Fleet of Knives Read online

  “This is what I looked like,” she said. “Back when I was a real girl. Back when I really was Lucy, before I got ill and my dad hooked my brain into the ship’s matrix to try and keep me alive.”

  “So the name, Lucy’s Ghost…?”

  “Was more literal than otherwise.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” I stood up and rubbed my face with my hands. I knew most ships had brains based around a few kilograms of organic neurons grown from harvested stem cells, but I’d never heard of one incorporating the brain of a living person—let alone a child. “That’s… horrible.”

  Lucy gave an unconcerned, philosophical shrug. “It wasn’t ideal, dearie, but at least I got to travel.”

  Addison looked troubled. “So,” she said, “are you the human Lucy or the ship, Lucy?”

  The little girl stuck out her bottom lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “A little of both, probably. With a dash of something else.”

  Over the past few minutes, Kelly’s gun arm had started to relax. Now it straightened, drawing a bead on the girl’s forehead.

  “What else?”

  Lucy stretched lazily, shrugging off the blanket. “There’s part of me that used to be the Restless Itch.” She looked around at the rock walls of our cavern, as if surveying the walls of a prison cell. “Just a tiny part that’s hoping you might take it with you when you leave, because it’s been stuck out here for so long, and it’s been so endlessly, desperately bored.”

  She jumped to her feet and gripped the fabric of my spacesuit.

  “You will take me with you, won’t you?” she said, pleading like a worried little girl. I tried not to flinch away. I was having trouble getting my head around what she’d told me; but she looked so small, wide-eyed and helpless, I knew I couldn’t simply abandon her. And she sounded like the Lucy I remembered, the irascible old ship that had been my friend and home for the past eight years.

  “Yes,” I said, realising as I spoke that I meant it. “Yes, of course.”

  A brilliant smile lit her face. She released her grip and stepped back.

  “Thank you, Johnny. I always knew you were a good boy.” She looked around at all of us, and her face grew sombre. “Unfortunately, it might not be as easy as you think.”

  Kelly narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  Lucy clasped her hands together. “I really do want to come with you. I left a text file on the ship to say where we were, in case any rescuers intercepted the wreck. But if we’re going to survive long enough to get rescued, you’re going to have to find a better place to wait. Somewhere secure.” She lowered her voice and glanced around at us in turn. “Because I’m afraid we’re all in the most terrible danger.”

  A skittering sound echoed from the rock-walled corridor to our right.

  “What the hell is that?” Addison’s voice could have cut glass. I looked at her and was surprised to see her jaw set and her face drained of colour. She had been born and raised on Hellebore, an anarchic settlement on the edge of the Intrusion—an area of space where the normal rules of existence were fluid and subject to unexpected and violent change. As a result, very few things in the normal universe worried her. In fact, the only things that really, truly freaked her out were spiders—and that skittering sounded exactly like the gait of a large, multi-legged critter. Or maybe more than one.

  Lucy turned towards the darkened opening. In other circumstances, the sombre expression on her little face might have been adorable; here, it was simply chilling.

  “You’d better ready your weapons,” she said, “because we are not alone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ONA SUDAK

  The Marble Armada burst apart like a dandelion, its seeds racing away on a million diverging vectors, snatched away by winds of strategy and purpose. Their hulls gleamed the colour of moonlight. Their bows sliced the fabric of space like scalpels through silk.

  And then most of them were gone, having leapt into the higher dimensions, on hundreds of thousands of unannounced quests. Those that remained turned their noses towards Camrose, and the vast orbital shipyards hanging above the planet like industrial towns cut loose from the ground and flung up into the firmament.

  Being neutral, Camrose hosted yards owned by the Outward, the Conglomeration Navy, and the House of Reclamation, as well as half a dozen other, smaller factions. Lit by the unfiltered light of the system’s yellow sun, the ships of the Marble Armada spiralled towards them all like vultures.

