Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  A thousand things could have gone wrong from the moment we jammed on our helmets and went outside. The queer thing is that for the most part they did not. The hauling-in went very quickly, and if a line snagged or a sail tangled on itself, it was nothing we were not prepared to fix. Paladin worked the winches, Tindouf kept an eye on the strain-gauges, and the rest of us—which was three, to be precise—jumped to his orders.

  Still there was no sign of that wicked swallower. But we were close now, and when I wriggled out of my suit and went to the control room, Fura was bent over the drawings, while Paladin buzzed updates through the intercom.

  “We’re starting to turn,” she said, grinning with wild enthusiasm. “Not a touch from the sails or ions, just the pull of the swallower, brushing us off our old trajectory. Paladin: you’ll tell me the instant we’re swept, won’t you?”

  “Of course, Miss Arafura.”

  She turned to me with a comradely smile. “They won’t have cause to sweep us just yet, so I’m not expecting anything. They’ll still think we’re on our old heading.”

  Prozor, Surt and Tindouf arrived in quick succession. Prozor was rubbing the spikes back into her hair, Surt was nursing a broken fingernail, and Tindouf was examining a waxy deposit on the end of his thumb, which I think he had just dug out of his ear.

  “Port coil-guns loaded, water-primed, and ready to be run out,” Prozor said.

  “Good,” Fura said, in a low, serious voice. “We’ll sweep at the moment we’re past the point of closest approach to the swallower. Paladin says one hard pulse should suffice for pointing accuracy, but I’ll chance a second if there’s any doubt. He’ll compute the firing solution, and we’ll send them a rapid broadside, say ten slugs a piece. That’ll put some recoil on us, difficult to predict ahead of time, but we’ll consult the compasses and star-finders and recompute for a second salvo.”

  “Remember we mean to disable them, not destroy them,” I said, as if there was a danger that this small distinction had slipped Fura’s mind.

  “Paladin will apply an offset to the targeting solution, as soon as we have a ranging fix,” Fura answered. “We’ll err on the side of caution. I would sooner miss their rigging completely than risk an accidental strike against the hull.” She gave me a quizzical look. “Did you doubt my intentions? I am willing to murder when I have been deliberately wronged, and especially when I know my adversary. This is different.”

  “I am very glad to hear it,” I said.

  “Afterwards, if there is damage, I should be very surprised if they do not use their squawk or bone room. We’ll maintain heightened watches until we arrive at port.”

  “Good,” I said, finding little to disagree with, on this point at least. “I’ll go and see that Strambli’s comfortable, shall I, before we make our close approach?”

  Fura looked down at the chart, knotty with scribbled annotations. “You have thirty minutes. Then I would like us all at action stations. Give my regards to Strambli.”

  *

  It was a blessing of sorts that Strambli was unconscious. I made sure she was properly secured to her bed, sponged the sweat from her face and brow, and generally made her as comfortable as I could. She never stirred, and I thought it likely she would remain in this stupor throughout the coming engagement, even with the clamour of those broadsides.

  We had pulled in all but the last thousand spans of rigging and sail, so that Revenger resembled a flower with a crown of dark, attenuated petals, and that was as far as it was prudent to reduce matters, since we would need to restore our full spread once we were clear of the swallower. It was already tugging at us, though, its differential pull drawing a litany of groans and complaints from the ship’s fabric as it was stretched and pressed in ways it had seldom been accustomed to. I say seldom rather than never, as it seemed very likely to me that Bosa must have used this swallower—and others like it—to effect similar course changes, furthering the myth that her ship had supernatural capabilities of pursuit and evasion.

  We felt it in the galley, too. Under sail or ions, the ship was never truly weightless, but there was always a regularity to its movements, one that we had absorbed into our bones until we scarcely noticed it. Our habits adapted to that slow acceleration or deceleration and became second nature. Now all the rules had been suspended, for the forces acting on us were coming in laterally, and as my inner ear registered that critical difference, so my stomach remembered the nausea I had long considered a thing of the past. It was like learning to be in space all over again, and the sole consolation was that none of us were immune, not even Prozor.

  The groans and complaints intensified. Despite our best preparations, some pipes and valves burst under the buckling strain, and we had to scamper around sealing water and pressure leaks. Paladin, meanwhile, called out our decreasing distance from the swallower, first in thousands of leagues, then hundreds, and now in a continuous, quickening report.

  “Seventy. Sixty … fifty …”

  The sounds of distress from the ship had shifted from low moans to high, wailing shrieks, like some prisoner being tortured to confess on a tightening rack. Tindouf eyed the strain-gauges with a mad intensity. Even with our hauled-in state, elements of rigging and sail-control gear tore loose.

  “… thirty … twenty, ten …”

  There was a point of maximum distress, a death-scream of sorts, and then by some miracle we were through and Paladin was counting upward instead. The ship had held. Whatever damage had been incurred, we had not lost hull integrity, nor the basic operation of electrical navigation and sensor systems. Even in that moment, knowing the worst was behind us, I felt my nausea start to abate.

  There was, of course, still the small matter of retaliation.

