Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I had a brother,” Fura said. “I’m reasonably sure I’d remember if there’d been a sister.” She paused. “My full name is Tessily Marance. I was born on Indragol, not Mazarile, and if you think Indragol is one of the better worlds, you clearly haven’t been there. My father was Darjan Marance, first owner and captain of the Grey Lady. Ask around and you’ll hear his reputation. He funded her, and I inherited the ship from him in ’93.”

  “You’d have barely been out of nappies,” eyes-too-far said.

  “Well I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I was eighteen years old. I had the legal entitlement to own and command the ship, which is exactly what I did.”

  That would have made Fura twenty-five years old now, which would be a stretch were it not for the glowy and the hardness that had taken up residence in her face. Anyway, she said it with such brazen assurance that the men didn’t blink.

  “Well, if you do hear about a pair of sisters, you’ll be sure to mention it, won’t you?” said eyes-too-close. Then his attention shifted onto me, and some glimmer of interest or suspicion troubled the singular line of his brow. “And you’d be?”

  “Tragen Imbery. Bone Reader. Why’re you taking an interest in those two sisters?”

  “Word is they got themselves tangled up with Bosa Sennen,” said eyes-too-far.

  “Ah,” I said. “And you believe in fairies too, do you? Bosa Sennen’s just a story. The time we’ve spent in the Empty, we’d know if it weren’t. Unless you know differently?”

  “We used her skin for paper,” Strambli said, piping up unexpectedly. “We jumped her and cut her up with Ghostie gubbins. We had to pull her off the spike of her own ship. Went through her like a skewer, but still she lived.”

  There was a silence. The two Port Authority men looked at each other, and I think in that moment our fates stood on a knife-edge, with the worlds taking a breath in their orbits. Then their too-wide mouths cracked into grins again, missing teeth standing out like square sails of blackest catchcloth.

  “She’s got an imagination on her, that one,” eyes-too-close said.

  “Used her skin for paper!” echoed eyes-too-far. “Look at the state of these women. All scrag and bones, the lot of them. Jumped her! Perhaps they have been out in the Emptyside too long.”

  “We have,” I said, seizing the moment. “And I know we don’t look like much, and it’s true we wouldn’t be much use in a fight, but we do have valuables to trade. You’ll have to forgive Greben. She’s the only one of us who ever put much stock in those old sailors’ tales about Bosa Sennen, and since that yardknife went through her she’s been mixing up her own predicament and some of the stories.”

  “I’ve been doing what I can for her,” said Surt. “But I’m not a physician. You’ll let us through, won’t you? I’m Taine, by the way—Integrator on the Grey Lady.” She looked in Prozor’s direction, while rubbing at the back of her neck. “This is Lodran—our Bauble Reader.”

  “Got a tongue in her own head, hasn’t she?” eyes-too-far said.

  “If you wanted to ask me something,” Prozor said, folding her arms across her chest, “you had your chance. Now, do we get to spend our quoins around your flea-pit of a world, or would you sooner we carried on to Kathromil, or Metherick?”

  “Give ’em credit,” eyes-too-close said, speaking in a loud whisper. “They’re not trying to win us over with nice words and flattery.”

  Fura coughed. “You’ll forgive us, gentlemen. Things have been tough on the Grey Lady lately, and we’re all running on empty bellies. Mainly, though, we’re concerned about our friend. You’ll have to excuse us if our manners are a little on the frayed side.”

  Eyes-too-far gave a slow nod. “Who are we to turn down honest trade? Your credentials were in order, and we won’t turn you away, not with such an urgent case as your companion. But doing business with the wheel is a privilege, not a right. Before we let you dock, we’ll need to see the colour of your quoins. The Port Authority levy is a thousand bars, payable immediately. Can you stretch to that?”

  “Is that a refundable bond?” Fura asked hopefully.

  “No,” eyes-too-close answered.

  “I suspected it mightn’t be.” Fura snapped a finger in my direction. “Trage. Oblige these gentlemen with a thousand-bar quoin, if you may.”

