Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 14

Triumvir Ilia Volyova gazed into the abyss of the cache chamber, wondering if she was about to make the kind of dreadful mistake she had always feared would end her days.

Khouri’s voice buzzed in her helmet. ‘Ilia, I really think we should give this just a tiny bit more thought.’

‘Thank you.’ She checked the seals on her spacesuit again, and then flicked through her weapon status indicators.

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you mean it. Unfortunately I’ve already given it more than enough thought. If I gave it any more thought I might decide not to do it. Which, given the wider circumstances, would be even more suicidally dangerous and stupid than doing it.’

‘I can’t fault your logic, but I’ve a feeling the ship… I mean the Captain… really isn’t going to like this.’

‘No?’ Volyova considered that a far from remote possibility herself. Then perhaps he’ll decide to co-operate with us.‘

‘Or kill us. Have you considered that?’

‘Khouri?’

‘Yes, Ilia?’

‘Please shut up.’

They were floating inside an airlock that allowed entry into the chamber. It was a large lock, but there was still only just enough room for the two of them. It was not simply that their suits had been augmented with the bulky frames of thruster-packs. They also carried equipment, supplemental armour and a number of semi-autonomous weapons, clamped to the frames at strategic points.

‘All right; let’s just get it over with,’ Khouri said. ‘I’ve never liked this place, not from the first time you showed it to me. Nothing that’s happened since has made me like it any more.’

They powered out into the chamber, propelling themselves with staccato puffs of micro-gee thrust.

It was one of five similarly sized spaces in Nostalgia for Infinity’s interior: huge inclusions large enough to stow a fleet of passenger shuttles or several megatonnes of cargo, ready to be dropped down to a needy colony world. So much time had passed since the days when the ship had carried colonists that only scant traces of its former function remained, overlaid by centuries of adaptation and corruption. For years the ship had rarely carried more than a dozen inhabitants, free to wander its echoing interior like looters in an evacuated city. But beneath the accretions of time much remained more or less intact, even allowing for the changes that had come about since the Captain’s transformations.

The smooth sheer walls of the chamber reached away in all directions, vanishing into darkness and only fitfully illuminated by the roving spotlights of their suits. Volyova had not been able to restore the chamber’s main lighting system: that was one of the circuits the Captain now controlled, and he clearly did not like them entering this territory.

Gradually the wall receded. They were immersed in darkness now, and it was only the head-up display in Volyova’s helmet that gave her any indication of where to aim for or how fast she was moving.

‘It feels as if we’re in space,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s hard to believe we’re still inside the ship. Any sign of the weapons?’

‘We should be coming up on weapon seventeen in about fifteen seconds.’

On cue, the cache weapon loomed out of the darkness. It did not float free in the chamber, but was embraced by an elaborate arrangement of clamps and scaffolds, which were in turn connected to a complicated three-dimensional monorail system which plunged through the darkness, anchored to the chamber walls by enormous splayed pylons.

This was one of thirty-three weapons that remained from the original forty. Volyova and Khouri had destroyed one of them on the system’s edge after it went rogue, possessed by a splinter of the same software parasite that Khouri herself had carried aboard the ship. The other six weapons had been abandoned in space after the Hades episode. They were probably recoverable, but there was no guarantee they would work again, and by Volyova’s estimate they were considerably less potent than those that remained.

They fired their suit thrusters and came to a halt near the first weapon.

‘Weapon seventeen,’ Volyova said. ‘Ugly son of a svinoi, don’t you think? But I’ve had some success with this one — reached all the way down to its machine-language syntax layer.’

‘Meaning you can talk to it?’

‘Yes. Isn’t that just what I said?’

None of the cache weapons looked exactly alike, though they were all clearly the products of the same mentality. This one looked like a cross between a jet engine and a Victorian tunnelling machine: an axially symmetric sixty-metre-long cylinder faced with what could have been cutting teeth or turbine blades, but which were probably neither. The thing was sheathed in a dull, battered alloy that seemed either green or bronze, depending on the way their lights played across it. Cooling flanges and fins leant it a rakish art deco look.

