The drill was simple enough. My duty watch ran for twelve hours. But I wasn’t expected to be in the bone room that whole time. Trusko wanted two hours out of me in the morning, two in the afternoon, two in the early evening watch before I signed off, plus any other intervals at his own discretion. Sometimes that meant waking me up, or pulling me away from the galley when I was supping with the rest, but mostly he didn’t ask much of me outside of those twelve hours. Six hours on the bones was still a long stint, even with gaps between the sessions, but by then I was strong enough to take it.
My routine was always the same. Hook on the neural bridge, plug in to whatever node was best the last time, then search the peripherals in case there was a better signal. Sometimes there was no signal at all, and sometimes it was coming in off one of the nodes at the far ends of the skull, which hardly ever talked to me.
If Trusko had a particular transmission he wanted sent back to the Congregation, or to another ship, that was always the next thing. Needed care, too. It was no good just screaming his message out. I had to tune in and listen for the recipient – the friendly bones somewhere out there in space. That would be a ship Trusko knew, or a broker or something on one of the worlds. It was like sifting through a sea of whispers for the one that was whispering your name, and your name only, and then the two of you had to tune in close to each other, like a pair of lovers, and say your piece before someone else got nosy.
Other than that, I was to listen out for any special transmissions that were meant for Trusko, as well as general service broadcasts going out to all ships, such as solar weather reports or emergencies like the one that caught the ’jammer that was losing lungstuff. Finally – except it made up most of the time I was on the skull – I was to listen out for signals that definitely weren’t meant for us, but which we could still pick up.
That was most of what Rackamore had had us doing, as well. It was what buttered a captain most of all, getting ‘intelligence’ that wasn’t meant for his ship. Nine out of ten times the gen wasn’t that useful, but once in a while it could make a difference. A tip-off about a bauble about to pop, or some other crew of coves running into difficulty. If a captain was in the right place, with a tight ship, they could act on that intelligence. It was what everyone was trying to do. And we all knew that every other ship out there was trying to steal intelligence from us. There were only two defences against that. The best skulls and the best Bone Readers. And even then that wasn’t always enough.
I didn’t really care about Trusko’s business, though. The only part of the bone room that really interested me was the chance it offered to get back in touch with Adrana.
And for now, at least, she wasn’t sending.
‘We ain’t even considerin’ it,’ Prozor said.
‘I’d say we’re considering it by virtue of you just bringing it back up in conversation.’
‘Only to get it out of your noggin’ once and for all. Were you not listenin’ when I told you what happened in the place?’
‘You said you left the loot behind. You said hardly anyone went to the Fang before you, so there’s a good chance no one’s been back since.’
‘And it won’t be us.’
‘It has to be, Prozor. I want what you left behind in those gold boxes, the ones you said were full of shivery stuff. Weapons and armour, wasn’t it? And you didn’t bring any of it out when the surface started thickening up. That means it’s still there for the taking. We do it exactly the same way Rack did – with ropes and a bucket. Lower down that shaft until we reach those vaults, then haul back up. It’s just a bauble. None of ’em are safe, so what’s so bad about this one?’
‘You know what, Fura. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been so coy about your plan.’
‘I know Githlow died in the Fang,’ I said carefully. ‘I remember every word of that story, too. I think it was the first time you spoke to me like I wasn’t some dirt Rack had brought into the ship on his boots. But it wasn’t the bauble that killed Githlow, or the Ghostie stuff. It was Sheveril, wasn’t it? She spooked, and tipped up the bucket. It was a bad business. But it weren’t the bauble. If Sheveril was the spooking type, it was only ever a matter of time before she made a mistake.’
‘Don’t speak of it,’ Prozor said in a dark warning tone, ‘as if you were there.’
‘I’m sorry. Really. What you told me about Githlow . . .’ I gave a shudder. ‘My imagination’s enough, Proz. I didn’t need to be there, not after the way you told it. Here’s the sharp end of it, though. Our problem ain’t the Fang. It’s Bosa Sennen, or whoever’s the person wearing that name for now. And after what she did to Triglav, and Jusquerel, and all the others . . . Githlow had an easy death.’