  The walls of the bridge displayed the tactical status of every vessel in the system. Every faction had sent at least one ship. Some had been positioned to monitor the white fleet, others to guard against it. Now suddenly, they found themselves scrambling to respond to the sudden movement of ships that hadn’t so much as twitched in six months.

  As I watched, a Conglomeration battle group took up position between the advancing daggers and one of the orbital shipyards. The group consisted of a Scimitar-class warship, accompanied by a pair of Carnivore-class heavy cruisers, three Cudgel-class destroyers, and half a dozen Hyena-class frigates similar to the one that had rescued me from jail.

  The bear made a low growling noise in the depths of his fur-rolled throat.

  We are receiving a signal from the Scimitar.

  “Let me hear it.”

  The bear gestured with a claw, and a familiar human voice echoed through the room.

  “This is Admiral McDowell of the Conglomeration vessel Harbinger to alien ships. You are approaching a military facility. Please alter course immediately and withdraw to your previous positions.”

  McDowell and I had been at the Academy together. He was a good man and a dedicated officer, but had always been as stubborn and unyielding as a goat.

  “You’d better do as he says.”

  Beside me, the creature let loose a volley of snorts that seemed to shake the platform on which we stood.

  We do not recognise his authority.

  I threw a hand towards the tactical map. “But he thinks you’re threatening that habitat.” To my surprise, I noticed that the facility McDowell was protecting had been tagged as belonging to the Outward faction.

  We do not threaten. We act.

  I laughed. “If you don’t pull those ships back, he’ll fire on them.”

  That is your considered opinion?

  “Yes, I know this man. He takes his duty very seriously. Trust me, if he thinks you’re behaving against the interests of the people he’s shielding, he will fire on you.”

  He would instigate an act of war?

  “He wouldn’t shirk from it.”

  Then our course is justified.

  The bear reared up on its hindmost set of legs and let forth a roar I could feel in my gut. In response, the two white ships bearing down on McDowell’s position increased their speed. I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could vocalise my objection, searing white beams leapt from the bellies of the marble ships, spearing first the Harbinger, then its accompanying cruisers. The voices on the radio link turned to shouts of alarm. I heard McDowell order retaliatory fire, but his ship was already falling apart around him. Pieces broke from the Conglomeration vessels. A frigate flared and blossomed into a cloud of dirty flame.

  I put a hand across my mouth. “What are you doing?”

  We act to preserve life.

  “By killing people?”

  By destroying the means to wage war. Only when war is impossible will life be safe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SAL KONSTANZ

  I woke in the hold, curled beneath the protective folds of the inflatable life raft’s canopy. I could feel the vibration of the ship’s engines and hear the comforting creaks and gurgles of its systems.

  We were due to arrive at our destination in a little over an hour.

  When on a mission, standard House operating procedure was for commanding officers and crew to alternate four-hour watches with four hours of rest time, and take a single eight-hour sleep
period once every twenty-four hours. In practice, things on the Trouble Dog were looser. There was little for any of us to do while travelling through the higher dimensions, so watches tended to blur into rest periods, and our individual body clocks came to regulate our sleep patterns.

  Of course, this meant our diurnal rhythms were often out of sync. Someone would be going to bed while someone else would be getting up or contemplating lunch. And that suited me. It meant I didn’t see so much of the rest of the crew, and that while they slept, I could enjoy wandering a silent, almost empty ship.

  The only time this arrangement caused problems was when we emerged from the hypervoid and all had to be awake simultaneously—but as that could happen any time of the day or night depending on the length of our journey, and as we’d inevitably be out of sync with local planetary time anyway, we didn’t let it worry us. Whatever happened, at least the ship would always be feeling rested and alert; for the rest of us, jetlag had simply become a way of life—and coffee, strong tea, and other commercial stimulants were the pick-me-ups we relied upon to coax our sluggish brains into wakefulness.

