Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  He lifted his face to mine, as if my words might contain a trap, a cruelty, that he was about to wander into.

  “I wish you meant that, Adrana. I wish it will all my heart.”

  “Stay with us, Doctor Eddralder. For the sake of Merrix, but not merely Merrix. There is … trouble, ahead. I am sure of that.”

  “And if I am the source of that trouble?”

  “I do not think that will prove the case. You will be tested, though. Your services will not end with Strambli.” I paused, glad—in a perverse way—to be thinking of something besides Chasco or Lagganvor. Glad to have this man’s troubles before me, eclipsing my own. “If you wish to lessen that stain on your conscience, as I believe you do, then you must dedicate yourself to the betterment of this crew.”

  “They do not like me. Lagganvor never will.”

  “Is he your captain, Doctor Eddralder?”

  “No,” he reflected. “I do not suppose that he is.”

  “I am. I am Captain Adrana Ness, and you have my confidence. My confidence, and …” I paused, shaking my head ruefully. “I meant to say my friendship. But I do not think we are quite there yet.”

  *

  We gathered in the galley. Surt was already there, a little bag on the table before her, clamped down by the magnetic attraction of whatever was inside it.

  “Can’t believe I’m the first to pick up on this,” she said, looking at all of us, but in particular at Fura. “But then it seems I must be, or someone else would’ve mentioned it.”

  “Mentioned what?” I asked.

  Surt undid the cinch at the neck of the bag and delved inside. There was a jangling sound, and she came out with a quoin, one of her own, which she set down on the table before us.

  I studied the patterns of interlocking bars on its face. A hundred-bar quoin, by my reckoning. Not enough to call a fortune, but a nice piece to jam into your pocket all the same.

  “And?” Strambli asked.

  “Proz,” Surt said. “Would you be so kind as to turn down that sweeper console, and the lights on that squawk box? I already closed the shutters on the Sunward window, but we could use a bit more gloom.”

  Prozor was always happy to comply when a request had been put in such companionable terms. She drifted over to the equipment consoles and flipped the master toggles that cut off their power. A hum went out of the room. Now that the instruments had been dimmed, the only other fixed source of light in the room was the lightvine, and that was only glowing very feebly, since the lightvine spreading into this part of the ship was a little past its best, succumbing to the speckling and fading characteristic of older cultivars, and rarely depended on since the equipment usually gave off more than enough illumination. There was also the matter of Fura’s glowy, but it was only as effective as a small patch of lightvine, and made no significant difference to the room’s brightness.

  “There’s a point to this, is there?” Fura asked.

  “There is, Cap’n,” Surt said. “And it’s starin’ you right in the noggin’, if only you’d clamp your eyes on the table.”

  The quoin was also glowing. The visible face, and in particular the grid of bars, put out a yellowish cast. It was a colder, more sickly sort of hue than came out of the lightvine or Fura’s flesh.

  “I don’t know when it began,” Surt said. “But I’m thinkin’ it can’t be too many days ago. Maybe not even a day since. I think I’d have known otherwise—I count ’em often enough. It ain’t just this quoin, either. All the ones in my bag—all the quoins I’ve got to my name. They’re all lightin’ up the same way. Take a gander, if you doubt me.”

  There was no need. That same emanation was coming out from the bag’s neck, projecting a vague yellow smear onto the ceiling.

  “We’d better check all our quoins,” I said. “If there’s something funny happening to Surt’s—”

  “No need,” Fura said, with an easy indifference. “The effect is widespread. It applies to my quoins as well. I noticed it a couple of watches ago.”

  I kept my voice level.

  “You ought to have said something.”

  “There was nothing to be said, nothing beyond the obvious inferences, which we are all capable of making. The quoins on Revenger are sensing the quoins in The Miser. That’s correct, isn’t it, Lagganvor?”

  “It would be hard to argue otherwise.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this would happen?” I asked.

  Something tightened in his face, as if his skin had shrunk tightly. “It’s not an effect I’ve seen before. It’s true we came here on several occasions under my period of employment. But the quoins were never left lying around. They were kept well away from the likes of us, boxed and crated in the holds, or kept in very heavy bags. This was Bosa Sennen’s crew. None of us were paid a wage, or allowed to keep prize money in our cabins.”

