The Black Lung Captain

Ten

Crake could smell himself. Stale alcohol leaked from his pores as he worked. His stomach was sore, and felt swollen. He couldn't tell if he was hungry or not. Even the small exertion of setting up his equipment was making his heart pound. His knees hurt from kneeling on the floor of the antechamber.

Damn it, he needed a drink.

Working by lanternlight, he leaned over and shifted one of the tuning poles a fraction to the left. It was important to get them right. If they weren't all equidistant from the door, the readings would be skewed. There were five poles, thin slivers of metal standing on round bases, in a semicircle around the door. They were linked by cables to an oscilloscope, a small wooden box with a half-dozen gauges on its face.

Next to the oscilloscope was his portable resonator. It was another box of roughly the same size, wired to a damping rod: a smooth globe of metal, standing on a short, thick pole, which was set in a heavy square base. Like the oscilloscope, it was covered with a bewildering array of brass dials, gauges and switches.

He was conscious of the others watching him as he made his final adjustments. He ignored them as best he could. They'd all come to this horrible place because of him. Grist only sought out Frey so he could get his hands on a daemonist. If he failed here, he'd let them all down. Maybe the whole expedition would be ruined then, and that fellow Gimble would have died for nothing.

Keep your head down. Keep working. Prove you can do this. Prove you're good for something.

They watched him work, and none of them had any idea how loathsome he really was.

Jez had disappeared and Silo had gone after her. That was good, at least. He could do without the Murthian's silent scrutiny. Silo had a way of making it seem like he knew something about you that he wasn't telling. And he could certainly do without Jez. He wished he'd never told her about that day, when he did the most terrible thing. She'd never said a word since, but it didn't matter. He couldn't stand her looking at him. Was it disgust in her eyes? Pity? He didn't know which was worse.

He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He wanted to be sick. Maybe he'd feel better if he was sick.

Grayther Crake. Look what you've become. Look where your fascination with daemonism has got you. How your dear brother would laugh.

But his brother wouldn't have laughed. His brother had hired the Shacklemores, the best bounty hunters in the land, to hunt him down. They'd almost caught him in the Feldspar Islands a year ago, at Gallian Thade's Winter Ball. He'd stayed ahead of them ever since, but he couldn't ever let down his guard. They always got their man in the end, the Shacklemores. They were well known for it.

Never able to relax, never able to forget.

He couldn't close his eyes without seeing her.

'Crake?' said Frey. 'You alright?'

He realised that he'd stopped working, wrapped up in his private misery. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to concentrate. 'I asked you to be quiet,' he said, irritated more at himself than Frey.

There's a job at hand. Get it done. Don't think about anything else.

He connected the oscilloscope and the resonator to a chemical battery. Sparks crackled as he attached the clips.

'I need absolute silence from now on. Any noise is going to upset the readings.'

Grist chose that moment to have a minor coughing fit. He tried to suppress it, but that only made it worse. Eventually he had to leave the room, eyes watering. They heard him barking his lungs up outside. Crake sighed and waited till he was done. He came back with his cigar clamped between his lips, took a soothing drag, and exhaled with a brown grin.

'Apologies, Mr Crake,' he said. 'I'll be good now, for a while at least.'

Crake pushed a lank strip of hair out of his eyes and got to work.

First, the oscilloscope. He took hold of a dial, lowered his head, and listened. Millimetre by millimetre, he turned the dial. When the needles on the gauges began to tremble, he shifted to another dial and began turning that, picking out the harmonics that the door was emitting. Once he had the bottom and top end of the harmonics, he began closing in on individual frequencies. At that point, his devices gave way to old-fashioned intuition.

He turned the dials a fraction at a time, attending to his instincts. Each time he nailed a frequency, the sense of strangeness grew. The fine hairs on the back of his hand stood up. He got the feeling he was being watched, which deepened into outright paranoia as he progressed. A faint whine, like the buzzing of a mosquito, started up in his ears.

