Revenger 9780575090569 (11 page)

‘What’s the most valuable thing you’ve ever found in a bauble?’ I asked.

‘Found, or pulled out?’ Triglav asked.

‘There’s a difference?’ Adrana put in.

‘Tell her about the engine,’ Prozor said, as if she was cutting off a line of conversation she didn’t care for.

‘It was about the size of a tea urn, a
bronze-
green thing with all sorts of pipes all over it,’ Triglav said. ‘Not a monkey trinket. Tusker or
Bug-
Eye, perhaps. We didn’t even try to make it work.’

‘Did someone?’ I asked.

‘Yes, on a sphereworld called Prosperal, somewhere down in the
mid-
processionals. And they got a hole drilled through their world for their trouble – all the way out from the inside.’ Triglav bent his sad features into half a smile. It was like someone wearing clown
make-
up, trying to form the opposite expression to the one painted on. ‘The lesson there is it’s not our business to fiddle around with things. Provided we’ve found ’em, and been paid for ’em . . . that’s enough for me.’

‘I’d have thought you’d be more curious,’ Adrana said.

‘Curiosity’s for coves that don’t know when they’ve got a good thing,’ Triglav said, scratching under his jaw. ‘I’m happy with my lot. Plenty worse things than being a bald little ion engineer on a sunjammer, even one that’s never going to make anyone’s fortune.’

‘Good,’ said Prozor. ‘Because that’s what you’re stuck with.’

We were still talking about baubles and trinkets when Hirtshal came into the room. The master of sail had a way of ending any conversation without a word. He cocked his bearded chin at the window, not even bothering with a question.

‘Five minutes,’ Prozor said. ‘You want a ringside seat, Hirtshal?’

Hirtshal stood with his arms folded, his eyes all cold and flinty like nothing could have interested him less.

‘No.’

The launch was now very close to the bauble’s surface, but with telescopes and binoculars we could still track it, a little grain of silver sliding over the flickering
ruby-
red of the surface. Prozor had consulted her books once or twice in the last few hours, but nothing had given her cause to alter her figures. The bauble’s changes were happening so quickly now it made me dizzy to look at them.

‘Rack’ll have his hand on the rockets,’ Triglav said in a low whisper. ‘If that bauble doesn’t pop on cue, he’ll turn around sharpish, put about five gees on the launch, and damn the rivets.’

‘I hope he has enough fuel,’ I said.

‘Plenty. Remember, it’s not just the crew he’s hoping to bring back to us.’

I had been expecting something spectacular when the bauble opened, but the truth was that it was a bit
anti-
climactic. The view of the underlying world had been growing sharper and more prolonged by the minute . . . and then suddenly it held, and the
ruby-
red surface didn’t return.

It was just like Mazarile, only less interesting to look at. A face of rock, craters, ridges and clefts, without even the compensation of areas of skyshell and the cities beneath.

‘Start the clock,’ Triglav said.

‘Already have,’ Prozor answered. ‘Two hundred and
fifty-
eight hours and counting.’

The launch continued its descent. It passed the point where the artificial surface had been and carried on to the true one beneath. Even though it was just a dot of silver, it gave off a smudge of light whenever Rackamore touched the steering jets. The swallower gave Brabazul’s Ruin the same surface gravity as Mazarile, so the launch needed to use its rockets to achieve a landing.

‘You see that line of craters?’ Triglav asked. ‘They’re on Loftling’s charts. There’s a way in near the rim of the rightmost crater. The captain’ll put down as close to that point as possible – no sense in walking further than you have to.’

The bauble had opened on schedule, so we could bank on it closing just as promptly. Rackamore’s party had two hundred and
fifty-
eight hours until they’d need to be back in space, above the level where the bauble’s surface had formed. That was more than ten days, and Loftling had only needed one day to make a round trip.

‘They’re down,’ Prozor said. It was only a minute or two later that Rackamore squawked back to confirm that they were safe and beginning to leave the launch.

‘Keep a watch on the sweeper,’ he said. ‘And if the sisters aren’t in the bone room, they should be.’

We waited just long enough for the party to step out onto the surface, although even with the telescopes there was nothing we could see of that. After a few minutes Rackamore said that they’d found Loftling’s entrance, and that Mattice was already following Loftling’s guidelines on opening the lock.

