Revenger 9780575090569 (3 page)

I looked at my sister, then at Madame Granity, then at Vidin Quindar.

‘We just talk to Captain Rackamore,’ I said. ‘That’s all. And when he tells us we aren’t suitable, which he will, we come home and never say another word about any of this. Is that a deal?’

‘Deal,’ Adrana said.

2

Rackamore rented an office on the side of Hadramaw Dock, so high that the elevator had taken long minutes to crawl its way up there. The office was small, sheeted over in grey metal, with one large window looking back out over Mazarile, and because we were above the skyshell now there was nothing beyond that window but vacuum. It seemed wrong that anyone could be comfortable in such a place. There was a desk in the room and three people around it. Two were seated on one side of it, facing us with their backs to the window, the third one was standing on our side of it, leaning over papers and still in low conversation with the other two.

Vidin Quindar, who’d brought us from Neural Alley, coughed at the door.

‘Ah, Quindar,’ said the older of the two seated men. ‘These are the girls, are they?’

‘These is the lovelies, Cap’n Rack.’

‘Then show them in. I’ll take it from here. You can wait outside.’

Vidin Quindar made a humble, grovelling motion with his fingers. ‘Usual percentages, usual terms, is it?’

‘Ever the
cut-
throat, Mr Quindar. Rest assured that if the girls satisfy – and it’ll be Cazaray who delivers the verdict on that, not I – then you’ll have your quoins.’

We took our positions next to the standing man. It was pretty clear that some business was being concluded. The standing man gathered the papers on the desk, rolling them tight. Despite myself I couldn’t pass up a squint. They were drawings, white ink on a blue backing; complex diagrams full of scratchy lines and geometric shapes. ‘I can expect your word tomorrow, Captain? I cannot make you a better offer than this.’

‘Thank you, Mister Gar,’ the older man answered. ‘You’ll hear from us.’

When the man with the papers had left, the older man looked at us and said: ‘We lost a hundred acres of sail out by Trevenza Reach. Have you any idea of the cost of sail? No one
makes
it now, despite what you may have heard. The wholesalers – men like Gar – gather up scraps, measure the shapes, sew the lot back together into useful acreages. Then they sell it back to us – the poor beggars who owned it in the first place – at about ten times what we made on the original deal.’ A cautionary note entered his voice. ‘But we cannot function without sails, and a poor sail is worse than no sail at all, because it inspires false confidence. Gar has a reputation.’

‘So, unfortunately, do his prices,’ said the other seated man.

‘Was there trouble by Trevenza Reach?’ I asked.

Captain Rackamore looked at me with mild interest. ‘You’ve heard of the world?’

‘Read about it. It’s in one of the highest orbits, and it’s very eccentric. It must have swung out of the Congregation a long time ago – a collision or something, sending it out into the Empty.’

‘Right enough,’ Rackamore said. ‘No, there wasn’t trouble – not the kind you’re thinking of. We just ran into some debris, and it peppered our foresail pretty badly. Had to limp back on ions. No weapons, no pirates. Does that disappoint you?’

‘Debris still sounds pretty dangerous,’ Adrana said.

‘It can be,’ Rackamore said, nodding at my sister. ‘Speed is our principal ally, and if we carried more armour we’d be too slow to be economical. So we take that chance. But I wouldn’t overstate the danger: we’re much more likely to lose a sail than to take a direct hit on the hull.’

He was handsome, in a slightly too obvious way, like a picture of a prince in a children’s book.
Square-
jawed, piercing eyes, a distinguished nose. Fine cheekbones. Arched, aristocratic eyebrows. A cruel curl to his lips. His hair was long, but tied back neatly. He was tall, even in the chair, at least as long and thin as Vidin Quindar, but there was a refinement about him that wouldn’t have been out of place anywhere on Mazarile. The white of his shirt was spotless, the leather of his waistcoat polished up like a mirror, creaking as he leaned forward in his chair.

In one hand he held a
multi-
bar quoin, tapping it against the desk.

‘See for yourselves,’ he said, moving aside some of the remaining papers to expose a handwritten sheet. ‘This is a breakdown of my losses over the last ten years – the crew who died, were injured, who never came back; set against capital earnings. Cazaray will vouch for it.’

The younger man sitting next to him nodded at the ledger.

‘I’ve lost two Scanners, three Openers, one Assessor, one Integrator,’ Rackamore went on. ‘That’s a normal rate of attrition for the kinds of target we go after. We’ve hauled in to seventeen baubles in that time, and cracked thirteen of them. I lost the Integrator when a piece of Fifth Occupation technology turned on her.’

