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  I heard an edge in Cazaray’s voice, but it was not the recrimination I might have feared. ‘No . . . that wouldn’t have done anything to damage the skull. There might be something wrong with the input, or the lines to the bridges, or the bridges themselves . . . but it’s hard to see why. Did you try the spare bridge, the one I used?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. It was an obvious thing to suggest, and I chided the both of us for not thinking of it.

  ‘Well, be quick about it. Try some of the other nodes. Only one of you needs to go – the other one can stay here.’

  Adrana looked at me. Neither one of us relished being in the bone room alone, but if there was one of us who stood a chance of picking up a faint signal, it was my sister.

  ‘Adrana’s gone back.’

  ‘Good,’ Cazaray said, that edge still in his voice. ‘All right. There’s more than likely nothing wrong, just a loose connection somewhere. But let’s backtrack. You mentioned a faint signal . . . was that something you picked up now, since we spoke the last time?’

  ‘No, sir.’ I swallowed. ‘Whatever it was, it was there before.’

  ‘But you distinctly said that you hadn’t picked up anything.’

  ‘We hadn’t, sir.’ All of a sudden I felt as if I had only just joined the crew; that all the weeks that had passed since Mazarile counted for nothing. ‘It wasn’t anything clear. Not a message, not even a word. It was just . . . there. And then it wasn’t. And now most of the lights have gone out inside the skull . . .’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Adrana looked inside it, when we knew it wasn’t working. The lights had gone dead, lots of them anyway.’

  Cazaray broke off. I could hear him talking to Rackamore, Rackamore answering, but not what either of them were saying. My hands were damp, a line of ice running all the way down my spine. I didn’t know if I’d made some terrible gaffe, or acted just in time. I glanced to the door, wishing Adrana would hurry up.

  ‘This is the captain,’ Rackamore said. ‘Triglav: can you hear me?’

  ‘Aye, Captain.’

  ‘I do not wish to snap to rash conclusions. But the fact that we have just arrived at this bauble, and just had our skull go silent . . . I cannot dismiss the coincidence.’

  ‘The sweeper’s clear,’ Triglav said.

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ Rackamore answered urbanely. ‘Nonetheless, we may still need ions and sail at very short notice. Coordinate with Hirtshal to make the necessary arrangements.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked Prozor.

  She whispered: ‘Captain’s shivery we might be about to be jumped.’

  ‘Jumped?’

  She kept her voice low. ‘Someone waits for us to do the hard work, emptying the loot from a bauble. Then pounces on us and steals our prize. Or tries.’

  ‘But there’s no one else out here,’ I said.

  Prozor looked back at me. ‘Best you pray there ain’t.’

  6

  I must have passed those black boxes a hundred times without giving them a second glance. If I’d stopped to consider, which I hadn’t, I’d have assumed they held water, compressed lungstuff, spacesuit parts . . .

  ‘Cap’n’s philosophy is to run light, and that includes armament,’ Prozor said, as she undid straps and slid the topmost box free of the others. ‘But that don’t mean we just lie back and take it.’

  She undid catches and creaked open the lid. Inside the box, contained with packing, was a framework, straps, something like a mask.

  Prozor dragged the thing out of the box and set it to one side.

  ‘The Gunner’s Girdle,’ she said. ‘Put it on.’

  Prozor opened another three boxes. She took out more girdles and started putting one on herself, doing up a leather strap that went around her waist and then two more that crossed diagonally over her chest. The mask was on a hinged piece, ready to swing down over her head.

  She folded down two metal struts like the rests of a chair, with a kind of pistol grip at the end of each strut.

  I copied what she was doing. ‘Which part is the gun?’

  ‘The part that stays outside. This is the part that points and fires. Open those boxes and bring me two more of these.’ Prozor reached over and lowered the mask over my eyes. It was a blank metal plate, curved so that it obscured my vision to the left and right. Prozor touched a stud on the left arm of my harness and the mask seemed to swell to blank out everything around me.

  Blackness filled the mask, and then stars peppered that blackness.

