THE LAST LOG OF THE LACHRIMOSA
Alastair Reynolds
WAKE UP.
No, really. Wake up. I know you don’t want to, but it’s important that you understand what’s happened to you, and—just as vitally—what’s going to happen next. I know this is hard for you, being told what to do. It’s not the way it usually works. Would it help if I still called you Captain?
Captain Rasht, then. Let’s keep it formal.
No, don’t fight. It’ll only make it worse. There. I’ve eased it a little. Just a tiny, tiny bit. Can you breathe more easily now? I wouldn’t waste your energy speaking, if I were you. Yes, I know you’ve a lot on your mind. But please don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s any chance of talking your way out of this one.
Nidra? Yes, that’s me. Good that you’re wide awake enough to remember my name. Lenka? Yes, Lenka is alive. I went back for Lenka, the way I said I would.
Did I find Teterev?
Yes, I found Teterev. There wasn’t much I could do for her, though. But it was good to hear what she had to say. You’d have found it interesting, I think.
Well, we’ll get to that. As I said, I want you to understand what happens next. To some extent, that’s in your control. No, really. I’m not so cruel that I wouldn’t give you some influence over your fate. You wanted to make your name—to do something that would impress the other ships, the other crews—leave your mark on history.
Make them remember Rasht of the Lachrimosa.
This is your big chance.
“I’LL FIND MAZAMEL,” said Captain Rasht, clenching his fist around an imaginary neck. “Even if I have to take the Glitter Band apart. Even if I have to pluck him out of the bottom of the chasm. I’ll skin him alive. I’ll fuse his bones. I’ll make a living figurehead out of him.”
Lenka and I were wise enough to say nothing. There was little to be gained in pointing out the obvious: that by the time we returned to Yellowstone, our information broker stood every chance of being light years away.
Or dead.
“I won’t fuse his bones after all,” Captain Rasht continued. “I’ll core out his spine. Kanto needs a new helmet for his spacesuit. I’ll make one of out Mazamel’s skull. It’s fat and stupid enough for a monkey. Isn’t it, my dear?”
Rasht interrupted his monologue to pop a morsel into the stinking, tooth-rotted mouth of Kanto, squatting on his shoulder like a hairy disfigurement.
In fairness, Mazamel’s information wasn’t totally valueless. The ship at least was real. It was still there, still orbiting Holda. From a distance it had even looked superficially intact. It was only as we came in closer, tightening our own orbit like a noose, that the actual condition became apparent. The needle-tipped hull was battered, pocked and gouged by numerous collisions with interstellar material. That was true of our own Lachrimosa—no ship makes it between solar systems without some cost—but here the damage was much worse. We could see stars through some of the holes in the hull, punched clean through to the other side. The engine spars, sweeping out from the hull at its widest point, had the look of ruptured batskin. The engines still seemed to be present when we made our long-distance survey. But we had been tricked by the remains of their enclosing structures. They were hollow, picked open and gouged of their dangerous, seductive treasures.
“We should check out the wreck,” Lenka said—trying to make the best of a bad situation. “But there’s something on the surface we should look at as well.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. Some kind of geomagnetic anomaly, spiking up in the northern hemisphere. Got some metallic backscatter, too. Neither makes much sense. Holda’s not meant to have much of a magnetosphere. Core’s too old and cold for that. The metal signature’s in the same area, too. It’s quite concentrated. It could be a ship or something, put down on the surface.”
Rasht thought about it, grunted his grudging approval.
“But first the wreck. Make sure it isn’t going to shoot us down the instant we turn our backs. Match our orbit, Nidra—but keep us at a safe distance.”
“Fifty kilometres?” I asked.
Rasht considered that for a moment. “Make it a hundred.”
WAS THAT MORE than just natural caution? I’ve never been sure about you, if truth be told—how much stock you put in traveller’s tales.
Mostly we aren’t superstitious. But rumours and ghost stories, those are something else. I’m sure you’ve heard your share of them, over the years. When ships meet for trade, stories are exchanged—and you’ve done a lot of trading. Or did, until your luck started souring.
Did you hear the one about the space plague?
Of course you did.
The strange contagion, the malady infecting ships and their crew. Is it real, Captain? What do you think? No one seems to know much about it, or even if it really exists.
What about the other thing? The black swallowing horror between the stars, a presence that eats ships. No one knows much about that, either.
What’s clear, though, is that a drifting, preyed-upon hulk puts no one in an agreeable frame of mind. We should have turned back there and then. But if Lenka and I had tried to argue with you on that one, how far do you think we’d have got? You’d have paid more attention to the monkey.
Yes, Kanto’s fine. We’ll take very good care of him. What do you think we are—monsters?
We’re not like that at all.
No, I’m not leaving you—not just yet. I just have to fetch some things from Teterev’s wreck. Be back in a jiffy! You’ll recognise the things when you see them. You remember the wreck, don’t you?
Not the ship in orbit. That was a wash-out. The fucking thing was as derelict and run-down as Lachrimosa. No engines, no weps. No crew, not even frozen. No cargo, no tradeable commodities. Picked clean as a bone.
No, I’m talking about the thing we found on the surface, the crash site.
Good, it’s coming back to you.
That’ll help.
“IT’S A SHUTTLE,” Lenka said.
“Was,” I corrected.
But in fact it was in much better condition than it had any right to be. The main section of the shuttle was still in one piece, upright on the surface. It was surrounded by debris, but the wonder was that any part of it had survived. It must have suffered a malfunction very near the surface, or else there would have been nothing to recognise.
Around the crash site, geysers pushed columns of steam up from a dirty snowscape. Holda’s sun, 82 Eridani, was rising. As it climbed into the sky it stirred the geysers to life. Rocks and rusty chemical discolouration marred the whiteness. A little to the west, the terrain bulged up sharply, forming a kind of rounded upwelling. I stared at it for a moment, wondering why it had my attention. Something about the bulge’s shape struck me as odd and unsettling, as if it simply did not belong in this landscape.
Unlike the other ship, no misfortune befell us as we completed our landing approach. Rasht selected an area of ground that looked stable. Our lander threw out its landing skids. Rasht cut power when we were still hovering, so as not to blast the snow with our descent jets.
I wondered what chance we stood of finding anything in the other craft’s remains. If the ship above had proven largely valueless, there did not seem much hope of finding glories in the wreck. But it would not hurt us to investigate.