Shadow Captain Read online

  “So we’re using up precious fuel,” Strambli said, frowning so hard she made her lopsided face even less symmetrical. “In order to get more fuel.”

  “Not so hard to get your grey around,” Fura said, directing a fond if exasperated smile at our Opener. “Like depositing a quoin in a bank, so it’ll turn into two quoins.”

  “I’d thank you not to mention banks,” Prozor said, rarely missing a chance to remind us that she had lost her savings in the crash of ninety-nine.

  “You’d need a lot of faith in banks to deposit your last quoin,” Strambli muttered. “Which is what that fuel is to us.”

  “It isn’t,” Fura said. “Not by a good margin. But we do need more propellant, and if we’ve got to burn some to get our mitts on Rack’s stockpile, so be it.” She directed her glowy face at Prozor and me. “Besides, I’d say it’s our stockpile now, wouldn’t you? We’re the last of Rack’s crew, so it’s not as if any other cove has a better claim on this place than us.”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “We’ll get in fast,” she was already saying, while working the controls, steering us nearer to the bauble. “Take as much as we need, and no more. What made sense for Rack makes sense for us, too. Agreed, Prozor?”

  “No truer thing ever said,” Prozor answered, which was her way of managing to sound equivocal. She snapped shut her bauble book, did up the fancy clasps as if she had no expectation of ever needing to open it again between now and the last gasp of the Old Sun. “Usual margins, I take it?”

  “However Rack liked to play it,” Fura said.

  “Well, Rack had a few advantages we lack,” Prozor said, meaning (if I knew her at all) a crew he’d picked by hand, rather than one that had been shoved together by chance, but she left the rest of her statement tactfully unvoiced. “Usual margins’ll cut it. The rest of us, we may as well finish gettin’ suited.” She gave a squint to her chronometer. “We’ve got five minutes until field drop.”

  So far so practical, and we’d already donned most of our vacuum gear, apart from the helmets and final connections. We’d inherited a very capable ship, full of fine equipment, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the motley look of our party. Our suits were a jumble of parts, brown and rust-coloured alloys cut and welded together with care and attention, but not much thought as to whether the final result was pretty to the eye. We were ugly and lumpy, like the contents of a junk shop thrown together in the approximate shapes of people. Why didn’t we use some fancy suits that Bosa had left us? Because there weren’t any, or rather there weren’t any that were suitable for this sort of work. Bosa didn’t soil her hands scrabbling through baubles. She let other crews have the pleasure of that, and then jumped them for their pickings. Bosa had left us some handsome black vacuum suits, but they were for boarding and gutting other vessels, leaving us to salvage our mongrel gear from the hulk of the Queen Crimson, Captain Trusko’s ship.

  We checked each other’s suits, locking down helmets, tightening faceplates, making sure all the hoses and seals were secure, swinging our arms and legs, making squatting and flapping motions. Strambli went around with a little squirt-can, dribbling oil into the moving parts. I worked my gloves until my fingers bled inside them. We checked the suit-to-suit squawk, me giving a thump to the side of Prozor’s helmet until she came through clearly. Fura was still operating the launch, but she allowed herself to be fussed over from her seated position, stretching out an arm like a queen expecting to be kissed on the fingers. It was her right arm in this instance, which was mechanical from the forearm down to the fingertips. She would wear a normal pressure gauntlet on the other hand, but on the tin one she had a pressure-tight cuff around the elbow, keeping her metal hand free of any encumberment and allowing her to touch and sense things in vacuum with a great discrimination. The cuff was bothersome and hard for her to adjust, so Strambli was checking it for pressure integrity.

  Prozor examined her timepiece again. “One minute,” she said, this time coming over the squawk, so that her voice sounded distant and near at the same time, because there was still atmosphere in the launch.

  Fura slowed us down for the final approach. It was like a restless, sooty sea down there, blanketing the world beneath. The field was fidgeting around, growing tenuous in places. Bits of the surface began to show through, prickly with jagged, upright rock formations, like the quills of some armoured animal.

