Revenger 9780575090569

by Alastair Reynolds

  It was even worse luck for her that she wasn’t quite dead. The spike had gone right through her, from the small of her back to her belly, but it was a narrow wound and it had sealed itself pretty thoroughly. She’d have died if we dragged her off it, so after she had dealt with Garval, Prozor found a yardknife and sawed right through the last three spans of the spike, and we brought Bosa back inside the Nightjammer with that thing still skewering her.

  We carried her to the medical room of the Nightjammer, the box of horrors where Bosa did her brain surgery. I’ll say this for the place: it was clean, and she’d plundered a lovely set of drills and knives and saws and so on from the ships she fell on.

  She wasn’t going to live. That was clear. But we removed most of her suit, got lungstuff into her, stopped her bleeding, sealed the wound as best we could. Not out of niceness, no. There wasn’t an atom of niceness left in any of our heads, not for her, and especially not in mine. Having your own sister put a blade to your throat, and knowing it was Bosa that turned her that way, will burn niceness out of the gentlest cove.

  I laid it out for her.

  ‘You’re going to die, Bosa. I’ve got your ship and I’ve diced your crew into cubes. If there was one of ’em still alive I’d pluck his eyes out and feed them to you like grapes. But there isn’t. Just Adrana, and although you started turning her, you didn’t finish the job.’

  It was hard for her to speak. Her eyes were gummy, her throat raw, and we had to keep putting the lungstuff back into her just to get any sense out of her gob.

  But she managed this: ‘I turned her, Fura. I turned her and it’s too late to undo what I started. You can kill me, but all I’ve done is line another Bosa up to stand in my place.’

  I didn’t want to hear that, not now. So I changed the tack of our chinwag and said: ‘Tell me about the quoins. What did Adrana mean, they’re the souls of the dead?’

  ‘Ask her yourself.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘There was a war,’ Bosa said, after another glug of lungstuff. ‘A long time ago. Not one of ours. One of theirs. Aliens. It just spilled over into the Congregation, between one of our Occupations.’

  Prozor, who was behind me, said: ‘Which aliens?’

  ‘None we know of. No name we’ve got for ’em. All they left us to remember them by is the quoins. They were slaughtered, you see. Driven to extinction. And when the end was nearly upon them, they took their own souls and squeezed them into quoins, and they’re still inside. It’s not money. It was never money.’ She forced her mouth into a half-smile. ‘Just recordings. The more bars, the more souls there are inside. Hundreds, thousands of them. And they’re not just patterns, like letters on a tomb. They’re frozen, yes. But they can live again.’

  I was listening to words bubble out of a dying woman who was mad long before she’d been spiked on her own ship, and if I had one grain of sense in me I’d have ignored every one of those words.

  But sense was never my strong point.

  I asked: ‘What do the other aliens want with them?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Bosa said. ‘Not the Crawlies, or the Clackers or the Hardshells. They just want to gather them up and sell them on. They’re just the brokers. There’s someone else out there, some other aliens we don’t even know about. It’s them the quoins are for.’

  ‘The ones who were slaughtered?’ Prozor asked.

  ‘The ones who did the slaughtering. They want the quoins, so they can get at the souls and pull them out again.’

  ‘To make them live again?’

  ‘To put them through more torments. To keep tormenting them. To keep them in agony until the Old Sun’s just a cinder, and even then they wouldn’t stop.’ Her mouth cracked wider, eager to get something across. ‘But I could stop them, Fura. I could do a good thing. Steal the quoins before they ever got to the banks, and keep them out of circulation. There’s a world out there, a bauble, where . . .’ But she coughed, and blood came out of her mouth in a fine red spray, stinging my eyes. ‘I was trying to do a good thing, you see. A good thing. I couldn’t take on the banks, couldn’t take on the aliens . . . but I could do this one thing. If I saved even one quoin from them, that was good, wasn’t it?’

