‘See what?’ Trusko asked.
‘Ghostie stuff,’ Prozor said.
They edged close to the box she’d opened. I was looking as well. The box looked empty, just a rectangular enclosure with smooth gold walls, lacking the ornamentation it had on the outside. Empty at least when I was staring at it directly, trying to see something. But when I averted my vision, forcing my brain to stop asking if the box were empty or not, a smoky, glassy outline showed itself. The natural reaction was to snap back onto it, try to see it more clearly. But then there wasn’t anything in the box again.
‘I see it,’ Strambli said, with wonder and terror in her voice. ‘It’s what she says. Ghostie. Heard of it, but never seen it . . . never even met anyone who’d seen it.’
I kept glancing away, catching furtive snatches of what was in the box, and allowing my brain to stitch these clues into a form. It was a knotty thing to do. It wasn’t just hard to see the stuff in the box, it was hard to remember what you’d just glimpsed. The Ghostie stuff was as slippery on the grey as it was on the lamps, like it didn’t want to be remembered.
Slowly, though, I got the curious gist of it. The thing in the box was upright, with arms and legs and a torso. It was made up of glassy panels, curved to fit around a cove.
‘It’s armour,’ Prozor said. ‘Ghostie armour. And there’s more of it. All these upright boxes. They all hold armour.’
‘Been here before, have you?’ Strambli asked.
‘I just know it.’
Before the conversation took a swerve it oughtn’t, I went back to one of the other open boxes. I glanced away and back again, until I made out a pile of long, glassy things with thick mid-sections and handles at one end.
Not handles, exactly, I decided.
Grips and stocks and triggers.
I reached into the box, closed my fingers around something tangible. I drew it out. The Ghostie weapon was invisible and as light as if it were carved out of frozen smoke. It still felt as real and solid in my fingers as any crossbow.
‘Guns,’ I said. ‘Ghostie guns.’
Trusko didn’t say anything for a few moments. I could hear his breathing over the squawk. We were all breathing fast, lugging twice our usual weight around, and the prickly feeling of the vaults wasn’t doing anything to settle our nerves. But Trusko was at least as excited as he was frightened.
‘We’ve done it,’ he said, the words coming out hoarse between breaths. ‘After all the failures, all the busts. This changes everything.’
Strambli couldn’t mask her own enthusiasm, but it was tempered by realism. ‘We’ll take what we can. Leave the boxes, if necessary, and just take what’s in ’em. But even then, we’ll never shift more than a fraction of what’s here. And it’s no good saying we’ll come back another time. The rumour’s already out there. Some other coves’ll be here before we can blink, clean the place out . . .’
‘We can seal the doors,’ Trusko said. ‘Make as many trips up and down the shaft as we can, then seal everything up. Make it harder for them, at any rate.’ He was still bewitched. ‘Just a few trinkets of Ghostie stuff changed the fortunes of whole crews. What’s here’s enough to change a whole world, a whole economy.’
‘Better hope the market doesn’t get flooded,’ Prozor said drily.
‘We’ll get back to the worlds. Get a good price for the loot, before the price dips. We’re still ahead of the game.’ He pivoted around, throwing his arms wide. ‘Fura – I had my doubts about that intelligence you threw me, but I thought it worth taking a chance on. Rest assured you’ve earned your share of this. And, Prozor – your auguries told us this was feasible. If ever I had my doubts about either of you . . .’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘we ought to start moving it up the shaft.’
Trusko raised his hand in good-natured surrender. ‘Of course, of course.’
We were down to fifteen hours and spare change. Fourteen before we needed to be in the launch and on our way. I couldn’t see us making more than one round trip up and down the shaft in less than five hours, which meant we had time – just – to make three trips to the surface, three loads of Ghostie stuff in the bucket.
By then we’d be cutting it plenty fine.