  “Thirty seconds,” Prozor said. “Maintain descent rate.”

  “Don’t look like it’s quite ready to pop,” Strambli ventured.

  “It will,” I said, knowing how unlikely it was that Prozor would have made an error in her auguries.

  In the last fifteen or twenty seconds the field seemed to shiver, and that shivering sped-up like the flicker from a coin spinning on the table, that fast whirlygig flutter just before the coin topples over. That was the death song of a field, and when it went it went instantly, just vanishing, so that what was below was now just an uncloaked rock, spines sticking out all over, bristling from pole to pole.

  It was dark. One side was facing the Empty, the other the Old Sun. We were ten million leagues beyond the outer orbits of the Congregation, so that the Old Sun’s light had already fought its way through the gaps between thousands of worlds—millions, more likely—growing a little dimmer and wearier with each exchange. When that light flopped onto the bauble like an exhausted traveller, about all it could do was daub a few red and purple highlights across those quills, hinting at the gloomy secrets trapped between their roots. On the side facing the Empty—where the only dependable illumination was that from the distant stars, too far away for any monkey mind to comprehend, even those of us who’ve ventured as far out as Trevenza Reach, the bauble was nearly as black as Revenger’s own sails.

  “Do you see anything you recognise?” Fura asked, directing her question at Prozor.

  Prozor had started one of the stopwatch dials on her timepiece, measuring out the hours from the moment of field drop. “Drift north. That clump of spikes over there is a landmark.”

  “They all look the same,” Strambli said.

  “Not to me,” Prozor answered.

  Fura levelled us out just above the tops of the spines. I looked over her metal-clad shoulders at the fuel gauges, watching the needles twitch every time she had to use a pulse of thrust to stop us drifting in too close. Prozor had already told us there was a swallower inside the Rumbler, which added to our difficulties, especially as we were going to be hauling out heavy reserves of propellant.

  “Keep talkin’, Proz,” Fura said.

  “Take us lower. Cut between that pair of spikes.”

  “Won’t be much clearance.”

  “No more’n we need. Our launch ain’t any bigger than the one Rack used, and he squeezed through any number of times.”

  “Take your word for it,” she said, and although I could only see the back of her helmeted head, I imagined her biting on her tongue as she concentrated hard.

  We slid between the spikes, angling down. It got darker, shadows criss-crossing until they squeezed out the last, meagre traces of light. Fura turned on the launch’s own lamps. Yellow beams crossed vacuum and danced across the swelling roots of those stony spines.

  “I see the landing zone,” Prozor said. “Dead ahead. Hold this descent and you’ll be golden.”

  “Why’s this place called the Rumbler, anyway?” Strambli asked.

  “Adrana,” Fura said, turning to me. “Call out the heights, please.”

  “Why, certainly,” I mouthed, moving to the side of her console, where I was able to read the slowly revolving digits of the altimeter. The instrument was similar to the sweeper on Revenger, only instead of whirring around it pinged pulses straight at the ground, measuring the delay before they bounced back. “One hundred spans,” I said, when the digits hit that round number. “Ninety. Eighty.”

  Something buzzed on the console, a red light flashing. Fura snarled.

  I r
ecognised that light. Fuel warning.

  “Don’t tell me you cut it that fine,” I whispered.

  “No point going home if we don’t find Rack’s stockpile,” Fura replied, in the same low voice.

  “I can’t believe—”

  “Maintain those call-outs, sister.”

  I wanted to snap back at her for voicing her request as if it were a demand, but since I was just as keen for us not to crash as Fura, I forced myself to swallow my pride and intone the numbers.

  “Sixty.”

  “Lateral drift,” Prozor said.

  Fura nodded. “Correcting.”

  “Fifty spans,” I said through dry lips. “Forty.”

