“I still don’t understand why I have to be down here.”
Ann shut her eyes and breathed carefully for three seconds before replying. “It’s how the trick works. You know that. Oh no oh dear, those poor helpless marooned mariners, only two of them left, better help, pish posh pash, then SURPRISE up comes the one with all the weapons and we get the goods.”
“Yeah, but why me? The bilges are busted and it stinks down here.”
“You’re eight foot nine, Lizzy. You don’t look helpless enough.”
“I damn well feel it. I’m starving. Besides, why are we following the trick? It isn’t a trick! Fen ran us right through a keelee pod, FEN should be the one down here snorting bilge fumes in every orifi-”
Fen had been dozing quietly against the lifeboat’s engine until then, and she didn’t really seem to stop. She just shifted, snorted, and ended up with the muzzle of her broadbarrel pressed against the metal-plated deck.
“I heard that. Hey Ann, tell her that thing would barely break my skin even without the hull in the way.”
Fen yawned. “Tell her I’d be aiming for the eyes, Ann.”
“Hey Ann? Tell her I’ve got four extras.”
Ann shut her eyes again, crossed them, and muttered curses to herself over and over and over. She wished she could go back to her old standby of imagining stabbing the two of them, but in the confined space of the lifeboat she was a little worried that fantasy could become factual very quickly.
Not that it wouldn’t be useful. They weren’t running low on food yet, but they weren’t on any of the major shipping lanes. Could be a long wait, but she could at least make it a long, QUIET wai-
“Hey Ann.”
“What?!” she snapped in spite of herself.
Fen tapped her shoulder. “Smoke to the west, coming on in.”
“That’s bullshit. There’s nothing out there.”
“Is now. Been watching it for the last hour.”
“You didn’t say anything!”
“Wanted to be sure.”
Ann allowed herself a brief relapse of bad habits. Blood on her hands, Fen’s variously-severed anatomy around the deck, Lizzy sealed in the bilge and set on fire. Very relaxing.
“Fine,” she said, sugar-sweet and twice as soft. “Let’s get the engine going.”
The ship was a low-slung thing; its deck barely above water. Fat and heavy and set root-deep into the waves, it reminded Ann of a burnt hulk. Already sunk, already-dead.
No sails, no mast. A single bulky chunk of superstructure that seemed mostly to exist for the sake of housing a well-protected antenna.
“Nobody up top,” observed Ann. “Not that there’s much for them up there.”
“Nobody listening, either,” said Fen. She shook the bulky ship’s radio; eight years older than any of them and one of the few things they’d wrestled out of the Perse’s bridge before the sinking. “Not on any of the usual channels.”
“Maybe they know about the trick and they’re ignoring us,” said Lizzy.
Ann glared at the ship. “In that? For fear of us? Not likely. Look at it; the crew can’t be smaller than eight dozen; six at the pinch.”
“Ghost ship?” said Fen. Her teeth were bared now in that friendly way that meant an edge of fear mixed with a dose of adrenaline.
Ann realized her hand had been creeping towards her belt and stopped herself. Tells like that could get you killed. “Maybe,” she said. “If not, we can always fix that.”
The entrance was air-locked; a double-sealed descent down a ladder.
“They knew that deck wasn’t staying dry, didn’t they?” asked Lizzy. She stretched herself, all five arms as far above her head as she could reach. “I like these people. They know how to build a proper ceiling.”
“Shut up about the bilge,” said Ann. But she was thinking about that. They were standing in a broad, basically-empty corridor, nothing special about it beyond a ridiculously chicken-scratched floor; the sort of thing you’d find in any humanoid or nearhumanoid vessel. That was reassuring; dealing with enemies outside your species was hard enough, when they were outside your phylum things could get very difficult. But the space from the upper deck to the floor was a good twelve feet.
“Giants or not,” said Fen, “we’re armed. And we’re awake, or alive, or whatever they aren’t.”
“Captain is asleep.”
The voice was calm and bedrock-steady, despite the slight radio crackle. Before the first word had finished, all three of them were armed and tense.
