‘We,’ Trusko said. ‘So it’s true. You’ve been working against us, both of you, this whole time . . .’ Then a dark thought seemed to settle behind his forehead. ‘Gathing. Surt. Please don’t tell me . . .’
‘Surt’s fine,’ Prozor said. ‘She had to be put out of commission, that’s all. And I didn’t see none of you shedding any tears over Gathing.’
Trusko made to reach for the console.
‘What’re you doing?’ I asked.
His hand stilled over the switches. ‘Calling Drozna. Telling him to make arrangements to put the two of you in irons, soon as we dock.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Prozor said. ‘For a start, it’ll clue Bosa in that there’s something odd goin’ on, and that’s the last thing you want. Secondly, the only way you’re getting through to the end of this day is by doin’ exactly what I tell you. You think we wanted the Ghostie stuff ’cause we’re short of a few quoins? I had my share of quoins and Black Shatterday showed me what they’re worth. I ain’t in this for money.’ Prozor shot me a guarded look, not hostile but not exactly what you’d call companionable. ‘Nor’s she. What we’re in this for is payin’ back Bosa, and it’s the Ghostie stuff that’s key to it. Bosa won’t be ready for it.’
‘And we will be?’ Trusko asked. ‘If Drozna’s already picked up a return on the sweeper, she can’t be far out.’
‘Probably ain’t.’ Prozor shrugged. ‘Bosa’s way, she doesn’t show herself until it’s too late to cut and run. She ain’t showed herself proper yet, so what Drozna saw was probably a mistake. Runnin’ out her guns to test ’em, or something. Or putting out a launch and boardin’ squad. Now, I was countin’ on having a little more time for us to familiarise ourselves with the Ghostie stuff. Like, weeks or months more time. But seein’ as Fura’s decided we only need minutes, that’s what we’ll be workin’ with.’
I fought it, but the shame must have been plain on my face.
Trusko moved his hand from the console. The cove was still nervous, thrown into a dizzy spin by what had happened. He’d steered away from real hazard all his life, and now hazard had come knocking anyway, like it was due an invitation. I thought of how Rackamore had taken the news of Bosa’s return. He hadn’t gone looking for trouble, either, but the difference was he was ready to stare it in the eye when it showed up.
‘I had to move us along,’ I said. ‘If we’d gone to the trouble getting the Ghostie stuff, and then been jumped by another ship, or gone to port and sold it all on, before Bosa had a chance to find us . . . anyway, I wasn’t going to wait months. She’s still got my sister, and after what she did to Garval . . .’
‘Who the hel—’ Trusko started.
Prozor raised her voice. ‘We’ve all got questions we’d like answerin’, Cap’n. Some more’n others. But now’s not the time for it. You’ve got to get us safe and sound in the Queenie, before Bosa closes in. That means you’ve got to be fast while not lookin’ too fast.’
‘Because she’d go away, pick another target?’ Strambli asked.
‘No,’ I said, smearing that hope like it was a bug under my thumb. ‘Bosa’s after your skull, mainly, and she can’t damage the ship too badly without damaging the goods. She’ll soften you up, then board. By then, the game’s usually over and she won’t be counting on much resistance. That’s when we’ll take her. If we give her reason to spook, she’ll just turn all her coil-guns on you from a thousand leagues out. And we ain’t got any defence against that, even with the Ghostie stuff. Close action’s the only edge we’ve got over her, and for that we need to lure her inside the Queenie.’
‘Fura’s right,’ Prozor said.
‘The armour’s the key,’ I said. ‘And the sharp things. She won’t be expecting any of that. But we’ve got to be ready by the time we dock. Now for the bad news.’
Trusko gave a gallows laugh. ‘You mean we haven’t already had it?’
‘We’re going to have get into that armour. Five suits is all we’ve got, but five’s all we need. Prozor tells me the armour will fit around us and make us hard to see. The catch is our suits are too bulky. We can’t wear ’em, and that means we can’t do without ship lungstuff.’
‘Could we put the armour on inside the suits?’ Strambli asked.
‘Not if your suit’s already as tight as mine is,’ I said. ‘Anyway, that would rob us of half the benefit from the armour, which is being slippery on the eyes.’
