by R J Theodore
The starship had automated chambers to travel between decks, and Sophie led her to the door in front of one. Getting their prizes off the ship would be easier if they could use the lifts, but until they identified and deactivated whatever traps the other crews kept running into, they’d have to avoid the powered sections of the ship. It would be a long afternoon of sally bars, paraffin torches, and emergency accessways.
A panel near the lift, which thankfully came away from the bulkhead without a fight, opened on a vertical access shaft. Above and below, a ladder on the far side led into darkness beyond the reach of their torch beams. The chamber was hardly big enough to fit the largest items on the list. She suppressed a shudder. They’d have to open up the ship on whatever decks they found those items. Sophie pointed down, toward the section of the ship where the Bone salvage crew had entered. Talis shook her head, moving her finger in a circular motion. They’d make a thorough sweep of the current deck before squeezing into the shafts.
Except for the sound of her breath filling the helmet and soft lonely echo of their movements, the corridors of the ship were silent. The carpet flooring absorbed the clomp of their booted feet. Her ears felt plugged in the stillness, though she tried to listen for the sounds of other crew. She didn’t hold a lot of hope that they’d find them alive.
Chapter 25
They made their way from cabin to cabin, forced open every locker or bulkhead cabinet they came to, searching every compartment on that deck. It amounted to a quarter of the smaller items on their list. They piled everything in the corridor outside the cabin through which they’d entered, to be safe. If a line snapped or a grapple slipped and the ship shifted in the flotsam, she didn’t want everything they’d gathered to go spilling out the makeshift entrance.
They gathered everything on Eneil’s list they could find. Talis began to worry over where to house their ship’s rightful crew so they could fit everything in the cargo hold, but she wanted to know as much about that tech as she could, especially if someone in the Empire was planning to return it into the hands of the Yu’Nyun, or put it to their own use.
Isolated from the other crew areas on board the Yu ship, they found a small compartment with smooth, featureless walls and an unpadded surgery table centered beneath a circle of darkened lamps. In a drawer built into the base of the table, they found several small white cases, each as big across as a supper plate. Their carving tools. Made of high-polished alloy, with impressions of Yu’Nyun fingertips molded into the grip, laid out in padded indentations that matched each piece in the set. The cases were unadorned, but something about the focused nature of the room made the instruments feel ceremonial and precious.
Nothing precious in the way Sophie and Talis tossed them in a netted bag together. Small and light enough, they took every one they found. Sophie shouted that they would be great for detailed power system work, provided the alloy wasn’t conductive. And if it was, there were sculptors and artists enough in the world who would love the delicate instruments.
Talis frowned at the list on her arm. Next was a crate of the alien rifles. The aliens would have those aboard every ship. Rather than copper-cased bullets, pointed bolts, cannon balls, or lead shots, the weapons fired narrow beams of crackling light that devastated whatever they touched. Tisker’s arm, when one grazed him, didn’t even bleed until the crispy scab was later pulled open by his movements. It would have made for a nasty, puckered scar if Meran hadn’t used her powers to heal him.
The Yu’Nyun survivors that resettled in Diadem had weapons. Harnessing energy like that, in a package small enough to carry, could benefit many underserved cities and towns on remote islands. It could also tip Peridot’s control into the hands of whoever had such an arsenal. If the Vein engineers could decipher their secrets, of which Talis had no doubt, maybe someone would be able to rise up against the invaders and set Imperial politics aright.
It wasn’t as though the technological advancement that came with any item on the checklist couldn’t shift the balance of power.
They found and emptied an armory near the lower hatch of the ship, on the same deck as the infirmary where they grabbed a few field kits and a locker’s worth of medical tools and supplies. They rigged pulleys on the shaft opening on the first deck, so they could ease the weapons crates, each larger by more than twice the size of their payment coffers, up the vertical accessways. The medical kits were tied together by their handles and sent up next. Back at the hull breach overlooking open sky, Talis strapped into the main comm line long enough to give Tisker a status update.
“Enough poking around. We’ve gotta find that Bone crew now,” she told him after they’d sent up a platform for him to unload. “You don’t hear from us by dinner—”
“Get out of here. Aye, Cap.”
“What? Five hells, no. Don’t you dare leave us behind. You don’t hear from us by dinner, you get down here and dismantle this ship from keel to weather deck until you find us, you hear?”
His acknowledgement came back on the same breath as a relieved chuckle.
The pile of inventory near their entry hole was enough for three platform loads hauled up to Im Ufite Rantor. But even after they’d prowled through as much of the ship as they had, every deactivated corridor and cabin, over half the list remained unsatisfied. Including the simula. It was a consolation to Talis that the ships’ holds weren’t piled up to the overhead with the programmable bodies, but there were more of the alien ships downed in the flotsam.
They had the other five ships that Eneil’s depth sounders had located, and Talis had seen their invasion fleet. There were plenty of silver starships in the flotsam. Scattered gods-knew-where, but out there all the same.
Scrimshaw’s ship had carried five simula, the unclaimed four lost to the explosion. Gods-be-good, was it possible those were the only simula the aliens had brought with them?
