Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I don’t get the impression that torturin’ was his life’s ambition. More that he drifted into it, and got in a bit too deep. Can’t be too hard on the cove, can we, if he was only lookin’ after his daughter’s interests?”

  “You make it sound as if we should just forgive and forget.”

  “I’ve crewed on one or two more ships than you,” Prozor said, which was a very kind way of putting it. “And if I’ve learned one thing in that time, besides never trustin’ a bauble with my life, it’s that there ain’t one of us who doesn’t have a blemish or two. The fact is, if we get too choosy about our shipmates, it ends up a very lonely life indeed.” She flicked her eyes to the outer hull. “Somewhere out there’s a crew made up of coves who’ve never set a foot wrong, but I can safely say I ain’t ever met such a crew, nor heard of one.”

  “Rackamore’s was a good crew, wasn’t it?”

  “In comparison,” she conceded. “But only in comparison. Did you ever ask Trysil about the stories behind her tattoos? I did, and got nightmares for weeks. And Mattice? Big, cheerful Mattice? Wouldn’t hurt a fly Mattice? He killed a man once, in cold blood.”

  I had to fight to bring their faces to mind, these old crewmates of ours.

  “He must have had a reason.”

  “Oh, he did—punishment for selling him contraband equipment. Cost us badly, when we were deep into a bauble, and Mattice’s tools broke down on us. Mattice waited two years to see the man again, two years in which he hardly spoke a word about the whole affair. But he was plottin’ and plannin’ the whole while.”

  I nodded slowly, thinking of Prozor herself, and the biological weapon she had carried with her, the symbiont organism that had eventually wrought a terrible death on Gathing.

  “Rackamore, though,” I said, easing my way around to the topic I had meant to initiate from the outset. “He was free of blemishes, wasn’t he? Besides what happened to Illyria … and that was hardly his fault … there wasn’t any bad business in his past, was there?”

  “Why’d you ask?”

  I drew breath before answering. “You knew him better than Fura and I, Proz, and for much longer. Did he ever mention a brother to you?”

  The angles of her face gained a hundred new acutenesses. It was as if Prozor were holding up a mask, embossed with a harder, sharper caricature of herself. “What makes you think there was ever a brother?”

  I met her deflection with a firming of my own resolve. “Was there?”

  After an interval Prozor said: “Once.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something had happened, is what it means. Enough that they weren’t brothers any more. Not to each other. Rackamore … Rack made us promise we’d never mention the other one. Not once. And although it hurt us, we loved Rack enough to do his bidding.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Not now, Adrana.” But then some calculation proceeded behind her brow and she regarded me with new and direct suspicion. “What’ve you found, that you’re rakin’ over this? What do you think you’ve found?”

  “Rackamore’s brother inscribed a message in a gift to him. It was obviously well-meant. Then Rackamore erased the message—almost as if he were erasing his own brother, his own flesh and blood. What happened between them that was so bad?”

  Prozor glanced aside and I think for an instant she had decided to say no more on the matter, at least not until some suitable interval had passed. But I had uncorked something, if only momentarily, and she must have realised that it was better for the truth to flow now, however painful the process.

  “Illyria. Illyria is what happened. She was Rackamore’s daughter, but his brother loved her like she was his own. He’d spent a lot of time with her, when her own father was away from the worlds. Eventually, Rack decided to take her with him into space, so that he could spend more time with her. Brysca—his brother—disagreed. Said it was too dangerous. Argued and pleaded with Rack. But it wasn’t to no avail. Rack’s mind was made up. Brysca disowned him—cut him off cold. Hated him, and considered him reckless to the point of cruelty. They never spoke after that.”

  “And when Bosa took Illyria … I don’t suppose that helped.”

  “Rack was broken, proper desolate. He reached back out to Brysca, but his letters came back unopened. It was much too hard for him to carry on as if his brother was still out there, so he just wrote him out of his own life, as if he’d never drawn a living breath.”

  I considered the depth of feeling that it would take to shut my own sibling out of my life to that extent. Fura had acted in ways that left me exasperated, perplexed and angry, but I had never come close to wishing her out of existence, and I doubted that such a capacity lay within me at all.

  Or, reciprocally, in Fura herself.

  “Did you ever meet Brysca?”

  Her answer was blunt, inviting no further enquiry. “No.”

  “There’d be a likeness to Rackamore. Would you recognise him, do you think?”

  “I ain’t ever been one for faces, and even less so since they put several sheets of tin in my head.”

  But I wasn’t done. “If Brysca’s still alive, he’d have heard about what happened to his brother. It was all over the worlds, after Bosa’s attack. That, and what she did to Captain Trusko, is the reason they’ve finally agreed to pool together and do something about her.”

  “He must’ve known,” Prozor said, with evident reluctance. “And maybe that’s softened his views on Rack.”

  “Brysca would have lost two loved ones to Bosa,” I said. “First Illyria, who was almost his own daughter, and then his brother.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’re you drivin’ at, exactly?”

