“Hello Çrom,” an utterly unsurprisingly tacky female voice like something out of Dashley’s Damsels spoke from the ceiling. “You’re not Çrom,” it added a moment later.
“No,” he said, passing off a third layer of protocols – Skelliglyph’s own personal marker-code. “I’m a friend of his. I’ll be returning you to your rightful owner,” he hesitated as the codes cycled through the elegant old computer, mercury fish flitting into a dark subaquatic maze. “What level of intelligence are you?” he asked, when his internal systems failed to access the Charon’s integrated response programs beyond the most superficial deck. The codes he’d been given could go all the way to the computer’s core. His own sensors could not.
“I am conditionally reasoning non-sentient according to the Revised Corporate handbook and Elder Accords,” the ship’s computer said. “I am capable of flawlessly replicating and communicating the illusion of sentience but am not technically self-aware.”
Greyblade grunted in silent amusement to himself. This was the same classification that human beings officially enjoyed – but in the case of the Charon’s systems, it meant that they didn’t constitute a legally sentient entity like Osrai, merely a highly complex series of programs. Still, it never hurt to be polite. “Do you have a preferred name?” he asked. Skelliglyph had been a little surly and intractable on the subject of his old ship – if he hadn’t been, Greyblade might not have been so taken aback by the Charon’s name in the first place – and hadn’t told him much aside from the access routines.
“Çrom called me Dora,” the computer replied. “I was commissioned with the identity marker Zed.”
“Do you have a preference?”
“No.”
“Okay, Dora,” Greyblade followed a smooth access ramp up and around into the small control cabin above the Charon’s nose, and tapped the interfaces. Fhaste designs had a timeless aesthetic to them – art didn’t go out of date in quite the same way as technology – so it was hard to say whether he or the Charon was the elder. Certainly a lot of her components and configurations were original, and that meant they were old. Maybe not Godfang-old, but Fhaste was one of the premier post-Worm minds in design and invention. “How long do we have until the Kedlams take steps here?”
“This is the ninth attempt to alter my proprietary status since the Kedlams took possession of me,” Dora replied. “I am making logs of previous attempts available to your tactical interface,” the information promptly surfaced. “The Kedlams are naturally averse to use of heavy weaponry or other force once an intruder is in proximity,” the computer continued, confirming what Greyblade was seeing, “as this would risk damage to my hull and systems. And you are the first intruder to achieve access. As such, I lack tactical knowledge regarding what their next steps might be.”
“Right,” he said. “They’re not going to blow you up to prevent your theft,” for almost any other valuable item, Greyblade might have deemed his current hosts very much in the ‘if we can’t have it, no-one can’ philosophical camp. Vorontessæ had a wide streak of aggression … but not with a Fhaste. Destroying the Charon, removing her from existence, would be worse than losing her to a thief. Even for the Kedlams. “Now what about–”
“They have, however, disabled my song,” Dora added.
“Your … song?” even as he asked, Greyblade was reacquainting himself with classical Fhaste terminology. The song in the heart was the ship’s relative field generator. “You can’t go superluminal,” he went on, not that a relative jump would have been on the table anyway, from a ground-based start. “What’s the nature of the engine’s disabling?”
“My song is regulated by a single Tear of the Caretaker,” Dora said. Greyblade dutifully looked this up, and nodded. Like everything else about Fhaste vessels, the relative engine was vastly overpowered and flamboyantly outblown. Its energy regulation was handled by a storage cell called a Sorontethian Wellspring which – rendered into the more flowery terminology of the Fhaste22 – was a droplet of merged unreality / reality, Limbo being the Caretaker Ghåålus of the same. There were honest-to-goodness sonnets about the device, but they didn’t really matter. What mattered was that the relative drive would not generate a field without it. “The Kedlams removed it as part of my impound-and-storage protocol.”