“There,” said Fen. She pointed her broadbarrel at the ceiling’s corner, where a tiny speaker was humming to itself.
“Captain is asleep. Please do not make loud noises. Captain is asleep.”
“Identify yourself and your home port,” said Ann.
“Captain is asleep. We sail from eastmost onward. Guests may find lodging-space in one of the holds. Please be quieter. Captain is asleep.”
Fen sheathed her broadbarrel, laughed when Ann snarled at her. “Nobody home,” she said. “Hear that monotone? No inflection? It’s got to be a recording. Or a basal AI.”
“Y’mean I don’t have to stab it?” asked Lizzy.
“Stab it? Let’s just find it. Wherever it is, the bridge is. Wherever that is, the captain’s near. And where the captain is, is money.”
“If this thing’s really from west, it won’t HAVE money,” said Ann. “Not anything a decent bank’d recognize.”
“If this thing’s from west,” said Fen, “it’s practically made of money already.”
Made of money or not, exploring the ship was tiring business. The doors were a strain to move, even for Lizzy. The corridors were too long, their legs were too wobbly from the lifeboat’s confines. And no matter where they walked, the speakers followed them, echoing just slightly from the bare walls of the all-too-clean rooms they walked through. It was starting to get on Ann’s nerves a little; an honest ship deserved some dirt. The nearest thing this one had was the scratches on the floor; long, wobbled, and interwoven.
“Captain is asleep,” the speaker said quietly, as she slid into a vast, half-darkened space. “Please do not overly disturb the cargo. Captain is asleep.”
Ann prodded the nearest pallet. Spongey, soft, but packed hard. Some sort of grain. “Food,” she said.
“Lots of food,” said Lizzy. “Big appetites for big people.”
“So where are they all?”
“Captain is at the bow of the ship, against the keel,” said the speakers. “Please do not disturb Captain. Captain is asleep.”
They looked at each other.
“Not a recording, then” said Ann.
“AI’s worth a good chunk of money,” said Fen. “Especially one from off the map. Bulky to move, though.”
Lizzy cracked her knuckles. “Bulky’s my maiden name.”
“Captain is asleep,” repeated the speaker. “Please do not approach.”
“Which direction do we go if we don’t want to disturb your captain then?” asked Ann.
“Right at the next intersection.”
Fen’s grin came back. “AIs,” she said, fondly.
Left at the next intersection was less direct than it sounded; the ship’s guts might have been gleaming-clean, but their layout was a coiled mess, wrapping around from room to room to room. Engines, generators, storage closets – the size of mess halls – and more and more food lockers. Mostly full ones, but one or two dead empty, bare-floored. They hurried through those vaults a little faster than necessary.
“No bunks,” said Ann.
“Maybe they don’t sleep,” said Fen. “Or they just drop wherever they’re sitting.”
“’Captain is asleep,’ remember? And don’t tell me they’d sleep just anywhere they feel like; I haven’t seen DUST since we got on this thing. Where’s the crew?”
“Captain is asleep beyond this door. Please depart immediately. Captain is still asleep.”
Lizzy reached up and checked the handle.
“No lock,” she said, marvelling.
“Release the handle immediately. Captain is asleep and will be disturbed. Please-”
The door slammed against the wall, but the three pirates were inside the captain’s chamber before it had even started clanging, weapons out, eyes moving.
There was no bed. There was no desk. On one wall, a cabinet was mounted, securely fastened. And on the other, a mass of machinery and plating that reached to the ceiling, centered on a door that was built like a giant’s casket.
“Fen, check the cabinet for the AI. Lizzy, let’s wake up the napper.”
“Captain’s sleep cycle continues for another six hours. Captain must not be disturbed or shipboard activity will undergo severe desynchronization. Please do not disturb Captain’s berth. Please leave Captain’s quarters immediately.”
There was some sort of soft vacuum sealing the berth, and Lizzy ended up having to use all five arms, fangs gaping in concentration, eyes pulsing in their sockets until the metal squeaked and she roared and the whole thing popped open in a flash, knocking her flat onto her back.