‘Captain,’ said Prozor. ‘Can you keep us on a steady headin’ for a few minutes, while we try on our new toys?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Trusko stammered. ‘We’re lined up for the time being. But I must keep in contact with Drozna. I’d do so normally.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But a word out of place, and Bosa’ll give you cause to regret it. Strambli: lay out the armour and figure out which bit goes where. Prozor and I’ll start getting out of our suits. Watch your hands on those sharp things.’
We’d stowed the armour and guns inside the launch, in the compartments ahead of the aft bulkhead. The launch was still on a whisper of thrust, so it wasn’t properly weightless, and that helped with getting everything organised. Prozor and I got on with the sweaty, grunty business of shedding the rest of our suits, helping each other out, but not making too much in the way of pleasant conversation while we were about it. I wasn’t surprised. We’d both kept stuff from each other, Prozor with the auguries and me with the Nightjammer, but if I was blunt with myself, mine was the slyer of our deceptions.
I’d been honest in my explanation, too. I wasn’t prepared to drag things out with Bosa. But I think it was going to take a bit more than a word or two to square things with Prozor. I wanted her back on my side, though. I’d come to like thinking of her as a friend, and I didn’t much care for the idea that she felt I’d betrayed her.
Even if that’s what I’d done.
‘I don’t understand why it had to be us,’ Strambli was saying, while she laid out the armour, mostly by feel rather than sight.
‘I might ask the same question,’ Trusko called back.
‘Because you weren’t brave,’ I said. ‘You weren’t brave, and you weren’t successful. We needed a crew Bosa wouldn’t think twice about jumping, because you looked like easy pickings. Amateurs, which is what you are. And when you put yourselves in harm’s way, out here around the Fang, it wouldn’t ever have occurred to Bosa that you were luring her in deliberately.’
‘We weren’t,’ Strambli said.
‘I was,’ I answered, colder than the last breath of the Old Sun. Then, feeling that I owed them a bit more of the picture: ‘Bosa took Adrana, my sister. She’s another Bone Reader. She’s better than me, and I’m better than most. Adrana and I’ve been in contact, through the bones. I told her about the Fang, and how she had to slip Bosa the idea about jumping us.’
‘You knew what we’d find here,’ Trusko said, marvellingly, as if he was only now starting to see how thoroughly he’d been played. ‘All along. You lied to me, didn’t you? That intelligence . . .’
‘It was what I needed to do, Captain. But understand, it wasn’t anything against you, not on a personal level. In fact I’m doing you a favour. You and all the captains. You slink around pretending she’s not out there, but deep down she’s got the shivers into you, and that ends now. We’re taking Bosa Sennen. We’re taking the Nightjammer.’
Forty minutes is a long time when there’s something you’d rather be doing, but it’s no time at all in a pickle. Truth was, I’d rather have been doing a lot of things other than figuring out the workings of the Ghostie armour. But I also knew we couldn’t count on much grace when we got to the Queenie, assuming we got there before Bosa made her jump. We had to work out what we had, what we could use, and just as importantly how to use it – all in the time it took a tram to get from one end of Jauncery to the other.
Getting out of the suits was the start o
f it. We were stripped down to just a layer of clothes, just enough to stop a cove freezing to death: leggings and vests and not much else. I kept telling myself that the suits wouldn’t have made much difference, not where Bosa was concerned, but it was still hard to let go of the one thing that felt like it might have stopped a crossbow bolt.
With my arms bare – what was left of my arms, anyway – the glowy really stood out. The others noticed it too. It hadn’t been like that before, not even before I started getting treated for it. I could feel the lightvine tingling under my cheeks and brow, too, shining like fierce warpaint.
I felt fierce, too. And if I wasn’t ready for a war, then I was ready for battle.
No: not a battle, exactly.
Close action.
We started trying on the armour. Just being near the Ghostie stuff was making snakes slither in my gut, and now I had to fit it around me like I was trying on a corset. But the armour wanted to help, in its own queer way. Pieces joined up too easily, or adjusted themselves to fit more snugly. There was something quietly wicked about it, like a cove that whispers in your ear too much, earning your trust. We wanted something of the armour, but I couldn’t help wondering what the armour wanted of us.
