Fleet of Knives

by Gareth L. Powell

  “It’s all right. It’s nearly with you.”

  “But there’s one climbing out of the nest. It’s—” I stopped speaking as the little creature heaved itself up onto the lip, and I got my first proper look at it.

  The thing stood on five limbs. A sixth was raised in my direction, the fingers splayed like the petals of a flower. Leaning close, I could just about make out tiny, coal-black eyes regarding me from the centre of the palm. A little slit of a mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

  “It’s a baby Druff!”

  The youngster flinched at the sound of my voice. Its scales glistened like oil on water. It looked me up and down several times, as if trying to decide whether to investigate further or flee.

  I spoke quietly, so as not to startle it. “Where did we get thirteen baby Druff?”

  When she replied, the Trouble Dog managed to sound both amused and embarrassed. “Nod gave birth last night.”

  “Gave birth?” I shook my head, feeling absurd. “You’re telling me our engineer got itself knocked up, and popped out thirteen little copies of itself?”

  “I believe it happened the last time we were on Camrose.”

  A grating swung aside on well-oiled hinges, and Nod slunk into the room. At the sight of it, the little one squeaked, and ran over to wrap four of its arms around one of its parent’s ankles.

  “Captain.” Keeping its head low, it looked up at me.

  I crossed my arms. “I think you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  In a blur of limbs, another four of the babies broke cover, and attached themselves to Nod. One clambered up on its back.

  “Much sorry, Captain.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were expecting? Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

  The Trouble Dog cleared her throat.

  “The Druff are intensely private about these matters. Nod requested my discretion.”

  “Birth good,” Nod cut in. “Offspring good. But rescue mission unexpected.”

  I began to understand.

  “You were anticipating giving birth while we were in port?”

  “Port birth. Give offspring to relatives to raise.”

  “You had relatives on that planet?”

  “Relatives on every planet.” Nod sounded taken aback by my ignorance. “All Druff related. All Druff from World Tree.”

  I massaged my forehead.

  “And had this happened, I would have been none the wiser?”

  It opened and closed the fingers of its hand/face.

  “No need to tell. All private.”

  “But now we’re stuck with them?” One of the creatures was sniffing around the toe of my boot.

  “Until Hound of Difficulty returns to Camrose.”

  I looked up and saw two more pulling out the wiring around a light fitting. In their little high-pitched voices they were chanting the words, “Work. Do work. Always work.”

  Nod raised its face to mine, tilted questioningly to one side.

  “Nod in trouble?”

  I looked down into the black pearls of its eyes, and sighed.

  “No,” I told it, “you’re not in trouble. But try to keep them under control, okay? I don’t want to end up stranded out here without air and power because they’ve been chewing on something critical.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NOD

  Offspring good.

  Offspring fast and clever. Already into everything.

  On World Tree they would already be tending the fibres beneath the bark. Here, they help Nod.

  Help work.

  Work, then rest.

  Work, then build new, bigger nest, and sleep.

  Curl up in family bundle. Protect against storms. Tend systems.

  Dream of World Tree.

  In hours, offspring will be old enough to have names.

  Much think.

  Much decide.

  Might name one after Captain.

  Then Bothersome Mutt will have fourteen engineers.

  Eighty-four hands.

  One hundred and sixty-eight eyes.

  Five hundred and four fingers.

  Nothing will stay broken.

  Everything fixed.

  Everything working.

  Always working.

  Work, then rest.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  JOHNNY SCHULTZ

  The scale of the corridors felt wrong. Everything was too large. Female Nymtoq stood two and a half metres tall, and all the doors and ceilings had been built to accommodate them. Creeping through the darkened passageways of the Restless Itch, we felt like children investigating a deserted house at midnight. We were even whispering.

  In the light from our torches, the corridors were hexagonal in cross-section, the resultant sideways bulge designed to allow the ship’s builders to stretch and unfurl their vestigial wings as they walked, or to pass each other without flattening their meticulously preened plumage against the polished rock.

  After a tense fifteen minutes, we came to a place where the passageway broadened into a cavern. Kelly went in first, sidearm at the ready, swinging the beam from her flashlight into any shadow conceivably large enough to conceal a threat.

  “It’s clear,” she called.

  I went in after her, shining my own torch around to get an idea of the shape of the space. As far as I could tell, the floor plan was roughly elliptical, around thirty-five paces in length and sixteen or seventeen in width. The ceiling was a vaulted arch high above us.

  “There are only two entrances,” Kelly said. “If we hole up by the far wall, we can cover them both.”

  “Okay.” I waved to the others to join us. In the unsteady light, they looked gaunt and tired, haunted by the losses we’d endured, and I didn’t like to think what might happen if I tried to force them onwards. “We’ll rest here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kelly moved away to help the others shed their burdens and find places to sit against the curved wall. Their voices were quiet and subdued, devoid of their usual banter, and I knew how they felt. We were all struggling to deal with the shock of it all. The ship that had been our home and livelihood was gone. Our friends were dead. And here we were, cast into a vast, unlit subterranean labyrinth filled with unknown dangers and apparently built by a race of tall bird people.