  ‘Now look around. Move your head, your whole body.’

  I twitched one way and there was the bauble world, with part of the Monetta looming into view beneath it. I turned some more, and there was the purple-blue shimmer of the Congregation. Swinging out from the hull, exactly following my line of sight, were the muzzles of guns.

  ‘You feel this trigger?’ Prozor forced my index finger onto a hard metal stud in the pistol grip. ‘One squeeze, that’s all it takes. Works anywhere inside the ship, within reason. Shoots magnetic slugs, five leagues per second. Use ’em sparingly, or you’ll cook the coils before we run out of slugs.’

  ‘Maybe it would have been an idea to have the firing lesson weeks ago.’

  ‘Not my problem, girlie. This is what happens when you make Cap’n Rack twitchy.’

  ‘Fura.’

  I lifted up the mask. It was Adrana, working her way back from the bone room. From her expression I could tell the news wasn’t any better than before.

  ‘No change?’

  If she had questions about the harness I was wearing, she put them aside. ‘Cazaray’s bridge didn’t make any difference. I tried all the inputs. It’s like it was never alive in the first place.’

  ‘Perhaps I should try . . .’ I started saying.

  ‘I said it was gone,’ Adrana said, and I nodded, accepting that the bones were beyond any use we could make of them.

  Prozor was gathering up the girdles. ‘Never mind the skull. Help me with these. You can each carry one.’

  When we got back to the galley, Triglav was just coming back in from the bridge. ‘Still nothing on the scope,’ he said, before setting his gaze on me. ‘I see we’ve just recruited our new gunner.’

  Prozor moved to the console and worked the controls. ‘Cap’n?’

  ‘I’m still here. Do you have encouraging news for us?’

  ‘Triglav says the sweeper’s clear. But the bones are still dead.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ Rackamore asked.

  Adrana leaned in. ‘Definitely. I tried everything I could think of. What’re you going to do now?’

  ‘We’re returning. Cazaray is concerned, and that’s reason enough for me.’

  ‘Hirtshal and I’ll put on suits,’ Prozor said. ‘We can get you in and out quicker.’

  She snapped a switch and turned from the console. ‘Better hope this isn’t something simple, both of you, or you’ll have cost the Cap’n good hours in that bauble.’

  ‘What’s Cazaray so worried about?’ I asked, sensing more was at hand than anyone was willing to discuss.

  ‘Something like this has happened before,’ Triglav said, squinting a cautious eye at his colleagues. ‘A skull, a powerful skull – with a powerful Bone Reader – can freeze out another one that’s nearby. Jam it, if we were talking about squawking. Or kill it completely, like a bolt of lightning hitting circuitry.’

  ‘You think that’s what might be going on?’ Adrana asked.

  ‘My job’s to act, not think. Captain wants ions, I’ll give him ions.’

  ‘But the sweeper,’ I said. ‘It’s clear. There can’t be anyone near us, can there?’

  No one answered.

  Hirtshal pushed himself off from the table, the threads slipping from his fingers as if they’d never been knotted. P
rozor patted him on the back, the first nice thing I’d seen between them. We remained in the galley, just us and Triglav for the moment. A little while later we made out the flash of fire as the launch fired its chemical rockets and began its ascent.

  Triglav took us through to the bridge and showed Adrana how to use the sweeper controls, including the power-boost. ‘The instant you see so much as a twitch on the scope, give it everything. That’ll give us a hard fix with range and angular size. Doesn’t matter if we burn out Jusquerel’s wiring, so long as we get some warning and a clear idea where to shoot.’

  ‘What about me?’ I asked.

  ‘Drop that visor over your lamps and start looking for anything out there that shouldn’t be.’ Triglav began to shrug himself into one of the same gun harnesses, grunting as he tightened the belly strap under his paunch. ‘Look for a milky haze in the opposite direction from the Old Sun – all the leftovers that didn’t get made into worlds after the forging. If there’s a ship, it’ll stand out against that.’

  He scooped down the visor and settled his hands on the pistol grips, ready for action.