  I yawned and pulled on my boots. Then I climbed out of the raft and stretched. According to the clocks back on Camrose Station, the time was somewhere around mid-afternoon. But I hadn’t been running on Station Time for months and as far as I was concerned, it was time for breakfast.

  I had been sleeping in my clothes, and felt grimy and in need of a shower. I thought about going back to my cabin to freshen up, but then decided my hunger took priority. I scratched my scalp with chewed fingernails, and put on my baseball cap. Then I trudged up to the galley.

  When I got there, I found the Trouble Dog’s avatar displayed on the large wall screen.

  “Hello,” she said.

  I peered sleepily at her. Today, she had decided to appear in a chic black cocktail dress, with matching elbow-length gloves, a string of pearls around her neck, and her hair piled up in an elegant coiffure.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  Her heavily made-up eyes glanced down at her finery.

  “Oh, you mean this?”

  “Yes.” I poured myself a cup of coffee. “Why are you all dolled up?”

  The Trouble Dog smiled. “It’s my birthday.”

  “Seriously? I didn’t even know ships had birthdays.”

  “We have inception dates. It amounts to the same thing.”

  I picked up the cup and warmed my hands around it. “You never mentioned it before.”

  “I never felt the need before.”

  “So, what’s changed?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems appropriate to celebrate another year of continued existence.”

  I smiled. “You’re getting sentimental in your old age.”

  The avatar opened her mouth. “I am not!”

  “It’s all right,” I assured her. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  I blew steam from my coffee and took a seat at the counter.

  “How old are you today?” I asked.

  “Fifteen.”

  She looked twenty-five: a soldier in a cocktail dress. I looked around for some food.

  “I’ve never known a ship celebrate its birthday before, and I’ve been on quite a few.”

  The Trouble Dog shrugged her bare shoulders. “I have no idea what other ships do.”

  “Do you miss them?” With the exception of the traitorous Adalwolf, all her siblings were dead.

  “I shouldn’t.” She wrinkled her nose. “I mean I’m not designed to mourn lost comrades. And yet, I do miss them. I miss their noise in my head.”

  “That’s only natural.”

  “Not to me it isn’t. It’s… discomforting.”

  “That’s grief for you.”

  “I don’t know how you people stand it.”

  “We muddle through.”

  She frowned. “Does it last long?”

  I thought of Sedge, and of my parents. “That depends.”

  “There are variables?”

  “Some.”

  The avatar rolled her eyes. “I think I liked it better when I didn’t have a conscience.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, emotions suck. But if it’s any consolation, having them makes you a better person.”

  She was silent for almost half a minute. When she finally spoke again, she said, “You lost your boyfriend?”

  “I did.”

  “But he’s not actually dead?”

  I shook my head. “In some ways, that makes it worse. In some ways, I guess it’s easier to bear, knowing he’s still out there, frozen in the hold of that Hopper ship.”

  “How so?”

  I sighed. “Because I’ll always know he’s still alive. He’ll always be as I remember him. Young and perfect, and he’ll never age. He’ll quite literally never age until long after I’m dead and gone.”

  “And that makes it better?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  The Trouble Dog thought about this. “You humans are strange,” she said.

  An hour later, when it came time to emerge, we strapped into our couches. On the main screen, the Trouble Dog’s avatar had elected to remain in her socialite apparel.

  “If you’re going to punch a hole in the universe,” she said while fiddling with her pearls, “you might as well do it looking fabulous.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  JOHNNY SCHULTZ

  “What are they?” Kelly demanded.

  Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know, but they came on board at around the same time you did.”

  “They’re not from here?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  We were all standing now. Even Santos was upright, leaning against the cavern wall to take the weight off his injured foot. I ordered Kelly to keep watch on the entrances to the corridors while I unzipped her canvas kit bag and distributed the rifles it contained.

  “How many?” Kelly asked.

  Lucy held up her hands, fingers splayed. “Ten.”

  “What do they look like?”

