Revenger 9780575090569

by Alastair Reynolds

  If Bosa had died by the Ghostie gun then there was justice in that death, but not nearly enough for my liking. Too quick, too painless, too clean. I preferred the idea of her falling away from the wreck, watching her lungstuff reserves dwindle away, the cold and the terror chewing into her marrow. I didn’t see why Bosa Sennen deserved either forgiveness or mercy.

  ‘We’re ready to cut loose,’ Prozor said. ‘Brace for rockets.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, realising we were about to make fools of ourselves.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We still need surprise,’ I said. ‘The rest of ’em have to believe this is Bosa, coming back with her prize. But we can’t squawk, they’ll know it’s us.’ I reached for a spare lungstuff tank, knowing I’d need it. ‘Wait for me.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Prozor asked.

  ‘The bones,’ I said.

  I left the launch and crossed back into the ruined bowels of the Queenie, and then found my way to the skull. I spun the wheel on the door without thinking about it, and that wasn’t very bright on my part, because there was still lungstuff in the bone room. It all came out in one go, and if I hadn’t been suited the force of that door hitting me would have left me for dead. The effect of the decompression was still making the skull jiggle around on its wires even when all that was left was vacuum.

  I sealed the door behind me. Still with my suit and helmet on, I took that spare lungstuff tank and opened its valve all the way it would go, flooding the room. I didn’t need the lungstuff with my suit on, but I couldn’t take my helmet off without it, and with the helmet on I couldn’t slip on the neural bridge.

  I was worried that the decompression had damaged the skull, and perhaps it had. The twinkly seemed more subdued, just a few lights glowing out of those bony cavities.

  It didn’t matter. I didn’t need much out of it now.

  ‘Adrana,’ I said, putting every hope I’d ever had into her name. ‘It’s Fura. I’m still alive. We got Bosa’s boarding party. Killed them all, and Bosa too; most likely.’

  When she didn’t answer, I started to think the worst. Anything could have happened on the Nightjammer while we were engaged with our own slice of the action. Perhaps her crew had taken a sudden dislike to their new Bone Reader, for the trouble that had come their way since Adrana’s recruitment.

  Then she came through.

  ‘Fura!’

  ‘We’re coming over. We’ve taken her launch, and we’re riding it over to the Nightjammer. But you’ve got to act as if she’s still alive. Tell the rest of ’em there’s a problem with the squawk, but that Bosa’s on the launch. Make it seem like she’s beaten us, like she’s jubilant; crowing with her victory. Can you do it, Adrana? It won’t take us long to complete the crossing, and we’ve got some work to do before we dock—’

  ‘I’ll . . . I’ll do what I can.’ The doubt in her came through the skull as if we were sitting holding hands in the parlour. ‘You’re so close now, Fura. I can’t believe we’re nearly together again. Please be careful.’

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ I said. ‘You only have to do a little bit more, and then everything’s going to be all right.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You’ll succeed. I know. I’ve got faith in us both.’

  And I did too, though I couldn’t say where that faith had come from, or how deep it went. Just that it was the only thing that was going to get both of us through that day, so we might as well make the best of it.

  I signed off from the bones and set off back through the Queenie to the launch. I was halfway there when I remembered what I’d left in my quarters, and although time wasn’t exactly on my side there wasn’t a power in all the worlds that would have stopped me making that detour.

  I found the broken head, the glass dome of it, and I cradled it to me like it was my own newborn, because I wouldn’t have been here otherwise and I owed Paladin more than abandonment on this wreck.

  ‘You’ll speak again,’ I said, making a promise between the two of us. ‘I know it. We ain’t done with each other yet.’

  The other thing I took was Rackamore’s Book of Worlds.

  The launch was still there, Prozor’s thumb twitching on the thruster control. As soon as I was through the lock she poured on the rockets and we made smart work of crossing over to the Nightjammer, doing it with the kind of swagger her crew would be expecting. That made it tricky for us, too, because we had to get out of our suits and back into the Ghostie armour. But the armour obliged in that, seeming to want to get back on us almost without our bidding.