Prozor grabbed me by the wrist of my good hand, and there was a righteous hard anger in her eyes. She twisted. I felt my bones grind together like two rods of rusty iron, ready to snap. I gritted my teeth, holding in my pain, and waited for her to give in or rip my hand off, whichever she chose.
‘There are things you’ve earned the right to say to me,’ Prozor said. ‘That ain’t one of ’em.’
‘But it’s the truth,’ I said quietly. ‘And you know it.’
She crunched my bones. Then let go.
She breathed hate into my face for a minute. It wasn’t directed at me, I knew. It was aimed at all the stupidity and bad luck and sorrow that had brought her to this place, this moment, in the dark hold of a ship whose name wasn’t worth the price of spit.
I just happened to be in the way.
‘We ain’t doing it. That’s final. And even if we was . . . you’ve forgotten one small part. We’d have to persuade Trusko it was in his best interests to crack the Fang.’
‘We can work on that,’ I said.
We hauled in at the first bauble. It was a straightforward job, in and out without complications. The bauble had already dropped its field when we arrived, revealing a wrinkly little walnut of a world, not even five leagues across, with surface features that lined up nicely with Trusko’s charts. The auguries were on the nail, and all the observations Prozor had made as we crept in closer led her to believe that the bauble was going to continue behaving itself. Trusko had an eight-day window for an operation that wasn’t expected to take more than twenty-four to thirty-six hours. We wouldn’t be loitering, either, no matter what loot turned up. To meet our appointments with the other baubles, we needed to be on our way sharpish.
The bauble team went out in their launch. It was Trusko, Gathing, and Strambli, with the rest of us left on the Queen Crimson to mind ship. From the galley’s vantage we watched the launch fall towards the surface, smearing our snouts against glass, the Congregation’s purple glimmer playing off the launch’s side.
‘You probably envy ’em it,’ Drozna was saying, directing his remarks at Prozor and me, but mainly the latter. ‘Thinking of all the glory of being the first to open one of those things. But you wouldn’t get me inside a bauble for all the quoins twixt here and Sunward. Lots of margin here, hours and hours of it, but it isn’t always so leisurely. Wouldn’t care to be inside one of them when the field starts thickening over again. Can’t be anything more shivery than that.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Had much experience, have you?’
‘Enough,’ I said. ‘Ain’t seen the inside of a bauble, no. Bone Readers generally don’t. But tales aplenty, I’ve heard ’em.’ I glanced at Prozor. ‘Dicey stuff happens in baubles. And it isn’t just about being locked inside. Sometimes that’s the least of it.’
‘I wouldn’t believe all the tales you’ve ever heard,’ Drozna said, with a sympathetic look. ‘Sailors get bored on these long crossings. Not much to do except listen to the rigging and make stuff up. Rigging sings, did you know that?’
‘Here we goes,’ Tindouf said, tapping out the residue from his pipe.
‘Drozna’s not w
rong,’ Surt said, drawing in her cheeks like they were made of something so thin you could jab your finger through it. ‘The chaff I’ve heard, and not just about baubles either. The way some coves talk, you’d think they’d all been jumped by the Nightjammer one time or another.’ She folded her arms. ‘Me, I ain’t even sure Bosa Sennen exists. Maybe once, a long time ago. But now she’s just a name people pin on bad luck and accidents. Sometimes ships don’t come back from the Empty, it’s true. But there’s a million reasons for that, which don’t need to involve Bosa Sennen.’
‘You think she’s a myth?’ I asked.
Prozor shot me a warning glance.
‘Until I’ve got evidence to the contrary, why should I believe anything different?’ Surt asked. ‘I ain’t seen her, and I don’t aim on seeing her.’
‘I hope you get your wish,’ I said.
