‘I don’t care for it either.’
‘It’s when the armour starts feelin’ like a natural part of you, that’s when you need to worry.’ Then she touched a hand to me. ‘We wronged each other, Fura. I know it. And maybe one of those wrongs was worse than the other. But if I blame you, I’m only blamin’ you for what Bosa Sennen put into your head, and that’s hardly any fault of yours.’ I was content with that, but she wasn’t done. ‘Anyway, it ain’t what the rest of ’em deserve.’
‘The rest?’
‘Cazaray. Mattice. Jusquerel. Triglav. Trysil. Hirtshal – all one word of ’im. And Rack. Can’t forget Rack.’
‘It was a good crew,’ I said. ‘We were lucky to have them. Lucky to sign on with a good ship, a good captain. We hadn’t earned it.’
‘You’re earnin’ it now.’ Then she bent her mouth closer to my ear, whispering out from behind the faceless visor of the Ghostie armour. ‘Somethin’ was poisonin’ this one. Maybe it was Gathing, with that snidey manner of ’is. Maybe it was Trusko, clinging to a past he made up for himself. Maybe it was just too much bad luck, over ’n’ over again. That’ll grind any crew down. But now that we’ve lived with ’em, I know that they ain’t the worst.’
I didn’t feel like smiling, but I managed it anyway.
‘Praise indeed.’
‘I mean it, Fura. Strambli was foxed by that door, but then so was Mattice when he first ran into somethin’ like that. And Mattice was as good as they come. Surt’s not a bad Integrator. Seen better, but she’s no slouch. Drozna and Tindouf, they ain’t so terrible either.’
‘You feel bad that we used them?’
‘No, just that we had use someone. I’ll be true to you. When Black Shatterday wiped out my quoins, I only had one thought left in me, which was to bury Bosa. If that meant dyin’, or takin’ another crew with me – if that meant takin’ you with me – then I was ready for it. But somethin’ changed when we came out of the Fang.’ Prozor’s mask glanced away from me, as if this was more than she was ready to share. ‘I still want to vent Bosa. But I ain’t dyin’ for it, and I’d sooner none of the rest of us die either.’
‘Then we’ll try very hard not to,’ I said.
Our ears popped again. ‘Secondary lock,’ Prozor said. ‘She’s through. Won’t be long now.’
I nodded. ‘We’d better get ourselves dispersed. I’m going to the bone room. They’ll find it quickly enough.’
We left Trusko and Drozna in the galley, to face Bosa and her boarding squad when they arrived. Tindouf went aft, to the part of the ship he knew the best. Surt hid herself away in the bridge, among the monkey and alien gubbins she’d stitched into functionality. Strambli went midships, near the sleeping area, and Prozor went to the kitchen. We took crossbows, Ghostie blades and the smallest of the pistols, but even those we’d only use as a last resort.
By then I knew my way around the Queenie like I’d been born to it. It only took a minute to get into the bone room. I spun the locking wheel as a matter of routine, stationed myself against a wall, then dimmed the lights. I waited another minute, then two. The bone room was soundproofed, so I wouldn’t have heard any kind of commotion even if the squad were shouting their way right past the door, hammering on walls and bulkheads as they went. Still, after two or three minutes I was surprised when no one had tried to open the door from the other side.
I gave it a little longer, then slipped the Ghostie mask off my face. For a moment I felt as if I’d come up from underwater, rising from the deep end at the Hadramaw public baths. I took a deep breath and set the mask aside. Then I pulled the neural bridge off the wall, settled it over my scalp, and plugged in to the skull.
It didn’t take long to connect to Adrana. It didn’t surprise me that she was on skull watch during the middle of the attack, for Bosa would still be looking for any useful intelligence on us.
‘Fura . . .’ she said, her voiceless presence whispering into my brain. ‘You’re alive. I’m so glad. When she opened up the coil-guns . . .’
‘She didn’t want to hurt us too badly,’ I said. ‘Not yet. When she’s got the skull, it’ll be a different game. But we’re ready for her.’
