Revenger 9780575090569

by Alastair Reynolds

  All this on a world a bit more than eight leagues across, and none of those cities extending more than a single league across the surface.

  Now I also understood properly how the docks – one at Hadramaw and a second at its counterpart at Incer – were like a pair of horns jutting out from our world on either side, as tall again as Mazarile’s own radius, so that the distance from the swallower to the tip of either dock was more than sixteen leagues.

  ‘Impressed?’ Rackamore asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and it was the honest truth. It was impressive to see our entire world in one glimpse. But it also made me feel small and insignificant and a bit stupid for ever thinking Mazarile was anything special.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘A world the size of Mazarile could manage very well with only one dock,’ Rackamore said, sounding all effortless, despite the crush from the launch’s rockets. ‘But then it would be out of balance, and that would do awkward things to your day and night cycle. So they built two, exactly opposite each other, and we can take our pick of where we land. Mostly we prefer Hadramaw – the customs officials are friendlier.’

  Rackamore worked the levers on the console and I felt the pressure of the chair ease against my bones. The rumble of the rockets became a murmur, like a dinner party going on next door.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We have the speed we need to match the Monetta’s Mourn. It won’t be long now.’

  Soon we were weightless, the rockets silent. Adrana and I were still strapped into our seats, but I felt the missing weight in my belly, like the endless plummeting fall of a bad dream. Rackamore said we’d be better off not undoing our buckles for now. We’d need time to adjust to weightlessness, and there’d be plenty of that later.

  Mazarile had shrunk to a two-horned ball. The cities of night still glowed, but now Hadramaw was turning to the Old Sun and it was Bacramal’s turn to slide into purple twilight.

  ‘Here she is,’ Rackamore announced, making the rockets fire again, but this time with less ferocity.

  Adrana strained to peer through her window. ‘It’s tiny!’

  ‘Everything looks small in space,’ Rackamore said. ‘It’s just the way of things. No lungstuff to fuzzy up the view.’

  ‘Lungstuff’s got nothing to do with it,’ Adrana countered. ‘That ship’s just small.’

  The launch veered, bringing the orbiting Monetta to my side of the windows. Adrana hadn’t been exaggerating. It did look tiny. Worse, we’d be putting our lives in the care of that fragile-seeming thing. The thought put an extra twist in my belly.

  What we were looking at was just the hull of the ship, as the sails and rigging hadn’t yet been run out. It was just a dark little husk, pointy at one end, flared at the other, lodged against the twinkly background of the Congregation like a paper cut-out in a lantern show.

  Put a crossbow to my head and force me into describing it, and I’d say Rackamore’s ship was fish-shaped. The hull was longer than it was wide, and all curvy along its length, with hardly any angles in the thing at all. There were ridges and flanges all along it, just as if it had been made from planks, curved and joined neat as you could ask. But like a fish – like some bony, poisonous, bad-tempered fish – it also had all manner of fins and barbs and stingers and spines jutting out this way and that. Some of them I could guess had something to do with her rigging. And like a fish, it had a big gapey jaw at one end, and a pair of bulgy eyes near the jaw – they were big windows – and at the other end of the hull was a thing like a lady’s fan, stiffened with ribs, that couldn’t help but look like a tail.

  We sidled in closer. Rackamore used the rockets like a miser, quickly tapping them on and off to cut our speed almost to zero.

  ‘See? She seems bigger now. As she should. Four hundred spans, prow to stern. Seventy-five spans across at the widest point. She could swallow twenty of these launches and still have room in her belly. Prow is the open mouth where we’re about to dock. Stern is the other end, where the ion exhaust fans out. She moves both ways, and up and down, and sideways if need be, but we have to agree on something – you never know when your life might depend on it. Do you like her?’

  ‘Still doesn’t look big to me,’ Adrana said.

  It didn’t look big to me either, even up close, but now that she’d stated her mind I saw a chance to get one over on my sister.

  ‘It’s big enough. What were you expecting, a palace?’

  Adrana glared at me.

