Tantamount Read online

  Tantamount

  Published by Tyche Books Ltd.

  www.TycheBooks.com

  Copyright © 2013 Thomas J. Radford

  First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2014

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9918369-9-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-00-9

  Cover Art by James F. Beveridge

  Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey

  Interior Layout by Ryah Deines

  Editorial by M. L. D. Curelas

  Author photograph by Devin Hart

  CIP data has been requested

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  This novel is dedicated to my grand-father, Phil Wright, who inspired my love of story telling. He doesn't read fantasy. But he said he might read this one.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Kitchen cutlery burst through the wall, rupturing it and showering splinters across the room on the other side. A knife struck the wall, digging into the wood only inches above where Nel's head rested in her hammock. Her eyes focused in shock on the blade, still shaking with momentum, arms grabbing for the sides of the hammock and fighting the urge to sit bolt upright in bed. She rolled to the side, got tangled in the hammock and hung upside down for a moment before dropping to the cabin floor. Yells streamed through the wooden panels of her cabin walls. Or what was left of them. Swearing aloud herself, Nel got her hands to the floor under her and started to stand up. Another projectile rocketed through the hole in the wall and Nel dropped back to the floor, sprawling ungracefully with her face against dust and grit. She spat it out furiously, her eyes going to the unwelcome addition to her cabin. A fork.

  A fork. The tines were embedded in the wall, the handle still quivering from the force of the impact. A fork. That made sense, the galley was right next to Nel's cabin, sandwiched between her own and the captain's. Nel stared at it, eyes narrowing.

  “Gabbi!” she shouted pulling her legs up and crawling towards the cabin door. The yelling continued unabated; she could make out at least three distinct voices, all of them intertwined and trying to drown out the others, rising higher and higher in an effort to be heard.

  Nel stumbled out onto the deck as the ship pitched under her feet. She had to grab for the frame of the cabin doorway. More yelling and screaming outside, the crew grabbing for lines and purchase as the ship heaved, tossing them from their posts. The deck rolled under Nel's feet, tilting and shuddering. The whole horizontal plane shifted for a moment and Nel thought the ballast in the hold was going to go. She looked up at the stars, the sparkling pinpricks of light in the inky miasma that was deep space and waited for the world to turn topsy-turvy. However, the ballast and its artificial gravity held, keeping them all from being thrown overboard.

  Gravity was a damned convenient thing to have in space. Murder to sail a ship without it.

  Another crash came from the galley. Nel turned and glared that way. It sounded like every pot and pan inside the narrow room was being thrown around, which likely was not too far from the truth. However, if Gabbi's little temper tantrum was rocking the ship the way it felt like it was then Nel was going to put a stop to it. If that meant putting the boot into her cook then so much the better.

  She took a step and the ship swayed again, pitching the other way and ending on a lean. The ballast was definitely shifting now, the ship's gravity plane with it. Nel made a dive for the galley and hooked the entry, pulling herself in and taking her first look at the commotion that had woken her.

  The ship's cook, Gabbi, faced off against Nel's navigator. Gabbi was a small woman, dark and petite, if you were being polite. Rotund and stout if you weren't and chubby if you were being honest. Right now Gabbi's puffed up cheeks were red, but not from any sort of good humour—she was enraged and brandished a soup ladle in one hand to prove it. The ladle was making threatening motions towards her crewmate.

  The crewmate in question was Loveland Quill, an unfortunate name that the navigator was sensitive about. Being a Kelpie, one of the non-human misfits on the Tantamount's roster, the snake-skinned Quill literally wasn't the most likeable crewman aboard. This also wasn't the first time someone had turned violent on him. Right now Gabbi was trying to cram all of the ship's cooking utensils down the navigator's throat. Half a dozen long-handled copper pots circled around Gabbi's head, kept there by the sheer force of her will.

  Bloody thaumatics, Nel thought grimly. Thaumatics was what people like Quill used to propel ships through air and space. Combined with the still shifting ballast in the ship's hull, thaumatics was what made travel between worlds possible. People who were strong enough used it to propel ships. People like Quill. People like Gabbi, who weren't quite that strong, could still move smaller things at a fair decent clip. Things like pots, pans, and the entire cutlery drawer embedded in Nel's wall.

  All the smaller ammunition in the galley had already been expended, cutlery was scattered around the room, here and there, driven into the wall, the tables, even the floor. One of the long table benches floated in front of Quill, studded with sharp, pointy projectiles. While Quill didn't possess the thaumatic nuance to manage dozens of items like Gabbi, he could heft significantly larger and heavier objects, hence his responsibility for launching and landing the ship planet-side and keeping it moving in the void.

  The pots circling Gabbi picked up speed, a dizzying spiral of cooking implements that began to peel off one by one and fly towards Quill. The navigator threw the bench in the way, pots ricocheting off the hardwood furniture.

