He looked through the window. ‘Yes, that’s her. Rack and Jusquerel just ahead.’
The one I was sure was Hirtshal stopped mid-stride, and for a stupid instant I cursed him for hesitating. But then I saw something had gone right through him. It was a thin gleaming line, entering by his right shoulder, exiting by the left hip, the end of it skewered into the hull, pinning him into place like a specimen.
A harpoon.
The weapon must have had a piercing head, and the entry and exit wounds it had punctured through his suit were wider than the diameter of the shaft. Lungstuff was geysering out of those two holes, and with the lungstuff came something else – a cargo of sparkling pink glitter.
Prozor was trying to help Hirtshal. Trying to staunch the flow of lungstuff and blood, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his thigh, pressing her faceplate against his. The outgassing made a mockery of her efforts, laughing its way between her fingers.
‘Prozor!’ Triglav shouted. ‘It’s over – leave him! Get inside before one of those things takes out someone else.’
But there weren’t words enough in the universe to make Prozor turn her back on him. And it wasn’t words that decided it, in the end. The harpoon exploded, turning into a line of sun-bright fire that burned right through Hirtshal, its vicious energy finding every join, every seam, in the armour of his suit. Light fanned from his wrists, from his elbows, from his knees and waist and neck. His faceplate became a dark-fretted searchlight.
Hirtshal came apart. His helmet drifted away, then his arms and torso, and the upper parts of his legs. Only his magnetic boots remained, still fixed to the hull.
‘Hirtshal . . .’
Triglav settled a hand over my wrist. ‘Mourn him later – it’s for the best.’
‘Why didn’t it explode straight away?’
‘Because this was crueller,’ Triglav said.
Rackamore urged Prozor on. I’d nearly lost sight of them around the curve of the hull when another harpoon caught Trysil, pinning its way through her lower leg, between knee and ankle. Trysil reached down, trying to drag the harpoon out of her leg. Rackamore and Jusquerel turned back, while Prozor waved at them to continue. They returned to Trysil and tried to heave the harpoon out of her suit. It was jammed firmly into the hull.
‘No,’ I said.
I saw them look at each other. Trysil motioned them away with both her hands. Rackamore took a hesitant step backward, then reached out a hand. His fist closed around Trysil’s, and then he bowed his whole body, and I knew that this wasn’t some final attempt at rescue, but a captain’s farewell.
Rackamore let go, but even as he stepped back he never turned his gaze from his colleague. Then the harpoon flared, and the brightness of it seemed to eat all the way through Trysil’s boot and the lower leg. She flailed her arms and her pinned-down leg came apart just beneath the knee, truncated in a furious molten glow.
Rackamore reached out to try and grab her hands, but it was too late. Trysil fell away from the Monetta, the stump of her leg still smouldering.
‘Triglav, I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Trysil,’ he said. ‘Trysil. My Trysil.’
I felt a gust of lungstuff, and started in panic. Somewhere we had been holed. But without even looking at me Triglav raised a calming hand. His voice was surprisingly even and composed, given what he had just witnessed.
‘Just the lock opening for the bauble party. Normally we get the pressure nice and equalised first.’
They weren’t long in making their way to us. Rackamore was tugging off his white-crowned helmet even as he entered the galley. Then came Prozor, cradling her helmet, and behind Prozor was Jusquerel, carrying a large wooden box.
‘Cazaray and Mattice are gone,’ Rackamore said, before any of us’d had a chance to fire off a question. ‘They died when the launch was hit.’
I wanted to believe he’d made a mistake; that both of those men were still breathing, but deep down I knew Rackamore wasn’t in error. And I thought of both of them, the way they’d been good-hearted to Adrana and I, and of Cazaray in particular, who I’d come to regard a decent man who wanted the best for everyone around him, and now they were gone and the speed at which it had happened was almost too shocking to take in. I don’t suppose I’d really known grief until then, because when mother died we were both small, and there are some emotions you can’t really feel until you’re older. But it wasn’t just grief. I was angry, too, and a little part of that anger was turned back at myself for not voicing my fears early enough.