The human body reacted to the presence of the unnatural. A daemonist learned to listen to that. Behind him, the others shuffled nervously. They were discomfited, even scared, but unsure why.

He lost himself in concentration. It had been a while since he'd had a puzzle like this to work on. It was good to bury himself in the Art. With no possibility of a proper sanctum aboard the Ketty Jay, he'd been using crude, portable equipment this past year, working in a corner of the cargo hold. It limited him to small, simple effects, like the earcuff communicators, which were comfortably within the range of his skill. But thralling a daemon was one thing; subduing someone else's was a different matter.

Finally he was satisfied that he'd accounted for all the elements of the complex, dissonant chord emanating from the door. The chord was like a cage, binding the daemon there. It was a weak entity, this one. Barely more than a spark of other-worldly life, set to a single task.

He scanned the settings on the oscilloscope, then sat back on his heels. 'Well, if it isn't daemonism, I don't know what it is,' he said. Now he had the readings, silence was no longer necessary.

'What do you mean?' asked Hodd.

'I mean, it's no kind of special technology or anything else. It's straightforward, thralling-a-daemon-to-a-door daemonism.'

'You mean the Manes have daemonists?'

'Just telling you what's here.'

'Can you break it?' Grist asked, eagerly.

'I should think so,' said Crake.

He set to work again, this time on the resonator. He turned the first dial, tuning in to the frequency he wanted. The damping rod hummed as it sent out frequencies of its own, interfering with those that bound the daemon. Crake saw one of the gauges on the oscilloscope drop to zero. One frequency neutralised. He sought out the next. He had the readings from the oscilloscope, so homing in on them was easy. With each frequency he matched, the damping rod hummed louder. He could feel the vibration in his back teeth, his stomach, his bowels. The brainless daemon thralled to the door was fighting to escape back to the aether. It made him want to be sick again.

The last gauge on the oscilloscope dropped. The chord thai chained the daemon was countered. Crake felt his skin prickle, then there was a sensation of lifting in his body, as if there had been a pressure on him these past few minutes which had suddenly been released. The paranoia dissipated. All was normal.

The daemon was gone.

He made a cursory scan for frequencies with his oscilloscope, then reached over and undipped his equipment from the battery.

'It's done,' he said.

'You're a damned marvel, Mr Crake,' said Grist, stepping past eagerly. He reached for the handle of the door, hesitated, then grabbed it. When nothing happened, he chuckled. 'A damned marvel.' He pushed the door open.

'Hey, we should see what's happened to Silo and Jez,' Frey said, but Grist ignored him and went on through, with Crattle and Hodd close on his heels. Frey shrugged and followed them. 'Suppose they can take care of themselves.'

Crake trailed along behind, with one last look at his equipment. He didn't like leaving it lying around like that, but he didn't want to be left here on his own.

Beyond the door was a short corridor ending in a small room. Grist was already at the other end, his lantern illuminating the way. Crake followed his captain in.

It was not what he'd expected. The room was entirely unimpressive. Simple, square, and featureless. In the centre was a thin pedestal, a metre high, and on top of that was a metal sphere about the size of a grapefruit. There were no other exits.

Frey looked around disdainfully. 'I'm not seeing any of this vast wealth you spoke of, Captain Grist.'

Grist was studying the sphere. 'Mr Crake, do you know what this is?'

Crake looked closer. It was made of black metal and appeared smooth. Silver lines ran across its surface in curves and circles. The pattern had no symmetry, and there was never a straight line. It gave him a headache just to look at it.

But there was something more. At this distance, it was impossible not to notice. His finely honed daemonist's senses were quivering with the presence of unseen energies.

'I have no idea what it is,' he said. 'But that little ball is putting out a lot of power. Makes the barrier I just broke through look like a card trick.'

Grist's eyes glittered hungrily. His cigar moved from left to right in his mouth. 'Curious,' he said. 'Real curious.' He reached out to pick it up. 'Perhaps we should—'

He was arrested by the tip of a cutlass, which flicked through the air to press against his throat.

