Revenger 9780575090569

by Alastair Reynolds

  Besides, we didn’t want them screaming and screaming, drawing Bosa from the squawk.

  That’s what happened, though.

  She came back into the galley from the bridge with that silver suit on, the one I’d glimpsed through the lookstone, when she was just a tiny figure on the launch. I supposed she’d been trying to use our squawk to signal back to the Nightjammer, that being quicker and simpler than going back to her launch, but she was finding out for herself how damaged the squawk was.

  Now she was finding something else out.

  Bosa still had her helmet on. She was looking around the galley, her back to the bridge, drinking in what had happened while she had her attention snared by the squawk. There wasn’t any part of her face I could see. The suit was sleek and tight-fitting, silver where the others were black, but otherwise similar. Even the visor was silver, but she must have been able to see through it by some means.

  She took in Trusko, still bound to the chair, but with dead bodies flanking him. Blood was everywhere, dark red nebulas of it, all clotted and ropey even as they drifted around the room. Slowly Bosa must have cottoned on that she wasn’t alone. What she could see of us, I couldn’t speculate. But some itchy intution told her we were present.

  She reached up and touched a toggle on the neck of her suit. Her voice came out exactly as it sounded over the squawk, with all the same static and interference and looping echoes.

  ‘Well, that’s a turn. Not much surprises Bosa, but you’ve done yourselves proud. What is it – Ghostie gubbins?’

  ‘From the Fang,’ I said, choosing to speak for everyone. ‘We knew it was there, too. It wasn’t an accident, us just stumbling on it. You’ve been played, Bosa.’

  The silver-visored helmet nodded back at me. Blood scudded slowly between us, reflecting in the silver.

  ‘And you’d be?’

  ‘We wasn’t properly introduced,’ I said. ‘But you’ve met my sister. I’m Fura Ness. I’m the other Bone Reader, the one you thought were getting, when Garval put herself in my place.’

  ‘There was one survivor on that ship,’ Bosa said. ‘I know, because I picked up the squawk. But it wasn’t you.’

  ‘You got it wrong,’ I said. ‘You’ve had it too easy out here, taking your pick of ships. It’s made you lazy. You thought you’d have a bite of Trusko, too. But look who got to him ahead of you.’ Then I cocked my head at the woman next to me. ‘Show her, Prozor. Take off your Ghostie mask and show her how deep she’s in it.’

  ‘More’n she realises,’ Strambli said. ‘I said it wouldn’t go well for her if she killed Drozna.’

  Prozor was following my suggestion. She lifted up her face, presenting all its angry angles to Bosa. ‘I was there when you killed ’em,’ she said. ‘In that same room, when you killed Triglav, Jusquerel, Cap’n Rack himself, and thought you’d done the same to me.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Rackamore,’ Bosa Sennen said. ‘I’ll take the other names, but not that one. And if you were there to see it, Prozor, you know I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘We know who you are,’ Prozor said.

  ‘Let me show you,’ Bosa said, and touched another control on the ring of her helmet. I heard the same wheeze of lungstuff as before, and the same glassy whirr as the visor retracted up into the crown of the helmet. The face that looked back at us wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. It wasn’t scarred or cratered or tattooed or disfigured by radiation or made otherwise strange by the glowy. It was a woman. She had fine features, a proud curl to her lips, a certain steel in her eyes, but there wasn’t anything about her that would have drawn more than a second or third glance in Mazarile.

  But it was also a face I knew – or that wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me.

  ‘Illyria Rackamore,’ I said, voicing the name she’d been born under. ‘Go on, deny it.’

  Her look was mild, almost forgiving.

  ‘I am what I am, child. What would be the sense in denying it?’

  ‘Bosa turned you,’ I said. ‘Just as she was turned by another Bosa, and another before that. How far back do you go?’

  ‘Longer than you’d care to know. And I won’t be the last, either. I’ll take my place with the others, proudly, and pass on the good work of Bosa Sennen to my natural successor – and if you’re the sister you say you are, you won’t have much trouble guessing who I mean. She’s a fine enough boney now, but they don’t last, do they? And she’s older than you, so she’s nearer the day when the bones stop whispering. But I’ve plans for her beyond then. She’ll make a worthy Bosa, will Adrana Ness.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She won’t. She’s strong.’

