Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I was gettin’ to that …” Prozor said. “What are the chances that one twinkle-head managed to take all our fuel and stack it in those piles?”

  “Send some more our way,” Fura said. “We can spare a few more crossbow bolts, if they all go down that easily. Let’s get this fuel to the top of the slope.”

  Leaving the sparking, smoke-belching twinkle-head where it had fallen, we resumed our progress up the slope. The rest had done our muscles some good, but it was more than rest that made us work faster now. I felt as if an extra pair of hands was helping us roll the bottle, getting us to the top faster. I had my back to the darkness behind me, and that suited me very handsomely.

  With a final grunt and shove we got to the top of the shaft, rolling the second fuel bottle to a halt next to the first, which was just where we’d left it.

  “How long until the ball comes around again?” Fura asked, not even catching her breath.

  “Eighteen minutes,” Prozor said, meaning it had taken us twenty to fetch the second bottle and roll it to the top, allowing for the interruption caused by the twinkle-head. I had no reason to doubt her, but it had felt about twice as long.

  “That’s just time to reach the far door if we move now,” I said, remembering it had taken us fifteen minutes the first time. “We can push both bottles at the same time, if you like. Once they’re rolling on a level surface, they shouldn’t slow us down too much.”

  “And the third bottle?” Fura asked.

  “Forget the third bottle,” I said, meeting her glowy-framed eyes with my own, and putting as much authority into my voice as I dared. “Two’s better than nothing. We don’t want to run into more of those things.”

  “I ain’t going back down there,” Strambli said, giving a little shudder behind her visor. “Not for all the quoins in all the banks in all the Congregation.”

  “While we’re bumping our gums,” Prozor said, “the ball’s rolled closer. Nearer to seventeen minutes now. We could still make it, but it’s gettin’ tight. Depends how fine you want to cut things.”

  Fura looked at each of us in turn, and I could see some dark calculation working behind her eyes. It was less about the minutes and seconds that were preoccupying the rest of us, and more about loyalties and command, and how far she could presently push, given that none of us had scratched our names under any sort of agreement that she was in charge.

  “All right, we stick with what we’ve got. But we ain’t chancing the ball this time round.”

  “I could go ahead,” Strambli proposed. “Make sure the way’s clear.”

  “It’ll take four of us to lug that fuel,” Fura said. “So we all stay put.” She hefted her crossbow again, ready to use it if something came shambling up the shaft. “Tell us a story, Proz. You’ve always got a story.”

  “Not today,” Prozor said, unshipping her own crossbow.

  Strambli and I did likewise.

  *

  “Five minutes,” Prozor announced, and I couldn’t help but take a deep breath, as if we were already on the point of moving. I touched the fabric of the bauble, trying to feel the faint but growing rumble of the ball, the promise that it was on its way. But there was nothing, and I ought not to have expected it.

  I spent the next couple of minutes pondering our plans beyond this bauble, given the limited likelihood of our getting more fuel out of it on this visit. So far, since taking Revenger, we had contented ourselves with the margins of the Congregation, holding to the shadows and generally not doing anything that might attract attention. But we could not go on like that indefinitely. We were not outlaws, exactly—at least, we did not think of ourselves as such. But then I found my thoughts returning to Surt, and the sail-flash she thought she had seen from the fighting room, and our automatic assumption that we were being stalked by another ship.

  It was not how we thought of ourselves, I knew, but what others did.

  “Three minutes,” Prozor said.

  I touched the wall again, unable to stop myself, and this time there was something.

  “I can feel it.”

  “I doubt it, girlie. It’s still a way off.”

  “I’m not imagining it.”

  Fura looked at me then touched the wall with her metal hand. To begin with it had been much clumsier than her old one, with hardly any feeling in it. But the longer it was a part of her, the more sensitive it had become, and now she said she could feel vibrations through it that were much too subtle for her other hand, especially cased in a gauntlet.

  “Adrana’s right,” she said. “There’s something. But I don’t think it’s …”

  “That’s what it is,” Strambli said, calmly enough.