  “Nothing very much,” I said, unwilling to speculate further in case I did more harm than good, rubbing nerves—the collective nerves of our crew—that were already raw. “It’s just … if Brysca was out there, and did know something of Rackamore’s fate, that might make him very, very determined to put an end to Bosa once and for all.”

  Prozor nodded slowly, taking in my words even if she did not fully comprehend the thrust of reasoning behind them, or the intimation of disquiet that had instigated them in the first place. It was not properly a suspicion, for a suspicion required rather more in the way of secure foundations than a general unease about the legitimacy of a new crew member, or a faint fretfulness concerning an erased dedication that I ought never to have glimpsed in the first place.

  “You’re a puzzle, girlie, and no mistake,” Prozor said.

  *

  Fura was in her quarters, consulting books, tables and scratchy journals, trying to evaluate our best chances for stalking a weak crew. “We’ll operate as Bosa did,” she said, throwing herself into this new enterprise with enthusiasm. “Pick ’em off near baubles, just as she tried to do with us. Except we’ll be kinder, and only take what we absolutely need. Our reputation will precede us, at least to begin with, and for once it will work to our advantage. The first sight of our sails and they’ll be opening their holds and flinging their treasure at us. Anything to avoid close action.”

  “No complications at all, then,” I said.

  “Only if we make them.”

  After a considerable silence, I replied: “I will cooperate in this venture. We will do what we need to do, and we will inspect this quoin cache, if indeed it exists, and we can do so without making further enemies of the Crawlies and their associates. I will do nothing to obstruct you, provided you do demonstrate that clemency you just mentioned.”

  “It matters to you that much, after all we have seen and done?”

  I nodded earnestly. “I have come to accept that she left a part of herself in me, a part that I will never fully extinguish. There is something of Bosa in me by design, and there is something of Bosa in you, as a consequence of what you needed to become in order to face her. How you choose to live is yours to decide. But my own mind is settled. If I cannot extinguish her completely, I can
at least resist her in a thousand small ways, starting with clemency.” I nodded again, meeting her eyes and holding them. “That is my side of the arrangement. Yours is still be finalised.”

  Fura looked satisfied, but also a little puzzled.

  “I think my position is plain enough, dear heart.”

  “No. There’s something else.” And I shoved aside her books and papers and paperweights until there was room to spread out the journal of the Shadow Occupations, which had been in her cabin since before our expedition to Wheel Strizzardy.

  I opened the pages and turned to the careful, hand-drawn diagram, with the timeline of the familiar Occupations and the translucent overlay which implied the existence of hundreds of others.

  “I thought you had dismissed this as beneath your consideration.”

  “I had. Then I chanced upon a man striking a match repeatedly, down in the streets of Port Endless, and it set an idea in motion.”

  Fura surveyed me with a guarded, provisional interest, as if I were proposing the outline of a new parlour game. “Continue,” she said.

  “I asked myself if we might be looking at the problem in the wrong light. We have been fixating on those four hundred Shadow Occupations, and wondering why there is no trace of them in the historical record. I see the answer now, or at least I did when I watched that man. The question is wrongly framed. We ought instead to be asking why the thirteen Occupations caught fire, when four hundred others did not.”

  “I still don’t—” Fura began.

  I silenced her. “When I had a moment, I asked Paladin to consider that recurrence interval. Twenty-two thousand years, and a little more, if I remember rightly.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think there may be something out there, Fura. On a very long orbit—much, much longer than anything we are ordinarily accustomed to. A twenty-two thousand year orbit may be absurd, compared to anything in our common experience. But there is nothing in celestial mechanics to forbid it. It would only mean that there is a thing, an object, which spends the greatest part of its existence in the high Empty, far beyond the worlds of the Congregation. And yet, every twenty-two thousand years, it loops close to the Old Sun, and sometimes—sometimes—something happens. A civilisation begins. A bright sliver in the darkness. A new Occupation.”

  “And yet … mostly it does not.”

  “That is the conundrum,” I said, agreeing with her. “There is something else. We have already noted that the interval between the observed Occupations is lengthening. That can only mean that this … thing, whatever it may be, is becoming less successful in igniting these windows of civilisation. As if the man striking the matches is nearing the end of the box, and those remaining are increasingly soggy, and less prone to work.”

  “I am … glad,” Fura said, “that you have found something of import in these old writings. And I admit, there is a fascination in it. You have me persuaded, or at least on the way to it.” Her face fell into sympathy. “But there is one fatal drawback.”

  “Which is?”

  “We could never hope to find such a thing. An orbit like that would place it impossibly far from the worlds, beyond any hope of detection. It must be, or we would know of it.”

  “You are right, in the sense that it will be difficult to find,” I said. “But not as impossible as you make out. What is the present year, if I might be so bold?”

  “You know it to be 1800.”

  “Recorded history never starts at the very onset of an Occupation—there is always a period of uncertainty before inter-world civilisation becomes sufficiently settled to permit an agreement about dates and calendars. But we can be confident that it is not more than three thousand years since the start of our Thirteenth, and probably less.” I leaned in to reinforce my point. “It’s out there, sister, and not even a sixth of the way into its orbit around the Old Sun. And I wish to find it. That will be your side of our agreement—your complete and unswerving cooperation in this matter. We will locate your quoins. Then we will locate my objective, even if that means sailing further out than any ship has ever gone.”

