Shadow Captain Read online

  “Prozor,” I said.

  “… or Jusquerel swapped ’em without tellin’ me, or the juice has drained out of Rack’s transmitter, or …”

  “Prozor,” I said, firmer this time.

  “What’s it say?” Fura asked, leaning over.

  There was a pattern of lights on the top of the thumb, a fat central one and a ring of smaller ones around it. The main one was flashing the brightest, but one of the outer ones was giving off a faint pulse as well, pointing down the corridor.

  “We’re on the right scent is what it says,” Prozor said. “And there was you all doubtin’—”

  “Keep walking,” Fura said, cutting her off.

  I kept the thumb raised up in front of me, the lights flickering in and out now and then, but generally getting brighter and steadier as we got near the base of the corridor. As the floor levelled off we went through another arched doorway like the first, and then we stepped into a much larger chamber, too big for our lamps to illuminate. We paused for a few moments then carried on walking, our labouring bellows the only sounds coming through our squawk receivers.

  “This is the place,” Prozor said.

  Fura turned to our Opener. “Light it up, Strambli.”

  Strambli opened a little box on her belt and reached in as daintily as anyone could while wearing vacuum gloves. She pinched out a light-imp, a star-shaped thing about the size of a marble, then held it up before her with a sort of fond regret before squeezing it. The stellate object shattered and a flicker of light played between Strambli’s fingers until she stepped back and the flicker stayed where it was, suspended. It wavered and got brighter, pushing out a fierce yellow light that quickly exceeded the contribution from our lamps. The yellow light flooded the chamber, brightening all the while.

  Strambli had let the light-imp off between us, so our own shadows produced hard spokes which reached all the way to the walls. We shuffled around as the yellow light wavered and danced.

  The room was circular, with a domed ceiling. It was at least twice as wide as the landing zone on the surface, with more alcoves around the rim—a few holding toppled or broken soldiers but most of them empty. Above the alcoves were long inscriptions in the same ancient language as the doorway we’d entered through.

  I paused to take it all in.

  I had been thinking about the deep antiquity of things almost constantly since we had taken to this new life among the worlds and baubles, pondering numberless aeons and the thin scratches of civilisation we have made against that vaster darkness. I had spoken to Paladin of the things he had seen, and pored over the learned histories and charts, trying to reach a point where such contemplation left me feeling settled and comfortable, rather than dizzy and bereft. But I could not—the means was not within me.

  Somewhere out beyond the Empty there now shone stars that had been born in gas clouds after this room was decorated. There were stars that had been alive then that were just corpses now, if they had left the least trace of themselves. There was just too much past, too much time that had already happened, and our lives were as nothing against that endless black conveyor belt, ceaselessly rolling, stretching and stretching ever further backward into a dread eternity.

  If any person were to say that they stood in such a place and did not feel the abyssal press of those discarded ages, I can state with confidence that they were either lying or deluded.

  “Um, Prozor,” Strambli said, coughing a little delicately. “This is the place, isn’t it?”

  “This is the place,” Prozor said. Then, with a bit less assurance: “It has to be.”

  “Then where the hell is my fuel?” Fura demanded, almost breaking into a shout. “If it isn’t in this room, and there’s only one way in and out of this room …”

  “That thread on the door wasn’t infallible,” I said. “Someone could have put it back the same way after they left.”

  “No. The localiser’s still picking up a signal,” Prozor said. “If some cove pilfered the fuel, they’d have pilfered the transmitter as well.”

  The light-imp was still giving off its yellow radiance, hovering in the vacuum like an obliging fairy. I could understand Strambli’s reluctance to crush it. Light-imps were often found in baubles, but they weren’t so common as to be worthless.

  “There’s another doorway,” I said quietly, because I had only just noticed it for myself, and none of the others were directing their gazes in the same direction. “Between those alcoves, it’s darker than the others. There’s a way out of here.”

  “Deeper into the bauble, you mean,” Strambli said.

