Fleet of Knives Page 2

  And when I pinned on that sixteen-pointed yellow star, and read the emblazoned motto, Life Above All, I knew with certainty that I had found a place where I could serve the remainder of my days with real honour—the kind that comes from compassion and forgiveness rather than cruelty and expedience.

  * * *

  I awoke two hours later, stiff from lying on such a hard surface, and surprised to have slept so long. The climb up the side of the mesa must have tired me more than I’d realised.

  “Welcome back.” The sound of the Trouble Dog’s voice filled me with an unexpected pang of desolation. Why was I out here, lying on a desert rock a hundred light years from where I’d been born? A hundred light years from the graves of my parents, and who knew how much further from the frozen husk of the only man I’d ever loved.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

  I rubbed my eyes and levered myself up on my elbows. The wind still felt warm, but it had lost the furnace-like breath of midday.

  “As well as can be expected.” I sat up. Something clicked in my lower back, and I suppressed a groan.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I thought you might appreciate the rest.”

  I blinked in surprise. “That’s unusually considerate of you. If I didn’t know better, I might suspect you were maturing.”

  I packed away my things and walked back towards the head of the steps. As I approached, I saw a small knot of tourists cresting the edge of the plateau on donkeys. They had ridden up during the heat of the day, and were all red-faced and panting beneath their wide-brimmed hats. When they caught sight of me, their smiles were filled with the comradeship of mountaineers passing each other on a high peak. As they dismounted from their rides, we passed a few pleasantries about the heat, the steepness of the climb and lack of safety rails.

  Then one of the men asked, “Are you a member of the House?” He had a thick moustache and a military bearing. I looked down at my loose clothes, wondering how he could have guessed. Then I remembered the badge I’d used as a clasp for my cape: a relief image of the House of Reclamation’s sixteen-pointed star, rendered in bronze. I brushed it with my fingers.

  “Yes.”

  “We saw your cruiser in orbit.” He jerked a thumb at the implacable desert sky, and I had to resist the urge to glance upward in response.

  “Yes,” I said, “she’s with me.”

  He nodded, seemingly understanding the complex relationship I had with the offensive heavy cruiser I called both home and sister.

  “She’s a Carnivore, isn’t she?”

  “Decommissioned.”

  “I thought so.” He tapped his barrel-like chest. “I spent eighteen years in the Conglomeration Navy. Saw action around Charlotte’s World during the war.”

  He seemed so proud, so pleased with himself, that I couldn’t help saying, “I was at Pelapatarn.”

  For an instant, some of his bluster dropped away.

  “You fought at Pelapatarn?”

  “I commanded a medical frigate.”

  “Really?” He leaned forward, clearly impressed despite himself. “Was it as bad as they say? The battle, I mean.”

  “Worse.” I couldn’t bring myself to elaborate. Some things can’t be put into words, and the defeat of the Outward forces at Pelapatarn was an atrocity I had no way to articulate. Luckily, he seemed to understand this as well. We both looked at the dust between us, lost for a moment in our own experiences of the war.

  The rest of the tour group moved off, towards the temple ruins. The moustachioed man forced a smile.

  “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Captain.” He saluted. “And it’s good to see some ships still have human crews.”

  I returned the salute, feeling faintly ridiculous. I was getting impatient to begin my descent. I felt sticky and in need of a shower and a cold drink. But his last remark puzzled me.

  “Human crews?” All ships carried human personnel, except… “You’re talking about the Marble Armada?”

  His smile collapsed into a scowl. He hawked phlegm and spat it into the dust.

  “Fucking invasion fleet, if you ask me.”

  “Really?” He obviously had no idea of the part I’d played in rousing the Armada from their millennial slumber. “They don’t seem to have done anything hostile.” As far as I knew, the Armada had taken station on the edge of the Camrose System, and was currently locked in discussion with the elders of the House, trying to figure out how best to accomplish their mission, which was the prevention of another conflict on the scale of the Archipelago War. I said as much, but my new friend was not to be so easily placated.

  “What do we really know about them,” he insisted, flushed and sweating, “except they survived the death of the race that built them, and now they’re here, offering to help us in turn?”

  The Conglomeration had always been introspective and suspicious of other species. It was an attitude that, as a former member of the Outward, I’d always found deeply irritating.

  “They don’t seem hostile,” I said.

  He shook his head, disappointed by my naivety. Then he jabbed his thumb against his chest.

  “Well, I don’t trust them,” he said, “and neither should you.”

  PART ONE

  LUCY’S GHOST

  The universe has an almost infinite capacity to charm and appal.

  Sofia Nikitas

  CHAPTER ONE

  JOHNNY SCHULTZ

  The attack came while we were in the higher dimensional void, and it came without warning. I’d had a late-night card session with Santos and Kelly, and was making my way up the companionway to the bridge, eyes still bleary with sleep, when the Lucy’s Ghost slammed sideways, smacking me hard against the bulkhead.

  I ended up on my back at the foot of the ladder. My left shoulder felt battered, and I’d scraped my right shin. I’d been carrying my antique leather pilot’s jacket in one hand, and had dropped it when I hit the wall; and somehow, I’d cut my forehead. When I put my hand to it, the fingertips came away red and sticky with blood.