At the door to the bone room, before we spun the wheel, we experienced a moment of collective hesitation, a silent exchange of looks, both of us knowing that we had to push aside our doubts and rise to the moment. My throat was dry, my hands clammy.

I spun the wheel and we went inside.

Without Cazaray to squeeze some of the space out of the room, the skull seemed larger. I moved around it as if seeing it for the first time, picking my way through the loom of supporting strings, wondering again at the
long-
dead creature that had once owned these bones.

‘I’ll start at one end,’ Adrana said, taking the two sets of neural bridges from the wall. ‘You the other. If we meet in the middle without getting anything, we’ll know no one’s sending.’

I took the pins from my hair so that I could flatten it close to my scalp, and put on the neural bridge, jamming it down as tight as possible. I plugged in, closed my eyes, and emptied my thoughts. There was nothing from the peripheral input. I gave it long enough to be sure, then moved along to the next location. The skull quivered in its springs. Adrana moved her input at the same time as mine, disturbing the skull no more than necessary.

Nothing on the second nodes, for either of us.

We opened our eyes, met each other’s gaze, nodded, carried on.

On the third I felt a prickle.

‘Something . . .’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘Quiet.’ I should have kept my trap shut – Cazaray would have chastised me for that – but the prickle was still there. Something was sending, or trying to send. But the signal was weak.

‘I’m moving to the next input. It might be stronger.’

‘All right,’ Adrana said doubtfully.

I uncoupled, plugged in again. The contact was clearer this time. I shivered a little.

‘Better?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then tell me what you’re getting.’

‘It’s not clear yet.’ I was speaking and trying to hold my mind empty at the same time. ‘Let me work on it.’

‘Is it near or far?’

‘I can’t tell. Chaff it – let me concentrate.’

I moved to the next node. Nothing coming through on that one. I returned to the previous site. The signal was still there, but I was pretty sure it had got fainter.

‘Well?’ my sister demanded.

‘I don’t know. It’s not as strong.’

‘Let me try.’

‘Because you’re always better than me?’

‘In this case – yes.’

Pride nearly got the better of me, and I don’t mind admitting it. But I rose above it and allowed Adrana to couple onto the node. I backed away from the skull, eased the bridge from my head.

‘Show me how it’s done.’

Adrana ignored my goad and plugged in. Her face went all placid and
doll-
like, as if she’d been doing this since we were in nappies. For a good minute she showed no reaction, but then there was a twitch at the edge of her eyelid, and a faint crease dug itself into her forehead.

She unplugged and went back to the node where I’d first detected the presence. Then back to the other node. Her lower lip pulled back from the top one.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘I thought there was something. On the first input, just for a moment. Then it was gone.’

‘I didn’t imagine it, then.’

‘Sometimes there’s noise on these inputs. Static charges building up in the skull. You know that.’

‘That’s not what it was.’

‘All right,’ she said, jerking the neural bridge off her scalp. ‘So what are you suggesting we do about this ghost signal? Take it to Triglav, or Prozor, or Hirtshal, and tell them to call back the party because we
might
have picked up a send from anywhere in the Congregation?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘Then what?’

‘I’m just saying there was something there. Something that didn’t feel
right
. I don’t know where it was sending from, or to whom. That’s all.’

Adrana took my neural bridge and hung it back up with hers on the wall.

‘We’re jumpy,’ she said, taking a conciliatory tone. ‘It’s our first time alone.’

I put one pin between my teeth while I fiddled another into my hair.

‘I didn’t imagine it,’ I said, gritting out the words.

‘Mattice got the door open,’ Triglav said, scratching behind an ear. ‘No surprise there – Mattice is
almost
as good as he thinks he is, and Loftling’s instructions can’t have been too wide of the mark. They were in contact until that point, but now they’ve begun to descend into the world we won’t hear too much from them again.’

‘Isn’t that a risk?’ I asked.

‘Cap’n’s way,’ Prozor said. ‘Settin’ up repeaters, runnin’ wires through doors, that all takes time. All goes well, they’ll hit the loot in about six, eight hours. Gives ’em time to scope it out, sort the loot from the chaff, get some of it back to the launch, check in with us, and maybe think about going deep again.’

‘Say eighteen hours round trip,’ Triglav stated. ‘But they still need to rest and sleep. Maybe a round trip a day, if they push it. Room for ten of those before the bauble blinks on us, but Rack won’t push it anywhere near that close.’

