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Synopsis
The gripping sequel to the Locus award-winning science-fiction adventure Revenger tells a story of obsession and betrayal as two sisters hunt for the greatest treasure in the universe.
Adrana and Fura Ness have finally been reunited, but both have changed beyond recognition. Once desperate for adventure, now, Adrana is haunted by her enslavement on the feared pirate Bosa Sennen's ship. And rumors of Bosa Sennen's hidden cache of treasure have ensnared her sister, Fura, into single-minded obsession.
Neither is safe; because the galaxy wants Bosa Sennen dead, and they don't care if she's already been killed. They'll happily take whoever is flying her ship.
Shadow Captain is a desperate story of cursed ships, vengeful corporations, and alien artifacts, of daring escapes and wealth beyond imagining...and of betrayal.
Release date: January 15, 2019
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 448
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Shadow Captain
Alastair Reynolds
“An adroit and fast-paced blend of space opera and police procedural, original and exciting, teeming with cool stfnal concepts. A real page turner. The prefect of this title is sort of a space cop, Sipowicz in a space suit, or maybe Dirty Harry with a whiphound.”
—George R. R. Martin on The Prefect
“[Reynolds is] one of the most gifted hard SF writers working today.”
—Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Aquila Rift
“[Reynolds is] a mastersinger of the space opera.”
—The Times on Blue Remembered Earth
“A swashbuckling thriller—Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly—that nevertheless combines the author’s trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterization.”
—Guardian on Revenger
“Revenger is classic Reynolds—that is to say, top of the line science fiction, where characters are matched beautifully with ideas and have to find their place in a complex future. More!”
—Greg Bear
“A leading light of the New Space Opera movement in science fiction.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A fascinating hybrid of space opera, police procedural, and character study.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Prefect
“Reynolds has sketched in a galaxy littered with the relics of former civilizations (human and alien), with plenty left to the reader’s imagination, and room for a sequel.”
—Library Journal on Revenger
“Revenger is tremendous fun.”
—Locus
“An expert mix of the fantastical and horrific.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Revenger
“Reynolds’ newest action-packed science fiction novel is a tale of sisterly devotion, heartbreaking loss, and brutal vengeance.… Fans will enjoy the well-developed characters and detailed world building.”
—Booklist on Revenger
“A blindingly clever imagining of our solar system in the far flung future.”
—Sun on Revenger
“A rollicking adventure yarn with action, abduction, fights, properly scary hazards, very grisly torture and even ghosts of a sort.”
—Daily Telegraph on Revenger
“By far the most enjoyable book Reynolds has ever written.”
—SFX on Revenger
“The world of Revenger is undeniably fascinating, and with Reynolds as your storyteller, a journey into it is definitely worthwhile.”
—SciFiNow
“Reynolds makes the human story compelling in a narrative that, spiced with bizarre characters aplenty and propelled by vengeance, smacks intriguingly of everything from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Mad Max.”
—Nature on Revenger
“A delightful romp through the spaceways.”
—Interzone on Revenger
“A must-read … an unexpectedly personal and emotionally-driven tale of determination and retribution—with some great twists along the way and a gutsy heroine …”
—Starburst magazine on Revenger
“A layered star-spanning odyssey filled with drama, adventure, and, yes, revenge.”
—AudioFile on Revenger
“An excellent, gripping piece of work.”
—sfandfreviews.blogspot.com on Revenger
“Basically, it’s Treasure Island meets Moby Dick, set in space, with a nice Blade Runner-ish color palette and a cast of characters worthy of a Terry Gilliam movie. I loved it.”
—Joanne Harris on Revenger
“One of the giants of the new British space opera.”
—io9
“It’s grand, involving and full of light and wonder. Poseidon’s Wake is one of the best sci-fi novels of the year.”
—SciFiNow
“Reynolds blends AIs, mysterious aliens, intelligent elephants and philosophical ruminations on our place in the universe in a well-paced, complex story replete with intrigue, invention and an optimism uncommon in contemporary SF.”
—Guardian on Poseidon’s Wake
“Few SF writers merge rousing adventure with advanced futuristic technology as skillfully as Alastair Reynolds.”
—Toronto Star on On the Steel Breeze
“Reynolds is a master of the slow build up leading to apocalyptic action, and On the Steel Breeze is no exception.”
—National Space Society
“A book of great fascination, rich description, and memorable action.”
—Locus on Absolution Gap
“His writing mixes spartan style, provocative ideas, and flashes of dark humor.… Reynolds excels at weaving different threads together.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books on Slow Bullets
“Alastair Reynolds is a name to watch. Shades of Banks and Gibson with gigatons of originality.”
—Guardian on Blue Remembered Earth
“If you like hard SF … with fast-paced action and hard-boiled characters … you’re in for a great ride.”
—SF Site on Redemption Ark
“Reynolds has a galaxy-sized imagination allied to a real storytelling ability.”
—Bernard Cornwell on Blue Remembered Earth
“Heir to writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Reynolds keeps up the tradition of forward thinking.… An immensely thrilling, mind-bending piece of work.”
—The A. V. Club on House of Suns
“[A] tour de force … ravishingly inventive.”
—Publishers Weekly on Revelation Space
“Reynolds takes quests for vengeance and redemption and places them on a galactic stage.”
—Locus on Redemption Ark
“Tell me what you think you saw.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Surt said, squeezed next to me in one of the two adjoining seats in the sighting room. “I oughtn’t have mentioned it, not with your sister being so jumpy.”
“Never you worry about Arafura. If you saw something, we all need to know about it.”
“But if there was another ship scuttlin’ about out here, we’d have seen it on the sweeper, wouldn’t we?”
“The sweeper isn’t infallible, Surt. That’s why we watch for sail-flash. If the conditions are right it can show up across a much longer range, especially through a telescope. You were sighting through one of the high-magnification tubes, weren’t you?”
Surt looked abashed. “I wasn’t even trying to find a ship. Just looking out at the worlds, hoping to get a squint of my home. Fura won’t get cross at me, will she?”