‘Strambli’s right, I think,’ I said. ‘Ordinarily, the boxes alone would be worth an expedition. But they’re too heavy for us to shift more than one at a time. I say we take this one, the one with the guns, and move the armour out separately. If two of us ride the bucket, we can easily squeeze four or five of those suits of armour on it.’ And seven would be nicer, I thought to myself: one for each of us. Six if we assumed Drozna wouldn’t fit, five if we took Surt out of consideration as well.
Trusko might not have taken kindly to his Bone Reader dictating the order of operations, but Strambli wasn’t going to quibble with me now that I’d thrown her a biscuit.
‘The guns it is,’ the captain said, cocking his head sidelong at the box. ‘Do you think they . . . still operate?’
‘There’s power in ’em,’ Prozor said. ‘Or whatever counts as power with the Ghosties. If there wasn’t, you’d just be looking at piles of twinkly dust.’
Trusko had one of the glassy guns between his hands. He looked like he was miming it, not actually holding anything, until you squinted away and caught the shivery sense of it, like a heat haze or mirage tricking itself into the form of a weapon.
Something wrong. Something against the natural order of things.
‘I wonder what one of these could do,’ Trusko said.
I reckoned he’d find out soon enough.
We only managed two return trips. On the first one, we took the gold box and the weapons, Trusko and me nursing it back up to the surface while Prozor and Strambli stayed behind in the vault to lighten the strain on the line and get the next load ready. We loaded the box onto the launch, and then went back down the shaft. I couldn’t say I much liked the idea of going back into the bauble. The squawk wasn’t working as well as it had when we landed, even from the surface, and I knew that squawk breaking up was often a herald to the field starting to thicken over. I was expecting it to make Trusko jittery, but he just put it down to the vagaries of his equipment, the cove still convinced he had a few more days of grace before the bauble closed up. At least we were still getting word to and from the Queenie, even with the signal breaking up. Drozna hadn’t given the captain anything to trouble his noggin over.
Ten hours were left on the clock by the time the winch brought us back level with the door. We trooped through to the vault, pleased when we met up with Prozor and Strambli. They’d spent their time profitably, going through more of the boxes and sorting the loot into rough categories. They’d found five of the suits of armour, and they were laid out onto the floor now, a blurry presence that you had to not look at to stand any chance of seeing. They made me think of those dead cells that float through the liquid of the eye, those swimmy seahorses you can barely see unless it’s bright – except instead of seahorses these were shaped into breastplates and gauntlets and so on. Next to the armour they’d organised some detachable items; visors, helmets, knives and pistols. ‘Be careful with the sharp things,’ Prozor said. ‘Just ’cause you can’t see ’em, don’t mean they can’t take a piece off you.’ She held up her gauntlet, wiggling the fingers. There was a deep gash in the material of her palm, almost enough to break all the way through and allow the lungstuff out.
‘You’ve done us proud,’ Trusko said, surveying the spoils. ‘We’ll be up and down that shaft more times than we can count, but it still makes me shudder to think what we’ll need to leave behind. If I had atomic munitions I’d think of collapsing the shaft itself!’
Someone else flooding the market with Ghostie stuff wasn’t going to be the cove’s most immediate and pressing problem, I thought. But I kept my trap shut.
The armour was light, so we didn’t need
to leave anyone behind in the vault on the next trip up. Prozor would have found a reason to come up anyway, knowing as she did that we were down to our last ten hours, but at least she was spared the strain of coming up with something.
By the time we got to the bucket Trusko was still drunk on the idea of his fortunes taking a swerve. ‘We’ll need to act with the utmost discretion,’ he was saying, his mind racing ahead to wealth and fame. ‘Even the small amount that we’ll take back with us on the Queenie, it’s no good trying to get a price for all that in one go. We’ll maximise our gains by selling on one item at a time, never hinting at the true haul . . .’
‘They’ll get a whiff of it as soon as we sell two bits of Ghostie stuff,’ Strambli said, folding up the bucket’s connecting bridge.
‘Then we’ll need to be even more discreet. Secrecy clauses. Never dealing with the same broker twice. No one allowed to speak of what they’ve bought off us, for a year or three . . .’
