Shadow Captain Page 7

  “Most of them don’t.”

  “But thirteen of ’em do, and very handsomely at that. Paladin confirms it, too.”

  It was true, as near as my eye could judge, squinting through the translucent sheet to the one below it, and allowing for folds in the paper, the thickness of the inked uprights, and so on.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” I said. “The thirteen Occupations seem to fit these ticks quite nicely. But what about the hundreds that don’t match at all? They just fall in the gaps between Occupations, where we know there wasn’t any civilisation.”

  “That we know of.”

  I nodded slowly. Historians sometimes spoke of “Shadow Occupations” as a theoretical possibility—little false dawnings of civilisation, happening between the known Occupations but leaving no trace of themselves, or whose traces had been confused with the relics of the known Occupations. It was possible, I suppose, and it gave historians something to argue about, which suited their temperaments ideally. But so far as I recalled, not even the wildest of them had ever suggested that there might have been hundreds of Shadow Occupations.

  Let alone in the region of four hundred and twenty-seven.

  “It can’t be,” I declared firmly. “We’d have known of such a thing by now. Assessors would be tearing their hair every time we cracked a bauble. Nothing would make any sense. But the thirteen Occupations do make sense, most of the time. Paladin: which Occupation made you?”

  “I am a robot of the Twelfth Occupation, Miss Adrana, as well you know.”

  “And you’d know if there’d been dozens and dozens of Shadow Occupations between then and now, wouldn’t you?”

  “I cannot say with certainty, Miss Adrana. I was confined within a bauble for much of the time. I must also depend on the historical records compiled by people.”

  “Tinheads only know what we tell ’em,” Fura said, which was a little unkind given that Paladin was listening.

  “Somewhere there’ll be older robots, or ones with a better memory, won’t there?”

  “Good luck finding ’em, or persuading ’em to blab when you do. This is dangerous knowledge, sister. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the tinheads would sooner pretend not to know anything about it, if they know what’s good for ’em.”

  I stared at the sheets, part of me certain that she had thrown me this puzzle as a diversionary tactic, knowing how much I liked such fancies, while the other part of me could not help but be drawn into it. “Those thirteen lines seem to match up pretty well,” I allowed. “But I’m not sure it tells us anything. If you asked me to find a pattern of lines that fitted our timeline, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard. Finding patterns is what we’re good at, but it doesn’t mean there’s any deeper truth to it.”

  “This ain’t like looking into some tea leaves in Neural Alley,” Fura said chidingly. “Some cove went to a lot of trouble to find that regularity, and I think there’s something to it.”

  “So you really think there are all these Shadow Occupations, hundreds of them, that no one’s ever found any trace of?”

  Her answer was more considered, more guarded, than I’d been expecting. “No, not really. But if something didn’t happen at all those intervals, when it did thirteen other times, that’s just as puzzling to me.”

  Curiosity gripped me and I removed the paperweight, folded back the extending sheets, and leafed through the rest of the heavy volume. The pages were full of knotty little diagrams, numbers and calculations and curious squiggling types of algebra, and lots of drawings similar to the ones on the extending pages, complete with timelines and notches.

  It was all handwritten, I realised. Inked and tinted very carefully, without so much as a smudge or correction, but not printed. It was all too neatly inked, I decided. Only a lunatic could keep up that degree of orderliness page after page, scribbling down their addled theories like a manic printing machine, never once committing the tiniest slip.

  “This is either the work of a genius, or someone just as insane as Bosa herself. She shredded every book in Rackamore’s library. Why didn’t she do the same to this one?”

  “Spite drove her when it came to Rack,” Fura said. “But she wasn’t averse to a little scholarship, when it lined up with her own interests. She took her whims and obsessions seriously and she had time to dig into them. Much more than one ordinary lifetime, if you think of all those bodies she burned through. Once she started pondering the meaning of quoins and baubles and aliens, and these little Occupations of ours, what makes ’em start as well as what makes ’em end, it was natural that she’d follow that to the beginning, and the question of what makes us what we are. In her own mad mind she still had room for curiosity, like the rest of us. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I was her prisoner, not her best friend.”

