I completed my adjustments, satisfied that I’d done all I could without risking engine malfunction. Three of the five dials were now showing orange, indicating that those settings were now outside what the Conjoiners deemed the recommended envelope of safe operation. If any of the dials were to show red, or if more than three showed orange, than we’d be in real danger of losing the Petronel.
When Ultras meet on friendly terms, to exchange data or goods, the shipmasters will often trade stories of engine settings. On a busy trade route, a marginal increase in drive efficiency can make all the difference between one ship and its competitors. Occasionally you hear about ships that have been running on three orange, even four orange, for decades at a time. By the same token, you sometimes hear about ships that went nova when only two dials had been adjusted away from the safety envelope. The one thing every shipmaster agrees upon is that no lighthugger has ever operated for more than a few days of shiptime with one dial in the red. You might risk that to escape aggressors, but even then some will insist that the danger is too great; that those ships that lasted days were the lucky ones.
I left the starboard engine and retreated back into the main hull of the Petronel. Van Ness was waiting to greet me. I could tell by the look on his face—the part of it that I could read—that the news wasn’t good.
“Good lad, Inigo,” he said, placing his heavy gauntleted hand on my shoulder. “You’ve bought us maybe half a day, and I’m grateful for that, no question of it. But it’s not enough to make a difference. Are you sure you can’t sweet-talk any more out of them?”
“We could risk going to two gees for a few hours. That still wouldn’t put us out of reach of the Cockatrice, though.”
“And beyond that?”
I showed Van Ness my handwritten log book, with its meticulous notes of engine settings, compiled over twenty years of shiptime. Black ink for my own entries, the style changing abruptly when I lost my old hand and slowly learned how to use the new one; red annotations in the same script for comments and know-how gleaned from other shipmasters, dated and named. “According to this, we’re already running a fifteen per cent chance of losing the ship within the next hundred days. I’d feel a lot happier if we were already throttling back.”
“You don’t think we can lose any more mass?”
“We’re stripped to the bone as it is. I can probably find you another few thousand tonnes, but we’ll still only be looking at prolonging the inevitable.”
“We’ll have the short-range weapons,” Van Ness said resignedly. “Maybe they’ll make enough of a difference. At least now we have an extra half-day to get them run out and tested.”
“Let’s hope so,” I agreed, fully aware that it was hopeless. The weapons were antiquated and underpowered, good enough for fending off orbital insurgents but practically useless against another ship, especially one that had been built for piracy. The Petronel hadn’t fired a shot in anger in more than fifty years. When Van Ness had the chance to upgrade the guns, he’d chosen instead to spend the money on newer reefersleep caskets for the passenger hold.
People have several wrong ideas about Ultras. One of the most common misconceptions is that we must all be brigands, every ship bristling with armaments, primed to a state of nervous readiness the moment another vessel comes within weapons range.
It isn’t true. For every ship like that, there are a thousand like the Petronel: just trying to ply an honest trade, with a decent, hardworking crew under the hand of a fair man like Van Ness. Some of us might look like freaks, by the standards of planetary civilisation. But spending an entire life aboard a ship, hopping from star to star at relativistic speed, soaking up exotic radiation from the engines and from space itself, is hardly the environment for which the human form was evolved. I’d lost my old hand in an accident, and much of what had happened to Van Ness was down to time and misfortune in equal measure.
He was one of the best captains I’d ever known, maybe the best ever. He’d scared the hell out of me the first time we met, when he was recruiting for a new shipmaster in a carousel around Greenhouse. But Van Ness treated his crew well, kept his word in a deal and always reminded us that our passengers were not frozen “cargo” but human beings who had entrusted themselves into our care.
“If it comes to it,” Van Ness said, “we’ll let them take the passengers. At least that way some of them might survive, even if they won’t necessarily end up where they were expecting. We put up too much of a fight, even after we’ve been boarded, the Cockatrice’s crew may just decide to burn everything, sleepers included.”
“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t want to hear it.
“But here’s my advice to you, lad.” Van Ness’s iron grip tightened on my shoulder. “Get yourself to an airlock as soon as you can. Blow yourself into space rather than let the bastards get their hands on you. They might be in mind for a bit of cruelty, but they won’t be in need of new crew.”
I winced, before he crushed my collarbone. He meant well, but he really didn’t know his own strength.
“Especially not a shipmaster, judging by the way things are going.”
“Aye. He’s good, whoever he is. Not as good as you, though. You’ve got a fully laden ship to push; all they have is a stripped-down skeleton.”
It was meant well, but I knew better than to underestimate my adversary. “Thank you, Captain.”
“We’d best start waking those guns, lad. If you’re done with the engines, the weaponsmaster may appreciate a helping hand.”
I barely slept for the next day. Coaxing the weapons back to operational readiness was a fraught business, and it all had to be done without alerting the Cockatrice that we had any last-minute defensive capability. The magnetic coils on the induction guns had to be warmed and brought up to operational field strength, and then tested with slugs of recycled hull material. One of the coils fractured during warm-up and took out its entire turret, injuring one of Weps’ men in the process. The optics on the lasers had to be aligned and calibrated, and then the lasers had to be test fired against specks of incoming interstellar dust, hoping that the Cockatrice didn’t spot those pinpoint flashes of gamma radiation as the lasers found their targets.
