Bone Silence 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 © 2020 by Dendrocopos Ltd

  Excerpt from Revelation Space copyright © 2000 by Alastair Reynolds

  Cover design by Black Sheep/Orion Books

  Cover images © Depositphotos

  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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  First Orbit eBook Edition: February 2020

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Gollancz in 2020

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957612

  ISBN: 978-0-316-46273-0

  E3-20200117-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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of Revelation Space

  Also by Alastair Reynolds

  Praise for Alastair Reynolds

  This one’s also for my mum

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  Tap here to learn more.

  1

  It had begun as a distant glimmering dot; now it was unmistakably a world.

  At the front of the rocket launch, from her control position behind the forward windows, Fura Ness tried to fly exactly like any other prospective visitor. Too confident in her approach, and she would draw attention to herself. Too cautious, and she would look as if she had something to hide.

  Which—of course—she did.

  The sweep was bouncing range-location pings against the outer shell of Mulgracen. A dial showed their closing speed, now down to just six thousand spans per second.

  “That will do nicely,” Lagganvor said, as he leant over her shoulder to study the instrument board.

  Fura took her time answering. She flipped a switch or two, worked a lever, tapped her nail against a sticky gauge.

  “This ain’t my first approach, Lag.”

  Lagganvor’s reflection smiled back from the burnished metal of the console.

  “Nor mine.”

  Fura applied a little more counterthrust, dropping them to five thousand five hundred spans per second. They were threading through the orbits of other ships gathered around Mulgracen that ranged from little runabouts like their own to fully-rigged sailing vessels, albeit all close-hauled so near to the gravity well of a swallower.

  “All this way for a pile of bones,” Prozor said, in a familiar complaining tone.

  “Bones we happen to need,” Fura answered.

  Prozor rubbed the dent in her head where a metal plate had been put in. “You need ’em, girlie. The rest of us is quite satisfied never goin’ near those horse-faced horrors.”

  “I share your reservations,” Lagganvor said, directing a confiding smile at Prozor. “But I also appreciate the need for up-to-date intelligence. Without a viable skull, we’re operating blind.”

  “And this intelligence,” Prozor said. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with gov’m’nt men turnin’ over every rock in the Congregation to look for us, would it? Gov’m’nt coves with ships and guns and undercover agents and plenty of intelligence of their own?”

  Lagganvor scratched at his chin. “It might.”

  “Then why in all the worlds is we… goin’ anywhere near a world?”

  “We’ve been over this,” Adrana Ness said, turning to face Prozor from the seat immediately behind her sister’s control position. “It’s all very well keeping to the margins, picking off other ships for essential supplies—that’s served us well enough since The Miser. But it’s not sustainable. We’ve only adopted piracy as a temporary measure, not a business for life.”

  Prozor nodded at the forward windows, where Mulgracen was now large enough for surface details to be visible. “And offerin’ our necks on the choppin’ board by voluntarily going to a world—that’s meant to be an improvement?”

  “It has to be done,” Fura said, sighing hard. “None of the skulls we’ve found on other ships were worth a spit by the time we got our hands on them. So we’ve no choice but to shop. But I ain’t taking silly risks. Mulgracen’s a long way out and there’s no likelihood that anyone will be expecting us. It won’t be like Wheel Strizzardy…”

  “The risk was supposed to be contained there as well,” Prozor said.

  “It was,” Fura answered through gritted teeth. “Just not contained enough.”

  Mulgracen was a laceworld, orbiting the Old Sun in the Thirty-Fourth Processional. It was neither entirely hollow, like a shellworld, nor entirely solid, like a sphereworld. It was, instead, a sort of sugary confection, made up of many thin and brittle layers, each nested delicately within each other and inter-penetrated by voids, shafts and vaults through which a ship could move nearly as freely as in open space. The outer surface—from which the launch was bouncing its range-finding pulses—was only loosely spherical. There were gaps in it, some of which were whole leagues across. Between these absences were irregular plates of uninterrupted surface, some of them joined by thick necks of connecting material and some by only the narrowest, most perilous-looking of isthmuses. Nowhere was this surface layer more than a tenth of a league thick, and in places it was considerably thinner. Little domed communities, never more than a quarter of a league across, spangled against the firmer-looking bits of surface. Now and then a tiny train moved between them; a luminous worm hurrying through a glassed-over tube.