“Of course not,” I answered softly, making an adjustment to one of the aiming wheels. “We’ve all done it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. A bit of homesickness doesn’t make us any less committed to the crew.”
“I probably wasn’t even squintin’ in the right part of the sky. Never could get my head around all those tables and charts like the rest of you. Got a noggin’ for machines, not numbers.”
“Don’t feel too bad about it. Those tables aren’t easy for any of us, except maybe Paladin.”
She tipped her head down, silent for a few seconds.
“Do you ever look, Adrana?”
I nodded, picking up on her meaning. “For my homeworld? Yes. Now and then. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, not so I’d stake my life on it.”
“It was Mazarile, weren’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds a pretty place.”
“It wasn’t, not really. Just a brown rock with some green bits. Too dark and dowdy to show across more than a few thousand leagues. Our parents moved there when they couldn’t afford to stay somewhere nicer, down in the Sunwards, and I don’t think it ever really felt like home to them.”
“Is your parents both back there?”
“No … not exactly. Our mother died quite a long time ago. She got sick when one of those illnesses swept through the worlds, and we didn’t have enough money to get a good doctor or go to the aliens. Maybe they couldn’t have helped her—”
“And your father?” Surt asked sharply, cutting across my ruminations.
Something in me went as tight as rigging under a full spread of sail. Since we’d taken over the running of this ship, my sister and I had both had to deal with some difficult changes. Her being what she’d become, and me being what I’d been on the way to becoming, thanks to the unpleasantnesses that had been visited on me in the kindness room. For the most part, we squared up and discussed these things openly, at least between ourselves. Given that we’d once got to a point where I had a knife to her throat, talking was the only way to rebuild the trust we’d shared since childhood.
But even then, even after all this healthy openness, Father was a subject I dared not go near.
“Which tube were you using when you saw the flash?”
Surt blinked at my non-answer, but she was clever enough not to poke at that subject. “It was this one, Adrana,” she said, swivelling one of the tubes around, thumbing open the cover on its eyepiece.
“It’s plausible, I think. The optics on all of ’em are all top-notch, and the mirrors nicely silvered, but she must have had that one re-calibrated quite recently. I wouldn’t mind betting it’s one of the best sighting pieces on any ship anywhere in the Congregation.”
“Pity she couldn’t think of anything pleasant to do with it, ’cept butcherin’.”
“She did have her character flaws,” I said, smiling so that she understood that my understatement was most certainly ironic. “But at least she had excellent taste in equipment.”
Until recently our ship had belonged to a woman called Bosa Sennen. Bosa had called her ship Dame Scarlet, but among her enemies it had long earned a second, nearly official designation: the Nightjammer. It was by way of allusion to both its favoured haunts, in the darkness beyond the worlds, and the blackness of its hull and sails. Bosa employed it to hunt down other crews, stealing their prizes and murdering their crews, save the very few that she took for her own purposes. She had done this for much longer than an ordinary lifetime, because Bosa Sennen was as much an idea as a person—an idea that could attach itself to an individual, to use or be used by that individual, before moving onto someone else.
Less than a year ago, Bosa had made the first of two serious errors. She had stalked and taken a ship, the Monetta’s Mourn, on which my sister and I were serving: our first time away from Mazarile, and our first experience on any such ship. Arafura had escaped but I had not, and Bosa only decided to use me rather than kill me because of my skill with bones. So she had taken me aboard the Nightjammer and started turning me to her ways, using psychological, chemical and electrical methods of torture, coercion and personality-adjustment.
Months later, she had made her second error. She had gone after another crew and tried to take them, not knowing it was a trap put together by Arafura. My sister’s plan had been ruthless and clever. She had saved me and captured Bosa, and between us—and her crew—we had gained control of the Nightjammer, making it ours.
A new ship needed a new name, and so we gave it one.
Revenger.
It had been ours for three months; three long months which took us from one year into the next, and because the old year had been 1799, and the new one was 1800—eighteen hundred years since the documented founding of the Thirteenth Occupation—it was a new year as bright and shiny as a hatpin and felt like the propitious time to be starting a fresh enterprise. We were going to make something of ourselves. Not as butchers or pirates, but as honest privateers—those who wanted to remain in this life, at least, rather than going back to our homeworlds. Exactly who wanted what was yet undecided—and not much spoken of. But whatever our decisions, collective or personal, there was no possibility of just waltzing back into the busy commerce of the Congregation.
We would be shot to splinters at the first glimpse.
The problem was, we knew what we were, and what our new ship had become. But the rest of civilisation was not yet reliably acquainted with the facts. As far as the other ships and captains were concerned, and so far as the rich worlds, cartels and banking concerns behind the organised expeditions knew, Bosa Sennen was still alive and active. It would take more than just a helpful transmission from us to set things straight—especially as Bosa had a long record of just that sort of duplicity.
So for three months we’d had no choice but to skulk.
In truth, the time was usefully spent. First we had to learn how to operate Revenger, and that took weeks—plenty of them. We had to hook what was left of our old family tutor and mentor into the nerves of the ship, Paladin’s robot mind gradually taking control of the navigation, sail-gear and weapons. Then we had to keep up our basic stocks of consumable materials, including fuel, and that meant cracking a few easy baubles, going into them and scooping out such treasures as remained unplundered. We had done so, and proven that we could operate the ship and function as a crew. But still, every time we took the launch back from the surface of a bauble, we were reminded what our ship looked like from the outside.
A predator.
A black-hulled, black-sailed monstrosity, cruel in her lines and entirely incapable of being mistaken for anything but the Nightjammer. We meant to change her disposition, but that would take time, and for now we dared not be too hasty about it. If someone did chance upon us, even in these dark, distant orbits, and made a decision about us, then we might require all the weapons presently available, merely for our own self-defence.
Thus we loathed Bosa, while at the same time being cynically grateful for the quality of the fittings she had left us.