‘If you can talk to it,’ Khouri said, ‘can’t we just tell it to leave the ship and then use it against the Inhibitors?’

‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ Volyova’s sarcasm could have etched holes in metal. The problem is that the Captain can control the weapons as well, and at the moment his commands will veto any I send, since his come in at root level.‘

‘Mm. And whose bright idea was that?’

‘Mine, now you come to mention it. Back when I wanted all the weapons to be controlled from the gunnery, it seemed quite a good idea.’

‘That’s the problem with good ideas. They can turn out to be a real fucking pain in the arse.’

‘So I’m learning. Now then.’ Volyova’s tone became hushed and businesslike. ‘I want you to follow me, and keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to check my control harness.’

‘Right behind you, Ilia.’

They orbited the weapon, steering their suits through the interstices of the monorail system.

The harness was a frame that Volyova had welded around the weapon, equipped with thrusters and control interfaces. She had achieved only very limited success in communicating with the weapons, and those that she had been most confident of controlling had been among those now lost. Once, she had attempted to interface all the weapons via a single controlling node: an implant-augmented human plugged into a gunnery seat. Though the concept had been sound, the gunnery had caused her no end of troubles. Indirectly, the whole mess they were in now could be traced back to those experiments.

‘Harness looks sound,’ Volyova said. ‘I think I’ll try to run through a low-level systems check.’

‘Wake the weapon up, you mean?’

‘No, no… just whisper a few sweet nothings to it, that’s all.’ She tapped commands into the thick bracelet encircling her spacesuited forearm, watching the diagnostic traces as they scrolled over her faceplate. ‘I’m going to be preoccupied while I do this, so it’s down to you to keep an eye out for any trouble. Understood?’

‘Understood. Um, Ilia?’

‘What.’

‘We have to make a decision on Thorn.’

Volyova did not like to be distracted, most especially not during an operation as dangerous as this. ‘Thorn?’

‘You heard what the man said. He wants to come aboard.’

‘And I said he can’t. It’s out of the question.’

‘Then I don’t think we’ll be able to count on his help, Ilia.’

‘He’ll help us. We’ll make the bastard help us.’

She heard Khouri sigh. ‘Ilia, he isn’t some piece of machinery we can poke or prod until we get a certain response. He doesn’t have a root level. He’s a thinking human being, fully capable of entertaining doubts and fears. He cares desperately about his cause and he won’t risk jeopardising it if he thinks we’re holding anything back from him. Now, if we were telling the truth, there’d be no good reason for refusing him the visit he asked for. He knows we have a means to reach the ship, after all. It’s only reasonable that he’d want to see the Promised Land he’s leading his people into, and the reason why Resurgam has to be evacuated.’

Volyova was through the first layer of weapons protocols, burrowing through her own software shell into the machine’s native operating system. So far nothing she had done had incurred any hostile response from either the weapon or the ship. She bit her tongue. It all got trickier from hereon in.

‘I don’t think it’s in the least bit reasonable,’ Volyova replied.

‘Then you don’t understand human nature. Look, trust me on this. He has to see the ship or he won’t work with us.’

‘If he saw this ship, Khouri, he’d do what any sane person would do under the same circumstances: run a mile.’

‘But if we kept him away from the worst parts, the areas which have undergone the most severe transformations, I think he might still help us.’

Volyova sighed, while keeping her attention on the work at hand. She had the horrible, overfamiliar feeling that Khouri had already given this matter some consideration — enough to deflect her obvious objections.

‘He’d still suspect something,’ she countered.

‘Not if we played our cards right. We could disguise the transformations in a small area of the ship and then keep him to that. Just enough so that we can appear to give him a guided tour, without seeming to be holding anything back.’

‘And the Inhibitors?’

