Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  Besides, I would chide myself, we had business to attend to. Even if the exact nature of that business was perhaps clearer to Fura than it was to me.

  8

  Even with the alteration in shifts, there was still a six-hour watch when there were two work parties outside, leaving only two of us inside the ship.

  As we went into the fourth watch, one of the rest teams would get suited-up and join the team outside, who were enduring two consecutive vacuum shifts. After due consideration I had judged that this was the best time to sneak a look at Fura’s journals.

  Fura and Surt were on the double vacuum shift on the nineteenth day. Strambli and Prozor had gone out to join them for the fourth watch and Tindouf and I were inside. We had completed all our chores by the end of the third watch, made tea, played cards, spoken of rigging and sails, and I had endured more of Tindouf’s singing and humming than was fair on any sane creature. The ship had shuddered a little, as it was predisposed to doing, and an amber light had come on on one of the status boards in the galley. Tindouf shook his head, more in mild annoyance than frustration—that shudder and status light spoke of a common fault with one of the circuits feeding the ion engine.

  “I promise I shant’s be long,” he said, as if we were in danger of missing each other’s company.

  “It’s all right, Tindouf—I wanted to look up something in the Book of Worlds, anyway. I’ll be going to my bed when I’m done—all this not-working makes me tired.”

  “You can use my Book of Worlds if you cares,” Tindouf said helpfully.

  “Thank you, but there’s a copy in the control room, and I know my way around that edition pretty well.”

  “Suits yourself, Miss Adrana.”

  Tindouf collected his clay pipe and shoved off in the general direction of aft. I waited until I was certain of no early return. The only remaining sounds were the occasional thuds of magnetic boots stomping around on the outside of the hull as the other four got on with their work.

  I went into the control room, and pottered around for a minute or two studying the controls and screens, as well as the Glass Armillary—admiring it the way you would any delicate, precious thing. Principally though, I was summoning up the courage to go into Fura’s cabin. Before I did so, though, I went to one of the chained shelves and took out the Book of Worlds, just so I could make a show of pondering it if Tindouf were to pop back unexpectedly.

  More than that: I actually flicked through it to the entry on Wheel Strizzardy:

  Wheelworld in the thirty-seventh processional. Quarter-spoked, with a fixed hub and ample docking amenities situated at both hub and rim. Nineteen leagues in circumference, of which the whole is pressurised and agreeably disposed for habitation. There is but one principal settlement, which is Port Endless, a continuous thin conurbation strung along the entirety of the rim, and presently home to three hundred and forty thousand citizens. At one time rather bustling, Wheel Strizzardy has in recent centuries fallen on quieter times, and prospective visitors are well advised to …

  Exactly the backwater we had been promised. I snapped the book shut so hard that it gasped out a puff of dust. Keeping it clutched in my hand all the same, darkening the cover with my palm-sweat, I went to the connecting door that led into Fura’s cabin. I had never known it to be locked, and there would have been rumbles of grave discontent had she ever fallen into that habit. Frankly, though, I was only half-relieved when the door opened at my push. Had it been bolted, at least I would have had an excuse to abandon my plans.

  You might wonder how I could love and admire my sister, and be grateful for all she had done for me, and yet still keep that little knot of distrust in my heart concerning her motivations. You might deem it strange and cold and uncharitable of me. All I can offer by way of defence is my certainty that we had reciprocal feelings about each other, and that this state of affairs had existed long before we ever set to space. It was the product of our childhood, of two girls of similar age being confined together, educated at home, and largely obliged to make the most of each other’s company. Our self-made entertainments often depended on the withholding of some information or intent from the other. It meant that from an early age we had become very agreeably familiar with the idea of not entirely trusting the other.

  So it carried through into the present, except the games had become more serious. I distrusted what the glowy was doing to Fura and feared its progression, but that was only part of it. The changes she had wrought upon herself had made her less recognisable to me, less easy for me to understand or predict. There were preoccupations that I knew she chose not to share with me. Taking her side of things, I knew she had concerns about the electrical, chemical and psychological conditioning Bosa Sennen had worked on me. I said that I had flushed Bosa out of my system, and I wished to believe it for myself, but that was insufficient assurance for Fura. She must have worried that I was putting on an act, waiting for the right moment to slip back into character. It was no good me pointing out that she was the one living in Bosa’s cabin, obsessing over quoins and retribution.

  The truth was that we both had Bosa in us to a degree: me because she had imprinted herself deliberately, and Fura because she’d had to become more like Bosa to kill her in the first place. What it meant, though, was that those knots of mutual distrust were hardening and growing, like an echo that amplifies with each return, and I could think of nothing that was likely to help matters.

  Sneaking around her possessions would most certainly not assist. But I had to see those journals.

