Fleet of Knives Read online

  I turned my sensors away from my pursuers, and ran a quick check on the data Captain Konstanz had supplied. If her calculations were correct, I’d be able to plough straight through the main hangar area—likely destroying my new shuttle in the process—and continue inward using the tunnel that led from the back of the main bay. With luck, I’d be able to penetrate a kilometre from the surface.

  Either that, or smash myself against the tunnel mouth. The margin for error came down to less than a couple of metres in either direction. If I screwed up, everything would end in a tumbling fireball of exploding wreckage. But if I succeeded, at least I’d be safe for a short while. Maybe even long enough to regroup and figure out a plan that didn’t involve all of us dying.

  There was a sudden flash. Ahead, the landscape flared with unholy light, momentarily overloading my cameras. Alarms went off, and my rear sensors registered a series of huge energy pulses in my wake.

  Having accepted that the torpedoes couldn’t catch me in time, and doubtless wary of damaging the Nymtoq shrine, Sudak had instead chosen to detonate them prematurely, hoping to inflict at least minor damage before I reached shelter.

  The expanding shockwave hit me like a kick in the pants, but I managed to remain on target. The landscape rushed up at me, and then I was inside, flashing through the hangar area and diving straight into the rear tunnel. I felt a flank brush the wall, and heard metal screech as hull plates were ripped away. One of my antennae tore out by the root, leaving broken cables flapping. But I didn’t have time to worry about any of that. Instead, I diverted all the power I had to my forward jets, firing hard to slow my headlong rush—as ahead lay nothing but a solid rock wall.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  SAL KONSTANZ

  Leaving the tunnel, we found ourselves in a short corridor that led to a thick door. Beyond, we discovered a room shaped like an amphitheatre. And ahead, at the far end of a suspended walkway, we could see three of the survivors from the Lucy’s Ghost. They were maybe a hundred yards away. But there were more of those multi-legged alien things climbing up the walls to reach them. Many more. Hundreds, maybe. And more were boiling up all the time.

  As I watched, the woman raised her plasma rifle and fired, knocking a couple of the dog-sized creatures back into the morass of their scrambling siblings. The other two seemed unarmed.

  So far, the creatures didn’t seem to have noticed us. But that changed as soon as Alva Clay dropped to one knee and opened fire with the Archipelago pistol. Bolts raked the walls, shredding through the churning, scrambling ranks. Individual lobsters seemed to crumple as if chewed by invisible teeth. Limbs burst. Shells cracked. Jets of gore spattered the nearest crustaceans in a livid, evil-smelling sludge.

  I drew my own sidearm and began firing, taking my time and selecting my targets. My weapon wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as Clay’s, but these creepy-crawlies were a lot smaller than the other one we’d seen, and their shells seemed thinner. Whenever I pulled the trigger, the recoil kicked against my braced arms, and a hole appeared in a carapace. One shot wasn’t enough to stop these beasts, but still seemed enough to hurt them. Three shots and they went down thrashing—only, I noticed with disgust, to be ripped asunder and cannibalised by their brethren.

  The man at the far end of the walkway turned to us. He had a child in his arms.

  “Come on!” I called to him. The walkway itself was free of monsters. It seemed they couldn’t jump high enough to reach it, which was why they were climbing the walls. He started running in our direction. At the same time, Clay switched her attention from the crawfish at the far end to the ones now scaling the walls beneath us, trying to reach our end of the bridge.

  The woman with the plasma rifle had started to walk backwards, still firing at the creatures swarming towards her. I left Clay defending our exit route, and ran to join her, reloading my pistol as I squeezed past the man and child coming in the opposite direction.

  “Keep going,” I told them. Far below, the floor writhed with legs and pincers, and I wished the builders of this ship had thought to include railings on their suspended walkways.

  The plasma rifle fired again, sending lines of incandescent, superheated gas into the ranks of advancing beasties. I came to a halt at the woman’s shoulder.

  “Take the middle,” I told her. “I’ll keep the edges clear.”

