“And the next place?”
She moved her hand along a bit, but still on the same processional. “Kathromil. Tubeworld. Population around one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand at the last census. Just one major settlement, but I hear it’s not too bad a place to do business. No swallower to trouble us, so we can haul-in close on sails without ripping ourselves to shreds, and we won’t burn too much fuel shuttling over.”
“Sounds ideal.”
“It’s my favoured choice out of the three, in so far as I’m forced to approve of any part of this plan. I would still rather we confined ourselves to more baubles, rather than risking contact with civilisation. That said, I feel duty bound to point out that there is one small drawback.”
“Which is?”
“They’ve got some bad blood where Bosa’s concerned.”
I shrugged. “Who doesn’t?”
“More than the usual. After the crash of eighty-one Kathromil ended up on hard times, not being on anyone’s obvious trade circuit. To dig themselves out of that hole, the chamber of commerce invested almost all of their surplus in an expedition of their own. Sponsored a ship and a crew, in the hope they’d turn up something to change everyone’s fortune.”
I nodded. “The same bright idea our chamber had with Captain Lar.”
“At least Captain Lar came back. The Kathromil expedition wasn’t even that lucky. They ran into Bosa, down near the Dargan Gap. She picked ’em apart, leaving just enough evidence to make it plain that the handiwork was hers. Butchered the expedition and bankrupted its backers. As you can guess, the city elders on Kathromil have been nursing some bad feelings ever since. Once a year they have a parade through the streets, after which they make a big bonfire and burn an effigy of Bosa. Still, we’re not Bosa, are we?” She held her gaze onto me for a second longer than was comfortable, as if daring me to dispute this last point. “So long as we don’t give them any cause to suspect otherwise, there’s no reason for ’em to treat us inhospitably. I just thought I’d mention it, is all, so you knew there was that fly in our stew.”
“I don’t know, Fura. Seems to me if there was a place we’d be wise to avoid, it would be a world with a particular grudge against Bosa. What about the third possibility?”
“I don’t think it’s as viable.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Her finger skipped to the thirty-seventh processional, and landed next to a wax inscription. “Wheel Strizzardy. Wheelworld, as you might’ve cottoned. Just as easy to haul-in to as Kathromil, all things considered. Population about three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand, so a shade busier than the other places, although we oughtn’t to put too much stock in that, the census being so out of date …”
“As long as there’s people, it serves our needs. I’m sorry, but I’m thinking I like it a bit better than the other two. Metherick’s all right, apart from the fuel and trouble’ll it’ll cost us, but I’d still sooner do business with a place in the thirty-seventh than the thirty-sixth. It’s only one processional further out but things thin out quickly in those outer orbits.”
“That they do. And so does the experience of ships and trade. But is Wheel Strizzardy too far into the backwaters? Anyone who decides to leave us, they’d be at the arse-end of nowhere.”
“We’ll make sure everyone has the facts before they decide whether to leave us or not,” I said. “Besides, what you said about Metherick applies just as well to Strizzardy. If there are coves stuck there, we’ll be able to pick and choose our new recruits.”
“Mm,” Fura said doubtfully. “I’m still favouring Kathromil.”
“Then why did you consider Wheel Strizzardy, if you’re so set against it?”
“I’m being fair about it. I know there’s a mood about the ship—some of ’em thinking I’m getting above my station, that I’ve always got to have my way.” She made a convincing show of regret, dimples appearing either side of her mouth. “This ship’s had its share of monsters. I don’t care to be the next one. So I will be flexible.”
This surprised me, in a good way, but I did my best to accept it without fanfare. “I’ll put your arguments fairly and squarely—you have my word on that.”
“I don’t need your word, sister. I trust you to do right by me—and all of us.”
The intercom buzzed. Fura snapped to it with a scowl of irritation. “What is it?”
“Miss Arafura,” Paladin said. “The solar weather event is abating. According to the latest advisories on the general squawk we shall not be troubled by another disturbance for at least a week.”
“Adrana and I will listen on the bones, just in case there’s anything more on the horizon. Was that all, Paladin?”
“No, Miss Arafura. There was something else.”
Fura switched the intercom to the private channel, so that it was only coming through into this room.
“Proceed, Paladin,” she said.
“During the peak of the storm, when our operational systems were suffering the greatest disturbance, I detected a troubling indication from a number of our hull receivers.”
“Connected to the storm itself?” I asked, thinking how the electromagnetic interference had already played havoc with our compasses.
“I cannot be certain, Miss Adrana. It is possible that the storm created rogue signals in a number of my sensory circuits, and I have allowed for those wherever possible. But there is also a chance that we were swept by another ship.”
6
Paladin was right about the storm, but the clearing of the weather left our minds more unsettled than before. I wished we could know for certain what had happened, but like Surt’s two sail-flashes (only one of which was in the official record) the event only sowed further anxiety. To begin with, the storm might have tricked the hull receivers into generating a false reading, giving the impression that we had been swept when in fact nothing had occurred.