  My heart was in my throat the whole way over, though. I’d no way of contacting Adrana, no way of knowing how cleverly she’d been able to dupe them.

  All I can say is, they weren’t expecting us.

  Not at all.

  When the launch returned, its silence made perfect sense to them. There might be no operable squawk on either the launch or the wreck of the Queenie, but Bosa had their prize, and was coming back with it. Open the locks and prepare to cut out on ions and main sail, boys and girls.

  That was what they had been told, anyway. What they got, when we docked, was a quick and bloody tuition in all the forms of mutilation possible with the armour and weapons of the Ghosties, and they had nothing that made a difference to us.

  I’ll say this for us: we exercised restraint. It wasn’t that we were feeling charitable, or in any sort of forgiving mood. None of that, not after all she’d dished out to us. But the Queenie was gone and we still needed a ship if we were ever to get home, wherever that might turn out to be. The Nightjammer wasn’t top of the list of ships I might have chosen, but it was all we had.

  So we took her, without too much damage, and it was glorious, and at the end of it all there wasn’t one of us that wasn’t proud to have sailed on the Queenie, under Captain Trusko.

  ‘She’s ours now,’ I said. ‘This ship. Whatever wrongs she’s done, they were never the ship’s fault. And we can start putting her right.’

  ‘There’s one wrong I ought to settle first of all,’ Prozor said. ‘For you as well, Fura. We didn’t do right by Garval, when she was one of us. But we can treat her properly now. I know it’s too late for her, but I ain’t spending a minute more on this ship with her stuck on the front like that.’

  ‘I’d help you,’ I said, sorry that I hadn’t given more thought to Garval myself. ‘You know that, don’t you? But I’ve got to find my sister.’

  Find Adrana, and tell her the hardest news of all.

  She was in the Nightjammer’s bone room when we took the ship, and she’d had the good sense to stay there while the bloodletting was in progress. None of us knew where the room was, of course, but – as I’d learned by then – it was in the general rule of things to find the bone room about as far from the noisy parts of the ship as you could manage, and as far enough inside as possible. Looking somewhere near the middle was always a good bet, and if you worked methodically out from the centre it wouldn’t be long before you found your bones, no matter how cleverly your crew had tried to conceal their most precious asset.

  Bosa did her best, I’ll give her credit for that. The door and locking wheel were hidden behind a false partition that sprang back into place after you’d gone through. But I’d have ripped that ship apart with my fingernails if I’d needed to.

  I knocked on the door, using the pattern we’d agreed, and I was turning the wheel with my own hands when I felt Adrana put her own muscles into the effort. The wheel spun until it was a blur, and then the door swung open, and we were together again.

  I’ve put words down on paper, tens of thousands of them, more words than there are worlds with names, and if you’ve followed my red scribblings this far – and made allowance for what happened to my hand – then you’ll have some notion of all the things that had happened to me since I last saw my sister. I’d watc
hed her being taken on the Monetta, dragged away from me on the other side of a door, and I’d suffered all the weeks after that not knowing if she was still alive. I’d seen the decimation of Rack’s crew, the unkind business Bosa had wrought on them, and I’d seen the extents I’d go to to keep my own heart beating. I’d seen Trevenza Reach and the insides of baubles – which is more than a fraction of coves will ever be able to say. I’d seen all the worlds from the outside of the Congregation and got some sense of this little glimmery puddle of life we called the Thirteenth Occupation. I’d seen what the Ghosties left us and held catchcloth and lookstone for myself. I’d nattered to aliens and robots, and found a hardness in myself that made me a little jumpy at the thought of what I’d become. I’d turned from my own home and left my own father to die, and although it made me choke to think of those things – and what I’d done in Neural Alley, in the Limb Broker’s – I couldn’t say I regretted the steps that had brought me to this moment. Not the place they’d carried me to, either, and not the person they’d made me into.

