Fleet of Knives

by Gareth L. Powell

  “Already done, dearie.” The avatar frowned. “But things are deteriorating quickly. Structural failure appears imminent. You’d better hustle.”

  * * *

  The intercom wasn’t working. I said goodbye to Vito and, pausing only to retrieve my leather jacket, made my way aft to the crew lounge on shaky legs.

  Addison met me at the door.

  “Hell’s teeth,” she said, “you look like shit.”

  I wanted to tell her about Vito, Monk and Jansen, but I didn’t have the words. Instead I looked past her, to the dining area where Dalton was ministering to Santos.

  “How’s the foot, chef?”

  Santos glowered at me from beneath darkened brows.

  “The lunch is ruined, compañero.”

  I walked over to the table. It was bolted in place, but knives and forks lay scattered all across the floor.

  “Can you walk?” My voice was hoarse. “We need to leave.”

  Dalton looked up. At sixty-two years of age he was the oldest of us all, and had been crewing merchant ships longer than I’d been alive.

  “We’re evacuating?” He looked concerned. He knew the dangers of abandoning ship so far from home, and knew how attached I was to the Lucy’s Ghost. However, he also realised we’d been attacked, and might be attacked again at any moment.

  “I don’t think we have a fucking choice.” The walls gave an ominous groan. “We’re running out of air, and the hull’s about to buckle. Get yourselves up. Help Santos if he needs it. And get down to the lock. I want everybody suited in five minutes.”

  I turned to Addison. “Where are the others?”

  “Kelly’s down in the hold with Henri,” she said. “Chet’s still in engineering.” She glanced around. “Did you have any luck getting hold of Jansen or Monk?”

  I shook my head. “They’re not coming.”

  “What about Vito?”

  “He didn’t make it, either.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Yeah.” I looked at Dalton and Santos. “Okay, you two. Take a communicator and get down to the airlock. See if you can collect Kelly and Henri on your way. Riley, you’re with me.”

  “Where are we going?” Addison asked.

  I clipped a communicator to my wrist, and pulled on the jacket.

  “To get Chet.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  ONA SUDAK

  The flyer took us north, across salt marshes and low hills, to the coast, where cold, grassy mudflats ran down to thick, cement-coloured water.

  With the side hatch open, the noise of the air rushing past was too loud to permit unaided speech. Unable to communicate with the armed men and women around me, I tried to relax and control my breathing. For the moment, I had been spared death. If my new captors wanted to kill me, they could simply have shot me in my cell, as they had with poor Berwick, or thrown me from the flyer’s open hatch as soon as we achieved enough height to ensure a fatal fall. Instead, they were keeping me alive for some further purpose, and I could only pray it wasn’t going to involve anything more unpleasant than the prospect of a firing squad. The way these people had calmly executed the staff and inmates at the prison spoke of a ruthlessness that left me in no doubt of my fate should my usefulness to them come to an end.

  I thought of Adam, the young paramour I’d lost in the Gallery. The young man who’d sacrificed his life for mine. What would he think of all this? What would he think of me?

  Fresh sea air swirled through the compartment and my nostrils twitched. Somehow, it smelled of freedom, and that was enough to ignite a tiny ember of hope in my chest. Whatever happened now, I had outlived the sentence handed to me by the court. The soldiers charged with my execution were themselves dead; every breath I took now was a victory in itself, and every second I spent in this flyer took me further from the cell in which I’d endured the past twenty-four miserable, lonely weeks.

  My court martial had been conducted in the full glare of the public spotlight. The admirals responsible for issuing the order to raze Pelapatarn were all now living in unobtrusive retirement, and had contrived to place the blame for that atrocity squarely at my feet. No trace of the original order had endured, no shard of evidence to suggest it had originated anywhere but with me. I had been in command of the fleet at the crucial instant, and so the culpability was mine.

  Capital punishment wasn’t illegal in the Conglomeration, but it was frowned upon and seldom enacted. Rather than get blood on their hands, the authorities considered transportation a more humane option. Why execute a person, they argued, when you could ship them out to a frontier planet and use them as slave labour in the construction of a new civilian settlement? Murderers, rapists and child molesters were crammed into leaky transport ships and despatched to the margins of Conglomeration space. But some crimes were considered too gigantic in scope, and too appalling to be solved by mere banishment. I had been charged with the destruction of an entire biosphere, the murder of nineteen thousand soldiers and four hundred thousand human non-combatants, and the genocide of fifteen billion sentient trees.

  Proceedings lasted just over an hour. After a recitation of the charges and evidence, it took the board of seven officers and warrant officers presiding only five minutes to pronounce me guilty on all counts. The fact I had fled the scene of the battle and spent the next three years in hiding did little to dissuade them of my responsibility for the outrage.

  After that, it was just a case of waiting for them to decide how exactly they wanted me to die.

  I watched the shallows give way to deeper waters. While in the Gallery, I had been stuck for two days inside a flying box, at the mercy of five-thousand-year-old alien technologies. I knew the virtue of patience, and the prudence of using the time I had now to physically and intellectually prepare myself for whatever might ensue.

