Chasing the Dragon (12 page)

A hundred metres out she turned back, equipped a shell into her
right arm launcher, and watched the little missile streak a trail of
smoker's breath to the dim circle of the door before it exploded in
white-hot fire and chunks of rock. A plume of filthy smoke rolled up
and the black-stained stone went crashing down in white foam into the
high tide.

Lila turned and made for Malachi's signal. She felt colder and emptier than she had ever been.

The cause for concern became obvious before she even arrived. Malachi
was with some other agents on the beaches a few miles up the coast,
where the city gave way to empty land owned by the wealthiest individuals. Here lush forests covered the rolling hills and dips and islets,
giving way occasionally to designed glades or constructed grottoes,
waterfalls and other features that looked so natural but were anything
but. Even the beaches had been groomed, the sand whiter and finer, the
rock pools more interesting, the docks perfect, their chromed mooring
posts gleaming in the weak sunlight.

The tide was just starting to go out. At a point midway along this
Gold Coast by the high-water mark the dark, whalelike body of a ship had been beached. The shape was unmistakable; it was a galleon with
three masts and a narrow, square tucked stern in which leaded
coloured glass still glowed. The masts were ruins, however, barely
stumps, and as she flew closer Lila identified the twenty-two rotted
and rusted guns at her portholes. She was waterlogged, as if she'd
crawled up from the bottom of the ocean, and on her sides her paintwork was worn away almost to nothing, although on the stern Lila
could just make out the picture of a blue ground and a golden deer.

She landed twenty metres from the fluttering cordon ribbonshardly needed since the beach was private property-and walked
towards the cluster of agents standing on the hull's leeward side. The
sea was soft and quiet, the light brilliant on the waves, so much so that
it was difficult to make out the faint light the ship itself emitted. This
was noticeable to human eyes in dark shadow, as a faint gleaming on
the edges of things.

Lila gave the whole object a wide berth and joined Malachi at the
edge of the group. Among them the stocky figure of Bentley stood
impassively, her face turned towards the sea.

They knew, Lila thought to herself. Of course the machines all
knew everything that happened to their number. For a split second she
almost found herself moving forward to speak but then glanced at
Malachi and saw his amber eyes were frowning.

"There's another one, several more ... farther down." He gestured
at the coastline.

Lila watched with him as one of the human agents went forwards
under orders and poked the vessel with a stick. They all heard the tap.

"Pretty damn solid for a ghost," she said.

"You know what it is?" Malachi asked.

"The Golden Hind," Lila replied. "But it's a wreck. Why?"

Malachi folded his arms. He was wearing a camel coat that was too
heavy for the day but he still looked cold. "Don't know."

The stick-poker came back looking grey and tense. "Feels funny,"

he said, putting the rest of the team between him and the ship. Lila
looked back at the house this plot belonged to. It was snugged in
halfway up a steep hill, about a hundred metres from the water,
standing on long poles though it looked like most of it was cut into
the hill. Expansive, expensive, she thought, and caught the flash of
sunlight off a pair of high-power binoculars looking back at her.

A man Lila didn't know came up to them and asked Malachi to
take a better look. "We need your kind of vision here," he said, nodded
to Lila as if she were just another colleague, and then looked back at
Malachi, his expression taut with discomfort.

"Come with me," Mal said, so fast Lila almost didn't catch the
words. If she hadn't known better she'd have thought he was afraid.

"'Kay." She nodded, glad to be useful or, indeed, glad to be anything positive this morning for however long it could last.

He led the way over the wet sand to the point where the stick man
had stood. The hull listed over them here, but was broken down enough
that the lower decks were exposed. Seeing it from there made it quite
clear the thing was a ruin. Water dripped from it, and Lila copied Mal's
studious avoidance of the fall. It was black and difficult to make out any
details inside. The witchlight that shone from its vertices was so weak
that the contrast with the sun rendered it useless. The whole thing gave
off a chill that made the air around it noticeably colder-almost three
degrees colder, Lila noted-and there was a smell like metal but no
smell of anything else. She put her hand out and touched her fingertips
to its hull. The cold there was actually blistering, but she was able to
stand it long enough to get plenty of information.

"That's not wood."

"Yeah, no shit," Mal whispered, keeping his words from the others.

Lila looked at the stern of the ship, where a large portion of it was
still in contact with the water. For the first time she noticed the tiny
alteration in sound where tiny pieces of ice were washing in the lukewarm waves. White ice formed jutting spars just above the water line. Where the sun shone on the bulk of the wreck however, water was running freely.

"How could a ghost stay this solid here?" It didn't make sense to
her. She'd seen ghosts before, but not like this one. They had forms
made of light and air; sometimes they could use small particulatessand, dust, snow-and small items to make their forms, but this was
unheard-of. "I mean, it isn't wood, but it looks and feels like it. It has
the same molecular structures, hydrocarbons, water, mineral traces. It's
got the same properties as something you'd cut from a sizeable tree.
It's even been splintered by cannon shot. The light is in the midrange
for ghostlights." She would have gone on, but analysis of ghost forms
was an incomplete, almost un-begun science.

"It's part of the Fleet," Malachi murmured. His eyes searched and
searched it relentlessly. "But the Fleet was never wrecked. All the vessels were whole. I don't understand...."

"What's the Fleet?" she asked.

"Trouble," he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat
and slowly backing up, all the while keeping an eye on the ship.

"Are you expecting someone to come out of it?"

His eyes flashed as he turned abruptly to look at her. "No. No."

"So, you're done?"

"Hardly."

"Someone has to go into it."

"Yes."

"Do a proper survey. See the insides."

"Yes." He nodded vigorously.