Her long-range telescopes were the equal of anything in any museum on Mazarile, and certainly superior to the optical instruments on the Monetta’s Mourn, which was itself very well equipped. They were properly cared for, too. Their tubes had engravings on, their leather-work was still fine and black, and the movable gaskets—where they pierced the glass bubble of the sighting room—were still tight against vacuum and nicely lubricated. There were many tubes too, clustered together with their eyepieces aimed back at us like the point-blank muzzles of a firing squad.
Surt ventured: “Do you really think it was sail-flash?”
“I think it more than possible.” I pressed my eye to the lens and worked the focus dial. “If there is a ship stalking us out here—or at least trying to get close enough to this bauble to jump our claim—then her captain will be doing her utmost to control the disposition of her sails, with respect to the Old Sun, while not caring to cast light in our direction. But sometimes it can’t be avoided.” To begin with I swept the scope quite widely, picking up the red glimmer of the bauble around which we were orbiting, and I considered the chances that some of that glimmer might have got caught up in the optics and thrown a confusing trick of light across Surt’s eyepiece. It wasn’t that likely, I decided. The optics were good and Surt would have needed to be staring almost directly at the bauble to pick up any of its blush.
Satisfied that the answer lay elsewhere, I swept the scope back and forth along a narrower arc, patrolling the area in which Surt thought she had seen the flash. “Or it could be something else. Space debris, or a flash from a rogue navigation mirror that’s drifted free of the main commerce routes. Or it could be a hundred other things, none of which are of consequence.”
“I should’ve taken more pains to note down the position when I saw the flash.”
“You did all that you could, Surt. The main thing was to bring the matter to my attention, which you did.”
“You’ve always been kind to me, Adrana.”
“We’re all just trying to do our best.”
“I know, and I think Fura knows it too, but she can be sharp with me when I get things wrong.”
“Pay no heed.” I adjusted the sighting angle again. “Without you, we’d still be trying to get Paladin to speak again, never mind run this ship. Arafura knows that perfectly well.”
“Would she like it better if I called her Arafura, do you think? Only I thought Fura was the name she preferred.”
“It is. I think she believes it more suited to her current calling. Shorter and harder.”
“Like Bosa,” Surt said, pleased with herself for making this connection.
“No,” I answered firmly. “Not like that. Never like that.”
“I didn’t mean no disrespect, Adrana. There I go, getting things wrong again. I’d be better off shutting my gob completely. And keeping away from pens and paper. All I ever leave is a mess of smudges.”
“You’re serving this crew, Surt, and serving it capably.”
I vowed not to be too harsh on her for failing to record her observation. Only a little while since, Surt had been unable to read or write, and the use of pens and log books was still not second nature to her. When I checked over the observational watches, hers were the blemished, crossed-out and incomplete entries.
She was becoming more proficient, though, and needed no chastisement from me. Not when we were hardly spoilt for spare hands.
“Do you see anything?” she asked expectantly, as I switched from one eyepiece to another.
“Nothing,” I said, when I had swept a few more sectors. “I don’t doubt your sighting, not for a second. But I don’t think we need trouble Fura on the basis of a single flash.” I had used my sister’s shortened name deliberately, thinking it might put Surt better at ease, and had made a private decision that I would try and think of her by the same means. “Perhaps, when we have what we’ve come for, and are debating our next course, I’ll mention it to her in passing. But there’ll be no slight on your actions.”
“I hope not. I don’t really mind that sharp tongue of hers … but that’s just words. There’s a wrong side of her I never want to see.”
“Nor do any of us,” I said under my breath.
*
Our launch broke away from its berthing rack with a jolt and slipped neatly between the teeth of the upper and lower jaws of Revenger’s maw and into clear space. Through the portal I watched the jaws hinge shut on the red-lit docking bay, the only light and colour for millions of leagues. Until Fura touched the jets and sent out a pulse of rocket thrust, lighting up the hull in brassy highlights, that sharp-toothed grin was the only part of the ship to be seen.
She used the rockets sparingly, knowing we were low on chemical reserves. From my seat behind her control position I watched her with a quiet, sisterly admiration. She had come a long way since Captain Rackamore took us up in his launch for the first time, at my instigation.
“And you’re sure no one will have cleaned the place out before we got here?” she asked, twisting around in her seat for a second before snapping her attention back onto the controls.
“Sure as I can be,” Prozor said, sitting opposite me, clutching her notebook—scrawled full of her bauble maps and auguries and reminders to herself—as well as a very expensive pocket chronometer, which she had in the other hand, her thumb clicking down on the starting and stopping buttons as if she needed reassurance that they still worked. “Rack came back here over and over, and there was never any sign of anyone else showin’ interest. Mainly ’cause there wasn’t much worth salvagin’, at least not in the shallow layers, and there never was time to go deeper. Not even for a crew on their game, like we most definitely was.”
Slowly the bauble came round in the nose windows of the launch. It was hard to see, even though we were less than twenty leagues out. The field was still up, cloaking the lump of rock, but unlike some we had seen it was gauzy and dim, like a layer of smoke clinging to the rock’s surface.
“The question I’m stuck with,” Strambli said, “is what this place is worth to us, if no one but Rackamore ever bothered with it. You just said there’s no treasure here.” She was exercising her fingers, squeezing on a little contraption made of springs and metal.
“Depends what you mean by treasure,” Fura said, craning around to look at Strambli. “My book, treasure’s whatever a cove needs most in the here and now. Don’t matter whether it’s a million years old or a month, it’s the immediate value that counts. All the gold in the Congregation’s no use to someone gasping on their last drop of lungstuff. We ain’t in that boat just yet. But what we do need badly is fuel.”