  They were shuffling into the range of our helmet lamps, a sort of moving barricade of them coming up the corridor like a plug, shuffling and shambling and knocking against the walls as they approached. They were all twinkle-heads but no two of them were exactly alike. Some of them had a limb or part of a limb gone from their suits, and a few still had a bony part hanging down where the suit had been ripped away, flapping around like a gristly pendulum. The only thing they had in common was that most of them still had a skull, or part of one. As their heads bobbed up and down in what was left of their helmets I caught the twinkly behind the eye-sockets, pretty glinting colours that had no place in such a horrible setting. Some of them had jaws and some of them didn’t, and some of their skulls were staved in or almost completely gone above the sockets, so that the twinkly was much more visible.

  There were so many of them, and so many squeezing in behind the ones at the front, that we would have been dead if they had possessed any sort of massed weaponry. That was the one blessing. If they had a plan, I supposed it was to overwhelm us, then pick us apart like a carrion.

  We were frozen for a few moments. Fear played a part in that, but there was also indecision.

  Fura broke the paralysis. She put a bolt into the middle of the mass, and was loading another when Prozor took a shot of her own. Strambli and I were soon joining in. We just aimed, shot, reloaded. There was no strategy to it beyond that, and the suits and body parts of the twinkle-heads were such a jumble that it would have been quite futile to concentrate our attack on any one weakness. The skulls were the obvious target, but putting a bolt through the front of a visor was anything but straightforward. Still, we tried our best, aiming for the ones who had little left of their helmets, and out of those, favouring the ones whose skulls were already half-shattered. When the bolts found their mark, the twinkly exploded like silent fireworks, and the twinkle-head went stiff as their suit lost its governing control.

  But the mass of twinkle-heads was continuing its advance, and although we were doing some damage they were soon going to push us out into the main tunnel. Some of them were giving off black smoke now, just like the first one, and that was making it even trickier to aim our crossbows.

  “Strambli,” I said. “Help me with this.”

  I fired one last shot then dropped my crossbow. I got both hands on the second bottle, the one we had just sweated all the way to the top of the slope, and began to shove it back to the lip of the incline, Strambli joining in as soon as she got my intention.

  “No!” Fura said, realising what I had in mind. “We need that fuel!”

  “No,” I said, patiently as you please. “What we need is to stay alive long enough to use the other bottle of fuel.”

  Before she could offer any objection I gave the bottle a final heave and momentum took it over the lip, Strambli and I letting go as it began to roll toward the twinkle-heads. I snatched my crossbow up from the floor and was loading another bolt into it when the bottle ran into the twinkle-heads.

  It went through them like a fist through skittles. The first wave got the brunt of it, bits of them exploding under the impact, metal and bones and twinkly splintering out of the smoke, but as the bottle’s own passage cleared a path behind it, I saw it rumble over the second and third waves pressing in behind the
forward party, and the effect was just as devastating.

  They were not stopped, though, and nor was that an outcome I had been counting on. The twinkle-heads who had suffered the least damage fought their way through the remains of their comrades, shoving them aside or picking up pieces to use as bludgeons. But we had slowed the advance, and now it was easier to direct our bolts at the survivors, taking careful aim through visors or going for joints and other vital suit components.

  That minute and a half since Prozor’s last update took its sweet time passing, but I felt we had tipped the balance in our favour now and when the ball came sweeping past us in the main tunnel, rumbling by in a few seconds, I was certain that we had made the right decision. Now we had thirty-eight minutes to get to the far doorway.

  Common sense said to abandon the remaining fuel bottle or send it trundling after the twinkle-heads as a follow-up gift. But I had to bend my thinking to Fura’s. We could roll it on the level easily enough, so it was foolish to waste it now. So we spilled out into the main tunnel, Prozor and I propelling the bottle ahead of us, wheeling it through ninety degrees, and then pushing and pushing until the hard part was keeping up with it.