  ‘They said as much about Illyria. Never thought Bosa could turn Rackamore’s daughter, and yet here I am, living and breathing.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why do you do this?’

  ‘For the quoins,’ she said.

  ‘They’re useless to you,’ I replied. ‘You can’t go anywhere to trade or deposit them, so what’s the point? Centuries of plunder and butchery to sit on a fat pile of money you can’t ever spend?’

  ‘It was never about making myself rich. It’s about keeping the quoins under my eye, where they can’t come to harm. Where they can’t get their claws or feelers on ’em.’

  ‘It’s just money,’ I said, hoping that the doubt didn’t cut through my voice and show itself.

  Bosa smiled at me, and it was like Pol Rackamore was standing before us, looking fondly on the remnants of the crew he’d loved. ‘That’s what they want you to think. Shall I let you in on another secret?’ Slowly she lifted one of her hands, revealing the thing she’d cupped in the palm.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘This one you’ll like.’ She was grinning, all pleased with her own cleverness. ‘It’s one of Bosa’s favourites. It’s not Ghostie, but they weren’t the only ones who knew how to put the shivers in us.’

  She was holding a small, jewelled device that could have been a badge or a gaming token, and her thumb was caressing part of it.

  ‘It’s a weapon, but you guessed that. Fifth or Sixth Occupation – ask your Assessor, if you’re that interested.’

  ‘Our Assessor had an accident,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a shame. You’ll just have to take it on trust, won’t you? It’s a delayed designation device – a Firefist. While I was in here I designated its attack points. Didn’t I, Trusko? You saw the light as it marked its targets.’

  I looked at Trusko, and he looked at Illyria Rackamore, but if there was any acknowledgement in that glance it was too furtive or fleeting for me.

  ‘No one uses an energy weapon on a ship,’ I said.

  ‘Unless they’re suited,’ she corrected me. ‘And while my visor’s raised at the moment, it would only take a micro change in the pressure to drop it again.’

  ‘You’ve lost, Bosa,’ Strambli said. ‘We took your crew apart. We cut through them like they were lungstuff.’

  ‘I’ve still got the Dame Scarlet.’

  ‘You think you have.’

  The voice had come from behind Illyria, not from one of us. Her face tensed, the smile tightening, curling up at the edges in a way that wasn’t entirely natural, as if there were little hooks digging into her skin. Those steely eyes rolled back as far as they would go.

  ‘Ah,’ she said.

  It was Surt, wrapping a hand around Illyria’s throat and touching the edge of the Ghostie blade to the front of her helmet, level with the eyes. We could hardly see her, and even the idea that this shattered, sketchy form belonged to Surt was difficult to keep in the head from one thought to the next. But it had to be her. The rest of us were accounted for. She had been in the bridge all along, even when Bosa was in there trying to operate the squawk.

  ‘Let go of the Firefist,’ I said.

  Illyria’s face slackened. The smile relaxed,
settled into a look of weary resignation. She murmured a sound of surrender, and seemed about to cast aside the jewelled device. Then her thumb twitched and prongs of ruby light flared out from her fist, branching between her fingers, a dozen of them shooting away at all angles, stabbing out through the lungstuff and into the surrounding material of the Queenie’s hull.

  Illyria was fast, but Surt was quicker. She was pulling the Ghostie blade back through the open faceplate even as the ship began to vent pressure. She touched the bridge of Bosa’s nose, drew a bubbling line of blood.

  ‘No,’ I said, before the howl of escaping lungstuff drowned out any possibility of speaking. ‘Not yet.’

  Surt hesitated, then pulled the blade away. The silver visor came down again, masking Bosa’s face.

  ‘Cut me free!’ Trusko shouted, and I realised that the captain was still bound to his chair. The lungstuff was screaming out, as if the hull was fraying open like an old pair of stockings. It tasted cold and thin in my throat, more like metal than gas.

