China Mieville - Railsea

He enticed Daybe in with a strip of biltong. “You better not hurt my bat,” he said.

“It ain’t your bat,” Shikasta said. “You’re its boy.” She snapped the thing on Daybe’s right leg. Immediately it chirruped in rage & shot into the air, peeing on her arm as it went, to her yelled disgust.

Daybe zipped in complicated jackknifes, loop-the-loops, corkscrews, twisting its body, trying to dislodge the thing. Shikasta wiped bat wee off her hand. “Right,” she said.

Her box whistled & cooed. It clicked in complicated staccato time with Daybe’s ill-tempered aerobatics. The blue-lit screen glowed, an electric fog in which appeared a dot that echoed Daybe’s aerial motions. The bat veered into the distance, the noise from the machine grew quieter: closer, louder.

“Is that …?” said Sham.

“Yes it is,” said Shikasta. “It’s a tracker. It knows where the signal thing is.”

“How does it work? How far?”

“It’s salvage, ain’t it?” Shikasta said. “No one knows.”

They all three ducked as Daybe came at them. The receiver squealed, then moaned as the bat flapped away.

“Where did you—or your trainmate—get it?” said Sham.

“Manihiki. Where all the best salvage is. There’s a new place in the Scabbling Street Market .” She said that exotic name carefully, clearly enjoying it, like a spell. “These things are really useful. Like, if someone steals something & you’ve got one of these in it, you might be able to follow. So they ain’t cheap.”

“Or if there’s something you’re spending your life chasing …” said Sham slowly. Something that gets close enough to you, sometimes, for you to see. But that keeps slipping away again.

“You ain’t seen one before, have you?” Shikasta smiled. “I thought you’d like it.”

If you spent your life like that, chasing some taunting quarry, what wouldn’t you do for one of these? Sham thought. You’d go out of your way, wouldn’t you, to get one , he thought.

You’d go to Manihiki to buy one .

CAPTAIN NAPHI?”

If she was surprised to see Sham, she showed no sign of it. It was plausible, he supposed, that he might have simply wandered into her favourite café. That he had not tracked down several of his comrades from the Medes & asked them where they thought he might find her.

She was sitting at a corner table, with a journal in front of her & a pen in her hand. She did not invite him to sit nor shoo him away. She merely stared at him, long enough that his already great nervousness grew greater.

“Soorap,” she said. “Doctor’s aid.”

She sat back & placed her hands, with a soft thump & a hard clack, on the table in front of her.

“I sincerely hope, Soorap,” she said, “that you are not here to discuss—”

“No!” he stammered. “No. Not at all. Actually, there was sort of something I sort of wanted to sort of show you.” Daybe scrabbled under his shirt. He pulled the animal out.

“Your beast I’ve seen,” said the captain. Sham held out Daybe’s leg, on which the tiny mechanism still protruded like a tick.

After her demonstration, Shikasta had been appalled at her inability to entice Daybe back to her, to retrieve the transmitter. She had waved, & it, of course, ignored her. “I ain’t going to get that thing back!” she had shouted. & Sham had had an idea.

He beckoned the bat for her, but when it got within a few yards, he surreptitiously altered his come-here motion to a get-away one, so, wary, Daybe would spiral off up again. Sham gave Shikasta his best shrug & apologetic eyebrows. “It don’t want to come,” he said.

“You better hope,” she said finally, all the unexpected friendliness of the last couple of days quite gone, “that no one clocks that there’s one fewer of these things. I’ll be in so much trouble!” Sham nodded humbly, as if it was his fault she had stolen it. “When your flying rat comes back, you take that thing off & get it back to me, alright?”

That evening, out of her ear- & eyeshot, he had whistled Daybe into his arms. Examined the clip on its leg. Whispering an apology, he had twisted it tighter. Now it would take a metal cutter to get it off. & here he was now, nervously pointing out a transceiver, or receptor, or receiver, or transceptor, or whatever the thing was called, while Daybe fiddled.

“One of my mates found this, Captain,” he said. “She showed me how you work it. There’s a, there’s this box like a, um, & it knows where this thing is.” Naphi’s face gave away nothing. On Sham plunged. Talk-tunnelled through the captain’s dirt-cold silence like a conversation-mole.

“I thought maybe it might interest you.” He gave a rambling & rattling description of what that odd thing did. “After what I heard—I was in the pub, Captain. It’s been an honour serving with you & I was hoping maybe you might let me do it again.” Let her think he was a brownnoser, & ambitious. Fine. “& I thought this might be of, like of help, you know.”

The captain tugged at the bat’s leg, hard enough to make Daybe squeak & Sham wince. Naphi looked intent. She was breathing a little faster than a moment ago.

“Did your friend tell you,” Naphi said, “where such items might be obtained?”

“She did, Captain,” Sham said. “Scabbling Street Market, it’s called. It’s on …” He hesitated, but where else did one get the cuttingest-edge salvage? “On Manihiki.”

Oh, she looked up at him then. “Manihiki,” she said. The most gentle & sardonic ghost of a smile haunted her lips for a few seconds. “Out of the goodness of your heart, you bring me this.” Still her mouth was haunted. It twitched. “How enterprising. How enterprising you are.

“This might be of use, true, Soorap,” she said at last. He swallowed. “It’s a possibility,” she said, “to be pursued.” She stared into space. Sham could almost see the train of her mind grinding over plan-rails.

“So,” he said carefully, “I just thought you might want to know there are those things on Manihiki. & if you’re travelling again, you know …”

“How did you find me, Sham ap Soorap?”

“I just heard you might be here,” he said. Was she having a tryst? he thought. He had barely stopped to wonder how badly he was intruding. “Someone said you were—”

“That I was meeting someone?” she said, & with that perfect timing, a person behind Sham said Captain Naphi’s name.

He turned, & it was not the secret lover he had momentarily imagined. It was Unkus Stone.

AFTER THE SHOUTS OF GREETING, SHAM’S HAND still on the older man’s back, he realised Stone was limping, badly. That he supported himself on sticks.

“How did you even get here?” Sham said.

“Got better,” Stone said. He smiled, but it wasn’t what he wanted it to be. “Thumbed a ride on a Streggeye-bound carrier. A mail train. Legs gammy or not there are things a trainsman like me can do.”

“Hello, Stone,” Naphi said.

“Captain Naphi.”

The silence became excruciating.

“Should I go, Captain?” Sham said. But I’ve only just got started , he thought. I had you all interested in my salvage! We was getting somewhere! Next thing we’d have been going somewhere!

“What are you here to tell me, Stone?” said the captain.

“Rumours,” Stone said. He met Sham’s eyes & glanced at the doorway, inclined his head.

Sham got the message. Despondently he turned & walked towards the door. He tried to strategise as he went. But there was a scraping sound, & the captain said his name. She had pulled another chair into place.