  “Stand fast!” Nel bellowed at the top of her lungs. Her order startled the two combatants so sufficiently that Gabbi lost her concentration; pots, pans and the odd surviving spoon dropped out of the air. Quill kept his defences up, peering cautiously out around his improvised shield. Across the galley, a bald and wrinkly head popped up from behind the range, framed by two oversized ears. Jack, Korrigan Jack, Gabbi's burly kitchen assistant.

  “Skipper,” Gabbi started to say. There was a crash as Quill released his grip on the bench and it fell to the floorboards. The noise it made was thunderous, but hardly enough to shake the whole ship. Nel's gaze focused on it, feeling sick inside.

  It wasn't Gabbi and Quill that had been making the ship rock.

  “You two . . .” Nel left the threat unfinished, unwilling to waste any more time on them. She turned away from the aerial battlefield that was the galley and began to sprint the length of the ship, heading for the bridge, passing confused crew members on the way. She didn't stop to ask any of them what was going on; she needed to see for herself.

  Nel found the bridge just as confused as the rest of the ship, but at least the captain was
there. Horatio Phelps turned at the arrival of his first officer. His dishwater grey hair was a mess and he was still in his nightclothes, the overlong shirt flapping around his knees. He had been roused as surely as Nel herself and looked none the wiser for it. His baggy and sleep-ridden eyes seized on Nel with a sudden urgency she found deflating. Horatio obviously had no idea what was going on either.

  “What's going on, Nel?” he called out, confirming her suspicions.

  Nel shook her head, manhandling her captain aside to take over his vantage point. From the elevated bridge they could see the length of the ship. They could see for countless leagues in any direction, in fact, but being as they were in the deep void of space between planets there shouldn't have been anything to see at all. Unless they'd hit a freak solar storm. Some stray satellite maybe? No, such an impact would have been tossing the Tantamount like a bathtub toy or ripping a new hole in its hull. What then?

  Debris. She could see it now. Flotsam. The mangled wreckage of what had once been another ship of the void. Like a fireside story, more details gradually emerged, becoming visible in the black misty miasma they sailed through. Shredded sails floated in the airless void, not stirred by so much as a flutter of breeze, broken spars splintered into jagged stakes, a mast broken in two but with some of its rigging still attached. Bits and pieces of the ship's paraphernalia hung off the rigging, pulleys and locks, hawsers and nets, like some mad artist's inertialess sculpture of a spider web.

  “Hells,” Nel whispered. The ship she was looking at wasn't just dead and adrift—it had been smashed, utterly smashed, almost down to the last boards and nail. For the crew who had manned her, the ship might as well have been in one of the nine hells. The void was often considered one of them.

  The Tantamount shuddered again as a large piece of debris nudged it before ricocheting off into the deep, spinning slowly.

  “Why wasn't anyone on watch?” Horatio demanded indignantly. “Where was Quill?”

  “The galley,” Nel said shortly, not caring to explain right now. She had just seen something else in the wreckage. The crew.

  She could make out a dozen or so bodies, scattered amongst the timbers of what had once been their vessel. They hung limp and motionless, drifting with the rest of the debris. They made Nel think of puppets, marionettes with severed strings. Some bodies were snagged in the wastrels, others floated free, grotesquely drifting through the midnight skies that were the void.

  “There could be survivors,” the captain said, not sounding as though he believed it himself.

  “Not likely,” Nel said. “This could have happened days ago. Weeks . . . months even.”

  It could have happened years ago. Nothing decayed in the void; it just drifted, frozen and cold until it encountered something else. Then, depending just what was encountered, the flotsam could burn up, crash, or get dragged into orbit. In some parts of the void, where the lanes were treacherous, there were whole leagues of wrecked ships. They were graveyards built up over centuries of collected disasters, held together as huge, floating mausoleums.

  “Wreckage isn't dispersed enough,” Horatio said, sounding sure of himself now. “This isn't so old.”

  “Still not likely to find anyone.” Nel sought to head off what she saw as a pointless exercise.

  “We're looking,” Horatio said firmly. “Get to it.”

  Nel grimaced. “Aye aye, Captain.”

  She snapped out orders to the milling crew. Quill had surfaced from the galley. It was hard to read his scaly-faced moods but he didn't look particularly chastened to find the ship in such a state during his watch. Nel knew she would be having words with Quill later, about several things.

  For now, she let him take the helm, bringing the ship to a stop clear of most of the debris. Quill was the navigator and an officer for good reason. It was his abilities that propelled the Tantamount through the void and you didn't keep that post without being good at it. It was why Nel and the captain tolerated the confrontational Kelpie. In the same way as he and Gabbi had hurled pots and pans at each other, he now put his abilities to better use steering the ship clear of any further damage.

  Without people like Quill, it was impossible to break free of a planetary surface or to navigate the void. Even if a ship could be launched without navigators to guide them and adjust their course, they would continue on a straight lined course until something caused them to stop, like another planet. And it would be a sudden and fiery stop without a navigator.

  Under Nel's orders the crew rushed to launch the tenders, or “bubbles” as most people referred to them. There was no breathable air in space, gases and solar currents aplenty, but nothing most humanoids could survive in. Space was just that, empty apart from the miasma, a misty black cloud found wherever ships sailed.