'Perhaps we should pause a moment, Captain Grist,' said Frey, 'so you can tell us exactly why we're here, and what we really came for.'

Grist's gaze slid down the length of the blade to Frey. Frey met him with a defiant stare.

'Now what you're doin' might be thought by some to be an unfriendly action,' Grist said, his voice a gravelly snarl. 'One deservin' of recriminations, if you take my meaning. You'd best not be plannin' to rip me off, Frey.'

'Odd,' said Frey. 'That's just what I thought you intended to do.'

'Gentlemen!' Hodd said. 'Can't we be reasonable?'

'Me and my crew were brought here under false pretences,' said Frey, never taking his eyes off the other captain. 'This man owes me some answers.'

The suspicions had been there from the start, of course. They always were. Frey never trusted anyone outside his own crew, least of all strangers who came bearing promises of great wealth. He'd been burned that way before. Ever since he'd met Grist, things had been adding up and adding up until there was no doubt left in Frey's mind.

He knew the ways of liars and cheats. He'd done enough of both in his time. He didn't always figure them out straightaway but, given time, he'd spot them. And as much as he liked Grist, he knew when he was being taken for a ride.

It was that look in Grist's eyes that did it. That unguarded moment, when he reached for the sphere. Greed. Naked lust. It was like the poor saps he'd seen entranced by Crake's gold tooth. Spellbound.

Grist knew what that sphere was. Frey would have bet his life on it. In fact, he thought, that was probably what he was doing right now.

'What makes you think I ain't honest, Frey?' Grist said. A barely suppressed rage had darkened his face. Frey was used to seeing him full of bullish bonhomie, but now he caught a glimpse of the other side. Grist was capable of terrible, towering anger. Frey would have to be very careful from now on.

'I'll tell you,' said Frey. 'But first, tell your bosun that if his hand gets any closer to that pistol, you'll be smoking your next cigar through a hole in your throat.'

From the corner of his eye, Frey saw Crattle's hand drift away from his revolver.

'Now,' said Frey. 'Let's begin at the beginning. Fifty-five, forty-five. You remember that?'

'Course I do,' Grist said. 'That's the split we agreed.'

'Right. You agreed to cut me in on forty-five per cent of a fortune. Almost half your money. It was your operation; you were just bringing me in. Nobody offers terms like that. I'd have been happy with seventy-thirty.'

'So you've a blade to my throat 'cause I was generous?'

'I'm not done. You could have come here with your own crew and kept it all. The only reason you needed me was because of Crake. A daemonist. Because you thought a daemonist might be able to get through this mysterious door Hodd found. In fact, you offered me forty-five per cent of the profits on the off-chance that my daemonist could help you out. People only offer that kind of money if they aren't intending to pay it. Easy to make promises you don't have to keep.'

'If you say so, Cap'n.'

'You made out you had no idea of the nature of that barrier, or even if there was something worth finding behind it,' said Frey. He leaned closer to Grist, smelling the sweat and smoke of him. 'But you took a pretty big risk and went to a lot of trouble to get my daemonist here. And it just happened to be right up his alley, isn't that right, Crake?'

Crake nodded uncomfortably. 'Straight daemonism. Nothing to it.'

'You said yourself, you're not a gambling man,' Frey said to Grist. 'So I reckon you knew. You knew what this craft was, and you knew what that barrier was. In fact, you knew a lot more than you were saying.'

'I knew,' said Grist. 'Now take that damned sword out of my face. No one's gonna hurt no one, are they, Crattle?'

'No. Cap'n." said the bosun. He relaxed a little, but his bulbous eyes were still wary in the lanternlight.

Frey let the point of his sword drop away from Grist's neck, but he kept it hovering nearby. Just in case.