  “One hundred leagues,” Paladin reported. “Clear for ranging pulse at your command, Miss Arafura.”

  Fura at least did us the credit of searching our faces before returning her answer.

  “Send it, Paladin.”

  “Sweeper active. Ranging pulse sent and returned. I have a hard fix on the pursuing ship. She lies one thousand, four hundred leagues astern of us.”

  “Close,” I said, speaking for all of us. Much closer than I had guessed.

  “Targeting solution computed, and offset applied.”

  “Should we risk a second pulse, to be doubly sure?” I asked.

  “Paladin says the fix is definite,” Fura answered.

  “Return sweep detected,” he said, an instant later.

  That was enough for Fura. They had detected our ranging pulse, sent back one of their own, and although they would initially be confused by our changed position, that state of bewilderment would not last indefinitely. Sooner or later, even with doubt in their minds, they would put another salvo our way.

  “Fire all coil-guns,” Fura said. “Ten slug salvo.”

  After the noisy protestation of the ship as we rounded the swallower, the report of the broadside seemed softer than before, and because it was a familiar sound there was a strange lulling reassurance in it, for it meant the ship could not have been hurt too badly.

  The guns sounded again. There was an interval of a second between each shot, just enough to stop the guns from over-heating too quickly. The water pumps were surging now. Within a minute the pipes were scalding to the touch, and before long we had another series of leaks and shattered pressure gauges to attend to, this time with the added attraction of high-pressure water spraying into our faces.

  The salvo—ten slugs apiece—ended, and Paladin began to rework his calculations for the second wave, allowing for our recoil displacement, and the deflection of the slugs’ trajectories by the swallower’s field.

  “Our first salvo should now be arriving,” he said. “And I have a second ranging pulse, which may be in direct response to our slugs.”

  “Give me that second broadside,” Fura said.

  “Recomputing, Miss Arafura … just a moment. There is some disagreement between our gyroscopes
and star-trackers. I should like to confirm our pointing with a second ranging pulse of our own.”

  “If you have the slightest doubt about our orientation, those guns don’t fire,” I said.

  Fura shot me a look of pure indignation, but even she must have recognised that we could not launch an attack with indiscriminate disregard. “Why are the readings not in agreement?”

  “A consequence of our passage around the swallower,” Paladin said. “There may be water contamination on some of the circuits. It should clear with time, but for the moment we must depend on a second sweeper pulse for pointing accuracy.”

  Fura gritted her teeth, fist clenched.

  “Then do it. Hard and fast. Make it count.”

  Paladin sent out a second sweeper pulse, then reported that two more ranging pulses had swept us. Followed, almost immediately, by a report of muzzle flash.

  “They’re still using chasers,” Prozor said.

  “Solution re-computed,” Paladin announced. “I am ready to … I am troubled, Miss Arafura. There is a curious pattern to the return pulse, an asymmetry about the central target.”

  “We got lucky, is all,” Fura said. “Took out a few hundred acres of sail, I’ll bet. There’s your bloodying, Surt—we got ’em squarely where we meant to.”

  “Then we don’t need a second salvo,” I said, making my suggestion in a low, cautionary tone.

  “We’ll leave ’em in no doubt that we had the means to take them out,” Fura said. “One salvo might have been a lucky miss, but when they see that we did it deliberately, they’ll know we could have done a lot worse. Fire, Paladin.”

  The coil-guns sounded again, ten times, then fell quiet. This time the pipes and gauges held, and the silence that followed was broken only by creaks and bumps as the ship gradually relaxed. The swallower was thousands of leagues behind us now, and the heat generated by the broadsides was slowly dissipating.

  “Run the short-range sweep, minimum power,” Fura said. “I want to know if those chaser shots come anywhere near us. Tindouf, make ready with ions and stand by to run out all sail once we know we’re clear of their grape-shot. I think they got the message.”

  Fura moved to the galley’s sweeper console, bracing her hands either side of the screen like someone peering into a wishing-well. It had taken a minute for the first of our broadsides to begin arriving at the enemy; now the second wave was about to reach its mark.

  Prozor, Surt, Tindouf and I squeezed around the console as best we could. A fan of lines scratched across it for an instant, then faded.

  “Did you pick that up, Paladin?”

  “Heavy return fire, Miss Arafura—chasing shot, with a high kinetic load. But well astray of our position.”

  “Polite of ’em not to hit us,” Fura said.

  The screen went bright, filling with yellow light, almost as if it had malfunctioned. I was starting to think that it must have been a powerful return sweep dazzling our own instrument, when the brightness faded save for a cluster of speckles near the scope’s middle. I stared at them, not really understanding, as they faded and then were picked up again as the sweep returned.

  “We’re on the short-range setting,” I said. “Aren’t we?”

  “Paladin?” Fura snapped.

  “We are on the short-range setting. We should not be seeing a return pulse at this strength, unless there is a great deal of reflecting material.”

  The speckles were diffusing, but also moving slowly away from each other.

  “Talk to me, Paladin,” I said. “We’re seeing something very odd on the sweeper. That ship’s lit up like a beacon.”