‘One thing we know,’ Drozna said. ‘One thing everyone’s agreed on. The Nightjammer’s picky about who she jumps. A bauble like this, nice and close to the Congregation . . . and – meaning no disrespect to the Cap’n – one that ain’t likely to make our fortunes or anyone else’s . . . it just ain’t the kind of prize that’s worth Bosa’s time.’ He stroked a palm across the side of the table, for reassurance. ‘We’re not the kind of fish she goes after, and I like it that way.’ He smiled phlegmatically. ‘Anyway, what’s the point of fortunes? You can make all the knotty plans you like, and then something like Black Shatterday comes along . . .’
‘Did it hurt you?’ I asked.
‘Not me. What I banked wasn’t worth the cost of lungstuff before the crash, never mind afterwards. But I hear it hurt some coves bad.’
‘They were fools, then,’ Prozor said.
Trusko’s crew came back from the bauble on schedule. They docked and brought the loot back into the galley, laying it out in magnetic boxes so we could all paw through it and see how brave they’d been. All I could do was stand back and go along with the general mood, not caring to give away how little I actually knew about baubles and loot.
Of course I knew about history, and Occupations, and I knew my share of worlds and names and dates. But none of that was practical knowledge, the kind of lore an Assessor or an Integrator carried under their skin like a different kind of glowy. But if I’d been on as many ships as I claimed, more than a bit of that lore would have rubbed off on me by now.
‘This’ll do handsomely,’ Trusko said, holding up an ornate gold gauntlet with six fingers and a thumb. ‘Bring a nice little quoin, this will.’
‘Oh it will,’ Gathing said, drenching his answer in sarcasm. ‘Brokers are falling over themselves to buy bits of old spacesuit that don’t work any more and that no one could wear even if they did.’
‘You said it was worth our while bringing it back,’ Strambli said, her big eye becoming even more glary and accusatory while the smaller one shrank down accordingly, like one star stealing matter from another.
‘When junk’s all you’ve got,’ Gathing said, ‘you take the best junk. Well, maybe it’ll bring in a quoin or two on Mulgracen. The brokers there have a taste for glittery rubbish, as long as it’s ancient.’
Strambli dug a broken skull out of the box. She gave it a rattle, then put it to her ear. ‘Think you can get a whisper out of this, Fura? It’s still got twinkly stuff in it.’
‘If Fura can get a whisper out of that,’ Gathing said, ‘Fura can get a whisper out of a brick.’
‘I’ll see what it can do,’ I said, taking the skull.
Trusko picked up a small slab of frosted glass, about as thick as a cut of meat. He held it to his eye and tracked it slowly around the room. ‘Lookstone,’ he said. ‘And still functional. Lookstone’s dependable. Holds its value. Always gets a good price, no matter the market.’
‘It’s a small piece of lookstone,’ Gathing quibbled.
‘Better’n none at all,’ Strambli said.
‘Let me see it,’ Prozor said, jabbing out a hand. Trusko gave her the lookstone and she held it up to her own eye. She twisted around on the bench, altering her angle of view. Then she glared at me. ‘What, Fura? You ain’t never seen lookstone before?’
I took a chance. ‘We never ran into any. Just one of those things. Sometimes you look, and you don’t find.’
‘Then now’s your lucky day.’ Prozor passed me the lookstone. It was a small gesture, but she’d calculated it well – the first tiny thawing of the relationship. ‘Hold it up. In your fleshy hand, not the tinny one. Needs flesh to work.’
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Squeeze it nice and carefully.’
All of a sudden, instead of peering at a slab of frosted glass, I was looking through the ship, out beyond its hull, into open space. I could see the bauble, everything. I tracked my point of view, as the others had done.
‘That’s incredible.’
‘Second Occupation technology,’ Gathing said drily. ‘Never duplicated, in all the subsequent eras. No one has a glimmer of a clue as to how it works. There’s no machinery in that lookstone, nothing any of our artisans can detect, at least. You can cut it open, if you’re rich or foolish enough, and all you’ll find is the same hazy glass all the way through it.’ He nodded. ‘That piece’ll bring in about six hundred bars. There you go, Drozna: you’ll be able to afford approximately one new square league of sail.’