‘He has to know about them eventually — everyone will. So what’s the problem with Thorn finding out now rather than later?’

‘He’ll ask too many questions. Before long he’ll put two and two together and figure out who he’s working for.’

‘Ilia, you know we have to be more open with him…’

‘Do we?’ She was angry now, and it was not merely because the weapon had refused to parse her most recent command. ‘Or do we just want to have him around because we like him? Think very carefully before you answer, Khouri. Our friendship might depend on it.’

‘Thorn means nothing to me. He’s just convenient.’

Volyova tried a new syntax combination, holding her breath until the weapon responded. Previous experience had taught her that she could only make so many mistakes when talking to a weapon. Too many and the weapon would either clam up or start acting defensively. But now she was through. In the side of the weapon, what had appeared to be seamless alloy slid open to reveal a deep machine-lined inspection well, glowing with insipid green light.

‘I’m going in. Watch my back.’

Volyova steered her suit along the weapon’s flanged length until she reached the hatch, braked and then inserted herself with a single cough of thrust. She arrested her movement with her feet, coming to a halt inside the well. It was large enough for her to rotate and translate without any part of her suit coming into contact with the machinery.

Not for the first time, she found herself wondering about the dark ancestry of these thirty-three horrors. The weapons were of human manufacture, certainly, but they were far in advance of the destructive potential of anything else that had ever been invented. Centuries ago, long before she had joined the ship, Nostalgia for Infinity had found the cache tucked away inside a fortified asteroid, a nameless lump of rock circling an equally nameless star. Perhaps a thorough forensic examination of the asteroid might have revealed some clue as to who had made the weapons, or who had owned them up to that point, but the crew had been in no position to linger. The weapons had been spirited aboard the ship, which had then left the scene of the crime with all haste before the asteroid’s stunned defences woke up again.

Volyova, of course, had theories. Perhaps the most likely was that the weapons were of Conjoiner manufacture. The spiders had been around long enough. But if these weapons belonged to them, why had they ever allowed them to slip out of their hands? And why had they never made an effort to reclaim what was rightfully theirs?

It was immaterial. The cache had been aboard the ship for centuries. No one was going to come and ask for it back now.

She looked around, inspecting the well. Naked machinery surrounded her: control panels, read-outs, circuits, relays and devices of less obvious function. Already there was an apprehensive feeling in the back of her mind. The weapon was focusing a magnetic field on part of her brain, instilling a sense of phobic dread.

She had been here before. She was used to it.

She unhooked various modules stationed around her suit’s thruster frame, attaching them to the interior of the well via epoxy-coated pads. From these modules, which were of her own design, she extended several dozen colour-coded cables that she connected or spliced into the exposed machinery.

‘Ilia…’ Khouri said. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Fine. It doesn’t like me being in here very much, but it can’t kick me out — I’ve given it all the right authorisation codes.’

‘Has it started doing the fear thing?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact it has.’ She experienced a moment of absolute screaming terror, as if someone was poking her brain with an electrode, stirring her most primal fears and anxieties into daylight. ‘Do you mind if we have this conversation later, Khouri? I’d like to get this… over… as soon as possible.’

‘We’re still going to have to decide about Thorn.’

‘Fine. Later, all right?’

‘He has to come here.’

‘Khouri, do me a favour: shut up about Thorn and keep your eye on the job, understand?’

Volyova paused and forced herself to focus. So far, despite the fear, it had gone as well as she had hoped it would. She had only once before gone this deep into the weapon’s control architecture, and that was when she had prioritised the commands coming in from the ship. Since she was at the same level now she could theoretically, by issuing the right command syntax, lock out the Captain for good. This was only one weapon; there were thirty-two others, and some of those were utterly unknown to her. But she would surely not need the whole cache to make a difference. If she could gain control of a dozen or so weapons, it would hopefully be enough to throw a spanner into the Inhibitor’s plans…

And she would not succeed by prevarication.