‘Did they suffer?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Rackamore said. ‘The one mercy was that it was quick.’ But his jaw tensed and he needed to gather himself before continuing. ‘I’m afraid we also lost Hirtshal and Trysil out there, and they didn’t have that mercy. You saw all that, I think. Triglav: I’m sorry. We did what we could.’
‘You did more than you had to,’ Triglav replied.
‘You think it’s her?’
‘If it’s not the Nightjammer, Cap’n, it’s her vicious bitch of a twin. She’s close enough for the eyes now. Take a look for yourself.’
Triglav meant one of the screens, which was showing a view through one of the cameras outside the ship. To begin with it was hard to know what I was looking at, as if someone had made a collage out of different kinds of black fabric, so nearly similar that you couldn’t say where one piece ended and another began. But slowly my eyes got the shape of it.
‘It’s like us,’ I said.
It was a sunjammer, turned bow on so that we were looking at its gaping mouth. Larger or smaller than the Monetta, I couldn’t say. But the shape wasn’t so very different. A bony, fishy hull, with ribs and spines and spikes and the angled arms of sail-control gear. Blacker than us, though – blacker and bonier still, and somehow uglier and more fierce. Something else, too. The Monetta came to a blunt nose above its jaw, but the nose of this other ship was sharp, tapering out to a kind of lance, and fixed to that lance – under or above it, depending on which way you agreed was up – was something I didn’t care to recognise, but did all the same. A monkey form. I just knew, there and then, that it wasn’t a carving or a sculpture, but an actual body, pulled into some agony of contortion with their knees up to their chest, their arms squeezed into their ribs, their head angled back to look forward along the line of the harpoon, and their hands knotted together like they’d been praying that the next breath would be their last, and by some thin mercy maybe it had.
‘It’s her,’ Rackamore said. ‘The better part of me hoped we’d never meet again. But there’s another part that was counting on a reckoning. If I can just draw her out of that ship . . .’
‘Does it have a name?’ I asked.
Jusquerel set the box on the table and opened it. Inside, tucked tightly together in opposing directions, were about a dozen crossbows. Rackamore took one out, ratcheted the bow and slid a bolt into the groove, then turned to us with a hard, hungry gleam in his eyes. ‘Dame Scarlet is the name she was given,’ he said. ‘But to call her that would be to give her some kind of legitimacy. She’s the Nightjammer to us, and that’s all the name I care to give her.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Bosa Sennen,’ Triglav said, as if the name was an oath. ‘And she’s got us over a barrel. We could send a crew out to fix the guns, but it’d be quicker and kinder to slit their throats now.’
‘It’s the way she wanted us,’ Rackamore answered, holding his crossbow in one hand, levelling the other on Triglav’s shoulder. ‘She forced a sustained rate of fire on us, knowing we couldn’t keep it up.’ He managed a smile. ‘I’m sure you bloodied a few noses, Trig.’
The others started preparing their crossbows. None of them needed any tuition from Prozor, readying the weapons with as much ceremony as if they were cleaning cutlery. Triglav dished out two to us, then gave us a quick, cursory
lesson in how to load and fire them. ‘Aiming’s the easy bit,’ he said. ‘On a ship, especially. Hard thing is not hitting someone.’
‘Just make sure it’s the right someone,’ Rackamore said.
I was thinking back to the one time I’d heard the name Bosa Sennen. Cazaray had mentioned her, just after talking about the stern-chase that had cost Rackamore his daughter, Illyria.
‘It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ Rackamore said. ‘We’ll fight, and we’ll give her something to remember us by. But if we’re driven back, and we fail, and if she means to take you, and you happen to have the means to stop her doing that – any means – you do it.’
I understood Rackamore. There were knives on the ship. There were power lines and doors that opened to vacuum. Explosives to crack open the doors inside baubles. Crossbows you could turn on yourself. A hundred other ways to deprive Bosa Sennen of a living prize.
But I wondered if I’d have the spine, if it came to that.
Something thumped against us.