  I closed the cabin door behind me, but refrained from latching it. I paused a while to make sure the stomping was still going on outside, and that there was no indication that Tindouf had returned to the galley.

  Paladin was the main thing that caught my eye, his globe flickering with tiny lights, serving as the room’s sole source of illumination. No lightvine grew around the walls of the cabin, although it was abundant elsewhere. Fura forbade it from this room.

  “May I help you, Miss Adrana?”

  “I’m quite all right, thank you,” I said, quietly.

  I moved to him, eyeing the items on the desk, fixed there by magnetic means. Journals and ink-wells and paperweights and quoins, a mixture of things that had originally belonged to Bosa or been salvaged from Captain Trusko’s ship. Several editions of the Book of Worlds, one of them a much earlier edition than the volume in my palm. Fura’s own account of her adventures: The True and Accurate Testimony. I opened it idly, as I had done on many occasions, because no matter what I might think of my sister lately, I never failed to be impressed by her industriousness in filling all those pages.

  It was bound into the cover of a book that had once belonged to Captain Rackamore, his own edition of the 1384 Book of Worlds, and being one of the few tangible links to our former employer, it had a fond significance to me as well. My fingers stroked the swatches of marbled paper on the inside cover, which had already been very old and damaged before Bosa mutilated it. Perhaps it was my heightened alertness, but I noticed something that had never been obvious to me before. There was a patch in the lower corner of the book where the marbling had been rubbed away almost back to the underlying material of the cover. It looked deliberate, rather than an accumulation of small insults. Almost, I thought, as if there had been something written there, which was now effaced.

  Setting it aside, because it was not the objective that had drawn me into the room, I turned instead to the other journals. I recognised them easily enough. I had seen them both open on her desk, Fura writing into one while reading from the other. They were both secured by quoins, which I moved, glancing only cursorily at their denominations and marvelling that I could now treat a high-bar quoin with such casualness. The journals began to drift away from the desk, and I reached for them with my free hand.

  “Are you certain I cannot be of assistance, Miss Adrana?”

  “Has she asked you to keep any secrets from me, Paladin?”

&n
bsp; A rapid, agitated chatter came from his relays, just like the sound of the stock-market ticker Father had once kept in the downstairs parlour, when he had shares worth monitoring.

  “I am obliged to serve and protect both of you, to the limit of my abilities.”

  “Which means she might have, I suppose, but that it conflicts with your deep programming. Unless she asked Surt to rewire your basic loyalties.”

  He chattered and flashed some more.

  “My loyalties are unwavering and beyond any external influence. I am at the service of the Ness sisters, not as a slave but as a free machine, a robot of the Twelfth Occupation, soldier and protector, and a verified witness of the Last Rains of Sestramor.”

  “I know, and I shouldn’t have asked. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about some of the things I said and did to you when we were back on Mazarile. Do you remember the household very much, Paladin, or were those memories damaged when they broke you?”

  “I had a life, and then another life, and now I have this life. I remember a great deal, but I have forgotten vastly more. You were never as unkind as you believe, and a great many times I was deserving of your scorn, for I was not fully alive.”

  Sensing that I wasn’t going to get very much out of him by direct interrogation—nor did I wish to put him through undue distress—I scanned the desk for such clues as were readily apparent.

  Weighed down side by side were a pair of papers that had clearly been torn out of log books or similar. They were lined and columned, with printed annotations, and had both been filled in by hand. One was in a normal, legible script, whereas the other’s entries were in a curious sort of angular writing, a script that triggered no immediate recognition but looked to me like some form of code.

  I paid attention to the one I could read, examining the entries.

  4/7/96 15:00 rising flux, eight becoming nine—hauled in sun-gallants as precaution

  19/7/96 03:00 quietude, but moderate activity forecast for coming watch

  30/7/96 09:00 eight decreasing to seven—advisory favourable but considered prudent to retain stay-preventers on star-foils

  13/9/96 18:00 quietude, running under all sails

  14/9/96 09:00 continuing quietude, turning to moderate lassitude

  21/9/96 12:00 sudden storm, ten exceeding eleven, squawk and sweeper inoperable—all able vacuum hands charged to haul-in …

  What I was looking at, plainly enough, was the routine record-keeping of any spacefaring ship. The two pairs of sheets were printed differently, but each had a column of dates running from the top to the bottom, and the legible entries concerned observations on the changing patterns of solar weather and the captain’s response to it.

  And then I understood.

  “This weather journal belonged to Captain Trusko, didn’t it, Paladin?”

  “I have not been vouchsafed the origin of the document, Miss Adrana. I was merely asked to correlate the entries against those in the encrypted log.”

  “Which is Bosa Sennen’s—the weather log of this ship. Different ships, but subject to the same weather events, broadly speaking.”