‘Khouri, listen to me. Minor change of plan.’

‘Uh-oh.’

‘I’m going to go ahead and see if I can get this weapon to submit entirely to my control.’

‘You call that a minor change of plan?’

‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’

Before she could stop herself, before the fear became overwhelming, she connected the remaining lines. Status lights winked and pulsed; displays rippled with alphanumeric hash. The fear sharpened. The weapon really did not want her to tamper with it on this level.

‘Tough luck,’ she said. ‘Now let’s see…’ And with a few discreet taps on her bracelet she released webs of mind-numbingly complicated command syntax. The three-valued logic that the weapon’s operating system ran on was characteristic of Conjoiner programming, but it was also devilishly hard to debug.

She sat still and waited.

Deep inside the weapon, the legality of her command would be thrashed out and scrutinised by dozens of parsing modules. Only when it had satisfied all criteria would it be executed. If that happened, and the command did what she thought it would, the weapon would immediately delete the Captain from the list of authenticated users. There would then only be one valid way to work the weapon, which was through her control harness, a piece of hardware disconnected from the ship’s Captain-controlled infrastructure.

It was a very sound theory.

She had the first indication that the command syntax had been bad an instant before the hatch slid shut on her. Her bracelet flashed red; she started assembling a particularly poetic sequence of Russish swearwords and then the weapon had locked her in. Next, the lights went out, but the fear remained. The fear, in fact, had grown very much stronger — but perhaps that was partly her own response to the situation.

‘Damn…’ Volyova said. ‘Khouri… can you hear me?’

But there was no reply.

Without warning machinery shifted around her. The chamber had become larger, revealing dimly glowing vaults plunging deeper into the weapon. Enormous fluidly shaped mechanisms floated in blood-red light. Cold blue lights flickered on the shapes or traced the flow lines of writhing intestinal power lines. The entire interior of the weapon appeared to be reorganising itself.

And then she nearly died of fright. She sensed something else inside the weapon, a presence that was coming closer, creeping through the shifting components with phantom slowness.

Volyova hammered on the hatch above her. ‘Khouri…!’

But the presence had reached her. She had not seen it arrive but she sensed its sudden proximity. It was shapeless, crouched behind her. She thought she could almost see it in her peripheral vision, but even as she wrenched her head around the presence flowed into her blind spot.

Suddenly her head hurt, the blinding pain making her squeal aloud.

Remontoire squeezed his lean frame into one of Nightshade’s viewing blisters, establishing by visual means that the engines had actually shut off. He had issued the correct sequence of neural commands, instantly feeling the shift to weightlessness as the ship ceased accelerating, but still he felt the need for additional confirmation that his order had been followed. Given what had happened already, he would not have been entirely surprised to see that the blue glow of scattered light was still present.

But he saw only darkness. The engines really had shut down; the ship was drifting at constant velocity, still falling towards Epsilon Eridani but far too slowly ever to catch Clavain.

‘What now?’ Felka asked quietly. She floated next to him, one hand hooked into a soft hoop that the ship had obligingly provided.

‘We wait,’ he said. ‘If I’m right, Skade won’t be long.’

‘She won’t be pleased.’

He nodded. ‘And I’ll reinstate thrust as soon as she tells me what’s going on. But before that I’d like some answers.’

The crab arrived a few moments later, easing through a fist-sized hole in the wall. ‘This is unacceptable. Why have you…’

‘The engines are my responsibility,’ Remontoire said pleasantly, for he had rehearsed exactly what he would say. ‘They’re a highly delicate and dangerous technology, all the more so given the experimental nature of the new designs. Any deviation from the expected performance might indicate a serious, possibly catastrophic, problem.’

The crab waggled its manipulators. ‘You know perfectly well that there was nothing at all wrong with the engines. I demand that you restart them immediately. Every second we spend drifting is to Clavain’s advantage.’

‘Really?’ Felka said.