But if one ship were stalking another, and wished to sweep them to improve their positional and distance fix, then a solar disturbance was exactly the time when that sweep might be risked. If it were done quickly, just a single ranging pulse, then from our standpoint it would be hard to distinguish from a false indication caused by the storm and the other ship would only run a small chance of giving away its own location. Since our own equipment was already providing confused readings, and our more delicate instruments had been pulled into the hull, it was a gamble well worth taking. I imagined the sweeper-operator in our phantom pursuer, hunched over a glowing screen, one hand on the thumb-control, waiting for the opportune moment when the storm would provide maximum confusion, and then transmitting that ranging pulse. A second or so later, our ship would have shown up on the sweeper screen as a faint, fading blob. Our sails were dark and our hull all the shades of charcoal and black, but our ship would only have to reflect a small fraction of that ranging pulse to give away our position.
The situation was perfectly balanced. We could have used the cover of the storm to send a ranging pulse their way, and benefited from the same confusion. But we had not thought of it, and now the storm was fading, and to run the sweeper now would confer little or no benefit. Quite the contrary. We would both know exactly where the opposing ship lay, which was a kind of parity. But if we had in fact not been swept—and we were not sure that we had been—then running the sweeper now would discard whatever stealth advantage we now retained.
If indeed there was another ship out there at all.
But Paladin’s sensors had detected that sweep from the same general part of the sky as the sail-flashes. While I believed in a growing number of curious things, coincidences were not among them.
*
I spun the locking wheel, opened the door, entered the cramped, windowless space, and then fastened the door again from the inside, tightening the wheel as far as it would go.
The skull filled most of the room, suspended from the spherical wall by a series of cables, each of which had springs interspersed along its length to dampen
any vibrations. It was long like a horse’s skull, but much larger, and if there’d been a large enough hole in it I might easily have wriggled inside and used it as a cot. Not that I had much inclination to do that. Through the fist-sized eyeholes lay a cavelike structure of thin ridges and partitions of bone, as well as gauze-thin curtains of tissue, and several hundred tiny twinkling lights, sprinkled around the interior and sewn together with a fine cobwebbing of connective strands, the lacy remnants of alien neural circuits. Those lights had made me uneasy long before I ever saw my first twinkle-head; now that uneasiness produced a shudder. The lights flickered because some obscure process still went on, even though nearly all the organic matter in that skull had been scoured away. It was like a city where all the people had died, all the purpose for the city’s existence gone, the buildings gutted and windowless, wind chasing rubbish down the deserted streets, but where the traffic lights still worked, the underground trains still operated and the stock-market machines kept printing out reams of paper babble.
I assured myself that the twinkly was just machinery that no one had turned off, clever enough to do its job but not quite clever enough to grasp that its host was deceased. The twinkly was twinkling because it was in contact—or attempting to re-establish contact—with other skulls, the remote dead brethren of this one-time alien host.
Which was handy for us—crews, I mean—because it meant we had another means of signalling each other besides the squawk, which was to imprint our own messages onto that alien murmuring.
The difficulty was that only a few people had the aptitude to send and receive signals through the skulls.
I was one of them. So was Fura.
Of those who were capable, only one in a thousand ever got really good at it. The problem was that the aptitude gradually faded away as the brain’s neural circuitry hardened into the fixed patterns of adulthood. Mister Cazaray, who had taught my sister and I, had been in his early twenties when he started losing his edge. By then his synapses were stiffening, no longer able to adjust to the skull. Cazaray had still been able to read the skull on the Monetta, but his faculty had been declining and he would never have been able to tune in to a different one.
I was nineteen; Fura well past her eighteenth birthday. I had to remind myself of that now and then, as the events of the past year were enough for several lifetimes, and there were days when we both carried it in our faces, feeling old beyond our years. But still, we were not yet of the age Mister Cazaray had been, and that meant that we ought to have a few more years of reliable skull-time between us. But exactly how many years—how long it would be before the aptitude began to tail off, gradually or precipitously—no one could have told us.
I went to the part of the wall where the neural bridges were racked, took one of them from its hook and settled it on my head, pressing down to get the induction pads as close to my scalp as possible. There were fold-down muffs to shield the ears, and a pair of hinged blinkers for the eyes. The bridge also had a bulge on the left-side temple, which contained the spool for the contact wire.
I drew out the contact wire, pinching the small, needle-like plug as if I were about to do some darning.
Then I turned my attention to the skull. Apart from the holes drilled into it for the support wires, there were dozens of metal sockets bored into the bone, dotted at random positions from one end to the other. These were the possible input sites, where the contact wire from the neural bridge might be able to lock in to a viable signal.
If it had only ever stayed in one position, the life of a Bone Reader would have been a lot simpler. But half the art lay in chasing that signal around the skull, following it as if it were a rat scampering under floorboards.
Sometimes it was very faint, and sometimes entirely absent. Occasionally it disappeared for good, which was why captains occasionally needed to find new skulls. “New” in the loosest sense: all skulls were ancient, but there was a market in them and now and then some fortunate cove found one in a bauble, and if it was a sound one, that was the cove’s retirement taken care of there and then.