  My heart was racing. Turning my head from the wavelets rushing beneath the flyer, I closed my eyes and willed my shoulders to relax. My breathing slowed and my fists unclenched. I had been a captain in the Conglomeration Navy. This morning, I had been prepared to face death by firing squad, and I would now face whatever lay at the end of this journey with the same dignity and composure.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes again, the four men and women in the compartment with me were pulling on breathing masks. When they had them in place, the woman opposite leaned over and strapped one over my mouth and nose. Then she pulled a pair of goggles down over my eyes. I tried to ask her what she was doing. Flyers like these were strictly for low-level use, with operational ceilings well below the point at which we might require oxygen. I don’t think she could have heard me, muffled as I was behind the rubber mask, but she jabbed her thumb downwards, at the slate-grey waters beyond the open hatch. She then sat back and strapped herself into her seat. I couldn’t read her expression behind her silver goggles. Around us, the others were also strapping themselves into position, and I experienced a queasy flutter of unease.

  As soon as everyone was in place, the flyer tipped to starboard, and we began to shed height in a long, wide turn. I could see the waves rising to meet us. Up front, I could see the pilot leaning into the turn. His actions seemed calm and deliberate.

  A flyer like this wouldn’t float. Was he actually going to try and land on the water?

  I began to struggle against my restraints.

  “You’re insane!” I called, but the others just looked at me, their silver eyes blank and disconcerting.

  The wind tore at us.

  The engines howled.

  And the ocean rushed up to slap us.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SAL KONSTANZ

  Alva Clay was beside me as we left the bar and started walking in the direction of the main port. Although the sun had long since gone down and hard desert stars were glittering overhead, we could still feel the day’s heat radiating from the sandstone walls and the packed earth beneath our feet. We didn’t talk. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Things b
etween us were still brittle and tenuous, like broken eggshells. Instead, we moved in wary but companionable silence, content for now to be headed in the same direction.

  Stalls on either side of the narrow street offered food, souvenirs and desert hiking gear to the thin trickle of pilgrims and tourists en route to the Temples of the High Country. The air carried the greasy scent of frying onions, the entreaties of hawkers and the chatter of stallholders. Lanterns burned. Music played from speakers hanging from awnings. The awnings flapped like indolent sails, stirred by the dry evening wind that crept furtively off the desert.

  When we were halfway along the street, a shuttle rose from the port, howling like an unquiet spirit. Clay stopped to watch the blue candle flame of its exhaust.

  “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time,” she said. “You caught me on a bad day.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” The shuttle was little more than a bright speck now, but she kept her face turned upwards. “Today would have been my daughter’s eighth birthday.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “I don’t anymore.”

  She seemed so matter-of-fact, I hardly knew how to respond.

  “What happened?”

  “She was killed in the early years of the war.” She shrugged. “Her father took her out shopping, and neither of them came back.”

  “Is that why you’re—”

  “Grumpy?”

  “Actually I was going to ask if that’s why you’re such a hard ass all the time, but I guess it amounts to the same thing.”

  She turned to me, mouth half open in indignation, fists clenched.

  “I know what it’s like to lose your family,” I said.

  “You have no idea.”

  “I lost my parents. I was just a kid.”

  Clay snorted. “She was my daughter. Do you have the first fucking clue what that means? How that felt?”

  “No, I don’t suppose I do.”

  She turned away. “No, you don’t.”

  “But I’m here for you if you want to talk about it.”

  She hunched her shoulders. “Fuck off.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I don’t think talking’s going to do any good.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m here. I’ll always be here, if you want me.”

  Her chin dropped to her chest, and she sighed. After a moment, she looked around. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I saved your life, Alva. That means I’m responsible for you.”

  She seemed to mull this over. “I guess you do have your redeeming qualities.”

  I offered her my hand. “Friends again?”

  She looked down at my open palm. “Don’t push it.”

  She gave a wry half-smile, and I felt a wave of almost debilitating relief. We might never be as close as sisters, but for now, I could believe we were going to be okay.

  “You do know we’re being followed, right?”

  I glanced behind me. “Where?”

  Clay kept her eyes on me. “About four stalls back. Thin guy. Dressed like a local but moves like a spook.”

  “The guy with the dark glasses? I saw him. Couldn’t miss him, really. Who wears dark glasses at night?”

  “I’ve seen him too many times for it to be coincidence.”

  The man in question appeared to be browsing through jewellery, but he kept his head angled our way, tracking us in his peripheral vision. I looked away, trying to make it appear I was simply glancing around in embarrassment after our emotional outburst.

  “Do you think he’s alone?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “What do you think he wants?”

  Clay started walking, keeping her pace leisurely and her demeanour casual. “He’s keeping an eye on us.”

  “Why?”

  “Hell’s teeth, Cap. Why do you think?”

  I slouched along beside her, hands in pockets—just a couple of bored spacers looking for something to do. “Who do you think he’s working for?”

  Clay shrugged. “Could be Conglomeration. Could be Outward. Could be somebody else entirely.”

