“Then you’re going against his orders.”
“I suppose so.”
“I presume you could get into trouble for that.”
“He’ll never find out.” I thought of the unknown ship that was creeping towards us. “He’s got other things on his mind now. It’s not as if he’s going to be paying you a courtesy call just to pass the time of day.”
“But if he did find out…” She looked at me intently, lifting her chin. “Do you fear what he’d do to you?”
“I probably should. But I don’t think he’d be very likely to throw me into an airlock. Not until we’re under way at full power, in any case.”
“And then?”
“He’d be angry. But I don’t think he’d kill me. He’s not a bad man, really.”
“Perhaps I misheard, but didn’t you say his name was Van Ness?”
“Captain Rafe Van Ness, yes.” I must have looked surprised. “Don’t tell me it means something to you.”
“I heard Voulage mention him, that’s all. Now I know we’re talking about the same man.”
“What did Voulage have to say?”
“Nothing good. But I don’t think that necessarily reflects poorly on your captain. He must be a reasonable man. He’s at least allowed me aboard his ship, even if I haven’t been invited to dine in his quarters.”
“Dining for Van Ness is a pretty messy business,” I said confidingly. “You’re better off eating alone.”
“Do you like him, Inigo?”
“He has his flaws, but next to someone like Voulage, he’s pretty close to being an angel.”
“Doesn’t like Conjoiners, though.”
“Most Ultras would have left you drifting. I think this is a point where you have to take what you’re given.”
“Perhaps. I don’t understand his attitude, though. If your captain is like most Ultras, there’s at least as much of the machine about him as there is about me. More so, in all likelihood.”
“It’s what you do with the machines that counts,” I said. “Ultras tend to leave their minds alone, if at all possible. Even if they do have implants, it’s usually to replace areas of brain function lost due to injury or old age. They’re not really interested in improving matters, if you get my drift. Maybe that’s why Conjoiners make them twitchy.”
She unhooked her legs, dangling them over the edge of the bed. Her feet were bare and oddly elongated. She wore the same tight black outfit we’d found her in when we boarded the ship. It was cut low from her neck, in a rectangular shape. Her breasts were small. Though she was bony, with barely any spare muscle on her, she had the broad shoulders of a swimmer. Though Weather had sustained her share of injuries, the outfit showed no sign of damage at all. It appeared to be self-repairing, even self-cleaning.
“You talk of Ultras as if you weren’t one,” she said.
“Just an old habit breaking through. Though sometimes I don’t feel like quite the same breed as a man like Van Ness.”
“Your implants must be very well shielded. I can’t sense them at all.”
“That’s because there aren’t any.”
“Squeamish? Or just too young and fortunate not to have needed them yet?”
“It’s nothing to do with being squeamish. I’m not as young as I look, either.” I held up my mechanical hand. “Nor would I exactly call myself fortunate.”
She looked at the hand with narrowed, critical eyes. I remembered how she’d flinched back when I reached for her aboard the Cockatrice, and wondered what maltreatment she had suffered at the iron hands of her former masters.
“You don’t like it?” she asked.
“I liked the old one better.”
Weather reached out and gingerly held my hand in hers. They looked small and doll-like as they stroked and examined my mechanical counterpart.
“This is the only part of you that isn’t organic?”
“As far as I know.”
“Doesn’t that limit you? Don’t you feel handicapped around the rest of the crew?”
“Sometimes. But not always. My job means I have to squeeze into places where a man like Van Ness could never fit. It also means I have to be able to tolerate magnetic fields that would rip half the crew to shreds, if they didn’t boil alive first.” I opened and closed my metal fist. “I have to unscrew this, sometimes. I have a plastic replacement if I just need to hook hold of things.”
“You don’t like it very much.”
“It does what I ask of it.”
Weather made to let go of my hand, but her fingers remained in contact with mine for an instant longer than necessary. “I’m sorry that you don’t like it.”
“I could have got it fixed at one of the orbital clinics, I suppose,” I said, “but there’s always something else that needs fixing first. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the hand, some people might not believe I’m an Ultra at all.”
“Do you plan on being an Ultra all your life?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say I ever had my mind set on being a shipmaster. It just sort of happened, and now here I am.”
“I had my mind set on something once,” Weather said. “I thought it was within my grasp, too. Then it slipped out of reach.” She looked at me and then did something wonderful and unexpected, which was to smile. It was not the most genuine-looking smile I’d ever seen, but I sensed the genuine intent behind it. Suddenly I knew there was a human being in the room with me, damaged and dangerous though she might have been. “Now here I am, too. It’s not quite what I expected…but thank you for rescuing me.”
“I was beginning to wonder if we’d made a mistake. You seemed so reluctant to leave that ship.”
“I was,” she said, distantly. “But that’s over now. You did what you thought was the right thing.”
“Was it?”
“For me, yes. For the ship…maybe not.” Then she stopped and cocked her head to one side, frowning. Her eyes flashed olive. “What are you looking at, Inigo?”
“Nothing,” I said, looking sharply away.
KEEPING OUT OF Van Ness’s way, as he’d advised, was not the hard part of what followed. The Petronel was a big ship and our paths didn’t need to cross in the course of day-to-day duties. The difficulty was finding as much time to visit Weather as I would have liked. My original repair plan had been tight, but the unknown ship forced me to accelerate the schedule even further, despite what I’d told Weps. The burden of work began to take its toll on me, draining my concentration. I was still confident that once that work was done, we’d be able to continue our journey as if nothing had happened, save for the loss of those crew who had died in the engagement and our gaining one new passenger. The other ship would probably abandon us once we pushed the engines up to cruise thrust, looking for easier pickings elsewhere. If it had the swiftness of the Cockatrice, it wouldn’t have been skulking in the shadows letting the other ship take first prize.
But my optimism was misplaced. When the repair work was done, I once more made my way along the access shaft to the starboard engine and confronted the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. As expected, all six dials were now showing deep blue, which meant they were operating well inside the safety envelope. But when I consulted my log book and made the tiny adjustments that should have taken all the dials into the blue-green—still nicely within the safety envelope—I got a nasty surprise. I only had to nudge two of the dials by a fraction of a millimetre before they shone a hard and threatening orange.
Something was wrong.
I checked my settings, of course, making sure none of the other dials were out of position. But there’d been no mistake. I thumbed through the log with increasing haste, a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, looking for an entry where something similar had happened; something that would point me to the obvious mistake I must have made. But none of the previous entries were the slightest help. I’d made no error with the settings, and that left only one possibility: something had happened to the engine. It was not working properly.