“I see,” Greyblade muttered, trying without much success to find an equivalent replacement part or workaround in his repertoire. The fastest known model of ship in the Corporation did them very little good if she couldn’t generate a relative field, and Greyblade had a sneaking suspicion that Skelliglyph had known about this all along.
Pay him nothing until you are safe on the far bank. Pay him nothing even then.
You’re getting paranoid, Kisser, he told himself in Gabriel’s gruff voice. Prophecies do this to you every time. Just do the job in front of you.
“I am capable of making a short luminal jump,” Dora said, “using my standard reactor.”
“Light speed?” he said, surprised. “Won’t that cause … damage?”
“I am calibrated to make short emergency jumps of up to one thousand, eight hundred and nineteen kilometres,” Dora said, “which is–”
“The astral stanza,” Greyblade said, “I know. You’ve done this before, have you?”
“Yes. It is not a recommended procedure for non-ship-component matter. Çrom does not care for it, but he has survived.”
“I bet he has,” Greyblade muttered. He himself had a luminal-attenuation compensator built into his armour, which could technically protect his atoms from degradation on a light-speed jump. He wouldn’t arrive at the far end happy, but he wouldn’t arrive at the far end as a nasty mess for Dora to wash out of the Charon’s control cabin, either.
It had, however, been several years since he’d performed a full calibration of the compensator, and several decades since he’d last bounced with it. He tapped at the ship’s controls, trying to call up some specs on the intended luminal transference.
Before he could get very far, the comms system spoke up again. This time the voice from the ceiling was not Dora’s, but the familiar tones of Fov Kedlam.
“Sir Knight,” the Vorontessi said. “May we speak?” he didn’t wait for Greyblade to respond – to be honest Greyblade wasn’t sure the communications system on the Charon would obey him yet anyway – before continuing. “It’s not too late to take a step back from this and reconsider. We are still willing to believe you may be an injured party in recent events and are merely looking for a way of getting the attention of the authorities. We are perfectly willing to cooperate with you on this. However, you have hidden yourself inside a very valuable piece of equipment, undoubtedly for tactical reasons–”
“Would you like to continue listening to this man?” Dora asked, the voice from the comm changing so abruptly from stern Vorontessi to laughably sultry computer that for a moment Greyblade thought Fov had just suffered a severe yet hilarious aneurysm.
“Not really,” he said. “If you’re ready to make that jump, I have some coordinates that Çrom gave me.”
“This is an unfamiliar location,” Dora noted once he’d passed on the agreed meet-up point. “But it is within luminal jump parameters.”
“Right,” Greyblade muttered. The location was an abandoned and practically forgotten manufactory facing onto the underside of the Axis Mundi step, a spot that was in Greyblade’s jaded view almost too perfect for smuggling operations and for thieves to hide out in while the heat died down. Still, it seemed like the best place within an astral stanza of the Kedlam compound to regroup and figure out how they were going to get this lovely old ship to fly. They might be parked there for a while, if he couldn’t figure out an alternative field regulator to the missing Tear of the Caretaker. “Let’s go then.”
They went.
UNDER THE STAIRS
It was another two and a half hours before Çrom turned up at the gloomy, rock-hewn factory. Two and a half hours with nothing but the steady d
rip of atmoplanic condensation and the automated maintenance system cycling up every ten minutes before finding a broken motivator component somewhere in its subroutines and saying “REPLACE MOTIVATOR COMPONENT 19” in an extremely loud mechanical voice.
The long wait was actually fine as far as Greyblade was concerned, because it gave him a chance to recover from the bounce.
The shift from normal-universe velocity to relative speed was disorienting but easy enough to deal with. You got used to it after a few dozen jumps. It was, after all, an extreme shift – your matter, and everything else inside the relative field, was accelerated to a speed insupportable by reality and so was flipped over into unreality, which had its own rules. Atomic projection from one point to another at the speed of light, however, all took place in reality and according to reality’s rules, and was consequently far less pleasant. Matter, especially organic matter, had ways of making itself miserable … and that was even if said matter managed to reconstitute itself properly at the far end.
