Fleet of Knives Read online

  “You speak Nymtoq now?”

  “No, but there’s only one button. So I guess it’ll be one press to open the door, and another to close it again.”

  I caught a scowl behind Kelly’s faceplate and smiled to myself.

  “Okay, smartass,” I said to Addison. “Why don’t you push it?”

  “I just did.”

  At first, there was no response. Then the hatch moved. It jerked up half a centimetre, and rolled silently aside, disappearing into a slot in the wall. Behind it, we found a large cylindrical cavity with another door at the far end.

  “This ship was supposed to last generations,” Addison said, hauling herself inside. “They would have kept the important controls simple.”

  One by one we followed her, until only I was left clinging to the surface. I turned my head and shoulders to get one final look at the Lucy. I’d left four members of my crew back there—five if you included the ship herself. But I had no time for grief or self-recrimination. No time to think they’d have all still been alive if they hadn’t followed me on my damn fool quest. The five remaining members of my crew were still breathing, and counting on me to keep them that way. I told my suit to log the Lucy’s position and trajectory for future reference, and then turned my back on her. The dead could wait.

  Feeling simultaneously determined and terrified, I clambered into the airlock. As I cleared the hatch, Addison hit a control on the wall, and the outer door rolled back into place, sealing us off from the comforting light of the stars.

  * * *

  They started calling me “Lucky” Johnny Schultz around the time I bought the Lucy. Being an insufferably cocky seventeen-year-old, I’d put it about that I’d won her in a card game, and people had believed me. Traders can be a superstitious lot, and soon any success I had—any deal that paid off, any cargo that fetched a decent price—was ascribed to my “luck”, rather than any innate business acumen I might possess. But that’s the thing about luck—it doesn’t really exist unless you’re looking for it. And once you start believing in it, you start seeing it everywhere.

  If we managed to stay alive long enough to be rescued, it would only bolster my reputation. Never mind the fact I’d lost five members of my crew and wrecked my ship. My survival alone would be enough to convince the port rats I was still fortune’s favoured child.

  * * *

  The interior of the Restless Itch was pressurised, but dark. Once we were through the airlock’s inner door, Kelly and Dalton abandoned their manoeuvring harnesses. Dragging additional loads had almost exhausted the propellant in their tiny thrusters, and they were too bulky to carry. While they were doing that, Addison used her suit’s sensors to check the composition of the air, and then removed her helmet.

  Beside her, the accountant, Henri Bernard, hesitated. “Is it safe?”

  Addison shrugged in the beam from his helmet lamp. We were standing in a black-walled corridor that seemed to recede into infinity in both directions. Our shadows danced along the walls, where strangely organic-looking vents and pipes bulged. Some vented steam and other vapours, which glistened in our lights.

  “Nothing that’ll kill you quickly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we’re fine for now, but I wouldn’t want to stay here more than a few days.”

  Bernard turned and stomped a few paces down the echoing corridor, and then stopped with his back to the rest of us. Over the radio, I could hear him muttering under his breath. Ignoring him, I cracked the seal on my own helmet. The air in the corridor was cool and carried a stale, chemical smell, like a long-forgotten swimming pool. I wondered how long it had been since anyone—or anything—had breathed it.

  As I looked around, I saw Kelly had already unsheathed one of the guns, and was keeping watch on the corridor, fulfilling her role as security chief even as her captain stood around sniffing his surroundings.

  Okay, I thought. Time to be decisive. Time to act like a captain and live up to the image of Lucky Johnny Schultz.

  “Okay, Bernard, get back here and help Santos with the provisions.” I clipped my helmet to my belt. “I’ll take one of the guns. Kelly and I will be on point. Dalton, you’ve got the medkit. Addison, you take a weapon and bring up the rear.”

  “Where are we going, boss?” Kelly asked.

  “We need somewhere to hole up. Not too far from the surface, but somewhere secure where we can make ourselves comfortable for a few days.”

  Kelly seemed to understand. “A defensible position within detection range of potential rescuers?”

  “Yeah, that sort of thing. And access to the communications array would be a bonus, if we can get it working.”

  “On it.” She threw a crisp salute, and started walking, gun swinging from side to side as she scanned the corridor ahead for potential threats. I followed a few paces behind, my own weapon held with the barrel facing the floor. I’d had to remove my gloves to fit my finger through the trigger guard. As I walked, with the others shambling along behind me, I ran the fingers of my free hand along the corridor walls behind the tangle of pipes. They were as smooth and cold as obsidian. They had been hacked from the living rock thousands of years before humans discovered spaceflight, and for most of that time these internal spaces had been empty and unused, their former inhabitants having killed themselves off in a desperate, anarchic fit barely a third of the way into their millennial voyage. In the flickering torchlight, I could feel the weight of those centuries settling into my bones. The eight long decades of the Lucy’s career seemed like a snap of the fingers in comparison.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ONA SUDAK

  As we took a circuitous route to avoid revealing our point of origin, the journey to Camrose Station took two days. I spent most of that time ensconced in my cabin learning all I could about the ongoing talks between the Marble Armada and the House of Reclamation, who were acting in this matter as representatives for the entire Human Generality. So far, there was little enough to go on. Having been abandoned by its creators five millenniums ago, the Armada had slept away the intervening centuries in a pocket universe, locked in the heart of a gaudily carved planet. They had been waiting for an entity worthy of their loyalty, one who could provide for them a purpose; and they had found such a creature in the Reclamation Vessel Trouble Dog.