‘Only in the very loosest sense. If we’re delayed any further our only realistic option will be a remote kill, rather than a live capture.’

‘Not that that’s ever been under serious consideration, has it?’ Felka asked.

‘You’ll never know if Remontoire persists with this… insubordination.’

‘Insubordination?’ Felka hooted. ‘Now you almost sound like a Demarchist.’

‘Don’t play games, either of you.’ The crab pivoted around on its suckered feet. ‘Reinstate the engines, Remontoire, or I’ll find a way to do it without you.’

It sounded like a bluff, but Remontoire was prepared to believe that overriding his commands was within the capabilities of an Inner Sanctum member. It might not be easy, certainly less easy than having him do what she wanted, but he did not doubt that Skade was capable of it.

‘I will… once you show me what your machinery does.’

‘My machinery?’

Remontoire reached over and prised the crab from the wall, each suckered foot detaching with a soft, faintly comical slurp. He held the crab at eye-level, looking into its tight assemblage of sensors and variegated weapons, daring Skade to hurt him. The little legs thrashed pathetically.

‘You know exactly what I mean,’ he said. I want to know what it is, Skade. I want to know what you’ve learned to do.‘

They followed the proxy through Nightshade, navigating twisting grey corridors and vertical interdeck shafts, moving steadily away from the prow of the ship — ‘down’ as far as Remontoire’s inner ear was concerned. The acceleration was now one and three-quarter gees, Remontoire having agreed to reinstate the engines at a low level of thrust. His mental map of the other occupants showed that they were all still crammed into the volume of the ship immediately aft of the prow, and that Felka and he were the only people this far downship. He had yet to discover where Skade’s actual body was; she still had not spoken to him through any other medium than the crab’s voice box, and his usual omniscient knowledge of the ship’s layout had been replaced by a mental map riddled with precisely edited gaps, like the blocked-out text in a classified document.

‘This machinery… whatever it is…’

Skade cut him off. ‘You’d have found out about it sooner or later. As would all of the Mother Nest.’

‘Was it something you learned from Exordium?’

‘Exordium showed us the direction to follow, that’s all. Nothing was handed to us on a plate.’ The crab skittered ahead of them and reached a sealed bulkhead, one of the mechanical doors that had closed before the increase in acceleration. ‘We have to go through here, into the part of the ship I sealed off. I should warn you that things will feel a little different on the other side. Not immediately, but this barricade more or less marks the point at which the effects of the machinery rise above the threshold of human sensitivity. You may find it disturbing. Are you certain that you wish to continue?’

Remontoire looked at Felka; Felka looked back at him and nodded.

‘Lead on, Skade,’ said Remontoire.

‘Very well.’

The barricade wheezed open, revealing an even darker and deader space beyond it. They stepped through and then descended several further levels via vertical shafts, riding piston-shaped discs.

Remontoire examined his feelings but nothing was out of the ordinary. He raised a quizzical eyebrow in Felka’s direction, to which she responded with a short shake of her head. She felt nothing unusual either, and she was a good deal more attuned to such matters than he was.

They continued on through normal corridors, pausing now and then until they regained the energy to continue. Eventually they arrived at a plain stretch of walling devoid of any indicators — real, holographic or entoptic — to mark it as out of the ordinary. Yet the crab halted at a certain spot and after a moment a hole opened in the wall at chest height, enlarging to form an aperture shaped like a cat’s pupil. Red light spilled through the inverted gash.

‘This is where I live,’ the crab told them. ‘Please come in.’

They followed the crab into a large warm space. Remontoire looked around, realising as he did so that nothing he saw matched his expectations. He was simply in an almost empty room. There were a few items of machinery in it, but only one thing, resembling a small, slightly macabre piece of sculpture, that he did not instantly recognise. The room was filled with the soft hum of equipment, but again the sound was not unfamiliar.