  “Hey!” I yelled up the companionway. “What the fuck was that?”

  I could feel the artificial gravity flickering as it tried to recalibrate, having been unable to compensate for the savagery of the lurch.

  Above me, Vito Accardi’s face appeared at the hatch.

  “Something hit us, chief.”

  Keeping one hand over the cut on my head, I scooped up my jacket and scrambled to my feet.

  “Yeah, no shit?” I held onto the wall for support. With the gravity skittish, I didn’t want to get caught off guard by a second impact. “What was it? Are we being shot at?”

  Looking down at me with wide eyes, Vito shook his head.

  “I don’t know. But you’d better get up here.”

  * * *

  The Lucy’s Ghost was a medium-sized trader, licensed to carry a hundred and sixty tons of cargo between the various worlds of the Generality. She was three hundred metres in length and a hundred and fifty across her beam. In profile, she was a blocky, industrial-looking three-sided chisel, with a blunt nose at the front, and chunky propulsion units at the rear. She’d had many owners in her time, and had travelled the length and breadth of the Generality, all the way from Earth to the Rim Stars and the Trailing Edge. In cross-section, she resembled a triangle with rounded points, split into three levels. The cargo area filled most of the large lower deck, with the remainder taken up by fuel containment and engines. The middle deck housed crew quarters, passenger staterooms, a cramped galley, maintenance shops and equipment storage. The smaller upper deck had been given over almost entirely to the bridge, but also housed the main passenger airlock and a small communal lounge area that sported a picture window, torn and scuffed leather seats and a variety of brown brittle-leafed spider plants.

  The story around the ports—a rumour I’d done my best to encourage—was that at the age of seventeen, as a young dock rat, I’d won her in a game of
cards. It wasn’t true, but it helped my reputation.

  I had actually bought her with a combination of money inherited from a childless uncle and a large mortgage from the bank—a mortgage I was still paying off in monthly instalments. Now, ten years and around a thousand light years later, I’d been playing the part of “Lucky” Johnny Schultz for so long, even I sometimes found it hard to remember which version of the story was real and which was made up.

  I pulled myself up the ladder and through the hatch, onto the bridge. The main display screen showed an external view of the grey mist that surrounded the ship. A second, smaller screen held a computer-generated image of the Lucy’s crew interface: a young girl with bright, playful eyes and hair the colour of starlight.

  I dumped my leather jacket across the back of the captain’s chair, and strapped myself in, wiping blood-sticky fingers on my thigh.

  “What do we know?”

  “Not much,” Vito said. “The ship didn’t see anything.”

  I looked at the Lucy. “Nothing?”

  On the screen, she pursed her virtual lips. “Sensor readings remain normal, dearie.”

  Even after all this time, it still felt strange to hear an old woman’s phrasing coming from someone so young-looking; but while the avatar’s image had remained frozen since the ship’s inception, her mind had aged over the decades she’d been plying the cargo circuits of the Generality.

  “No readings of heat, mass, anything like that?”

  “Just the void, same as ever it was.”

  Carefully, I flexed my shoulder. It was already beginning to stiffen.

  “Vito?”

  The pilot shrugged. He looked rattled. “Something hit us.”

  “But you didn’t see what it was?”

  “It didn’t come from the front.” I could see beads of sweat like jewels on his upper lip. “And the ship didn’t see it…”

  “Are you sure it was an impact? Could it have been explosive decompression?” I thought maybe something had blown internally, causing a hull rupture.

  The Lucy answered, “All internal compartments read as still pressurised, dearie. But I’m detecting serious damage to the starboard hull plates. Whatever hit us definitely came from outside.”

  That ruled out accident, malfunction or sabotage.

  Vito rubbed his lips with a nervous hand.

  “Pirates?”

  “In the void?” I shook my head. “It’s not possible. You can’t track another ship through the hypervoid. And besides, even if there were another ship out here, the Lucy would have seen it.”

  “Then what hit us?” He seemed on the verge of giggling. “A hypervoid monster?”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Faced with the abyssal emptiness of the void, the human brain—with its evolved ability to spot camouflaged predators lurking in the long grass—tended to impose patterns and threats where none existed. Men and women who stared into the shifting mists of the higher dimensions sometimes saw shadows moving in their peripheral vision, and imagined strange, impossible beasts skulking at the limits of visibility, like wolves circling the glow of a campfire.

  Vito’s laugh had a nervy edge. “Well, what else do you think it was, chief? A chunk of rock? An old beer bottle chucked from somebody’s airlock?”

  “Not likely.” You needed an engine to stay in the hypervoid. Anything without power would quickly drop back down through the dimensions, into the normal, everyday universe. So the chances of us having hit some piece of random debris were infinitesimally small. I pulled up feeds from all the external cameras on the hull, but saw nothing more than the usual shifting emptiness.

  “Nothing on your sensors?” I asked the Lucy again.

  “Not a sausage, dearie.”