  Bosa Sennen never set out to turn me into something I wasn’t, but she did, and if I ever felt like sparing her a spit of gratitude it would be for that.

  Adrana didn’t recognise me at first, in the bone room’s low red light. It wasn’t the armour. I’d shrugged it off by then and just taking it off me felt like relieving myself of a dark cloak of guilt and bad intentions. No, it was what I looked like without the armour that had her befuddled. She jerked back a little, and I couldn’t blame her for that. It wasn’t just the glowy, or the tin hand, or the hard set of my face, which was starting to look stern and angry even when I didn’t mean it. It was the fury in my eyes, a little glint of madness in both of them, and the fact that I didn’t mind in the least.

  We didn’t speak, not at first. We just hugged each other, hard, knowing it was real, knowing we wouldn’t be pulled apart again. I heard noises from the rest of the ship, but they might as well have been in another universe for all I cared. I’d got my sister back.

  We didn’t need to say much, not at first, and we didn’t need alien skulls to flash our thoughts to each other. There had always been a language between us that didn’t need words, one that had nothing to do with dead aliens or the bony gubbins they left us. It was just that we were sisters and we knew each other better than any one else could.

  It was a long time before Adrana pulled back from me enough to take me in as a whole.

  ‘What did they do to you?’ she asked.

  And I gave the only honest answer I could. ‘They didn’t do anything. I did it myself. I knew what I was doing. I’m Fura Ness and I chose to become what I am.’

  ‘If I didn’t know you already,’ Adrana said, ‘I think you’d frighten me.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘They say the glowy changes you.’

  ‘Lots of things change you. If it’s in my grey already, it can stay there. I like what I am now.’ I flexed my fingers in her hand. ‘Even these tin fingers. They’re not so bad. I can feel more through them with every day.’ I paused. ‘We’ve taken the Nightjammer. It’s ours now, not Bosa’s. We own this ship, and we can do what we like with it.’ I knew I was glossing over a thousand hard things we’d need to do before the ship was truly ours, but I also knew we’d find our way around every problem, one at a time, because we were a crew now.

  ‘Do you think it’ll get us back to Mazarile?’ Adrana asked.

  ‘It could,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think there’s anything there for us now.’ And I knew I had to get the truth out now, before it festered any more and started poisoning what was between us. ‘He’s gone, Adrana. Father’s gone. He died.’

  ‘Died?’ she asked softly.

  ‘He wasn’t well when we left. We knew that. After I got back, it just got worse. But you mustn’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Blame myself?’

  I’d said the wrong words, and once I’d have taken more pains to spare her feelings, but they were out there now so the best I could do was soften them. ‘It was a strain, all the worry we put him through. He started telling himself you were dead, because it was easier than clinging to the hope that he’d see you again. I read your obituary, Adrana. Just before I left.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  My words jammed in my throat, but I forced them out. ‘The morning I left. Paladin came with me, and . . .’

  ‘The morning you left. Oh, Fura. It must have been terrible.’

  And she pulled her head closer to mine and I thought there was sisterly kindness in it, as if she were going to hug me so near that our tears mingled and we got the salt of them in our mouths. Tell me it wasn’t my fault either, and I wasn’t to blame myself any more than she was.

  But I felt a cold edge on my throat.

  ‘He died, or you left him to die? Which was it, Fura?’

  I tried to ease back, but whatever blade she had against my neck stayed put.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘You think I didn’t know? Bosa told me weeks ago. She picks up scraps, transmissions, whenever she can. Obituaries. He wasn’t much, our father, but he got his paragraph. And Bosa hoped the news would turn me nearer to her, and she was right.’

  ‘She didn’t turn you,’ I said, hardly speaking the words in case she cut my throat. ‘If she had, you’d have warned her about the trap.’