  Prozor pointed a finger at the centre of the screen. “It ain’t so simple, Adrana. Those crosshairs were lined up with the enemy, based on Paladin’s last fix. But the bright stuff’s spreading out from a slightly different point.”

  “It’s still close,” Surt said.

  “But not that close.” I looked around at my comrades, at my sister. “I don’t think we hit them at all—certainly not close enough to the hull to do any damage.”

  “We sure as chaff hit something,” Prozor answered.

  “There was another ship,” I said, hearing my own voice, but almost as if I were a bystander, listening to myself and marvelling at how cool and calm I sounded. “It’s the only explanation. We aimed off-centre and hit a ship we didn’t even know was there. There was never just the one, all this time.”

  “There’s some other explanation,” Fura said.

  “You wish there were,” Prozor said. “So do I. But that return looks just like a ship spillin’ its guts into space after it took a direct hit. We must’ve caught a fuel tank, I think—blown them wide open.”

  Fura gave a shiver. “We didn’t mean for this. We fired defensively. We couldn’t have known there was a second ship.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not what we meant to do that matters. It’s how it’ll look from the outside, and we already know this isn’t good. Paladin: is there anything on the squawk?”

  “Not yet, Miss Adrana, although I am monitoring as many channels as I can.”

  “Do you think the other ship took any damage?” I asked.

  “Hard to say,” Prozor replied. “We might’ve clipped their rigging, maybe worse, but if we’d opened ’em up as well I think we’d see it.”

  Fura hammered the side of the console. “Paladin: another hard sweep. I want to know what we did, and what’s left behind. Damn it all: why didn’t we see two ships when we ran that ranging pulse?”

  “Paladin saw something unusual the second time,” I reminded her. “The first time, their sails may have masked the echo from the other ship, especially if the one we shot is running astern of the first.”

  “We weren’t expectin’ to see two, so we didn’t,” Prozor said.

  The sweeper flared and filled with the spreading, smearing debris of what we presumed was the second ship. It was like watching a firework burst in very slow motion, or dropping a spot of bright ink into dark water. Where the crosshairs met, though, was a harder return—the clear and distinct signature of another ship, with a symmetrical spread of sail.

  Tindouf rubbed at his jaw. “They looks all right.”

  “They could be gaggin’ on their last gasp of lungstuff for all we know,” Prozor said.

  “Should we … signal them?” Surt asked. “They ain’t shot back yet, have they?”

  Fura directed a withering look in her direction. “What, and say we’re sorry we just blew up your friend, good luck rescuing the survivors? I’ll remind you: they shot at us first, not the other way around. Strambli was hurt long before we fired back.” She straightened up, pushing back from the console. “Nothing changes. We sail on, because we still have an injured party. But Paladin will keep monitoring the squawk, and Adrana and I will take a turn on the bones for the next watch. The rest of you …”

  “What would you like us to do?” Surt said, with a dangerous sarcastic undertone.

  “Nothing,” Fura answered. “Not for another watch. Sleep and rest. Then we run out the sails again.”

  *

  Fura spun the locking wheel behind us while I took the neural bridges from their rack.

  “It’s getting harder to chase a signal,” I said, as we plugged in at different ends of the skull. “Quite a sharp drop-off compared to a few weeks ago. I wonder if we’ll soon be in the market for a new one.”

  “I noticed it as well,” Fura said, her hands still shaking as she adjusted the neural bridge. “I think it’s the skull, but we can never be too sure it isn’t our faculties tapering off.”

  “If we’re like Cazaray, we’ll have a few years left. Anyway, I’d be the first to feel it, wouldn’t I?”

  “Not always. Relative age plays a factor, so I’m informed, but so does the number of skulls you’ve plugged into, and the intensity of the exposure.”

  We were gabbling, because it took our minds off the immediate horror of what had just happened. We had ac
ted in self-defence. But once we had rounded that swallower, we could easily have lost them anyway. They would have needed to sweep us to relocate our position, and without the cover of a solar storm that might have been a greater risk than they were prepared to take.

  “How many skulls for you now?”

  “Six, counting the two skulls on the Iron Courtesan, and the one aboard the passenger ship, when Vidin Quindar took me back to Mazarile. Otherwise this would be the fourth.”

  “Four isn’t too many,” I said.

  “Not for us, perhaps. But then there are Bone Readers who never touch more than three skulls in their whole career, and some fewer than that.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But then we’re not most Bone Readers, are we? We’re the Ness sisters.”

  “Yes,” Fura said. “And look where it’s brought us.” She paused, eyes closed. “There’s just noise on this input. Are you having any success with yours?”

  “No, dead as a doornail.”

  “Move along.”

  We unplugged, plugged in, eyed each other, exchanged wordless nods and shakes of the head. This continued for several fruitless minutes. Then, just as we were ready to abandon the skull, some faint presence pushed through. We were connecting on nearby inputs and felt it at the same time. A whispering wind from which soundless voices emerged.

  … for pity’s sake send help … lungstuff … suits …

  … how many survivors …

  … I don’t know … beyond this room … if anyone …

  … how did she slip from us so easily?

  … For mercy’s sake send what you can …