Grist sucked resentfully on his cigar and glared at Frey. 'I knew she were a A lane craft. Knew it from Hodd's description, first time I met him. I come from the North; we all know about the Manes, more than you southern boys. They're just a spooky story to you. Us, we got to live with the threat of 'em. I even seen a dreadnought once, though it were gone in the fogs before I could decide to chase it or run.'

'You knew that door was protected by daemonism. That's why you needed Crake.'

'Aye,' said Grist. He was calming a little now. His tone had lost some of its darkness. 'Ain't the first time a Mane craft got downed. Back in the early days, when the Navy used to give a shit, they'd run patrols all over the North. They shot one down, got a good look at it. Then its mates all turned up. The Navy got out of there sharpish, but they took some gear with 'em, and they tested what they found.' Smoke seeped out between his teeth. 'Daemonism. Everyone thought the Manes might be daemons, but the Navy pretty much proved it decades ago. Never got round to telling nobody, though. Reckon they didn't want the panic.'

'You know a lot about it, though,' Crake put in. 'Navy reports on a crashed dreadnought? How does a man like you get access to information like that?'

'A man like me?' Grist said, with a dangerous stare. 'You don't know nothin' about me. I got my ways.'

'So you knew it was a Mane craft and you knew you needed a daemonist,' said Frey. 'I suppose you also knew your promise of treasure was worth dogshit, then.'

'Not true,' said Grist. 'Ship like this, it'll be full of stuff. Genuine Mane artefacts? They'll fetch ducats like you won't believe.'

'Not without the seal of the Explorer's Guild,' Frey replied. He looked at Hodd, who cowered a little. 'That's what you said, isn't it, Hodd? Back at the village? You didn't go through channels, did you? You haven't been paying your Guild membership. Nobody actually knows what Mane artefacts look like, so no one's going to believe we didn't just make the stuff ourselves if it doesn't come Guild-approved. We won't get a tenth of the value, selling it through fences.'

'You'll still make your money, and get your split,' said Grist. 'Fifty-five, forty-five. I been dealing with you fair.'

'It's hardly vast bloody wealth, Grist!' Frey cried. He was getting angrier as Grist's fury diminished. He was annoyed that he'd allowed himself to be played for a fool. He turned his wrath on Hodd, who was an easier target than the burly captain. 'What were you thinking?'

Hodd quailed. 'Erm . . . well, I was rather hoping ... I mean, once we came back with all those artefacts, they'd have to listen to reason. They'd have to let me back in!'

Frey, who knew next to nothing about the Explorer's Guild, looked at Crake for confirmation. Crake shook his head. 'They wouldn't,' he said. 'Probably wouldn't even let him in the building. If you're not a paid-up explorer, you're not allowed to make discoveries. Best you can hope for is that someone else who is Guild registered recreates your expedition and steals the credit.'

'Aye,' Grist agreed. 'What a system. Makes me glad to be a smuggler. At least it's honest work.'

'But surely ... I mean . . . it's a crashed Mane dreadnought!' Hodd blustered. 'It's only been a few years I haven't been paying the fees! They'd make an exception!'

Silence. Sceptical stares. A raised eyebrow from Crake, as if to say: Really? Would they?

Hodd turned on Grist, flailing his arms about in a huff. 'Well if you thought that, why did you come at all?'

'That was my next question,' said Frey.

Grist indicated the metal sphere with the nub of his cigar. 'That thing,' he said. 'You could've taken whatever you wanted. But that would've been part of my share. I came here for that.'

'I figured that much out,' said Frey. 'So what is it?'

'It's a power source,' Grist said. 'Like nothin' you've ever seen before.' His eyes drifted to the sphere, and they took on that hungry look again. 'When them Navy boys looked over that dreadnought they shot down, they couldn't find nothin' that looked like a prothane engine, nor any sign of aerium neither. The science fellers reckoned it had to be powered by somethin' else.' He scratched at his bearded cheek. 'Somethin' like this.'

'This is what you came looking for?' Crake asked, peering closer at the sphere.