“Rack used this place as a supply drop,” Prozor said, looking around at the rest of us besides Fura, which amounted to Strambli and myself. Just the bare minimum for an expedition into a bauble, with Surt and Tindouf staying behind on the main ship. Paladin counted as crew as well, I suppose, but none of us were in the habit of thinking of him in quite that way. “Propellant for his launch. A handsome stockpile. Rack’s philosophy was to run a light ship—minimal armour, minimal armaments. And a nice, lean crew, so we didn’t have to split a prize too many ways. He didn’t want to be luggin’ a hold full of rocket fuel around, so the Monetta only ever carried just enough to do the job, Rack always knowin’ he could come back to the Rumbler when he needed a top-up.”
“So we’re using up precious fuel,” Strambli said, frowning so hard she made her lopsided face even less symmetrical. “In order to get more fuel.”
“Not so hard to get your grey around,” Fura said, directing a fond if exasperated smile at our Opener. “Like depositing a quoin in a bank, so it’ll turn into two quoins.”
“I’d thank you not to mention banks,” Prozor said, rarely missing a chance to remind us that she had lost her savings in the crash of ninety-nine.
“You’d need a lot of faith in banks to deposit your last quoin,” Strambli muttered. “Which is what that fuel is to us.”
“It isn’t,” Fura said. “Not by a good margin. But we do need more propellant, and if we’ve got to burn some to get our mitts on Rack’s stockpile, so be it.” She directed her glowy face at Prozor and me. “Besides, I’d say it’s our stockpile now, wouldn’t you? We’re the last of Rack’s crew, so it’s not as if any other cove has a better claim on this place than us.”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“We’ll get in fast,” she was already saying, while working the controls, steering us nearer to the bauble. “Take as much as we need, and no more. What made sense for Rack makes sense for us, too. Agreed, Prozor?”
“No truer thing ever said,” Prozor answered, which was her way of managing to sound equivocal. She snapped shut her bauble book, did up the fancy clasps as if she had no expectation of ever needing to open it again between now and the last gasp of the Old Sun. “Usual margins, I take it?”
“However Rack liked to play it,” Fura said.
“Well, Rack had a few advantages we lack,” Prozor said, meaning (if I knew her at all) a crew he’d picked by hand, rather than one that had been shoved together by chance, but she left the rest of her statement tactfully unvoiced. “Usual margins’ll cut it. The rest of us, we may as well finish gettin’ suited.” She gave a squint to her chronometer. “We’ve got five minutes until field drop.”
So far so practical, and we’d already donned most of our vacuum gear, apart from the helmets and final connections. We’d inherited a very capable ship, full of fine equipment, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the motley look of our party. Our suits were a jumble of parts, brown and rust-coloured alloys cut and welded together with care and attention, but not much thought as to whether the final result was pretty to the eye. We were ugly and lumpy, like the contents of a junk shop thrown together in the approximate shapes of people. Why didn’t we use some fancy suits that Bosa had left us? Because there weren’t any, or rather there weren’t any that were suitable for this sort of work. Bosa didn’t soil her hands scrabbling through baubles. She let other crews have the pleasure of that, and then jumped them for their pickings. Bosa had left us some handsome black vacuum suits, but they were for boarding and gutting other vessels, leaving us to salvage our mongrel gear from the hulk of the Queen Crimson, Captain Trusko’s ship.
We checked each other’s suits, locking down helmets, tightening faceplates, making sure all the hoses and seals were secure, swinging our arms and legs, making squatting and flapping motions. Strambli went around with a little squirt-can, dribbling oil into the moving parts. I worked my gloves until my fingers bled inside them. We checked the suit-to-suit squawk, me giving a thump to the side of Prozor’s helmet until she came through clearly. Fura was still operating the launch, but she allowed herself to be fussed over from her seated position, stretching out an arm like a queen expecting to be kissed on the fingers. It was her right arm in this instance, which was mechanical from the forearm down to the fingertips. She would wear a normal pressure gauntlet on the other hand, but on the tin one she had a pressure-tight cuff around the elbow, keeping her metal hand free of any encumberment and allowing her to touch and sense things in vacuum with a great discrimination. The cuff was bothersome and hard for her to adjust, so Strambli was checking it for pressure integrity.
Prozor examined her timepiece again. “One minute,” she said, this time coming over the squawk, so that her voice sounded distant and near at the same time, because there was still atmosphere in the launch.
Fura slowed us down for the final approach. It was like a restless, sooty sea down there, blanketing the world beneath. The field was fidgeting around, growing tenuous in places. Bits of the surface began to show through, prickly with jagged, upright rock formations, like the quills of some armoured animal.
“Thirty seconds,” Prozor said. “Maintain descent rate.”
“Don’t look like it’s quite ready to pop,” Strambli ventured.
“It will,” I said, knowing how unlikely it was that Prozor would have made an error in her auguries.
In the last fifteen or twenty seconds the field seemed to shiver, and that shivering sped-up like the flicker from a coin spinning on the table, that fast whirlygig flutter just before the coin topples over. That was the death song of a field, and when it went it went instantly, just vanishing, so that what was below was now just an uncloaked rock, spines sticking out all over, bristling from pole to pole.
It was dark. One side was facing the Empty, the other the Old Sun. We were ten million leagues beyond the outer orbits of the Congregation, so that the Old Sun’s light had already fought its way through the gaps between thousands of worlds—millions, more likely—growing a little dimmer and wearier with each exchange. When that light flopped onto the bauble like an exhausted traveller, about all it could do was daub a few red and purple highlights across those quills, hinting at the gloomy secrets trapped between their roots. On the side facing the Empty—where the only dependable illumination was that from the distant stars, too far away for any monkey mind to comprehend, even those of us who’ve ventured as far out as Trevenza Reach, the bauble was nearly as black as Revenger’s own sails.
“Do you see anything you recognise?” Fura asked, directing her question at Prozor.
Prozor had started one of the stopwatch dials on her timepiece, measuring out the hours from the moment of field drop. “Drift north. That clump of spikes over there is a landmark.”
“They all look the same,” Strambli said.
“Not to me,” Prozor answered.
Fura levelled us out just above the tops of the spines. I looked over her metal-clad shoulders at the fuel gauges, watching the needles twitch every time she had to use a pulse of thrust to stop us drifting in too close. Prozor had already told us there was a swallower inside the Rumbler, which added to our difficulties, especially as we were going to be hauling out heavy reserves of propellant.