  I spent the rest of my time doing as little thinking as possible. Perhaps one day I would write about my experiences as a condemned woman, and resume the career of Ona Sudak, poet at large. Until then, I was content to fall back on the ingrained routines of the military. I rose at 0600 hours and exercised. I ate in the mess with the rest of the watch, and slept when it was time to sleep.

  The food aboard the Hyena-class frigate consisted of basic naval rations. Under normal circumstances I would have found them bland and uninspiring, but they were a positive delight compared to the slurry I’d been fed in prison. For the first time in months, my clothes, hair and bunk were all clean and free of mites. Yet of all the pleasures denied to me during my incarceration, coffee had been the one I had most sorely and sincerely grieved. So much so that even the turgid, mud-like draught they served on board the Entanglement seemed to my parched senses the fairest of ambrosias.

  I was drinking a cup on the bridge with Commodore Wronski as we approached Camrose. The man had all the personality of a jellyfish, but I wasn’t there for his less-than-sparkling conversation. While he mumbled on about the day-to-day minutiae of supervising shipboard life, I kept my eyes fixed on the feed from the external cameras.

  We had dropped out of the hypervoid high above the planet Camrose. Urban lights lay scattered across its darkened night side like the embers of a thousand campfires.

  Moving across its face, and home to a million souls, Camrose Station loomed in orbit like a city that had somehow slipped gravity’s shackles and drifted upwards, hauling factories and shipyards in its wake. Its lights were the lights of commerce and industry: the homely yellow g
lows of offices and apartments; the blinking red and green navigation lights of shuttles and other small craft; the gaudy enticements of hologram advertisements; and the occasional spark of a welding torch.

  Trailing the station’s orbit by a good two hundred miles, the Armada’s million ships lay in a three-dimensional diamond formation. In the light of the sun, they gleamed as white as bone, their glittering prows as sleek and sharp as stilettos.

  Every schoolchild knew that the founder of the House of Reclamation had based the ideals of the organisation on the philosophies of the Armada’s builders. They had been dedicated to the preservation of life. They believed strangers in trouble should be helped, and stranded spacefarers rescued. And when their beautiful legions of ships made contact with the Trouble Dog, the knife-like ships picked up on the lingering shame the Trouble Dog felt for her part in the Archipelago War. To preserve life, they reasoned, they would have to prevent another such war from taking place.

  And now they were requesting my presence.

  When I’d first encountered them, they had rejected me as unworthy to lead them. So what did they want with me now?

  * * *

  Although I had seen the white ships before, I had never seen one up close, so it was only during our final approach that I started to fully grasp the scale of the force they represented. They might be as pointed and slender as a paper dart, but each was easily the size of a Scimitar. Amassed like this, they represented the largest military force the Generality had ever encountered, outnumbering the combined forces on both sides of the Archipelago War by a factor of at least three. If they had been hostile, we could not have stood against them.

  One of the ships had situated itself a few kilometres ahead of the swarm, and it was towards this one we had been directed.

  “Docking in four minutes,” reported one of the ensigns.

  Wronski set aside his half-empty cup and straightened the cuffs of his uniform. Around us, the rest of the bridge crew were silent, gazes drawn to the wall of spacecraft before us, their bows like so many sharpened thorns.

  “Well,” he said gruffly, “it seems it’s time to say farewell.”

  I placed my own mug on the arm of my chair and rose.

  “Thank you, Commodore.”

  “You’re quite welcome.” He narrowed his eyes, appraising me. “I don’t suppose I shall ever find out exactly what this is all about, but I’m glad to have been of service.”

  We exchanged salutes. Then, formalities observed, he took a step closer. When he spoke, it was in a lowered voice, meant for me alone.

  “And besides, for whatever it’s worth,” he murmured, “some of us still think you took the right decision at Pelapatarn.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a shame the courts don’t agree.”

  Wronski shook his head. I could smell the gel he used to keep his thinning hair slicked back, and the sweet black coffee on his breath.

  “If we’d sent in ground troops, we’d have lost thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands more than we did in your bombardment. Jungle warfare’s a bitch.”

  “That doesn’t excuse what I did.”

  “Doesn’t it?” He raised an eyebrow. “With respect, there are a lot of personnel alive today who might disagree.”

  * * *

  Having left the bridge, I made my way down to the main crew airlock. For the past days, I’d been trying to avoid thinking about the events that had led me to the brink of death by firing squad. Now, Wronski’s words had opened an emotional sluice gate. By the time I reached the airlock, my hands were quivering and my legs felt spongy and unreliable. My vision smeared. I felt something building at the back of my throat, but couldn’t tell whether it would emerge as a laugh or a sob.

