rolled cigarette, which he had just lit. As she watched him, his eyes rose from the flaming tip of the cigarette to meet hers.

“Zularna Munro?” he said. “Hi. Elijah Avaron. Fancy some lunch?”

*

Captain Gregori Pillion’s alarm woke him at 5.30 am. In a movement so routine as to be mechanical, he fell straight from his narrow bunk into the floor of his compact cabin and began to do press ups. Each rep caused his arms to ache sharply, each tense and release of his muscles driving away sleep and cleared the fog from his mind like a hot wind driving away morning mist.

He did fifty, stood stretched and crossed the cabin to his sink. Mechanically, his hands dabbed shaving foam across his face, and scraped a razor blade across his cheeks, under the concave curve of his chin, circumnavigating the whiskers with a practise born of years. Shaving done, he returned again to his bunk to make the bed, and it was then he realised, with resignation, that’d he’d pissed himself again in his sleep.

Pillion sighed, with ragged resentment. A dull sense of humiliation grew sharper as he looked at the small, fades stain on the bedsheets, a sadly familiar sight, and vague acrid scent of dried urine began to cloy in his nostrils. A moment of silence passed while he regarded his unwelcome but now routine, almost as routine as the press ups and the shaving, scene, before stripping his bed, and dumping the sheets in the chute that led to the incinerators, many decks below.

Gregori Pillion, like many soldiers, had lied about his age. But unlike the idealistic teenages who added three or four years to their age when signing up (deepening their voices and throwing back their shoulders to give themselves, fleetingly, the broad chests seen in all the recruitment ads), Gregori Pillion had lied and taken many, many years off his age when he had put his name down. He had been thirty six when he had signed on to join the Commonwealth Air Force, as a petty midshipman. Youthful looks, a strong physique, and a confidence that was almost palpable had convinced the recruiting sergeant that he was in fact nineteen, fresh from school, and ready to begin a long, dedicated military career.

That - that had been almost forty years ago.

A workout regime that would have made the most professional athlete wince, long hours of studying military strategy and history, an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of combat methods, brought on by a borderline photographic memory and scrupulous attention to detail meant that Pillion kept pace - and too often outpaced - men half his age. By the age of forty - or twenty six, according to official records - he was chief gunnery officer for the Cerberus, the new flagship in the Commonwealth’s 45th Fleet. By the time he turned thirty six (his fiftieth birthday), Cerberus had become his ship. At his formal welcome to the Captaincy, he had joked about prematurely going grey. One of many white lies.

And now, now age was catching up on him. The piss stained bed sheets, now burning along with all the other ship’s garbage, where just one sign of this. The ache he felt in his arms and chest from the press ups lingered on a little longer each day, like an unwanted guest who couldn’t take the hint. But most of all, the pills. It was always the pills.

He had them in his hand now. They were were hidden behind the mirror, in a little cavity he had hollowed out. The medication was not prescription. Each ground leave, he made contact with a pharma dealer on the black market. It had begun as a temporary fix, twelve years ago. A little pick me up. Something small, just to keep him steady. To keep him on a level. To keep him sharp. Now his day was ordered by a narcotic rainbow. Red to wake him up; orange to give him a boost; yellow to keep his focus clear; green to dull the ache in his joints; blue to sustain him through the afternoon, and violet, a sedative, to counter all the other pills and give him a deep, fitful sleep. He didn’t know what as in half the pills, and he didn’t care. As long as he never tired, as long as his focus never shifted, as long as he never once showed his age, he would devour half the earth for all it mattered.

He popped the red one and braced himself for the sudden rush of adrenaline it brought. It was like being dragged to the surface after a long period spent swimming underwater; his vision felt sharper, his sense of smell greater - enough to note the lingering odour of dry piss - and he felt suddenly very conscious of the way his muscles moved under his skin. His mind felt blissfully scrapped clear, his thoughts accelerating splendidly, and he was at last ready to face the day.

Pilllon’s quarters were deep in the bowels of Cerberus’s lower deck. He had, since taking up his captaincy, eschewed the marginally larger captain’s cabin for a typical crew bunk; better for men’s morale to see their commander mucking it with them, eating with them in the mess, taking part in the same rigorous physical training that he made them do. His official, and empty, quarters, were on the top deck, near the bridge, which was where he now directed his steps. With the clarity of the drugs, he held his head high, and enjoyed the familiar sights and sounds of his walk: the clanking of boots on the deck, the snapped commands from senior officers, and beneath it all, the deep thrum of the ships thauma drives, a constant baseline to every moment of his life when he was in the air. This - this was home.