  Strambli and Fura, meanwhile, kept up a rear-guard attack on the twinkle-heads, decimated now but still advancing. It was pitiful, glancing back to see them shambling, shuffling and crawling out into the main tunnel. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, not that it was always easy to tell where one twinkle-head ended and another began.

  We ought to have got ahead of them very easily, but the queer thing was that the more broken or dismantled the twinkle-heads were, the quicker they were able to go, shuffling or wriggling after us such that there was never a point where we could catch a breath. I saw one that was just the upper half of a spacesuit, with nothing below the waist except a bony pelvis and two twigs of legs. There was another that was just some legs joined at the hip, with no skull or brain to be seen, as curious as that sounds, and a third made up of a helmet, a shoulder, and most of an arm. It had found a way to move itself in sudden twitching convulsions, like a snake being repeatedly electrocuted. What it meant to do to any of us if it caught up was something best not dwelt on.

  Twelve minutes, it took us, to reach the sanctuary of the second doorway—three minutes less than on the way down. Sweat was pooling in our boots, our breathing like the rasping of saw blades. We had got far enough ahead of the twinkle-heads for them to be lost in darkness, but we all knew they were still behind us, still staggering and twitching their way along. That tide of broken suits and mangled body parts was not going to turn back just because we had slipped out of range of whatever passed in them for the gift of sight.

  As exhausted as we were by then, our labours were nowhere near done. We still had to heave the bottle up two more sloping corridors, always thinking of the twinkle-heads closing in on us, and by the time we got to the top of the first corridor—to the intermediate chamber where Prozor had expected to find Rackamore’s fuel store—my arms felt about as useless as those grasping bony twigs. The only saving grace was that if the corpses did show up in our lamps, we always had the option of flattening them with the remaining bottle.

  We were nearly back at the surface lock when the rumble came again. I thought it quite likely that some of the twinkle-heads had still been in the main tunnel, adding their impressions to the markings on the ball. It seemed to me that they must have had some dim cognisance of the ball’s regularity, to have managed to pilfer the fuel in the first place. Equally, I believed, a mindless, scavenging lust now drove them on, regardless of the consequences.

  I was very glad not to see them again.

  Breathless and weary, we made it back to the launch with just the one bottle of fuel, and none of us were in any sort of rush to linger on the bauble. Prozor neglected to rig another thread across the entrance, and Fura poured on the rockets almost before she was in her seat, the rest of us grabbing the handholds as we climbed away.

  “That went well,” I said, once we were into clear space, the Rumbler dropping away like the memory of a dream that had started well and then turned sour. “I’m sure there isn’t a plan in the history of the Congregation that went off as smoothly as that.”

  “It did,” Prozor said, taking off her helmet and working her hair back into its normal mass of bristling spikes. “Four of us went in and four of us came out. We didn’t die, and we’ve got a bit more than we went in with.”

  “One bottle,” Fura said, twisting around from her controls while Strambli was helping loosen the pressure-cuff on her right arm. “Hardly worth the fuel we burned getting here. We’re going back, next opportunity. Give those twinkle-heads a dose of something shivery and see how they like it.”

  “Or we could just look for some fuel somewhere else,” I said.

  “I thought you’d have shown more loyalty to Rack’s memory,” Fura said, wriggling her shoulder to extract her right arm from the suit sleeve. “That was his property down there, and now it’s ours by right. How can you rest knowing it’s been stolen from us?”

  “Everything that ever comes out of a bauble was someone else’s property once upon a time,” I said.

  “That’s different,” Fura said, shrugging out of the rest of her suit. “It’s been millions of years. No one cares after all that time.”

  “You’d best hope,” I said, drawing a dark glance from her.

  Before very long, the jaws of the docking bay were cranking wider, a red grin in the darkness. Fura used the steering jets to turn us around so that we were able to back into the mouth tail-first; a little fish letting itself be swallowed up by a bigger one. We latched onto the berthing clamp and the jaws sealed up on us. A few seconds later, Surt and Tindouf appeared outside our windows, wearing suits. They were checking over the launch and completing the docking connections so we could float aboard the main ship without getting back into our own suits.

