of them directly in front of us?’
‘One’s pretty close. Twenty metres below. Oh!’
‘Don’t just say “oh!” ’ Frey snapped. ‘Oh, what?’
‘One of the needles moved . . . now it’s changed back . . . now it’s gone back again.’
‘What you mean, it changed?’ Frey demanded. He wiped sweat from his brow. All this tension was making him feel sick.
‘It moved! What do you think I mean?’ Crake replied in exasperation. ‘Can you stop a moment?’
‘Well, why’s it changing? Is there something there or not?’ Frey was getting flustered now. He felt a fluttering sensation of panic come over him.
‘There’s more than four of those things out there,’ said Jez, who had got up from her station and was looking at the compass. ‘I’d guess it keeps changing the needles to show us the nearest four.’
‘There’s one thirty metres ahead!’ Crake cried.
‘But is it above us or below us?’ Frey said.
‘Forty metres above.’
‘Then why tell me?’ he shouted.
‘Because you told me to! ’ Crake shouted back. ‘Will you stop this damn craft?’
But Frey didn’t want to. He wanted to get this over with. He wanted to be past these invisible enemies and away from this place. There was a terrible feeling of wrongness stealing over him, a numbness prickling up from his toes. He felt flustered and harassed.
‘What the bloody shit is going on, Crake?’ he snarled, leaning forward to try and see what, if anything, was above them. ‘Someone talk to me! Where are they?’
‘There’s one, there’s three in front of us, one behind us now . . . umm . . . two above, thirty and twenty metres, there’s . . .’ Crake swore. ‘The numbers keep changing because you’re moving! How am I supposed to read them out fast enough?’
‘Just tell me if we’re going to hit anything, Crake! It’s pretty damn simple!’
Jez was staring in bewilderment. ‘Will you two calm down? You’re acting like a pair of—’
But then Frey recoiled from the window with a yell. ‘There’s something out there!’
‘What was it?’ Jez asked.
‘We’ve got one twenty . . . ten metres ahead . . . it’s below us though . . .’ Crake was saying.
‘It looked like . . . I don’t know, it looked like it had a face,’ Frey was babbling. His stomach griped and roiled. He could smell his own sweat, and he felt filthy. He wiped at the back of his hands to try and clean them a little, but all it did was smear more dirt into his skin. ‘The ghosts!’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s the ghosts of Rook’s Boneyard!’
‘There aren’t any ghosts, Cap’n,’ Jez said, but her face was red in the lava-light and her voice sounded strange and echoey. Her plain features seemed sly. Did she know something he didn’t? A blast of maniacal laughter came from the mess, Pinn laughing hysterically at something. It sounded like the cackle of a conspirator.
‘Of
