CORDELIA PA
The blast took out the villa’s front door and a fair bit of the wall to either side. As we picked our way in through the rubble, trying to avoid brushing against the glowing slag that had once been the doorframe, Lomax insisted on going first. I followed and Spider, cradling the smoking Hooper gun, brought up the rear.
Stepping over the threshold, I fanned away smoke and dust. My boots crunched on hot stone fragments. The room we were in was large and ran the length of the villa. Shelves lined the walls. Lewis stood at the bottom of a flight of wooden stairs dressed in a towelling robe, flip-flops and a pair of bright yellow Bermuda shorts. I recognised him instantly. He had a small bluestone pendant around his neck. Milk dripped from a half-forgotten bowl of cereal dangling from one hand. His mouth hung open. Stepping forward, Lomax levelled her pistol at his face.
“Anybody else here?”
Lewis looked down his nose at her. He had Nick’s build, but not his looks. Lewis’s eyes and face were soft at the edges, his cheeks ruddy, features smudged by drink and lack of exercise. Although his stance and dishevelment suggested a perpetually aggrieved adolescent, I guessed he was actually somewhere in his early thirties.
“Lomax?” Lewis glared at the smoking ruin of his door. “What the fuck?”
“Nice new place you have here. Now, sit down.”
“I will not.” Lewis drew himself up and used his free hand to pull his robe closed at the neck. “Where’s my father?”
“Nick’s gone.” Lomax lowered her weapon. “Missing in action. And that means I don’t have to take any more of your crap.”
The young man glowered. “You have my ship,” he said. “That means you work for me.”
“It’s not your ship.” Lomax’s smile was as thin and cold as a scalpel. “Nick didn’t leave it to you. We have a new captain now.”
Lewis looked at me. If I hadn’t been so angry, and if I hadn’t had Nick’s arrogance bolstering me from within, I would have shrunk from the contempt in his eyes.
“It’s what Nick wanted,” Lomax said.
“Bullshit.”
I stepped forward. “I’m your sister,” I said, then corrected myself. “Well, half-sister at any rate.”
Lewis looked me up and down, lip curled in disgust. “You?”
“Yes, me.”
“And you’ve come here to gloat, I suppose?”
I gave a small shake of the head. “No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I’m looking for a key.” I peered at the shelves lining the room, where various objects and artefacts lay on display. Some were dead or dormant, but the rest sang, their combined voices filling the recesses of my mind like a choir. My fingers tingled. The air in the room smelled like the insides of old, rusty tin cans that had been left out in the sun. Leaving Lewis where he stood, I walked slowly around the room, inspecting each object I passed. Some were small and lumpy, like parts taken from an old engine; others were thin and impossibly fragile, like icicles or tiny spires made from the thinnest membranes of spun glass. All were real and genuine. Small wonder the villa had barred windows: the shelves housed a small fortune’s worth of antiquities—certainly enough, if sold, to keep Lewis in flip-flops and cereal for the rest of his life.
I brushed my fingertips across the objects as I passed, hearing each raise its pitch in response to my touch.
“Get away from those,” Lewis said. “They’re not yours.”
I didn’t reply. I had two sets of memories competing for my attention—the first from my time as a scavenger, uncovering and salvaging artefacts similar to these; the second from my father, who had hauled containers full of these objects out to markets as far-flung as Earth and the Noble Stars, and who had picked out some of the best as gifts to mollify an estranged son.
“That’s a hell of a lot of relics,” Lomax said. “Nick sacrificed a lot to bring you those.”
The young man sneered. “Sacrificed what?”
“We could have made a ton of money selling them. They would have paid for a lot of fuel.”
Lewis plunked the cereal bowl down on one of the wooden steps. “Yeah, well it’s not them I want; it’s the ship. It should be mine.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “How do you figure that?”
“Because he owes it to me. It’s mine by right, and I want it.”
I stopped touching the artefacts and turned to face him. My fingers tingled. “I’m sorry, but we only came here for the key. It’s important, and I was hoping you could help us.”
“Then why’d you melt a hole through the front of my house?”
“Because she could,” Lomax snapped. “And besides, you know what Spider’s like.”
Unexpectedly, Lewis’s thin lips tightened in a half-smile. “Yes,” he said. “I know exactly what Spider’s like. Don’t I, Spider?”
Keeping his feet where they were, Spider swivelled his hips, bringing the Hooper gun’s maw level with Lomax’s midriff.
“Yes, sir, I reckon you do.”
Lomax stepped forward with her fists clenched.
“You cheap little bastard.”
Holding the Hooper gun, Spider shrugged. “What can I say? Dude knows about money. I’d rather have him as captain.”
“What about Nick?”
“Nick’s gone, Lomax. It don’t matter what he wanted now, he’s never coming back.”
With a twitch of the gun barrel, he motioned her into the centre of the room. Watching from beside the shelves, I swallowed. I could feel my pulse throbbing in my neck, just below my ear. My hands twitched, feeling helpless. Across the room, Lewis watched me with narrowed eyes. He seemed to be waiting to see what I’d do.
“I thought we were a team,” Lomax said.
Spider shook his head. “You and Nick never treated me as part of a team. You had each other. I was just someone to fetch and carry things, and help Gant prep the engines when we needed to fly outta somewhere fast.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah, it is. You and I, we never got along, not really.”
“And so you’re selling me out?”
Spider’s gold teeth flashed. He held the gun with the stock braced against his hip. “Kinda looks that way, don’t it?”
Still standing by the stairs, Lewis clapped. “The ship’s mine,” he said with a smile. He closed and tied his robe. “I’m the firstborn, it’s my birthright, and there’s not a thing you,” he glowered at me, “or anyone else, can do about it.”