  “Hmm…” Keeping one eye on the external screens, I called down to the crew lounge. Riley Addison answered. Twenty-five years old, with long auburn hair and a gold stud in her right eyebrow, she was the ship’s loadmaster, in charge of the loading and unloading of cargo, and keeper of the ship’s stores.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “We hit a bump.” I could see her frowning at the blood smeared across my forehead. “Is everybody else okay?”

  “Mostly just a few cuts and bruises.” She had a red mark on her cheek, as if she’d taken a glancing blow from something small and heavy, like a loose coffee mug or screwdriver. “Although Chet was down in engineering when it happened. It got thrown around pretty bad.”

  “How is it?”

  “It looks like it might’ve busted a couple of ribs.” Chet was the ship’s Druff engineer. It had shiny scales, six limbs, and six hands that also doubled as faces.

  “Shit.”

  “Any idea what hit us?”

  “I’m working on it. Have you heard from Abe?” Abe Santos was the ship’s cook. He would have been in the galley, preparing the midday meal.

  “He dropped a saucepan on his foot.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “It’s swelling up and he’s in a lot of pain. Looks like a nasty break, coupled with some scalding. Though to be honest, he seems more annoyed about the ruined spaghetti than anything else.”

  I smiled. “Well, that can’t be helped. Any word from Jansen and Monk?”

  “I haven’t been able to reach them.”

  “Keep trying.” I reached for the button that would end the call. “Get Dalton to do what he can for the others, and then make sure you’re all strapped in. I don’t want any more injuries.”

  Addison threw a half-assed salute. “Yes, sir!”

  I returned my full attention to the outside view. I’d never been particularly bothered by the emptiness of the hypervoid. Perhaps it was because I’d been crewing ships since I was fifteen years old, and had become accustomed to the swirling, tenuous mists. Maybe I was braver than most. Or maybe I simply lacked the imagination to conjure up horrors from nothingness. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t frightened of staring into the abyss.

  “Coming up on target in five minutes,” Vito said. He activated the intercom and his voice rang through the ship. “All hands, prepare to drop back into reality. Four minutes forty-five, and counting.”

  Although he was the pilot, the Lucy’s Ghost carried out the vast majority of navigational calculations. An unaided human brain simply couldn’t crunch the kind of numbers necessary to plot a course through the higher dimensions—and hurling yourself into the hypervoid without doing the math was a good way to disappear and never be heard from again.

  Nothing had changed on the external screens, so I asked the Lucy to keep monitoring them while I took a final look at the details of our target.

  We were planning to intercept an old Nymtoq generation vessel called The Restless Itch for Foreign Soil. It had been constructed from a hollowed-out asteroid in the days before the Nymtoq discovered higher dimensional travel, and had been in flight now for almost ten thousand years. The society within fell apart and died out long before it reached its intended destination, and so the Nymtoq had been maintaining the old ship as a memorial, placing it on a looping course that took it back and forth through their territories, endlessly plying the dark spaces between the stars, at speeds that ensured it only came close to the light of inhabited systems once every few centuries.

  Our plan was to pull alongside, cut our way in, and strip out as much saleable tech as we could carry. The battles of the Archipelago War had left wrecked human ships in a dozen systems across the Generality. Over the past couple of years, we’d scraped a living salvaging materiel and spare parts from them, but now the good finds were drying up, and we needed an alternate source of income—even one that was technically illegal, and likely to land us in a world of trouble if the Nymtoq ever discovered what we’d done. They would consider what we were planning an act of piracy, but I preferred to think of it as salvage. The Restless Itch had been adrift for centuries with its crew gone and systems dormant, while the rest of the universe zipped past it in the hypervoid, covering similar
distances in days rather than decades. It was a monument, a flying tomb. And we were archaeologists, come to case it for valuable antiquities.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. The truth was, we were simply going to break in and lift anything that took our fancy. We didn’t have the time or inclination for finesse.

  Vito cleared his throat. “Four minutes fifteen.” He began to throttle back the engines, preparing for a gradual transition back into normal space. If the Lucy’s calculations were correct—and the coordinates I’d bought worth the money I’d paid for them—we’d emerge into empty space a few tens of kilometres from the massive, drifting bulk of the Restless Itch.

  “Four ten.”

  I gripped the arms of my couch and offered a silent prayer to any gods that might be listening. If we failed here, I wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the crew, let alone fuel and provision the ship for another flight. Yes, we were risking the ire of an alien species, and the wrath of human customs officials, but if we couldn’t secure a decent cargo, and bring it safely to market, we’d all be grounded and out of a job.

  “Three fifty.”

  I double-checked my harness. The transition to normal space could occasionally be rough, and I’d been thrown around enough for one day. I tested the fastenings and adjusted the straps to make them more comfortable. My heart had begun to pound with the excitement and anticipation of the coming raid.

  Only another three minutes…

  I was still looking at the countdown when I caught movement in my peripheral vision: an impression of something black slipping between wisps of mist. By the time I turned my eyes to the screen it was gone.

  “Ship, what was that?”

  “What was what, dearie?”

  I indicated the display in question. “There was something on the starboard screen, just for a second.”

  “My sensors aren’t registering anything.”