Shadow Captain

by Alastair Reynolds

  Lagganvor has gone to ground, with my quoins. If he’s wise he’ll never mention my name again. But no one wise crosses me in the first place. He’ll blurt, eventually, and I can’t have that. Besides, I wouldn’t mind having my eye back.

  A picture was forming in my mind from these scraps. I only had the outline of it, but that was sufficient. Bosa had been forced to do some sort of business with the edges of civilisation, some rare but necessary transaction. Not in person, obviously, but through willing intermediaries. Lagganvor was either a crew member, or some agent she thought she could trust. She had given him quoins and sent him off to do her bidding. And he had disappeared, absconding with her money and the risk of exposing her secrets.

  What followed was Bosa recounting the steps she had taken to find Lagganvor again. Gathering intelligence by her usual furtive means, listening to rumours and skull-whispers. Lagganvor had wronged her, and she was never one to let bygones be bygones. She wanted to find him again—silence him, most likely, with a side-order of cruelty, just so no one else got any silly ideas.

  Find him, torture him, kill him.

  From what I could gather from the entries, Bosa had been determined to catch up with Lagganvor, but had at the same time been distracted by other, equally pressing matters. One of them, I quickly realised, had been settling an old grievance—or at least unfinished business—with Pol Rackamore. That had led to one thing, and then another, and eventually it led to Bosa herself dying, with Lagganvor still out there somewhere.

  I wondered if he knew his good fortune, not to have those black sails on his back.

  Then something else caught my eye and I had to stare at it for a few seconds just to make sure of my wits.

  Fura had written down some of Bosa’s possible best-guesses for where Lagganvor might be hiding out. They were in a column, etched down in Fura’s heavy, laboured hand, each pressed a bit more deeply into the paper.

  Most of the names meant nothing to me.

  Proscle

  Rustrell

  Zancer

  Scillmouth

  But one I did know, especially lately. It was the last in the list, and my sister had underlined and circled it in her special ink:

  Wheel Strizzardy

  I closed the journals and made sure they were put back on her desk exactly as I had found them.

  “Paladin, listen carefully to me.”

  “I am listening, Miss Adrana.”

  “I will not ask you to lie. You have not lied to me, to the best of my knowledge, and I respect that. But unless Fura asks a direct question of you, I would ask that you volunteer no knowledge of this conversation, or of my having been in this cabin.”

  “That is an unusual request, Miss Adrana.”

  “I accept that it is. But since I am not asking you to state a deliberate falsehood, nor to withhold information if it is requested of you, I am fully confident that it is within your capabilities.”

  “Might I ask your intentions?”

  I had felt cold spying on Fura’s writing, but something hot was rising in me now. I could see how the rest of the crew and I had been turned into unwitting accomplices while thinking we were going against her wishes. That story about the Bosa-hating cult on Kathromil might have been real, but Fura had dropped it into her conversation knowing exactly the effect it would have on us. My devious, deceitful sister was playing us all like shadow-puppets.

  I thought of the time I had pressed a knife to her throat, when she first found me in the bone room during the fight with Bosa. The anger of that moment flared back into me. Rather than willing it away I allowed it to linger, letting it warm me from inside; a golden glow filling my ribcage.

  “I’m considering them,” I said.

  I had no plans to kill her for this treachery, or even to punish her badly. She was still my sister. But some hurtful things were going to have to come out. If it was the glowy making her act in this secretive, distrustful way, I would make fair allowances. But it would only double my resolve that something needed to be done about it, before I lost Fura for good.

  I double-checked to make sure her things were undisturbed before leaving the room. She would learn of my presence there in the end, but—with Paladin’s hoped-for cooperation—it would be my choice when that happened, not hers.

  I closed the connecting door and lingered in the control room, looking at the Glass Armillary again and musing on how Fura had played me so skilfully, setting me up as her instrument to convince the others. I felt disgusted with myself, as if I were in some sense complicit.

  “Oh, Fura,” I said. “How did we end up like this?”