I swallowed.

‘That’s rare, though,’ he went on. ‘Integrators normally stay
on-
ship when my teams are working a bauble, and
on-
ship is always the safest place to be. There’s no reason for a Sympathetic – a Bone Reader – to leave the ship.’ Rackamore drew a clean, manicured nail down one of the columns on the ledger. ‘See for yourselves. I’ve never lost a Bone Reader.’

‘Then why do you need a new one?’ Adrana asked.

Rackamore looked surprised. ‘Didn’t Mr Quindar outline our situation while he was bringing you to the docks?’

‘Getting anything straight out of that grinning spider was more of a challenge than it was worth,’ Adrana said.

‘Mm.’ Rackamore set his features in a troubled grimace. ‘Tell them, Cazaray.’

The younger man was dressed as well as Rackamore, and his voice, although higher, was also that of an educated man. His face was scrubbed and pink, his hair blond, raffishly tousled. ‘Even the best of us don’t last for ever in the position, Miss . . .?’

‘Adrana,’ she answered levelly, meeting his gaze.

‘And I’m Arafura,’ I put in.

Cazaray nodded and looked at us in turn, a touch bashfully, before settling his attention on Adrana. ‘We start young – the sooner the better, generally speaking. As our brain circuits harden into place, it becomes knottier to maintain coherence with the skull, or to adjust to changes within the skull itself. And almost impossible to learn to work with a completely
new
skull.’ He leaned back in his seat. ‘There’s no tragedy in it. I’ve had a good run, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve been well rewarded for it.’

‘What are you going to do next? I asked.

‘Train up my successor first – no small business. After that, I should be very content to retire. I’ve earned enough.’ I noticed now that there was a distance in his eyes, the same one people said they saw in ours. ‘Under someone like Captain Rackamore, on a good ship like the
Monetta’s Mourn
, ten years is enough to set you up. Provided you don’t have exorbitant tastes.’

‘We’re not looking to sign on for ten years,’ Adrana said.

Rackamore moderated the curl of his lips with a smile. ‘I’m not looking to sign a pair of green unknowns on a
ten-
year contract either. Quindar should have mentioned a
six-
month term? Shorter than that, and it’s not worth Cazaray training you up. But in six months, you’ll have time to prove your worth, as well as decide whether the shipboard life’s one that suits you. It’s not just about being able to pick up the whispers. A good Bone Reader needs a fair hand, too, to set down transcripts quickly and neatly, and they’ve also got to be able to send as well as receive. The question is, do you want to take your chances in space?’

‘We’re not afraid,’ Adrana said.

‘Quindar wouldn’t have brought you here if he didn’t believe you had potential. What do you think, Cazaray? Could you work with them?’

‘We’ve not exactly been spoiled for choice with candidates,’ Cazaray said. ‘And they’ve got to be better than Garval, at least . . .’ But then he clamped his lips tight.

‘I’ve heard of siblings working the bones on other ships,’ Rackamore said, looking at us thoughtfully, stroking the quoin as he spoke. ‘If these two can work together to pull some sense out of that skull, they might give us an edge.’

I drew the ledger closer to our side of the table. ‘These numbers,’ I said, tapping a finger against one of the columns. ‘Is this what you’d pay one of your crew members?’

‘Per year, and assuming a certain level of success with baubles, yes.’

‘It’s a lot of money.’

Adrana pulled the ledger nearer to her. ‘Divide that number by two, for six months, and then double it again because there are two of us. You don’t get a discount because we’re sisters. That’s already eighty bars worth of quoins. I’m not saying that would undo all our losses, but . . .’

‘Losses?’ Rackamore enquired gently.

‘Our father made some bad investments,’ I said. ‘Sunk money into Malang Lar’s expedition.’

Rackamore’s expression was one of muted sympathy. ‘Yes, a regrettable business all round. We’re cautious – I won’t deny that. But Lar took caution to
unheard-
of depths, keeping to the shallow processionals, the Sunwards, the
well-
studied baubles. The trouble is, those are the ones most likely to have given up their prizes already.’ He gave a
non-
committal shrug. ‘So it proved. Was it really bad for your family?’

‘Our parents came to Mazarile before we were born,’ I said. ‘They’d escaped one economic slump and thought to better their fortunes on Mazarile.’