Prozor took something out of her utility belt. I only got a glimpse of it before she leaned over the side of the bucket and let it fall into the shaft. Because there wasn’t any lungstuff in the shaft, and we were already under two gees, it went down fast.
‘What was that?’ Trusko asked.
‘I was just thinkin’ of them that came here before us, and them that’ll come here later,’ Prozor said.
I think what she dropped into the shaft was a flower, with red petals, and the vacuum must have turned it into something like glass.
But I never asked her and she never spoke of it.
We loaded the Ghostie armour and equipment onto the launch. We were properly tired by then, ready to drop, but I think Trusko still had the spur in him to go back into the bauble at least once before we rested. But when he contacted Drozna, everything changed.
‘Don’t want to make more of it than I should,’ Drozna said, his voice coming over the squawk console inside the launch. ‘But we got something a little while ago.’
‘Got something?’ Trusko asked.
‘It was on the sweeper for a moment. A return, nearby. Something large, but not clear either. All ragged, like it was made up of bits. Then it was gone, and there’s been nothing since.’
‘Probably a fault on the sweeper,’ Trusko said, like he wanted someone to pat him on the back and tell him to stop worrying.
Prozor looked at me. I could only see the middle part of her face through that grilled-over porthole, but it was enough. She didn’t like the thought that was forming in her head. A return meant that another ship was near. It couldn’t be the Nightjammer, though, because the Nightjammer didn’t know we were taking a look at the Fang.
Did it?
‘Something’s not right,’ I said.
And Prozor answered: ‘I think we’re agreed on that.’
I’d played out in my head how and when we might get round to informing Trusko that his ship and crew had been turned into bait for Bosa Sennen, but the time had always been of my choosing, when we were good and ready for it. And somehow, as I ran that little exchange through the toy theatre in my head, I’d got over the knotty part about breaking it to Prozor that the Nightjammer already knew where we were. Exactly how I got from one side of that conversation to the other, I hadn’t figured.
I guess it was time to find out.
‘Captain,’ I said, still meeting eyes with Prozor, still aware of her face bottled behind that glass, all angles and fury, ‘there’s something you and I need to have a little chat about.’
‘Fura?’ he asked, not getting the tone of what I was saying.
‘I’d listen to her,’ Prozor said.
Strambli had taken off her helmet now that we were inside the launch. Her madder, larger eye was on me, doubt swimming behind it.
‘What?’
‘You’re in trouble. We’re in trouble. All of us.’ I had to take a breath, forcing myself into something close to calm if not quite calm itself. ‘You’ve been tricked,’ I went on. ‘By me. I’m not what you thought I was, and neither’s Proz. But we’re not your enemy. The enemy is the return Drozna just got on the sweeper.’
‘What,’ Trusko said slowly, ‘would that return be?’
‘It’s Bosa Sennen’s ship. What she calls the Dame Scarlet and what the rest of us call the Nightjammer.’
‘No,’ the captain said, with a flat certainty. ‘I’ve never crossed orbits with her. Never given her a reason to take an interest in me or my operation. I’m not even sure she exists.’
‘You soon will be,’ I said, reaching up to unlatch my helmet. ‘We’re not going back into the bauble. The auguries weren’t what you thought anyway. Less than seven hours from now, the field starts firming up again. Mainly, though, you need to get us back to the Queenie before Bosa closes in for her attack.’
‘Attack,’ Trusko repeated.
It was like he was hearing me, but the words weren’t quite drilling into his noggin.
‘She wants your skull,’ I said. Then, smiling like he might have taken that the wrong way, I added: ‘The one in the bone room. Hers is duff. She blew it taking the Monetta.’
‘Monetta,’ Strambli said. ‘There’s that name again.’
‘Prozor and I crewed on it,’ I said, lifting off my helmet. ‘We were shipmates, and we survived Bosa Sennen.’ Then, to Trusko: ‘I wasn’t kidding, Captain. We really do need to be on our way. I can explain how the rest of it’s going to work out as we cross over.’
