I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations to three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.
The Petronel surged faster, still maintaining her former heading. It was only possible to make adjustments to the starboard engine, since the port engine had no external controls. That didn’t matter, because the Conjoiners had arranged the two engines to work in perfect synchronisation, despite them being a kilometre apart. No one had ever succeeded in detecting the signals that passed between two matched C-drives, let alone in understanding the messages those signals carried. But everyone who worked with them knew what would happen if, by accident or design, the engines were allowed to get more than sixteen hundred metres apart.
I completed my adjustments, satisfied that I’d done all I could without risking engine malfunction. Three of the five dials were now showing orange, indicating that those settings were now outside what the Conjoiners deemed the recommended envelope of safe operation. If any of the dials were to show red, or if more than three showed orange, than we’d be in real danger of losing the Petronel.
When Ultras meet on friendly terms, to exchange data or goods, the shipmasters will often trade stories of engine settings. On a busy trade route, a marginal increase in drive efficiency can make all the difference between one ship and its competitors. Occasionally you hear about ships that have been running on three orange, even four orange, for decades at a time. By the same token, you sometimes hear about ships that went nova when only two dials had been adjusted away from the safety envelope. The one thing every shipmaster agrees upon is that no lighthugger has ever operated for more than a few days of shiptime with one dial in the red. You might risk that to escape aggressors, but even then some will insist that the danger is too great; that those ships that lasted days were the lucky ones.
I left the starboard engine and retreated back into the main hull of the Petronel. Van Ness was waiting to greet me. I could tell by the look on his face—the part of it that I could read—that the news wasn’t good.
“Good lad, Inigo,” he said, placing his heavy gauntleted hand on my shoulder. “You’ve bought us maybe half a day, and I’m grateful for that, no question of it. But it’s not enough to make a difference. Are you sure you can’t sweet-talk any more out of them?”
“We could risk going to two gees for a few hours. That still wouldn’t put us out of reach of the Cockatrice, though.”
“And beyond that?”
I showed Van Ness my handwritten log book, with its meticulous notes of engine settings, compiled over twenty years of shiptime. Black ink for my own entries, the style changing abruptly when I lost my old hand and slowly learned how to use the new one; red annotations in the same script for comments and know-how gleaned from other shipmasters, dated and named. “According to this, we’re already running a fifteen per cent chance of losing the ship within the next hundred days. I’d feel a lot happier if we were already throttling back.”
“You don’t think we can lose any more mass?”
“We’re stripped to the bone as it is. I can probably find you another few thousand tonnes, but we’ll still only be looking at prolonging the inevitable.”
“We’ll have the short-range weapons,” Van Ness said resignedly. “Maybe they’ll make enough of a difference. At least now we have an extra half-day to get them run out and tested.”
“Let’s hope so,” I agreed, fully aware that it was hopeless. The weapons were antiquated and underpowered, good enough for fending off orbital insurgents but practically useless against another ship, especially one that had been built for piracy. The Petronel hadn’t fired a shot in anger in more than fifty years. When Van Ness had the chance to upgrade the guns, he’d chosen instead to spend the money on newer reefersleep caskets for the passenger hold.
People have several wrong ideas about Ultras. One of the most common misconceptions is that we must all be brigands, every ship bristling with armaments, primed to a state of nervous readiness the moment another vessel comes within weapons range.
It isn’t true. For every ship like that, there are a thousand like the Petronel: just trying to ply an honest trade, with a decent, hardworking crew under the hand of a fair man like Van Ness. Some of us might look like freaks, by the standards of planetary civilisation. But spending an entire life aboard a ship, hopping from star to star at relativistic speed, soaking up exotic radiation from the engines and from space itself, is hardly the environment for which the human form was evolved. I’d lost my old hand in an accident, and much of what had happened to Van Ness was down to time and misfortune in equal measure.
He was one of the best captains I’d ever known, maybe the best ever. He’d scared the hell out of me the first time we met, when he was recruiting for a new shipmaster in a carousel around Greenhouse. But Van Ness treated his crew well, kept his word in a deal and always reminded us that our passengers were not frozen “cargo” but human beings who had entrusted themselves into our care.
“If it comes to it,” Van Ness said, “we’ll let them take the passengers. At least that way some of them might survive, even if they won’t necessarily end up where they were expecting. We put up too much of a fight, even after we’ve been boarded, the Cockatrice’s crew may just decide to burn everything, sleepers included.”
“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t want to hear it.
“But here’s my advice to you, lad.” Van Ness’s iron grip tightened on my shoulder. “Get yourself to an airlock as soon as you can. Blow yourself into space rather than let the bastards get their hands on you. They might be in mind for a bit of cruelty, but they won’t be in need of new crew.”
I winced, before he crushed my collarbone. He meant well, but he really didn’t know his own strength.
“Especially not a shipmaster, judging by the way things are going.”
“Aye. He’s good, whoever he is. Not as good as you, though. You’ve got a fully laden ship to push; all they have is a stripped-down skeleton.”
It was meant well, but I knew better than to underestimate my adversary. “Thank you, Captain.”
“We’d best start waking those guns, lad. If you’re done with the engines, the weaponsmaster may appreciate a helping hand.”
I BARELY SLEPT for the next day. Coaxing the weapons back to operational readiness was a fraught business, and it all had to be done without alerting the Cockatrice that we had any last-minute defensive capability. The magnetic coils on the induction guns had to be warmed and brought up to operational field strength, and then tested with slugs of recycled hull material. One of the coils fractured during warm-up and took out its entire turret, injuring one of Weps’ men in the process. The optics on the lasers had to be aligned and calibrated, and then the lasers had to be test-fired against specks of incoming interstellar dust, hoping that the Cockatrice didn’t spot those pinpoint flashes of gamma radiation as the lasers found their targets.