  “You went on her errands,” I said. “She gave you funds for that.”

  “Yes, when we were back in the Congregation, or near it. Never near The Miser.”

  “I s’pose it’s possible,” Prozor said.

  “I’m as intrigued as any of you are by this phenomenon,” Lagganvor said. “It’s never been documented, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “The banks hold quoins in large quantities,” I said.

  “But apparently not in quantities to compare with the reserves in The Miser. You’ve got to remember that this is not just the work of one woman, over one lifetime. The iterations of Bosa have been busy for much longer than that; longer even than the institutional histories of some of our oldest banks. And rarely were they as single-minded or ruthless as Bosa Sennen.” Lagganvor took the hundred-bar quoin and examined it with a scrupulous close attention, flipping its face over so that the yellow radiance spilled on and off his face, catching the dark gleam of his artificial eye. “I cannot tell you what this signifies,” he said, clacking the quoin down onto the magnetic surface, and sliding it back to Surt before she got anxious. “But it never seemed to interfere with our business. We came, deposited our quoins, and left. This effect must fade once we leave, or else every quoin on the ship would be tainted, and useless for any transactions. Which they were not.”

  “I don’t cares for it,” said Tindouf. “Quoinses acting as if they knows there’s other quoinses. T’aint proper, t’aint natural.”

  “Natural’s not in it,” I said, trying to reassure him. “None of this is proper or natural, not from the moment we took her ship. Bones aren’t natural. Ghosties aren’t natural. Swallowers aren’t natural. Sailin’ around in ships isn’t natural. But we’re here and this is what we have to work with. If all they do is light up a little … then I suppose it’s good news for us, and even better news for Lagganvor. It means we can start believing that The Miser’s real.”

  “I never had any doubts,” Fura said.

  24

  The quoins brightened and brightened as we slipped nearer. It affected every quoin on the ship, regardless of denomination or where they were kept. Fura even took one into the bone room, which was as secure and private a place as anywhere, and by her testimony the quoin still shone. I took her word for it, since I could not bear to go near that useless, skull-cracked room after what had happened to Chasco.

  But by then we had all become accustomed to that yellow glow, and while I would not go so far as to say any one of us was exactly comfortable with it, we did at least have Lagganvor’s assurance that nothing untoward was likely to happen. There were already plenty of mysteries attached to quoins, I told myself, and it was not so queer to add another one to the list.

  Our final approach, until we furled sail and sent out the launch, was perfectly uneventful. Such friction as there had been between different elements of our crew—between Lagganvor and Eddralder, Eddralder and Fura, even Fura and I, became less apparent. Lagganvor was doing nothing to rekindle my suspicions, causing me to wonder if they had indeed been baseless, while Eddralder was settling into his new role as our permane
nt physician, seeming to accept my assurances that his past was of no concern. Merrix was growing brighter and more confident by the day, now that she was no longer under Glimmery’s leash, and showing a willing eagerness to muddle in with various shipboard chores. Strambli was rallying. Mainly, what helped with the collective mood was that we were all caught up in the mystery and excitement of what was ahead; what was indeed now very close at hand.

  From the sighting room I had spied our objective across thousands of cold leagues, doubting that such an unprepossessing object could ever be the repository of such wealth. The Miser was indeed nothing to look at, but I suppose that was the point. Stripped of their fields, most baubles would be just as unexceptional to the eye. Millions of little wrinkled rocks orbited the Old Sun, and if some fraction of them had once been settled, it was so far back in the long history of the Congregation that no legible trace now remained of monkey presence. Such cities that might have once have adorned their surfaces had been scoured away millions of years ago, and any trace of living matter had long been reduced to dust. It was proposed by the scholars that a very great proportion of the fifty million worlds had been settled before or during the first and second Occupations, but that a war had come, a terrible world-burning conflagration, and no subsequent Occupation had approached those former glories, nor ever would.

