Zhukova swung out, firing. She had switched to full auto. Las-rounds kicked out of her carbine and ripped through the first rank of raiders. The next rank began to topple and collapse. Some got off shots, but they went past her, wild.
‘Gak you all to hell and back!’ she screamed.
Zhukova kept firing. Damn wastage. Damn aiming. Damn even seeing. Urnos’ blood was in her eyes and all over her face.
The boarders came apart like bags of meat. They fell towards her. Shaking, Zhukova looked down at her weapon. The alert sigil lit up, telling her the cell was out. How long had it been out? Had she emptied it making the kills?
The boarders had fallen towards her…
She blinked, and wiped blood off her mouth with a shaking hand.
Mkoll appeared through the smoke behind the bodies of the enemy. He raised his hand, and beckoned to her with a double twitch of his fingers.
On the company deck, the women of the retinue had gathered the children and the elderly into the storage rooms and set up barriers at the main hatches using cot frames. Ayatani Zwiel hurried around, helping the injured, and making reassuring speeches to dispel fear. It was going to take more than a few kind words.
Yoncy wouldn’t stop crying.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Juniper soothed her. ‘We’ll be safe.’
It wasn’t all right. Juniper could smell smoke in the air, and every few minutes there was a thump or bang from aft, some of them fierce enough to shake the deck. Most of the children were crying or at least whimpering, but Yoncy’s sobbing seemed particularly piercing.
It didn’t sound like fear. It sounded like pain.
‘Juniper?’
Juniper looked around and saw Elodie.
‘What are you doing here?’ Juniper asked.
‘I was in the infirmary when it happened,’ Elodie said.
‘But what happened?’ Juniper asked.
‘I’m not really sure,’ said Elodie. She could see that Juniper was scared. ‘I thought I could help down here. Help with the kids.’
She took Yoncy out of Juniper’s arms.
‘Honne’s taken a knock to the head,’ she said, gesturing towards a woman sprawled in the walkway nearby. ‘Get her on a cot and see if you can fix a dressing.’
Juniper nodded and hurried to Honne’s side.
‘It’s all right, Yoncy,’ Elodie said. Yoncy was crying loudly, and it was setting off the younger children all around them.
‘Yoncy, calm yourself,’ said Elodie. ‘You’re a big girl now. Stop your sobbing.’
‘The bad shadow,’ Yoncy wailed.
‘What? What, honey?’
‘I want Tona. I want my brother. I want Papa Gol!’
‘They’re busy, Yoncy,’ Elodie said, stroking the girl’s hair.
‘Busy with the bad shadow because it came back,’ she said.
‘What’s the bad shadow?’ asked Elodie. She didn’t really want to know. Sometimes, the imaginations of children conjured horrors far worse than anything real. In the cot rows some nights, she’d talked small children down from nightmares that had chilled her heart.
‘I want my papa,’ said Yoncy, wiping her eyes clumsily on her over-long sleeve. ‘He knows what to do. He knows how things are meant to be.’
‘Major Kolea is a brave soldier,’ nodded Elodie. ‘He’ll be here soon, I’m sure of it, and he will chase the bad shadows away, Yoncy.’
The child looked at her as if she were stupid.
‘Shadow,’ she said, overemphasising the correction. ‘Papa Gol can’t chase the shadow away. He’s not bright enough.’
‘Oh, now! Gol’s a clever man,’ said Elodie.
‘Not bright bright, silly,’ frowned Yoncy. ‘Bright bright. When Papa comes, everything…’
She hesitated.
Elodie smiled.
‘Gol will be here soon,’ she said.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ asked Yoncy.
‘I… No, not really.’
‘No one does,’ said Yoncy. ‘No one can see in the dark.’
Yoncy tilted her head and looked up at the broad, ducted ceiling of the company deck.
‘It’s almost here,’ she said. ‘The bad shadow will fall across us.’
Eight: Bad Shadow
The screaming was Vaynom Blenner’s first clue that he wasn’t dealing with just another hangover.
He got off his cot and stumbled into the hallway. The deck seemed to be at a slight angle. That wasn’t right; shiftship decks didn’t slope. They had systems, gravitic whatchamacallits, to make sure the horizontal true was maintained. Maybe his head was sloping.
That wasn’t ideal either, but it was a local problem.
‘What’s the feth-name commotion?’ he growled, grabbing Ree Perday as she hurried past.
‘The ship’s foundered, sir!’ she replied. She was scared.
‘Foundered? What does foundered mean?’ he asked.
She shrugged.
‘Swear to the Throne, Perday, I’m not in the mood–’
‘I don’t know what it means!’ Perday snapped, her anxiety getting the better of her discipline in the face of a senior officer. ‘It’s a word. Someone said, just now. Someone said we’d foundered.’
Blenner looked around.
‘The hell is that screaming?’
‘Cargo shifted,’ she said. ‘People are hurt. And upset.’
He pushed past her and entered the practice chamber. The instruments of the Colours band, most of them packed in crates or cases, had broken free of their packing ties and stow-nets and created a pile like a rockslide across the floor. Corpsmen were treating bruises, cuts and the occasional twisted ankle of bandsmen caught in the spill.
‘Throne of Terra!’ Blenner snorted. ‘I thought someone was actually hurt!’
‘Get this mess stowed again!’ he shouted.
‘We were getting it stowed, commissar,’ said the old bandmaster, Yerolemew. ‘For secondary orders, as per instruction. You remember that?’
‘I don’t like your tone, old man,’ Blenner snapped. Yerolemew took a step back, and lowered his gaze. Blenner swallowed. It had slipped his mind. He was foggy, but he remembered the warning. The ship was running poorly. It could fall out of warp. Then they’d be sitting ducks, so the regiment had to come to secondary.
At which point, apparently, he had decided to take a nap.
‘I was just in my cabin, checking inventory,’ he mumbled. ‘How do we stand with secondary?’
Yerolemew gestured towards Jakub Wilder, who was dealing with a bandsman named Kores. Kores was almost hysterical. In fact, most of the screaming seemed to be coming from him.
‘What’s the problem?’ Blenner asked.
Kores started to wail something.
‘Not you,’ Blenner snarled, ‘you.’
‘The shock tore the cargo loose,’ said Wilder sullenly. ‘Heggerlin has broken an arm, and Kores here, his hautserfone got smashed.’
‘His instrument?’
‘It’s an heirloom,’ said Wilder. ‘It probably can’t be repaired. The valves are busted.’
Blenner sighed. His contentment that he had been placed in charge of a bunch of fething idiot bandsmen, who were unlikely ever to see action and thus reward him with an easy, carnage-free life, came with a downside, to wit they were a bunch of fething idiots.
He was considering how much to shout at them when the fog cleared slightly. The slope of the deck, the toppling of the packed cases, Perday’s use of the word ‘foundered’.