  “It would be unwise of me to comment.”

  “You don’t have to—I can join the dots for myself. Those weather entries don’t line up precisely—they wouldn’t, unless the ships were operating in the same area of space—but it’s enough to give you something to work with, isn’t it? She’s got you using these weather logs to crack Bosa’s private code.”

  Paladin stopped with his chattering and flashing.

  “Have I done something wrong, Miss Adrana?”

  “No … not at all. You’ve done very well. If Bosa made records in code, it’s only right that we find a way to read it.”

  I was still holding the journals. Both had clasps on them, and if they had been locked that would have been the end of it. But Fura had not fastened them. I opened one of them and leafed through pages and pages of the same angular writing, until I came to about halfway through the book and the pages turned blank.

  Bosa Sennen’s private journal, I thought to myself. Presumably interrupted at the point when she had the grave misfortune to run into my sister for the second time.

  I flicked back through the densely-written pages. The shade of ink changed now and then, but it all looked to be done in the same hand. I should not have been too surprised by that. If Bosa had been keeping journals for as long as she’d been stalking ships and crews, she would have needed a lot more than one volume to set down her ruminations. This was merely the most recent of them, and doubtless if I’d been able to look at older versions, the evidence of Bosa’s identity shifting from one body to another would have been plain. Without Fura’s intervention, it would soon have been my handwriting filling up one of these books.

  The text occupied the pages in relentless blocks, without any sort of rest for the eye. Every now and then, though, a small part of it was underlined in red. I knew that shade of red very well—so did we all. It was Fura’s special ink, the one she had used to compose The True And Accurate Testimony.

  I held the book closer to my eyes, squinting at the parts she had underlined. It was always a similar pattern of symbols, varying only slightly.

  A particular word, a particular phrase, I decided.

  I put the journal back down, setting a quoin over it the way it had been when I arrived.

  Then I opened the second book and flicked through its pages. I only had to glance at them to recognise Fura’s handwriting. It had changed since our childhood days, but not greatly. Although she had to force her tin fingers to hold and move a pen, that was evidently easier than learning to write with her other hand. The writing was pressed onto the pages, like some declaration scribed into rock. There was a tense, compressed quality to it, as if all the rage and frustration had transferred from her fingers into the ink itself, where it now lay like a primed trap.

  I leafed through the pages. In the silence of the cabin, they made a slippery whisking sound, like scissors being sharpened. I listened for the clomp of footsteps on the hull, a warning that the hands were returning to the lock, but no one was moving around at the moment.

  The entries were fragmentary, not linear. The latter part of it was blank, but there were also gaps all the way through, and there was never one page that was filled top to bottom. I believed that I understood: Fura was translating parts of Bosa’s journal. Not systematically, from the start, but piecemeal.

  I opened the first journal again and cross-checked. If there were three underlined sections on one page, then there were three fragments on the corresponding page in Fura’s book. If there were no underlined sections, that page was left blank.

  I read some of the translated parts, and there was rarely a complete sentence.

  area of catchcloth we discarded today would’ve bought us a million-bar quoin, if we were so inclined

  caught secreting quoins in his private quarters, with a clear view to jumping ship

  between six and seven million quoins at present market value

  a trinket that reminded her of a quoin, but it was nothing of the sort

  stuffed his belly with quoins as a reminder not to cross me

  forced to do business, so rationed out the quoins even though it pains me

  I felt cold. I knew I was holding something that Fura had not been in any rush for me to see, and that I ought to have put it back down on the desk before I saw something I regretted.

  But I could not help myself.

  “Quoin or quoins,” I whispered aloud. “That’s how you’ve been doing it. Looking for any occurrence of those words, and translating around them. Is this true, Paladin?”

  “I have only done as I was requested, Miss Adrana.”

  My hands were starting to shake now. I knew that Fura had an interest in the quoins, and I could scarcely blame her for trying to learn a little more about Bosa’s preoccupation. But this was the first I’d seen about cracking secret codes, or making a methodical
effort to dig out specific information connected to the quoins. It must have taken uncommon reticence for Fura not to boast about comparing the weather reports.

  Still with trembling fingers I turned more of the pages in Fura’s journal. A word—a name—started jumping out at me, underlined where it appeared in certain of the translated passages.

  can trust Lagganvor with the quoins

  if someone’s to carry quoins on my behalf, better Lagganvor than Rastrick or Mullery. But I’d sooner do it myself

  Sent Lagganvor off in the launch, told him he’d be wise to come back with more than one quoin if he doesn’t want to see my sharp side. He thinks I’m soft on him, after the gift of that eye. But I only gave him the eye so that he could serve me more efficiently

  I skimmed ahead, a dark intuition beginning to prickle just under my forehead, like a night-sweat.