“Keep talkin’, Proz,” Fura said.
“Take us lower. Cut between that pair of spikes.”
“Won’t be much clearance.”
“No more’n we need. Our launch ain’t any bigger than the one Rack used, and he squeezed through any number of times.”
“Take your word for it,” she said, and although I could only see the back of her helmeted head, I imagined her biting on her tongue as she concentrated hard.
We slid between the spikes, angling down. It got darker, shadows criss-crossing until they squeezed out the last, meagre traces of light. Fura turned on the launch’s own lamps. Yellow beams crossed vacuum and danced across the swelling roots of those stony spines.
“I see the landing zone,” Prozor said. “Dead ahead. Hold this descent and you’ll be golden.”
“Why’s this place called the Rumbler, anyway?” Strambli asked.
“Adrana,” Fura said, turning to me. “Call out the heights, please.”
“Why, certainly,” I mouthed, moving to the side of her console, where I was able to read the slowly revolving digits of the altimeter. The instrument was similar to the sweeper on Revenger, only instead of whirring around it pinged pulses straight at the ground, measuring the delay before they bounced back. “One hundred spans,” I said, when the digits hit that round number. “Ninety. Eighty.”
Something buzzed on the console, a red light flashing. Fura snarled.
I recognised that light. Fuel warning.
“Don’t tell me you cut it that fine,” I whispered.
“No point going home if we don’t find Rack’s stockpile,” Fura replied, in the same low voice.
“I can’t believe—”
“Maintain those call-outs, sister.”
I wanted to snap back at her for voicing her request as if it were a demand, but since
—George R. R. Martin on The Prefect
“[Reynolds is] one of the most gifted hard SF writers working today.”
—Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Aquila Rift
“[Reynolds is] a mastersinger of the space opera.”
—The Times on Blue Remembered Earth
“A swashbuckling thriller—Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly—that nevertheless combines the author’s trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterization.”
—Guardian on Revenger
“Revenger is classic Reynolds—that is to say, top of the line science fiction, where characters are matched beautifully with ideas and have to find their place in a complex future. More!”
—Greg Bear
“A leading light of the New Space Opera movement in science fiction.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A fascinating hybrid of space opera, police procedural, and character study.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Prefect
“Reynolds has sketched in a galaxy littered with the relics of former civilizations (human and alien), with plenty left to the reader’s imagination, and room for a sequel.”
—Library Journal on Revenger
“Revenger is tremendous fun.”
—Locus
“An expert mix of the fantastical and horrific.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Revenger
“Reynolds’ newest action-packed science fiction novel is a tale of sisterly devotion, heartbreaking loss, and brutal vengeance.… Fans will enjoy the well-developed characters and detailed world building.”
—Booklist on Revenger
“A blindingly clever imagining of our solar system in the far flung future.”
—Sun on Revenger
“A rollicking adventure yarn with action, abduction, fights, properly scary hazards, very grisly torture and even ghosts of a sort.”
—Daily Telegraph on Revenger
“By far the most enjoyable book Reynolds has ever written.”
—SFX on Revenger
“The world of Revenger is undeniably fascinating, and with Reynolds as your storyteller, a journey into it is definitely worthwhile.”
—SciFiNow
“Reynolds makes the human story compelling in a narrative that, spiced with bizarre characters aplenty and propelled by vengeance, smacks intriguingly of everything from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Mad Max.”
—Nature on Revenger
“A delightful romp through the spaceways.”
—Interzone on Revenger
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“Tell me what you think you saw.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Surt said, squeezed next to me in one of the two adjoining seats in the sighting room. “I oughtn’t have mentioned it, not with your sister being so jumpy.”
“Never you worry about Arafura. If you saw something, we all need to know about it.”
“But if there was another ship scuttlin’ about out here, we’d have seen it on the sweeper, wouldn’t we?”
“The sweeper isn’t infallible, Surt. That’s why we watch for sail-flash. If the conditions are right it can show up across a much longer range, especially through a telescope. You were sighting through one of the high-magnification tubes, weren’t you?”
Surt looked abashed. “I wasn’t even trying to find a ship. Just looking out at the worlds, hoping to get a squint of my home. Fura won’t get cross at me, will she?”
“Of course not,” I answered softly, making an adjustment to one of the aiming wheels. “We’ve all done it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. A bit of homesickness doesn’t make us any less committed to the crew.”
“I probably wasn’t even squintin’ in the right part of the sky. Never could get my head around all those tables and charts like the rest of you. Got a noggin’ for machines, not numbers.”
“Don’t feel too bad about it. Those tables aren’t easy for any of us, except maybe Paladin.”
She tipped her head down, silent for a few seconds.
“Do you ever look, Adrana?”
I nodded, picking up on her meaning. “For my homeworld? Yes. Now and then. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, not so I’d stake my life on it.”
“It was Mazarile, weren’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds a pretty place.”
“It wasn’t, not really. Just a brown rock with some green bits. Too dark and dowdy to show across more than a few thousand leagues. Our parents moved there when they couldn’t afford to stay somewhere nicer, down in the Sunwards, and I don’t think it ever really felt like home to them.”
“Is your parents both back there?”
“No … not exactly. Our mother died quite a long time ago. She got sick when one of those illnesses swept through the worlds, and we didn’t have enough money to get a good doctor or go to the aliens. Maybe they couldn’t have helped her—”
“And your father?” Surt asked sharply, cutting across my ruminations.
Something in me went as tight as rigging under a full spread of sail. Since we’d taken over the running of this ship, my sister and I had both had to deal with some difficult changes. Her being what she’d become, and me being what I’d been on the way to becoming, thanks to the unpleasantnesses that had been visited on me in the kindness room. For the most part, we squared up and discussed these things openly, at least between ourselves. Given that we’d once got to a point where I had a knife to her throat, talking was the only way to rebuild the trust we’d shared since childhood.