After a short life journey, he arrived on the bridge. Like most airships in the Commonwealth fleet, Cerberus possessed a diamond shaped bridge, which jutted out from her aft command tower. Two crew pits ran the length of the bridge, and in them, crew members bustled over control screens, monitoring Cerberus’s propulsion systems, Her shockstream drive, Her forty five rail gun batteries, twenty ATS and ten ATA missiles batteries, Her nav systems, and by extension, the lives and fates of her seven hundred strong crew. At the very end of the bridge was the helmsman’s post, and roughly in the middle was Pillion’s command station: a semi circular arrangement holo screens and workstations. Pillion had gotten rid of the command chair - a captain should always be on his feet - and without it, he had a unobscured view as he approached out of the forward canopy. It was deliberately large to make the bridge well light, and afford Pillion a magnificent view of the early morning light, the softness of the clouds, and piercing through them, the great prow of Cerberus.

His XO was waiting for him dutifully by his command station. She saluted as he came to a halt.

“Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Pillion returned the salute. “Report, if you please.”

Lieutenant Modaboah was a tall woman Pillion had personally selected from the Commonwealth military academy in Pretoria. Her ramrod straight posture and impeccably neat uniform suggested someone who had more conformity than creativity, yet Pillion had found her to be an effective XO. “We are proceeding as scheduled, Captain. We are currently cruising at 23,000 feet, over the coast of Northern Ireland. Our ETA at RAF Bassingbourn is 1800 hours today if we maintain minimum propulsion. We could increase to maximum drive if you so wish.”

Pillion waved a hand dismissively. “No need, Lieutenant. Our rendezvous in Cambridge was set for 1900 hours. I very much doubt Dr Crucius will expect us to be early. Have you prepared a squad of men to collect the Doctor and his equipment from Cambridge?”

“Indeed, sir,” replied Modaboah. “Major Watkins and his team will depart as soon as we dock. Will you be accompanying them, sir?”

“No, I shall speak with Crucius when he arrives on board.” Pillion swiped a hand over his view screens, reviewing updates and reports from section chiefs. “Have we set up quarters for the good Doctor?”

“Yes, sir, we are due to place him in the spare quarters on the officers deck -”

Pillion smirked. “No need for that, Lieutenant. If the Master of St Jude’s College, Cambridge, wish to lodge aboard my ship, he can damn well have a bunk with the rest of the men.”

Modaboah nodded, but Pillion noted her smile briefly. “Not a fan of the intelligentsia, sir?”

Modaboah’s ability to speak freely without request - something which Pillion had never enjoyed about the military - was a refreshing feature. “On the contrary. I admire the man’s research The man himself? Less so. What greater hospitality can we offer Dr Crucius than that of the fine men and women of the lower decks? He may even wish to chip in to deck 14’s poker game.” Pillion finished swiping through his morning reports. “On another note, send a message to the captains of the Ajax and the Marksman that I shall expect them for a briefing at 1200 in the ready room. I’m sure our support vessels will have some role to play Crucius’s games,”

“You think we’re wasting our time, sir?”

“We do as the PM commands, Lieutenant,” replied Pillion briskly, “But he never told us we had to be happy about it.”

Being unhappy about things was perhaps an inaccurate way to describe Pillion’s feelings about this latest mission. As part of his briefing, he had watched Dr Crucius’s presentation on the absurdity storm. He did not doubt its power, nor the threat it posed to military and civilian vessels. He did not, even, believe it to be unreasonable that a battleship and support vessels of her majesty’s air force should tasked with investigating the storm.

He simply wished it hadn’t been his.

