“Could this have happened some time ago, during Bosa’s attack on Captain Trusko, and we’re only now aware of it?”
“No, I’s quite sure this is new. I keeps a careful eye on them strain-gauges, you sees, and I’d have known if we’d already been sail-shot. I thinks this happened within the last shift.”
I activated the short-range squawk. “Paladin?”
“Yes, Miss Adrana?”
He sounded faint and scratchy, but that was as it had to be. We were keeping the power as low as possible, so that our communications would be undetectable to anyone more than a thousand leagues from the ship. “Paladin, it looks as if we’ve been shot at—what Tindouf calls sail-shot. It’s played merry havoc with a whole area of catchcloth. Did you see anything on your sensors that might have been an attack?”
“No, Miss Adrana—most certainly not.”
Fura, who could not have been too far from Paladin—I imagined her at her desk, scribbling into those journals—cut across our exchange. “We can’t have been shot at, Adrana. We’d know it. We’d have seen coil-gun flash, either visibly or thermally, and surely something would have hit the hull if they sent a volley our way.”
“Tindouf believes it happened within the last few hours,” I said.
“Then perhaps we ran into debris. We are creeping closer to the Congregation, after all.”
Behind his visor, Tindouf gave a slow, grave shake of his head. He dared not contradict my sister to her face, but he was content to let me know his feelings.
“We’re coming in anyway,” I said. “We were just about done with our shift, and I don’t like the look of this at all. No one’s going outside again until we’ve talked it over.”
*
There were four of us in Fura’s quarters—Tindouf, Prozor, the two of us, and I suppose Paladin as well, making five.
“You most likely won’t have seen coil-gun flash,” Prozor was saying. “The muzzles never get hot enough to show, because sail-shot hardly needs any magnetic impulse compared to a full slug broadside.”
Fura needed persuasion. “Then what, may I enquire, is the point?”
“A disabling shot, girlie. Aimed at your sails and riggin’, not your hull. And if it does hit your hull, it’ll just bounce off without doin’ too much harm.”
“To take a ship intact, rather than destroying it,” I said.
“That’s the idea,” Prozor said. “Nothin’ more vulnerable than sails. Only thing that stops ships tearin’ each other to shreds is good manners, most of the time.”
“And yet,” Fura said, extending her metal hand. “Here we are. Still alive, and with ninety-nine percent of our spread of sail intact. If that volley was meant to disable us, it’s not done very well, has it?”
“I wouldn’t sleep too soundly,” Prozor said. “If there’s a ship behind us, as we reckon, then that might’ve been a ranging shot, just to get a feelin’ for things. Prob’ly they don’t have a really accurate fix on our position just yet, or they’re a little too far away for a precision shot. But they’ll be hopin’ to come closer.”
Fura could hold to her opinion tenaciously, but if the weight of argument was against her—and it was in this case—then she would usually relinquish her position, albeit after some difficulty.
“You’ve seen your share of stern-chases, Proz. I won’t quibble with your reading of things. The question is, what can we do in response? Send a broadside their way, and hope they get the message?”
“They have a better fix on us than we do on them,” I said. “All we have is an area of sky, whereas we know they’ve managed to bounce at least one sweeper pulse off us. But even if we did know their coordinates well enough to aim our guns, we’d have to think very hard before retaliating.”
“And why is that?” Fura asked.
“Because we’re going out of our way not to look as if we play by the old rules of this ship.” I hammered the heel of my hand against the table to bolster my meaning. “We’re innocent privateers. That isn’t an act, it’s what we are—what we intend to remain.”
“We’ve been shot at,” Fura’s eyes widened as she spoke, as if she were making an exceedingly simple point that I was being too stupid or obstinate to understand.
“Possibly,” I allowed. “Even probably. But we can’t be sure it wasn’t an accident. If we respond in kind, we’ll invite an escalation, as well as making it plain to them that they have managed to damage our sails, which will be exceedingly useful intelligence. If we strike more forcefully, with heavy slugs, we’ll seem to be acting just as Bosa Sennen would have done—with disproportionate and murderous disregard. If we open the squawk and attempt to persuade ’em of our good nature, we’ll also be giving away our exact position.”