But even then, even after all this healthy openness, Father was a subject I dared not go near.
“Which tube were you using when you saw the flash?”
Surt blinked at my non-answer, but she was clever enough not to poke at that subject. “It was this one, Adrana,” she said, swivelling one of the tubes around, thumbing open the cover on its eyepiece.
“It’s plausible, I think. The optics on all of ’em are all top-notch, and the mirrors nicely silvered, but she must have had that one re-calibrated quite recently. I wouldn’t mind betting it’s one of the best sighting pieces on any ship anywhere in the Congregation.”
“Pity she couldn’t think of anything pleasant to do with it, ’cept butcherin’.”
“She did have her character flaws,” I said, smiling so that she understood that my understatement was most certainly ironic. “But at least she had excellent taste in equipment.”
Until recently our ship had belonged to a woman called Bosa Sennen. Bosa had called her ship Dame Scarlet, but among her enemies it had long earned a second, nearly official designation: the Nightjammer. It was by way of allusion to both its favoured haunts, in the darkness beyond the worlds, and the blackness of its hull and sails. Bosa employed it to hunt down other crews, stealing their prizes and murdering their crews, save the very few that she took for her own purposes. She had done this for much longer than an ordinary lifetime, because Bosa Sennen was as much an idea as a person—an idea that could attach itself to an individual, to use or be used by that individual, before moving onto someone else.
Less than a year ago, Bosa had made the first of two serious errors. She had stalked and taken a ship, the Monetta’s Mourn, on which my sister and I were serving: our first time away from Mazarile, and our first experience on any such ship. Arafura had escaped but I had not, and Bosa only decided to use me rather than kill me because of my skill with bones. So she had taken me aboard the Nightjammer and started turning me to her ways, using psychological, chemical and electrical methods of torture, coercion and personality-adjustment.
Months later, she had made her second error. She had gone after another crew and tried to take them, not knowing it was a trap put together by Arafura. My sister’s plan had been ruthless and clever. She had saved me and captured Bosa, and between us—and her crew—we had gained control of the Nightjammer, making it ours.
A new ship needed a new name, and so we gave it one.
Revenger.
It had been ours for three months; three long months which took us from one year into the next, and because the old year had been 1799, and the new one was 1800—eighteen hundred years since the documented founding of the Thirteenth Occupation—it was a new year as bright and shiny as a hatpin and felt like the propitious time to be starting a fresh enterprise. We were going to make something of ourselves. Not as butchers or pirates, but as honest privateers—those who wanted to remain in this life, at least, rather than going back to our homeworlds. Exactly who wanted what was yet undecided—and not much spoken of. But whatever our decisions, collective or personal, there was no possibility of just waltzing back into the busy commerce of the Congregation.
We would be shot to splinters at the first glimpse.
The problem was, we knew what we were, and what our new ship had become. But the rest of civilisation was not yet reliably acquainted with the facts. As far as the other ships and captains were concerned, and so far as the rich worlds, cartels and banking concerns behind the organised expeditions knew, Bosa Sennen was still alive and active. It would take more than just a helpful transmission from us to set things straight—especially as Bosa had a long record of just that sort of duplicity.
So for three months we’d had no choice but to skulk.
In truth, the time was usefully spent. First we had to learn how to operate Revenger, and that took weeks—plenty of them. We had to hook what was left of our old family tutor and mentor into the nerves of the ship, Paladin’s robot mind gradually taking control of the navigation, sail-gear and weapons. Then we had to keep up our basic stocks of consumable materials, including fuel, and that meant cracking a few easy baubles, going into them and scooping out such treasures as remained unplundered. We had done so, and proven that we could operate the ship and function as a crew. But still, every time we took the launch back from the surface of a bauble, we were reminded what our ship looked like from the outside.
A predator.
A black-hulled, black-sailed monstrosity, cruel in her lines and entirely incapable of being mistaken for anything but the Nightjammer. We meant to change her disposition, but that would take time, and for now we dared not be too hasty about it. If someone did chance upon us, even in these dark, distant orbits, and made a decision about us, then we might require all the weapons presently available, merely for our own self-defence.
Thus we loathed Bosa, while at the same time being cynically grateful for the quality of the fittings she had left us.
Her long-range telescopes were the equal of anything in any museum on Mazarile, and certainly superior to the optical instruments on the Monetta’s Mourn, which was itself very well equipped. They were properly cared for, too. Their tubes had engravings on, their leather-work was still fine and black, and the movable gaskets—where they pierced the glass bubble of the sighting room—were still tight against vacuum and nicely lubricated. There were many tubes too, clustered together with their eyepieces aimed back at us like the point-blank muzzles of a firing squad.
Surt ventured: “Do you really think it was sail-flash?”
“I think it more than possible.” I pressed my eye to the lens and worked the focus dial. “If there is a ship stalking us out here—or at least trying to get close enough to this bauble to jump our claim—then her captain will be doing her utmost to control the disposition of her sails, with respect to the Old Sun, while not caring to cast light in our direction. But sometimes it can’t be avoided.” To begin with I swept the scope quite widely, picking up the red glimmer of the bauble around which we were orbiting, and I considered the chances that some of that glimmer might have got caught up in the optics and thrown a confusing trick of light across Surt’s eyepiece. It wasn’t that likely, I decided. The optics were good and Surt would have needed to be staring almost directly at the bauble to pick up any of its blush.
Satisfied that the answer lay elsewhere, I swept the scope back and forth along a narrower arc, patrolling the area in which Surt thought she had seen the flash. “Or it could be something else. Space debris, or a flash from a rogue navigation mirror that’s drifted free of the main commerce routes. Or it could be a hundred other things, none of which are of consequence.”
“I should’ve taken more pains to note down the position when I saw the flash.”
“You did all that you could, Surt. The main thing was to bring the matter to my attention, which you did.”
“You’ve always been kind to me, Adrana.”
“We’re all just trying to do our best.”
