Shadow Captain Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Dendrocopos Limited

  Cover design by Blacksheep and Lauren Panepinto

  Cover photo by Depositphotos

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Barbara Bella

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Gollancz and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2019

  First Edition: January 2019

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961293

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-55570-8 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-55568-5 (ebook)

  E3-20181201-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  Meet the Author

  By Alastair Reynolds

  Praise for Alastair Reynolds

  Orbit Newsletter

  To Mum, with continued love and gratitude.

  1

  “Tell me what you think you saw.”

  “It wasn’t nothing,” Surt said, squeezed next to me in one of the two adjoining seats in the sighting room. “I oughtn’t have mentioned it, not with your sister being so jumpy.”

  “Never you worry about Arafura. If you saw something, we all need to know about it.”

  “But if there was another ship scuttlin’ about out here, we’d have seen it on the sweeper, wouldn’t we?”

  “The sweeper isn’t infallible, Surt. That’s why we watch for sail-flash. If the conditions are right it can show up across a much longer range, especially through a telescope. You were sighting through one of the high-magnification tubes, weren’t you?”

  Surt looked abashed. “I wasn’t even trying to find a ship. Just looking out at the worlds, hoping to get a squint of my home. Fura won’t get cross at me, will she?”

  “Of course not,” I answered softly, making an adjustment to one of the aiming wheels. “We’ve all done it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. A bit of homesickness doesn’t make us any less committed to the crew.”

  “I probably wasn’t even squintin’ in the right part of the sky. Never could get my head around all those tables and charts like the rest of you. Got a noggin’ for machines, not numbers.”

  “Don’t feel too bad about it. Those tables aren’t easy for any of us, except maybe Paladin.”

  She tipped her head down, silent for a few seconds.

  “Do you ever look, Adrana?”

  I nodded, picking up on her meaning. “For my homeworld? Yes. Now and then. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, not so I’d stake my life on it.”

  “It was Mazarile, weren’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds a pretty place.”

  “It wasn’t, not really. Just a brown rock with some green bits. Too dark and dowdy to show across more than a few thousand leagues. Our parents moved there when they couldn’t afford to stay somewhere nicer, down in the Sunwards, and I don’t think it ever really felt like home to them.”

  “Is your parents both back there?”

  “No … not exactly. Our mother died quite a long time ago. She got sick when one of those illnesses swept through the worlds, and we didn’t have enough money to get a good doctor or go to the aliens. Maybe they couldn’t have helped her—”

  “And your father?” Surt asked sharply, cutting across my ruminations.

  Something in me went as tight as rigging under a full spread of sail. Since we’d taken over the running of this ship, my sister and I had both had to deal with some difficult changes. Her being what she’d become, and me being what I’d been on the way to becoming, thanks to the unpleasantnesses that had been visited on me in the kindness room. For the most part, we squared up and discussed these things openly, at least between ourselves. Given that we’d once got to a point where I had a knife to her throat, talking was the only way to rebuild the trust we’d shared since childhood.

  But even then, even after all this healthy openness, Father was a subject I dared not go near.

  “Which tube were you using when you saw the flash?”

  Surt blinked at my non-answer, but she was clever enough not to poke at that subject. “It was this one, Adrana,” she said, swivelling one of the tubes around, thumbing open the cover on its eyepiece.

  “It’s plausible, I think. The optics on all of ’em are all top-notch, and the mirrors nicely silvered, but she must have had that one re-calibrated quite recently. I wouldn’t mind betting it’s one of the best sighting pieces on any ship anywhere in the Congregation.”

  “Pity she couldn’t think of anything pleasant to do with it, ’cept butcherin’.”

  “She did have her character flaws,” I said, smiling so that she understood that my understatement was most certainly ironic. “But at least she had excellent taste in equipment.”

  Until recently our ship had belonged to a woman called Bosa Sennen. Bosa had called her ship Dame Scarlet, but among her enemies it had long earned a second, nearly official designation: the Nightjammer. It was by way of allusion to both its favoured haunts, in the darkness beyond the worlds, and the blackness of its hull and sails. Bosa employed it to hunt down other crews, stealing their prizes and murdering their crews, save the very few that she took for her own purposes. She had done this for much longer than an ordinary lifetime, because Bosa Sennen was as much an idea as a person—an idea that could attach itself to an individual, to use or be used by that individual, before moving onto someone else.