She followed Sophie down a new set of corridors, trusting the engineer to choose a path that would take them around the live portions of the ship until they couldn’t avoid them any longer. There was a broad cargo bay behind the hatch Ketzali het Parantu’s crew had used to enter the ship. Sophie hadn’t figured they’d made it very far beyond that.
Talis’s shoulders ached from carrying the alien cargo and the weight of her suit all around the narrow-corridored ship. And from wedging open every gods-rotted hatch across twenty-six gods-rotted decks. The descent suits were a work of mastery, keeping them comfortable and their vision clear of condensation, but she’d had enough of cramped, porthole-less spaces. Enough of carefully stepping around pale, frozen bodies. Enough of remembering the events that got them in this mess to begin with.
Sophie held out a hand, and they both stopped moving forward. At the end of the corridor in which they stood, a light was pulsing along with sparks that rained from the overhead. The light source was swinging gently. Sophie motioned toward her ear and gave Talis a meaningful look. Talis held her breath long enough to make out a very non-mechanical thumping, and the muffled shouts of distant voices.
Without waiting for her captain’s leave, Sophie pulled a section of bulkhead free to reveal rivers of wires and conduit pipes behind them. The arrangement matched a readout on Sophie’s tablet, and she followed its flashing complaint down the corridor to a damaged panel, black with the scars of a past fire. As Sophie wrestled the distorted bulkhead panel free, sparks rained from shredded copper wiring. Sophie was no specialist in electrical systems, but thanks to her electrocancellation cannon, she was extremely specialized in breaking them. She waved Talis away from the bulkhead and aimed the barrel at what looked like a junction box. There was a whine and a percussive sound, and the sparking quieted. The voices grew louder. Talis thought they sounded less panicked and more celebratory now. She cranked up her belt-pack to increase the output of her torch now that the sparks had gone dark.
Sophie swapped the barrel for the tablet and tra
ced its read-out in both directions. Satisfied, she looked back over her shoulder at Talis. “Seems like that should take care of the power on this section of the deck.”
“Not a bad idea to knock it out as we go, no matter what we find.”
Sophie nodded, rolled her shoulders under the load of her barrel, and closed her eyes in concentration. “Can’t tell where the voices are coming from with this helmet on.”
Talis walked up the curving corridor until she almost lost sight of Sophie, then paused to listen again. Shook her head after a moment. “I think they’re back that way.”
She felt lighter as they followed the commotion to a sealed cargo bay door, where she and Sophie got to work with fresh torches and their sally bars. If the Bone crew survived this, Talis had probably just earned another favor from their captain.
Their enthusiasm for recovering the missing crew was slightly tempered as they opened the deck hatch onto the remains of a gunfight. Even though she’d been wishing she was long out of the suit, Talis was very thankful for the atmospheric seal in her helmet. Yes, there were living Bone crew, but there were more bodies than survivors, all with wounds that had begun to decay. Talis realized that the warmth in her fingers after all these hours in the suit was not as much a credit to the suit as to the enclosed alien hull. Everything that fell to flotsam usually froze solid, but even after two years, it was warm enough inside the alien ship’s still-sealed compartments for flesh to rot off the bone. Fortunate for the surviving crew, who might have otherwise died of exposure. Their faces were drawn and ashen, their lips inside the helmets chapped and bleeding, and some of them struggled to stand as Sophie and Talis entered the battle-marked cargo deck.
“Please tell us,” said one man as the others still sighed in relief at the sight of them, “is the Ketzali intact and waiting for us above?”
Talis clasped his arms, able to feel the strong biceps even through the material of her gloves atop his suit. “She is. They were making moves to rescue you when we came along.”
If they had been happy to be found by Talis and Sophie, they were more relieved to hear that news. The man trembled beneath Talis’s hand, and she released him to celebrate with the other survivors. “We’ve cleared the decks,” she told them. “It’s safe to return to your ship.”
“We were sent here with a purpose,” said another of their group. “We cannot leave until we have searched the ship completely.”
“It’s already done,” said Sophie. “No simulas on this ship.”
They looked suspiciously at her until Talis stepped up with her hands out. It might be warm enough to rot but she wasn’t about to pull her suit off to show them Onaya’s mark down here. “You can search what we did pull, but you’ll find none of the Yu’Nyun bodies.”
They balked at that. “Yu’Nyun bodies?”
For a moment Talis thought she misspoke the Bone words, then realized what they must have been told about their mission. “The simula start Yu’Nyun, but they can change to look like anything. No doubt the temple told you to bring back a new body for Onaya. If you were able to, she’d have looked almost exactly like the goddess did before. But before you switch them on, they’re as lanky as the corpses littering the corridors outside.”
This news seemed to unsettle the crew. Or at least, as the survivors met each other’s eyes, it cast doubt on the importance of searching for the things rather than accept the rescue they were being offered.
“Come on. You’ve been through hell. Your captain’s got her platform lowered for you, and I’m sure there’s a pot of something hot on the hob, waiting for your return. I’ll tell her what we found, myself.”
This seemed to satisfy them. Talis was quite satisfied, herself. She wanted one more parlay with their captain before they parted ways, and speaking on behalf of the exhausted crew was a fine chance to do so.