  ‘Triglav? I think I’m frightened.’

  I’d become used to the sad-faced man, but the lower half of that face, all that showed beneath the visor, didn’t seem to belong to the same person at all. The set of the mouth was hard, humourless, fierce.

  ‘Good. Not being frightened, now that would worry me.’

  I lowered the visor, then pivoted slowly around.

  A grid of lines and little numbers. Ship under me. Congregation at my back. Its shifting purple-blue-red radiance played across the Monetta’s hull, making it squirm and dance like a living thing. The bauble, and the nearing metal bullet of the launch.

  Away from that, looking out into the Empty, only two things: stars and blackness, and a lot more of the latter than the former. The stars were impossible little pinpricks, and the black was a cruel, cold slap against the idea of light.

  ‘Launch is twenty leagues out,’ Adrana called out. ‘Can’t see anything closer than the Iron Courtesan, and she’s too far out to matter. If you see anything nearer, Fura, or think you see anything . . .’

  ‘Triglav.’

  My breath slowed. I had turned my point of view very slightly, sweeping an area that I thought I had already ruled out. I saw a knot of darkness, like a very black rose. I blinked, swung my vision off it, tried to find it again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I thought something was there, just for a second . . . but it wasn’t.’

  ‘Sweep the area again, Arafura.’

  ‘Wait.’ That knot of darkness against darkness, a black rose on a black field, was back again. It seemed to float both in front of and beneath the plane of the sky. It was there and then it wasn’t.

  Its petals were tattered sails, emanating from a central focus.

  ‘Triglav, I . . .’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Quadrant fifty-five, twelve.’

  ‘Yes. I see it.’

  I heard a click as Triglva worked a trigger. Then, more distantly, the discharge of the magnetic coil-guns. It was like a drum roll, played very fast and hard, cutting off as sharply as it began.

  Now I saw a sequence of flashes, clustered very tightly, and lasting about as long as our scatterfire volley.

  ‘Fire, sir, from the other ship!’

  Between the time I registered the flashes, and the time I finished speaking, they were on us.

  The Monetta shook again, but this time the shaking was a hundred times as violent.

  I lifted the visor, certain I’d done all that I could for now. The drum roll came again, our own guns returning fire. Then another impact, dull-sounding, like a huge bell being struck by a hammer. Feeling a deeper dread than anything I’d known, I went to the window, making out the tiny speck of the launch, willing it closer.

  ‘We’ve already been hit, haven’t we?’

  ‘Just softening us up,’ Triglav said. ‘She meant to kill us, we’d know it by now.’

  Rackamore’s voice sounded over the squawk. ‘We’re lined up. I see Prozor and Hirtshal inside the bay. Get those nets tight as you can – I’m going to burn off some of this speed at the last moment, but this still isn’t going to be a soft docking. Cazaray wants to know . . .’

  He was speaking and then the only thing coming across the squawk was a scream of static, so loud that reflex got me lunging for the console until some circuit or overload broke the connection without any help from me.

  ‘They’ve been hit,’ Triglav said, flipping up the visor and making his way to the console. He worked the controls, switching through channels. ‘Captain – are you reading us? Prozor! Hirtshal!’

  Prozor’s voice came through, ragged and distant. ‘We see ’em. Launch is tumbling pretty bad. Venting gas. They’re veering.’

  ‘Enough to miss us?’

  ‘Not sure. Angle’s changing.’ Then her tone altered. ‘Oh, hell. It doesn’t look good, Trig. Got a hole in her side big enough to drive a barge through. Bleedin’ out like a stuck pig.’

  In the window the launch was a slowly cartwheeling cylinder, gushing out a glittery spiral of escaping gas. I thought of the people aboard it, the five members of the party, and wondered if a single one of them remained alive. Rackamore, Cazaray, Mattice, Jusquerel, Trysil . . . not exactly friends, yet, but people I’d come to think of as friends-in-waiting.

  They couldn’t be dead.