  Less than a year ago, Bosa had made the first of two serious errors. She had stalked and taken a ship, the Monetta’s Mourn, on which my sister and I were serving: our first time away from Mazarile, and our first experience on any such ship. Arafura had escaped but I had not, and Bosa only decided to use me rather than
kill me because of my skill with bones. So she had taken me aboard the Nightjammer and started turning me to her ways, using psychological, chemical and electrical methods of torture, coercion and personality-adjustment.

  Months later, she had made her second error. She had gone after another crew and tried to take them, not knowing it was a trap put together by Arafura. My sister’s plan had been ruthless and clever. She had saved me and captured Bosa, and between us—and her crew—we had gained control of the Nightjammer, making it ours.

  A new ship needed a new name, and so we gave it one.

  Revenger.

  It had been ours for three months; three long months which took us from one year into the next, and because the old year had been 1799, and the new one was 1800—eighteen hundred years since the documented founding of the Thirteenth Occupation—it was a new year as bright and shiny as a hatpin and felt like the propitious time to be starting a fresh enterprise. We were going to make something of ourselves. Not as butchers or pirates, but as honest privateers—those who wanted to remain in this life, at least, rather than going back to our homeworlds. Exactly who wanted what was yet undecided—and not much spoken of. But whatever our decisions, collective or personal, there was no possibility of just waltzing back into the busy commerce of the Congregation.

  We would be shot to splinters at the first glimpse.

  The problem was, we knew what we were, and what our new ship had become. But the rest of civilisation was not yet reliably acquainted with the facts. As far as the other ships and captains were concerned, and so far as the rich worlds, cartels and banking concerns behind the organised expeditions knew, Bosa Sennen was still alive and active. It would take more than just a helpful transmission from us to set things straight—especially as Bosa had a long record of just that sort of duplicity.

  So for three months we’d had no choice but to skulk.

  In truth, the time was usefully spent. First we had to learn how to operate Revenger, and that took weeks—plenty of them. We had to hook what was left of our old family tutor and mentor into the nerves of the ship, Paladin’s robot mind gradually taking control of the navigation, sail-gear and weapons. Then we had to keep up our basic stocks of consumable materials, including fuel, and that meant cracking a few easy baubles, going into them and scooping out such treasures as remained unplundered. We had done so, and proven that we could operate the ship and function as a crew. But still, every time we took the launch back from the surface of a bauble, we were reminded what our ship looked like from the outside.

  A predator.

  A black-hulled, black-sailed monstrosity, cruel in her lines and entirely incapable of being mistaken for anything but the Nightjammer. We meant to change her disposition, but that would take time, and for now we dared not be too hasty about it. If someone did chance upon us, even in these dark, distant orbits, and made a decision about us, then we might require all the weapons presently available, merely for our own self-defence.

  Thus we loathed Bosa, while at the same time being cynically grateful for the quality of the fittings she had left us.

  Her long-range telescopes were the equal of anything in any museum on Mazarile, and certainly superior to the optical instruments on the Monetta’s Mourn, which was itself very well equipped. They were properly cared for, too. Their tubes had engravings on, their leather-work was still fine and black, and the movable gaskets—where they pierced the glass bubble of the sighting room—were still tight against vacuum and nicely lubricated. There were many tubes too, clustered together with their eyepieces aimed back at us like the point-blank muzzles of a firing squad.

  Surt ventured: “Do you really think it was sail-flash?”

  “I think it more than possible.” I pressed my eye to the lens and worked the focus dial. “If there is a ship stalking us out here—or at least trying to get close enough to this bauble to jump our claim—then her captain will be doing her utmost to control the disposition of her sails, with respect to the Old Sun, while not caring to cast light in our direction. But sometimes it can’t be avoided.” To begin with I swept the scope quite widely, picking up the red glimmer of the bauble around which we were orbiting, and I considered the chances that some of that glimmer might have got caught up in the optics and thrown a confusing trick of light across Surt’s eyepiece. It wasn’t that likely, I decided. The optics were good and Surt would have needed to be staring almost directly at the bauble to pick up any of its blush.

  Satisfied that the answer lay elsewhere, I swept the scope back and forth along a narrower arc, patrolling the area in which Surt thought she had seen the flash. “Or it could be something else. Space debris, or a flash from a rogue navigation mirror that’s drifted free of the main commerce routes. Or it could be a hundred other things, none of which are of consequence.”

  “I should’ve taken more pains to note down the position when I saw the flash.”

  “You did all that you could, Surt. The main thing was to bring the matter to my attention, which you did.”

  “You’ve always been kind to me, Adrana.”

  “We’re all just trying to do our best.”

  “I know, and I think Fura knows it too, but she can be sharp with me when I get things wrong.”