  Fura worked another control. From the belly of the launcher came a clunk and whirr as it put out its spidery landing legs, too delicate and cumbersome to be deployed before now. Now the stutter from our engines was lighting up more and more of our surroundings, the spikes rising up around us like the huge, petrified trees of some fairytale forest.

  “Backwash,” Fura said. “Transitioning to landing jets.”

  “Steady as she goes,” Prozor said.

  “Twenty spans,” I called out. “Ten … five …”

  The landing area came up fast, a flat circle of blasted stone, scorched by multiple rocket exhausts. The legs were the first to touch, springing down to absorb some of our momentum.

  “Contact light,” Fura said, as another indication lit up. “Motors stop.”

  The launch settled down on its legs, landing belly-down. The engine rumble died away, leaving only the hiss and puff of our breathing mechanisms, the leathery bellows squeezing in and out.

  The red fuel warning light was still flashing. Only now that we were down and stopped did Fura reach over and flick her finger against it, making it turn off.

  “Faulty indicator,” she said, turning around with a big grin on her face. “You didn’t think I was that desperate, did you?”

  Through the barred-over window of my faceplate I smiled tightly. “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “How much time, Proz?”

  Prozor’s visor tipped down to study her timepiece. “Six hours, eleven minutes.”

  Fura pushed back her control seat, rising from the console. “Then we’d best not stand around bumpin’ our gums, had we?”

  We helped Fura complete the last of her suit checks, gathered our equipment—we were all carrying something, not just Strambli with her particular box of tricks for getting through doors and other sundry obstructions—and then went through the launch’s airlock in pairs, which was the most it could take at a time.

  When there were four of us outside we stood next to the launch, swivelling around with our helmet lamps on to get a better view of things. The launch only just fitted on the landing zone, hemmed in by the roots of the rocky spines, their tops lost to darkness. The level ground under our feet was new, which was to say it wasn’t more than a few centuries old, rather than the millions of years that this bauble had been ticking around the Old Sun. Some other captain had put it there, making it easier to come and go.

  “What was that?” Strambli asked.

  We’d all felt it, too. Like a little shudder going through the ground under our feet, there and gone almost before we had time to notice it.

  “Reason it’s called the Rumbler,” Fura said. “That’s some sort of deep activity which—I’m reliably informed—ain’t anything we need to poke our noses into. Right, Proz?”

  “Right. We’ll keep to the shallow levels. What goes on under ’em isn’t our concern. They say it’s the swallower, getting fidgety in its magnetic cradle.”

  “If I never see a swallower up close, that’ll suit me just fine,” Strambli said.

  None of us contradicted that sentiment, especially not Prozor.

  2

  We set off.

  At one end of the landing area was a steep ramp leading down into the surface of the bauble, with a doorway at one end of it. The aforementioned swallower was putting out half a gee at the surface, which sounds very little if you’ve spent your entire existence on a civilised world like Mazarile, Graubund or Metherick. You might imagine we were bouncing around like puppies, hardly feeling the weight of our suits.

  It wasn’t like that at all.

  In the three months since we took Revenger, we’d only set foot outside that ship to visit baubles, and only a couple of them had swallowers. The rest of the time we’d been floating around inside the main ship, hardly weighing a feather. Even when she was under sail or on full ions, Revenger never got above a few hundredths of a gee, which was just enough to be a nuisance but not enough to give your bones and muscles any sort of trial. Now, Surt—who was back aboard the main ship—knew her way around the medicine cabinet, and there were pills and potions that could keep our hearts from getting too lazy, or our bones from crumbling away like stale biscuits.

  But the short time we had spent under the press of the launch’s rockets had been no sort of preparation for surface operations. By the time we grunted and shuffled our way to the bottom of that ramp I was sweating like a horse. We weren’t even inside.

