Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.
We found our LUP.
It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum – as the whole cruiser seemed to be – and I realised then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.
As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-round defence, covering a 360-degree arc.
Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.
This was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed a Commissary knew about it. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of the Brightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.
Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.
To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness – forty-five minutes before they are fully effective – but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.
When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. ‘So,’ she said briskly. ‘What’s your name, tar?’
‘Case, sir.’
‘What do you think of your new quarters?’
‘Where do I eat?’
She grinned. ‘Turn off your comms,’ she said.
I complied.
Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled. She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed the cast would fall away of its own accord.
She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.
‘I don’t need that.’
‘Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.’
‘Sir, there’s a rumour that stuff makes you impotent.’ I felt stupid even as I said it.
Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. ‘Anyhow it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it any more, does he?’
I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started ebbing almost immediately.
Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her belt kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. ‘I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.’ Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. ‘Case, you’re on stag. And show this worm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?’
‘Yes.’ More SOP.
She slid away through silvery threads.
I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the kits Till had fetched for us. There was water, rehydration salts and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumb nail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons and spindles of rope, even fishing line.
I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odours. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.
As for me, I felt fine.
The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other – none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.
I guess Pael had never been trained like that. He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard was crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his energy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.
After a time he said, ‘Case, is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Are you from Earth, child?’
‘No, I—’
He ignored me. ‘The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that? But they do admit a few off-worlders.’
I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I couldn’t care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, ‘Where are you from, sir?’
He sighed. ‘51 Pegasi. I-B.’
I’d never heard of it. ‘What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?’
‘Is everything measured relative to Earth? … Not very far.
My home world was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered – or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.’
I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.
He looked up at me. ‘Where you grew up, could you see the sky?’
‘No—’
‘I could. And the sky was fall of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometres wide, tacking this way and that in the light. I loved to watch them. But on Earth you can’t even see the sky – not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.’
‘Then why did you go there?’
‘I didn’t have a choice.’ He laughed, hollowly. ‘I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious Commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think – and we can’t have that, can we?…’
I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t ‘my’ Commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who know too much stuff. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.
But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all. I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.
There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.
Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. ‘Not a peep out of the beacon.’
Pael said, ‘You realise our time here is limited.’
I asked, ‘You mean the suits?’
‘He means the star,’ Jeru said heavily. ‘Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon equipment, the stars don’t last long before going pop.’
Pael shrugged. ‘We have hours, a few days at most.’