  “Still, some of her obsessions must’ve rubbed off on you, this being one of ’em.”

  I was in no immediate mood to go back over my time in the presence of Bosa, so I made a very strong effort to ignore Fura’s digging and twist my mind back onto the immediate subject at hand.

  “I accept that it’s interesting.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “But if there’s a glimmer of truth in any of this,” I said, tapping a finger against the heavy volume, “wouldn’t the simplest thing be to ask the aliens?”

  “The same aliens that Bosa said have been busy trading in dead souls, stuck inside quoins?” Fura flexed her fingers. “I wouldn’t trust one word that rattled out of a Crawly.”

  *

  Near to a bauble—or any world, for that matter, which contained a swallower—a ship like ours was always in the prudent habit of reducing its spread of sail, sometimes folding and retracting all the sails completely, so that all that was left of the ship was the tiny hard husk of its hull. There were other considerations, too. Debris got caught up in a world’s gravity well, pulled into it like dirt around a plug-hole, and even a small amount could do prodigious damage to a spread of sail, and that was before you considered the easy opportunities for sabotage by rival parties. Crews spoke of hauling-in to a world, by which they generally meant a close approach or low orbit, but the deeper intention of the phrase lay in the act of pulling in some smaller or larger fraction of a ship’s spread of sail, which was a very cumbersome and delicate process at the best of times.

  We had reduced our sail as we neared the Rumbler, but not completely, since a ship with no sails must depend on ions alone for speed and is therefore vulnerable to ambush. Now, as we shrugged off the Rumbler’s influence, we were once again running under five thousand acres of collecting area. We were just barely able to achieve that, though, since we were still operating without a dedicated master of sail, and much of the control gear and rigging arrangements on Revenger—setting aside the question of her night-black sails themselves—were of unfamiliar or unorthodox disposition.

  We had Paladin, of course, and he was wired directly into the sail-control systems, so he could, in principle, operate all necessary aspects of the rigging. But Paladin had no innate understanding of celestial navigation, or the particular quirks of this ship. Like the rest of us, he was having to learn on the job. We had furnished him with such operational documents and manuals as we could find, but Bosa’s crew had been so well-schooled that they seemed to have had little need for any instruction beyond word-of-mouth.

  What we did have was Prozor and Tindouf. Neither was a master of sail but both had crewed on enough ships to pick up something of the art, vastly more than the rest of us, and when they bashed their heads together on a particular problem it was pleasing how readily they came up with a solution. They had hauled-in and hauled-out the sails each time we got near a bauble, getting better at it each time, and they had made such alterations to the trim and arrangement of the rigging as suited our changes of course.

  This work would have been difficult at the best of times, using the ordinary reflective sail. Ours were a singul
arly different proposition. These catchcloth sails were tuned to an invisible flux, a ghost-gale blowing right out of the Old Sun’s core. They had a peculiar way of behaving, flapping and billowing according to their own capricious moods, and they needed a constant careful eye on the sail-control gear. What made them trickiest of all was that the sails were black on both surfaces, and this was an order of blackness beyond anything in our common experience.

  Fura had shown me some small scraps of catchcloth in the ship’s stores, and wafting them through my fingers was like trying to hold a shadow composed of ink. It seemed to slither out of my grasp like a thing with its own volition. You could make no crease, and a piece of catchcloth folded over itself twenty times still felt as thin as a single layer.

  Out in space, strung on lines of molecular-filament rigging that themselves went out a hundred leagues or more, catchcloth was the literal fabric of nightmares, especially when you were depending on it for your existence. Tindouf and Prozor could only see the catchcloth by the things it concealed, and for the most part that meant trying to assess when a piece of black sky was covered over by something even blacker. Of necessity they placed their reliance on strain-gauges on the winches, as well as the ship’s inertial compass, to verify that our infernal sails were behaving as they ought.