‘As ready as Rackamore was?’
‘This’ll be different. But I have to know. We think she brought seven people with her – eight in total on the launch.’
‘Yes, that tallies.’ She didn’t ask me how I knew, and I was glad of that, for it spared me explaining the lookstone to her. ‘Bosa wasn’t counting on a fight, or else she’d have sent them over with harpoons, rocket packs and magnetic boots, to land on your hull from outside.’
‘Then we’ve still got her where we want – thinking she’s ahead of us. Do you know how many are left on the Nightjammer?’
‘Five, including me. What’s going to happen, Fura?’
That was when I heard someone tug at the wheel to the bone room.
‘Blood,’ I said, and closed the connection. Then, to myself: ‘Blood’s what’s going to happen.’
The wheel was still turning.
I slipped off the neural bridge, redonned the Ghostie mask, and detached the long-bladed weapon from my armour. My hand was closed around something solid, but there was still no presence to it. I might as well have been trying to hold onto a column of fast-moving lungstuff, the blade weighed so little.
I pressed back against the wall, to the right of the door. The wheel stopped turning and the door creaked wide. I held my breath, jammed tight against that wall. It was still dark in the bone room, and my eyes had had time to adjust to it.
I wasn’t expecting it to be Bosa who jammed her head through the door, and it wasn’t. The suit was polished black, gleaming like someone had spent a lot of hours and spit getting it that way. Our suits were too bulky to move around easily in the Queenie, but Bosa’s were some older and better technology, and the coves inside them must have barely felt they were encumbered. That was good if you were sweeping through an enemy ship, mowing down the opposition, but not so good when a little caution was the order of the day.
Like now.
I wanted to know if I was dealing with one or more of them, so I let the black-suited figure come further into the bone room. They looked to either side as they passed through the door, and as they glanced to the right, they were looking right at me. I saw his face and eyes through his visor.
There was a twitch of something there, like a premonition of recognition rather than recognition itself. The cove’s brain was telling him something wasn’t right, but somewhere between one part of his noggin and the other, the message was getting addled. His eyes lingered on me for maybe half a second, and then they got pulled back to the main prize. He reached out a hand, steadying himself on the skull’s support wires. With the other hand, he stroked along the skull’s top ridge. The twinkly was still twinkling, and I suppose those lights were pretty no matter what flag you sailed under. He gave a look back, through the door he’d come from, and I knew then that he was on his own.
He spoke. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, just the muffled report of it, spilling through his visor and into the lungstuff I was still dragging down my windpipe. I didn’t need to hear him: it was obvious. He was all puffed up with himself like teacher’s pet, having been the one who’d found Bosa’s new skull.
I let him have his moment.
Then I peeled myself off the wall, coming up behind him. If I made any sound, he didn’t hear it through that suit. I had the Ghostie blade in my right hand. I scooped my tin hand over the top of his helmet, until I got my fingers around the rim over the top of his visor. He knew I was on him then, but it didn’t matter. He made to twist around, but I was faster. I pulled the Ghostie blade through the collar where his helmet joined his suit, and it went through like there was nothing there at all. I only just stopped before I started cutting through myself. His helmet floated away from
his neck, his head still in it, and as it tumbled past me I got a good squint at his face, his eyes still open, and maybe just a glimmer of comprehension showing on them before his thoughts clouded out.
Meanwhile, blood was rocketing out of the other part of him like it was late for an appointment. His body tumbled as well, and the blood-coloured fountain painted itself all over the skull and walls and me.
The odd business was, though, that the blood didn’t stay on the Ghostie armour. It didn’t slide off it, either. I watched it shrink down into patches, and then smaller patches, like the armour was soaking the blood into itself. It should have changed colour, or become less transparent, less Ghostie, but it didn’t.
If anything, it was harder to see than before.
