God Engines

Chapter One: The Weight of Gods

The colossus dreamed, and Donal Raeth felt it as pressure behind his eyes.

He stood on the maintenance gantry at Magistrate's shoulder, eighty-two meters above the ash-flats, with the wind off the Thresher plain pushing grit into every seam of his coveralls. Below him the god-engine's arm hung slack in its cradle of scaffolding, the great manipulator claw half-open like a hand that had forgotten what it was holding. Sparks fell in slow orange arcs from the welders working the elbow joint. Somewhere in the hull, a coolant pump thumped in a rhythm Raeth knew better than his own heartbeat.

Contentment. That was the word he used for it, privately, the way you name a thing you can never speak aloud. During maintenance cycles, when the crews crawled through Magistrate's body and touched its bones, the pressure behind his eyes went soft and warm, like sun through a closed eyelid. When the weapons cycled, it turned into something else. Something with weight and teeth.

He had never told anyone. Seventeen years, and he had never told anyone.

"Bond-Engineer." The voice crackled from the gantry speaker. "Kelstrom wants you in the reactor gallery."

"Tell her I'm coming."

"She said you'd say that. She said to tell you she means now."

Raeth allowed himself a thin smile and clipped his harness to the descent line. "Then tell her I'm already there."

He rode the line down the flank of the machine, past the layered armor plates with their old scars, past the maniple sigil stenciled at the hip — a set of scales beneath a broken tower — and past the smaller, uglier marks that engineers left over the years: repair codes, batch numbers, one crude scratched drawing of a bird that nobody had ever admitted to making. Magistrate was two hundred and ten years old. It had fought on eleven worlds. It had outlived every human being who had ever built it.

Gormund IV spread out below him in shades of rust and bone. Three years ago this had been the Compact's fourth-largest munitions world, a place of endless manufactories stitched together by rail-canals and slag lines, where the sky at night glowed orange from the smelters. Now the smelters were cold. The rail-canals were choked with wreckage. The sky glowed orange anyway, but that was from the fires.

The Eighth Maniple's forward bivouac occupied the floor of a dry basin behind the Palisade Line, six god-engines standing in a loose crescent with their scaffolding around them like the ribs of something eaten. Magistrate. Ironwrit. Garrison. Rampart. Testament. Warrant. Between and beneath them sprawled the human clutter of war: fuel bladders, ammunition cradles, prefabricated barracks with their roofs weighed down against the wind, and the crawling vehicles of Colonel Edrik Golver's 44th Armored Regiment, which spent more time being repaired than driven.

Raeth hit the deck plates at the base of the descent line and unclipped. His knees complained. Forty-three years old and his knees had opinions about ladders now.

Anya Kelstrom was waiting at the reactor gallery hatch with a scanner in one hand and the expression she wore when she was about to ruin his day.

"You're not going to like it," she said.

"I don't like most things."

"You're going to like this less." She turned and ducked into the hatch, and he followed.

Inside, Magistrate was a cathedral of hot metal. The reactor gallery ran the length of the machine's torso, a corridor of gridded walkways suspended in the dark around the containment shell, which glowed a dull cherry through its shielding lattice. The air tasted of ozone and burnt lubricant. Two hundred and ten years of heat had annealed the walls to the color of old bronze.

And everywhere, that pressure. Stronger in here. Not words — Raeth had learned long ago that it was never words — but a texture. A leaning-toward.

Kelstrom led him along the port walkway to a section where the heat-exchange loop came down out of the ceiling in three great pipes, each thicker than a man. She had already stripped the insulation off one of them. She thumbed her scanner and held it up so the projection floated between them, a ghost-image of the pipe's interior wall in false color.

Raeth looked at it for a long moment.

"Micro-fracturing," he said.

"Micro-fracturing," Kelstrom agreed. "Lattice-deep. All along the primary return. And here." She swiped, and a second image replaced the first. "And here. Nine sites I'm confident about. Probably twice that many I can't resolve."

"When?"

"Three weeks ago. The Kessring Junction action." Her jaw tightened. "We ran at ninety-four percent for two hours because the artillery net went down and somebody had to do something about it. Then we came back and the damage got logged as thermal stress within tolerance."

"Who logged it?"

"Does it matter? Everyone's short-handed. Everyone's tired. Someone glanced at a number and moved on." She killed the projection. "Here's what matters. If we take this reactor above seventy percent for any sustained burn, the fractures propagate. Propagation means a rupture in the return loop. Rupture means superheated coolant at four hundred atmospheres venting into whatever deck it feels like, and then containment starts eating itself, and then we're a very expensive crater."

The pressure behind Raeth's eyes shifted. It felt, absurdly, like being watched by something that understood the conversation.

"How long to replace the loop?" he asked.

"Six days in a proper depot with a proper crane and a spare loop, of which we have none. Out here?" Kelstrom laughed without humor. "Never. I can sleeve the worst sites. Composite wrap, internal shims. It'll buy us margin. It won't buy us seventy."

"How much will it buy?"

"Optimistically? I can get you to eighty for short bursts. Minutes. And every burst spends the margin." She looked at him steadily. She was fifty-one, broad-shouldered, with white in her cropped hair and burn scars mapping the backs of both hands. She had been aboard Magistrate for nineteen years, two more than him. "Donal. This goes in the report. The Marshal has to know."

Raeth put his palm flat against the pipe. It was warm even through the glove. Under his hand he could feel the deep vibration of the coolant moving, the slow arterial thump of a two-century-old body.

Six engines. Six, to hold a line that had been designed for a full legion. Testament had a bad hip actuator and could not run. Warrant's main cannon had a cracked recoil damper and could fire twice a minute instead of six times. Rampart was sound but crewed by replacements who had never fought together. Garrison was the smallest of them, a hundred years newer and half the tonnage, good for screening and nothing else. And Ironwrit had no pilot at all, not since Ansel Vardin had died two weeks ago with a Cognate suicide crawler welded to his cockpit hatch.

If Magistrate came off the line, the Palisade had a hole in it the width of a valley.

"Sleeve them," he said. "Everything you can reach. Pull people off the arm work if you have to."

Kelstrom didn't move. "And the report?"

"I'll handle the report."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer you're getting." He turned to face her. "Anya. If I tell Solward that Magistrate can't fight, he pulls us to the rear and puts Rampart in our slot, and Rampart's crew has been together for five weeks. They'll be dead inside a day and the western approach opens up. You know that."

"I know that if the loop lets go with the reactor hot, everyone in this hull dies, and so do the people standing near us." Her voice didn't rise. That was the worst part. "I've buried enough of my techs, Donal."

"Then help me not bury any more." He softened it as much as he could. "Sleeve the fractures. Give me eighty for a minute when I need it and sixty when I don't. I'll fight the machine to that number. I swear it."

She held his gaze a while longer. Then she looked away, at the great glowing shell of the containment.

"You'll fight it to that number," she said. "Until you can't."

"Until I can't," he agreed, and something behind his eyes, deep in the warm dark of the machine, seemed to settle — the way a dog settles when a decision has been made in the room and the shouting is over.

Kelstrom left to gather her techs. Raeth stayed a moment longer in the gallery with his hand on the pipe.

"You heard all that," he murmured. "Didn't you."

The reactor hummed. The coolant thumped. Nothing answered, in the way that nothing had been answering him for seventeen years, and yet the pressure behind his eyes rolled over him like the flat of a warm hand, and Donal Raeth stood in the belly of a god and felt, absolutely and unscientifically, that he had been understood.