  ‘She’s a good ship,’ Cazaray said. ‘Whatever you make of her now, she’ll feel like home before you know it.’

  Someone on the Monetta’s Mourn must have been alerted to our arrival, for the jaw gaped wider, cranking open to reveal a red-lit mouth, a red-lit gullet, into which we slid like a fat morsel, no quicker than a walking pace, until the launch clanged against some restraint or cradle and all was still.

  We stayed weightless. Rackamore and Cazaray came out of their chairs and indicated that we could unbuckle, but that we should move with caution until we were confident. ‘One kick in the wrong direction,’ the captain said, ‘and you’ll be nursing a bruise until Mournday week.’

  Through my porthole, I watched the jaw close up again, squeezing out the last glimmer of the Congregation. Now all I saw were the red walls around us, ribbed with metal and strung with guts of pipes and tubes. Figures moved around outside, just beyond the launch. They wore brassy spacesuits with armoured parts and complicated hinged joints, their faces hidden under metal helmets with grilled-over faceplates.

  ‘We can pressurise the launch hold,’ Rackamore said. ‘But most of the time it isn’t worth the trouble. Easier to suit up.’

  There was another clang, then some metal scraping and scuffing noises, conducted through the fabric of the hull, and then a squeal as the lock was opened from outside.

  A small, wiry woman, not wearing a suit, popped her head into the launch.

  ‘Welcome back, Cap’n.’ Then a nod to the younger man. ‘Cazaray. These the recruits, is they?’

  ‘The Ness sisters,’ Rackamore said. ‘Treat them well, for they may turn our fortunes.’

  ‘We thought that about the last one.’

  ‘This is Adrana, this is Arafura,’ Rackamore went on. ‘And this is . . . well, why don’t you introduce yourself?’

  ‘Prozor,’ she said.

  Her face had a hard, feral look to it. The name was one I’d already seen in the ledger. Rackamore had lost two Bauble Readers in the last ten years, but Prozor had been in that position for long enough that her name had gone all the way down the bottom half of the ledger, year by year.

  ‘Get them aboard, show them their quarters, make sure they’re given something to eat and drink. Oh – and Prozor?’

  ‘Cap’n?’

  ‘This is new to them. Every part of it, from weightlessness to living with vacuum only a scratch away.’

  Prozor shrugged. ‘I’ll make allowance.’

  ‘Good. And now I need to talk to Hirtshal about the new sail we’ve just brought from Mazarile. We’ll break orbit shortly, on ions if the sails aren’t ready. I’ve a mind to put some leagues between us and Hadramaw Dock.’

  ‘Something up?’

  Rackamore nodded, his jaw set tight. ‘Family business.’

  They never told us exactly how old the ship was, or who had owned it before Rackamore, much less who’d put down the quoins to have her made. But if the long-dead coves who’d designed the Monetta’s Mourn had set out to make her insides as confusing and twisty as possible, they couldn’t have bettered the job they’d done. It was a mad maze of passages and rooms and cupboards and doors. Four hundred spans doesn’t seem like much, and maybe it isn’t when you’re speaking of a row of houses or a stroll through Mavarasp Park. But it’s surprising how many little rooms you can stuff into the fat belly of a four-hundred-span ship,
and surprising how many different ways you can come up with of linking them together, especially when there’s no up or down and no good reason not to put a door in a ceiling or a window in a floor. Passages twisted, forked, doubled back on themselves for no sound argument. Ladders and stairways threaded between decks, while bone-scraping crawlways linked compartments. There were hatches and ducts, elevators and winches. Pipes and wires went everywhere, and the ship gurgled, hissed and hummed to itself like a thing that was already half alive. Lightvine had been strung along the pipes and wires, encouraged to grow into all the inhabited spaces of the ship. Where the lightvine couldn’t be coaxed, other artificial lighting sources had been used.

  ‘This is where you’ll get your squint-time,’ Prozor said, when we reached what seemed to be a set of cupboards. ‘Ain’t large, but you won’t need much space when we’re under way. More beddin’ if you need it – you probably will.’

