Galactic North (20 page)

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 own 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.”

Van Ness sounded suddenly interested. “Interrogate her, you mean?”

“I didn’t say that, Captain. But we might want to ask her a few questions.”

“We’d be playing with fire. You know they can make things happen just by thinking about them.”

“She’ll have no reason to hurt us. We’ll have saved her life just by taking her off the
Cockatrice.
”

“Maybe she doesn’t want it saved. Have you thought of that?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we find her, Captain.”

He pulled a face, that part of his visage still capable of making expressions, at least. “I’ll give you another twelve hours, lad. That’s my limit. Then we put as much distance between us and that wreck as God and physics will allow.”

I nodded, knowing that it was pointless to expect more of Van Ness. He’d already shown great forbearance in allowing us to delay the departure for so long. Given his feelings regarding Conjoiners, I wasn’t going to push for any more time.

We caught her eleven hours later. We’d driven her as far as she could go, blocking her escape routes by blowing the few surrounding volumes that were still pressurised. I was the first to speak to her, when we finally had her cornered.

I pushed up the visor of my helmet, breathing stale air so that we could speak. She was huddled in a corner, compressed like some animal ready to bolt or strike.

“Stop running from us,” I said, as my lamp pinned her down and forced her to squint. “There’s nowhere left to go, and even if there was, we don’t want to hurt you. Whatever these people did to you, whatever they made you do, we’re not like them.”

She hissed back, “You’re Ultras. That’s all I need to know.”

“We’re Ultras, yes, but we still want to help you. Our captain just wants to get away from this time bomb as quickly as possible. I talked him into giving us a few extra hours to find you. You can come with us whenever you like. But if you’d rather stay aboard this ship . . .”

She stared back at me and said nothing. I couldn’t guess her age. She had the face of a girl, but there was a steely resolution in her olive-green eyes that told me she was older than she looked.

“I’m Inigo, the shipmaster from the
Petronel
,” I said, hoping that my smile looked reassuring rather than threatening. I reached out my hand, my right one, and she flinched back. Even suited, even hidden under a glove, my hand was obviously mechanical. “Please,” I continued, “come with us. We’ll treat you well and get you back to your people.”

“Why?” she snarled. “Why do
you
care?”

“Because we’re not all the same,” I said. “And you need to believe it, or you’re going to die here when we leave. Captain wants us to secure for thrust in less than an hour. So
come on.
”

“What happened?” she asked, looking around at the damaged compartment in which she had been cornered. “I know the
Cockatrice
was attacking another ship . . . how did you do this?”

“We didn’t. We just got very, very lucky. Now it’s your turn.”

“I can’t leave here. I need to be with this ship.”

“This ship is going to blow up if one of us sneezes. Do you really want to be aboard when that happens?”

“I still need to be here. Leave me alone, I’ll survive by myself. Conjoiners will find me again.”

I shook my head firmly. “That isn’t going to happen. Even if this ship doesn’t blow up, you’re still drifting at twenty-five per cent of the speed of light. That’s too fast to get you back to Shiva-Parvati, even if there’s a shuttle aboard this thing. Too fast for anyone around Shiva-Parvati to come out and rescue you, too.”

“I know this.”

“Then you also know that you’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to actually get anywhere before your resources run out. Unless you think you can survive fifty years aboard this thing, until you swing by the next colonised system with no way of slowing down.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

A voice buzzed in my helmet. It was Van Ness, insisting that we return to the
Petronel
as quickly as possible. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but if you don’t come willingly, I’m going to have to bring you in unconscious.” I raised the blunt muzzle of my slug-gun.

“If there’s a tranquiliser dart in there, it won’t work on me. My nervous system isn’t like yours. I only sleep when I choose to.”

“That’s what I figured. It’s why I dialled the dose to five times its normal strength. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to give it a try and see what happens.”

Panic crossed her face. “Give me a suit,” she said. “Give me a suit and then leave me alone, if you really want to help.”

“What’s your name?”

“We don’t have names, Inigo. At least nothing
you
could get your tongue around.”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Give me a suit. Then leave me alone.”

Van Ness started screaming in my ears again. I’d had enough. I pointed the muzzle at her, aiming for the flesh of her thigh, where she had her legs tucked under her. I squeezed the trigger and delivered the stun fléchette.

“You fool,” she said. “You don’t understand. You have to leave me here, with this . . .”

That was all she managed before slumping into unconsciousness. She’d gone down much faster than I’d expected, as if she’d already been on her last reserves of strength. I just hoped I hadn’t set the stun dose too high. It was already strong enough to kill any normal human being.

Van Ness had been right to be concerned about our proximity to the
Cockatrice.
We’d barely doubled the distance between the two ships when her drive spar failed, allowing the port engine to drift away from its starboard counterpart. Several agonising minutes later, the distance between the two engine units exceeded sixteen hundred metres and the drives went up in a double burst that tested our shielding to its limits. The flash must have been visible all the way back to Shiva-Parvati.

The girl had been unconscious right up until that moment, but when the engines went up she twitched on the bunk where we’d placed her, just as if she’d been experiencing a vivid and disturbing dream. The rilled structures on the side of her crest throbbed with vivid colours, each chasing the last. Then she was restful again, for many hours, and the play of colours calmer.

I watched her sleeping. I’d never been near a Conjoiner before, let alone one like this. Aboard the ship, when we had been hunting her, she had seemed strong and potentially dangerous. Now she looked like some half-starved animal, driven to the brink of madness by hunger and something in finitely worse. There were awful bruises all over her body, some more recent than others. There were fine scars on her skull. One of her incisors was missing a point.