  ‘Oh, I considered it,’ Adrana said. ‘But then I thought: what’s more useful to me? Tipping off Bosa, or seeing what I can get out of her walking into it? She told me I was going to be the one, you see. Not for a while, not until I’d stopped being able to pick up the whispers, but after that, I’d be the one she favoured. That’s how it works, you see – how it’s always worked. Bosa picks the one to follow her, the one with the aptitude. It wasn’t a hard choice, Fura! I could read, and put two numbers together, and that already put me at the front of the line. But I also had her cleverness, she said, and I could be sly when I needed it, and she knew I’d soon see things the way she did.’

  I had to keep her talking, so I said: ‘And how did she see things, exactly?’

  ‘Bosa’s not bad, Fura. That’s just how they make her seem. But it’s Bosa who’s been doing right all these years, not the rest of ’em. It was Bosa that worked out the quoins, and if the truth of that doesn’t cool your blood, nothing will. They’re souls, Fura. The souls of the dead. Only they’re not dead, exactly.’

  I heard what she was saying, but the words weren’t making any sense to me. Not then, anyway.

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Now? Now’s simple. You say you’ve finished off her crew? Then that’s spared me a lot of trouble, especially if you’ve brought me a new one just in time. I could keep reading the bones, but why would I need to, now you’re here? You can be my new Bone Reader. You’re as good as I ever was, I know – just a little behind me.’

  ‘She’s got other plans.’

  I heard the voice, and then the click as she released the catch on her crossbow.

  ‘Prozor,’ Adrana said, in a casual sort of way, as if it wasn’t more than hours since they’d spoken.

  She was halfway into the bone room, one hand on the crossbow, the other bracing against the doorway.

  ‘Knife off her throat, girlie.’

  I felt the cold edge pull away. I drew the first proper breath since she’d put that blade on me. I was just about to say something, offering some words of explanation or excuse for what my sister had done, but Prozor must have decided things were plain enough as they stood. She flipped the crossbow around single-handed and crunched the stock down on Adrana’s scalp.

  Adrana softened next to me, gave a sigh and started drifting out of my arms.

  ‘Don’t kill her,’ I said.

  ‘What we do or don’t do with her can wait,’ Prozor said, reaching in to pluck the knife from Adrana’s l
imp fingers. ‘In the meantime I thought you’d care to know that I found Garval. It didn’t take long, knowing where she was. But I found something else, too.’

  I didn’t understand.

  Not until she showed me.

  We’d have found her sooner or later, I suppose, but she’d have been dead by then and it pleased me handsomely to have her still alive. When Bosa had been blown out of the wreck of the Queenie, it had been her good fortune – slim as it was – that our ship had been lined up nicely with the Nightjammer, so that the force of the blast set her crossing over from one to the other, without needing any tricky skill on her part. To begin with, I was sure, there’d have been a deep dread in whatever was left of her heart – the dread of falling into the endless Empty, with only the dwindling capacity of her suit to keep her alive. But then that dread would have softened to hope, and then delight, if she was capable of such a thing, that her course was perfectly true and guaranteed to take her back to the Nightjammer. Oh, she had a surplus of speed, it was true, and no choice about how hard or soft she was going to hit the ship’s hull, but her odds of survival had just gone up immeasurably. And since she had good expectations of getting back to the Nightjammer before any of us, she could alert her crew, bring the rest of her guns onto the wreck of the Queenie, and finish us off in a volley of spite and temper, even as she sacrificed any remaining thought of taking our bones.

  But it wasn’t to be.

  So nicely were our two ships lined up, you see, that once Bosa left the Queenie, it was only ever a matter of time before she found herself driven onto the spike sticking out of the bow of the Nighjammer, the same bowsprit spike that she’d made Garval’s last resting place. And she’d have had time enough to realise it, too, as her own ship got bigger and bigger in her visor.