  “Suicidally further.”

  “We would find a way, no matter the cost.”

  She met my words with a look of dark admiration. “We sound as ruthless as each other.”

  “Perhaps we are. Does that trouble you?”

  “No.” Fura teased me with a half-smile. “In fact I rather like it. But there is the small matter that you don’t have the first idea where to begin.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But I do have time to think about it, and I have Paladin, and all these records which Lagganvor will eventually help us with. It was one of her concerns as well. This ship still has secrets to yield. How do we know she didn’t get halfway to the answer?”

  “You are mad to think of this,” Fura said, but the look in her eyes was more admiration than pity, as if my madness brought us a little nearer, two sisters once again united by the fever of a shared enterprise, even if our individual goals were in only partial alignment.

  “Perhaps I am. But no madder than you and your interest in those quoins. Ultimately, we are driven by a similar curiosity. You sense that the quoins have a significance beyond their transactional value; that they have a meaning beyond mere currency. A clue, perhaps, as to the concealed mechanism of our civilisation. That interests me as well; I shan’t deny it. But I am also concerned to know something of the origins of our Occupation, as well as the factors that may govern its demise. If we were speaking of a clock, I would say that your interest lies in the complexity of its hidden workings, the mysteries of gears and ratchets. Whereas I would also like to know who made the clock. Your interest is functional; mine ontological.”

  “I am glad you know yourself,” Fura said, “as well as you seem to know me.”

  That was when Paladin said: “I am sorry to inform you, Captains, that there is a ship approaching us. It is the rocket launch from the White Widow, closing quickly.”

  *

  When it must have become clear that Glimmery’s survival was not contingent on our own, the able members of Captain Restral’s party had recovered their heavy launch, refuelled it, and set off in rapid pursuit. Between worlds, only a sunjammer could ever catch another sunjammer, and only then with expert handling and the favourable alignment of external factors. But a ship such as ours was intensely vulnerable in the vicinity of worlds, where it lay within the reach of rocket vessels like the launch. The launch had neither the fuel nor the endurance to pursue a sunjammer into deep space, and that disadvantage was one that captains could usually depend on.

  Not now. We were being chased by a smaller but formidably quick and well-armoured craft, and while the launch might be technically out-gunned by Revenger, it would only need to deliver a single accurate shot to disable us, or worse. It was an engagement that ran counter to all the accepted norms of war and civility, and for which there were only questionable precedents. The common good relied on the extension of reciprocal courtesies, even in space, and this action was highly discourteous. Yet we had earned it, I thought, by failing to honour our promise to Glimmery.

  With the main squawk out of commission, Fura went to our launch and tried to reason with our pursuers. There was an exchange of signals. The opposing craft, she reported, was under the command of the one-armed Mister Trensler, and it was equipped with a high-calibre chasing piece that could easily shatter our flanks, destroying our ion-emitter, or piercing the hull completely. Revenger was handsomely armoured in comparison to most ships, but all armour came at a cost of weight and bulk. Much of the Nightjammer’s former reputation had depended on stealth and ambush rather than impossible invulnerability.

  Fura tried to dissuade them from continuing their approach. She warned them that she would strike if they came nearer, and that while she would strive to disable them, showing that excellent clemency she had promised me, it would be much harder to cripple a launch than a fully-rigged sunjammer, and should a shot of our
s find its mark it would most likely destroy the launch completely.

  This they understood. They could hardly fail to understand it, since a man such as Mister Trensler would have been perfectly acquainted with the realities of an asymmetric engagement.

  And yet still they came.

  So—because I could think of no other means of persuasion—I went to the bone room. There was a bone room on the launch, I knew, and while that was an unusual arrangement, it was feasible aboard a heavy, well-outfitted vessel. And I was certain that the White Widow’s Bone Reader would be aboard the launch.

  I plugged in with all the haste of battle. I knew I did not have very long to argue them out of this course, and that Chasco was my only point of leverage.

  By the cruellest of ironies, our skull worked the first time. It would have done me a lasting kindness not to have worked, or for Chasco not to be connected, but that was not how it was.

  Chasco?

  Adrana Ness. I am surprised. I did not think you would have the nerve.

  Then why were you connected?

  We are coordinating resources, Adrana. Transmitting tactical intelligence. You will soon see the fruits of that. It was thought better not to use the squawk, even with encryption.

  Do you know Mister Trensler well, Chasco?

  Tolerably. I respect him. He is no Captain Restral, but then none of us are. Why do you ask?

  With whatever influence you have, please convince him to give up this chase. It will come to no good. We will fire on you. Fura won’t wait until you’re close enough to use that stern-piece. Paladin’s already computing the firing solution. We made a mistake when we hit the Calenture, but it was no fault of Paladin’s.

  He won’t turn. I know the man too well. And I wouldn’t permit him to change his mind, even if it were within my ability. Captain Restral did not last long in the infirmary, you should know. But Trensler was with him at the end. He vowed …

  I felt it then.