Then something else. These were soft thuds, and they came in quick pairs.
Footfalls.
‘They’re on us,’ Triglav said.
Rackamore slung his crossbow over his shoulder and went to the console, working the switches and dials with a hasty ease. He bent his lips towards the grille.
‘This is Rackamore of the Monetta’s Mourn. I presume I am addressing Bosa Sennen? You want something, that is plain. So do I. State your terms, and you shall have my response.’
Rackamore snapped a switch.
The console buzzed, and a voice crackled out of it.
Maybe it had been a woman’s voice, once, but it was hard to be sure. The voice had been shredded, rubbed raw, forced through circuits, looped back on itself, mangled into a parody of itself, and then cut through by static and random bursts of electronic noise.
‘There are no terms, Pol, except your immediate and unconditional surrender. Open your locks and prepare to be boarded.’
‘Why in all the worlds would I do that?’
‘The fruit of your loins, Pol. That’s why. I never killed her, you know. She was too juicy a prize for that. Bosa’s taken fine care of your Illyria. She’s well and she remembers you, and if you want to keep her alive, you’ll stop stalling and start opening locks.’
I watched his face, trying to gauge how much of a shock this was to him. Maybe less than I’d expected.
He swallowed, but kept his voice composed.
‘I want to see her.’
‘When you’ve been a good host and acceded to Bosa’s requests, then you’ll have your wish. Open your locks, or we’ll start cutting.’
His fingers clenched and unclenched over the console. Adrana was working her crossbow action over and over, as if she stood a chance of it becoming automatic in the time available to us.
‘You know we’ll fight,’ Rackamore said.
‘If it makes you feel better. But don’t put too much spirit into it. You do want Illyria back, don’t you?’
‘Give me a moment to prepare for boarding. You’ve damaged quite a few of our systems, so I can’t just open the locks at the snap of your fingers.’
Rackamore locked her out of the circuit before she had a chance to reply, then turned to us. ‘You have one task, if I might request it. I know the bones aren’t working, but if you can squeeze anything out of that skull, any kind of outbound transmission, you owe it to the other ships. Put out that we’re under attack, and that it’s Bosa Sennen. Warn them to keep clear. I don’t want Jastrabarsk or anyone else getting mixed up in our trouble when there’s so little they could do.’
‘He could help us,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t he?’
‘You could throw six ships against the Nightjammer,’ Triglav said, ‘and it’d still be uneven.’
Rackamore turned back to the console and threw a switch. ‘I’m opening the locks, Bosa. Be ready for a fight.’
Crossbows in hand, we made our way through the twisty dark maze of the Monetta’s Mourn. I led the way, noises and shouts chasing us from the front of the ship.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ Adrana said.
‘What?’
‘What Rackamore was saying. Kill myself to avoid being taken by Bosa Sennen, or whatever her name is.’
‘He wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it.’
‘But it’s different for them. They’ve all done all sorts of things with their lives. Seen and lived more than we have. Probably been closer to death more times than we know.’
‘I’m not sure how that changes it,’ I said.
‘We haven’t had our lives yet, Fura. And I’m not ready to end mine just because Rack says it’s for the best. How the hell does he know? Maybe Bosa’ll take us and we’ll like working for her.’
‘Yes, she seems the caring, compassionate type.’
‘Or we’ll escape. She’s obviously just some thug with a ship. Probably a bit stupid. But we’re smart. We’re the Ness sisters.’
‘Yes, and look at how smart the Ness sisters are.’ I pushed my hair out of my eyes. ‘If the Ness sisters had a brain cell between them, they’d be back in Mazarile, taking needlecraft lessons from a robot.’
We squeezed around one of the narrow bends. Rightly or wrongly we’d have felt safer in suits, but with all that bulky armour on there’d have been no hope of making it through to the bone room.
‘We got to see the whole Congregation,’ Adrana said. ‘And a bauble. We saw a bauble open. And a pirate ship. We saw a space battle. We saw scatterfire. Don’t tell me you’d rather we stayed at home.’