  I dropped to my knees next to Addison.

  “How are you doing?”

  She gave me a look. “How do you think?”

  “Been better?”

  She gave a dry half-laugh. “A damn sight better. What’s your plan?”

  “Hunker down and wait for rescue. Why? Did you have a pressing engagement I wasn’t aware of?”

  “No such luck.” Our hectic dash through the engineering spaces of the Lucy’s Ghost had left her hands, clothes and face smudged and dirty. “I just want to know how long we’re going to be stuck here.”

  “A few days at least.”

  I sat back and looked up at the ceiling. There was something ancestral and comforting about watching shadows leap and twitch across the roof of a cave—even if the “cave” in question was part of an alien vessel, skirting the ragged edge of human space.

  “We’ll go exploring later,” I said. “But right now, we’re all tired, and we need to rest.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t expected to fall asleep. The floor was uncomfortable, and my mind in turmoil. But sometimes, when you’re overwhelmed, the body just shuts down. It needs time to process and regroup, so it puts you to sleep—even when you think maybe you’ll never sleep again for the dead faces looming in your memory.

  When I woke, maybe an hour later, I was cold and stiff from lying on hard rock, but the worst of the adrenalin had had time to work its way out of my system, and I felt calmer and more in control. More like my old self. More like Johnny Schultz.

  I pushed myself up. Addison was asleep beside me, with her head resting against the bag of cutting tools. Dalton and Santos were huddled against the wall. Only Kelly and Bernard
were awake, and Bernard’s torch was the only one lit. The accountant glowered at me, but said nothing. Kelly gave me a nod.

  “All clear,” she whispered. “No sign of life.”

  “Thanks.” I hadn’t really expected there to be; this ship had been deserted for seven thousand years. And yet, there was something almost tangibly threatening about the darkness of the corridors—a hackle-prickling sense that somewhere in the blackness, invisible eyes might be watching… I felt a shiver run through me. I’d never been scared of the dark before. But then, I’d rarely encountered darkness so thoroughly alien and complete. Even in the depths of space there were the stars; here, there was only rock and metal, and no sources of light save those we carried. If we turned them off, we’d be able to see nothing at all.

  “Do you have orders?” Kelly asked.

  “Orders?” I tried to rub the stiffness from the back of my neck where it was still sore from the tumble I’d taken during the attack on the Lucy’s Ghost. “Not really, just sit tight, I guess. I’ll keep watch now; you get some sleep. We’ve got a fucking long wait ahead of us.”

  I took a deep breath in through my nose, and again wondered how long it had been since the air molecules I inhaled had last passed through a living respiratory system. They say each lungful you take on Earth contains atoms once inhaled by the likes of Shakespeare, Caesar and Einstein. Here, I guess all we were breathing were the last, dying gasps of the Nymtoq crew after they’d finished slaughtering each other. It wasn’t a comfortable thought. When rescue came, I’d be glad to get out of this flying tomb.

  I was about to say as much when a flicker of movement caught my eye. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Kelly. Her torch and gun swung around and we both gaped in astonishment at the figure standing in the mouth of the corridor. Behind me, Bernard let out a startled cry.

  It was a young girl. She must have been around eleven or twelve years old. And pale blue light crackled from her eyes.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Lucy?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ONA SUDAK

  It wasn’t easy becoming Ona Sudak. The first time, I mean. Back when I was on the run after the torching of Pelapatarn. Back before the Trouble Dog found me, and brought me back to the Generality for trial.

  Back then, I chose the name Ona Sudak at random, picked to go with my resculpted, altered physique, my new retinae and fingerprints. I hadn’t given it much thought. I didn’t think it mattered. But sometimes, names have a kind of power. A cosmic resonance. And their cadence shapes the kind of people we become.

  At least, that’s how Sudak would explain it.

  Before I became her, I was Captain Annelida Deal, the Butcher of Pelapatarn—a war criminal fleeing retribution. I had spent my life in the military, working my way up through the ranks, fighting my way through the terrible attrition of the decade-long Archipelago War. And then suddenly, I was a civilian. The war was over, and with it my sense of purpose. I couldn’t be Annelida Deal any longer; I had to cut her adrift. I had to give up everything that made me her.

  My career was over, but that was just the start. If I wanted to remain at large, I knew I’d have to fundamentally alter my lifestyle and routine. It wasn’t enough to simply look different; I’d also have to act differently. Instead of the somewhat strident captain I had been, I adopted a softer manner, a quieter tone. I gave up drinking rum and switched to chilled white wine; stopped eating Stilton and started pretending to like olives. Gave up action movies and switched to reading books. I made a thousand such decisions, invented a thousand new habits. And from those aggregate behaviours, a new personality emerged.

  Or possibly, it had always been there, and I’d been too wrapped up in the military to notice.

  Whatever the truth, I soon found myself wearing floral print skirts instead of regulation uniform, drinking tea instead of coffee, and—most surprising of all—writing poetry.