'Ain't it enough?' Grist asked. 'A power source that don't need aerium or prothane? If you could figure it out, you could power a fleet with these things. You'd never need to refuel. Allsoul's balls, it'd be a revolution! The Fourth Age of Aviation!' He nodded his head towards the sphere. 'You know what this is worth to the right people? There ain't enough numbers in the world.'

'I've got some. Fifty-five, forty-five,' said Frey. 'Like we agreed.'

'Aye,' said Grist, reluctantly. 'Fair's fair. I reckon even fifty-five per cent'll be more money than I can spend in a lifetime.'

'Don't forget my five per cent!' Hodd chimed in hopefully.

'Aye, yes, five per cent for you,' said Grist, waving him away.

Frey lowered his cutlass. 'The deal stands, then.'

'The deal stands,' Grist agreed.

Frey slid the blade back into his belt. The tension in the room eased down a notch.

'Better let me run some tests on that sphere before anyone touches it,' Crake suggested. 'Don't want anyone dead. I'll go get my equipment.'

'I'll come with you,' said Frey.

Frey was at the doorway when Grist spoke. 'One more thing, Cap'n Frey,' he said quietly. 'Draw a blade on me again and it'll be the last thing you do.'

'If I have to draw this blade on you again, Captain Grist, it'll be the last thing you see,' Frey replied.

They retreated to the antechamber, where Crake began gathering up his equipment and moving it down to the room with the sphere.

Frey didn't help. Instead he took his lantern and went and stood in the passageway outside the antechamber. He needed a little air, or as much air as he could get in this place.

Frey leaned against the chill metal wall and listened to his heart slow. Damn, he'd been frightened. Hadn't shown it, but he'd felt it inside. There was something about Grist. He'd caught a glimpse of the man under the grins and the laughter and the backslapping, and it had scared him. Something black and furious and maniacal.

He hadn't forgotten Gimble's fate either, the careless way Grist's bosun abandoned a wounded crewmate to die. A captain's nature was reflected in his crew, Frey reckoned, and that didn't speak well of Grist. Partnering up with him seemed like less and less of a good idea.

But he was committed now. And to be fair, Grist hadn't done anything Frey wouldn't have done himself, if he were in Grist's boots. So what if he'd kept some secrets to himself? A lie by omission was barely a lie at all, really. At least Frey had figured it out in time.

Maybe they could still come out of this rich. But he'd have to keep a close eye on Grist. That was for certain.

You don't know nothin' about me, Grist had said. That, at least, was the truth.

He thought about heading off to search for Silo and Jez, but decided against it in the end. No sense everybody getting lost. If they weren't back by the time Crake was done, they'd all search together. In the meantime, he daydreamed about the kinds of things he could spend all that money on. This time, he promised himself, he wouldn't fritter it away. He'd do something worthwhile. No blowing it on cards and booze and women.

Maybe he'd build an orphanage. After all, he'd have money to burn. Might ease his conscience a little. It'd go some way to making amends for a squandered life, anyway. Besides, a man could do pretty much what he wanted, as long as he could say he'd built an orphanage. You could shoot someone and it'd be okay. What kind of monster would hang a man who'd built an orphanage? A man who'd helped out all those little kiddies?

Presently he heard footsteps, and saw lanterns. Silo and Jez, back from their travels. He had no idea why Jez had wandered off, and he didn't care to ask. Jez looked a little shaken, but they both appeared unharmed.

'Everything alright?' he asked.

'Fine,' said Jez. 'Just went for a look around.'

'Find anything exciting?'

'A few things,' she said. 'Did Crake get through the door?' Frey noted the rapid change of subject, but he was happy to let it pass for now. 'Yeah. It was some daemonism thing. Apparently Manes are daemons. Did you know that?'

Jez went white. 'No . . .' she said. She swallowed. 'No, Cap'n. I didn't.'

'Are you alright? You look like—'

He was cut off by the sharp sound of gunfire.