The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [64]
A globular brass cage had once dominated the room, but now it had been relegated to the corner, along with a few portable oil lanterns. The new prize piece stood in the center, amid a mass of heavy cables. The echo chamber. Crake felt his stomach tighten at the sight.
It looked like a bathysphere: a ball of riveted metal, two meters in diameter, with a single porthole in a door on one side. It stood on a low plinth, braced by struts. Cables were plugged into it all over its surface.
Crake stared at the porthole and the darkness within.
You could still turn back. Tell them you couldn’t do it. They’d understand.
But back to what kind of life? What would he be to his crew after this? Dead weight? Someone to be pitied and tolerated? No, he’d had enough of that from his family, when he was a younger man. He’d borne it from them because he didn’t like or respect them. But he couldn’t bear it from Frey, or Jez, or Malvery.
He refused to be pathetic. Better to be dead.
He set to work. He checked the cables to the echo chamber, making sure everything was plugged in properly. After that, he familiarized himself with the control console, which differed in small ways from the one he knew. Lastly, he pulled over a resonator and connected it to a sequence of inputs on the echo chamber.
Plome was occupied with his own preparations, constructing a three-tiered defense of oscillation spheres, pulse pods, and resonator masts. Crake approved of his thoroughness, but privately he wasn’t at all sure that any conventional methods could contain a daemon capable of breaking out of an echo chamber.
Crake was studying formulae from a book when Plome came over to him, mopping his brow. “Boning up on echo theory, eh?” he asked nervously. “I thought you knew all about that stuff?”
“I do.” Crake snapped the book shut. He’d just needed something to stop his anxiety getting the better of him. He had it all by heart anyway. Not that it had done him much good last time. “I’ll assume this place is soundproofed? Things will get loud.”
“Oh, yes. Daemons thralled to the walls and ceiling. We could have an orchestra down here and you wouldn’t hear it in the sitting room.”
“Good,” said Crake. He’d used similar methods himself, in the wine cellar where he’d built his own sanctum.
“Shall we, then?”
“Activate the perimeter,” Crake told him. “And whatever happens, stay out there. There’s no telling what might come through.”
Plome nodded. “Good luck, Crake,” he said. He scurried away a few steps, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, you’re a braver man than I.”
Plome retreated to the edge of the sanctum, where he’d connected up a series of control consoles to manage the defenses. Crake felt a low vibration build in the air around him. Gradually a high-pitched whine slipped in, just at the edge of hearing. Soon the air was alive to his finely honed senses, a mass of sonic whorls and eddies. The invisible discord would confuse, repel, or destroy any daemon that ventured outside the echo chamber.
At least, that was the idea. But the idea was based on the weak, dim daemons that could be snared using conventional methods of daemonism. Echo theory gave access to the deeper realms, where dreadful beings lay. Creatures of craft and cunning. Whether or not they were susceptible to the crude science of their human adversaries depended on the strength of the daemon.
Not for the first time, Crake wondered if he could have done this another way. Maybe he could have created a tracking device, like Frey’s ring, that would lead them to the sphere? He could have done that using simpler, less dangerous techniques that he was comfortable with.
But, no, it wouldn’t have worked. He’d have needed the sphere with him, so he could