  With their speed reduced to just five hundred spans per second, Fura dropped the launch down through one of the larger gaps. The thickness of the surface plate swept up past them, and then they were into what was techni
cally the interior of Mulgracen. There was little sense of confinement. In many directions it was still possible to see stars, as well as a dozen or so nearer worlds and the purple-ruby glimmer of the greater Congregation. Beneath them, about a league below, was a smaller broken surface, ornamented with domes and the fine, glistening threads of railway lines. There were domes and lines above them as well, for there were communities attached to the underside of the outer shell, as well as to its outer surface. Only the thinnest of connecting structures bridged the two layers, and it seemed quite impossible that these feeble-looking columns and walls could support anything, let alone many square leagues of habitable ground.

  But they did, and they had, and they would. Mulgracen was already millions of years old, and it been claimed and lost and re-claimed many times during the long cycles of civilisational collapse and rebirth that made up the recorded history of the Congregation.

  Fura dropped their speed further still. Traffic was thick all the way into Mulgracen. Rocket launches were coming and going in all directions, with little regard for any sort of organised flow. Cargo scows and rocket tugs growled by on their slow, ponderous business. For every ship about the size of their own launch, though, there must have been ten or twenty smaller craft that were only used for shuttling within and around the world, and these seemed even more cavalier about navigational etiquette. They were nosey about it, too, swerving close to the launch and only breaking off at the last second. The anti-collision alarm was going off so frequently that in the end Fura cuffed it into silence.

  They went down another level. Only now was it getting hard to see any clear part of space, and the communities at these depths had to rely on artificial lights at all times of day. There were more of them, packed more closely together, and in places the towns had merged so thoroughly that they were now merely the districts of city-sized settlements, easily the rival of anything on the Ness sisters’ homeworld. The domed-over buildings were huge, multi-storied affairs, and their windows so numerous that they seemed to emanate a soothing golden glow of comfort and prosperity. Carved animals reared up from roof-lines, picked out by spotlights; neon advertisements flickered on the buildings’ sides, traffic lights threw red and green hues across pavements and intersections. People were still too small to see except as moving dots—even the trams and buses were like tiny gaming pieces—but it was not hard to imagine being down there, dressed for the season and strolling along lovely marbled boulevards lined with grand shop windows and no shortage of enticing places to dine and dance.

  Fura looked at her sister, wondering if Adrana felt any pangs of homesickness at this spectacle of bustling civilisation.

  “I’d forgotten—” Adrana began.

  “—how pretty things could be,” Fura finished darkly, and her sister met her eyes and gave the merest nod of mutual understanding. “How nice decent society looks, from the outside. How pleasant and inviting. How ready to accommodate our every wish. How devious and deceitful! It’s a trap, sister, and we ain’t falling for it.”

  “I didn’t say I was about to.”

  Fura slowed them again. They descended through the gap between two domes, then continued on down through the thickness of another layer, until they emerged beneath its underside. There was one more layer below, totally enveloped in a single glowing mass of buildings. That was the closest settlement to the swallower, which was somewhere deep inside that final sphere. They didn’t need to go quite that deep, though, which pleased Fura as it meant a little less expenditure of fuel.

  “There,” Lagganvor said, jabbing a finger at the windows. “The landing wheel.”

  Fura had been forewarned about the arrangements, but that did not make her any less apprehensive as she brought them in for the final approach. The landing structure was a very odd sort of amenity. It was like a carnival wheel, jutting down from a slot in the ceiling, so that only the lower two thirds of it was visible, turning sedately. There were platforms on the rim of this wheel, each large enough to hold a ship, and some cogs or counterweights kept them level even as the wheel rotated, lifting the ships up into the slot and the hidden part of their rotational cycle.

  A third of the platforms were empty. Fura selected one and brought them in belly-first, toggling down the launch’s undercarriage and cutting the jets at the last moment. She’d chosen the rising part of the wheel, and it did not take long for its rotation to take them into the slot and up to the apex, where ships moved through an enclosed reception area on their smoothly rising and descending platforms. Fura and her crew were not yet ready to leave the ship, and they were already descending by the time they had completed their suit preparations and gathered in the main lock.

  “Names and back-stories?” Fura asked.

  “Drilled into us so hard I might be in danger of forgettin’ my actual name,” Prozor answered. “Come to mention it… what is my actual name?”

  “Doesn’t matter, so long as you don’t slip up,” Fura said.

  Prozor knelt to squeeze some oil into a knee-joint.

  “Anyone would think you wasn’t overly sympathetic, girlie.”

  “I’m not.” Fura knuckled the chin-piece of her brass-coloured helmet. “I’m sympathetic to my neck, and to keeping it attached to something. And that means sticking to our roles.”