  ‘We sleep here?’ Adrana asked.

  ‘No, girlie, you play skittles here.’ Prozor opened the doors to show us what we were facing.

  ‘Does it get cold?’ I risked asking.

  ‘Truer to say it sometimes gets warm. Not afraid of a little cold, is you?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Adrana said, casting me a glance.

  The space was a compartment about the size of the smallest room either of us had ever slept in, and this was meant for two. At the back of it were two hammocks, one above the other, and a curtain that you could tug across the hammocks for privacy. Prozor showed us the hatches that held more bedding, as well as space for personal effects – not that we’d brought anything with us.

  ‘Sumptuous,’ I said.

  ‘Used to better, is you?’

  ‘I thought the captain told you to be nice to us,’ Adrana said.

  ‘You were getting the nasty side of me, you’d know it.’ But after a heavy sigh Prozor said: ‘Ain’t as bad as it looks. A cove gets used to things soon enough, and you’ll only spend as much time here as you want to. We nosh together. You’ll be the new cooks now – it’s always the Bone Reader what cooks, ’cause them being so precious and delicate they ain’t got much else to do. Other than that, you’ll be in the galley with the rest of us, singin’ songs, tellin’ stories, puttin’ on plays, readin’ fortunes, whatever passes the hours.’ She gave us a forbidding look. ‘Plenty of things scarce on a ship. Hours ain’t one of them.’

  ‘Are there books?’ I asked.

  ‘Books your thing, are they?’

  ‘Yes. It’s called reading.’

  Prozor sniffed, wrinkling her nose. She had sharp features: sharp nose, sharp chin, sharp dark eyes under jagged brows. She had a face that would look angry no matter her mood – all vees and angles, as if she had been sketched in a hurry, with hard strokes. Her hair was as sharp-looking as the rest of her, bristling out at all angles and stiffened into spikes and barbs by some kind of glue or lacquer.

  ‘Talk to Cap’n Rack. He’s always pleased to show off his library. More books in there than you’ll know how to read.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said.

  Prozor led us back through the ship. It might have been the way we had come, or some completely different route. It was hard to tell. She was pointing out different things all the while, grumpily unconcerned with how much we could take in at a time.

  ‘Near the middle now,’ she said, as we squeezed around an elbow in the passageway, still weightless. Adrana and I were moving by our fingertips and careful use of our feet, while Prozor darted forward with reckless speed, only to keep stopping and looking back at us as we caught up. She slid open a panel, ushered us through it.

  ‘Are you lost yet?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Way we like it. Someone else comes aboard this ship, we don’t want ’em stumblin’ on the bones too easy.’

  We were at a grey door, armoured like an airlock, with a wheel-shaped locking mechanism. We’d passed a dozen similar doors already. ‘Put it here for other reasons, not just to make it hard to find,’ Prozor went on. ‘Needs to be somewhere quiet, not too close to the bridge or the galley or any of that stuff. Can’t be too close to the sail-control gear or the engine room, either. This is the prime spot, and you’re welcome to it.’

  ‘Do you ever go inside?’ Adrana asked.

  ‘Couldn’t pay me enough, girlie. I read baubles. That’s what I’m good at.’

  ‘You’re forgetting your talent for charm and hospitality,’ I said.

  ‘You think this is funny, what you’re getting into? Let me tell you about baubles. Readin’ baubles will drive you mad, but that’s only because it’s knotty and a lot depends on making the right interpretation. Lives. Quoins. Reputation. Readin’ skulls . . .’ Prozor trailed off with a sadistic little shudder, before adding: ‘I like my head as it is. Don’t need no alien ghosts rattling around inside it, givin’ me shivery dreams.’

  With the bone room dealt with, Prozor took us to a compartment full of clothing: cupboards, drawers and hoppers full of trousers, tunics, belts, gloves, all of it jumbled up with no rhyme or reason with regards to size or fit. ‘Find what suits you. Long dresses might look fancy on Mazarile, but here they’ll only trip you up.’