This skull might have been good once, but it was getting trickier to use and the evidence for that was all over it. No one drilled so many input sockets into a skull unless the signal was turning elusive. The sockets were marked with symbols, inked onto the bone, making a record of dates and signal strengths. All very methodical, as was Bosa’s way. She wanted to know the speed at which this skull was failing her, so she could plan ahead to the next one. When Fura set a trap for Bosa, part of the lure had been the promise of stealing a fresh skull from Captain Trusko. But Trusko’s skull had gone dark as soon as we tried to transplant it from one ship to another, and we were forced to continue relying on Bosa’s original.
How long it would last was anyone’s guess. All these holes risked weakening the skull’s integrity. There were grave cracks running the length of it, sutured with metal staples, but it was the hidden flaws that caught you out, the buried stresses that built up internally and invisibly, until the skull cracked wide at the slightest contact.
“Courage,” I whispered to myself, for there was still no part of this that I considered natural or enjoyable.
The skull jerked on its springs as I hooked in, but it soon settled down. I disdained the eye-shields or ear-muffs, and did not need to turn down the light. I took a vain sort of pride in that.
Still, I was obliged to offer my empty mind to the skull.
There was more to it than just silencing the ordinary clutter of my thoughts. Any cove could do that, but squeezing even a hint of a signal out of a skull had taken Fura and I days and days of practice.
There must have been times when even Cazaray doubted that we had the gift. It was more than just calming the chatter in our heads. We had to find the secret windows and doors inside our own skulls, the ones that were usually bolted shut—for good reason—and fling them wide open so that a thin, questing wind could find its way into us. That wind pushed its way up from the dark, damp basements of our minds, through dusty chambers and along forgotten corridors, curling its way up secret staircases, until at last it found a way into the conscious mind.
Sometimes the wind was all that came, carrying no message except its own presence. It meant the skull was active, whispering to me, but that no one was using another skull to push a signal through to this one. It was like picking up a telephone and hearing a hum, but no voice.
I moved from one socket to the next. The wind was absent. Judging by the marks next them, these inputs had been dead for some while. But it never hurt to check.
I plugged and unplugged and listened.
And picked up the thin edge of something; a furtive, slippery presence that was there and not there. The input was sensitive, the presence coming and going as I moved my finger on the wire.
And moved my lips without speaking. Something.
I had been alone in the bone room until then but now I shared that space with a bodyless guest, one that might well have been mindless, but which was in the same instance fully aware of me, observing and responding.
It was the skull’s carrier signal, signifying it was active, capable of sending and receiving. The twinkly was twinkling a little brighter and more insistently than before as I nudged the skull into some state of wakefulness.
Patterns of coloured light spilled from the eye-sockets.
Now I had to listen even harder—to pick out a monkey signal riding the carrier wave, its modulations a hundred or a thousand times weaker. There were dials and sliders on the neural bridges, to amplify the signal. One always did that with caution, and never before locking on to a stable carrier.
There it was.
Words were coming through. It was less like hearing spoken language than being aware of the gaps that would be left if spoken words were taken out of silence, leaving negative hollows of themselves. Cold as newsprint, mostly, and lacking any sort of natural inflection.
My habit was to note down the words, mout
hing them to myself first, committing them to memory just long enough to scratch them into the message log, without once losing the train of what was still coming in. That was a skill in itself.
“… beg confirmation of auguries for Blind Spot, the Barnacle and the Yellow Jester. Will reciprocate with information on incidents of discord and mutiny on two vessels of mutual interest …”
Neither meant for us, nor intelligence that was of any direct benefit. It was just one unnamed ship sending to another and thinking they had the conversation all to themselves. More than likely it was two ships that had done friendly business in the past and established a history of exchanging information. They might be using matched skulls, sourced from the same bauble; or matched readers—siblings, like Fura and I; or both. Or they might be using loose encryption—codes and misdirection—or simply trusting that no third party was likely to be tuning in at exactly the right time and frequency. It might even be a privateer sending indiscriminately, begging for scraps.
That was only one voice coming through. The strongest, certainly, but there were others, phasing in and out like ripples on water, so that I might catch only a word or a phrase at best.
“… purchase of ten thousand leagues of triple-filament yardage … would advise that a launch of excise men were last seen … lost the back-preventers on the photon squall … fifteen high-bar quoins by way of salvage … the surgeon’s mate to attend with all expediency … as we hauled-in to Black’s Talon … bring lungstuff and your best loblolly boys …”
Different voices, whispering out of different skulls, from different ships. Always ships, with rare exceptions. Skulls never worked properly on worlds, or else the banks and combines would have carved up the market in old bones years ago. Too unreliable for those coves, anyway. Too spooky.
It took a good Bone Reader to pick out those secondary voices, but I counted myself rather better than good. Beneath them was a level that was yet more difficult to read, and yet I knew it lay within my capabilities, when the skull was working well and all other factors lay in my favour. Pressing that higher babble from my attentions, I strained to listen beyond it. The silence rose and fell, roaring its emptiness into my mind. Sooner or later, as I well knew, I would think I heard a voice where none was present. But if I concentrated well enough I might pick up a true communication slipping beneath all the others.
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