I got her voice on the wind, and while it was scratchy and faint, I wasn’t about to mistake my sister for anyone else in the universe.
‘Fura.’
‘Yes.’ Relief and gratitude tumbled out of me. Whether she picked up on any of that, I couldn’t say. But I hoped she felt the way I did. ‘It’s me. I wondered where you’d been.’
‘Wondered the same thing, too. It’s this skull, Fura. Sending out that jamming signal against the Monetta, the one that cooked our old skull – it must have taken something out of it. Bosa knows it, too. She’s on the squint for a new one, and I don’t think she’ll wait too long about it.’
‘You mean she wants to jump another ship and take their skull?’
‘Bosa’s way,’ Adrana said. ‘But never mind that for now. Are you all right?’
‘Yes . . . yes, we’re fine here. I don’t think I even want to ask what it’s like for you.’
‘I’m all right. I just do what she says, and that’s enough for her – she can’t hurt me. But Garval . . .’
‘What has she done? You have to tell me. She saved my life, Adrana. I want to know what’s happened to her.’
‘It’s a drug. I told you that much. It does something to her bones. It’s making them fuse together.’
‘Fuse,’ I repeated, as if the word was weird and alien.
‘At the joints. Any place where a bone moves against another bone. Fingers. Arms. Legs and hips. Neck and head. It’s been very slow and the change from day to day’s very small. But it’s always in the same direction, always making Garval stiffer. It’s getting harder for her to breathe now, because her ribs are fusing into a solid cage, and she can’t move her lungs properly under them. Can barely speak, because her jaw’s fusing to her skull. She’ll die, and soon, but not before Bosa’s made a point of her.’
The thought of that torture put a bit of ice into me that never unfroze.
‘Why?’
‘Do you remember the glimpse we got of the Nightjammer, Fura? The spike at the front, and the figure under it? I saw it better when they took me. The figurehead used to be a breathing person, tortured the same way as Garval, until they’re just a single living bone wrapped in meat and skin. Once in a while, Bosa changes the figurehead – usually when she wants to teach a lesson about loyalty.’
‘Oh, Garval. After all she did.’
‘If I had a way of putting her out of it, Fura, believe me I would. I know what she did for you, and there isn’t any way to repay that.’
‘Maybe that drug’s reversible. If Garval can just hang on . . .’
‘Until what?’
‘There’s hope,’ I said. ‘Prozor and I’ve been working on a plan. I told you we were coming for you, didn’t I?’
‘And I told you to go home, like a good little sister.’
‘There’s a bauble,’ I said. ‘It’s called the Fang. It’s the one where Prozor lost Githlow, her husband. Well, we’re sailing to it again. We’re six days out now, so we’ll be on it in twenty-one days. Three weeks from now. You’ve got Bosa’s ear, haven’t you? She wouldn’t keep a Bone Reader if she didn’t pay attention to what they give her.’
‘I don’t know where you’re going with this, Fura.’
‘We’re going to crack that bauble. Then you’re going to come in and jump us, just like Bosa did with Captain Rackamore. First you’ll need to confirm you can make the crossing, but they say the Nightjammer’s fast, don’t they?’
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Before we go any further.’
‘No. I’m not your good little sister now. I’m Fura Ness and I’ve got a tin hand and the glowy in me and I want to see Bosa’s blood on the wrong side of her skin.’
To her credit, she let me speak.
‘We’re sailing to the Fang,’ I continued. ‘So are you. One way or another. Copy down these parameters.’
‘Fura . . .’
‘Just do it.’ And I wouldn’t relent until she’d taken down the numbers I’d already committed to memory, and then repeated them back to me. ‘Sell Bosa any lies you need to. We’ve been lying our hearts out to Captain Trusko, so you can do the same to Bosa. Tell her you’ve got a sniff of something. There’s a ship chancing its arm on some rumoured loot, and they’re ripe for jumping. No armour, no weapons, and the crew and its jelly-livered captain wouldn’t know close action if it came up and bit them. Best part of all: there’s a nice skull waiting for you at the end of it all.’