  One consolation was that the door into the bauble was open, exactly as Prozor had promised. The frame was a heavy arch of stone-coloured metal, marked with black symbols and with controls and indicators set into recesses up and down both sides. Those symbols meant nothing to me. There might have been thirteen Occupations—thirteen times since the Sundering when people had spread out and made homes in the worlds of the Congregation. But some of those civilisations had been thousands of years long, sufficient for many languages to come and go just within a single Occupation.

  Conventionally, it was an Assessor’s business to know the ancient tongues and scripts. But we were presently lacking a full-time crewmate in that position, which meant that such work fell to our Bauble Reader or Scanner, Prozor, who had been around the worlds long enough to be able to double as Assessor or Opener in a pinch.

  “Eighth Occupation,” she said. “Time of the Two-Headed Princes, I think. Turbulent’s the word for them days. Baubles were starting to pop open left, right and centre and everyone was making a scramble for loot and power. Lots of lawlessness, lots of wars and revolutions, in just that one Occupation.”

  “So we just … walk through, is that it?” Strambli was asking, before any of us had crossed the dark threshold of the doorway. She was about to act on that statement, stretching a hand into the gap.

  “Wait,” Prozor said, and reached to pick at something on the left side of the frame.

  “What?” Fura asked.

  “Just checkin’ this is still in place. Which it is.” She was pinching something between her fingers, too small or fine for me to make out. “Rack stretched a line of riggin’ across the door, criss-crossed from top to bottom. Did you cotton onto it?”

  “No,” Strambli said, sounding slightly put-out.

  “That’s the idea. Wouldn’t have known if you’d broken it, either. But Rack would.”

  “So he’d know if anyone’d trespassed, while he was away,” I said, nodding and thinking that Bosa wouldn’t have been averse to a similar trick. Except in her case—if I had learned anything during my time as her protégée—the thread would have been rigged to set off a bomb or weapon.

  You could never be too particular, in baubles.

  “Any other little mementos Rack might have left us?” I asked, as we filed through the door.

  “No, just that one—and it nearly slipped my grey, too.” Prozor pulled a gadget from her belt, a thing the size of a thick thumb, and passed it to me. “But this didn’t. Clamp your lamps on that. Surt helped me lash it up from the gubbins we pulled from the Queenie.”

  “It’s meant to mean something, is it?”

  “Short-range squawk localiser. When we’re near the supply—assuming old Proz hasn’t forgotten the frequencies—it ought to start flashin’. There’s a transmitter stashed in with the fuel, where your average thievin’ co
ve wouldn’t think to look. Rack didn’t want anyone lootin’ his drop to get too far with it.”

  I stared down at the cobbled-together device, which was doing a perfectly creditable job of looking totally dead.

  “Then we’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “Have some faith, girlie.”

  The doorway led into a sort of corridor, sloping gently into the bauble. We lost squawk contact with the main ship as soon as we ventured a few paces into it, but Prozor said that was to be expected, and nothing out of the usual for baubles.

  There were alcoves on both sides, with plinths where statues had once stood. They were all gone now, except for some rubble and a handful that were so pitifully broken they were not worth the trouble of moving. From what we could see of the remains, picked out with our helmet lamps, they were all soldiers, dressed in scaly armour, their hands clutching invisible armaments.

  We carried on down. I looked at the localiser, willing it to light up. But so far there was nothing.

  The rumble came again, just as it had before. I thought of the swallower having some sort of indigestion, grumbling as it wolfed something down. Swallowers were not meant to swallow anything once they were chained and harnessed in the middle of worlds, but occasionally things shook loose and fell into them, and once in a while that could start a chain-reaction that reduced a whole little kingdom to hot rubble as the swallower gorged, getting fatter and heavier.

  “This isn’t looking too encouraging,” I said, eyeing the still-dead localiser.

  “It was just a precautionary measure,” she said, breezily. “And maybe I did get them frequencies muddled around. My noggin’s had a few leaks in it since Bosa put a fresh dent in my skull …”

  The device started flashing.