Shadow Captain Read online

  “Be better if I ignored all that, would it?”

  “Her business—her madness—doesn’t have to become ours.”

  “Oh, I can keep her at arm’s reach,” she said off-handedly. “The glowy’s companion enough for me—there isn’t room in my skull for a second tenant.”

  “You’d best be sure of that.”

  “Oh, I am. It wasn’t me that she tried to turn, was it? Beyond that short time near the end of her life, after I rescued you, me and her were barely acquainted.”

  “No,” I said, reflecting on the things she had done to Bosa. “But from her point of view, you more than made up for it.”

  “Listen,” she said, striking a more reasonable tone. “I’m not making any assumptions about those quoins. But if they do exist, that’s still stolen money, isn’t it? Perhaps all that stuff about dead souls being locked in the quoins is just so much chaff. As you said, she’d have come out with anything if it bought her a few more breaths. But we’d be fools to turn up our noses at a hoard of quoins, if it’s ours for the taking.”

  “Mm,” I said, not convinced by this sudden shift to cold-hearted avarice. “And we’d do … what, exactly, with this money?”

  “If Bosa was stealing from crews for as long as legend has it, there could be millions of high-bar quoins sitting unclaimed.” Her voice gained a reverential hush. “Ours, Adrana. We could split it among the crew and retire to the worlds of our choosing. No one’d know where it came from. That’s the great benefit of quoins—they can’t be marked or traced. So long as we spent our gains carefully, so as not to devalue the quoins already in circulation, we could live handsomely.”

  “I’m glad you’ve given this some thought.”

  “Just musing on it, dear heart. We could do more than retire, though. The banks treated our poor father shabbily, didn’t they? For once we’d have leverage over ’em, sister. Financial power—more than our dear dead parents ever dreamed of. Father always paid his debts—he was too proud not to. But when he needed a loan to help look after Mother, or take care of his own health, do you think they cared? He was a fine, proud man, and the banks rewarded his honesty and loyalty with callous disregard.” She sniffed, lines wrinkling the bridge of her nose. “We could be a power in the Congregation that they needed to be fearful of, not the other way around. Now, wouldn’t that be a fine thing?”

  “You always did have a way of making any action seem like the only proper thing.”

  “You were the one who twisted my arm to run away.”

  “And it’s turned our lives upside down.” I sighed, not wanting to squabble with Fura. Time was I’d have generally won any argument, being ten months older and cannier, but that advantage counted for little now. “All this talk is speculation, though. You don’t have the faintest idea where to start looking for those quoins.”

  “And you are certain she never mentioned them to you?”

  I sighed again, wondering how many times we had already gone over this. “She was nurturing me as a possible successor, not unburdening herself of her every secret. She never spoke of them and we never visited any rock or world between the time I was taken and the time you came for me.”

  “No matter,” Fura said, glancing at those journals on her desk. “The operational secret must lie somewhere in this ship. Paladin will find it sooner or later; there’s nothing he can’t ferret out, given time. He’s got to be careful, though—can’t rush things. The ship may not be sentient like Paladin, but it’s got a slyness about it all the same. There’s a chance it’ll scramble or erase its secrets if it suspects interference.”

  “I thought the ship was ours?”

  “It is—in the flesh, if not yet fully in spirit. But have no fear, dear heart. We’ll bend its loyalty to us soon enough, with care and consideration, and oblige it to cough up its treasures.”

  “I listened to the bones,” I said, off-handedly, thinking I should enjoy a look at those journals, when the opportunity came.

  She gave me a sharp, disapproving glance. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “We did. Never one of us alone with the skull. But it’s dying and you were otherwise occupied. Anyway, I thought you should know that I picked up a mind and word.”

  Curiosity battled with displeasure in her face.

  “Did you?”

  “Nightjammer. This ship’s old nickname. They were trying very hard not to let it slip, especially when they sensed me.”

  “You should never have—”

  I cut her off with gentle assertiveness. “I knew you would not be pleased, and I thought twice about mentioning it. I’ve said nothing to the others for now, they’re rattled enough as it is. But I think we may read a few things into that name. Someone knows what we are, and I’m of the strong opinion that the mind I sensed is on the ship that generated that sweeper pulse and gave off Surt’s sail-flash. We are being shadowed by a ship that knows our identity, and I can think of only one reason anyone would be so bold as to do that.”

  “They wish to take us,” Fura said, with a sort of reverence in her voice. “And they must believe they can.”

  7

  We turned for Wheel Strizzardy. We were falling back into the Congregation now, chasing a long parabolic course, employing the flux on our sails to alter our angular momentum around the Old Sun, and therefore—by slow and painstaking means—effect the celestial equivalent of tacking into the wind.

  For ten days a sort of normality returned to the ship. Despite a heightened period of watches in the sighting room, no more sail-flashes were seen. The Old Sun had settled into a deep and contented slumber, with no eruptions or prominences to meddle with our systems, and therefore no possibility of using the sweeper in a covert fashion. We were not swept, and we did not dare chance a return sweep. I did not return to the bone room, and to my knowledge neither did Fura. In fact, I went so far as to employ Prozor’s old trick of placing a thread across the doorway—except that in my case I used a strand of my own hair. Whenever I inspected the bone room door, that strand was still present. In truth I was not surprised by that. Fura cared even less for that crack-ridden skull than I did. I think she was afraid that some of Bosa’s madness was still inside it, waiting for a new receptacle. Neither of us would be too sorry when it finally stopped working.