  I got the Ghostie knife and slipped through his restraints.

  ‘Sorry it’s come to this,’ I said, not really knowing if he could hear me.

  Surt had slipped around Illyria while she was preoccupied with her helmet. Trusko stretched a hand out to me. His lips moved. He was saying something, but the cove barely had the strength to get it out.

  ‘Gun,’ he said. ‘Ghostie gun.’

  I passed him one of the pistols, closing my hand around the phantom thing, feeling the shape of it better than my eyes could make out its shifty outline.

  Trusko took the gun. He looked down at the sly thing with a sort of deadened wonder, blinking at it the way a drunkard will blink at something that won’t come into focus, and then he turned in his seat to aim the pistol at Bosa Sennen.

  ‘No,’ I said, guessing what he meant to do next. We were holed in a dozen places and the lungstuff was bleeding out fast, but that wasn’t the same as blasting half the ship away.

  Bosa started backing away, retreating into the bridge, the mirror of her face still turned to us.

  Trusko looked back at me. It was impossible to hear anything now, and I was starting to feel a blackness clogging the edge of my thoughts. But Trusko mouthed words anyway and the wonder of it was that I got his meaning.

  Quarters, he was saying.

  His personal quarters.

  I didn’t have the strength to scream, and barely enough to move myself. I grabbed Prozor by the scruff and mimed for her to follow me into the quarters, and Strambli, Surt and Tindouf got the message smartly enough. By then we were swimming against the rush of lungstuff fighting its way out in a dozen directions, but none of that flow going in the way we needed, and by the time we got over the threshold into the room my lungs felt like they were sucking on vacuum. I didn’t have much more to give, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking back.

  Bosa had backed all the way into the bridge. She was turning from us.

  Trusko couldn’t have had much more breath in him than the rest of us. But he still hung onto enough consciousness to level that Ghostie gun and fire, and if that was his last living act as captain of the Queenie, it wasn’t a bad one.

  A thousand times I’ve sifted through my recollection of what happened in the instants that followed, trying to find some sense or order to it that I can live with. There was the pull of the trigger, the discharge of the weapon, and what it did to every single thing that was caught up in the widening cone of that shot, and there was the violent slam as Trusko’s quarters sealed itself up, pressure doors closing on both the galley and the bridge, and us seeing him for the last time, that gun in his hand even as the life raced out of him.

  That’s how it should have been, anyway.

  But it wasn’t.

  All I can say is that the Ghostie gun’s action wasn’t concentrated at that one point in time when Trusko pulled the trigger. It was splintered, cut up into shards and reassembled around that moment, like a deck of cards getting shuffled, so that – in some way that I can’t get at with words – the doors were already sealed before he fired, and Illyria was still looking back at us even after the gun had done its work, and sometimes her visor was up, sometimes it was down, sometimes it was jammed halfway between the two.

  I’ve told myself that it couldn’t have been like that, and that it must be my recollection of the sequence of things that got addled, but – much as that helps me to sleep – I ain’t sure it’s exactly true.

  No. The Ghostie gun did something shivery to time as well as space and matter, and we were there when it happened, and if that makes a knotty confusion between what’s sane and what isn’t, you can take your complaints to the Ghosties.

  25

  Trusko’s room kept us alive. Even as the rest of the Queenie lost her lungstuff, save for the small part that was contained by bulkhead doors and a few lungstuff-tight spaces – we survived. The cove might not have been the greatest or most courageous captain, but he had taken excellent care of his own amenities. My intution had been right, the first time he called me into his quarters. That sense of solidity wasn’t merely my imagination. The walls and doors enclosing the quarters really were built to a higher standard than the rest of the ship, because Trusko wouldn’t have had it any other way. You could call him a coward for that, and many will. But when he took that Ghostie gun and aimed it at Illyria he knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe one brave, selfless act can’t outweigh a life spent acting otherwise, but I ain’t one to judge. I think Trusko got the crew he wanted, in those last minutes, and I think he did right by them.

  Anyway, you’ll hear criticism of Trusko and the sunjammer Queen Crimson, and plenty of it. But you won’t hear it from me and you won’t hear it from Prozor.