  I leant around her and picked off a crawfish that was trying to slip around a mass of its fallen brothers by clawing its way along the side of the bridge. Two shots to the face loosened its grip, and it fell back into the pit.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Riley. Riley Addison.”

  “Hi, Riley.”

  I put my free hand on her shoulder and began to guide her backwards, pausing occasionally to take down a lone crustacean that had somehow escaped the main plasma onslaught.

  By the time we reached the centre of the bridge, high over the deepest part of the bowl, we had maybe twenty-five metres between the nearest pincers and ourselves.

  “Okay,” I said, tugging at her sleeve. “That’ll do, let’s go!”

  We turned and ran.

  Ahead, Clay was battling to keep her end of the catwalk clear, firing downwards at the clawed monsters as they tried to clamber the walls to reach her.

  As we approached, she let fly with a couple of final shots, and then stepped aside to let us pass. Once we were through, into the tunnel, she followed, sealing the door behind us.

  For a moment, all we could do was lean against the rock walls, fighting for breath. My hands shook and my legs felt like overcooked pasta. Then the banging started. Inside the chamber, the crawfish had finally taken the bridge, and were now hurling themselves bodily against the door.

  “We need to move,” Clay said, and I could only nod in agreement.

  Walking cautiously, I guided the other four along the short corridor, back towards the tunnel that led to the docking bay where we’d left the shuttle.

  “Have you heard from the Dog?” Clay asked from the rear.

  “Nothing since that last transmission.”

  “Do you think she followed your plan?”

  “I have no idea.” So many things could have gone wrong. For all I knew, we were stranded here, in a rock riddled with violent metallic crustaceans.

  We were nearly at the end of the corridor. Clay shrugged, and looked back over her shoulder for signs of pursuit.

  She said, “I guess we’ll find out soon enough, huh?”

  * * *

  As soon as I stepped out into the tunnel, I knew something had changed. The air was as cold and stale as it had always been. The space was as wide and cavernous as before, but now grooves had been scored in the walls and deck, and small chunks of rock and metal debris had been strewn along its length. To my left, I could see the distant lights of the hangar. To my right, about half a kilometre from where we were standing, something seemed to be blocking the tunnel. At first, I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. Then the shapes resolved and I let out an involuntary cry.

  The Trouble Dog lay jammed against the tunnel’s starboard wall, having gouged a long furrow in the rock floor. We were seeing her from the stern, facing into the circular pits of her main engine exhausts. Curls of black smoke issued from cracks in her bronze-coloured armour, one of her defence turrets had been crushed against her flank, and I felt dismayed at the prospect of what further damage we might find when we got close enough to see her front end.

  “Holy hell,” breathed the man behind me. He still clung to the little girl, as if afraid to put her down. As if terrified one or the other of them might disappear if he relaxed his embrace, even for a moment. “Is that your ship?”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  NOD

  Another great landing.

  Really.

  Really great.

  Malfunctions everywhere. Fires on three decks. Hull plates buckled fore and aft.

  Thought first rule of space combat was not to crash
into other ships. Basic common sense. Day one of training.

  But no.

  Hound of Difficulty decides to fly right into the side of a big rock.

  Now much work needs doing.

  Much work, no rest.

  Send offspring to their tasks. Weld, bend and replace. Solder. Get fire suppression systems back online. Raid stores for replacement components. Set printers to manufacture modules we lack.

  Whole ship feels like World Tree after a big storm. Branches bent and battered. Leaves stripped.

  Much work to do.

  Much work, and no rest.

  No rest.

  Not on this stupid, reckless ship.

  She exasperates me.

  She endangers me.

  Yet I love her.

  I will not rest until she is fixed.

  No rest, just endless work.

  Eternal patience.

  Constant devotion.

  Unspoken love.

  * * *

  Now, where did I put that tree-forsaken wrench?