The issue, Pillion thought as he turned his gaze back to the forward canopy, and out into the clouds, was that he was bored. He commanded one of the finest vessels in the Commonwealth’s fleet, and yet it had been almost a year to the day since he and his crew had last locked heads with Severance forces. The war had not changed - wars rarely did - but as a result of the routine cycling of ships between active and non active duty, and the bizarre machinations of the upper echelons of the RAF, Cerberus had spent far longer than she should have away from the front. For months now, he had run escort missions, led pathfinding expeditions for natural resources in the frozen parts of the world, helped evacuate refugees - all important work, certainly - but what Pillion wanted, needed, was a kill. The last time Cerberus had fired her rail guns had been months ago, when the ship had abruptly been set upon by pirates off the coast of Mozambique. The pirates had had far more exuberance than skill in combat, and to Pillion’s disappointment it had taken not more than a few volleys across their bows by Cerberus’s vastly superior rail guns to cause the pirates to radio frantically in surrender. Capturing them, then transportation to the Hague for trial, followed by over a month of unintended shore leaves as he had been called upon time and again to repeat the same statement of their guilt over and over, had been one of the most tedious moments of Pillion’s life. He almost wished he’d given no quarter and gunned them down in the air.

Gregori Pillion had fought at the Battle of Sofia, where five hundred Severance airships had tried to break to Mediterranean line, and been driven back by an undersized, but tactically superior, Commonwealth force. It was he who had led the daring raid, along with the 34th and 29th fleet, on the Severance’s prime weapons development site in Guam. It was Cerberus which had led Operation Barracuda, which had seen Commonwealth forces make a valiant attempt to drive the Severance out of the Philippines, and had at the very least, forced them back to the mainland. That sort of combat experience placed Pillion a country mile ahead of many of the other captains of the fleet, and yet here he was, flying to Cambridgeshire of all places, to collect a pompous - if intelligent - man, and his chemistry set.

He had become so lost in his thoughts that he had not noticed that Modaboah was still speaking. “Say that again?”

“There is one other matter, sir,” Modaboah repeated, “Just before you came on deck, a vessel docked with us - private airship, registered to the Ministry of Theological Justice. The passenger asked to speak with you, sir. I had him sent to your formal quarters.”

A visitor from the Ministry of Theological Justice? Interesting. “Very good, Lieutenant. I shall see him at once. The bridge is yours.”

“Sir,”

Pillion strode from the bridge and made his way to his formal quarters on the officers’ deck. A visitor from Theological Justice was unusual but not unheard of - often, they sent people out to military vessels to registers the various faiths among the crew, and periodically the clergy themselves might deem it necessary to attend on a particular crew. Pillion was as religious as he needed to be without too many questions being asked, so viewed the men from Theological Justice with as much tolerance as he had to.

He simply hoped, as he reached the officers’ deck and proceeded up the corridor towards his formal quarters, that the Ministry had not sent one of their Listeners to audit his crew. He had little time for those proselytizing evangelists, and cared even less if any of his crew harbour feelings of atheism. As long as when the general alarm sounded, and they were at their stations, he didn’t give a flying fuck which God they bothered to worship.

The Captain’s formal quarters were aft of the main bridge, on the desk above, and like the bridge, their canopy afforded a fine view of the open sky. Pillion had had the personal furniture stripped out and replaced with armchairs, a desk, and a formal meeting table. As he entered the room, his guest was hunched over this, with his back to him. He noted, immediately, the finely tailored suit - at odds with the austerity of the military surroundings - though by the figure’s posture he was unable to see their face.

Pillion opened his mouth to greet the visitor, but the other spoke first, without looking up from the table: “Good Morning, Captain Pillion,”

There was something odd about the voice. It sounded metallic, echoing, and each syllable was punctuated by a little click. “Good Morning,” said Pillion, a tad taken aback, “Welcome aboard Cerberus, Mr….?”

Slowly, almost lazily, the visitor straightened up and turned. Pillion started, and took an instinctive step back, his right hand falling to the holster of the side arm on his hip: the immaculately dressed man wore a mask fashioned into the shape of a crow’s head. Layers of interlocking, polished steel created the vivid image of feathers, ending a wickedly curved beak. Real feathers sprouted from the back of the mask like a shock of hair. Behind the mask’s empty eyeholes, the man’s real eyes watched him, beadily and unblinking.

“Forgive me, Captain,” the figure said. As he spoke, the beak opened and shut in time with his words, the closing of the beak giving that little metal click. “My name is Gorcrow.”