  It was a busy time, and that helped settle our collective nerves. Besides the sighting room watches, all hands were required to help with the work of transforming the outline of our ship. We had less than five weeks to complete the job, since we would be falling into sweeper and telescope range long before we actually hauled-in at our destination.

  Prozor was right: it only had to pass muster at first glance, but if there was something about that first glance that rang false we would be in immediate trouble.

  With only six able crewmembers we all had to weigh-in. Quickly we agreed on a division of labour, with shifts and teams all plotted out by the hour and by the watch. Most of the work would require being outside, in vacuum gear, which meant a lot of taking suits on and off, and coming and going through locks. The more that could be made to run like clockwork, the better we could keep to a schedule.

  It was a golden rule that one, or preferably two, people would always remain inside the ship. One to make sure those outside could get back in, if something went wrong with the lock. Another just in case the first one went and died on us. It was why Tindouf and Surt had remained aboard while the rest of us went down to the Rumbler. It was also prudent to have eyes and ears on the sweeper and squawk, and someone had to be in the sighting room whenever practical.

  So we organised into three teams, dividing up the watches in a pattern that was equally fair and equally gruelling. Fura and Surt constituted one squad, Strambli and Prozor the next, and Tindouf and I the third. Each team was made up of one former member of Captain Rackamore’s crew, and one former member of Captain Trusko’s, allowing for some overlap, and sidestepping any question of strained loyalties or favouritism.
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  It was hard on us all and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it was better than sitting around fretting, with nothing on our minds but worry. Now our heads and hearts were taken up with practical matters, preparing for our watches, coming and going from locks, taking care of suits and tools and always, always planning the next step. Curiously, although we were tired, and although there was still a possibility that we were being pursued, our collective moods all went up a notch. There was more laughter in the galley than at any time since our taking the ship, even if that mirth had a ragged edge to it and was never far from turning into yawns.

  Deep down, I thought, we were creatures of order—all of us. We liked divisions of work and rest, and felt happiest when we had a structure governing our days.

  The pattern of watches proceeded thus. The first team would sleep for six hours, work outside for six, rest for six, then rest again. Twelve hours straight rest sounded easy, but in reality there was never any shortage of chores to be done, including cooking and washing-up, since the usual arrangements were now in abeyance.

  Meanwhile the second team’s watches would be to sleep, work outside, rest, then go outside again. The third team had the toughest pattern: sleep, rest, and then two consecutive outside shifts—twelve sweaty hours in vacuum gear, with no respite. They got a lot done, though, by not having to come in and out between those shifts.

  No one would have put up with that, except that the following day would see the arrangement shuffled around, so that it was the first team who worked the double vacuum shift, and the second team who got two consecutive rest shifts.

  You might think it was inefficient that we all slept at the same time. But that was the usual way of things on a small ship, and it made the meal times much easier to arrange, as well as ensuring that the noisy comings and goings of locks and suit checks was never to the detriment of anyone’s squint-time. Six hours was more than enough, even given our tiredness after the vacuum shifts. Under the near-weightless conditions of space, the body demands a lot less restitution than it does on a world.

  That was the division of watches; what we did in them was a different question. We had no master of sail, but Tindouf was the next best thing, so it fell to our team to tackle the job of making our sails look as normal as we could, using the two thousand acres of ordinary sail. It was a slow and fiddly job, but not especially difficult or dangerous, beyond the commonplace hazards of working in vacuum. Before we commenced, Tindouf found a piece of sail the size of the table and used it to sketch out the work ahead of us, drawing a spidery diagram with Revenger like a tiny bug pinned at the centre of a prodigious fan-like spread of rigging and sails. His plan was to haul in some of the catchcloth sails and substitute normal sails in their place, while also adding a few hundred leagues of supplementary rigging, supporting an arrangement of normal sails that had no purpose beyond making us look friendly.

  “We won’t sail as ’andsomely as we does now,” Tindouf said, stroking his chin regretfully. “Torque loading’ll be out of kilter, for one, and we’ll needs to use ions to smooth ’er out. But at least we’ll have the luxury of seeing our own sailses, for once.”

  “So will anyone shadowing us,” Surt said.

  “That can’t be helped,” I replied. “We either do this work or never go near another port, and we need every hour left to us to get it done. But we can minimise the risks, can’t we, Tindouf? Keep our reflective surfaces averted from any eyes astern of us, so they needn’t see very much more than they already do. If they’re even behind us at all. We haven’t seen anything since we turned.”

  “I do like an optimist,” Strambli said.

  “Sos do I,” Tindouf said.

  I was content that the shift assignments had thrown us together. Tindouf had little to say for himself when he was outside, preferring to sing to himself—usually childlike lullabies and nonsense ditties. If it bothered me I could turn down the gain on the suit-to-suit squawk, but generally I was happy to hear him mumbling and humming away, because it meant things were going well. I only needed prick up my ears when he went silent, because that usually meant something had got torn or tangled or jammed.