  I had been moments from a seemingly certain and implacable death, and although bitter and angry, I had been almost resigned to my fate. Now, I wasn’t entirely sure I could handle the mental gear-shifting necessary to accommodate the fact of my deliverance—especially at this moment, as I stood on the very threshold of something potentially stranger and more outlandish than death.

  A pair of marines showed me into the lock. One of them handed me a kit bag, and then they sealed the inner door, leaving me alone and friendless as I confronted the outer door, and the unknown fate that lurked beyond.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SAL KONSTANZ

  I waited until I was certain the Trouble Dog had safely made the jump into the higher dimensions, then I unbuckled from my command chair and climbed down from the bridge at the centre of the ship, to the human quarters that circled its waist. A day and a half of glorious isolation stretched ahead, during which we would gather our strength and prepare for whatever we might find when we reached the last reported position of the Lucy’s Ghost. I planned to spend much of the time as far from the rest of the crew as possible, holed up either in my cabin or in the inflatable life raft in the hold. But before I retreated, it was my duty as captain to check on them all, and ensure they were prepared for the journey to come.

  I didn’t feel like starting with Alva Clay, so I wandered aft, towards the engineering facilities.

  Many of the Trouble Dog’s day-to-day operations were fully automated and self-regulating. But not even the smartest system could be expected to cope with every eventuality, and there were occasionally repairs or adjustments that the ship just couldn’t manage without external help. And that was why we carried an engineer. Whenever a light panel broke in one of the crew quarters, or a length of wiring burned out in a difficult-to-reach electrical duct, Nod was there. And in combat situations, it could move fast and make the kind of creative on-the-fly judgement calls that the Trouble Dog struggled with. Her inbuilt priority had to be to keep herself functional and dangerous. She seemed genuinely fond of us all, but in extreme cases—such as once during the war, when a pair of marines had been trapped in a damaged section of the ship and the Trouble Dog had wanted to open that area to vacuum in order to extinguish a fire which threatened to disable some of her combat sensors—her inculcated need to survive and complete her mission compelled her to entertain notions of “acceptable losses”, and it took the morality of a flesh-and-blood engineer—and captain—to counterbalance her unintentionally merciless pragmatism.

  Every ship in the Multiplicity—the wider community of alien races that surrounded and encompassed the Human Generality—carried a Druff engineer. Nobody remembered now which race had been the first to employ the Druff, but by the time humanity escaped into the wider cosmos, the creatures had been ubiquitous for millennia, and every human ship for the past two centuries had carried one.

  I picked my way back to the series of linked chambers that made up Nod’s domain. Ducts and wiring conduits crisscrossed the bulkheads. Yellow-and-black warning decals called attention to awkward corners, uncovered intakes, and low ceilings. Water dripped from somewhere, and the walls reverberated with the clamour of the machinery behind them. A spicy, animal scent underlay the all-pervading tang of hot metal.

  Like its arboreal ancestors, Nod slept in a nest. It built a fresh one every few days, mostly from pieces of discarded packaging, lengths of wire and any other pieces of crap it had lying around. As I ducked my way into the warm alcove that served as its main living space, I saw its latest effort wedged in the gap between two piles of equipment. Nod wasn’t in it, though. Doubtless it was off somewhere, deep in the bowels of the ship, tweaking some system or other. If I’d wanted to, I could have asked the Trouble Dog to locate it, but that seemed to defeat the point of a casual visit. I didn’t have any pressing reason to see it, I was just calling to say hello. If it was working, I’d be better off leaving it undisturbed.

  I was about to turn and retrace my steps when a flicker of overhead movement caught my eye. Something black and roughly the size of my hand scuttled into one of the ceiling ducts.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “What was what?” The Trouble Dog spoke via the bead in my ear. “Are you all right,
Captain? Your pulse and respiration are spiking.”

  “You’re damn right they’re spiking!” My mouth was dry. I could almost hear my pulse. I took a couple of wary steps back towards the exit, keeping my attention rigidly fixed on the hole into which the creature had disappeared. “There’s something loose down here.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “I only caught a glimpse.” I paused and swallowed, wishing I had some sort of weapon. “But it looked kind of like a spider.”

  “Ah.”

  “A big spider. Tarantula-sized.”

  The ship was silent for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you they were aboard.”

  At her words, I felt a cold prickle run the length of my spine. “They? There’s more than one of those things down here?”

  “There are eleven of them in your immediate vicinity. Two more elsewhere on that deck.”

  I heard skittering footsteps and whirled around, just in time to see another of the creatures dart through the door, into the access way beyond. Now, if I wanted to retreat, I’d have to do so knowing there was at least one of them blocking my path.

  “What are they? Where did they come from?”

  “I think you should speak to Nod.”

  “It brought them aboard?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. I’ve signalled it, and it should be here momentarily.”

  I was trying to look in every direction at once, hands raised defensively in case one of the critters leapt at my face.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nod should be the one to explain.”

  “But—”

  A limb appeared over the wiry rim of Nod’s nest, and I swallowed back a surge of panic. I’d never been particularly susceptible to arachnophobia—but then, I’d never previously been stuck in a hot, noisy and cramped engine room with eleven tarantulas.

  “Ship…”