The armour wasn’t just invisible when it was laid out on the floor. When you fixed it on, the part of the body it was covering became just as hard to see. The sleeve piece made my flesh forearm disappear below the elbow, so that my elbow became a stump and the hand seemed to be floating in the lungstuff on its own. I could see the smoky outline of my vanished arm, but like the armour it hardly showed at all unless you were looking nearly away from it. I had a thermal glove on my flesh hand, but there was nothing like a glove in the Ghostie armour, just an extended plate that covered the area from the wrist to the finger joints. There were other gaps too, and as I was fixing on my own pieces I wondered what the point was of only being three-quarters invisible, or seven-eighths. It was only when I saw Prozor and Strambli that my doubts were settled. I could see the gaps between their armour, the flesh and fabric of their normal selves, but holding onto the idea of those gaps, and joining up the spaces between them to make a monkey form . . . that was harder than it had any right to be. It was as if the fact of them wearing Ghostie armour was making me forget what a person was meant to look like who wasn’t inside the armour. It was slippery in more ways than just being hard to see. It was getting into our heads, and I didn’t much care for the feeling.
By the time we’d sorted out the armour, we had about ten minutes left until docking. Trusko had been speaking to Drozna on and off, sticking more or less to script. If they had some secret code worked out between them, Prozor and I weren’t smart enough to plumb it. I didn’t think it likely. Captains only come up with secret codes and procedures when they expect to run into trouble, and Trusko’s whole career was built around avoiding it in the first place.
Pity it wasn’t working out too well for him.
‘Captain,’ I said, drawing his attention back to us now that we were in the armour. ‘We ought to get you fitted, too.’
He’d known what we were doing, but Trusko still jumped when he saw what we’d become. I took that as a good omen. His gaze was sliding all over us, like his eyes couldn’t find something to settle on. ‘I know you’re there,’ he said. ‘I can even see you. I tell myself I can see you, ’least ways. But somewhere between my eyes and my grey, the message isn’t getting through. It’s like just the idea of knowing you’re there, just holding that in my head, it’s like a number that’s got too many digits.’ He was saying this with more distaste than fascination, and the look on his face wasn’t so much awe or delight as the sickly, paling appearance of a cove who’s having trouble keeping his dinner down. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said, giving a little shudder. ‘It’s wrong.’
‘None of us like it,’ I said. ‘But Bosa’s going to like it even less.’
‘Let me dock the launch first,’ he said. ‘It’ll keep me occupied for the next ten minutes and any delay might look odd.’ He stretched towards the console. ‘Drozna. We’re lining up for you. Get the doors open and be ready. Anything we need to know about?’
‘Nothing since that sweeper return,’ we heard Drozna answer. ‘Like you say, probably just a glitch . . . but it was clear, for the moment it was there. Is everything all right, Captain?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘We’ve had false returns before, and they haven’t given us cause to abandon a bauble halfway through the cracking of it.’
I drew a line across my throat, telling Trusko to cut the conversation short before it took us all into choppy seas. ‘There’s no difficulty, Drozna. Just get that door open.’
The arrangements for docking took up the remaining minutes of our crossing. We had to get back into our seats for the last part of it, and it was strange to buckle myself in, look down at my own belly, and find myself looking all the way through to the chair. I knew I was wearing the armour, and I knew there was a body under it, but it was getting harder to hold those two things square in my head.
Prozor was the last one to get into her seat. She doled out the sharp things, showing us how they fixed onto the armour so we wouldn’t need to carry them in our hands. Some were stubby little knives that would be good for stabbing, while others were closer to short swords, with straight and curved blades. ‘Whatever these’re made from,’ she was instructing us, like we were the pupils and she the wise old teacher, ‘there isn’t much they won’t go through, other than Ghostie armour itself. Skin, bone, metal, glass, it’s all the same to Ghostie knives. You saw what the edge did to my glove, and I hardly touched it.’
‘We’ll be careful,’ I said, flexing my tin fingers and thinking of the price I’d paid for them.
‘What about the guns?’ Strambli said. ‘There’s a reason guns aren’t a good idea on a ship.’