Ann was already there, slipped between doorway and berth, blade out and humming with frictional force.
The captain was nearly what she’d expected; alien, but not altogether so. A tetrapod, vaguely reptilian; spindly and elongated in a way that made her think of a chameleon, but moreso. Tailless, nearly eight foot curled up; closer to eleven maybe if it was standing upright. Its eyes were flickering in the restless whirl of REM sleep. Machinery crowded the inside of the berth, nestled around its mouth in a way that made her think of nursing; deeply inappropriate for an egg-laying creature.
“Ann?”
It took her a moment to recognize the voice. That wasn’t Fen; Fen never sounded worried. “Yes?”
“There’s no AI in here. Just spare parts.” Machinery clanged off spotless deck plates. “It has to be here. There’s nowhere else they’d put it. Where is it?”
“Captain is waking up.”
It was a calm, steady voice. It was entirely empty of static. It was coming from the berth.
“Captain is waking up,” and this time Ann saw the slight movement from the captain’s throat, heard the hiss and whistle of air moving up from lungs bigger than her torso. “Capacity for communication receding. Depart immediately or safety will be compromised.”
Ann watched the thing’s pulse accelerate with a professional’s eye. There. Right there. That would be the quickest way. “Yours first,” she told it, and drew back her blade.
The first thing that happened was the eyes stopped moving.
The third through fifth things were obscured by the impact of the second thing against Ann’s skull, which sent her hurtling out of the captain’s quarters and into the opposite wall of the corridor.
The sixth thing must’ve been because of Lizzy, because as Ann’s hearing sloshed back into her head she could hear the other woman roaring. Or screaming. Or both.
The seventh thing was Fen passing her at a jog, face set dead, feet flailing. As she rounded a corner the eighth thing pursued her in a titanic blur and a shriek of metal, surging past Ann’s face before she could tell it from anything.
And then she was alone again, head aching, mouth and nose full of blood. Some of it wasn’t hers; she could smell the acrid tang of Lizzy mixed with a deeper, richer undertone, and knew that she wouldn’t find anything good if she looked in the berth.
Ann started walking. She knew she should be running instead, but every time she tried to make her legs move faster something in her side shifted and pressed against deeper, softer portions of her insides. So she tottered, like an old woman. Forgetful like one too; she’d left her blade behind. There was something horribly tranquil about the realization that it probably wouldn’t make a difference.
Finding her way wasn’t hard, at least. They’d left a trail of open doors in their wake, for which she was doubly thankful; opening one on her own had gone from difficult to impossible now. Her muscles were jelly and her head was still swimming, which was probably why she didn’t notice the captain until she was right behind it.
It seemed bigger; it was the first she’d seen it – properly seen it – out of its berth. It was bent low over the floor, arms whirling, and when it spun to face her, for a split instant she saw what was gripped in its hands and it was the funniest thing she’d seen all day.
Then it was on her, and over her, and sprinting down and past her, deeper down into the ship, trailing a scream and a scratch behind it as its claws slid over the floor at full speed.
She walked over to the spot it had been squatting. It glistened with the universal scent of strong soap, but there was something redder underlying it that her nose recognized.
It had been cleaning up after Fen.
Ann walked a little faster after that, even if she’d just proven to herself that the captain wasn’t necessarily about to kill her, not with its body awake but unthreatened and its brain turned off. It was going to finish its chores sooner or later, probably sooner, and she’d rather that she wasn’t still around afterwards. She reached the airlock without incident, and for a while she dithered at it, trying to find a way to wedge it open. A bad squall or a sharp storm, and it would all be over fairly quickly, even with just the one entry available But the machinery was well-crafted and she didn’t have her blade and besides her head was pounding again, pounding so hard that she could barely think of escape, let alone revenge.
And as she unmoored the lifeboat from the side of the ship and slid back into the big empty blue of the far west, she realized it had done her a favour anyways. There was plenty of food now. Plenty of food for a long, quiet wait.