  The launch had been lined up for the Monetta’s mouth-like docking bay, but now it was drifting off-course, threatening to do at least as much harm as one of the enemy’s slugs if it struck our unprotected hull. Gas was still squirting out, the angle of drift steepening.

  But a figure was emerging into view around the curve of the hull, stomping across the hull plates on magnetic soles. The helmet, with its grilled-over faceplate, caught the light for a moment. I saw a sternly impassive face, cut across by a white moustache.

  The figure stomped on, coming nearer to the window. It bent down to a piece of low, heavy equipment mounted on the outside of the hull. It had a powerful, compact look to it, like some iron beast squatting before a pounce. I wondered for a second if it might have been one of the guns, then recognised it as part of the sail-control gear.

  ‘Hirtshal!’ Prozor called. ‘There isn’t time!’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  Hirtshal curled a fist around a handle and tugged so hard on it that the recoil severed the magnetic bond between his boots and the hull. The equipment sprang away from the hull on a coil-driven hinge, swinging high and wide like a catapult.

  From its end spilled an inky mass of tightly packed rigging, furling out into a ragged, billowing net.

  Hirtshal regained his hold on the hull plating and ducked, raising one arm over his helmet in self-preservation. Still tumbling, still putting out gas, the launch passed the front of the Monetta. The rigging was unpacking itself, magically unknotting. The launch was already starting to drift into that smoky confusion, faint threads of rigging cloying their way around the tumbling hull, offering the beginnings of resistance . . .

  ‘He’s done it,’ I said. ‘Hirtshal caught the launch!’

  The threads tightened, and then we felt the jerk as the momentum of the launch was transferred to the Monetta. The sail-control gear strained under the load, and the launch began to move in an arc, until it clanged against the hull, drifted off, and stopped. It was lashed to us, but safe.

  Hirtshal began to pick his way through the tangle he had made. Prozor was clanging into view in her own set of magnetic boots.

  Triglav tried the console again, flipping between different channels. There was still only static. The flow of gas from the hole in the launch had begun to taper off.

  A door popped open in the side of the launch. Lungstuff blasted out and a fist a
ppeared, then a forearm, then a brown-suited form clambered out of the wreck, almost immediately tangling themselves in the rigging. Another figure.

  Triglav was next to me, still with his visor pushed up.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be firing the guns?’ I asked.

  ‘Coils heat up pretty fast if you sustain fire.’ He settled his sad eyes onto mine. ‘We’re not a battleship, girlie. This ain’t what we do for a living.’

  Prozor and Hirtshal had pulled knives out of their belts and were hacking through the rigging, helping to untangle the survivors of the launch party. Two were outside now, and a third was coming out of the lock. That one had a white patch on the crown of their helmet, just as Rackamore’s had done.

  Adrana said: ‘Something new on the sweeper, Triglav.’

  ‘Multiple contacts, between us and the other ship?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘She’s putting out her own boarding party. Ceased fire ’cos she don’t want to cut ’em to ribbons with her own scatterfire.’ Triglav jammed down the visor. ‘But doesn’t stop us giving some of it back. I’ll see if the coils have cooled down enough.’

  A rain of blows began to sound against the hull, concentrated on the side of the Monetta facing the enemy. It was lighter this time, not the same as the earlier scatterfire volleys.

  ‘That’s the boarding party’s own guns, not the ones on the ship,’ Triglav said, just his mouth visible. ‘Can you still see Prozor and Hirtshal?’

  ‘They’ve got three of them,’ I said. ‘They’ve cut their way through the rigging and I think they’re working their way back to the front of the ship, or an airlock.’

  All we could do was watch while the five suited figures made their slow, stomping progress back to the bow, moving in rocking lock-step like clockwork figures that had nearly wound down to stillness.

  ‘Prozor and Hirtshal are going out of sight,’ I said. ‘The other three are still behind them.’

  Our guns stopped. Triglav squeaked up his visor.

  ‘That’s us done. Barrels are cooked, or we’re out of slugs, or both. Can you see Trysil?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Could that be Trysil bringing up the rear?’