  “I think we are tolerably prepared,” Lagganvor said. “Now, may we discuss the division of chores? I think I would be most effective, and speedy, if I were permitted to operate independently. Obviously I can’t help with the procurement of a new set of bones, but the other items on our shopping list…”

  “The sisters can take care of the shivery stuff,” Prozor said. “You can stick tight by me, Lag, seeing as you know the terrain.”

  “I have been here once, dear Proz; that hardly makes me qualified to write a tourist brochure.”

  They made a last-minute inspection of each other’s suits. By then the platform was just coming back round to the apex. Fura opened the lock and they tramped down the access ramp with their luggage, onto the platform’s gridded metal surface. At the edge they waited for the platform to come into line with the fixed surface of the reception chamber, and then stepped briskly from one to the other. It was a nimble operation, but no crew who had just come in from a string of bauble expeditions would be fazed by such a test. From there it was a short walk into a reception lock, after which it was possible to remove their helmets.

  They found themselves at the back of a shuffling line of crews being questioned by immigration clerks and revenue men. The room was full of low murmuring, bored questioning, the occasional stamp of a document. Once or twice a clerk stuffed some papers into a pneumatic tube that took them further up the administrative hierarchy.

  The line moved sluggishly. Fura and the others put down their luggage and nudged it along with their boots as another crew joined the line behind them, and then another.

  It was brazen, just being here. They had avoided any contact with civilisation for months. Nor was Mulgracen some outlaw world, where a blind eye might be turned. It was prosperous, long-established, well-connected: unusually so, given its orbit within the Frost Margins. It did a lot of trade, and that was the crux of Fura’s gamble: she had been relieved, not disheartened, when she saw how many other ships were coming and going, and it pleased her now to be at the back of a grumbling, slow-moving queue.

  From behind them a gruff voice raised a complaint as one of the clerks abandoned their desk and left a “closed” sign, forcing two lines to converge into one.

  “You did well,” Fura whispered to Adrana.

  Adrana dipped her nose, looking at Fura over the bridge of her spectacles. “High praise.”

  “For once I wasn’t the one making the choices. It’s good for you to show a little… initiative… now and then.”

  “Don’t think too highly of me. All I did was pick a world we could reach that wasn’t too far in and had a halfway decent selection of bone shops.” She glanced back at the crew behi
nd them, who were grumbling about the closed desk. “Any other benefits are… incidental.”

  “Incidental or otherwise, they’ll serve us nicely.” Fura dropped her voice. “I’d say ‘well done, sister,’ but perhaps it’s about time we slipped into character.”

  “Whatever you say, Captain.”

  The line moved in fits and starts, and after about thirty minutes it was their turn to be questioned. Fura put their papers onto the table and stood with a hand on her hip, affecting a look of mild but compliant impatience. She was still wearing her vacuum suit, and for once she had a full sleeve and glove over her artificial hand, instead of the pressure-tight cuff she normally wore.

  “Captain… Tessily… Marance,” said the clerk, a heavy-jowled man with a persistent low cough. “Captain Tessily Marance. Tessily Marance.”

  “Don’t wear it out,” Fura said.

  He held one of her papers, squinting as he compared the photograph with her face.

  “In from the Empty, are you?”

  “No law against it.”

  He licked his fingertips, turning pages quickly.

  “Where was your ship registered?”

  “Indragol.”

  “Describe it.”

  “It’s about four hundred spans long, with rooms inside and lots of sails and rigging.”

  He looked at her with a stone-faced absence of humour.

  “The world, not the ship.”

  “Why, are you planning a holiday? All right, Indragol. It’s a cesspit down in the Twenty-Eighth. Tubeworld. Besides the Grey Lady, the only other good thing to come out of it was my father…”

  “His name?”

  “Darjan. Darjan Marance.”

  He shifted his gaze onto Adrana. “Who is she?”

  “She can speak for herself,” Fura said.

  Adrana looked down her nose at him. “Tragen Imbery.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Sympathetic.” Adrana leaned in and added, in a near-whisper: “That’s a Bone Reader, you know.”

  He held up a different page. “Take off your spectacles.”

  Adrana complied, staring at him with a fierce, level gaze. He continued holding up the page, frowning slightly, and beckoned one of his colleagues over. The first clerk handed the papers to the second, murmuring something in regard to Adrana. The second clerk sat down and began going through their papers with a heightened attentiveness, taking out a pocket magnifier and consulting a reference document, presumably looking for tiny flaws in their forged credentials. Meanwhile, the first clerk began asking Prozor and Lagganvor questions.