  “If you’d see your way to splitting that levy into, say, two five-hundred bar quoins, that would be a great convenience,” eyes-too-far said.

  Fura nodded slowly. “I understand you perfectly, and that’ll be no trouble at all.”

  I went to the bag where we kept a small number of quoins for exactly this sort of petty transaction. In my time away from Mazarile I’d gained some ability to read the patterns of the bars, and my fingers quickly alighted on two five-hundred bar quoins. I dragged them out of the bag without hesitating, knowing this transaction had only put a scratch in our fortunes. It was odd to be so lackadaisical about quantities of money that would have transformed our lives only a year earlier, lifting Father out of his debt and perhaps easing the strain that had eventually sent him to his grave. Now it was just something we burned like fuel.

  “You’ll follow us in,” eyes-too-close said, taking the proffered quoins and slipping them into a buckled pouch on his belt. “And dock under the rim, where we’ll show you. Keep a light touch on your jets, Cap’n Marance, because it’s no place to make a mistake.”

  “I’ll be sure not to,” Fura said.

  “We’ll squawk ahead to have the infirmary meet you at the rimside dock. Not a day too soon, by the smell of things.”

  They left us, and when the lock cleared and the men crossed over to their own launch, each of us except Strambli breathed out and grinned, as if we’d got through a dress rehearsal without so much as a fluffed line.

  Fura soon put her serious mask back on, though. “That was just a warm-up for what’s ahead, so let’s not get over-confident. I don’t care for the way they started talking about the Ness sisters.”

  I blinked, finding it queer that she was talking about us as if we were two other coves entirely.

  “Do you think we threw them off the scent? One of them seemed almost certain we were sisters.”

  “You came back at them well, though,” Fura said, and despite myself I felt a flush of pride that she was impressed by my performance.

  “A thousand bars had better be worth the price of entry,” Surt said.

  “I doubt the official levy was more than five hundred,” Fura replied. “Why else were they so keen to have it paid in two amounts?”

  “Do you really think they checked our credentials?” Surt asked.

  “I hope not,” Prozor said, “because if they did, they’d find they were paper-thin. But I know how these backwater fleapits operate. They haven’t got the time or the desire to be squawkin’ other worlds to corroborate claims and documents, not when they’re in a rush to see the colour of your quoins. Eventually, if we stayed long enough, someone might get around to checkin’ the history of the Grey Lady and her crew, filin’ an information request with the central registry down in the Sunwards, and then they might find a few things that don’t tally. But we won’t be stickin’ around that long, will we?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Fura said.

  12

  We followed the Port Authority launch all the way in. As we neared, it veered off to one of the spiny, tapering structures jutting down from the rim in a radial direction. There must have been at least fifty of these docking towers around the circumference of the wheel, but no two of them were alike, and more than half were clearly in an abandoned or derelict state, judging by the absence of ships berthed on them. The tower we’d been assigned was half a league from the rim to its outermost extremity, and it was mostly skeletal, with numerous ledges bracketed off it at different levels, each of which was large enough to take a launch or similar-sized vessel. It reminded me of the spike-shaped dock at Hadramaw, except that one pushed up from the face of a worl
d, rather than dangling down from beneath.

  I could see now why landing needed to be approached with care. Since we had to match the rotation of Wheel Strizzardy to be able to dock at its rim, we’d gone from near-weightlessness to having a strong—indeed stomach-churning—sense of up and down. If our jets failed for any reason, our little ship would carry on in a straight line, which would feel just like falling away from the rim. Fine if we were in open space, with room to play with, but not so clever if we were just about to settle onto one of those precarious-looking ledges. If a ship dropped off one of the higher ledges, it would be lucky not to crash through several more on its way down.

  We were assigned a mid-level ledge (the Port Authority ship shone its lamps onto the empty slot, then rocketed away) which was the best, or worst, of both worlds, depending on your point of view. There were ships stacked above us on the higher ledges, closer to the rim—and over-hanging us by degrees, since the docking spike grew wider as it went up—but there were also plenty under us, too, looking like little toy gaming pieces far below. Every now and then I made out the shiny stump where a ledge had broken away completely, no doubt to the miserable misfortune of some poor crew.