  I heard footsteps again, clanging on the outside of the hull. Not just one pair of footsteps but several of them, moving quickly. I took my leave of the control room and went back into the galley, planning to put on a pleasant face and give away no trace of what I had learned.

  Tindouf came into the galley, looking agitated. The knotting of his brow and the set of his jaw made me think of a spoilt baby on the point of mewling.

  “Is something wrong with the ions?” I asked, wondering what could be troubling the big man.

  “Not that, Adrana, but they’s comin’ in quicker than I likes. It’s not near the ends of their shifts, and that portents somethin’ bad. I don’t cares for it.”

  “Have you heard anything on the suit-to-ship squawk?”

  He shook his head. “Like most of the thingses on this ship, it only works when it has a mind to.”

  The footsteps were clanging around the hull in the direction of the main lock. Tindouf and I nodded to each other, a wordless understanding that we had best get to the lock promptly. It was under the galley, aft of the docking bay, squeezed between a storage room and some of the internal machinery related to the sail-control gear. It was a squeeze getting there, even if you were not suited, but I knew my way around the nooks and crannies of the ship.

  By the time we got to the lock, my ears had already given a pop as the ship bled a bit of lungstuff into space. That meant that the party was coming back in quickly, not bothering with the usual courtesies. We had plenty of reserve lungstuff, but that sort of haste was never a good sign. Portents somethin’ bad, I thought, Tindouf’s words echoing through my skull.

  The main lock was big enough to take four people at a time, and all of them were in it when the door opened. I took a quick inventory of what I saw. Fura was all right. She was already taking off her helmet. Surt and Prozor were all right as well, near as I could judge. But something had happened to Strambli.

  They were carrying her, and blood was bubbling around them, a scarlet froth of it that seemed to be originating from the lower part of her leg. I swallowed hard at the sight of it. Blood still discomfited me. I had seen prodigious amounts of it floating through the ship after Fura’s ambush, but as with many things connected with those events, I had pushed them into the dingiest corner of my conscious mind.

  “What happened?” I asked, directing my question at Fura.

  “I squawked. Where the hell were you?”

  “We didn’t pick up any squawk,” I said, waiting for Tindouf to give a nod of agreement. “But we’re here, aren’t we? What happened?”

  “I think they shot us again,” Surt said, her voice coming through the grille under her helmet. “Took out the spritsail, sixty leagues from the ship. None of us were anywhere near it, but the yardage was under tension and it snapped back and caught Strambli in its coils. Lucky it didn’t go clean through her, but she slipped with that Ghostie knife—”

  “Didn’t … slip,” Strambli said, grunting out the words, and although she was in obvious distress, I was glad that she was able to talk because that meant she was awake.

  “Help us get her to the surgery,” Prozor said, sounding breathless.

  Tindouf and I took over from Prozor and Surt, giving them time to get their helmets off and recover some of the energy they had obviously spent getting Strambli back to the lock. Fortunately it was o
nly a short distance to the sick-bay, along a narrow passageway tucked behind the sail-control gear, and into a small but well-equipped medical room located immediately beneath the coil-gun batteries and a little forward of the bone room.

  Bosa had kept a surgery but that had only ever been its secondary purpose. She had called it the “kindness room” and it was where she dished out most of her punishments, especially those that involved drugs, electricity, knives or some other manifestation of cruelty. It was also where she administered the treatments that helped twist a person’s loyalty or shatter their old notions of what was right and wrong. Some of that involved surgery and some of it also depended on electricity and drugs, but the one constancy was that there was nothing charitable about it. I had spent too much time in that room to wish to linger in it unnecessarily: days and weeks in which she whispered into my head, trying to turn me to her way of thinking, trying to push a corrupting shard of her own soul into my own, where it might lodge permanently, days and weeks in which she pressed electrodes to my skin or injected me with burning fluids. Just being near that room brought those long hours back; being inside it was enough to summon cruel and intricate thoughts, ideas of punishment and malice that felt both foreign and fully a part of me. She had treated me quite well, too, seeing in me her natural successor, and therefore keeping her physical punishments to a minimum. Others had not been nearly so fortunate. If she wished to make an example of someone, some poor cove she did not require alive or whole or sane, she would put them in the kindness room and visit unspeakable acts upon them. Their moans or screams or whimpers would radiate out from the kindness room via networks of speaking-tubes, feeding into every part of the ship.