  Principally, I was glad not to be in the other two teams. Not because I disliked the people in them, but because by my reckoning we had by far the pleasanter assignment. The other two teams had to turn the ship itself into something easy on the eye, and that was a far knottier proposition than changing some sails.

  Not just knotty, but as good as impossible, at least in five weeks. Revenger was always going to look mean. Meanness was baked into her lines, and there was little we could do about that. Like Monetta’s Mourn, she had an “eye” on either side of her hull, just rear of the jaw. The eye was the largest window, and on both ships it was positioned for the benefit of the galley, where the crew spent most of their waking hours. The eye on Monetta’s Mourn was set a little higher, though, and it managed to look friendly. On Revenger the eye was set low, almost in line with the jaws, and the effect was to suggest a subtle form of derangement. The eye was smaller, too, and there was a sort of purposeful frown to it. The general countenance was not improved by the jaws being set with rows of sharpened alloy teeth, or by the many angry spikes and barbs jutting out from the hull like poison-tipped quills.

  The plan was to cut away or disguise as many of these ugly additions as possible, but a number of them served functions relating to navigation and sail-control, complicating their disposal. Then there were the hatches and irises related to the coil-gun batteries, which had to be re-fashioned to look less like gun ports, or no more than anyone might expect of your average prickly privateer.

  They had to go out there with tools, dismantling what they could, cutting through what couldn’t be dismantled, all the while vigilant for tricks and traps, and minding not to skewer themselves or cut through a bit of suit when they thought it was the ship. For the purposes of cutting, they had recourse to Strambli’s tools and instruments, which ranged from drills and saws to energy-beams and a kind of miniature flame-torch that operated on the same propellant as the launch and would glide through most things like a knife through butter. Still, it was slow going, and there were bits of Bosa’s ship fashioned of strangely toughened materials that must have come out of a bauble, resistant to all our conventional cutting methods. It was small wonder she had soaked up all the coil-gun volleys directed at her by her victims. We saved any part that was small enough to bring back into the ship.

  None of that would have troubled me, but there was something else that made me glad not to be on those assignments. Over the years—we might as well say centuries—Bosa had been crossed by a lot of people. As with our friend Garval, she had a particular way of enforcing discipline. When she had killed someone—or was in the process of killing them—she was in the habit of fixing their bodies onto the outside of the hull. If they needed to be kept alive long enough to make her point, she would arrange it—plumbing life-support into a suit, even as that suit was nailed or welded onto the ship’s jagged lines. Garval had been the most recent addition, fixed under the bowsprit spike that projected from the upper jaw—the same spike that eventually did for Bosa herself, when she fell onto it. There were many bodies, though—more than we ever imagined when we first saw her ship. She had been welding and nailing them onto the hull for so long that in places it was three or four layers deep. When my companions peeled those bodies away, breaking them off like scabs of hard-packed rust, they glimpsed the cryptic history of the ship itself. I shuddered to think of the ledger of misery accounted by these corpses, or the length of time that misery had been drawn out. Still, there was nothing we could do for them now, save cutting them away and casting their remains into the Empty. There was scant dignity in that, and perhaps not all of them were deserving of any, but I preferred to think kindly of them while I knew no better.

  The shifts went on. We slept, ate, worked, and rested—trading tired stories of what we had faced, or considering our plans for the next
day. When one of the other two teams came in, I kept a careful eye on their faces, noting when things had gone to plan or when they had run into something that made them silent or reflective in the galley, unwilling to share the experience except in a guarded glance or suddenly averted eye. I held back from pressing, and so did the others. It was sufficient to know that they had found evidence that Bosa’s cruelty went further than we had so far imagined. I had already seen and heard enough to tide me over for one lifetime. The sooner we scoured her memory from this ship, the better.

  It was on the eleventh day after we had changed course that the thing with the sails happened, and after that very little was ever the same again.

  *

  Tindouf and I were working that shift alone. We had been out in the rigging, an easy league from the ship (which looked terribly small from that far out, like a small, dark pip lodged in a greater darkness) and we had completed our allotted schedule of duties. But before we had set out, Tindouf had been troubled by some indications from the strain-gauges, and he wished to conduct an examination of an area of old sail to make sure nothing had become torn or tangled. What he found was instantly disquieting.

  A whole spread of catchcloth studdingsail—more than ten acres of it—had been repeatedly punctured, and in places it had separated from the rigging and was furling around like a live thing, a dancing, folding, twisting curtain of impossible blackness, quite awful to behold. We watched it, half-mesmerised, until Tindouf delivered his verdict.

  “We’s been shot, Adrana. No doubts about it.”

  “Shot?” I said, understanding him but wishing I did not, because then there might be some explanation for this damage that was more palatable than violent action.

  “Sail-shot most likelies, yes. You loads it into coil-guns just like ordinary slugs, but it don’t go so quickly, and you don’t aims it straight at shipses, neither. Some coves calls it grape-shot, but since it’s mostly used against sailses, and not grapeses, I prefers sail-shot.”