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  ONA SUDAK

  I watched the firefly spark of another torpedo curve towards the implacable face of the Restless Itch. Thus far, nothing we’d launched had managed to penetrate further than the mouth of the hangar. Although large enough to admit a Carnivore-class heavy cruiser, the opening presented a relatively small target for missiles designed to harm an enemy through proximity detonation rather than direct impact.

  And as I watched the missile corkscrew towards its mark, I found myself wondering what Ona Sudak the poet would have made of all this. How would she have responded to this shelling of an ancient and holy site? I smiled. Probably with a long, rambling epic on the theme of mortality, along the lines of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” but nowhere near as eloquent or succinct.

  Less than a year had elapsed since I last composed a poem, and yet I found it increasingly difficult to remember what it had been like to be a lady of letters and leisure, and almost impossible to put myself in that kind of creative headspace. Even languishing in my cell for months on end, I had found it all but impossible to pick up a stylus and expound on my emotional state. It was almost as if I had lost that part of myself in the Gallery, when Adam died.

  Young, foolish Adam; even knowing my true identity as one of the Conglomeration’s most wanted war criminals, he’d still clumsily sacrificed himself to save me. And now my inability to satisfactorily interpret the selflessness of his act had left me unable and unwilling to write about anything of any lasting consequence.

  How bitterly ironic, I thought, that I could carry the blood of an entire world on my hands, and yet find myself emotionally poleaxed by the death of one indolent, barely talented teenager.

  Light burst against the rock, a good hundred metres from the mouth of the hangar. I swore to myself and ordered the launch of yet another torpedo.

  Behind me, the bear-like avatar shambled onto the bridge, the tips of its claws scuffling against the marble floor.

  We are receiving a message from the Nymtoq vessel, it said, its words elbowing themselves into my thoughts. I almost asked to see the transmission, but there would have been little point. The Nymtoq language, which consisted of a series of chirps and clicks, remained opaque and incomprehensible to humans. Instead, I asked for a translation.

  They are ordering us to leave their territory.

  “No surprises there.”

  What course of action do you recommend?

  On the screen, I watched a torpedo impact the edge of the hangar opening, adding a new scar to the asteroid’s pocked countenance.

  “Hold fast.” I stretched my neck and shoulders, and wished the Fleet’s builders had thought to place chairs on the bridges of their ships. “We can deal with the Nymtoq when they arrive. Until then, they’re irrelevant.”

  The bear gave a short bark.

  We concur. We should remain until we can be sure we have cleansed the area of parasites.

  “And in the meantime, there’s no point wasting any more torpedoes. If the Trouble Dog survived that idiotic manoeuvre, she’s too well hidden for us to reach her with a bombardment. Keep station and prepare to target anything emerging from that rock.”

  The Nymtoq cruiser demands a response.

  I flicked my upper teeth with a fingernail. Neither my hosts nor I wanted to get into a shooting war with such a well-armed and technologically advanced race. Although we would likely win such a confrontation, through sheer force of numbers if nothing else, the conflict would be of a scale and ferocity far outstripping the Archipelago War. And our mission was to prevent such conflagrations.

  I took a breath, trying to purge thoughts of Adam from my head.

  “Tell them we’re sorry if we’ve inadvertently strayed into their territory, and that we will comply with their request to depart as soon as we’ve concluded our business.” I could barely keep the annoyance out of my voice. We didn’t want a fight, but that didn’t mean we had to slink away like thieves in the night. I was the Butcher of Pelapatarn, for heaven’s sake, and I’d be damned if I’d meekly back down before a solitary cruiser.

  “But in the meantime,” I said, feeling a steely detachment settle over the pain of my young lover’s loss. “Tell them they’re outnumbered, and they need to stay the hell out of our way.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  SAL KONSTANZ

  Of course, I’d seen the Trouble Dog from the outside many times, but for some reason she looked larger now than usual. Maybe it was because I was used to seeing her hovering over me, silhouetted against an infinite sky, rather than up close and wedged into the side of a tunnel.

  In order to reach her, we had to scramble over broken hull plates and piles of scattered rock fragments.