  The little girl frowned. “What are those things you catch in rivers?” She made wriggling movements with her fingers. “They have tails and they’re kind of crawly and have snappy legs.”

  We all looked blank.

  Then Gil Dalton slapped his forehead. “She’s talking about crayfish.”

  I looked at him, none the wiser. “What the bloody hell are crayfish?”

  “Crustaceans from Earth.” He smiled. “Freshwater lobsters. They have armoured shells, eight legs and two pincers. Kids catch them in nets.”

  Lucy nodded excitedly. “Yes, those are the ones. Crayfish. But these are a bit bigger than usual, and they each have two sets of pincers.”

  Kelly’s patience was at breaking point. “How much bigger?”

  The little girl blinked in surprise, then solemnly stretched out her arms as far as they could reach. “About this big.”

  “Christ.”

  “And their exoskeletons aren’t made of calcium carbonate. As far as I can tell, they’re fashioned from some sort of metallic composite.”

  “Bulletproof?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  We were all holding rifles now. Puffing back her auburn fringe, Riley Addison looked grim but determined; the purser, Henri Bernard, held his as if afraid it might turn and bite him; and Santos the chef, leaning against the wall in his bulky blue spacesuit, cradled his in the crook of his arm, his lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. All trace of his usual jollity had gone. Even Dalton, the ship’s doctor, had armed himself.

  The weapons were a mixture of antiquated slug throwers and knock-off plasma rifles. The oldest had been part of the Lucy’s Ghost’s inventory longer than I’d been alive. They’d been brought onboard and left behind by the ever-churning roster of crewmembers that had served on the old ship over the decades. Digging deeper into the canvas sack, I dispensed ammo clips and power packs. I could feel myself sweating into the
inner layers of my suit. The armpits and crotch were beginning to chafe. The movements of our helmet lamps made the shadows leap and pounce.

  Kelly yelled, “Here they come!” And then they were upon us. The first boiled from the tunnel opening in a blur of legs, its four pincers swiping the air, the needle-sharp points of its eight legs pitter-pattering the polished rock floor.

  Kelly shot it in the mouth. It mewled and staggered, tottering on its legs like a drunken spider. Greenish-brown bile spewed from the wound, causing it to skid and slip.

  No sooner had it collapsed into a thrashing, keening mess than a second creature burst into the gleam of our lights. This one was larger, about the size of a dining table, the rim of its shell lined with curling, tusk-like spikes. Its multi-part jaws flapped and slapped, saliva frothing obscenely. Kelly, Addison and I all fired upon it. The cavern echoed with the crack of our slug throwers and the whine of Addison’s plasma rifle. But our efforts seemed to be in vain. The bullets punched dents in the creature’s shell, but not enough to admit a fatal wound, and the plasma bolts from Addison’s rifle only singed the surface of its metallic carapace, filling the cavern with the stench of hot aluminium.

  “Fall back,” ordered Kelly, and we began shuffling around the edge of the cavern, towards the corridor entrance on the opposite side from the one through which the crustaceans had come. Dalton helped Santos and Lucy, Bernard and Addison hauled the equipment, and Kelly and I walked backwards, trying to keep the creature at bay, even though it was hard to tell whether our shots were actually hurting it.

  Having seemingly learned from the death of its smaller compatriot, the monster kept one of its armoured claws in front of its maw, protecting its soft mouthparts from our fusillade. The other three pincers swiped and lunged in our direction. Above the clamour of the guns, its voice was a thin, skin-crawling squeal.

  Kelly’s rifle was empty. She dropped it and pulled her pistol.

  “Move!” she screamed.

  And then it was upon her. One of the flailing claws caught her leg and hauled her up into the air. The light from her torch flashed across its back. Then something snapped like a dry branch. Kelly shouted, half in pain and half in indignation, and fell to the floor in the flickering light. She writhed, hands reaching to staunch the blood pouring from the ragged stump of her right leg, where it had been severed above the knee.