“So what would be your recommendation?”
“I would ask Tindouf to find us some more ion thrust so that we have a chance of pulling out of range. Suspend all work outside the ship, except for those operations either on or very near the hull, presuming that they won’t strike at us directly. Increase the watches in the sighting room, and maintain close observation of the sweeper and squawk, supplementing Paladin wherever possible. You and I, meanwhile, will pay close attention to the skull.”
“Has you picked up a whisper from the boneses?”
I sighed, accepting that it was time to be more forthcoming with the other members of the crew, starting with Tindouf and Prozor. “Something, yes. I believe I touched the mind of another Bone Reader, someone aware of our nature. I caught the distinct appellation Nightjammer, and before that mind sensed my own, I believe it was reaching out to some other Bone Reader. Attempting to report, you might say.”
“Speculation,” Fura said.
“Yes, and it’s speculation that we’ve been shot at, as well. Everything is speculation when all we have is sail-flash, a sweeper pulse and a few holes in one of your sails. But I know what I felt, and I’m inclined to trust my intuition. That ship, whatever its nature, is not acting independently.”
“This changes nothing,” Fura said, without being quite able to suppress a visible trace of disquiet. “We must still continue with the alterations. In three weeks we’ll be within clear sight of our destination, and the work must be finished much sooner than that.” But she met my eyes and I believe I saw some grudging acceptance in her own. “It’s too dangerous to have too many of us out in the rigging, if there’s a chance of another sail-shot. But we can’t ignore the problem, either.”
“We could delay our arrival.”
“That’d look queer in and of itself, if someone has an eye on us,” Prozor said. “No good reason not to sail with all advantage.”
“She’s right,” Fura said, continuing after a very prolonged inhalation. “The only solution is to work more quickly, and more efficiently, so that we may achieve more in less time, and with fewer hands occupied outside. Surt and I took eight hours trying to cut through a single piece of cladding. That’s bad enough, but our torches depend on the same fuel we use for the launch, and that’s hardly in abundant supply.” She set her jaw. “But we know what’ll cut through just about anything, if we have the will to use it.”
“No,” I said flatly.
“We weren’t ever going to unlock ’em again,” Prozor said. “Not until we were at death’s own door.”
“If we don’t complete this work,” Fura answered, “that is very likely where shall find ourselves. We have the Ghostie things. We should not be afraid to use what is rightfully ours.”
“I’s don’t likes ’em shivery things,” Tindouf said, speaking for us all. “But if they helps us gets the job done quickers …”
The next morning when we were all awake, Fura and I went to fetch the keys to the Ghostie armour. Ever since we had used the armour and weapons to surprise Bosa, we had kept them locked away in a metal-walled vault near the bone room, tucked above the long gallery of the lateral coil-gun batteries. That arrangement had been arrived at by mutual consent, but not until after
one of the most vigorous debates of our new crew. There was a strong opinion that the Ghostie armour should be destroyed, or tossed into space at the earliest opportunity.
None of us liked it.
The Ghostie armour—the suits, the weapons—was age-old technology. It had come out of a bauble called the Fang, where it had been stored in gold-encrusted treasure boxes. Fura had told me of the expedition several times, embroidering the facts only slightly each time. I had also read her account of things in The True And Accurate Testimony.
When first they opened those boxes, it had seemed that they were empty.
Ghostie technology had a property that meant it slipped out of your conscious attention when you were looking at it directly. To see it at all, you had to look at it askew, out of the corner of your eye, and even then not try too hard. In those glimpses you saw glass armour, glass helmets, breastplates, gauntlets, shoulder-pieces, and glass knives and swords and guns—or what we chose to call guns, since we knew no better.
Occasionally I had taken the keys to the Ghostie store and risked opening the door and peering inside. My initial reaction was always the same, unwaveringly so. The Ghostie armour was gone. By some furtive means it had escaped, leaving only the bare walls of the store.
