Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You should be doing the opposite. We’re already damaged as it is.”

  “Superficial, according to Paladin. Nothing the hands can’t repair in a few shifts, even without Strambli to weigh-in. We will maintain all sail until we are very near the swallower, giving no hint of our intentions to the pursuing ship. Then we must haul-in rapidly—quicker than we’ve ever done before. Soon after, we shall use the swallower’s gravitational potential to our benefit.” She jabbed her metal finger against a paperweight and with the other hand scribed a curving course on the desk. “We swing in very tight, and change our tack, much more sharply and rapidly than we could ever do under any plausible combination of sails and ions.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “I would have thought it clear. We will surprise our adversary. Even if they have a fix on our position, they will not anticipate such a turn. It will confuse them, since they know nothing of the swallower, and in the fog of that confusion we will have the better of them. As we turn, we will sweep them once. That will expose our position, but they will doubt their readings and risk a return sweep of their own. By then we will have a very hard fix on them, and we will have the additional benefit of presenting our broadside to the pursuer. We will run out all lateral coil-guns and fire ’em until they cook.”

  “Do you mean to kill them?”

  She looked diffident.“To punish them, most certainly. They have struck at my ship.”

  “Our ship. With disabling shot.”

  “Tell that to Strambli.”

  I thought of chastising her for that remark, since it was not long since she had affected a chilly indifference to Strambli’s welfare. But I merely smiled and said: “It sounds like the sort of gambit Bosa would have tried. Using something dangerous to her advantage, launching a surprise retaliation, and showing no mercy.”

  Fura lifted an eyebrow. “And what of it?”

  “Are you sure you want to be doing something that makes us look more like Bosa, when we’re already trying to shake off her reputation?”

  “If survival requires us to act in a certain manner, I see no alternative. Unless you have a counter-proposal, dear heart?”

  I tightened my jaw. She knew well enough that I had nothing better to add, beyond holding our course and trusting in luck.

  “I don’t have an alternative. But that doesn’t mean I’m persuaded by your plan. We’ll need to discuss it with the others.”

  She made a benevolent gesture with her palm, like a queen granting some minor favour.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s a good thing Bosa left a record of this swallower in her unencoded journals, or we’d never have known about it.”

  “I have made some small progress in deciphering her encrypted records,” Fura said, off-handedly. “With Paladin’s assistance, needless to say.”

  *

  After that, there were only three possible topics of conversation on the ship, and they were all equally entangled. Strambli’s condition, the nature of our enemy, and the gambit Fura had in mind.

  “I don’t likes the idea, not one bit,” Tindouf said in reference to the last point, speaking—I felt—for all of us. “But I don’t says it can’t be done.”

  “Why must we haul-in?” Surt asked. “We’re short-handed as it is, and they could send more sail-shot our way at any moment.”

  “The swallower may have attracted debris,” I said. “So we’ll need to protect the sails just as if we were near a bauble or a world. But we’ll also be swinging much closer to the swallower, and the ship will feel the pull, like a sheet of dough being stretched under a roller. The sails and yardage would shred if we didn’t bring ’em in.”

  “I don’t like swallowers,” Prozor said, a statement that she interjected into the conversation at clocklike intervals, just in case any of us were at risk of forming the contrary opinion.

  “I’ve heard mention of naked swallowers,” Surt said. “Never sure I believed in ’em. Definitely never thought I’d be consentin’ to sail close to one by choice.”

  “They’re not evil or haunted or cursed,” I said. “Just a thing that people made once because it suited their needs, and most of the time they suit our needs as well.”

  “I heard it was the Clackers made ’em,” Surt said thoughtfully. “Or the Tuskers.”

  Tindouf stroked his chin. “The Stingtails, I heardses.”

  “It wasn’t aliens,” I said. “The swallowers are as old as any of the worlds, as old as the Congregation itself. It was us—monkeys like you and I. We took the rubble of the eight old worlds and made all the millions of new worlds out of all that material. But there was still a lot of stuff left over—enough to make lots and lots of swallowers. We put ’em in the new worlds so people could walk around normally, just as they used to on Earth or Mars, before the Sundering.”

  “I don’t like swallowers.”

  I laid out a sheet of sail, on which had been drawn the calculations for our course and the critical actions ahead of us. Our trajectory was a gradually sharpening curve, tending to a spiral as it neared the black pin-prick of the swallower.

  “Paladin verified these figures,” I said. “We can depend on ’em, and we gain in two ways. It gives us a helpful shove in the direction of Wheel Strizzardy, meaning we get there sooner—useful, if Strambli doesn’t start perking up. We also have the advantage of the other ship, for the few minutes that it’ll take ’em to doubt their readings. They’ll rumble us sooner or later, but not before we’ve bloodied their nose.”

  “I was thinkin’ of bloodyin’ a bit more than that,” Surt said, directing a confiding smirk at Tindouf.