  “Pay no heed.” I adjusted the sighting angle again. “Without you, we’d still be trying to get Paladin to speak again, never mind run this ship. Arafura knows that perfectly well.”

  “Would she like it better if I called her Arafura, do you think? Only I thought Fura was the name she preferred.”

  “It is. I think she believes it more suited to her current calling. Shorter and harder.”

  “Like Bosa,” Surt said, pleased with herself for making this connection.

  “No,” I answered firmly. “Not like that. Never like that.”

  “I didn’t mean no disrespect, Adrana. There I go, getting things wrong again. I’d be better off shutting my gob completely. And keeping away from pens and paper. All I ever leave is a mess of smudges.”

  “You’re serving this crew, Surt, and serving it capably.”

  I vowed not to be too harsh on her for failing to record her observation. Only a little while since, Surt had been unable to read or write, and the use of pens and log books was still not second nature to her. When I checked over the observational watches, hers were the blemished, crossed-out and incomplete entries.

  She was becoming more proficient, though, and needed no chastisement from me. Not when we were hardly spoilt for spare hands.

  “Do you see anything?” she asked expectantly, as I switched from one eyepiece to another.

  “Nothing,” I said, when I had swept a few more sectors. “I don’t doubt your sighting, not for a second. But I don’t think we need trouble Fura on the basis of a single flash.” I had used my sister’s shortened name deliberately, thinking it might put Surt better at ease, and had made a private decision that I would try and think of her by the same means. “Perhaps, when we have what we’ve come for, and are debating our next course, I’ll mention it to her in passing. But there’ll be no slight on your actions.”

  “I hope not. I don’t really mind that sharp tongue of hers … but that’s just words. There’s a wrong side of her I never want to see.”

  “Nor do any of us,” I said under my breath.

  *

  Our launch broke away from its berthing rack with a jolt and slipped neatly between the teeth of the upper and lower jaws of Revenger’s maw and into clear space. Through the portal I watched the jaws hinge shut on the red-lit docking bay, the only light and colour for millions of leagues. Until Fura touched the jets and sent out a pulse of rocket thrust, lighting up the hull in brassy highlights, that sharp-toothed grin was the only part of the ship to be seen.

  She used the rockets sparingly, knowing we were low on chemical reserves. From my seat behind her control position I watched her with a quiet, sisterly admiration. She had come a long way since Captain Rackamore took us up in his l
aunch for the first time, at my instigation.

  “And you’re sure no one will have cleaned the place out before we got here?” she asked, twisting around in her seat for a second before snapping her attention back onto the controls.

  “Sure as I can be,” Prozor said, sitting opposite me, clutching her notebook—scrawled full of her bauble maps and auguries and reminders to herself—as well as a very expensive pocket chronometer, which she had in the other hand, her thumb clicking down on the starting and stopping buttons as if she needed reassurance that they still worked. “Rack came back here over and over, and there was never any sign of anyone else showin’ interest. Mainly ’cause there wasn’t much worth salvagin’, at least not in the shallow layers, and there never was time to go deeper. Not even for a crew on their game, like we most definitely was.”

  Slowly the bauble came round in the nose windows of the launch. It was hard to see, even though we were less than twenty leagues out. The field was still up, cloaking the lump of rock, but unlike some we had seen it was gauzy and dim, like a layer of smoke clinging to the rock’s surface.

  “The question I’m stuck with,” Strambli said, “is what this place is worth to us, if no one but Rackamore ever bothered with it. You just said there’s no treasure here.” She was exercising her fingers, squeezing on a little contraption made of springs and metal.

  “Depends what you mean by treasure,” Fura said, craning around to look at Strambli. “My book, treasure’s whatever a cove needs most in the here and now. Don’t matter whether it’s a million years old or a month, it’s the immediate value that counts. All the gold in the Congregation’s no use to someone gasping on their last drop of lungstuff. We ain’t in that boat just yet. But what we do need badly is fuel.”

  “Rack used this place as a supply drop,” Prozor said, looking around at the rest of us besides Fura, which amounted to Strambli and myself. Just the bare minimum for an expedition into a bauble, with Surt and Tindouf staying behind on the main ship. Paladin counted as crew as well, I suppose, but none of us were in the habit of thinking of him in quite that way. “Propellant for his launch. A handsome stockpile. Rack’s philosophy was to run a light ship—minimal armour, minimal armaments. And a nice, lean crew, so we didn’t have to split a prize too many ways. He didn’t want to be luggin’ a hold full of rocket fuel around, so the Monetta only ever carried just enough to do the job, Rack always knowin’ he could come back to the Rumbler when he needed a top-up.”