  But it was also a surgery, and if it held items that could be put to sensible employment, it would have been wasteful of us not to make use of them. So we had blocked off those speaking-tubes, thrown out or dismantled all the contraptions and instruments that had no purpose beyond torture, and retained the rest so we could treat such minor injuries and ailments as befell us.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I told Strambli as we got her onto the long, leather-clad couch that served as both bed and operating table.

  “Didn’t … slip,” Strambli repeated. “Not my fault. Knife twisted. Wouldn’t have happened if that sail-shot hadn’t …”

  “Were we really attacked?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Fura snapped, the glowy brightening around her eyes and temples. “And we’ll be dishing some of it back, if I have my way. Come to my quarters as soon as you’re done here.”

  “Where is the Ghostie stuff now?” I asked Prozor.

  “Still outside,” she said, helping remove Strambli’s suit piece by piece, even as the blood still frothed out of the leg wound. “Locked in that chest, just as if we were swappin’ shifts.”

  There was a box on the hull, welded there for the purposes of tool-storage while we were altering the look of Revenger. “Did you see it happen?” I asked, thinking they’d have been working in close proximity.

  But Prozor gave a sharp shake of her head. “No. I was off freein’ up some tangled riggin’, around the curve of the hull. When I came back I saw Strambli was in trouble. Did Paladin pick up anythin’ on the short-range sweeper?”

  “No, the first I knew of this was when you came back in.”

  “Lucky she didn’t decompress,” Fura said, her cold eyes meeting my own.

  “The Ghostie blade’s only a few atoms thick,” Prozor said. “So even though it went in deep, right through her suit, it only left a hairline gap when she pulled it out.”

  “I’m sorry, Strambli,” I said, and she gave a yelp of pain as I removed the damaged part of her suit leg. Under the pressure-tight armour she had several layers of fabric insulation, sewn with flexible tubes for heat regulation, and they were all sodden with blood. But the bleeding was easing, I decided, probably because the underlying wound was so clean and narrow.

  “This’ll help,” Surt said, drawing up a syringe from one of the medicine cabinets.

  “You sure you know what’s in that?” I whispered.

  Surt nodded, easing my fears that she was about to inject Strambli with one of Bosa’s punishment drugs. Prozor, Tindouf and Fura had got the upper part of Strambli’s suit off and Surt was able to peel away Strambli’s sleeve to get to the flesh of her upper arm. She injected her very competently, and a wave of relief passed through Strambli almost immediately, her eyes losing focus and then fluttering as she slipped into something blessedly close to unconsciousness.

  I leaned in to inspect the wound, now that the blood-saturated fabric was being peeled away. It was in her left leg, about halfway up the shin, a little to the outside of the imagined line running between kneecap and foot. It was about the length of my little finger and looked no worse than a long paper-cut.

  “It could be worse,” Surt said, in a gently questioning tone.

  “Yes. She’s still got the leg,” I answered. “But it’s the worst injury we’ve seen since we took over this ship and we can’t take any chances with it. The wound will have to be cleaned and stitched, and then we pray there’s no damage to bone, nerves or circulatory structures.”

  “Didn’t know you’d been to medical school,” Fura said.

  “I haven’t.” I looked at her for a long, brooding moment, tempted to confront her with what I had discovered in her quarters. “I’m just speaking common sense. There might be bits of suit fabric forced into the wound, and they’d need to come out before they cause any trouble. If Paladin still had his body he could scan the injury, but all we have left is his head.” Which has been doing some sly translating for you, I added silently.

  “I’ll clean it,” Surt said, fishing in the medicine cabinets for what she needed. “But I’ve never stitched anything.”