‘Just as Mazarile was entering a slump of its own,’ Adrana said. ‘The crash of 1781.’

‘Their timing wasn’t very good,’ I said. ‘But they did the best they could. Arrived with a few belongings, some credit, an old robot. After the recession, they had to take us out of school. The fees were too expensive. So now we study at home, under the robot. Father hoped the Lar expedition would dig us out of that hole.’

‘We shouldn’t downplay Malang Lar’s accomplishment,’ Rackamore said, with a touch of forced charity. ‘Every sliver of history we recover is a little less ignorance. A beacon in the darkness.’

‘But it’s not worth anything,’ Adrana said. ‘And when you open a bauble and bring back relics, proper relics that are actually worth something, you usually bring back some history as well.’

‘It tends to happen,’ Rackamore said.

‘But not to Lar,’ Adrana said. ‘Which is why Adrana and I have to join your ship. We’ll sign on, and Cazaray will train us. And we’ll earn your pay.’

‘And then after six months you’ll leave us?’

‘A lot can happen in six months, Captain,’ Adrana said. ‘Perhaps you’ll be glad to see the back of us. Or perhaps we’ll take to the life . . .’

‘Cazaray?’

He leaned in confidentially, while still looking at us. ‘I say we sign them, Captain. Standard
six-
month trial. Usual terms.’

Rackamore tapped the quoin against the desk, like a judge delivering a verdict. ‘All right, we’ll get the paperwork drawn up. Subject to concluding my business with the sailmaker, we’ll be looking to break orbit in a day. Are there affairs you wish to settle, either of you?’

There was a knock at the door, and a long, pale face pushed through the crack.

‘Quindar,’ said Rackamore, irritated. ‘I asked you to remain outside. We’re not finished here yet.’

‘Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n, but you might want a little chinwag with the cove who’s just shown up. Calls himself Mr Ness, says he’s the father of the lovelies, and he ain’t too thrilled about developments. Oh, and there’s constables too.’

Rackamore gave a sigh. ‘Show the fellow in.’

Father pushed past Vidin Quindar, and two constables loomed behind him, epaulettes still flashing. Father had loosened his collar, and his hair was dishevelled with worry, as if he had pushed his hand through it too many times. He looked grey.

‘You ran away,’ Father said, shaking his head at the words, as if they had no business coming out of his mouth. ‘You
ran
from me.
Both
of you. The constables found what was left of Paladin! That robot was worth half the cost of our house, and now it’s in pieces. The shame you’ve brought on me, on your mother’s good memory . . .’

‘Mr Ness,’ Rackamore said, with a calming tone. ‘I’m sure we can resolve this. I am impressed with your daughters, and I wish to sign them on to my ship. They’ll be well looked after, and they’ll have every option to return home in six months.’

‘They aren’t of age.’

‘I am,’ Adrana said. And after glancing at me, she went on: ‘And if Arafura wants to assign herself into my guardianship, she’s free to do so. That’s all legal. You can’t stop it.’

Father touched a hand to his chest. His heart was weak, we both knew that, some defect that the Mazarile physicians weren’t confident enough to repair, but he’d developed a habit of playing on that weakness at moments like this.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.

‘Captain,’ Adrana said. ‘May I examine that quoin?’

Rackamore handed Adrana the fat metallic disc. She turned it this way and that in her hand, staring down into the shifting lattice of patterns that seemed to play beneath its surface, as if the quoin’s disc were an aperture into some higher, multidimensional realm.

‘You were using this as a paperweight, Captain,’ Adrana said.

‘I was.’

‘It’s a valuable quoin, isn’t it?’

‘One hundred bars.’

Adrana looked at Father. ‘That’s almost what you sunk into the Lar expedition. Fura and I could go out and earn eighty bars in six months – more if we’re lucky. Couldn’t we, Captain?’

Rackamore took the quoin back from Adrana and slipped it into a pocket in his waistcoat, where it made a circular bulge. ‘I can see you care for your daughters, Mr Ness,’ he said, directing his attention at Father. ‘I understand also that you find yourself in hardened circumstances. Let me make matters plain. The moment your daughters commit to my crew, I will place a bond of twenty bars in the Bank of Hadramaw, assigned solely to the Ness family. In six months, regardless of what happens in space – regardless of how your daughters fare, or however many prizes we do or don’t find – that bond transfers to you.’

‘While you shoot off into space with my daughters,’ Father said, drawing a finger along the clammy edge of his collar.