All the while this was going on, the enemy continued their long-range softening-up bombardment. The Cockatrice was using everything in her arsenal, from slugs and missiles to beam-weapons. The Petronel was running an evasion routine, swerving to exploit the sadly narrowing timelag between the two ships, but the routine was old and with the engines already notched up to close-on maximum output, there was precious little reserve power. No single impact was damaging, but as the assault continued, the cumulative effect began to take its toll. Acres of hull shielding were now compromised, and there were warnings of structural weakness in the port drive spar. If this continued, we would soon be forced to dampen our engines, rather than be torn apart by our own thrust loading. That was exactly what the Cockatrice wanted. Once they’d turned us into a lame duck, they could make a forced hard docking and storm our ship.
By the time they were eighty thousand kilometres out, things were looking very bad for us. Even the Cockatrice must have been nervous of what would happen if the port spar gave way, since they’d begun to concentrate their efforts on our midsection instead. Reluctantly I crawled back along the starboard spar and confronted the engine settings again. I was faced with two equally numbing possibilities. I could turn the dials even further into the orange, making the engines run harder still. Even if the engines held, the ship wouldn’t, but at least we’d go out in a flash when the spar collapsed and the two engines drifted apart. Or I could return the dials to blue-green and let the Cockatrice catch us up without risk of further failure. One option might ensure the future survival of the passengers. Neither looked very attractive from the crew’s standpoint.
Van Ness knew it, too. He’d begun to go around the rest of the crew, all two dozen of us, ordering those who weren’t actively involved in t
he current crisis to choose an empty casket in the passenger hold and try to pass themselves off as cargo. Van Ness was wise enough not to push the point when no one took him up on his offer.
At fifty thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice was in range of our own weapons. We let her slip a little closer and then rotated our hull through forty-five degrees to give her a full broadside, all eleven working slug-cannons discharging at once, followed by a burst from the lasers. The recoil from the slugs was enough to generate further warnings of structural failure in a dozen critical nodes. But we held, somehow, and thirty per cent of that initial salvo hit the Cockatrice square-on. By then the lasers had already struck her, vaporising thousands of tonnes of ablative ice from her prow in a scalding white flash. When the steam had fallen astern of the still-accelerating ship, we got our first good look at the damage.
It wasn’t enough. We’d hurt her, but barely, and I knew we couldn’t sustain more than three further bursts of fire before the Cockatrice’s own short-range weapons found their lock and returned the assault. As it was, we only got off another two salvos before the slug-cannons suffered a targeting failure. The lasers continued to fire for another minute, but once they’d burned off the Cockatrice’s ice (which she could easily replenish from our own shield, once we’d been taken) they could inflict little further damage.
By twenty thousand kilometres, all our weapons were inoperable. Fear of breakup had forced me to throttle our engines back down to zero thrust, leaving only our in-system fusion motors running. At ten thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice released a squadron of pirates, each of whom would be carrying hull-penetrating gear and shipboard weapons, in addition to their thruster packs and armour. They must have been confident that we had nothing else to throw at them.
We knew then it was over.
It was, too: but for the Cockatrice, not us. What took place happened too quickly for the human eye to see. It was only later, when we had the benefit of footage from the hull cameras, that we were able to piece together what had occurred.
One instant, the Cockatrice was creeping closer to us, her engines doused to a whisper now to match our own feeble rate of acceleration. The next instant, she was still there, but everything about her had changed. The engines were shut down completely and the hull had begun to come apart, flaking away in a long lateral line that ran the entire four kilometres from bow to stern. The Cockatrice began to crab, losing axial stabilisation. Pieces of her were drifting away. Vapour was jetting from a dozen apertures along her length. Where the hull had scabbed away, the brassy orange glow of internal fire was visible. One engine spar was seriously buckled.
We didn’t know it at the time—didn’t know it until much later, when we’d actually boarded her—but the Cockatrice had fallen victim to the oldest hazard in space: collision with debris. There isn’t a lot of it out there, but when it hits . . . at a quarter of the speed of light, it doesn’t take much to inflict crippling damage. The impactor might only have been the size of a fist, or a fat thumb, but it had rammed its way right through the ship like a bullet, and the momentum transfer had almost ripped the engines off.
It was bad luck for the crew of the Cockatrice. For us, it was the most appalling piece of good luck imaginable. Except it wasn’t even luck, really. Every now and then, ships will encounter something like that. Deep-look radar will identify an incoming shard and send an emergency steer command to the engines. Or the radar will direct anti-collision lasers to vaporise the object before it hits. Even if it does hit, most of its kinetic energy will be soaked up by the ablation ice. Ships don’t carry all that deadweight for nothing.
But the Cockatrice had lost her ice under our lasers. She’d have replaced it sooner or later, but without it she was horribly vulnerable. And her own anti-collision system was preoccupied dealing with our short-range weapons. One little impactor was all it took to remove her from the battle.