  “I know how we all feel about what’s happened. We’re angry about Strambli and feel we ought to be retaliating. And we will, in kind. But no more than that. We’ll show restraint—the one thing Bosa could never have managed. But we’re not her crew, are we?” I looked at my companions, inviting their affirmation, which was offered, albeit grudgingly. “That ship isn’t picking on us for no reason. It thinks we’re the Nightjammer, the Dame Scarlet. We can’t very well blame them for that, can we? They’ve chanced on us and we look like the most hated and feared ship in the Congregation. There’d be no censure against a captain who destroyed Bosa Sennen—quite the opposite. But our enemy wishes to take us alive and we will extend them a similar civility. We’ll send them a full coil-gun broadside, not sail-shot but heavy slugs, only we’ll take pains to damage only their sails, aiming away from the hull. Our sweeper fix will be accurate enough for that, and we know that Bosa’s guns are very precise at long range. Even if we only graze their sails, our meaning will be plain. They will see that we have demonstrated our kind intentions when it was within our grasp to do much worse, and that will stand us in good stead when we approach port.”

  “I don’t like swallowers.”

  By turns, despite these objections—none of them easily dismissed—Fura’s plan gained traction. It was agreed that veering close to the swallower was better than waiting for another salvo of sail-shot, and there was a general enthusiasm for hitting back at the enemy. If we were to commit to the idea, though, there was not a moment to be lost. We would be at the swallower in three days, and the sails would have to be struck with the expert coordination of Paladin, the sail-control gear, and those of us still fit enough to put on vacuum suits. Which would have been work enough, except that we were not yet done with the other preparations. If we had been busy before, now we were obliged to labour to the limits of endurance.

  The saving grace was that it took my mind off anything except the immediate practicalities. It was enough just to be working, eating and sleeping. In the grind of those hours I almost found myself forgetting Fura’s deception, or at least wondering if I might have misunderstood the scratchings in her journals. Perhaps she had made the connection with Lagganvor after our decision had been cast, and it was merely a happy accident that he had gone to ground in the same place. Deep down, though, I knew this was not how
it had happened.

  When I was not working, or taking care of my basic needs, I tried to think of Strambli. We all made a point of that, visiting her as often we were able, and keeping her abreast of developments.

  Slowly it became apparent to us all that she was not making the swift recovery we had hoped for. Surt, who was the only one of us who knew anything about shipboard medicine, had to spend more and more time in the surgery. She had cleaned the superficial part of the wound to the best of her abilities, but she had not been able to follow it down to its limits.

  Not that Surt was any sort of physician. It was merely that she was the only one of us who had picked up a few dismal scraps of healing lore and who knew her way around the common potions to be found on a ship. But she struggled to read the names of medicines, let alone the instructions that went with them, and she had no experience with surgery. We’d already done the best we could for Strambli. Surt changed the dressing and cleaned around the stitches once a day, and since none of us were likely to do a better job it was agreed that Surt should be relieved of some of her external duties, until such time as Strambli was stronger.

  Looking at that little scratch, as I had done, it was hard to see how it could have set her back so badly. But I reminded myself that it been a Ghostie edge that slipped into her, not just any old blade. There was a wrongness about every aspect of the Ghostie stuff, from the way it looked to the way it felt when you were wearing the armour or using the weapons. And that same insidious, treacherous wrongness obviously extended to the effect it had on one of its victims, even if the wounding had been accidental.

  Strambli was stable for those first days, drowsy when she was awake, complaining of discomfort some of the time, adamant in her lucid moments that she had committed no error. But the wound refused to settle down, the skin around it turning red and swollen, and worsening by the watch.

  On the day before our rendezvous with the swallower, Strambli started running a fever.

  “I cleaned it,” Surt maintained, as if we doubted her, when we were discussing Strambli’s predicament over bread and ale while Fura was off in her cabin, refining the elements of our plan with Paladin.

  “Without you and Tindouf she’d be a lot worse off,” I said, meeting her eyes and making sure she understood that I was serious.

  “There are surgical tools in that room,” Prozor said.

  “And none of us has a clue what to do with them,” I replied. “We can’t go opening her up and just hope for the best. All we can do is keep her comfortable and hope that she can fight off that infection on her own.”

  “And if she don’t?” Surt asked.

  “We could take out the stitches, open the wound and flush it out again,” Prozor said.

  “No,” I said. “Surt was thorough the first time. It’ll only risk more infection. We keep on as we are. Strambli’s strong and she has a good crew around her.”

  “Can’t get to this wheelworld soon enough for my tastes,” Surt said, rejecting a large chunk of green-mottled bread. “Swallowers or no swallowers.”

  “I know we have a few things on our plates,” Prozor said. “But there’s a detail or two we oughtn’t to overlook. I know we ain’t rounded the swallower yet, but if we don’t start wrappin’ our noggins around the other stuff, we won’t be shipshape.”

  “The other stuff?” I asked.

  “The name and history of this pile of rivets, girlie. We’ll need to call ourselves somethin’ besides Revenger, and it’s no use Fura struttin’ around callin’ herself Fura Ness, neither. Be too easy to draw a line back to Bosa, and that won’t do any of our necks any good, not until we’ve had a chance to sit down and explain ourselves, and I’d sooner do that at my leisure, not when some cove’s got a blade against my gullet. What I’m sayin’ is we need a story that’ll tide us over until we’re good and ready to put things straight. Any one of us that goes ashore is goin’ to need a fresh name and a made-up past that stands a bit of scrutiny. Includin’ you, Adrana.”