"We can wait until noon. Get some scaffolding. If you think it'll
last."

"Good idea." He backed off from it so fast he was giving orders to
the support crew at the fence line before she had time to make another
suggestion.

She was pleased, kind of. It seemed that in a crisis they were bud dies again. At least he was talking to her. That was good, she felt, but
she didn't hope for a lot more, though she needed it. Above her the
ship creaked and groaned as the water left more and more of it on the
beach. Lila scanned it and reanalysed the information her fingers had
gathered.

It was the oddest thing. There was no scientific framework that
dealt with this, to her knowledge. Ghosts spawned in the Void, by
methods that were imperfectly understood. The relation of the Void to
the worlds wasn't understood. Ghosts had always previously appeared
and vanished on their own schedules, even if they could be logically
attached to places, and some tests had said they were clearly composed
of aether. Here, in this ship, the aether had started to resemble matter.
It was doing a fake job, like any glamour, but it was a remarkably good
fake in the making. It was almost ... real.

Nobody in Otopia had ever seen anything like it before.

Lila's mind skipped back uneasily to the day years ago when she
had followed Zal into the woods to watch him tripping out in an elemental frenzy. Aside from the sheer weirdness of witnessing that odd
event, there'd been a ghost present. It was a large forest spirit of the
kind that experts liked to refer to as Archetypal, as if that helped. In
the form of a stag it had crept up on the flipped-out Zal and put its
nose against his hand. When ghosts touched living beings bad things
happened. For elves, their entire form was susceptible to being consumed, and Zal had lost some of his hand. Now the fundamental
bizarreness of it struck home. The outline of his hand had remained,
but it was like it was glass and the contents had been vacuumed out.
But an elf was blood and bones, as well as aether. What had happened
there? She could kick herself for not paying more attention.

And then there was her own close encounter with a thing like that.
It was before she was this cyborg Lila. Far away in Alfheim, when she
was just an overexcited assistant to a diplomat, thinking she was getting into the daring world of espionage.... Anyway, in the forests there she'd got caught by the infinitely more experienced and cunning
elf secret service. They'd tied her and her "fixer," Vincent, and left
them in the dark at the edge of their camp, apparently unguarded,
though she was too much involved with the conviction she was about
to die to bother trying an escape. And then, at some point in her terrified reverie she'd felt the bitter chill and the unmistakable icy touch
of a ghost approach. There was movement in the pitch darkness,
bushes moving, twigs snapping, and some sharp cries in incomprehensible Elvish that had let her know she'd had a guard all right, and now
it was running off in terror. An eldritch flicker illumined the ground
for a second or two. Screams then and Vincent shoving at her, getting
to his feet, starting to run blind into the woods. She was too slow. She
hit a tree. She fell over. There was the singing note of an arrow over
her head, a thump, an outbreath and she knew Vincent was dead. It
was her first day in Alfheim. Her first day at being a spy.

Brushing aside the memories that wanted to swamp her anew with
their horror she realised that their guard had been the one attacked by
the ghost, if attack was the right word. She knew nothing else about
it. Zal had recovered quite easily from his incident and she'd never
asked any details. Now the only people she could interview about her
own experience were the remaining members of the Elf spy band, and
she had no idea who they were, but surely someone in Alfheim knew
something about ghosts? Sarasilien, she thought ... and then remembered he was gone. She was in his place. Time she checked out what
he'd left her more closely.

But first ...

"Hey." She followed Malachi to the far edge of the cordon, where
he was making a call back to the office. "What's got you freaking out?"
Fey didn't concern themselves overly with ghosts, and as far as she
knew faery didn't really experience many of them.

He finished talking and closed the call. "That was Greer. We're to
see the rest and head back. He's gonna let the juniors keep an eye on things." For once he met her gaze and his lips made an unhappy shape
as he thought over what he was about to say. His seriousness was almost
enough to make her smile. "The last time I saw the Fleet I was standing
on the deck of a Hunter ship out in the Void. They ran from it. And I
keep hearing ..." He paused, and his discomfort became acute on his
face. "The damn thing haunts me. I don't know why. Ever since I was
out there. It's got something to do with the three sisters." He made a
warding sign as he mentioned the Fates "The middle sister was in the
admiral's boat with Zal. She's the one fished him out of the Void before
he was killed, just like she's the one using him as a hanky now."

"I don't get what your problem is with her ... them ... ," Lila
said. "They're no different to other faeries."

"Yes they are!" Malachi made pressing motions with both hands,
telling her to keep it down. "We shouldn't even talk about them. Not
even without names. They don't like it. And what they don't like has
a way of ending up like Zal for eternity, or worse. You think you got
remade by the stupid humans and their will to know about the
machines. Well, that's nothing compared to what they'll do to anything they take a fancy to change."

"Okay, if you say so," she hissed in reply, feeling faintly stupid at
having a whispered chat like schoolkids. "But it would help if you
could find a way of sharing what you know about them with me."

The black faery narrowed his orange eyes and peered at her. "Still
fixated on getting him back?"

"I know you don't want to be involved, don't worry." A chill fled
over her.

"Bit late for that," he said, but without rancor. He took a deep
breath and squared his shoulders.

She glanced back at the ship. "Do you really think this is personal?
About you, I mean?"

"No," he said. "Not this manifestation. Doesn't mean they forgot
me, though." He smiled weakly and shrugged. "There's only one place I'll discuss this, and it ain't in Otopia or any of the places we usually
hang out, I can tell you." He looked down, deep in thought, and
scuffed the sand with the sole of his pristine leather shoe. "Probably
time you got taken up-to-date with what's around here anyway. It'll
make a nice day out. Get a lot of things done. Yeah. Okay."