  “I’m no master of sail,” Tindouf said. “But I’ve done my share of stitchings. I’ll sews her up ’andsomely.” He thought about that for a few seconds. “But not so ’andsomely that she doesn’t have a scar and a story to talk about afterwards.” He looked down with a distant fondness at his own elaborately scarred and blemished knuckles. “We likes our scarses, we does.”

  “Just fix her,” Fura said, already turning from the patient.

  As she did so I noticed something in the battery of controls on her left sleeve, on the suit she had not yet removed.

  “You say you called in on the squawk?” I asked.

  She spun back to face me.

  “Yes, several times, and no one answered.”

  “You’re on the wrong setting,” I said, nodding at the controls. “Either it got knocked when you were going through the lock, or you forgot which one’s for the ship and which one’s for the launch.” I shrugged, content to have proven that Tindouf and I had not been sleeping on the job. “We guessed something was wrong when you all came in at once, ahead of time.”

  Fura screwed up her face in rage, but I had the sense that most of it was directed at her suit, not me.

  “Damn all this.”

  “Are you serious about retaliating?” I asked. “We don’t even know who we’d be shooting at, let alone where to aim.”

  “We soon will,” Fura said.

  9

  I met her in her quarters, as she had requested. She was at her desk, as composed as if nothing of the slightest consequence had happened. No attack, no wounding of Strambli, no intrusion by her sister into her supposedly private dealings. I wondered, under other circumstances, if some alteration to the desk and its belongings might have alerted to her to my activities. Yet while there was anger and determination in her face, the glowy was subdued and I saw nothing that suggested she harboured any fresh suspicions against me, beyond those that had been with us for months.

  “I think Strambli will be all right,” I ventured. “If the wound can be cleaned, and Tindouf does a good enough job stitching it up. If all else fails, we’ll be at our destination in a little over two weeks, and they should have much bett
er medicine than anything on a ship.”

  “We may be there a little sooner still,” Fura said. “Did you glance at the Glass Armillary on your way?”

  “Ought I have?”

  “You’ll recall that there are baubles—red marbles on long sticks, for those projecting into the Emptyside.”

  “We’re not detouring to a bauble,” I said, before the idea had a chance to take root.

  “Did I say that we were?” Fura looked affronted. “We’re strapped enough for fuel as it is. No, I meant to draw your attention to the small black marble, quite close to our present position.”

  “I assumed it was another bauble.”

  “It may have been a bauble once, or an inhabited world, or some nameless rock. It has no name now because it figures in no charts, no almanacs, no ephemeris tables—certainly none that you or I would ever have seen.”

  “Then I don’t—”

  “It’s a swallower,” Fura said, sighing slightly at my laggard comprehension. “A swallower without a world to enshroud it. A naked swallower, drifting through space on its own orbit around the Old Sun.”

  “No such thing exists.”

  “By which you mean that no such thing should exist, by all that’s right. Sometimes they get loose, though. When a world is destroyed—which happens, albeit rarely—the swallower’s never damaged. It breaks free of its confinement, a dragon unchained. The only reason we don’t hear of more swallowers orbiting the Old Sun is that the violence of the destruction is normally enough to send the swallower off into the Empty, forever beyond the Old Sun’s influence. This one remained behind, though.” Her hand moved to a bound journal. “Bosa knew of it, and the parameters of its orbit. It must have been very old information, long lost to the likes of Trusko or Rackamore. We’re very lucky that she kept track of the swallower’s position.”

  “So we can be sure to avoid it?”

  “No. So we can use it to our advantage.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I am perfectly serious. Our course was going to take us quite near the swallower in any case—not close enough to cause us difficulties, but near enough that we might have verified its position. Do you remember those books we used to look over, with the coloured plates? A swallower bends starlight, like a little lens, held up to the sky. I meant to sight onto it with one of the telescopes and prove to myself that the orbital tables were correct. We will still do that, but now I will have Paladin and Tindouf arrange a small alteration to our course, one that brings us much nearer to the swallower.”