  “I thought we’d worry about that when we’re a little nearer.”

  “No. Time to fret is now. No good some cove asking us for our name, registry and port of origin, and us saying, stand by, we’ll get back to you in an hour, just as soon as we’ve got our stories straight.”

  “That’s another kind of work we need to get busy with, then,” I said, feeling as if there was no end to it.

  “You told me you always did like makin’ up stories and plays,” Prozor told me. “Now’s your chance to shine.”

  *

  We could not operate the sweeper in advance, nor strike sail, but there was still the question of the coil-guns. They had been tested singly after we took the ship, using the remains of Trusko’s vessel as a target, and there was no reason to doubt that they would function just as harmoniously in unison. Yet we had never discharged a simultaneous broadside, nor sustained a continuous rate of fire to the limit of the guns’ ability to cool themselves.

  The enemy’s sail-shot must have been launched to us by chasing armaments, arranged to fire along the long axis of a ship, and if we had reciprocated with our stern-cannons, especially with a sustained discharge, there was an excellent chance that we would have exposed our position by dint of a thermal signature.

  I’d never set out to become well-versed in the workings of armaments, but Bosa had had her own ideas for me. Once she identified me as her most likely protégée, she had been very keen to instil a comprehensive working knowledge of weaponry, including our own and the various kinds that might be used against us. Coil-guns were one of the commonest—and most effective—sorts of shipboard defence.

  They worked on the principle of magnetic inductance, using a pulsed field to accelerate an inert slug to damaging speed. The repeated cycling of those inductance coils generated heat that couldn’t be easily dissipated, and sooner or later that heat would find its way into the guidance rails of the gun, causing them to buckle or tighten, leading first to a degradation of accuracy and then to a loss of penetrating efficiency, and finally to a complete seizure of the entire weapon. The remedy for that was to allow the guns to rest, giving them time to cool down and regain their full effectiveness, but under sustained fire they could be cooked beyond the point of recovery, and in the very worst instance—so Prozor informed me—a ship might be incapacitated, or even destroyed, by the unexpected and damaging recoil of a cooked coil-gun. Long before that, though, the hapless ship would have given itself away by the heat of its overloaded guns.

  Bosa’s cannons were fine pieces, well-maintained. She had shown them off to me, proud as if they were her own murderous kin. They had double-stiffened guidance rails, triple-wound solenoids, and devilish ranks of bladed cooling fins resembling saw-teeth. They could be fed from the ship’s water for additional refrigeration. Each gun was also capable of being fired manually from outside the hull, semi-automatically from within, or entirely under the captain’s discretion. The guns were connected to a pair of duplicated aiming consoles, one in the main control room and the other in the captain’s quarters.

  This latter arrangement was now under Paladin’s direction, and it was he who would be trusted with the disabling salvo as we passed the swallower. Only Paladin would be able to compute and aim quickly enough.

  But first we had to be sure we could rely on the coil-guns.

  “Until we turn, they have no direct view of our flanks,” Paladin said. “A short test-salvo ought therefore to run a very low risk of detection, and I will be sure not to allow any of the guns to run warm.”

  By common agreement ships always fired away from the Old Sun during test exercises, with the hope of preventing any stray shots from wandering into the orbits of the Congregation, where they might strike a world or a vessel. We followed the same courtesy, aiming at a blank point in the sky and testing the guns singly and then in unison.

  We were all ready for it, but it had been months since those test shots against Trusko’s hulk, and the noise and fury
of the weapons caught us as fully unawares as if we had never seen battle. First, a series of hard clangs running in rhythmic sequence from bow to stern, as if some ogre were striking a giant metal mallet against the hull, and with each of those clangs a twitch of unabsorbed recoil, as if the ship itself were startled. Dong, dong, dong, dong, gun after gun, until the last discharge.

  Then the roaring simultaneous broadside, not a twitch now but a shudder that seemed fit to loosen every hull-plate, and the sound of it less a noise than a gut-punch.

  “Again,” Fura said eagerly, the glowy brightening with her anticipation of revenge.

  Paladin fired another broadside, and another, and when we were done with the port coil-guns we repeated the exercise with the starboard batteries, as well as the dorsal and ventral guns, just in case we had need of supplementary fire. Then we returned to the port guns, and kept at it until Paladin said they needed to cool. Then it was time to reload the slug chambers, which could be done from inside the ship, and we all did our share, even Fura.

  “I’ll go and reassure Strambli that the world isn’t falling in,” Surt said, pulling a pair of padded stoppers from her ears, and making me wish I had thought to take the same precaution.

  “We’re not quite done,” Fura said.

  “Paladin says the batteries performed just as they were meant to,” I answered.

  “I’m sure they did, but all we were shooting at was empty space, and I’d like a little more reassurance that the targeting is precise. I have an idea, sister. I think it will suit both of us. Besides, it’s more than time that we put that last body of hers to good use. I never thought that she deserved the common decency of a burial, but this will serve very well indeed.”