  It took us a few minutes to gather our gear and float out through the connection into the galley of the main ship, which was linked directly to the docking bay and was the only area large enough to serve as a staging point for our expeditions, where we could gather to plan an expedition, assess treasure or take our suits on and off without jabbing our elbows in each other’s faces. It was still a tight squeeze, what with the galley table taking up half the room, as well as instrument consoles, equipment racks and storage lockers, which was why we did so much suiting-up and suiting-down on the launch. Surt and Tindouf had already come inside from the docking bay, their helmets off and ready to greet us.

  Judging by their hopeful looks, Fura hadn’t taken the time to signal ahead.

  “If you’d come back quickly, I’d’s’ve been worried,” Tindouf was saying. “That would’ve meant someone had already stolened that fuel, and there wouldn’t have been any point in stayings, would there? But you’ve been hourses and hourses. We takesd that to be a good sign, didn’t we, Surt?”

  “Until we saw their faces,” Surt said, puncturing his optimism like a harpoon through a balloon. “Ask yourself, Tindouf. Do they look like a happy crew?”

  “You know I’s not the best judge of that, Surt.”

  “They don’t look contented to me at all, Tindouf,” she said, confidingly. “They look like they’ve been through seven kinds of hell.”

  “Hell don’t begin to cover it,” Strambli said. “The things we saw …”

  “Did you get the fuel?” Surt cut across, evidently in no mood for one of Strambli’s long-winded accounts.

  I shook my head. “Some. Not as much as we’d hoped. Turns out Rack’s supply store wasn’t quite as theft-proof as he’d imagined.”

  “Twinkle-heads got to it,” Strambli said, giving a shiver.

  “Except we both know they’re not really real,” Surt said. “So whatever it was …”

  “It was twinkle-heads,” Prozor said, in the kind of tone that silences any further disagreement. “I know. I looked ’em right in the face, just befor
e we flattened them with a fuel bottle. About twenty, thirty of the grinny devils. Probably hundreds more in the lower levels. We were lucky to get out.”

  “What would they have done?” Surt asked.

  “Nothing pleasant, is what,” Prozor answered. “Be glad we got out like we did, with some fuel rather than nothin’. Now can we all agree to put some leagues between us and this bauble, before any of us get bad ideas about goin’ back for a second helping?”

  “Seems reasonable to me,” I said. “No point sticking around, anyway, with the window about to close.”

  “They took what was rightfully ours,” Fura said, her metal fingers opening and closing slowly. “That ain’t sitting well with me.”

  “What we’ve got will tide us over,” Prozor said soothingly. “Rack only ever took a bottle or two out at a time, anyway.”

  Surt made a beckoning gesture toward the galley table, its magnetic surface already set with lidded tankards and bowls, hot buttered bread steaming out of one of them. “Get some food and ale into you, that’ll take the sting outta the day. Tindouf and I’ll get that fuel unshipped from the launch and prepare the sails for departure. You did well, bringin’ back what you did. Count myself lucky I’ve never seen a twinkle-head. Don’t plan on seeing one, neither.”

  “Very wise,” I said, smiling at Surt.

  Surt had a famished appearance to her, all sucked-in cheeks and hollow eye-sockets, and that could look like hardness or even meanness at first acquaintance. She was kind, though, and very clever with machines, and over time we had come to consider each other good friends.

  “You sits yourself down,” Tindouf told her. “I can take care of the fuel for now. I’ll call when I needs the special touch.”

  “Save some bread for me,” Fura said, moving in the direction of the control room. “Some of us have work to do.”

  I floated myself onto a seat at the table, strapping a loose buckle around my waist to hold myself to the seat. Prozor had gone to the forward toilet before joining us, while Strambli was over at one of the store cabinets, rummaging around for some extra salt, as was her habit. Before she joined us, Surt tore me off a chunk of bread and leaned in to pass it over. I took the bread and bit into it, not realising until that moment quite how hungry I had become. The bread was turning a bit stale, and the butter was thinned-out, but it was vastly better than nothing.