  Fura set us down on the grilled platform of the ledge, easing off on the belly jets ever so gently, until she was sure the structure was taking our weight. Our bones protested as we got up, and we took very ginger steps as we moved around and completed suiting-up, as if one hard footfall might be more than the ledge could stand. It was necessary to take a short stroll in vacuum to get into the wheel, and of course there was no hope of getting Strambli into a suit the way she was.

  Fura had already taken that into consideration, though. She had packed a pressure-tight cargo chest, long enough to take a body, and we loaded Strambli and her stretcher into it, stuffing some of our own clothes and belongings in as well.

  “Will she be all right in that thing?” I asked.

  Fura was hands-deep in the chest, moving things around and making sure Strambli was nicely restrained. Slowly she closed the lid, which had a pressure seal around its rim.

  “It’ll hold. Helps that she’s unconscious, so she’s only drawing shallow breaths.”

  “There’s always an upside,” I said.

  The chest had handles on either end, so four of us managed it with moderate ease. We also had additional bags strapped to our suits, carrying money, short-range squawk sets, some small tradeable items, and additional changes of clothes. We carried her off of the launch like that, across that short distance of vacuum, and then through a pressure lock that allowed access to the elevators. They were powerful cargo elevators, easily large enough for a whole crew.

  Once we were inside and ascending, we took off our helmets, got our breath back and then Fura lifted the lid on Strambli’s casket. I had to bite down a gag reflex. She had only been boxed into that chest for a few minutes and already there was a putrid smell building up. I was very glad we would soon be at the infirmary.

  “I wouldn’t trust those auguries,” Strambli said to us, looking up from the stretcher laid out in the box. “Wouldn’t trust ’em to a Crawly. I promise you, we’ll be better off out of this bauble …”

  I touched my gauntleted hand to her brow, wishing I had a cold towel. “Easy.”

  Fura closed the lid again, curtailing Strambli’s ramblings.

  The elevator climbed to the top of the docking structure, went through a short interval of solid material (the outer crust of the rim, a hundred spans or so) and then burst out into the wheel’s tubular interior. Our point of emergence was a rimside dock, which was about as unattractive and unwelcoming place as I had ever conceived. There were many elevator doors, all facing into the middle of a circular concourse, with tall, dark buildings looming over us, and only a few windows lit up in any of them. Above everything was the continuous ceiling of the world’s inner rim. At some distant time, it must have been covered in illuminated panels, but only a few of them now remained, projecting a feeble sort of twilight onto the buildings and streets below. Those panels that did still work were blue with white dappling, which I knew from old books and pictures was the way the sky had looked before the Sundering, when the Earth was mantled in a skin of atmosphere that went on and on for dozens of leagues, hard as that is to conceive. In other worlds where such arrangements held, the sky might be the butterscotch of Mars, the gold of Titan or the sword-bright silver of Venus. It was said (long after the fact, of course) that after the dismantling of the old worlds, even though that act had been fully agreed upon, and only executed after a great and solemn deliberation lasting one hundred thousand years, and even though the fifty million new worlds offered abundant space and freedom, there was still a vast, aching sadness for what had been sacrificed, a sort of buyer’s remorse that echoed through all the numberless centuries down to the present age.

  Between those few extant panels were either their dead brethren or a grid of pipes and cables exposed by the falling away of other panels. In places a mist of water was leaking out of the pipes, transmuting into an oily rain by the time it found its way to the ground. It was hard to say whether that rain originated by design or neglect, but the consequence was that the streets had become slick black mirrors, and with treacherous deep puddles and sloping drainage channels situated—it seemed to me—exactly where they were most likely to surprise or trip the unwary, as if by some malicious intentionality.

  I was forming a rapid impression of our long-promised destination, and it was not tending to the favourable.

  “Have you got any weapons?”

  “No, thank you,” I answered, addressing the street vendor who had called out to us.

  “Do you want any?”