  “Deeper into the bauble, yes,” I answered.

  “That door was always sealed,” Prozor said. “We never opened it, never went through it, never even tried opening it. Rack never had cause—this place was only ever a supply drop to him. All the rumours said it had already been cleaned out of anything valuable.”

  I walked over to the black aperture between two of the alcoves, compelled to inspect it though every bone in me was screaming otherwise.

  “You got a fix?” Fura asked, as I waggled the thumb back and forth.

  “Not exactly. Could be under us, it could be off to one side behind those walls. What’s clear is that it wants us to go down that shaft. Are those gouge marks in the floor?”

  Prozor came over to join me, bending down to shine her lamp over the patterns. “Not gouged,” she said. “It’s metal, scraped off the fuel bottles.” She knelt down carefully, knee-joints squirting oil as they compressed. “Flecks of paint, too.” She looked at a chip of colour perched on her fingertip like a petal. “Can’t be too far away, or the localiser wouldn’t snag it.”

  “I don’t like it,” Strambli said.

  “You ain’t paid to like it,” Fura retorted, which was rich considering that none of us were on anything that could be called a regular schedule of payments. “If cracking baubles was easy, any monkey’d do it. We’re here precisely ’cause it ain’t easy. Proz: how much time’s left?”

  Prozor inspected her timepiece. “Five hours, on the nose.”

  It had taken us an hour to shuffle this far. Any crew could take a risk once or twice and not be punished for it, but going in and out of baubles over and over demanded restraint as well as fortitude. Crews that aspired to be long-lived as well as profitable always allowed as much time to exit a bauble as they spent getting in, plus a handsome margin to allow for fatigue and equipment failure. More still if they planned to lug loot out of a gravity well.

  “Then we go deeper,” Fura said, making a clenching gesture. “That fuel wasn’t just sitting here, minding its own business, waiting to be claimed. It was put here by Rack, ’cause it belonged to him, and now it belongs to me.”

  “And by ‘me,’” I said, “you mean ‘us.’ Just so there’s no confusion.”

  “We ain’t equipped,” Strambli protested. “Not properly. We ought to come back, with winches and ropes and anything else we might need.”

  As Fura gave a shake of her head behind the barred-over window of her helmet, the glowy made it easy to see her face. It was flaring brighter than usual, stoked by her anger and indignation, producing catlike stripes around her nose and brow. “We’ll burn more fuel doing that, and sit around for three months waiting for the next window.” She turned around on her heels, looking at each of us in turn. “Have you all forgotten who we are? This is the crew that took down Bosa Sennen—the crew that cracked the Fang! And we’re getting our drawers in a twist about a little stroll down a tunnel?”

  “We are going to need that fuel eventually,” I said, admitting it to myself as much as to anyone else.

  “What a surprise,” Strambli muttered, shaking her head. “The Ness sisters agreein’ with each other, when it suits ’em.”

  “Only they do have a point,” Prozor said. “And since I used to crew with the man who stashed the fuel here, the cove who never took nothing that didn’t belong to him, I also can’t help taking it sort of
personal.”

  I confess that I took exception to the idea of someone else pilfering it, too. For those of us who had known Rackamore—and I counted that association a privilege, even though our acquaintance had not been lengthy—this injustice was a grave personal slight. It would hamper us, too. Revenger hardly needed fuel, provided its sails and ion-emitters were in tolerable order. A big, delicate ship like ours seldom wandered close enough to a gravity well to do itself harm.

  But to visit baubles, as well as trade with the settled worlds, a crew needed a launch, a little runabout with rocket motors, and those motors gobbled up propellant like it was going out of fashion.

  We could have argued about whether or not to split up the party, but in the end we stuck together, moving away from the wavering glow of the light-imp and into the dark. Now it was just our lamps again, and our shadows pushing ahead of us, and long rows of alcoves and broken soldiers, stretching down and down. But on the floor, unmistakably, were lines of scratched metal and paint where our fuel had been dragged, and none too cleverly.