  Ona Sudak was a poet. She had a taste for long lunches and quick fucks, and she wrote long, bitter elegies for a generation chewed up by war. When she accidentally became a literary celebrity, I had no choice but to play along. To refuse the spotlight would have been to break character. And so I decided to hide in plain sight. I published more work, collected awards and gave readings, and took my pick of the younger and more interesting groupies. Some days, I even managed to forget Annelida Deal altogether…

  And there I would have remained, blissfully fucking my way through cruise after cruise, had my liner not blundered its way into a Conglomeration Intelligence operation in a distant star system. Stranded on an alien world, pursued by hostile forces, I had been compelled to reoccupy my former persona in order to survive. I had to become Deal again.

  But now, six months later, Deal was dead, killed in an aircraft crash, and I was…

  I didn’t know what I was. I’d reassumed Sudak’s name, but I wasn’t entirely her. My experiences in the Gallery had changed me. Having seen Adam die in the cruel, pointless way he did, I doubted I’d ever be able to fully recapture her spark of hedonism. Neither of my former identities was quite enough to describe what I’d now become. What the world had made of me. I had Sudak’s perceptions, and Deal’s grit. I was a combination of the best and worst in each of them—and, at the same time, something wholly new. I had killed thousands of people, and faced my own death over and over again. I had been through the fire and it had forged me into something sharper and stronger than I had once been. I was steel hardened in the furnace, a glimmering weapon infused with the intensity of a poet’s intellect.

  And I had work to do.

  * * *

  When the pressure in the airlock had equalised, the inner door skimmed aside to reveal the lustrous white interior of the dagger-shaped ship. The walls, floors and ceilings held the same pearlescent sheen as the outer hull. The air was frigid, and held scents both animal and antiseptic.

  A creature was waiting to greet me. It was the same multi-eyed grizzly bear I’d met in the Gallery—the one that claimed to be a gestalt avatar for the networked minds of the million-strong Armada. It blinked at me—a ripple of eyelids—and flexed its claws.

  When it growled, words appeared in my mind like subtitles.

  Ona Sudak.

  “Hello.”

  You are welcome aboard.

  The brown fur on the creature’s back looked soft and inviting, but there was nothing remotely cuddly about the muscular bulk beneath. Like the bear it resembled, this thing was definitely a predator, and I would no sooner have embraced it than have stuck my head in a tiger’s mouth.

  “Thank you.” I glanced around at the smooth, cold-looking bulkheads. “Does this ship have a name?”

  It has a designation.

  “And what might that be?” I assumed I’d need to know if I had to communicate with the ship.

  88,573.

  “88,573?”

  Correct.

  “That’s catchy,” I said.

  The bear snuffled disapprovingly.

  You are being insouciant.

  “I apologise.” I clasped my hands together. “It’s a defence mechanism.”

  You are afraid? It sounded surprised.

  “I don’t yet know why I’ve been summoned here.”

  The creature seemed to think about this for a moment. Then it reared up on its hindquarters, and I tried not to flinch away. In contrast with the rounded, sterile whiteness of our surroundings, its teeth and claws were sharp, with the yellowed sheen of old ivory.

  All will be explained.

  With painful gracelessness, it shuffled around, dropped back onto all fours, and lumbered off.

  Watching it move away along the gleaming white corridor, I released the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding, and swore quietly. The bear-thing’s gait looked clumsy, and it seemed always on the verge of tripping over itself. And yet for such a hefty animal, it moved with surprising speed, its soft paws padding a silent, irregular rhythm, with only the occasional click of a claw t
ip against the smooth marble floor. As I hurried to keep up, I cast about in vain for any sign of a crew. Every compartment we passed appeared to be as blank and featureless as the corridor—as if the ship wasn’t really a ship at all, but somehow more akin to a mask or sculpture than a functional machine. This impression grew as I noticed a lack of engine noise or vibration. I had spent my career serving on military ships, and had become used to the myriad cacophonies associated with the operation of such vessels. Here, those various clangs, hisses and shouts were absent, and their lack disturbed me. In the silence, we might almost have been walking through a museum exhibit rather than an operational warship.

  After a couple of minutes, we arrived at a spherical chamber, about ten metres in diameter. The floor of the corridor became a bridge, extending out into the exact centre of the room, where it widened into a small platform.

  Here.

  The bear stopped moving and I joined him on the suspended dais.

  This is the centre. The confluence.

  I looked around. Aside from their shape, the walls were as featureless as ever, and the air as chill.

  “Is this the bridge?”

  This is the focus. From here, you can lead the Armada.

  “Lead it? I thought I had been judged unworthy?”

  You were.

  “So what’s changed?”

  You have.

  “Because I went back and faced the consequences of Pelapatarn?”

  You were ready to relinquish your life to make amends. There is no higher atonement.

  “And now you want me to lead you?”

  Our mission is to end war. But we cannot act without the guidance and oversight of a biological intelligence. It is the way we were designed, to prevent us turning on those we were built to serve.

  “But why me?”

  When you ordered the bombardment of Pelapatarn, you did so in order to end the Archipelago War. You made a difficult moral choice, in the belief you were sparing more lives than you took.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “So, you need someone who’s not afraid of getting their hands dirty?”

  The bear’s eyes blinked and it tipped its head to one side, as if considering.