“So, you’re pirates?” Captain Sekkai of Ketzali het Parantu twitched, as though she wanted to reach for a weapon. Could have easily done so, there being a half dozen within easy reach.
She and her first mate, Faha, sat across their great cabin table from Talis and Dug. When they’d been invited aboard following the rescue, Talis dressed in some of Chel’s fresh clothes, making sure her loose sleeves were rolled and gathered to expose her finally useful scar. Dug had even found a razor to trim his hair back to his former style with the sides shaved high. Since he couldn’t comfortably lift his arm on the injured side, Sophie had helped him plait his hair into a tight cluster of thick braids across the top of his head to the back, where the loose hair and feathers were teased into a thick fall down his neck. He looked like himself again.
Talis had judged her counterpart well. She grinned, lopsided and charming. “Yes, we are flying a stolen airship. Yes, we took it at knife point from the previous crew, who are now tied up in the hold. But ‘pirates’ is a strong term for our situation, which I assure you results from a long line of extenuating circumstances.”
“Such as?”
“For one, our ship’s former crew as much as admitted that they work for the Veritors.”
A stone crumbled loose from the captain’s wall of judgement. “A Vein and Bone crew?”
Dug sat up straighter in his seat as if displeased at the implied accusation that his captain was lying. Talis knew his back was probably screaming from the time sitting still, but he hid the pain well. He always could. “I know how it sounds, Captain, but it is the truth. Eneil zur Selki is working through a third party who arranged the contract with a Cutter man. Thanks to the efforts of the Veritors and Imperials, there are very few Cutter folk who would know to look for us, or where to look for the Yu’Nyun derelicts.”
Talis nodded. “I wasn’t too pleased to figure it out, myself. But only ones aside from yourselves and my own who knew the right details about the alien ships? An Imperial captain named Hankirk and his friends, the Veritors of the Lost Codex, whom he no doubt informed, if they didn’t know already.”
“This may be true, but by certain courts, you remain pirates.”
“We’re captains, Captain. We haven’t got time for courts. Just the work, and maybe a few favors. I’ve already done you yours. Your crew is returned to you, and we confirmed your payload isn’t aboard this vessel. Now, will you take these people from me, or won’t you?”
Sekkai frowned. Talis knew she had less of a problem with Talis’s particular level of piracy than with the imposition of a dozen prisoners to manage. There wasn’t half so much paperwork for the Bone as there would be if this were a Cutter ship taking on such cargo, and the imposition was that they would have to detour to hand them over instead of proceeding straight to the next alien wreck. As Talis and Im Ufite Rantor would. But these prisoners were Veritor associates and the temple’s priestesses would be very interested in them. And Talis knew Sekkai knew it as well.
Faha crossed her arms. “And what will you do once we have freed you of this burden?”
Talis sighed and shrugged. “I’m still most interested in gathering up that tech before the Veritors can. As your people learned, they now intend to use the open borders as an excuse to swarm all over the wrecks to get what they’re after.”
“Which is what?”
“Same as you and more. They’ll take the simula, the weapons, and anything else they can find. Might hand it over to their alien friends; might put it to work for their own aims. Maybe both.”
Sekkai’s frown had deepened. “And when your hold is full of their prizes? What noble use will you put them to?”
“I know you must not think much of me, but I promise you, as a fellow captain, I’m not motivated by money at present. My government’s a farce, and my people are being lied to. Money won’t fix that, and if the Veritors get what they want, I can’t get far enough away from the problems they’ll cause to enjoy such wealth anyhow. But I’ve gotten news that there’s a revolution brewing in the u
ndercities. I want to make sure the right side has the tools to win.”
Did she fail to mention that she wanted to keep the simula away from Onaya as well as from the Veritors? Must have slipped her mind.
Sekkai and Faha exchanged a careful look. Dug took the opportunity to lend his voice in support of his captain. “We have a common enemy, Captain. You have the resources to transport these Veritor sympathizers to High Holy Priestess Illiya for questioning.”
Talis leaned forward while Dug’s words still hung in the air. “If they remain with the four of us, they’ll likely attempt to take their ship back sooner or later, and I confess that, after they sent the assassin after us, none of us can spare them much compassion.
“I know you were given orders to find the Bone Lady a simula. Sophie can show your people how to use the tablets we dredged up to check the ships for dangerous areas and to deactivate them. You can report this progress as well as deliver potential spies to your mistress. Considering the past difficulties you’ve had salvaging these wrecks, that will be a welcome update, I’m sure.”
Another look passed between the two Bone women. Sekkai finally nodded.
“You returned our people to us as you promised, and your mission has as much merit as ours. We will take your ship’s old crew. But I ask that, should you find a simula in the future, you bring it to me.”
Talis looked as though she were giving it some thought. “Of course, Captain.” Of course she absolutely would not.
The four of them stood and grasped wrists to seal their promises.
Over the next few hours, Sophie trained Sekkai, Faha, and their lead salvage team in the use of the alien tablets. She even managed to get herself a tour of the low-atmo ship before she returned with a notebook full of sketches. Pleased as a cat in cream, that one.