‘She’ll know.’
‘Not if you sell it to her the right way. You don’t go rushing up to Bosa, all bright-eyed, telling her you’ve got something juicy. You’ve got to throw it out casual, mixed in with other stuff, and let her make her own mind up on it. Which she will.’
‘And then what?’
‘Bosa’ll do the rest. She won’t jump us until we’ve come back from the bauble, ’cos that’s her way. Saves her the effort of going in, doesn’t it?’
‘You’ve been through this once, Fura. Why would you bring it on yourself again?’
‘Because I’ve learned. Because we’ll be ready. Because I promised Garval I wouldn’t forget what she’d done. Do this for me, Adrana. Do this for us.’
The skulls broke the connection without any warning. They did that sometimes, when something got out of phase in the twinkly, but it was always unnerving, especially as there wasn’t any guarantee of re-establishing contact. I was about to give it a try, anyway, figuring there was no harm in it, when someone hammered hard on the door to the bone room.
I disconnected and hung up my equipment, all methodical and proper, taking pride in this odd little profession of mine.
I spun the wheel. It was Surt, with her drawn-in face.
‘What?’
She gave me a sidelong look. ‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Gathing’s dead. He was screaming, struggling, loud enough to wake ’em up all the way to Trevenza. You sure you didn’t hear any of that?’
‘I’d have come, wouldn’t I?’ I said, closing the door behind me.
I knew right then that it was Prozor’s work. Maybe Gathing had other enemies – he hadn’t struck me as the kind that picks up many friends – but it was Prozor he’d singled out for a snidey comment in the galley, and me that was tangled up in the implications of it.
No one else had seemed to make much of it there and then, but it wouldn’t have taken more than a second or third remark to start stirring up their curiosity. Prozor coming on the Queenie, then me, and then all of a sudden Trusko’s got a bee in his bonnet about the Fang . . .
No, it wouldn’t have taken much at all. So he had to go. I didn’t have a problem with that, not in principle. It was just the executing of it that was knotty.
He’d died in his quarters and that was where everyone was gathered. He had a hammock, like the rest of us, and he was still in it. But he wasn’t in any kind of restful repose. Gathing looked like he’d had electricity run through him, or more properly that it was still running through him, bunching up his nerves and muscles so that he was all stiff and arched, with his hands drawn up before his face, all clawed and useless. It wasn’t electricity, though. We could touch him, and there was no trace of burning or scalding on him, his clothes or his bedding. That face of his, though, wasn’t one I was going to forget in a hurry. His jaw was locked open, like he was still screaming, and his eyes were so wide it was like there was invisible rigging tugging his eyelids apart. You could start to see around the curve of his eyes, and I didn’t like that at all. No one wants to know what we’ve got going on in our sockets.
‘Looks like poison to me,’ Drozna said, plucking at his own lower lip as he mused the scene.
‘The cove only ate with the rest of us,’ Strambli said. ‘Or what he cooked for himself. Wouldn’t have taken a glass of water from one of
us if he’d been on fire.’
‘He looks like he was on fire,’ Surt said. ‘All clenched up like that. Except he ain’t burned.’
‘He was alive when you got to him?’ Trusko asked, buttoning up the top of his shirt, for he had been drawn from his quarters unexpectedly. ‘Convulsing, screaming, and so on?’
‘You ’eard it yourself, Captain,’ Strambli said. ‘Any screamier, he’d have started popping the hull plates.’
‘Look at his handses,’ Tindouf said, pointing with the tip of his pipe. ‘Like he was trying to gets at something in his throat. I thinks Drozna’s right. It was poison after alls.’
‘It wouldn’t have been poison,’ Prozor said. ‘Poison’s hard to use on a ship. You can’t get rid of it easily and there’s a risk of it poisonin’ the ones you don’t want to poison.’
Drozna settled his gaze on her. ‘Were you thinking of poisoning him, then?’
‘No more than the rest of you were,’ Prozor answered.
‘Fura?’ Trusko asked.