  We cursed them, but they were also our salvation. We had every reason to hide, and by having catchcloth sails we made it practically impossible for another ship to sight us at anything but close-range. It was the advantage that had allowed Bosa to surprise and murder other crews. If Surt’s sail-flash did indeed betoken the presence of another ship, and they had spied us as we eclipsed the bauble’s light, then at least the sails had delayed this reckoning as long as possible. Now we had to hope that they would carry us back into the shadows, and we could speed away from that interested party as effortlessly as we slipped the bauble’s pull.

  As to our next destination, that was not a settled matter. There had been a plan—unstated, but I think mutually accepted—to continue along a string of baubles for a few more months, picking our targets shrewdly and generally staying out of anyone else’s sphere of operations. The holds of Revenger already contained a sizeable amount of quoins and treasure, no doubt most of it plundered from other crews, but it could always be added to and each bauble was a crucible in which we became a little harder as a crew. More than that, we enjoyed the challenge.

  Now that plan was looking untenable, even if Fura still clung to it. We didn’t have enough fuel to run the launch as freely as we would need. We could haul-in to one bauble, perhaps two if we ran our reserves down to the knuckle, but doing so would only be avoiding the inevitable. We still needed the worlds.

  It must have applied to Bosa as well. She had made her living stealing from other ships, but there must have been occasions when she needed something from a world, some rare but necessary commodity beyond the scope of her usual plundering. She could not have stolen from a world by force, so she must have been compelled into something resembling legitimate trade, although doubtless facilitated through intermediaries and disguises. Indeed, there were rumours of such activities. They only ever concerned worlds on the edge of the Congregation, where lines of communication were strained and the rule of law weaker than in the lower processionals.

  Dared we follow her lead?

  “We’re not outlaws,” Strambli was saying, as the crew gathered in the galley between shifts. “We just took an outlaw’s ship. That doesn’t stop us returning to the worlds and doing honest business. We need fuel, to begin with, and we definitely need more help. You Ness sisters are always harpin’ on about what a fine cove your Cap’n Rack was. Would he have run a ship with so few hands?”

  “He had a few luxuries we don’t,” Fura answered patiently. “Like friends, and monetary reserves, and the ability to trade whenever it suited him.”

  “Well, we won’t get any friends, skulking around out here,” Surt said, pausing as she sucked in her cheeks, which vanished into the sides of her face more than was pleasant to look at. “We’ve got the reserves, ain’t we? Maybe not in banked credit like Rackamore, but with the quoins and relics we’ve already got. We sure as apples ain’t poor. And we do need a master of sail, and an Assessor, and one or two spare hands wouldn’t kill us.”

  “We’ve run the ship by ourselves until now,” Fura said. “We may continue to do so. There are still many baubles within easy reach, and if we are careful with our fuel and supplies …”

  “We nearly got caught by those twinkle-heads,” Strambli said, giving a little shudder as she shuffled a deck of metal-coated cards. “If we’d run into real bother down there, do you think Surt and Tindouf would’ve been able to help us? We’re short-handed for bauble work, never mind how much fuel we have. We can’t go on like this.”

  “If there were more of us,” Surt said, “we’d be able to keep a permanent watch in the sighting room.”

  “You saw one flash,” Fura said coldly. “It was noted.”

  Trying to stay on convivial terms with both my sister and the three others, I said: “In practical terms we can sail back into the main worlds of the Congregation whenever we like. But we ought to be aware of the risks in doing so. You had the right of it, Strambli: we took an outlaw’s ship. That doesn’t make us outlaws in our own eyes but we have to think about how it looks from the outside. Besides ourselves, no one really knows what happened.”

  “Then we’ll tell ’em,” Strambli said, fixing me with her lopsided stare.

  “Easier said than done,” I answered, with an understanding smile. “We could squawk our side of things all we liked, transmit our good intentions, even put it out through the bone room, but it would only take one doubter to put a coil-gun broadside across us, and even a brief squawk transmission would give away our position very easily. Until we’re in port, and explaining ourselves, no one’s going to trust a word we say—and the risk is we’ll get peppered long before we make port.”