But then I would catch myself and force my eyes to stop staring so intently, to slide to one side and focus on some imagined thing far beyond the confines of the store. Then, and only then, I might catch the hint of a glassy edge, the barely-defined shape of something I thought I almost had words for, and I would satisfy myself that the Ghostie armour was still present, still where it had been left.
“We only need the cutters,” Fura said after a long silence, during which she must have been going through the same process as me, half doubting that the relics were still present, and then finally convincing herself that they were. “The guns are too risky, and the extra armour won’t be of any benefit.”
“Maybe now isn’t the time to use any of it.”
“We’re being chased, dear heart,” she said in a gentle, pitying tone, as if I might have forgotten about the pursuing vessel. “If ever there was a time, this is it.”
“You’re frightened,” I said, marvelling at the thought that there was still something that could puncture her single-mindedness.
She seemed surprised.
“Yes—aren’t you?”
“Terrified. And glad to be terrified, too, and to see that you feel a bit of it as well. It means she can’t have got too far into me, and the glowy can’t have got too far into you.”
Fura reached for one of the knives, averting her vision deliberately so that she was able to guide her metal fingers onto the haft instead of the blade.
“Do you remember the last time you held one of these? I believe it was to press the blade against my throat.”
“The ingratitude of it,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh, I don’t blame you for that—why would I? It was Bosa’s madness, still lingering in you. But we flushed her out of you, didn’t we? Good and proper.” She opened my palm and placed the knife in it, as tenderly as if it were a necklace of flowers. “See? I trust you implicitly, even with a Ghostie blade. Would I do that, if I thought there was even a tiny bit of Bosa still hanging around?”
“I suppose,” I said quietly, “that you’d find out sooner or later, whichever way it was.”
“Whether you’re to be trusted?”
“No,” I answered. “Not just me. Either of us.”
“Is there something you’d care to get off your chest, sister?”
“You gave in very easily.”
“Gave in?”
“When the crew contradicted your preferred choice of destination. I thought you would kick up more of a rumpus, but you accepted it very equably.”
“Ah. Then from your tone, I take it that you would have preferred it if I’d turned against their choice, and forced my own upon them?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. But it makes me wonder what sort of preference it was, if you were so content to discard it.”
“They say that the glowy,” Fura replied, “is inclined to make one see conspiracies where none exist. It turns whispers into betrayals, and your closest friends to enemies. The curious thing, though, is that I’m the one with the glowy in me, not you.”
A silence fell on us. I had said too much, and in doing so concretised a vague feeling into a tangible suspicion. Fura, in the substance of her responses, had done nothing to quell that suspicion. If anything, she had only hardened it. But both of us must have known that any further words would do more harm than good, considerably so, and therefore we said nothing. In that brooding, reproachful state we extracted the rest of the cutting implements, by which I mean the knives and machetes and swords—anything with an edge and a handle. They had to be treated gingerly, because if you slipped with one of those bladed horrors they’d whistle through just about anything, as Bosa’s crew had found out the hard way. Once the cutters were organised, we locked the vault again, but not before satisfying ourselves that the other things were still where they belonged. All this was completed in that same wordless condition, our communications—such as they are—effected by cold glances and curt nods.
To begin with nothing bad happened.
The shifts were reorganised a little, so that there were only a few hours in which the sighting room was unoccupied, and Fura and I increased our watches in the bone room as often as we could, sometimes together, Fura setting aside her reluctance if we were jointly present, and sometimes singly, and in that regard usually me rather than Fura. I might have remonstrated with her for not taking her due share of the burden, but my sister was rarely amenable to that sort of persuasion, and in any case I believed that she was sincere in the stated cause of her aversion; that with the glowy in her she already had enough to contend with besides the whisperings of alien skulls. We were both of us mindful of the night-terrors that had come upon our friend Garval, who had been driven to the brink of insanity by the skull on Captain Rackamore’s ship, and while Garval had pretended to more aptitude than was the case, neither of us were anxious to meet the same fate.