The nausea, headaches, and nervous dysphasia of the extremities were the best you could expect, after a flawless and technology-smoothed projection from one point to another. Arriving as a near-luminal stream of metallic water was a distinct possibility. Luminal projection beat tearing your ship apart in an attempt to jump to relative speed too close to a large mass … but the body tended to disagree with such assessments. A luminal jump was really only something you attempted when you had no other choice.
“They still haven’t replaced that motivator component,” was the first thing Çrom said when he appeared at the open nose-ramp of the Charon. He tsked. “Industry these days.”
“What kept you?” Greyblade rasped.
“Well there’s no skimmer that swings down this way,” the grinning human said, then grew serious. “How did you get in here so fast? I thought you’d need to run the evasive subroutines and fly her around for a while before doubling back. Maybe even jump out on the hull and shoot some pursuers heroically with a stolen scattergun in the process. We’re repainting before we leave, by the way – there’s a refitting rig, at least there was,” he blinked. “Wait,” he said, “you didn’t splo here.”
Splo? Greyblade shook his head. Skelliglyph really was an antique. “Yes,” he said, “our good ship Charon dropped into this factory by luminal transfer, dragging me along for the ride.”
Çrom whistled, and stepped back to eye Greyblade up and down. “You’re looking well.”
“Yeah,” Greyblade growled, “I’m just fine. Now tell me–”
“And don’t call her by her stolen-ship name,” Skelliglyph added sternly. “I told you, we’re repainting her,” he snorted. “Charon. This is the Highwayman. Always was. Long as I’ve owned her,” he gestured for Greyblade to continue. “You were demanding … ?”
“Without a relative drive, we’re likely to still be sitting here repainting our liberated ship by the time the Kedlams track us down,” Greyblade said. “How are we going to fly out of Eden Road airspace without relative speed, let alone all the way to the arse end of Beyond the Walls? Because I’m telling you, light-speed jumping there an astral stanza at a time…” Çrom just went on grinning, so Greyblade started on his provisional tactical outline until the human decided to join in. “I might be able to retrofit her to generate a standard relative field, might even be able to do a pretty good job on it depending on what we can scavenge from this factory, but – no offence, but at that point there are a lot of better ships we could take out. Never mind the fact that we’d be defacing a technological artwork, the point of getting a Fhaste was the speed–”
Çrom, smirking broadly, reached into the bulky bag slung over his shoulder and produced an odd little statuette.
Greyblade blinked at the gleaming object. It was a scale miniature of Mygon, the Pinian First Disciple, in clear pale-blue crystal. The Pinian was grinning almost as smarmily as Skelliglyph was, and the overall look of the figurine was either desperately tasteless or exorbitantly expensive. Actually, Greyblade decided, it was definitely both.
“Ta da,” Çrom announced.
“What is that?”
“This,” Çrom replied, “is the Highwayman’s relative field power regulator. I believe it’s fancifully referred to as a Tear of the Caretaker in the manual. Removed as a security measure to prevent–”
“This – this figurine is the energy cell?” Greyblade took the little pale-blue statue carefully and ran a quick analysis on it. It did have internal structures consistent with the Sorontethian Wellspring storage cell schematics he had on file. “Why does it look like Mygon?”
“Technically I think it looks like one of his preceding incarnations,” Çrom said in a discerning tone, “Speed or the Sprinter or whoever. It’s a fairly common motif in vessels designed to be fast. The Pinian First Disciple is famously fast, so the symbolism is…” he seemed to read Greyblade’s expression through the visor. “Have you seen the relative engine?”
“I hadn’t gotten that far in my examination,” Greyblade admitted, and handed back the figurine.
“Oh, you have to see it. It’s glorious. It’s like a diorama made by the universe’s most tasteless iconographer.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Dora remarked.