  “One of us sees sense, at least,” Fura said.

  “I’m trying to see both sides,” I replied. “I don’t like the idea of not seeing the worlds again. That’s no life, even if we were able to stay alive. We didn’t set out to be fugitives, did we? And even if we go with your idea and continue working baubles, short-handed as we are, and hoping our luck doesn’t run out, there’s no guarantee that we’ll find enough to live on.”

  She held her silence before answering, taking in all of us in turn, even silent, amiable Tindouf, who seemed content with whatever fate threw at him, provided it did not take him too far from his beloved ion-emitter.

  “If your minds are set on this,” she said, sounding very much as if she was having a tooth drawn, “then I shan’t be the one to stand in your way. But at least accept that it would be madness to sail into the lower processionals, or to any world where we’re likely to run into other ships and crews in any numbers.”

  “Agreed,” I said provisionally, glancing at the others for their assent, which seemed to be offered. “But there are worlds on the edge of the Congregation, the same sorts of out-of-the-way places where Bosa must have done some trade.”

  “What about Trevenza Reach?” asked Strambli keenly, her larger eye brightening like a miniature nova. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Trevenza Reach, and we could always recruit some new crew there, couldn’t we?”

  “It’s no good to us,” Fura said, with blunt dismissiveness. “I was there once, but its orbit’s taken it closer to the Congregation since then. It’s highly populated, swarming with spies and agents, and a common stopover for crews working the high spaces. Corrupt, as well. Vidin Quindar was able to get out there and smuggle me back to Mazarile with only a scrap of paperwork.”

  “There are twenty thousand other inhabited worlds,” I said. “It oughtn’t to be too hard to find one that fits our requirements.”

  “If you think it trivial, sister, be my guest.” But some cautious impulse showed in her face. “No. If you’ll allow it—
all of you—I’ll take a gander at the Book of Worlds, and the Glass Armillary, and find us a few candidates. You’ll admit that I have a good knowledge of the worlds, won’t you?”

  None of us could contradict her on that score. She’d had her nose in one or more volumes of the Book of Worlds since she could read, and she was still pining for the beautiful editions she had seen in Rackamore’s library. She could reel off the names of two hundred worlds before I got to twenty.

  “Then it’ll be your choice?” I asked.

  “No! I’ll just present the options I think are worth your consideration, and the final selection will be yours and yours alone. I’ll accept your collective decision, but that ain’t to say I’ll endorse it.” Fura folded her arms. “Still reckon this is a suicidal course of action. But far be it from me to stand in the way of my own crew.”

  5

  Five days later I was up in the sighting room when the Old Sun began muttering and complaining to itself. The magnetic compasses started to gyre, while a pale fire—sometimes lilac, sometimes indigo—chased along the great cobwebbed leagues of our rigging, occasionally dancing on the distant perimeter of a sail, defining a rectangle or a hexagon of perfect starless obscurity.

  I watched with only a distant concern, struck more by the beauty of the spectacle than the chances of it doing us harm. It was silent and rather lovely, with the fire moving with a kind of playful animus that I found charming rather than threatening. In truth, and as I reminded myself, there was little cause for worry. The solar storm might impede the temporary functioning of some of our instruments and equipment, but it would have to be much stronger to do lasting damage. Paladin was safe, since Surt had installed blockades in his wiring, so he could not be overloaded by an induction surge.

  A normal ship would have been wise to reduce its spread of sail, and that could be treacherous if the sail-control gear was already immobilised by the storm. Our catchcloth sails put us at the mercy of different winds, though. Sometimes the fluxes rose and fell in synchrony, but as often as not the weather boiling off the surface of the Old Sun bore no relationship to the moods of the invisible gale surging from its core. The fire itself showed that the rigging was holding its configuration, and that the sails were under no excessive load. Tindouf, down in the ship, would be monitoring the strain-gauges as a matter of routine, while Paladin would be consulting the inertial gyroscopes and star-trackers to ensure we held our course.