Lomax drew herself upright. “Your father—”
“I don’t give a shit about my father. The man was a bastard and I’m glad he’s dead.”
“Nick was a good man. You shouldn’t—”
“He was a murderer. He killed my mother.”
Lomax blinked. “Excuse me?”
Lewis’s smile was one of bitter triumph. “He didn’t tell you that, did he? Well, I guess you weren’t as close to him as you thought.” He folded his arms across his chest. “When he left, she couldn’t handle it. She begged him to stay, but he loved the ship more than he loved us. And when she finally realised that, she took an overdose.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No, I don’t suppose you did.” Lewis turned to Spider. “I’m bored of this.” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his robe. “Kill her.”
“What?” I pushed myself away from the shelves. “Wait!”
Lomax waved me away. “Stay back, idiot.”
The skin went taut across the knuckles of Spider’s index finger. The gun bucked in his hands. Lightning cracked and sizzled, and I had to shade my eyes. When I could see again, Lomax lay dead, the whole left side of her body scoured to blackened meat and charred bone.
Lewis had the guilty look of a teenager who’d overstepped his bounds.
“Come on,” he said to Spider. “We’d better leave.”
Feet astride the carbonised remains of his former crewmate, Spider held the smoking Hooper gun in one hand. The room smelled like the aftermath of a barbeque. He nudged his head in my direction.
“What about her?”
Lewis wouldn’t meet my eye. “Leave her, she’s nobody.”
“She’s a witness.”
Lewis was at the door now. I could see he wanted to get away from the body on the floor, the stink in the air. “What does it matter? As soon as we’re on the ship, we’re gone. I’m never coming back here. There’s no reason to kill her.”
“No reason to keep her alive, neither.”
Lewis glanced back. His eyes met mine and I felt a shiver of recognition. Even though they looked nothing alike, the way the guilt wrote itself into the creases around his eyes, there could be no doubt he was Nick’s son.
“Fine,” he said, “whatever.”
I saw Spider’s gold teeth flash in an exultant smirk. The gun dropped towards me, the unblinking cavern of its smoking barrel as dark and pitiless as the hollow eye socket of Death. In the back of my head, Nick’s voice raged, telling me to run, but there was nowhere to go. Instead, I closed my eyes. The whispering song of the artefacts rose to a thunderous crescendo. My fingers flared to white-hot agony. I threw my hands forward to block the blast from Spider’s gun—and felt the objects in the room move with me. Alien metal swished and sang through the air.
And Spider died.
* * *
Turning its back on Cold Chapel’s rocky landscape, the Gigolo Aunt stretched its filigree wings and heaved itself back into the winds of the hypervoid.
Sitting beside Gant on the ship’s bridge, the planes of my face lit by the instruments, I monitored the consoles using piloting skills inherited along with my father’s memories. Having timed the transition to perfection, I had caught the higher dimensional winds at their height—a tricky manoeuvre Lomax would have been pleased to achieve. Even Gant was impressed. With deft taps at the screen, I angled the wings to catch the full benefit of the surge and felt a kick as the thin mists caught the outspread lace and bore the old ship ever faster forward.
Poor Lomax.
For an instant, standing over the older woman’s burned corpse, I had considered killing Lewis for ordering her death. But what would that have achieved? There were already too many bodies on the floor. I’d killed Spider in self-defence, with a reflex and ability I hadn’t fully realised I possessed. Killing Lewis in cold blood, no matter the justification, would have been murder. It was unnecessary and, more to the point, exactly the sort of thing I imagined he might have done had our positions been reversed.
Knowing I was better than him was revenge enough.
My fingertips brushed the blue pendant that now hung around my neck next to my mother’s chain. I’d taken it from him before I left. On first glance, it looked to be a small, flat stone about the size of my big toe, with a hole drilled through one end and a simple pattern—one upright scratch crossed by two shorter horizontal lines—etched onto its surface. Closer inspection revealed it to be a chunk of Plate material.
The key.
Lewis hadn’t had the slightest inkling of what it was he wore. Nick had told him it was valuable, and so he’d kept it. When I demanded he hand it over, he did so without hesitation or complaint. Of course, his decision had been eased by the two dozen spears of razor-sharp alien metal quivering in the air centimetres from his eyeballs, their tips glistening with Spider’s blood.
“Take it,” he said.
“Thank you.” My fingers flared like windblown embers. The music of the Plates sang in my veins. I curled the pendant’s leather strap in the palm of my hand and walked out through the ruined wall at the front of the house, leaving Lewis, still standing in his robe, staring after me and the cloud of relics that followed me into the wind.
Now, riding the void, the part of me that had been Nick smiled at the hull’s familiar creaks and groans. I felt a surge of pride. The Gigolo Aunt was my home now. I belonged here, on the bridge, surrounded by higher dimensional mists, and the red and green lights of the displays. With this ship, I could go anywhere. I could travel to the Noble Stars and back; maybe even as far as the Glitter Rim. It was my ticket to a bigger life—the greatest gift a father could bestow.
Unfortunately, as we both knew, it came with a price.
In the recesses of my awareness, I could feel the blade-like artefacts from Lewis’s house skulking in the hold like a pack of impatient attack dogs. They sensed the growing threat of the Fleet of Knives, and jostled against each other, scraping metal and stone in their anticipation of the fight to come.
Cold against my breastbone, the blue pendant blazed in my mind’s eye like a tiny, hard star, its yearning song urging me onwards, homewards.
Finally, I understood my purpose. I had been created to unlock the Plates. But to what end, I could still only speculate. In order to find the answer to that, I was going to have to talk to the old woman lying in the ship’s sick bay.