‘I’d rather not die,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
But there was something in what she said. I’d seen a sight that few others would ever know, and the moment had changed me. I’d seen the fifty million worlds of the Congregation in one glance, seen the shifting, shimmering purple twilight that was all that remained of the Old Sun’s energies, after those tired old photons had fought their way to the great void of the Empty. I’d seen the glimmer of the rubble left over from the forging.
I pushed on ahead of Adrana. She was dawdling, always looking back the way we had come. My ears popped and I drew a sharp fearful breath.
‘What was that?’ Adrana asked.
‘Rackamore must have opened the locks.’
‘He gives in easily.’
‘I don’t think he has much choice. Hurry? We’re nearly at the bone room.’
‘It won’t do any good, Fura. You know that, don’t you? He’s just giving us something to do, to take our minds off what’s ahead.’ She rattled her crossbow against the wall. ‘You think these little toys are going to help us?’
‘I’d rather have these than nothing at all.’
We were squeezing through a narrowing in the corridor when an alarm sounded. Where the corridor narrowed was a bulkhead door. It was sliding shut, grinding its way from one side of the corridor to the other, and I was on one side of it and Adrana on the other. There was an instant, no more than that, when one of us might have had time to squeeze through that narrowing gap. But we were too shocked to respond.
I twisted back and my eyes met Adrana’s.
‘Stop it!’ she called out, hammering her fist at a bank of controls on her side of the bulkhead.
‘I’m trying.’ There was a similar bank on my side but the controls were not responsive. ‘No good!’ I was shouting at her through the gap, over the metallic squeal of the closing door. ‘The ship won’t allow it! Must be an emergency override!’
Adrana jammed her crossbow into the gap, by now much too tight for one of us to have squeezed through. The door continued until it met the crossbow, at which point it gave a screech and began to shudder in its runners. I smelled burning.
‘It’s holding,’
Adrana said.
But the barrel of her crossbow was already beginning to buckle under the door’s force. Wooden splinters crunched away from the stock. The door lurched tighter.
‘It’s going to close. You’ll have to find another way to the bone room. If you go all the way to the stern . . .’
‘What if the doors are shut there as well?’
‘I don’t know. Try it. I think I can get there easily enough from here.’
Adrana pushed her hand through the gap. I closed my fingers around hers.
‘I don’t want to let go.’
‘You have to.’
‘I’m sorry, Fura. I did this. I brought this on us.’
‘No, you didn’t. I signed up to it as well. It’s not your fault. Whatever happens, you remember that. This is not your fault.’
Her crossbow was useless by now. On an impulse I unshouldered mine and slipped it through the gap, just as the door lurched tighter and brushed my arm hairs. I was still holding Adrana by the other hand, but I released at the last instant, just as her crossbow gave way and the door sped down to close the gap.
There was a tiny window in the bulkhead. Adrana was on the other side of it. Her eyes were wide and frightened. Not my older sister now, but just someone alone and scared in an unfamiliar place.
I knew how she felt.
I mouthed and pointed for her to go back. I knew there was another way to the bone room, and perhaps by the time she got to another bulkhead, the manual controls would be operable again.
Perhaps.
Through that little window I saw Adrana spin round. There was movement at the far end of the corridor – a dark confusion of arms and legs and faces, coming nearer.
Part of me knew it wouldn’t do any good, but I hammered my fists on the glass and when that achieved nothing I tried to budge the door with my muscles. But it might as well have been welded in place for all the difference it made. Watching was all I could do.
Adrana raised my crossbow. She got off one bolt, silent through the glass, and then the mass of figures surged forward. They had suits on, but they were better than ours, tighter around their forms, and quicker for moving through a ship. They were shiny black, throwing back reflections and glints so that it was hard to tell which arm or leg belonged to which body, and where the suits ended and the weapons started. There was no time for Adrana to ratchet back the crossbow and slide in another bolt. The mass was on her like a sudden rising tide. She pushed a hand against the glass, palm flattened, and I pressed mine against it from the other side, and then something pulled her hand from the glass, leaving only a moist imprint, and I turned and fled.
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