  I frowned. We had brought the Marble Armada out of retirement, and there were those who suspected the Trouble Dog of having more influence than she did over those legions of white, knife-like ships.

  “Should we confront him?”

  “You’re the captain.”

  I bit my lip. A year ago, I would have hurried back to the ship and secured the airlock. I hadn’t been very good at handling confrontation back then. These days…

  “Are you armed?”

  Clay raised an eyebrow. With her back to the man following us, she pulled up her vest to expose the glistening brown skin of her belly, and the black metal grip of an Archipelago pistol tucked securely into the waistband of her combat trousers.

  “I never leave home without it.”

  “Then let’s say hello.”

  * * *

  We led our new friend away from the light and activity of the market, into the narrow tangle of passageways that ran between the darkened warehouses on the edge of the port. Above us, the brightening constellations were unfamiliar patterns in an unfamiliar sky.

  I touched my ear and spoke to the Trouble Dog.

  “How close are you?”

  “About an hour out.”

  “Are you still tracking us?”

  “One moment… Yes, I have you.”

  “Do you see the guy tailing us?”

  “I have him tagged. Are you in danger?”

  I smiled at the concern in her voice. “Not right now, but keep an eye on us, okay? If things get weird, we might need you to come in hot.”

  I signed off. Beside me, Alva Clay shook her dreadlocked head. “We won’t need the big guns.”

  I glanced down at the bulge beneath her vest. “Look who’s talking.”

  To either side, the warehouses were dark and locked. Corrugated metal shutters covered their doors. Refrigeration units hummed. Steam rose from rooftop vents, orange in the light from the port. Discarded packaging spilled from overflowing dumpsters.

  I kept my hands in my pockets, my shoulders hunched. We were three quarters of the way along the passage. At the end, another alley crossed it at right angles.

  We turned left, and then stopped. Clay drew her weapon. When the man in dark glasses came around the corner, he found himself staring into its barrel.

  For a second, he gaped at us. Then he flinched away and started to run back along the passage. Muttering curses, Clay stepped around the corner and fired a warning shot over his head. In the confined space, the crack of the pistol hurt my ears. The noise of it was like a punch in the chest.

  “Run again,” Clay called, “and the next one goes through your ass.”

  The man had already stopped. He turned to face us, hands held in front of him.

  “Okay,” he said. “You got me.”

  “Who are you?” Clay walked towards him, keeping her gun levelled at his forehead. Now that I had time to get a proper look at him, I could see she had been right about him not being a local. He wore the same loose linen clothing, but his face was ruddy and flushed, and the sunburn on his nose and cheeks spoke of how unaccustomed he was to this climate.

  “I’m nobody.” He was out of breath. “Just a pickpocket scouting for marks.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You can’t prove otherwise.”

  “I don’t have to prove shit.” Clay waggled the Archipelago pistol. “I’m the one holding the gun, remember?”

  The man seemed to deflate slightly.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m not a pickpocket.”

  I stepped up level with Clay and looked him up and down.

  “What are you,” I asked, “Conglomeration Intelligence?”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “Guess again.”

  “Outward?”

  “Bingo.”

&
nbsp; I let my arms fold across my chest. “What’s your name?”

  “Wilkes.”

  “Is that your first or last name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not.” I reached forward and gently pulled his glasses from his face, revealing augmented eyes that glimmered in the alley’s gloom with a faint emerald luminescence. “Tell me, Mr Wilkes, if you’d be so kind, why the Outward government has an agent trailing us.”

  He blinked at me, and I saw the lenses of his eyes rotate as they focused on my face.

  “Don’t you know?”

  I turned his glasses over in my hands.

  “I’m guessing it has something to do with the Marble Armada.”

  He shrugged. “Of course.”

  “But why?” A warm wind blew up the alley, disturbing piles of paper and sand. Wilkes shuffled his feet, moving his weight from one hip to another.

  “You can’t blame us for being curious.” Beneath the redness, his face was entirely hairless—no trace of stubble, no lashes or eyebrows.

  “But Clay and I, we’re both Outwarders,” I said. “We both fought for the Outward during the war.”

  “You were Outwarders.” He looked apologetic. “You gave up your citizenship when you joined the House, remember?”

  I felt my cheeks redden. “That doesn’t change who we are.”

  “Doesn’t it?” He pursed his lips, as if weighing up the evidence. “Let’s see. You voluntarily left the Outward, and now you ride around in a former Conglomeration Navy cruiser. You rescued a known Conglomeration war criminal from the Gallery, and came home at the head of the largest fleet anyone’s ever seen—a fleet that seems to have taken your aforementioned ship as its role model.”

  “So?”

  “So the powers that be want to know exactly how much influence the Trouble Dog has over that fleet.” He raised his chin. “And given the fact the Trouble Dog takes its orders from you…”

  “You think I’m in command of the Armada?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No!”

  “And why should we take your word for that?”

  Beside me, Alva Clay cleared her throat. “Maybe,” she said, “because I’m standing next to her with an Archipelago pistol, and all you’ve got are two handfuls of sky.”