24
I left the bits of him in the bone room, sealed the door, took my crossbow in my right hand and started moving back through the Queenie, always scouting out a spot I could squeeze into if I knew someone was coming. Considering it was in the middle of action, the ship was graveyard quiet. I thought about what I’d done, and how easy it had been – not just easy in the way the blade had parted the head from the neck, but easy in how I’d not had to think twice before doing it. I knew I’d sworn to get back at Bosa, and a mind for vengeance will put a spur into the meekest of us, but it wasn’t just that. I’d sliced his head off because in that moment I couldn’t think of anything simpler or more beautiful to do. It was as if someone had written:
1 + 1 =
and then left chalk next to it, so I could finish it off.
And I wondered how much of that was to do with me, how much to do with the lightvine, and how much to do with the armour. And another part of me wondered if I was better off not knowing.
The second one wasn’t as straightforward as the first. I came around a twist in the corridor and there was another of those black suits at the end of it. There was a woman’s face in the visor. She slowed, narrowing her eyes, knowing something was out of place, but not quite seeing me for what I was. I froze, so that she wouldn’t have the motion of my disconnected parts to help her, but I was a shade too late. She brought up her crossbow and levelled it in my direction, still squinting. She barked out something, but again I didn’t get more than a muffle of it.
Then she shot the crossbow. The bolt hit me in the sternum – she’d found the middle of me, even with the armour – but it wasn’t any worse than a sharp tap from a finger and the bolt didn’t penetrate. I raised my own crossbow and gave her a bolt in return, nailing her right in the visor. The bolt punctured the glass, but it didn’t get her in the face. She reached up, touched the bolt where it was embedded, thought better of tugging it out, and surged towards me like she had springs on her heels. She had a sword of her own, the curved blade as black and shiny as her suit.
I pushed the Ghostie blade ahead of me. We closed the distance between each other, her sword chopping through the lungstuff like she was trying to find something in fog. I met it with the Ghostie and sliced it clean through, leaving her with just the handle and a little stump of sword jutting from it. She could still do damage with that, but I was quicker. I jabbed the Ghostie right into her chest, and then pulled up as I drew it out. I took it down to the hilt, imagining the invisible blade cutting its way out of the back of her like a fin made of glass.
The length of the blade was crimson when I glanced at it. But it drank the blood just as thirstily as the armour.
That was when I felt something press against the back of my noggin.
‘Drop it,’ a voice shouted through glass and lungstuff so that I got the gist of it well enough.
If it was a crossbow muzzle, it was pressing against the hair on the back of my head, not against any part of the armour. No matter what you might think, something like that can have a very persuasive effect. I let go of the blade, and allowed the crossbow to slide out of my other hand.
I heard a hiss, like the seal on a helmet being released. Then the glassy whirr of a visor going up into a helmet, the way ours don’t.
The voice was clearer now.
‘You gave it a good go, with that armour.’ The voice was a man’s, but quite high in its pitch, and better spoken than I’d been expecting. ‘All you’ve done is given Bosa something else for her money. She’s been after Ghostie gubbins for years, and now she’s got it all on a plate. Thought you could give her the jump, did you?’
‘I didn’t think anything,’ I said.
‘This bolt’ll go through your mush like it was piston-driven. They’ll be cleaning your grey off the walls for weeks, and picking bits of your bones out of their teeth after that. But you can save yourself that. We’re near the middle of the ship. Where’s the skull?’
‘What skull?’
I got a jab of the muzzle against my skull for that bit of back-talk, but I reckoned it was worth it for the cheek. If I was going to get a bolt through my brain, I’d rather be getting on someone’s nerves than going all bendy-kneed and pleading, like that was going to make a difference.
‘The bone room,’ the voice said. ‘Show me it.’
‘You can’t talks to her like that,’ said a voice I knew very well. ‘T’aint proper. T’aint respectful. She’s our Bone Reader, she is, and we’s very pleased with her service.’
There was a click, but it was the crossbow having its safety latch put back on. I turned around slowly, leaving the stabbed one to get on with bleeding out. Tindouf had reached over the shoulder of the man behind me and taken the crossbow from him, but not before slicing right through the top third of his helmet, so that his skull and brains were laid open like a wax model of someone’s insides.