  We let the thumb lead us on. That corridor went down and down, getting steeper in places. I visualised the way we had come as a sort of dog-leg with the empty chamber in the middle, and now we were about twice as far underground as at the start. The localiser’s lights were starting to point off to one side, almost back the way we’d come, except horizontally.

  The rumble came again, shortly before we reached the end of the corridor. It felt stronger, as if we were closer to the swallower. We were, too, but only a tiny distance compared to the size of the bauble. Now that rumble was starting to make me think of the snoring of some big coiled monster, sleeping in its cave while we tried to creep around it.

  “Rack had some funny ideas about the best places to leave his hard-earned,” I said.

  I was still pondering the decisions that had brought Captain Rackamore to his inglorious end when we came out into a huge sort of tunnel, too big to be properly called a corridor. Strambli dug out another of those precious light-imps and, after some muttered misgivings, cracked it open. In its hovering, wavering light we took in our surroundings. The size of the first chamber had been impressive enough after that long corridor, but this was something else again, and for a few moments none of us could find any words that seemed worth the bother of uttering.

  The tunnel was perfectly circular, like a drainpipe. We had come out of a doorway set into the curvature of the wall, almost at the lowest point where it formed a floor. The ceiling was about eighty spans above us, so even if we had made a tower of ourselves, each standing on the shoulder of the one below, we wouldn’t have reached much more than halfway up.

  What was almost more striking than the height of that tunnel was the way it stretched away in either direction, curving down ever so slightly as it diminished, until swallowed up by darkness. I guessed, without needing to do the mathematics (which would have been knotty, without a pen and paper) that the tunnel went all the way around the bauble before joining up with itself again.

  Unlike the corridor, the tunnel lacked any alcoves or ornamentation. It gleamed back at us with a sort of oily sheen, the walls unbroken by any doorway except the one behind us and another, much further along, just at the point where the shadows took over. We could all see that doorway, a fair stroll from where we had emerged, and the thumb clearly telling us that was the way to head.

  “How long?” Fura asked, breaking that long silence.

  “Four hours, thirty-three,” Prozor said. “And from what I know of us and our suits, we’ll need twenty minutes to huff and puff our way to that door, never mind what’s on the other side of it.”

  “We can still make it,” Fura said.

  Prozor laid a hand on her shoulder, before she started striding off. “That’s as maybe, girlie, but I still suggest we plant ourselves here, just for a while.”

  “Why?” Fura asked.

  “Because … I’ve got a hunch and I don’t much care for it. Those rumbles were always here when we came before, but they were under us and faint and Rackamore never needed us to go any deeper. But now I’ve taken the bother of timin’ ’em, which is what I should’ve done long ago, timin’ being second nature to a Bauble Reader.”

  “Go on,” Fura said, willing to let her speak.

  “They come too regular-like to be the swallower, unless it’s doin’ something that swallowers never do. Once every thirty-eight minutes. And you’ll notice it got stronger, the closer we got to this tube. I reckon there’s a reason for that.”

  “Something’s coming around,” I said, looking up and down the darkening length of the tunnel with a new foreboding. “In this pipe, or whatever it is. That’s what you think’s happening.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to be. But I figured it wouldn’t do us too much harm to wait and see what happens in …” Prozor glanced down at her timepiece again. “About seventeen minutes, now, I reckon.”

  “We’d have had time to reach that door,” Fura said.

  “Or maybe we wouldn’t,” I said, reminding myself that although she had rescued me, and put herself through a great deal of nastiness to do so, I was still meant to be her older and wiser sister.

  “I’ve heard of baubles with things like this in ’em,” Prozor said. “Just never run into one myself, or for that matter met a cove who has. Rat-runs, they call them.”

  “Ain’t we lucky you remembered now, and not when we’re halfway to that door,” Fura said.