Prozor turned to him. ‘Fura and I’ve got a few little points of order to settle between us. But she’s right about one thing. We do need to be up and off the bauble. You noticed how blurry those stars were starting to look, before we got back on the launch?’
‘I thought it was my helmet,’ Trusko said. ‘Getting all smeared over.’
‘It wasn’t. It’s space is what’s starting to smear over. Just a bit, not enough to stop us leaving. But the one thing we don’t want to do is sit around here bumpin’ our gums.’
‘Are you . . . serious?’ he asked, his gaze switching between the two of us.
‘Never been more serious, Captain,’ I told him. ‘But everything’s all right. I didn’t set you up to be torn apart by Bosa. She’s the one who’s in for a surprise.’
22
We lifted from the bauble, Trusko pushing the rockets all the way they’d go, the gees squeezing us into our seats, the engines roaring behind the aft bulkhead and the frame of the launch moaning and groaning like it was having bad dreams of its own. The ground fell away fast, the horizon bending into a curve that got sharper and sharper with every league we climbed. The one thing to be said for baubles was that it didn’t take long to put some distance from them. Only a minute after departure, we were already high enough for the field not to be a concern, even if it snapped back there and then.
Trusko eased back on the engines and began to lock us in for rendezvous with the Queenie. ‘I’ll squawk Drozna,’ he said, already reaching out to flick switches. He had taken off his helmet, but other than that he still had all of his suit on. ‘Warn him to start running out the sails.’
‘You can do that,’ I said, from the seat behind his control position. ‘But if you want to make it through to the end of the day, don’t say a word about it being Bosa. Don’t even sound as if you’re all that concerned – just that you’re coming back as a precaution.’
Prozor had slipped off her own helmet. She was sitting in the seat next to mine, across the narrow aisle that ran the length of Trusko’s launch. ‘Fura’s right,’ she said, squaring her jaw as if the words had given her toothache. ‘It’s fine to react – Bosa will have picked up Drozna’s squawk about the sweeper return. But you can’t let Bosa know you’ve any idea it’s her that’s coming in. She ain’t even crossed your mind yet. You’re still thinkin’ this is some other ship that wants a sniff at your claim and might not be too poli
te about it, but another part of you’s not even convinced that return wasn’t a phantom.’
‘We don’t even know it is Bosa,’ Strambli said, with a quivery desperation in her voice. ‘Do we?’
‘It’s Bosa all right,’ Prozor said, taking a kind of malicious pleasure in it, the way some people just love delivering bad news. ‘Ain’t it, Fura? Go on, ask the Bone Reader. She’s the one that called Bosa in.’
I slid my tongue over my lips. ‘I wasn’t planning on lying to you, Proz – any more than you were planning on lying to me about the auguries.’
‘What about the auguries?’ Trusko asked.
‘Call Drozna,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll talk. And remember – not a word about Bosa, or she’ll know something’s rum. We’ve got an edge on her now, but we’ll take the shine off it if we’re not careful.’
Trusko flipped the switches. ‘Drozna,’ he said, swallowing hard before carrying on. ‘That return may or may not have been real. Probably there’s nothing out there, but we’re coming back as a matter of routine. Have Surt check the sweeper. We’ll be in dock in fifty minutes.’
‘It was real,’ Drozna said. ‘Whatever I saw. But Surt’s looking into it anyway.’
‘Very good.’ Trusko closed the connection, then twisted back to look at us. ‘Tell me what you meant about the auguries, Fura.’
‘Ask Proz,’ I said.
He switched his gaze onto her. ‘Well?’
Prozor sighed, shook her head slowly. ‘You’d have found out in a few hours. The window’s tighter than I said it was. Much tighter. We’d have had time for one more trip into the bauble, and that’d have been cuttin’ it nice. The way those stars were starting to quiver, maybe not even that much time.’
‘Why?’ Strambli said. ‘Why did you lie about that?’
‘Because we needed the Ghostie stuff, and you wouldn’t have gone into the bauble if you’d known the odds,’ Prozor said.