“I know, and I think Fura knows it too, but she can be sharp with me when I get things wrong.”
“Pay no heed.” I adjusted the sighting angle again. “Without you, we’d still be trying to get Paladin to speak again, never mind run this ship. Arafura knows that perfectly well.”
“Would she like it better if I called her Arafura, do you think? Only I thought Fura was the name she preferred.”
“It is. I think she believes it more suited to her current calling. Shorter and harder.”
“Like Bosa,” Surt said, pleased with herself for making this connection.
“No,” I answered firmly. “Not like that. Never like that.”
“I didn’t mean no disrespect, Adrana. There I go, getting things wrong again. I’d be better off shutting my gob completely. And keeping away from pens and paper. All I ever leave is a mess of smudges.”
“You’re serving this crew, Surt, and serving it capably.”
I vowed not to be too harsh on her for failing to record her observation. Only a little while since, Surt had been unable to read or write, and the use of pens and log books was still not second nature to her. When I checked over the observational watches, hers were the blemished, crossed-out and incomplete entries.
She was becoming more proficient, though, and needed no chastisement from me. Not when we were hardly spoilt for spare hands.
“Do you see anything?” she asked expectantly, as I switched from one eyepiece to another.
“Nothing,” I said, when I had swept a few more sectors. “I don’t doubt your sighting, not for a second. But I don’t think we need trouble Fura on the basis of a single flash.” I had used my sister’s shortened name deliberately, thinking it might put Surt better at ease, and had made a private decision that I would try and think of her by the same means. “Perhaps, when we have what we’ve come for, and are debating our next course, I’ll mention it to her in passing. But there’ll be no slight on your actions.”
“I hope not. I don’t really mind that sharp tongue of hers … but that’s just words. There’s a wrong side of her I never want to see.”
“Nor do any of us,” I said under my breath.
*
Our launch broke away from its berthing rack with a jolt and slipped neatly between the teeth of the upper and lower jaws of Revenger’s maw and into clear space. Through the portal I watched the jaws hinge shut on the red-lit docking bay, the only light and colour for millions of leagues. Until Fura touched the jets and sent out a pulse of rocket thrust, lighting up the hull in brassy highlights, that sharp-toothed grin was the only part of the ship to be seen.
She used the rockets sparingly, knowing we were low on chemical reserves. From my seat behind her control position I watched her with a quiet, sisterly admiration. She had come a long way since Captain Rackamore took us up in his launch for the first time, at my instigation.
“And you’re sure no one will have cleaned the place out before we got here?” she asked, twisting around in her seat for a second before snapping her attention back onto the controls.
“Sure as I can be,” Prozor said, sitting opposite me, clutching her notebook—scrawled full of her bauble maps and auguries and reminders to herself—as well as a very expensive pocket chronometer, which she had in the other hand, her thumb clicking down on the starting and stopping buttons as if she needed reassurance that they still worked. “Rack came back here over and over, and there was never any sign of anyone else showin’ interest. Mainly ’cause there wasn’t much worth salvagin’, at least not in the shallow layers, and there never was time to go deeper. Not even for a crew on their game, like we most definitely was.”
Slowly the bauble came round in the nose windows of the launch. It was hard to see, even though we were less than twenty leagues out. The field was still up, cloaking the lump of rock, but unlike some we had seen it was gauzy and dim, like a layer of smoke clinging to the rock’s surface.
“The question I’m stuck with,” Strambli said, “is what this place is worth to us, if no one but Rackamore ever bothered with it. You just said there’s no treasure here.” She was exercising her fingers, squeezing on a little contraption made of springs and metal.
“Depends what you mean by treasure,” Fura said, craning around to look at Strambli. “My book, treasure’s whatever a cove needs most in the here and now. Don’t matter whether it’s a million years old or a month, it’s the immediate value that counts. All the gold in the Congregation’s no use to someone gasping on their last drop of lungstuff. We ain’t in that boat just yet. But what we do need badly is fuel.”
“Rack used this place as a supply drop,” Prozor said, looking around at the rest of us besides Fura, which amounted to Strambli and myself. Just the bare minimum for an expedition into a bauble, with Surt and Tindouf staying behind on the main ship. Paladin counted as crew as well, I suppose, but none of us were in the habit of thinking of him in quite that way. “Propellant for his launch. A handsome stockpile. Rack’s philosophy was to run a light ship—minimal armour, minimal armaments. And a nice, lean crew, so we didn’t have to split a prize too many ways. He didn’t want to be luggin’ a hold full of rocket fuel around, so the Monetta only ever carried just enough to do the job, Rack always knowin’ he could come back to the Rumbler when he needed a top-up.”
“So we’re using up precious fuel,” Strambli said, frowning so hard she made her lopsided face even less symmetrical. “In order to get more fuel.”
“Not so hard to get your grey around,” Fura said, directing a fond if exasperated smile at our Opener. “Like depositing a quoin in a bank, so it’ll turn into two quoins.”
“I’d thank you not to mention banks,” Prozor said, rarely missing a chance to remind us that she had lost her savings in the crash of ninety-nine.
“You’d need a lot of faith in banks to deposit your last quoin,” Strambli muttered. “Which is what that fuel is to us.”
“It isn’t,” Fura said. “Not by a good margin. But we do need more propellant, and if we’ve got to burn some to get our mitts on Rack’s stockpile, so be it.” She directed her glowy face at Prozor and me. “Besides, I’d say it’s our stockpile now, wouldn’t you? We’re the last of Rack’s crew, so it’s not as if any other cove has a better claim on this place than us.”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“We’ll get in fast,” she was already saying, while working the controls, steering us nearer to the bauble. “Take as much as we need, and no more. What made sense for Rack makes sense for us, too. Agreed, Prozor?”
“No truer thing ever said,” Prozor answered, which was her way of managing to sound equivocal. She snapped shut her bauble book, did up the fancy clasps as if she had no expectation of ever needing to open it again between now and the last gasp of the Old Sun. “Usual margins, I take it?”