  Prozor wore trousers, leather slippers and a black blouse, with various items of tarnished jewellery rattling around her throat in the weightlessness.

  Adrana sifted through the musty, mould-spotted contents of one drawer. She pulled out a glove, jutting her finger through a hole.

  ‘Did a bullet do that?’

  Prozor examined it thoughtfully.

  ‘No, girlie, that’d be a rat.’

  ‘We’ll keep our dresses,’ Adrana said.

  The galley was up front, between the bridge and Captain Rackamore’s quarters. By the time we arrived, the other crew had gathered there to welcome us. Even though we were still weightless, they were all managing to sit on chairs around a large circular table that was patterned with black and white hexagons, with items of food and drink fixed onto it by some means. Two windows of similar size bulged out into space on either side of the room – Mazarile was visible through one of them, turning slowly as we orbited it. There was a console in one corner, a few screens and readouts lit up, and some smaller controls and displays dotted elsewhere around the place, glowing like little flickerboxes, but mainly it appeared to be somewhere for the crew to eat, relax and discuss plans, and none of them seemed to be paying any heed to the equipment.

  ‘Come on in,’ said a burly, bearded man, indicating two vacant spaces either side of him at the table. He had an open, friendly face. ‘We don’t bite. If you’ve already met Prozor, then you’ll find the rest of us a distinct improvement.’ He slid a tankard across the table, from a black hexagon to a white, lifted it, then pinched his lips around the drinking nozzle in its lid. ‘Mattice,’ he added, after a sip. ‘Opener to his imperial majesty Captain Rack. And a damn fine one if I say so myself.’

  ‘You do,’ said the woman next to him. ‘All the time.’

  ‘Whereas you’ve never been known to brag about your touch with the gubbins, Jusquerel.’

  ‘That’s not bragging, Mattice. You think this ships runs on moonbeams and puppies?’ She nodded at us. ‘Jusquerel. Integrator. Did Prozor show you the bridge?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll show you later. I put the main sweeper in, and the squawk, and that secondary console over there. My job is getting one box of gubbins to talk to another, even when they weren’t even made by the same species. Anything on this ship works the way it was meant to, you can thank me for it.’

  Jusquerel was an older woman with a strong jaw, a small upcurved nose, and very long hair, which she wore in a complicated braid, slung back over her shoulder so that it hung – or floated – down her chest, cutting diagonally across it. Th
e braid was all threaded shades of silver-grey and bluish-white, as if it were spun from extremely fine metals. There was a poise to Jusquerel, an elegance to her posture that set her apart from the others.

  ‘Come and sit with us,’ Mattice repeated, patting one of the vacant chairs. ‘Here. Beer. Bread. Are they all so skinny in Hadramaw?’ He directed a reproachful look at Prozor. ‘I hope you haven’t scared the wits out of them.’

  ‘Someone needs to,’ Prozor said, unconcerned, taking her own seat at the table. She slid a metal box across the table, black hexagon to black hexagon, and eased open the lid, fishing around until she came out with a loaf of bread. ‘Any greener, they’d be foetuses.’

  ‘We were all green once,’ said a third member of the crew, as we took our places, one either side of Mattice. ‘None of us were born on a ship, out in space.’ He coughed, touched a hand to his throat. ‘Triglav. Ion systems. I’m the poor bastard who has to move this ship around when the sails won’t flap.’

  Triglav was small, bald and unassuming. He had the sort of downcast face that was bound to look worried about something regardless of what kind of day he was having. ‘Cazaray thinks you might be our new Bone Readers. If Cazaray says it, it’s good enough for me.’

  ‘You said that last time, Trig,’ said the woman next to him, who was as small as the ion engineer, but tough-looking instead, with her arms bared on the table before her, all messed over with tattoos and bulging with muscles. She had her hair shaved on one side of her scalp, long on the other, and her eyebrows looked like they’d been drawn on with ink, which maybe they had.

  ‘Trysil,’ she said, in her broken rasp of her voice. ‘Assessor.’ She reached out a hand, shaking with us in turn. Her grip was firm, and her palm was rough.