Greyblade gestured at the figure in Çrom’s hand. “Are you saying you’ve had this all along?”
“Oh, Lord no,” Çrom chuckled. “I stole it from the Kedlams’ collection just now. You were an amazing distraction, by the way. And their people certainly weren’t looking for me inside their own compound.”
Greyblade stared. “What?”
“If you reckon you can get the painting gear fired up, you can start on that,” Çrom said. “Dora will have the original specs,” he tossed the little statue in the air, flipped it end over end, caught it by the head and waved it vaguely. “I’ll put this back in place and then take a nap. We’ll be on our way by midday.”
“You doubled back and broke into their compound?”
Çrom’s grin stretched to hitherto unexplored regions of punchability. “Not bad for a human who still needs to sleep off his drunk,” he raised his eyebrows, “eh?”
THE HIGHWAYMAN
The painting and surface-finish equipment was dusty but in good working order, but the only colour capsule that wasn’t irredeemably corrupted was a sort of dark maroon. Greyblade did not count artistic appreciation and design among his skill-set, but he nevertheless saw immediately that rendering the entire exterior in a single colour would be an atrocity. He settled for stripping and recoating only the sections of hull that corresponded tonally with the section bearing the Charon name and idents.
He was considering the problem of reinstating the Highwayman branding, without any colour but burnt blood at his disposal, when Çrom awoke from his slumber.
“Urgh,” the human scratched his hair and stumped down the ramp as though still asleep. “Starting out with a hangover seems like bad luck. You wouldn’t happen to have a shot of pick-me-up in your tubes, would you?”
“Nothing that wouldn’t poison half your internal organs,” Greyblade replied, and was struck by a question. “If you die, do you still wake up with a hangover?”
“Yes,” Çrom replied disconsolately. Then he brightened a little. “Hair of the dog?” he went on hopefully. “The Kedlams cleared out the stash in my stateroom. Bastards. We’ll have to restock on the way.”
“Stateroom?”
“There’s one primary and two secondary crew cabins on board,” Çrom explained. “I’m afraid the primary cabin is non-negotiable, but the secondaries are still very nice,” Greyblade waved a dismissive hand and Çrom pointed up at the gleaming expanse of hull. “Paint job looks great though,” the human congratulated him. “You may have missed your calling.”
“Painting stolen ships wasn’t the first hobby to cross my mind when I retired,” Greyblade noted. Çrom looked hurt and opened his mouth to object, and Greyblade amended, “repainting l
iberated ships after returning them to their rightful owners didn’t pop up either.”
“Well, she looks great,” Çrom reiterated. “What prompted the new colour scheme?”
“The fact that the other capsules were ruptured.”
Çrom snapped his fingers and pointed approvingly. “Excellent choice.”
“How did you get here from the Kedlam place?” Greyblade asked. “Can they trace you? Or the cell?”
“I was on foot and by public transport all the way,” Çrom said, “and low-vis public transport at that, even if they manage to patch into the Axis Mundi surveillance systems. And the cell doesn’t have any traceable output or security tags. I removed the tracker film it had stuck to the base.”
Greyblade nodded approvingly. “I’m actually more concerned that they can follow my jump-beam,” he said, “but the luminal jump is low-impact. They’d need a Marston array to even isolate the projection intensity, and that would only tell them what distance we travelled, not the direction. And since that distance could have put us in transplanar space ready to just make a clean fly-out, they wouldn’t expect us to park here. Especially since we apparently stole the ship’s field regulator at the same time as we stole the ship.”
“And even more especially since I busted their array when I left,” Çrom added with another smirk. “It would have taken them a few hours to fix – and like you say, that’ll only give them the most general idea of how far you went. And the Highwayman’s song is singing. We’re all ready to go.”
Greyblade squinted at the smug human. “You wrecked their Marston array,” he said, “even though you weren’t expecting me to luminal-jump out of there?”
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