It lasted a hundred years. And the hilldiggers finished it.
2
The lack of intervening oceans on Sudoria allowed our civilisation to spread without fragmenting. There were still, however, attempts at forming independent states. The first was initiated by certain Sudorians espousing the ideology of the Blue Orchids—an ideology passed on over five generations by the surviving remnants of that party as it grew into a large secret organisation. They attempted to set up a bordered enclave on the coast of the Brak sea to the East of the Komarl but, having learnt the lessons of history, our political predecessors felt they could not allow this. The Sudorian army of the time was immediately dispatched to the area, with instructions to break up the enclave and forcibly relocate the Orchids. There was resistance and there was fighting, but nowhere near the scale of that seen back within the Sol system. We had yet to learn how to get really bloody.
— Uskaron
McCrooger
Crawling mind-numbing terror had turned my mouth dry and my guts rigid as stone. The sky ahead looked like a cataract eye, with the horizon folded up around it. Baroque old buildings rose to my right and left, leaning into each other like plotting courtiers. Having seen both visual effects before, I realised I was standing in a town within a cylinder world, but was too frightened to wonder how I'd come to be there. Heading towards the milky eye of the end-cap I found myself slipping and stumbling on some uneven hollow-sounding surface and, peering down, unreasonably knew that the street was cobbled with skulls, which had been laid over a compacted hogging of human bones. Ahead of me a figure stepped from a darkened alley and began to drift away up the street. I hurried to catch up, but just could not seem to move fast enough. Then I was abruptly right up behind the same figure and reaching out to grasp one shoulder. My father turned with his familiar bored What now? expression. I glanced away for a moment, trying to remember what important news I had to give him. I should have kept my gaze fixed upon him instead, for he seized the opportunity to transform; rising up above the buildings to cast me into shadow, growing convoluted and complex, a tangled living spire of—
Very little transition brought me to wakefulness, but I lay there paralysed with irrational terror, my eyes still tightly closed. Something had accompanied me out of that nightmare into reality and now stood poised above my sleeping mattress.
This is ridiculous, I thought, and forced my eyes open while expecting to see nothing. Something dark and shadowy slid away, muttering, into the walls. I reached out and hit the light panel set in the wall at the head of the fold-out mattress and forced myself to sit upright. The cabin seemed slightly distorted around me, requiring of me some unknowable mental effort to return it to normality. Eventually I stood up and went to get myself a drink. This had to be an effect of Inigis's scanning, I told myself again, uncomfortably aware that this weirdness had started in the drop-sphere, before I even met Inigis.
The next night I visited that cylinder world town again, and fled from my father's doppelganger. I felt his disappointment in me, and by the third night the nightmare seemed just a desultory attempt to attract my attention, and faded thereafter to feelings of anxiety and moments of panic in the night, though sometimes, while awake, I would catch sight of some figure out of the corner of my eye, turn towards it and find it had disappeared.
I spent most of my time aboard the ship accessing the palm screen and learning how to use the control baton Yishna had given me, reading omnivorously, my mind sponging up as much information as it could process. I reread Uskaron's book all through, then one day left it in the ship's refectory, from where it quickly disappeared—which told me something about attitudes aboard, though I'm not sure what. I ate regularly with Yishna and Duras, and quizzed them as intently as they quizzed me.
On my fourth day aboard, one of Captain Inigis's lieutenants turned up: a thin pointy-nosed man with a ginger queue and a perpetual frown etching his features. Behind him entered a young woman loaded down with a bulky mass of fabric.
"How may I help you?" I asked.
The woman placed her load down on the floor and, utterly ignored by the lieutenant, turned to go.
"Thank you," I said, smiling at her from where I still sat cross-legged on my mattress, though I wasn't yet sure what for. She appeared startled by that, then smiled tentatively before ducking through the curtain. The lieutenant just turned his head away from this exchange as if embarrassed to be witnessing it. I knew the Fleet was patriarchal, but his behaviour struck me as plain rude.
"I don't know your name," I said.
"I am First Lieutenant Drappler," he stated, then gestured to the stack of fabric. "We had to have this made for you. It is a shipboard survival suit—should we suffer a hull breach."
"Oh, very good." Like I would trust a survival suit received from one of Inigis's men. I would have preferred them to return my spacesuit, which was checked out by a forensic AI before I donned it. He stood there looking uncomfortable. "Is there anything else?" I asked.
"I am to show you this ship's safety procedures."
I held my hands out to each side and rose to my feet. "Please do so."
Drappler removed a baton from his pocket and pointed it to a row of four squares set high in one wall of my cabin. "The alarm tone is this." He pressed a button and a klaxon started wailing. It didn't matter how long they had been away from 'normal' human society, stuff like that didn't change—a loud repetitive noise imparting the meaning 'Panic now'. He shut down the alarm and now the squares lit up. One was yellow with a black band across it, the other three were green. "This is emergency level one, which indicates you must stay in your cabin. It usually means there might be some shipboard problem, but no hull breach." Now two of each kind of light. "Level two: this means hull breach. You must remain in or return to your cabin, and don your survival suit. Bulkhead doors will be closing off the affected area."
"And if you're caught in that area?" I asked.
"This." Only one green light left now. "Now you must proceed to an escape-pod and enter it quickly. The emergency is level three. If it rises to level four, the pod will be ejected." Now all four lights displayed that black-banded yellow. "If you see this while in your cabin, you must try to find a pod that has not already been ejected from the ship." He turned towards the curtain. "Now the escape-pods."
"Presumably this is prior to the ship being ejected from existence?" I asked quickly, wanting to delay his departure. A moment ago I had spotted someone lurking beyond the curtain, and I didn't want him to pull it aside only to reveal that there was no one there.