  So this was where all my travels and adventures had brought me. To be next to Bosa Sennen, and have her beg me to set her conscience straight.

  And I thought about it. Whatever she had ended up, after all the faces she had worn, was it possible it had all begun with a desire to set right what was wrong? Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty? And did the fact of that kindness excuse any part of her crimes, or just put a different shade behind them, like hanging an ugly picture on a different wall?

  ‘You said there was a bauble.’

  She looked at me with something like humour. ‘I did, didn’t I. But I wouldn’t be Bosa if I gave away her secrets too easily, would I?’

  ‘I own your ship now. I’ll find out anything I want.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dwell on those quoins too hard, if I were you. You might start seeing things Bosa’s way.’ She reached for me then, quicker than I’d have credited anyone in her condition was capable of. But it wasn’t to strike me, or do me harm. She got her fingers around my jaw, gentle-like, and angled my face a bit closer to hers, so she could see me more easily. ‘Especially not with the glowy in you like it is. Shines bright in you, it does. I bet you already feel the fire of it, the anger it puts into your veins. The odd notions it puts into your skull.’

  ‘If it’s in me, you’re the reason.’ I pulled her fingers off my jaw with my tin ones, and let her hand float limply down to her side.

  ‘I suppose gratitude’s in order, in that case.’

  I turned from her. ‘We’re not done, unless you’ve the good sense to die on me.’

  Her tone was interested, almost fond. ‘What’re you intending, Fura? You’ve got a pretty ship now, with pretty black sails, and if you took my crew then yours can’t be too shabby. But you need a plan. Every cove needs a plan.’

  We’d have found her special room no matter what, but she’d done her best to make it secret. It was as big as any cargo hold on any ship I’d known, and all it contained was the glass and bronzey metalwork of the bottles, and the green fluid and grey-green flesh inside them. From the door, I stared into its gloomy green depths for several long minutes before willing myself inside. The bottles went back and back, on both sides of the room. There were thirty in total, and twenty-three of them had bodies in. The others were empty, clean, waiting.

  We never got to the bottom of exactly how many of her there’d been. Clearly there were twenty-three Bosa Sennens before Illyria Rackamore, but whether was that the start of it, or just the bodies she had on this ship, we had no way of knowing. They weren’t all alike, not at all, and they weren’t all the same age when they ended up pickled. But I picked out a sort of sketchy likeness between them, and it wasn’t because they were family. It was just that Bosa chose her successors according to her tastes, and she had a certain eye for it. It didn’t take much imagination to see Illyria Rackamore floating pale-eyed and still in one of the now-empty bottles, and it didn’t take much more to see Adrana occupying the one after that.

  After that – who would it have been?

  I caught a smear of my own reflection in the glass of the nearest bottle, and it was like my own face was already floating there, looking out just like all the others.

  I wasn’t like her, I told myself. I’d changed a little, and there was a spur in me, and maybe something in my eyes that wasn’t too welcome, but that still put a million cold leagues between what I was and what she’d become.

  I clung to that. I had to.

  We had taken the ship and that was better than not taking it, especially given the state of the Queenie. But when Surt cast her eye over the essentials of the Nig
htjammer, taking in what she could given the size and strangeness of any ship, the news wasn’t as peachy as I’d hoped.

  ‘They did a cruel thing to us, Fura,’ she said, touching a finger to her bandaged scalp. ‘A cruel old thing. When they knew it wasn’t going their way, what was left of her crew made a knotty mess of her control gear. Tearing this out, tearing that out. I know we didn’t give them much time, what with all the murdering, but Bosa must have drilled her orders into ’em pretty deeply. If there was a chance of the Nightjammer being taken, they was to rip her living guts out, and they knew exactly where and what needed to be done. Yards and yards of wiring ripped out or severed, and I ain’t the foggiest how we’ll go about knitting it back together.’

  I nodded, refusing to be too cowed by this news. After all we’d been through, not having the odd setback would have been the queer thing. Funny it had come to me to be the level-headed one, I thought, seeing the way past our immediate difficulties when everyone else was losing their nerve.