  In the middle of this concourse was a sort of dreary bazaar or market, hemmed in by braziers and piles of rubbish. Only a few desultory merchants were doing any sort of business and there were even fewer customers. Not that the wares inspired any sort of confidence. There were spacesuit parts that were fit only for smelting, bits of old broken robot, smashed-up navigational devices, junk tools, and damp, threadbare garments. The merchants coughed behind veils of smoke and airborne grease, and the customers slouched around, chiefly dressed in hoods and raincoats, picking their way between the water channels. There was a lot of picking up and examining things, a lot of shaking of heads.

  “To think we paid a thousand bars for this,” Surt muttered.

  “Perhaps it gets better further along,” I said, kicking a pile of rubbish out of my way. As it rolled away the rubbish flung out a pair of segmented arms and began to drag itself in to a damp corner.

  “Captain Marance’s party?”

  Three figures were approaching us from the edge of the concourse. Two of them were bent over, pushing a wheeled trolley with a rain-sheet draped over a rib-like framework.

  The third—the speaker—was a short but wide man who walked with a swaggering, side-to-side gait. He had a squat upper body, his head and neck almost sunken into his torso, somewhat like a cake that had melted into its own base, with the lower part of his head hidden by the upraised collar of his brown raincoat. What was visible of his face was long-nosed and weasel-like, with rows of hair plastered back from a flattened forehead.

  “That’s us,” Fura said, not without hesitation. “I’m Captain Marance of the sunjammer Grey Lady. This is my crew—Tragen, Lodran and Lizzil—and this is our injured crewmate, Greben.”

  “Yes, we got wind of your poorly chum,” said the short, wide man. “Don’t you worry your pretty heads over her, now. You’ve come to the best possible place. Doctor Eddralder’s cleared all the decks, sharpened his best knives and given everything a twice-over scrub, extra special. He’ll smoke out what’s wrong with your pal in no time, and if he can’t fix it no one can.”

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “Begging your pardon, forgot my manners, my dear.” Our speaker touched a hand to the end of his nose. “I’m Mister Sneed. Old Sneed, or Sneedy, or Lasper Sne
ed if you’re formally inclinated, or even Mister S.” He grinned, exposing crumbling, gap-filled ranks of brown teeth. “Tragen, wasn’t it?”

  “Tragen Imbery, Bone Reader. Do you work for the doctor?”

  Sneed considered my point as if it was of intense philosophical interest. “In a manner, I suppose I do, and in another he works for me, so to speak, and at the end of the day you could say that we both answer to Mister Glimmery, which is what matters.”

  “And what has Mister Glimmery to do with helping our friend?” Fura asked.

  “Ah, I see you’re not intimately acquainted with the present situation.”

  “Ought we to be?” I asked.

  “I expect you will be, soon—Mister Glimmery wants only the best for his guests, you see, and since he has few guests of consequence at present, he’ll insist on lavishing all his attention on you. That means telling Eddralder to pull out all the stops, even if he has to neglect some of his other patients, which won’t sit well with him. But needs must, and the doc won’t mind once he sees how prestidigious you are, and he wouldn’t want to let Mister Glimmery down by not being an excellent and reliable doctor.”

  “We don’t want to put anyone out,” I said.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t, not at all, my dear. We’ll be at the infirmary in two shakes.” He nodded at the trolley-pushers. “Help ’em load their chum, boys, and be gentle with it.”

  Fura stood aside while Prozor, Surt and I assisted the trolley-pushers. Accustomed as they were to the wheel’s gravity, they made Strambli’s cargo chest seem much less burdensome. They slid her onto the trolley, peeling aside the ribbed rain-sheet and then drawing it back over the chest. Sneed then showed us a shelf under the main part of the trolley where we could store our helmets and any other parts of our suits we preferred not to carry. We unshipped lungstuff bottles, pressure bellows and portable squawk boxes, setting them carefully onto the shelf, and then off we trundled, Sneed leading the way, Fura and I flanking him, the trolley, trolley boys and the rest of our crew following.