  We got out of that room in the end, but I won’t pretend any part of it was easy. Trusko had a suit tucked away in a partition behind one of his charts, but we’d never have found it if Surt hadn’t been there. ‘Half the things people thought were secrets on this ship,’ the Integrator confided in us, ‘I’ve known ’em for years.’ I thought of Jusquerel on the Monetta, Lusquer on the Iron Courtesan, and reckoned it was probably just as true of them. Never mind what they say of Bone Readers, it’s Integrators that a captain needs to keep cosy.

  The connecting way between Trusko’s quarters and the bridge was double-doored, so we could get in and out of the room without losing all our lungstuff in one gasp. But there wasn’t a proper pump on it, and we lost a little lungstuff each time anyone had to go in or out through the door, into what was left of the rest of the Queenie. By the time Surt had put on Trusko’s suit and gone scouting for more suits and lungstuff, we were at the thin edge of what was remaining. In the space of an hour, as the lungstuff grew chokey, I went from thinking kind thoughts of Trusko all the way back to despising him again, for putting us through slow asphyxiation.

  ‘It’s a mess out there,’ Surt told us. ‘We ain’t got ourselves a ship any more, that’s plain.’

  ‘Good job there’s another one not too far off,’ I said.

  Surt’s eyes met mine through her visor. ‘I knew you meant to take the Nightjammer. But I didn’t think you were counting on taking it over as well.’

  I forced a smile. ‘Not exactly spoilt for choice, are we?’

  ‘There’s something else. That Ghostie gun mangled things up pretty good. Knotty to say what was what. I found Trusko, and I don’t think he suffered too much. Only thing that’s nagging me is there’s no clear sign of Bosa, or any part of her.’

  ‘We decompressed pretty hard,’ Strambli said. ‘If the gun didn’t get her, she might have been swept out.’

  ‘Could she have made it back to the Nightjammer?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re close enough,’ Surt said. ‘And that hole in us is lined up pretty good with Bosa’s ship. But jumping between ships ain’t like skipping puddles. Odds are
she still sailed off into the Empty, if that gun didn’t take care of her.’

  ‘There’s more Empty than not,’ Strambli said. ‘My guess is she’s falling a bit further into it by the second. You want to find her and taunt her, Fura?’

  I couldn’t say that the idea didn’t have some appeal. But we had a few hurdles to cross before we got into the luxury of score-settling. ‘No. The launch is our priority, and taking the Nightjammer. I want to get over there, and hard onto them, before they start having second thoughts.’

  We’d had to get out of the Ghostie armour to put the suits on, and taking that armour off wasn’t any more pleasant than wearing it. The only thing that was more unpleasant was seeing it lying in bundles again, all wrong and tainted, like it had taken a bit of our souls with it when we peeled it off. Knowing we’d need it again, we bundled it up and took it with us, but there wasn’t one of us that felt cosy doing it.

  We were hasty and nervous, but we still made sure we didn’t slip up while putting our suits on. A bad seal, a lungstuff line plugged into the wrong valve, a damaged visor – any of these things could end us just as easily as a crossbow bolt. I suppose it was a measure of how long I’d been crewing that I didn’t mind taking the time to ensure the suit wasn’t going to turn traitor on me.

  But the launch was still there when we reached it. The locks were peachy to crack, and Strambli got us aboard without too much trouble. We kept an eye out for booby traps, tripwires and so on, but I don’t think Bosa ever counted on someone else trampling around inside her own launch. Inside, the layout of things wasn’t so unfamiliar that Surt couldn’t work out the gist. There was lungstuff in the tanks and fuel enough in her belly to get us over to the other ship. Prozor and Tindouf went forward to familiarise themselves with the controls and navigation. I took out the lookstone again – I’d kept it with me all along – and swept out through the launch’s hull until I made out the Nightjammer again. She was much closer than a league now and it wouldn’t have taken much for us to jump across, if we’d trusted our legs. I studied her cruel dark lines, settling my gaze on the harpoon jutting from her front and thinking of the awful cruelty Bosa had inflicted on Garval.