Other than that, and allowing for a certain elevated state of apprehension, the work soon fell back into its old pattern, except that the pace of change was now accelerated. The Ghostie tools made life much easier. Not having to fight against the fabric of the ship was a significant benefit, and if there was now any aspect of it that was not as we wished, it came off without protestation. Of course, we were careful not to hack away anything vital, and a great deal of what was removed was done in such a way that it could be put back later, if we were so minded.
By the eighteenth day it was plain to all that our efforts were having some benefit. The character of our ship was being visibly modified, and perhaps it would soon be sufficient to meet our aims.
Tindouf and I had rigged a thousand acres of sail, and we were getting nimbler-fingered by the day. Those bright sails stood out against the catchcloth like silvery windows cut into the sky.
“It dont’s look quite right to me,” Tindouf confessed. “But I do knows my way around riggin’, and if most folk see enough ord’nary sails, they won’t go lookings for thems that they can’t see.”
I agreed. It was the best distraction we could hope for, and it would only have to suffice from a distance. By the time we were close to port, we would haul in sails anyway. All the attention would be on the main part of the ship at that point, and the hands had worked a surprising charm on her belligerent lines. They had softened the larger spikes and barbs by tacking sail-cloth over them, disguising their nature in the same way that furniture loses its obvious form under dust-sheets.
The sail was thin and easily torn, but it had been painted over using a stiffening caulk, the same preparations we used for patching hull leaks, and that imbued it with enough strength to suit our needs. The same had been done for the coil-gun ports, using sails to mask most of the doors, leaving just
enough visible to suggest that our ship still had some modest capabilities of self-defence. The teeth had been disguised by adding an extra layer of sail around the jaws to the docking bay.
Little could be done to remedy the baleful, scowly disposition of that main eye, or the scabbed, disfigured look of the hull after so many of Bosa’s victims had been cut away from it. But the hands had stretched more sail-cloth over the worst bits and painted what they could, using colours other than black so as to break up the lines and make the ship look a little more approachable. It was a question of going so far and no further, because no ship ought to be tarted-up too gaily. To me she still had that meanness, but it was ameliorated, even if the mask was perilously thin in places.
Meanwhile, every hour of work brought us nearer to the Congregation. Several times in Fura’s testimony she had mentioned how pretty all those worlds looked, especially when one’s vantage-point lay beyond them. I supposed it was the same with houses, which always looked more inviting from the vantage of a cold street corner, looking up at the yellow-lit windows of some grand tenement, imagining the lives going on within. Whereas inside, all that cosiness and warmth could get stuffy. Still, I would not deny that it was a pretty sight, and when Tindouf was occupied with something that spared me for a minute or so, I made sure to indulge my share of it.
The Old Sun almost hid itself away. There were too many worlds getting in the way, millions of them, slipping past on their own merry orbits, like shoals of fish swimming past some old lantern still shining from murky depths. Most of those worlds were not only nameless, but also uninhabited and perhaps scarcely ever visited. Out of all the potential worlds in the Congregation, people could only scratch a living out of twenty thousand of them, and without exception they were the ones that could still imprison an atmosphere.
But the Old Sun’s light fell on all the worlds indiscriminately, and each time it bounced off one, be it a rock or a bauble, or one of the mirrors that had been put into space to help ships move around, the light got bent or stained in one way or another, shifted from blue to red or red to purple, as if the worlds were fifty million little shards of coloured glass jangling around in a kaleidoscope, their only purpose to make flickers and spangles of light, a constant scintillating dance of them, which was as fancy to the eye as it was hypnotic. The colours of the Congregation were the colours of evening gowns and night-lit parlours and dusky rare gems in velvet-lined jewel-boxes. I will readily confess that it made me a little home-sick, thinking of all the pleasures and luxuries we were now having to forgo. At such moments my conviction wavered, and I would find myself speculating about the possibilities of returning to Mazarile, abandoning this adventurous new life. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but when we had a few more quoins to our name, just enough to feather our retirement. But then I would bring to mind the huge and empty house awaiting us, if it had not been repossessed by Father’s creditors, and the plot of land where he had gone to join our mother, and the pull of home would feel a bit less seductive.
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