It gave us enough of a handhold to start fighting back. With the Cockatrice out of the fight, our own crew were able to leave the protection of the ship without fear of being fried or pulverised. Van Ness was the first out of the airlock, with me not far behind him. Within five minutes there were twenty-three of us outside, our suits bulked out with armour and antiquated weapons. There were at least thirty incoming pirates from the Cockatrice, and they had better gear. But they’d lost the support of their mother ship, and all of them must have been aware that the situation had undergone a drastic adjustment. Perhaps it made them fight even more fiercely, given that ours was now the only halfway-intact ship. They’d been planning to steal our cargo before, and strip the Petronel for useful parts; now they needed to take the Petronel and claim her as her own. But they didn’t have back-up from the Cockatrice and— judging by the way the battle proceeded—they seemed handicapped by more than just the lack of covering fire. They fought as well as they could, which was with a terrible individual determination, but no overall coordination. Afterwards, we concluded that their suit-to-suit communications, even their spatial-orientation systems, must have been reliant on signals routed through their ship. Without her they were deaf and blind.
We still lost good crew. It took six hours to mop up the last resistance from the pirates, by which point we’d taken eleven fatalities, with another three seriously wounded. But by then the pirates were all dead, and we were in no mood to take prisoners.
But we were in a mood to take what we needed from the Cockatrice.
If we’d expected to encounter serious resistance aboard the damaged ship, we were wrong. As Van Ness led our boarding party through the drifting wreck, the scope of the damage became chillingly clear. The ship had been gutted from the inside out, with almost no intact pressure-bearing structures left anywhere inside her main hull. For most of the crew left aboard when the impactor hit, the end would have come with merciful swiftness. Only a few had survived the initial collision, and most of them must have died shortly afterwards, as the ship bled through its wounds. We found no sign that the Cockatrice had been carrying frozen passengers, although—since entire internal bays had been blasted out of existence, leaving only an interlinked chain of charred, blackened caverns—we probably wouldn’t ever know for sure. Of the few survivors we did encounter, none attempted surrender or requested parley. That made it easier for us. If they stood still, we shot them. If they fled, we still shot them.
Except for one.
We knew there was something different about her as soon as we saw her. She didn’t look or move like an Ultra. There was something of the cat or snake about the way she slinked out of the illumination of our lamps, something fluid and feral, something sleek and honed that did not belong aboard a ship crewed by pirates. We held our fire from the moment her eyes first flashed at us, for we knew she could not be one of them. Wide, white-edged eyes in a girl’s face, her strong-jawed expression one of ruthless self-control and effortless superiority. Her skull was hairless, her forehead rising to a bony crest rilled on either side by shimmering coloured tissue.
The girl was a Conjoiner.
It was three days before we found her again. She knew that ship with animal cunning, as if the entire twisted and blackened warren was a lair she had made for herself. But her options were diminishing with every hour that passed, as more and more air drained out of the wreck. Even Conjoiners needed to breathe, and that meant there was less and less of the ship in which she could hide.
Van Ness wanted to move on. Van Ness—a good man, but never the most imaginative of souls—wasn’t interested in what a stray Conjoiner could do for us. I’d warned him that the Cockatrice’s engines were in an unstable condition, and that we wouldn’t have time to back off to a safe distance if the buckled drive spar finally gave way. Now that we’d harvested enough of the other ship’s intact hull to repair our own damage, Van Ness saw no reason to hang around. But I managed to talk him into letting us hunt down the girl.
“She’s a Conjoiner, Captain. She wouldn’t have been aboard that ship of her ow
n free will. That means she’s a prisoner that we can free and return to her people. They’ll be grateful. That means they’ll want to reward us.”
Van Ness fixed me with an indulgent smile. “Lad, have you ever had close dealings with Spiders?”
He still called me “lad” even though I’d been part of his crew for twenty years, and had been born another twenty before that, by shiptime reckoning. “No,” I admitted. “But the Spiders—the Conjoiners—aren’t the bogey men some people like to make out.”
“I’ve dealt with ’em,” Van Ness said. “I’m a lot older than you, lad. I go right back to when things weren’t so pretty between the Spiders and the rest of humanity, back when my wife was alive.”
It took a lot to stir up the past for Rafe Van Ness. In all our years together, he’d only mentioned his wife a handful of times. She’d been a botanist, working on the Martian terraforming programme. She’d been caught by a flash flood when she was working in one of the big craters, testing plant stocks for the Demarchists. All I knew was that after her death, Van Ness had left the system, on one of the first passenger-carrying starships. It had been his first step on the long road to becoming an Ultra.
“They’ve changed since the old days,” I said. “We trust them enough to use their engines, don’t we?”
“We trust the engines. Isn’t quite the same thing. And if they didn’t have such a monopoly on making the things, maybe we wouldn’t have to deal with them at all. Anyway, who is this girl? What was she doing aboard the Cockatrice ? What makes you think she wasn’t helping them?”
“Conjoiners don’t condone piracy. And if we want answers, we have no option but to catch her and find out what she has to say.”