Prologue

Nine-wheeling sun, spread morbid grace.

The Damascene Astra was a two-and-twenty-hundred granfathom hullbrecher, a description which here implies a kinetic weapon capable of striking through both sides of a warship at effective range of one-and-five-hundred granfathoms, though the empyrean fathom, twice the length of the modern fathom, is used in astrocavalric naming out of respect for military tradition.

The Damascene Astra was a work of grotesque art, constructed through a tax of blood and death that paled only in comparison to the price it exacted from those in its sights. Every cubit of the gun was drawn up in interlocking plates, periodically bearing the stamped chain-and-cross insignia of the Seneschal Shield. To stand on the barrel of the Damascene Astra was to stare down a straight surface that continued to the very edge of the human eye’s capacity, like a planet surface devoid of horizon or curvature, with only the stars behind its shadow to betray the end of its span through their disappearance.

The Damascene Astra relied upon a twin moonsong triangulation to aim its shot from any distance at all, to escape the limitations of other methods. A paired necromatrice, said to be thousands of years old if one was to account for the stock from which it was carved, had been developed into a uniquely focused moonlistener for exactly this purpose, and when ferrous humor was flooded into its network, it could comb a fine fingertip through the vastness of the void, finding the gaps between asteroids and the telltale muffling of enemy warships.

The Damascene Astra, crewed by the proper thousand heads, if fired at the crest of its effective range, could easily reduce the residential coil of an orbital colony to a band of debris, retaining enough force to strike its shot (though roughly, such would be the stray of its course) through the armoured bridge of an Uhlander, or two, if they aligned just so.

Those were the facts as I had learned them.

The Damascene Astra was one of twelve near-identical guns which equipped the CSS Kladesten. Cruciform-mounted in sets of four along the warship’s spine, they formed the topmost layer of its armaments.

Like its siblings, the Damascene Astra was an unspecial monolith to cruelty, and when the batteries fired in concert, the walls themselves were said to sing as though a trumpet of the apocalypse. Miserable, mundane, and incomprehensible.

The CSS Kladesten was a city and a temple at once, a chariot and chapel, and to walk its reeking halls after engagements won or lost was to parade through a battlefield tomb, astride a mortuary parade. This was written in the books, and whether or not it was true, I fancied it just the same.

As I watched the ship pass, visible only as a mass of darkness against sparkling eternity, that’s what sprung to mind. That was all I could think of, though I had heard so much more.

From the stories of friends who had for a time crewed the ship, I knew the food was better than what was served on smaller craft, and I knew that when posts were assigned, it was more comfortable to run rations to the gunnery crew than to clean up after them. Through sheer frequency with which the complaints came up, I could describe in great detail the texture of the bedding in all four unpleasant states of inconsistency it was most often found.

I'd heard stories of nights spent scrubbing clean the piping which wormed free from the walls, and days spent oiling it out anew. I wondered at times whether the daily cycles had been tuned towards the traditional Kishar hour or towards the unified hour on Vedri, but I bit back on my tongue for fear of coming off as uninformed.

When the crew spoke of the Kladesten, they spoke of it not as a ship, but as a place. A world existed within its walls, restrained without escape.

There were gymnasiums inside. There was a park of some fashion or other, albeit I’d never heard what exactly that entailed. There was a section — sometimes referred to as a district — dedicated fully to the production of the ship’s food supply, which required only periodic supplementation from the colonies, but I was told it was not a proper farm.

I was told that this district was a terrible place to work, and I was inclined to believe that.

Inside the Kladesten, spoken of with a good deal more affection, there were twenty bars to a meager five pubs, and only one pub was worth visiting, and so it was filled to capacity whenever “shore” leave was allocated, which in truth was mostly taken within the bounds of the ship itself.

I had thought to ask of the military engagements, of the workings of the machines, of the way the guns actually worked, but the answers came back abstract to the point of being dismissive.

The most interesting part of the Kladesten, all seemed to agree, was how uninteresting it was. In sleep and in fury, it was somewhere, haltingly tangible, just like anywhere else.

The Kladesten was a place to live like any other. I was assured time and time again by those who had been posted there before and sought to be posted there again that it was a nominal weapon of war, in truth more a city that was sometimes rattled by eruptions of combat.

Strictly speaking, there were no civilians aboard the Kladesten, but many would have described themselves as such.

But as the leviathan blotted out the stars, as its horrible reach became a real thing to me, those stories felt so wildly insignificant, like nothing more than a waste of time. Even the measuring numbers I could call to mind, even the stories I had pried up on the ship's warfaring history. It was all meaningless before the great symbol in which it was cloaked.

The Kladesten was like a dream. It was a pillar lodged among the stars and done up in laurels of antennae that burst from the gaps in twisting ribs. It spun like a wheeled spear, but the core stayed straight as it dived true through the sky.

Though it had been built in a real place, and though it had been built of real things, it was an exile from the real. Just as easily as the light bent around its edge, the hull seemed to repel understanding, dividing itself between the small life lived inside and the monstrosity that could be viewed only from without.

From the shores of Veter, in high-risen homes and sunken streets that wound like rivers between them, in roaring trams and whispering elevators, weapons like these were a comfort.

Weapons like this were a promise of safety, and this weapon's promises were worth their weight in high-velocity ordinance. These promises were the embodiment of imperial might's benevolence to those they protected.

The Damascene Astra and its eleven reflections, flanked by their hundred-dozen smaller guns along the twisting hull, were guns trained towards the far frontier, towards somewhere else, towards something deserving, away from those shores, away from those home, with a path charted only through those things that could be (or else must be) sacrificed.

From the shores of Veter, from the military newspapers, from the interview journals, from the afternoon broadcasts, from the evening programmes, from the weaveboard pornography drawn in its likeness, the Kladesten was like a dream.

It was nothing short of impossibility, defined.

It was a thing that existed, but not presently, spoken of only through the reports of its many victories and its ferocious stature. The Kladesten was a royal blade raised at the dawn of battle and put away when it was no longer needed, stashed someplace it could not be stumbled upon, stashed away in a place where it warranted no mention.

It was wielded against the deserving, and then, just as gracefully, returned to its sheath.

I pressed my hands to the window's stale-cold glass, struggling to believe what I could plainly see. Even so far away as it must have been, I couldn't force it into my frame of vision. At times, it would block out the starlight, and when the shadows moved across me, I could swear I felt their weight.

From below the impossibly massive form of the Kladesten, cast in its shadow like an insect drowning in a lake, it felt no more possible to conceive of its scale.

Here was the pride of the Union.

Here was the wedge that had been driven through the sun's blockade.

Here was the steel of every man who would die to live free.

Here was the Kladesten in its terrible true form, as so rarely seen by those whose worlds existed only within. It was a beast of wrought metal, braying over heaven's orchestra.

Here in the shade of the star-blackening wreckage of the Kladesten, turning to wisping belts across the glowing sky, the towers of Veter seemed like a dream.

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