“However Rack liked to play it,” Fura said.
“Well, Rack had a few advantages we lack,” Prozor said, meaning (if I knew her at all) a crew he’d picked by hand, rather than one that had been shoved together by chance, but she left the rest of her statement tactfully unvoiced. “Usual margins’ll cut it. The rest of us, we may as well finish gettin’ suited.” She gave a squint to her chronometer. “We’ve got five minutes until field drop.”
So far so practical, and we’d already donned most of our vacuum gear, apart from the helmets and final connections. We’d inherited a very capable ship, full of fine equipment, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the motley look of our party. Our suits were a jumble of parts, brown and rust-coloured alloys cut and welded together with care and attention, but not much thought as to whether the final result was pretty to the eye. We were ugly and lumpy, like the contents of a junk shop thrown together in the approximate shapes of people. Why didn’t we use some fancy suits that Bosa had left us? Because there weren’t any, or rather there weren’t any that were suitable for this sort of work. Bosa didn’t soil her hands scrabbling through baubles. She let other crews have the pleasure of that, and then jumped them for their pickings. Bosa had left us some handsome black vacuum suits, but they were for boarding and gutting other vessels, leaving us to salvage our mongrel gear from the hulk of the Queen Crimson, Captain Trusko’s ship.
We checked each other’s suits, locking down helmets, tightening faceplates, making sure all the hoses and seals were secure, swinging our arms and legs, making squatting and flapping motions. Strambli went around with a little squirt-can, dribbling oil into the moving parts. I worked my gloves until my fingers bled inside them. We checked the suit-to-suit squawk, me giving a thump to the side of Prozor’s helmet until she came through clearly. Fura was still operating the launch, but she allowed herself to be fussed over from her seated position, stretching out an arm like a queen expecting to be kissed on the fingers. It was her right arm in this instance, which was mechanical from the forearm down to the fingertips. She would wear a normal pressure gauntlet on the other hand, but on the tin one she had a pressure-tight cuff around the elbow, keeping her metal hand free of any encumberment and allowing her to touch and sense things in vacuum with a great discrimination. The cuff was bothersome and hard for her to adjust, so Strambli was checking it for pressure integrity.
Prozor examined her timepiece again. “One minute,” she said, this time coming over the squawk, so that her voice sounded distant and near at the same time, because there was still atmosphere in the launch.
Fura slowed us down for the final approach. It was like a restless, sooty sea down there, blanketing the world beneath. The field was fidgeting around, growing tenuous in places. Bits of the surface began to show through, prickly with jagged, upright rock formations, like the quills of some armoured animal.
“Thirty seconds,” Prozor said. “Maintain descent rate.”
“Don’t look like it’s quite ready to pop,” Strambli ventured.
“It will,” I said, knowing how unlikely it was that Prozor would have made an error in her auguries.
In the last fifteen or twenty seconds the field seemed to shiver, and that shivering sped-up like the flicker from a coin spinning on the table, that fast whirlygig flutter just before the coin topples over. That was the death song of a field, and when it went it went instantly, just vanishing, so that what was below was now just an uncloaked rock, spines sticking out all over, bristling from pole to pole.
It was dark. One side was facing the Empty, the other the Old Sun. We were ten million leagues beyond the outer orbits of the Congregation, so that the Old Sun’s light had already fought its way through the gaps between thousands of worlds—millions, more likely—growing a little dimmer and wearier with each exchange. When that light flopped onto the bauble like an exhausted traveller, about all it could do was daub a few red and purple highlights across those quills, hinting at the gloomy secrets trapped between their roots. On the side facing the Empty—where the only dependable illumination was that from the distant stars, too far away for any monkey mind to comprehend, even those of us who’ve ventured as far out as Trevenza Reach, the bauble was nearly as black as Revenger’s own sails.
“Do you see anything you recognise?” Fura asked, directing her question at Prozor.
Prozor had started one of the stopwatch dials on her timepiece, measuring out the hours from the moment of field drop. “Drift north. That clump of spikes over there is a landmark.”
“They all look the same,” Strambli said.
“Not to me,” Prozor answered.
Fura levelled us out just above the tops of the spines. I looked over her metal-clad shoulders at the fuel gauges, watching the needles twitch every time she had to use a pulse of thrust to stop us drifting in too close. Prozor had already told us there was a swallower inside the Rumbler, which added to our difficulties, especially as we were going to be hauling out heavy reserves of propellant.
“Keep talkin’, Proz,” Fura said.
“Take us lower. Cut between that pair of spikes.”
“Won’t be much clearance.”
“No more’n we need. Our launch ain’t any bigger than the one Rack used, and he squeezed through any number of times.”
“Take your word for it,” she said, and although I could only see the back of her helmeted head, I imagined her biting on her tongue as she concentrated hard.
We slid between the spikes, angling down. It got darker, shadows criss-crossing until they squeezed out the last, meagre traces of light. Fura turned on the launch’s own lamps. Yellow beams crossed vacuum and danced across the swelling roots of those stony spines.
“I see the landing zone,” Prozor said. “Dead ahead. Hold this descent and you’ll be golden.”
“Why’s this place called the Rumbler, anyway?” Strambli asked.
“Adrana,” Fura said, turning to me. “Call out the heights, please.”
“Why, certainly,” I mouthed, moving to the side of her console, where I was able to read the slowly revolving digits of the altimeter. The instrument was similar to the sweeper on Revenger, only instead of whirring around it pinged pulses straight at the ground, measuring the delay before they bounced back. “One hundred spans,” I said, when the digits hit that round number. “Ninety. Eighty.”
Something buzzed on the console, a red light flashing. Fura snarled.
I recognised that light. Fuel warning.
“Don’t tell me you cut it that fine,” I whispered.
“No point going home if we don’t find Rack’s stockpile,” Fura replied, in the same low voice.
“I can’t believe—”
“Maintain those call-outs, sister.”
I wanted to snap back at her for voicing her request as if it were a demand, but since
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