  In Bosa’s case, the anonymity of this rock could not have been more capitally suited to her needs. A ship could sail within a thousand leagues and sniff nothing out of the ordinary. Even the most desperate of crews, run ragged after a string of bad baubles, would disdain such a pebble, knowing that the likelihood of finding even a single marketable trinket was vanishingly tiny; that they would be wasting fuel and lungstuff to no good purpose. So they would sail on, pinning their dwindling hopes on the next strike, and never guess how close they had come to the motherlode of all treasures.

  We knew, though—or believed we did. The behaviour of the quoins added to our conviction. And because we had been warned that The Miser would protect its riches, we stationed Revenger at a thousand leagues, hauled in yardage, and ventured the rest of the way in the launch.

  There were four of us aboard. Tindouf, Strambli, Surt, Eddralder and Merrix remained on the sunjammer, leaving Fura, Prozor, Lagganvor and myself to complete the expedition. It was a small party, but we had come to confirm a rumour, not to crack a bauble.

  “You said there’d be a welcome,” Fura said, turning from the controls to address Lagganvor when we had put a hundred leagues behind us. “Now might not be a bad time to put a bit of flesh on your story.”

  “There’s a robot mind running the place. It will know that we’re here, even with those dark sails of ours.” Lagganvor was leaning hard into his seat restraints, only a row behind Fura. “But it won’t act until we’re about five hundred leagues from the rock.”

  “And the act would be?” I asked.

  “Destruction. It has coil-guns all over it. You can’t see them, because they’re small calibre and well concealed, but you have my absolute assurance that they are present and under the command of the robot. They will target the launch first, and then concentrate a disabling spread on Revenger.”

  “That’s all very pretty,” Prozor said. “But you told us there was a word that’d get ’em playin’ nicely.”

  “There is.”

  “And the word is, what, precisely?” Fura asked.

  Lagganvor smiled obligingly. “Not a word in the strict sense. What it is, I would rather not disclose it at this instant.”

  “You know, Lagganvor,” my sister said, switching her attention back to the console for an instant. “I’m starting to think you and I are not getting on quite as well as I’d hoped.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t even know this word what ain’t a word,” Prozor said. “Maybe he’s been stringin’ us along until the absolute last minute, knowin’ how little he’s worth to us otherwise.”

  “I assure you I know the procedure. As to my worth, would you have found this place otherwise?”

  “Until we see a single quoin,” I said, “this is just a speck of useless dirt.”

  “Tell ’em what it is,” Prozor said.

  “Not yet, if you don’t mind. Bosa was very particular at this stage. She wouldn’t transmit her credentials until she was very near the rock, and I don’t think that was merely to avoid using a stronger signal, in case she was detected by some other party. There’s more to it than that. The Miser will demand an answer when it is ready, and not a moment sooner, and if you transmit when we are too far out, that will be taken as uncharacteristic behaviour. You must be patient, Fura.”

  “To hell with patience. Give me the word.”

  “And risk you giving it immediately? No—I’ll hold my tongue until we’re ready. Is your squawk active? Turn the gain high and start sweeping the frequencies around the middle bands.”

  She scowled but complied, and the speaker grille erupted with snatches of voices and melodies as she adjusted the dial. We were lying beyond the Congregation, but by much less than the extent of the Congregation itself, and there was no difficulty in picking up transmissions from worlds on our side of the Old Sun, if not further out. There were news broadcasts, dramas, sports commentaries and musical recitals, as well as the pulses of code that kept the timekeeping and financial arrangements of the Congregation in harmony. It was all achingly familiar to Fura and I, for we had often sat with Father as he listened to similar transmissions, especially in the days before our household possessed a flickerbox. It made me think of the pleasures of home, the dependable routines and comforts of a family life, however narrow our means and expectations.

  “What am I waiting for?” Fura asked.

  “You’ll know it when it comes. Slow our approach speed down a little, if you’d be so kind.”

  “Anything to oblige,” she said, with excessive sarcasm.

  We were just a whisker inside the five-hundred league threshold when the grille burst with three sharp similar tones. Judging by its clarity the signal had come in from very nearby.