  “It was the rumbles that set me thinkin’ it over. These rat-runs, most of the time they’re not workin’ as they were meant to. The things that go around, they get jammed up, stuck fast. Means the tunnel’s blocked at a certain point, but all that means is that you might need to go the long way round.”

  “But not this one,” Strambli said.

  We were still standing on the floor of the tunnel, the light-imp wavering.

  “Seventeen minutes, we could still do it,” Fura said.

  “On Mazarile,” I said, “when the trains were coming into Incer Station, they’d make a big breeze ahead of them. You’d see rubbish moving, and newspapers, and the hems of dresses would start fluttering, and ladies would reach up to hold their hats in place, and then you’d get a big warm draught of wind as the train was approaching. And that’s without the sound. But there’ll be none of that here. No warning, ’cause there isn’t any lungstuff here. No breeze, no rubbish. No sound, unless you count that rumble. That thing’s going to come around the bend and our first sight of it will be too late.”

  “I never had you down as the cautious one of us.”

  “If caution had anything to do with it,” I answered my sister, “I wouldn’t be within a million leagues of a bauble in the first place. But now that we’re here, I do quite like staying alive, while there’s a choice.”

  Fura gave a grunt, plainly disappointed in me, but my view prevailed over hers and we squeezed back into the last part of the sloping corridor, with just our heads inching out into the wider volume of the tunnel.

  “We don’t even know which way to look,” Strambli complained.

  “Toss a quoin,” Fura said.

  “I want to see it,” Strambli answered. And I understood her perfectly. Anything that happened in a bauble—anything that you survived, anyway—was a useful experience, doubly so if you ran into something a little out of the commonplace. More than useful: remunerative. You could sell that intelligence to other crews, to start with, but even if you chose not to, you would always know what you had seen or done, and it would do no harm at all to your reputation.

  “We ought to divide it up,” I said, smiling Strambli’s way. “Prozor and me looking left, Fura and Strambli right. When one of us says something, the others can look. But wind your necks in swiftish. If that thing trundles around the circumference of this bauble once every … how long did you say, Proz?”

  “Thirty-eight minutes. Of which eleven are remainin’.”

  “Then it isn�
��t going for a nice stroll in the park. I reckon it’s going to be moving about exactly as fast as a train.”

  Little more needed to be said in the minutes left to us. Prozor kept up a running countdown, telling us when it was down to two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds, fifteen, and then—collectively, I think—we all stopped breathing, just for the interval. Two of us gawping one way, two of us the other.

  In the end it was Prozor and I who had the first sight of it.

  In my mind’s eye I had been thinking of something like a flat-faced train, a sort of blank piston, filling the tunnel from side to side and bottom to top. In the event, I could not have been further from the mark. The rumbling thing was simply a big ball, covered in mottled metallic patches, rolling toward us. It was eighty spans in diameter—one of the grand old mansions on Jauncery Road would have rattled around inside it with room to spare.

  A big, rolling thing like that ought to slow down eventually, I found myself musing. There might not be pressure inside the bauble, but the ball was rolling along inside the corridor and there must have been bits of it scraping against the walls all the time. Its surface was rough-looking, not smooth-polished like a ball bearing. Over time, by all that was right and proper, it should have ground to a halt. Yet something was evidently keeping it going, whether in the ball itself or in the corridor, some sly force that compensated for the meagre increment of momentum it should have been losing with each roll around the bauble.

  I didn’t care for it at all.

  We watched as it struck the hovering light-imp and rolled right over it. It ought to have crunched the light-imp right out of existence but on the next roll the imp was still just visible, stuck to the ball as a sort of glowing smudge. On the next roll it was fainter, and on the one after that there was no trace of it. Then it was past us anyway, rolling off around the great lazy curve of that tunnel, disappearing back into the darkness, which was deeper now that we lacked the imp.

  Prozor started another of her timers.

  “Thirty-eight until it rolls around,” she said, poking her head out into the tunnel.