“You’re not from the Ministry, are you?” Pillion said cautiously. The horrific yet weirdly beautiful mask was not the only thing that unnerved him about the figure - maybe it was the clash with the clearly expensive suit, or the way those eyes watched him; without the benefit of the other features of a face, eyes alone conveyed only menace, cold calculation, and a hint of contempt. Eyes alone gave show only the darkest feelings.

Gorcrow cocked his head slightly to one side, causing the feathers at the back of his mask to shiver as it caught in the wind. “I am and I am not. The Ministry of Theological Justice transported me here. But I am here representing another group.”

“And who would that be?” Pillion lets his body relax, but his hand stayed loose near his side arm.

“A very powerful interest group. One with enormous influence and resources. One which has an interest in your services.”

“And why,” Pillion took a half step forward. It seemed a subtle gesture, but it allowed him to spread his centre of gravity, so that if needed, he could draw, and fire, absorbing the kickback in his stance. “Should I be interested in helping you?”

“Because,” Gorcrow interlaced his fingers. He wore leather riding gloves, and Pillion heard the audible ripple of the material, “I can give you what you want,”

Pillion hesitated. “And what is it you think I want?”

Gorcrow stepped to one side, revealing a small holo-projector on the meeting table. It was this he had been hunched over when Pillion had arrived. He tapped it lightly with a fingertip. An image flickered into view - several sleek military vessels, the image captured from some distance but clearly displaying nonetheless, open weapons clusters, and pulsing thauma drives.

“This,” said Gorcrow, “is the 52nd Severance Fleet. Twelve Panther class battleships, ninety guns apiece, with a further fourteen dreadnaughts. The Severance has in recent years pioneered new shockstream drives which allow their ships to shock with far greater accuracy than their existing fleet. These vessels could easily shock behind Commonwealth lines and attack Edinburgh , London, Paris, or Brisbane, once they become fully operational. The railguns on those vessels have advanced technology - they can fire ionised projectiles at a speed of mach 9 from a range of almost 500 kilometres. A formidable collection of vessels,”

Suspicion flared up in Pillion. He had heard rumours in the RAF high command of a new fleet of experimental airships in Severance hands, but no concrete information existed. “How have you come by this information?”

“My order transcends borders, Captain,” Gorcrow replied. “And in doing so, we know more than the Commonwealth could ever dream to.”

“Very well then, I must ask you to hand over what you have so I can pass it over to my superior officers -”

Gorcrow tutted, shaking his head, “Oh, have a care, Captain. I did not come with a titbit of information for the Commonwealth’s war. I came with information for you. I do not merely know of the existence of the fleet, but I also know that the Severance will be testing these vessels outside of their borders, in open sky. I know where, and I know when, and in return for your services, I shall provide you with this information. I reviewed your file, Captain - how long has it been since Cerberus last drew blood? A year? You’re a lion, Captain, and a lion needs prey. Your superior officers, in their infinite wisdom, have kept you off the hunting grounds. Do you not long for the hunt? And what a hunt this could be, Captain - the finest fleet the Severance has ever built, still weak, still not at its prime, falling before you...is this not what you want?”

Pillion realised he had breathed in a long time and took a sharp inhale of breath. He looked from Gorcrow to the holo-projector and then back again. “What…” he said slowly, “Is to stop me from summoning the master at arms, and taking the information from you.”

Gorcrow tutted again. “Now now, Captain. We both know that if you had meant to do that, you would have done so by now. And we also know that you, and your men, would be dead.”

Pillion bristled. “Are you threatening me -?”

“Not at all, Captain,” replied Gorcrow suavely. “Merely stating a fact. Will you hear my terms?”

They were no more than twenty feet apart. Pillion could see no weapons on Gorcrow. At this range he could get at least three shots off if the other tried to charge him. Yet there was something about those clinically cold eyes that stayed his hand. “Speak.”

“Very well. This evening you will be joined by Dr Horatio Crucius. This I know. He has been placed, by the government aboard this vessel to conduct experiments on a meteorological phenomena, known as an absurdity storm. This I also know. What I do not know is the results of the good doctor’s work. That, is what I wish to know.”

Pillion snorted. “You want to steal the research?”

“Do I strike you as a thief, Captain? No, I merely want to examine it. The group I represent could do much with the information Crucius may, or may not, find.”

“Tell me…’Gorcrow’...who do you represent?”

“A very good question, Captain...what do you know of the Brotherhood of Crows?”