‘That’s why we’ll be treatin’ ’em strictly as a last resort,’ Prozor said. ‘Think I can hold you to that?’
‘Yes,’ Strambli said, swallowing hard.
‘Good. Soon as we’re on the Queenie, we’ll stock up on crossbows anyway. You do have crossbows, don’t you, Cap’n?’
‘Yes . . . I’ll have Drozna open the armoury.’
She sprang forward, even against the gravity of the launch’s rocket, and jammed her hand over the console. ‘You’re still not gettin’ it, are you? Twitchin’ at a false echo on the sweeper’s one thing, but if Bosa thinks you’ve clued up to her, she’ll just pepper you for the fun of it. She wants that skull but she don’t want it that badly. There’ll be other ships, other crews.’
‘I didn’t ask for this,’ Trusko said, his voice small.
‘None of us did, cove,’ I told him. ‘But we’re getting it anyway.’
The squawk crackled. I was ready for Drozna’s voice to come out of it, but when the words came out smothered in static, all chopped up and reassembled, echoing and circling around on each other, biting each other’s tails, I knew who was doing the speaking.
‘Captain Trusko. That’s who I’ve got on the end, ain’t it? Brave Captain Trusko and the brave ship Queen Crimson. I got your registry, got your name, got the word of what you were after around this bauble. Do I have to spell out who I am? It’s Bosa, boys and girls. Bosa’s here, with Bosa’s ship, and Bosa’s got you handsomely outgunned.’
‘Don’t respond,’ Prozor said. ‘How far out are we?’
‘Five minutes. I have eyes on the Queenie, but . . .’
‘You can leg it now,’ Prozor told him. ‘It’s what anyone sane would do, havin’ just had an introduction from Bosa Sennen. Pour on the rockets and get us docked.’
Trusko applied more thrust. ‘She wants to talk. Why would she signal, if she didn’t want to talk?’
‘She knows what she wants and she’ll either take it or smash it,’ Prozor said. ‘Talkin’s just her way of tormentin’
you, makin’ you think negotiation’s an option.’
Now another voice sounded from the console. ‘Drozna here . . . did that you get that squawk, Captain?’
‘I did. We’re coming in.’
‘It can’t be Bosa Sennen, can it?’ Drozna asked plaintively. ‘Nothing we’ve done has earned us a visit from the Nightjammer. It’s someone else, trading on her name.’
‘Whether it’s Bosa or not, it was a declaration of hostile intent.’ Trusko looked back at us for a moment, searching out our forms in the splintered confusion of the Ghostie armour. ‘We’re capable of defending ourselves, Drozna, and we shall. Run out all coil-guns and break out the crossbows.’
I expected Prozor to chastise him for that, but instead she just nodded, what I could see of her face – what I could remember even being her face – dipping up and down. ‘It’s all right,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It’s what anyone would do, now she’s named herself. No harm in it.’
Bosa’s voice returned. ‘Is that you in that launch, Trusko? Bosa’s got her eye on you, you know. What’ve you dug out of that bauble for her? Something juicy? You know Bosa’s got exacting tastes.’
‘We’ve nothing for you,’ Trusko said. ‘The bauble was a bust. Why do you think we were coming home?’
‘That’s all right, Cap’n. It wasn’t the bauble that brought us here. Still, Bosa’ll make her own mind up about what is and isn’t valuable, if you please.’
‘I have nothing for you.’
‘Bosa heard you’ve a skull that’ll suit her needs. The skull’s all Bosa wants of you. Let her have it without fuss, and you’ll have a story to brag about to the other captains.’
‘No,’ Trusko said. ‘If I believed you’d keep to that promise, it’d be different. But you can’t be trusted.’
‘Has someone been saying bad things about Bosa? We can’t have that, can we?’
The Queen Crimson was coming up fast now, opening its red-lit mouth like a hungry fish set on swallowing a tiddler. For all his faults as an actual captain, Trusko at least knew how to operate the launch. He was playing those rockets and steering jets like they were organ stops, concentration making something of his face I hadn’t seen before. A different set of features was breaking through the softness, hinting at the harder man he might have been, if his stars had favoured him differently. We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don’t often get a glimpse of what we could have been.