Thousandth Night by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

aboard his ship?”
    But
Purslane did not answer me. She was looking beyond me, to the door where we had
entered. Her mouth formed a silent exclamation of horror and surprise.
    “Stop,
please,” said a voice.
    I
looked around, all my fears confirmed. But I recognised neither the voice nor
the person who had spoken.
    It
was a man, baseline human in morphology. Nothing about his face marked him as
Gentian Line. His rounded skull lacked Abigail’s prominent cheekbones, and his
eyes were pure matched blue of a deep shade, piercing even in the subdued light
of the command deck.
    “Who
are you?” I asked. “You’re not one of us, and you don’t look like one of the
guests.”
    “He
isn’t,” Purslane said.
    “Step
away from the console, please,” the man said. His voice was soft, unhurried.
The device he held in his fist was all the encouragement we needed. It was a
weapon: something unspeakably ancient and nasty. Its barrel glittered with
inlaid treasure. His gloved finger caressed the delicate little trigger. Above
the grip, defined by swirls of ruby, was the ammonite spiral of a miniature
cyclotron. The weapon was a particle gun.
    Its
beam would slice through us as cleanly as it sliced through the hull of
Burdock’s ship.
    “I
will use this,” the man said, “so please do as I say. Move to the middle of the
room, away from any instruments.”
    Purslane
and I did as he said, joining each other side by side. I looked at the man,
trying to fit him into the Burdock puzzle. By baseline standards his
physiological age was mature. His face was lined, especially around the eyes,
with flecks of grey in his hair and beard. Something about the way he deported
himself led me to believe that he was just as old as he looked. He wore a
costume of stiff, skin-tight fabric in a shade of fawn, interrupted here and
there by metal plugs and sockets. A curious metal ring encircled his neck.
    “We
don’t know who you are,” I said. “But we haven’t come to do you any harm.”
    “Interfering
with this ship doesn’t count as doing harm?” He spoke the Gentian tongue with
scholarly precision, as if he had learned it for this occasion.
    “We
were just after information,” Purslane said.
    “Were
you, now? What kind?”
    Purslane
flashed me a sidelong glance. “We may as well tell the truth, Campion,” she
said quietly. “We won’t have very much to lose.”
    “We
wanted to know where this ship had been,” I said, knowing she was right but not
liking it either.
    The
man jabbed the barrel of the particle gun in my direction. “Why? Why would you
care?”
    “We
care very much. Burdock—the rightful owner of this ship— seems not to have told
the truth about what he was up to since the last reunion.”
    “That’s
Burdock’s business, not yours.”
    “Do
you know Burdock?” I asked, pushing my luck.
    “I
know him very well,” the man told me. “Better than you, I reckon.”
    “I
doubt it. He’s one of us. He’s Gentian flesh.”
    “That’s
nothing to be proud of,” the man said. “Not where I come from. If Abigail
Gentian was here now, I’d put a hole in her you could piss through.”
    The
dead calm with which he made this statement erased any doubt that he meant
exactly what he said. I felt an existential chill. The man would have gladly
erased not just Abigail but her entire line.
    It
was a strange thing to feel despised.
    “Who
are you?” Purslane asked. “And how do you know Burdock?”
    “I’m
Grisha,” the man said. “I’m a survivor.”
    “A
survivor of what?” I asked. “And how did you come to be aboard Burdock’s ship?”
    The
man looked at me, little in the way of expression troubling his rounded face.
Then by some hidden process he seemed to arrive at a decision.
    “Wait
here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
    He
let go of the particle gun. Instead of dropping to the floor the weapon simply
hung exactly where he had left it, with its barrel still aimed in our