The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [65]
But there was another reason too. It came from a bloody-minded, angry, stubborn place inside him. He wanted to face the echo chamber again, because he was damned if he’d be afraid of it anymore.
“Ready,” said Plome.
Crake went to the resonator that was attached to the echo chamber. He tuned it carefully, according to the readings he’d scribbled down in the dreadnought. He’d noted the frequencies given out by the sphere while he was trying to determine if it was dangerous or not. Those frequencies formed a unique fingerprint that could be used to identify it.
“Ready,” Crake agreed. He threw a switch on the side of the console. A bass hum came from the echo chamber, growing louder as it powered up.
Crake closed his eyes. That sound. Just like last time. The feeling of retracing his steps toward disaster was inescapable. He knew what lay at the end of this path.
Her.
Slowly, he started to turn the dials, seeking frequencies. He’d calculated and memorized the range he intended to search in. It was a space where, historically, there had been several notable successes and relatively few disasters. The knowledge did little to reassure him. He’d played it safe last time too, and look how things turned out.
No, he reminded himself. That was your fault. You found a monster and you didn’t let it go. You wanted to be a pioneer.
He worked the dials, beginning at the upper and lower ends of the range and narrowing in. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. It wouldn’t be any of the five conventional senses that told him when he found a daemon.
The sudden, oppressive sense of being watched came upon him. The kind of feeling a mouse must get when it knows it’s been spotted by a cat.
Each daemon was like a vast, complex chord, with primary and secondary notes. If he could match those notes, he had the anchors he could use to drag it into phase with his world.
The room felt darker and colder suddenly. His skin prickled.
That was it. He’d found its range, its highest and lowest frequencies. He opened his eyes and looked at the control console.
It was enormous.
“You’ve found something?” Plome called from the other side of the sanctum.
Crake stared at the dials for a moment. Could you do this? Could you bring it through? With Plome here as witness? Spit and blood, how they’d talk about that one in the secret journals.
He caught himself. Hadn’t he learned anything? Didn’t he know where unrestrained ambition would get him?
“It’s nothing,” he said, and reset the dials. He wouldn’t make the same mistake this time.
He began again. Daemons fluctuated, shifting pitch and bandwidth all the time, and they were frustratingly tricky to pin down. It was another half hour before he found one that stayed still long enough for him to catch it. This one was smaller, occupying the higher end. He penned it in with interference frequencies, preventing it from escaping into the subsonics, and then set about identifying its primary resonances. It began to struggle, but Crake was persistent, and each time he nailed one of the notes in the chord, it had a little less wriggle room.
Acrid sweat trickled from beneath his hairline as he worked. Lost in his work, he forgot himself and where he was, his mind focused entirely on the task. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re not getting away,” he murmured. “Not from Grayther Crake.”
An atmosphere of unreality had descended on the sanctum. An indefinable feeling of strangeness. The mind knew something was wrong but couldn’t quite work out what. The presence of a being from the aether disturbed the senses on a subconscious level.
Something pounded on the inside of the echo chamber,