‘It’s still a good find,’ Drozna said doubtfully.
They sifted through the rest of it. The total accounting, when they were done, was that the bauble had brought in about eighteen hundred bars, assuming the current market valuations. There was no loot in there that wasn’t familiar, or already the kind of thing in circulation on the markets. Nothing that had not been seen before. Nothing that was going to change anyone’s fortune, for better or worse.
‘It’s not the best haul we’ve made,’ Trusko said. ‘But it’s an honest start and we’ve another two baubles ready to pop for us. Think of this as a warm-up.’
‘Yes, I can really feel our fortunes picking up,’ Gathing muttered.
So we sailed for the second. It was a twelve-day crossing, barely time for Drozna to run out the sails, trim then, and then haul them in again.
But a lot happened in those twelve days.
Prozor was going through the motions of appearing to accept me. She couldn’t rush it, or the others might have started to grow suspicious. But in a hundred small ways she began the slow process of treating me as just another member of the crew, even if that meant dishing out the exact same surliness that she reserved for the rest. It was the role she had found for herself on the Monetta and it seemed to suit her just as well on the Queen Crimson. Gradually our public exchanges increased from a word here, a word there, to full-blown sentences. When we were alone, we still had a lot more to say.
‘That hand hurting?’ she asked, when she caught a tenseness in me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s what I was told to expect. I can move some of the fingers a little now, as well. The nerve connections are establishing themselves. I don’t think there’s any infection.’ I showed her what I could do. ‘It’ll only get better. Eventually I’ll get touch through the sensors in the fingertips.’
‘Took some spine, doin’ what you did.’
‘It wasn’t anything, Prozor. Not compared to what happened to the others, or to Garval and Adrana. I don’t even miss the old hand. It wasn’t anything special, but this is. I’ve got a part of the Eleventh in me now, and it’ll always be there.’ I smiled. ‘Anyway, I don’t mind that it hurts a little now and then. Takes my mind off the itch from the glowy, and even that isn’t as bad as it was to begin with.’
‘They don’t know what to make of you,’ Prozor said, with an admiring shake of her head. ‘You’re a puzzle with too many bits, and they don’t all fit together. They all think you seem too young to have been on all those ships, but on the ot
her hand, you talk a good talk. Then there’s the manners, which you keep tryin’ to hide, but which you can’t quite manage. They think: posh girl, runnin’ away from home. And that’s no good to anyone, because posh coves are a liability out here. But then they clamp their lamps onto your tin hand, or your glowy, and they think: she can’t be makin’ it all up, can she, or how did she end up like that? Then there’s that glimmer in your eyes. You look like you’ve got a score to settle, Fura.’
‘I have.’
‘Just keep it stoppered for the time. We got to bide ourselves. If you’re still set on this mad course . . .’
‘You know I am.’
‘Then there’s work that needs to be done. I still think it’s madness, mind. Even thinkin’ of going back to that place . . .’ She looked at me sharply. ‘But the way you’re turning, the greater madness would be getting in your way. Heaven help the cove that gets twixt you and Bosa Sennen.’
‘Heaven help us both, Prozor.’
‘I had myself a squint at the auguries for the Fang. There’s an opening in five weeks, and if I know my celestial mechanics we could make the crossing in time, if Trusko put his mind to it. But we’d need to leave soon if we wasn’t to miss the end of that window.’
‘How soon?’
‘He can have this bauble. I’ll give this one to ’im. But we ain’t got time to spend on the third. Not that that’s going to be any great loss to anyone, the way things went with the first.’ Prozor paused. ‘The Fang’s a dicey one. If we miss this opening, ain’t another one for two years.’
‘I’m not waiting two years.’
‘No, didn’t think you would. All right, that clarifies things. Next thing is how we go about plantin’ the idea in the captain’s noggin’. Ain’t no use spookin’ him with mention of Ghostie stuff, or the fact that good coves already died in the Fang.’