  ‘It’s just control gear, Surt. I know it looks bad now, but we don’t need to move anywhere in a hurry and once you’ve had some rest I think you’ll see it more as a challenge than an impediment.’

  ‘I hope you’re right about that, Fura.’

  ‘I’ve faith in your abilities. I’ve faith in all our abilities.’

  ‘You don’t sound the way you did,’ Surt mused. ‘Not how you were before we got to the Fang, anyway. I always knew you was educated, with those thousand books of yours, but now you ain’t afraid to sound like it either.’

  She was right, I realised. But it hadn’t been anything intentional on my part. Just a mask that had begun to slip a little. I suppose some part of me knew that, however we went on from here, this crew – if it ever was a crew – was going to need a captain again. I suppose it was presumptuous to think of myself stepping into that vacancy, but then again, I’d all but taken the decisions for Trusko when he was alive, whether the cove knew it or not.

  ‘Surt . . .’ I began. Then stopped, before I put a thought out there that made me look foolish.

  ‘What is it, Fura?’

  ‘Oh, nothing – just a silly idea that crossed my mind for a moment.’

  ‘You might as well spit it out, I always says.’

  ‘You mentioned that the control gear was damaged. That’s mainly wiring, isn’t it? I was thinking . . . well, I know this will sound ridiculous. But a robot’s body’s mainly wiring as well, isn’t it? I know there are arms and legs and wheels and so on, but if a robot could operate those, couldn’t it operate sail-control gear, ions and so on?’

  ‘I won’t say it ain’t been tried, Fura. But robots aren’t always smart, and for the most part people are cheaper. That’s why ships are run the way they’re run.’

  ‘I know, but we’re not exactly dealing with a conventional ship, are we? Or a conventional crew. And Paladin’s at least as clever and resourceful as any person I’ve ever known.’

  ‘But that head ain’t said a word to you since you tried it. You told me.’

  ‘That’s true. But Paladin was dead once, and he came back to me. There’s no reason he can’t come back a second time, is there?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong cove.’

  ‘No, I’m asking exactly the right one. You know robots better than most, Surt, and you’re not about to give up on this ship. If I gave you his head, and trusted you to connect him up to the Nightjammer, as best you could . . .’

  ‘I suppose a robot could find his way around blockages, if it had to. They’re sly at that sort of thing.’

  ‘Or at least help you repair the damage, by tracing what works and what doesn’t. You may as well try it, Surt: we’ve little left to lose.’

  ‘I’ll wire ’im up. But don’t raise your hopes.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got confidence in you. This is our ship now, Surt, and we’ll make her fly.’

  ‘Mm.’ She gave me a doubtful look. ‘The question is, what do we do with it? I suppose now you’ve got your sister back, you’ll want to be returning to Mazarile.’

  ‘Some of us will have outstanding business in the Congregation,’ I told her. ‘Some of us won’t. But for the time being we’d best keep clear of the worlds. Bosa spent her life skulking in the margins because she knew she’d be torn apart if she ever got too close to civilisation. That’s how we’ll need to play it as well, to begin with. This ship might be ours now, but the shape of her still puts the shivers into the people, and I don’t want to stake my life on explaining ourselves over the squawk or the bones.’ I sounded sure of myself, and perhaps I was, but the truth of it was I’d barely given a thought to our future until she’d pressed me on it. ‘There’s a lot to keep us busy, Surt. We’re a good crew now, but we can become a better one. And there are plenty of baubles out here to cut our teeth on. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Crack a few of them, stuff our hold with a prize or two, and then consider our options. Bosa said there are quoins out there somewhere, a whole world stashed full of them, and someone needs to do something about all those poor dead souls, if that’s what they are. But first we need a ship we can sail, and we’ve some work to do on that score.’

  ‘I’ll see to your robot,’ Surt said.