‘They’d already have been awake for much more than a day,’ I said.

Triglav nodded vigorously. ‘But nothing’ll put a spring in your step quicker than a room full of loot. Believe me, they don’t all share his caution.’ He took a swig from his tankard – it was never very far from him – looking like a man drowning a multitude of sorrows. ‘But caution’s what’s kept them alive until now. Isn’t it, Hirtshal?’

The master of sail glanced up from a puzzle of knotted strings. He ruminated on the question for some moments.

‘Yes.’

‘There: a resounding show of support from the
ever-
loquacious Hirtshal.’

‘Too much caution, I say,’ Prozor mumbled. ‘Weeks to get out here, why not use all the time we have?’

‘You know why,’ Triglav answered. ‘Sometimes you can push things too far. If anyone knows that, it’s you.’

Hirtshal placed a hand on Triglav’s wrist. ‘Enough.’

But Triglav wriggled out from under the master of sail and helped himself to more bread and beer. ‘Why not? We all know what happened. If the Ness sisters are going to be part of this crew, they’ll end up knowing sooner or later. Why not now?’

‘Are you talking about the Fang?’ I asked.

‘Mattice wasn’t always our Opener,’ Triglav said. ‘That was Prozor. And do you know our dark secret? Proz was the best of them all. Until Captain Rackamore overreached himself, and our old Bauble Reader wasn’t as reliable as Proz is now—’

‘Shut up,’ Prozor said.

Triglav took another swig. ‘They’ve a right to know what can happen.’

‘Not now,’ Hirtshal said.

‘Never will be a good time for it, will there? But it’s part of what we are, and none of it was Proz’s fault.
That
you can blame on the Bauble Reader we had back then.’ Triglav rubbed a hand across his scalp, as if reassuring himself that it was still hairless. ‘And don’t worry – I wouldn’t stain the ship with his name. Enough to know that the estimate was wrong, the auguries all cockeyed. You tell ’em, Proz.’

She scowled at him – or made more of the scowl that was her normal expression – but now that the story had been dredged half into the light I could tell she needed to finish it off, the way you needed to finish lancing a boil once you had started.

‘You were right,’ she said, nodding at me. ‘It was the Fang. Just a name for a bauble. It’s still out there, somewhere, although I don’t care to remember the orbit it was on. Ordinary enough place, to begin with. Nothing shivery about it.
Bone-
coloured rock, all smoothed over with no craters. Been cracked a few times, some loot, but no one had ever gone really deep.’

‘Until we hauled in,’ Triglav said. He passed Prozor a beer.

‘Rack wanted to see what was in it, though. Meant going down further than anyone else. We made four trips in, and each time we reached a deeper set of vaults. On the fourth . . . well, we found somethin’. More than a league and a quarter down. Rooms. Lots of rooms. And a different kind of loot than any of us had seen before. Stuff I ain’t heard of before or since.’

‘Such as?’ I asked.

‘Nasty stuff. Gold boxes. Like cases of treasure, except engraved with skulls and bones, done like corpses with the meat comin’ off them. Crouching lions, with fizzogs half gone. All grinny and sockety. Monkey faces, too. Put the deep shivers in us all. Something about those boxes said
keep away
. Got worse, the closer you got to ’em. But Rack had the spur in him then. Had to know what was in those boxes. So he cranked one open. Cove was shaking just to be that near, but credit to ’im, he did it. Wasn’t no lock on it or anything, just a hinge. And inside . . .’

‘What?’

‘Ghostie stuff,’ Prozor said. ‘More of it than you or me or anyone else has ever seen in one place. And there wasn’t just that one box. There were dozens of ’em. We opened a few, when we could stomach it. Wasn’t easy.’

‘Ghostie stuff?’ I said.

‘The Ghosties go back a long way. First or Second Occupation, maybe earlier. They were people . . . maybe. But not like us. They did things we can’t do or even think of doin’. Wrong things. Things against the common laws of nature. Mostly they didn’t leave much behind, just a shivery reputation. Some coves say the whole reason for baubles is to keep Ghostie stuff from spilling back out into the worlds again, except now the baubles ain’t doing such a peachy job of it. You ever seen Ghostie stuff, Fura?’