‘I didn’t like him,’ I said, steering the closest path to the truth I could think of. ‘And I’d be lying if I said I was going to shed any tears now. He didn’t like any of us, did he?’
‘He had a certain . . . way,’ Trusko said. ‘But murder is murder, and I can’t countenance it. Besides, I hardly need remind any of you that he was our Assessor. Our only Assessor.’
I glanced at Prozor. Wisely, she was saying nothing for the moment.
‘Look,’ Surt said, with a quiver in her voice. ‘There’s something in his throat. Something coming out of his throat.’
‘Back,’ Trusko said. ‘Everyone.’
I didn’t need the captain’s suggestion for that. I was frightened enough as it was. With his mouth jammed open the way it was, we could see right down past his tongue. And there was something coming up from his gullet, bubbling up into daylight. It was a milky, silvery presence, and it seemed to be climbing up his gullet in deliberate steps, almost putting out feelers each time, like a thief hauling themselves up a chimney.
‘Tweezers,’ Prozor said. ‘Now. Before it gets out.’
‘What is it?’ Trusko asked, while Strambli dashed away to find something that met Prozor’s requirements.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘But it’s alive and inside him, and it’s ten to one this is the thing that had him bawlin’. What we don’t want is it gettin’ out and causing more mischief. Hurry up!’
Strambli was back inside thirty seconds, but it felt like minutes. The milky thing was nearly at the top of Gathing’s mouth by then. The rest of him was still, so it wasn’t some gastric tide coming up from his stomach. It was more like a thing that had climbed into him that was now intent on climbing back out.
Prozor took the tweezers. They were long-handled, which was good. She used one hand to lever Gathing’s jaw a little wider, and then dipped the tweezers in with the other. She poked around a bit, then drew them out with a jerk and a slurp, biting down on her lip with the concentration.
Pinched on the end of the tweezers was a squirming milky ball, with arms and feelers thrashing around and trying to grow away from it. Prozor held it up for us all to see, keeping her fingers safely clear of those feelers.
‘What . . .?’ Trusko said, trailing off.
‘I ain’t never seen one of these,’ Prozor said, looking us all in the eyes, and making it seem powerfully convincing. ‘But I’ve read of ’em. It’s an engineered organism, made for assassinatin’ folk. Called a Kill Star. A living weapon. It lives on a cove – binds to their nervous system, drinks off their blood, hides where it’ll be hard to see. Looks like a scar or blemish if you can see it at all, and matches their body temperature, so you can’t read it on a thermal scan. Doesn’t trouble the cove, and they can waltz in almost anywhere and not have anyone know they’re carrying a Kill Star. But when they need someone killed . . .’
‘It detaches,’ Strambli said, with a quiet horror.
‘Learns through the nervous system who to go after – picks up on hate and body chemistry. Finds itself a dark corner like a shoe or a pocket and waits. Then it crawls out and creeps its way into you. Into your mouth, into your lughole, any orifice it chooses. By the time it’s going in, it’s too late. Little gooey thing works its way into your innards and starts pulling you apart from inside, using those little feelers.’ Prozor’s face was a mask of hard indifference. ‘Brain’s the best way to go. Once it starts rippin’ up your grey, there ain’t a lot of you left to feel it happen. But Gathing’s must’ve come in through his gob – down into his guts. No wonder he was screamin’. ’ Prozor was still holding up the tweezers, with the milky thing writhing and squirming on the end of it. The others were keeping their distance.
‘You know a lot about it,’ Drozna said, arms folded across his chest. ‘Sorry, but it’s only what we’re all thinking.’
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And if I’d had plans to vent Gathing, a Kill Star would have suited me nicely, if I’d had the quoins to afford one, or known where to ask. Bring me a tankard, Strambli. Drozna: you got some of that hydraulic fluid you use in your sail-control gear?’
He looked doubtful. ‘I can fetch some. How much?’
‘About a tankard.’
While Strambli and Drozna were occupied, Trusko said: ‘Someone managed to bring it aboard, Prozor, regardless of how expensive or difficult those things are to find. You’d understand why we might have misgivings, especially concerning our most recen—’
‘It weren’t me,’ she said. ‘Fura can speak for herself, but she was in the bone room when Gathing started screaming, wasn’t she?’