  As one, we looked at Lagganvor.

  “That is the request to comply with approach clearance,” he said, relaxing a little, as if we had not been the only ones harbouring some doubts as to the accuracy of his intelligence. “The Miser puts it out on quite a wide frequency spread, but it’s as well to be sure by shifting your dial around the central band. There are normally three such transmissions, varying in central frequency, and we are obliged to respond within a minute of the last of them. It’s advisable to assume that you have missed at least one of the transmissions.”

  “Then … that password, if I may?”

  “Activate your sweeper, and transmit six ranging pulses at The Miser. Six only, closely spaced. No less, and no more.”

  Fura flicked toggles and directed the launch’s nose-mounted sweeper to direct a salvo of pulses at the rock. Six times we felt the slight jar as the sweeper’s energising solenoids powered up and discharged.

  Then nothing. We continued our approach. A minute passed, then two. Lagganvor was as on-edge as the rest of us. I do not think he took a single breath in those entire two minutes.

  Two more pulses were picked up by the squawk.

  “That is your approach authorisation. Continue at your discretion, Captain Ness. Do you see those three large craters, in a rough alignment? There is a landing point between the second and third, and you may already pick up indications of an entry point.”

  Fura applied retro-thrust. “It’s pulling us in.”

  “There’s a swallower. Be glad of it. It makes moving around in The Miser much more straightforward.”

  After our close approach to the naked swallower, the idea of one being bottled up safely inside a world—even a dead boulder like this one—filled me with no great trepidation. I realised now that there were layers of strangeness to our existence, and that the things I had once taken to be exotic or disquieting were in fact mundane, especially compared t
o the doubts and questions now at free liberty in my head.

  We landed without being destroyed. If the coil-guns were present, as opposed to a figment of Lagganvor’s mind, or phantoms of false intelligence, we never saw them. But by then none of us had significant cause to doubt his veracity. The quoins were glowing, The Miser had spoken to us, and there was indeed a landing point where he had stipulated.

  If there was a swallower, it was not a prodigious one. The pull at the surface could only have been half that on Mazarile, and yet The Miser was only a quarter of the diameter of our homeworld. How must it have been, when every rock around the Old Sun (not so old then, either) was meant to have people on it? I could barely comprehend such a state of affairs. It was hard enough now, keeping track of twenty thousand settled bodies. I was not so sure I would have liked to live in those dawn times, when an entire world could be as anonymous as a single person. Mazarile might not have been the grandest or liveliest place in the Congregation but there was still a chance that people had heard of it, or thought they might have heard of it, or knew someone who had visited once. Better to live in the ruins of empire, I thought, and stand a hope of being remembered, than to be lost in those golden multitudes.

  Once we had secured the launch, we completed our suit preparations and ventured outside. We carried some cutting and opening equipment with us, axes and torches and so on, distributed equally about our persons, but it was only in case we ran into difficulties.

  Fura had brought a bag of quoins with her. They had been glowing yellow for days, but in these last hours their intensity had increased, so that some of their light was beginning to seep through the weave of the bag’s fabric. That bag was never far from Fura’s hand, and she made a habit of inspecting its contents with some regularity.

  “Perkier than they’ve ever been,” she said, her visored face underlit by the yellow light from the bag.

  There was no lungstuff in The Miser, which made getting in and out of it far less irksome than if we’d had to go through locks and seals. If this was indeed Bosa’s stockpile—and I was close to accepting that as truth—then it was plain that she had not made it into any sort of home or hideaway, treating it only as one might a hole in a wall, into which the family jewels might be entrusted. She came, deposited her gains, perhaps withdrew such negligible amounts as were occasionally needed for her business transactions, and she left again, spending as little time as possible in The Miser’s grip. Our intentions, unless I misread my sister, were similar. We would confirm the nature of this place, deposit some quoins of our own, extract any supplies that might be of immediate utility, and depart. Fura’s curiosity might or not be sated by such a visit, but whatever her degree of satisfaction I believed it would be months or longer before we chanced to return. It would be enough to know that it existed, that we had located it, and that it was now ours to visit as we pleased.