‘Thank you, Tindouf,’ I said.
‘Ain’t necessary, Fura. But there’s more of them’s need killings, and I still needs some notches.’
‘Honestly, Tindouf, I didn’t know you had it in you.’
‘Peoples think I’s a harmless idiot,’ he said. ‘They’s only half right.’
By the time we met Prozor and made an accounting of our progress, we’d killed five of the boarding squad. Their blood was already bobbing around the ship, bits of it drifting through in odd coagulations, following lungstuff currents like it was taking a sightseeing tour.
We found Strambli not long after, and while we were glad to see her, and even gladder to find her alive, she hadn’t had a chance to get close to one of Bosa’s people.
‘I saw one,’ she said, breathless. ‘But the cove spooked, and he was quicker’n me. He was heading back to the prow when I last clocked him.’
‘There were eight of them,’ I said, as we crouched together in one of the wider corridors, not far from the kitchen where Prozor had been stationed. ‘If Surt hasn’t taken any, that still leaves Bosa and two others. They must still be in the galley, but they’ll be getting the shivers now and I wouldn’t want to guess what that’ll push Bosa into doing.’
‘If she touches Drozna,’ Strambli said, finding some ferocity in herself that I’d never seen before, ‘I’ll pop her eyeballs out myself, stick ’em on skewers, and jam ’em back in her sockets the wrong way round.’
‘We can’t leave it any longer,’ I said. ‘It’s Bosa we wanted, not her goons. Does everyone still have their blades and bows?’
We did a quick inventory. I’d regained my weapons after being rescued by Tindouf, and I still had the Ghostie pistol. The others still had their crossbows, and we made sure they were all drawn, bolted and ready to go. Here we were then: only a drift away from the room where she was. Part of me was straining to be in there, putting right what she’d wronged. But another part of me would have given anything not to face Bosa Sennen.
‘We’re not ready,’ I said, hoping I was sharing a common thought with the others. ‘But we’ll never be readier. And no one’s come close to doing what we’ve already done.’
‘Let’s take her,’ Strambli said.
>
And we nodded one after the other. There wasn’t any telling when it had happened, or what part in it Trusko could say was his. But somewhere between the Fang and this gathering, we’d become something we never were before, and that uncommon alchemy was as close to magical as anything that ever happened in all the long histories of the Thirteen Occupations.
We’d turned into a crew.
Drozna was dead. He’d been shot through the throat with a crossbow bolt, the same way Bosa killed Triglav, and if I might have doubted the presence of her hand until then, that would have been all the evidence I needed.
Trusko, though, was still alive. He wasn’t even wounded. He’d been punched around a bit, that was plain, but other than a cut lip and a bruised eye, which only made him look softer and puffier, he wasn’t much different than when we’d left him. Bosa had him strapped into a seat, and one of her black-suited boarders was on either side of him, but Bosa herself wasn’t in the galley. We’d already checked Trusko’s private quarters, so that only left the bridge, connecting off the galley the same way it had done on the Monetta. And now that we listened, we could hear her voice. She was using the squawk.
Or trying to.
In case I’ve given the wrong impression, we didn’t storm the galley and start hacking away. We came in stealthy as shadows, quiet as cats, and because of the Ghostie armour, and the unfamiliarity of the place, Bosa’s two grunts didn’t notice they had company until it was much too late. Credit to Trusko, too: if he batted an eyelid, I didn’t see it. Maybe the cove was too punched about to notice us, but I don’t think so. I reckon there was enough alertness going on in his noggin to appreciate that Bosa’s fortunes were about to take a severe dip, one that would make Black Shatterday look like a good day’s trading.
I’ll spare you the graphics of how we hacked ’em up, or what parts we detached from other parts, and what they made of it as it was going on. Suffice to say it wasn’t pretty, and if I ever have nightmares about my time on the Queenie, which happens more than you’d think, that’s the part that they tend to linger over. But while we weren’t kind to them, exactly, we weren’t cruel either, at least not in Bosa’s league.