  “How do we get in?” Johnny asked. He’d introduced himself and the girl, and, despite having to pick his way with bare feet, seemed awed by the Carnivore’s presence.

  I considered the problem. “Well, we can’t use the cargo doors, as she’s resting on them. And the main crew lock’s too high.” The cartridge-shaped hull curved out over our heads, and there was no way we could climb it; at least, not from the side. I led the others around to the front of the ship, where her nose had buried itself in the floor, having torn a long, shallow furrow in the rock.

  “We can get up here,” I said, placing one boot on the tip of her bow. “We’ll have to be careful, but if we take it slow, we can climb up onto her back. There’s a dorsal airlock a few metres aft of the forward missile emplacements.”

  We looked up the rising slope of the hull, like a steep hill looming before us.

  “And then what?” Schultz asked. “I mean, I know we’ll be safe in there, but won’t we still be trapped?”

  A loud, metallic clang echoed down the tunnel from somewhere behind us.

  “At least we’ll have time to think,” I said. “And that’s something we don’t have out here.”

  I began to clamber up the bridge of the Trouble Dog’s nose. The hull curved down and away on both sides, so it felt like climbing a mountain ridge, and I experienced a wobble of vertigo that caused me to put my hands out in front to steady myself. Behind me, Schultz followed with his arms held out to the sides for balance. Addison came after, and the girl, Lucy, scrambled happily between them, climbing like a monkey with her hands as well as her feet. Alva Clay remained on the ground, her gun sweeping the tunnel for potential threats.

  “How are you doing?” she called.

  “Almost there. You can come up now.”

  “Roger.”

  I turned and watched her hop up onto the ship’s hull. She began trudging after us. Her steps were deliberate and well judged, her footing sure. The hand holding the Archipelago pistol swung at her side. The vein-blue tattoos on her arms looked like snakes coiling around the branches of a swaying tree.

  At the top of the curve, I came to the row of blisters that comprised the forward missile batteries. As the Trouble Dog was resting wi
th her nose buried in the floor, her spine rose above me at a forty-five-degree angle. I took hold of an exhaust valve and pulled myself upwards, between two of the blisters, to where the dorsal lock was located.

  At that same moment, I heard a yell. Addison had seen something behind us. I looked back along the corridor and felt the blood in my veins turn to liquid nitrogen.

  “Alva!”

  She heard my shout and turned. Behind her, a wave of table-sized lobster creatures bore down upon us, surging around the base of the ship. Somehow they’d escaped from the room where we’d left them. I imagined those pincers snipping away sections of the steel door, widening a hole until they could squeeze through—first one, then another, and then all of them in a tumbling, thickening flood.

  Alva’s hand came up and the Archipelago pistol fired. One of the nearest monsters stumbled and fell beneath the stabbing feet of its brethren.

  “Get to the hatch,” she called, walking backwards up the incline while taking aim at another of the gunmetal crustaceans.

  I gestured to Schultz and the other two, urging them towards me.

  “Hurry up!”

  Schultz’s eyes were wide with fear as he helped Lucy and Addison past the missile batteries. I guessed he’d seen what these things could do.

  “Come on.” I had the outer doors open. I took Lucy’s hand and lowered her into the lock. Then I helped the others climb down. When they were all in, I turned back to see how Alva was getting on.

  But Alva wasn’t there.

  The lobsters had swamped the section of hull where she’d been standing. Their pincers waved and snapped. Their legs rattled. And there, tossed on that frantic, nightmarish sea, I caught a glimpse of a lone boot, torn and ragged and borne aloft on the backs of the swarm.

  Alva’s boot.

  She’d gone down fighting and hadn’t made a sound. Hadn’t cried out. And I’d been too preoccupied to notice the gunfire had stopped. Now, all I could do was stare in disbelief. My brain refused to process what I was seeing. The Archipelago pistol lay on the hull, as if she’d tossed it towards the airlock as the beasts took her. I reached out and retrieved it. Then Schultz pulled me down and the outer hatch clunked shut above my head.