  A ship carried its own atmosphere, its own gravity and air inside an envelope surrounding the ship, kept there by the same etheric ballast that kept the crew's feet planted to the deck. Bigger ships resulted in bigger envelopes, but when a situation required someone to leave the ship the normal procedure was to “bubble up” and float out from the ship in what was essentially an oversized fish bowl.

  “Coming out, Skipper?” one of the crewmembers, a man named Cyrus, asked, holding the hatch to one of the bubbles open. The bubble was a glass structure, roughly spherical in shape, like its name suggested, with a flattened base so it could be stored more easily when not in use.

  Nel grimaced, but nodded.

  “Just the two of us, Skipper?” Cyrus asked her. Nel followed his sideways glance to the gangly figure at his side.

  “Violet,” Nel acknowledged the ship's cabin girl.

  “Skipper,” the teenager's voice sounding thin in that awkward adolescent stage of development where nothing was ever in sync. “Do you need any help . . . ?” she left the question hanging hopefully. “Out there?”

  Nel frowned. “You been out in a tender yet?”

  “No, Skipper.” Violet shook a tangled head of fairy locks. “But Piper's been teaching me.”

  “Maybe now's not the time . . . ,” Nel started to say. Cyrus coughed into his hand.

  “Sorry, Skipper,” he apologised, catching her eye. “Got something in my throat.”

  Nel looked at him for a moment longer, her crewman gave her a shrug back, a slight roll of his shoulders.

  He's right, she thought, just like I told the captain. We're not going to find anyone alive out there.

  “All right, Vi,” Nel agreed. “You're coming, but this isn't a game. You do what I tell you, when I tell you.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper,” Violet responded with an enthusiastic salute. The girl was beaming, tail practically wagging. Nel sighed at the sight. Damned misfits, the whole crew.

  “Get in.” The skipper shook her head at Violet, pointing to the bubble. Then to Cyrus: “Go and find Gabbi, see if she needs any help. And tell Jack I'm going to be bringing him some patients.”

  “Aye, Skipper.” Cyrus nodded as Violet clambered into the bubble. “As you say.”

  “As I say,” Violet heard the skipper mutter as she climbed into the bubble herself. The flattened base gave them both something to stand on as they swung the hatch shut behind them. It made a squelching sound as it sealed in place. At a wave from Cyrus, the ship's crane then hoisted them up, just enough to clear the ship's railing before it swung them out into the void.

  Cyrus winked at Violet before he gave the signal; she could feel herself grinning back. It would be her first real time out in a tender, a bubble. Cyrus dropped his arm and the crane released them.

  Violet felt her stomach drop as they fell out of the Tantamount's envelope, the deck of the Tantamount disappearing from sight. In a moment it was replaced by the utter emptiness of space as weightlessness caught them. It went on forever and ever, pure black void and the duller black mist broken by distant stars. The only sound was the faint hiss from the hose piping air into the bubble. That and a wire-wrapped cable were the only things linking
Violet and the skipper to the ship. Away from the Tantamount's gravity-well the weightlessness of the void reasserted itself; both of them started to float freely within the bubble. Fortunately the controls inside were sturdy and robust, the turn-wheels and levers doubled as handholds during missions away from the ship, though they had to brace themselves between the controls and the bubble to operate both.

  Violet worked the controls for the exterior valves that controlled their movement at the skipper's instructions. It was hard work. Without a sense of weight Violet had to brace herself against the interior of the bubble to turn a wheel or pull a lever. She concentrated hard, trying to remember everything Piper had told her about controlling the tender.

  The valves she worked released tightly controlled bursts of air from the bubble that nudged them in the right direction. The skipper watched carefully as Violet worked. Air was precious and to be used sparingly in space. The bubble was a finicky and cumbersome contraption. Violet found it difficult to steer and now that they were out here amongst this mess of debris she thought it worryingly fragile. The walls were made from thick, toughened glass but they were still glass. Gradually though, Violet worked them through the field, moving in close enough to the crew of the shattered ship.

  The crew. The dead, frozen bodies floated listlessly around them.

  “What do you think happened here, Skipper?” Violet asked. Her voice sounded shaky even to her and the skipper glanced over. Violet kept her eyes away from the bodies, focusing on the remains of the other ship and the working of the tender instead.

  “Something ploughed right through their ship,” the skipper said, eyeing the bodies. One drifted in perfect slow motion past the bubble. There was a slight thump as it collided with the curved glass wall. Violet flinched, the involuntary motion causing her to drift back to the other side of the bubble. The impact of the body stuck the deceased sailor to the bubble for a moment, before their momentum shoved it off and sent the dead man spinning slowly in another direction. It was a macabre sight but Violet found herself focusing on the details. Not the cloudy, crystallised eyes or the curious hook of stiff fingers, but material details, the cut and colour of the uniforms all the dead wore. The cloth was a deep blue, almost black in colour, with white trim.