‘You said it could have been hidden away, waiting for its chance,’ Trusko said. ‘I’d say that makes any one of us a possible suspect.’
‘Wait,’ Surt said, bending down to reach something tucked behind Gathing’s hammock. ‘Cove’s got his vacuum boots here. Why weren’t they racked away with the rest of the suits?’
‘No law against it,’ Trusko said.
Surt dragged out the boots, grunting as the magnetic soles caught on the decking. ‘Pockets on the side of the boots, Cap’n.’
‘There’s no law against that either.’
‘But this one’s open,’ Surt said, bending back the leathery flap. ‘And there’s glass in here, all broken and sticky. Let me . . .’
Prozor closed a hand around Surt’s stick of a wrist. ‘Careful, friend. You wouldn’t know what’s on that glass, or what’s still in that pocket.’
‘What are you saying?’ Trusko asked.
‘I ain’t sayin’ anything.’ She let that hang there for a second or two. ‘But I’ve worked with Assessors of every stripe and I’ve met some you could trust and some you couldn’t. Pretty easy for an Assessor to slip something past their own crew. Something valuable that they find in a bauble and don’t want to be sharin’ with the rest of them. ’Specially somethin’ you can slip into a pocket, when no one’s lookin’. ’
Trusko paled. ‘You’re suggesting Gathing smuggled that thing back from one of the baubles?’
‘You’d need to be the judge. I didn’t know the man.’
‘I did,’ Surt decided. ‘And I didn’t care for him much. Always acting like he was better’n the rest of us, like we were the fools for stickin’ with you, Cap’n, while he had better plans . . . no disrespect.’
‘None taken,’ Trusko answered levelly.
Drozna and Strambli were back. They had the tankard and the hydraulic fluid.
‘Now what?’ Strambli asked.
‘Take the lid off the tankard. Then squirt that fluid into it. Get it good and full.’
Strambli undid the cover on the tankard. We were weightless, but the fluid was viscous and it glooped out into the tankard in a single green blob and stayed put, quivering like a fresh dog turd.
‘Be ready wit
h the lid.’
Prozor took the tweezered organism and forced it into the tankard, pushing it all the way in. As soon as it touched the fluid, it started squirming much more vigorously, sending out longer feelers, trying to get a grip on the tankard’s rim. Prozor rammed it down. The organism began to give off a high, keening squeal.
‘That’s so you know it’s being damaged,’ she explained. ‘Now the lid. Get it on quick and tight, Strambli. I’m pullin’ the tweezers away . . . now.’
She jerked the tweezers out, and Strambli raced to get the lid attached and tightened. The squealing was still going on, but muffled now, and tinny. Slowly it faded away to silence.
‘You just happened to know that my hydraulic fluid would kill it,’ Drozna said.
‘Burned my hand on that fluid once,’ Prozor answered. ‘Got a main hydraulic leak, squirting right back into the core of the ship. Figured if it didn’t like me, it probably wouldn’t like the Kill Star.’ She paused. ‘But if you had other ideas about dealin’ with it, you were welcome to share ’em.’
‘Whatever’s left in that tankard,’ Trusko said, ‘I want it destroyed. Along with anything left in those boots.’
‘Gathing’s going to need burying,’ Surt said, without much enthusiasm, still holding onto the vacuum boot. ‘Anyone ever ask him which world he came from?’
But it turned out no one knew, and no one cared. When they dumped his body into space there was a bit of ceremony, some fine words, a forced tear or two, but no one’s heart was really in it. Deep down they were thinking of the quoins he’d meant to keep for himself. There were a lot of things that a crew could forgive, from cowardice to incompetence, but being cheated out of an honest profit wasn’t one of them.
Not that Gathing had cheated anyone – to our knowledge.
But that was going to have to be my and Prozor’s little secret. And if one day I noticed that there wasn’t a star-shaped scar halfway down her back, where once there’d been one, I knew to keep that observation to myself.
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