  I smiled at her. It was good to have colleagues you could rely on, but even better when you could see the shapes of friendships still to form. ‘Good. And when you’re done, that bargain of ours still stands.’

  I went to see Adrana. Surt had given her a sedative, but she was coming out of it now, regarding me through narrowed, gummy eyes as I settled myself at her side. She was bound to her bed, just as Garval had been, and I thought of how our mutual fates had been spun together. There was a bandage around her head, but I was assured that Prozor’s crossbow hadn’t done any lasting harm.

  ‘What happened, Fura?’ she asked. ‘Why have they got me tied up like this?’

  ‘Do you not remember?’

  ‘I remember being in the bone room. You coming. Not much after that.’

  I put my warm hand on hers. ‘You tried to hurt me. I don’t think you really meant it, deep down – it was Bosa, acting through you. She must have started to turn you, and that’s not your fault, and I’m sure you did your best to fight her. But what’s done is done, and now I can’t be sure that you won’t hurt me again, or try to take this ship back for Bosa.’

  She lapped this up as if it was just any matter-of-fact business between sisters. I suppose being tied up meant she didn’t have much choice but to take me seriously.

  ‘She did try turning me. I knew it was happening. But I thought I was strong enough to keep her out.’

  ‘I imagine they all felt that way. We found her room, you see – the special room with all the bottled bodies she didn’t have any use for any more. I can’t believe any of them ever set out to become Bosa, but it happened, and it would have happened to you, given time. She’d settled on you as her successor.’

  ‘Is she really gone?’

  I glanced away. ‘She’s not a concern to us, if that’s what you mean. We found her, in the end. But it was only because Prozor wanted to give Garval a decent resting place. We found Bosa injured, but still alive.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘She’ll die. Probably before we’ve worked out how to operate this ship, and certainly before we sail for anywhere interesting. But until then it pleases me to keep her breathing. She has limits, I know, and if there’s information I feel I really need . . .’ But I pushed my darker thoughts aside with a smile. ‘It’s you that I’m concerned about, not her.’

  ‘You fear me?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Good. I’m not sure what I make of you, Fura. The glowy’s really shining out of you today.’

  ‘So they say.’ I used my tin fingers to stroke a knot out of her hair, as gently as I could. ‘I’
ll keep it in me, at least for now. I’m not sorry about what I’ve become. Sorry about some of the things that happened, and maybe one or two of the things I had to do. But what I’ve turned into? No. I’m proud of what I am. Proud of being Fura Ness. And I’d sleep more easily if I knew my sister was on my side.’

  ‘I will be.’

  ‘I think you will, but time’s going to have to be the judge of that. I’ll know, though. I’ll know when I look in your eyes and there’s nothing left of Bosa in them.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t leave me?’

  ‘A little splinter of her won’t hurt, I suppose. In either of us.’ I went to fetch her some water, and she drank it gratefully. ‘The ship’s in a bad way, I don’t mind saying. But we’ll fix her, and maybe Paladin will help us.’

  Her eyes brightened. ‘That old thing? Paladin’s with us?’

  ‘I brought him. The bit that matters, anyway. I know you never cared for Paladin, but there was more to him than either of us knew. He might be the thing that helps us knit this ship back together again.’

  Adrana nodded. There was a lot we still had to say to each other, but there would be time for that.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘They think I meant to go straight home. But I’ve got the spur in me for something different. Just for a little while, until we get our bearings. There are wrongs that need setting right, things to do with quoins, and if half of what Bosa told me is lies, I still want to find out what the rest of it means. And I’ve been inside two baubles, Adrana. Don’t mind admitting I was terrified, most of the time. The thought of being locked inside one, when the fields went back up . . . but there’s something else, too. An itch, I suppose you’d call it. I want to see a third one now. And a fourth. And I’ll take the risks, because I saw the look in Trusko’s eyes when he found the Ghostie treasure. I want to know what that thrill feels like.’