The largest item was the first thing he had noticed. It was a black egg-shaped pod resting on a heavy rust-red pedestal inset with quivering analogue dials. The pod had the antique look of much modern space technology, like a relic from the earliest days of near-Earth exploration. He recognised it as an escape pod of Demarchist design, simple and robust. Conjoiner ships never carried escape pods.

This unit was marked with warning instructions in all the common languages — Norte, Russish, Canasian — along with icons and diagrams in bright primary colours. There were bee-stripes and cruciform thrusters; the grey bulges of sensors and communication systems; collapsed solar-wings and parachutes. There were explosive bolts around a door and a tiny triangular window in the door itself.

There was something in the pod. Remontoire saw a curve of pale flesh through the window, indistinct because it was embedded in a matrix of amber cushioning gel or some cloying medical nutrient. The flesh moved, breathing slowly.

‘Skade…?’ he said, thinking of the injuries he had seen when he had visited her before their departure.

‘Go ahead,’ the crab said. ‘Have a look. I’m sure it will surprise you.’

Remontoire and Felka eased closer to the pod. There was a figure packed inside it, pink and foetal. Remontoire saw lines and catheters, and watched the figure move almost imperceptibly no more than once a minute. It was breathing.

It wasn’t Skade, or even what had remained of Skade. It definitely wasn’t human.

‘What is it?’ Felka asked, her voice barely a whisper.

‘Scorpio,’ Remontoire said. ‘The hyperpig, the one we found on the Demarchist ship.’

Felka touched the metal wall of the pod. Remontoire did likewise, feeling the rhythmic churning of life-support systems. ‘Why is he here?’ Felka asked.

‘He’s on his way back to justice,’ Skade said. ‘Once we’re near the inner system we’ll eject the pod and let the Ferrisville Convention recover him.’

‘And then?’

‘They’ll try him and find him guilty of the many crimes he is supposed to have committed,’ Skade said. ‘And then, under the present legislation, they’ll kill him. Irreversible neural death.’

‘You sound as if you approve.’

‘We have to co-operate with the Convention,’ Skade said. ‘They can make life difficult for us in our dealings around Yellowstone. The pig has to be handed back to them one way or another. It would have been very convenient for us if he had died in our custody, believe me. Unfortunately, this way he has a small chance of survival.’

‘What kind of crimes are we talking about?’ Felka asked.

‘War crimes,’ Skade said breezily.

‘That doesn’t tell me anything. How can he be a war criminal if he isn’t affiliated to a recognised faction?’

‘It’s very simple,’ Skade said. ‘Under the terms of the Convention virtually any extralegal act committed in the war zone becomes a war crime, by definition. And there’s no shortage in Scorpio’s case. Murder. Assassination. Terrorism. Blackmail. Theft. Extortion. Eco-sabotage. Trafficking in unlicensed alpha-level intelligences. Frankly, he’s been involved in every criminal activity you can think of from Chasm City to the Rust Belt. If it were peacetime, they’d be serious enough. But in a time of war, most of those crimes carry a mandatory penalty of irreversible death. He’d have earned it several times over even if the nature of the murders themselves wasn’t taken into consideration.’

The pig breathed in and out. Remontoire watched the protective gel tremble as he moved and wondered if he were dreaming, and if so what shape those dreams assumed. Did pigs dream? He was not sure. He did not remember if Run Seven had had anything to say on the matter. But then, Run Seven’s mind had not exactly been put together like other pigs‘. He had been a very early and imperfectly formed specimen, and his mental state had been a long way from anything Remontoire would have termed sane. Which was not to say that he had been stupid, or lacking in ingenuity. The tortures and methods of coercion that the pirate had used on Remontoire had been adequate testimony to his intelligence and originality. Even now, somewhere at the back of his mind (there were days when he did not notice it) there was a scream that had never ended; a thread of agony that connected him with the past.

‘What exactly were these murders?’ Felka repeated.

‘He likes killing humans, Felka. He makes something of an art of it. I don’t pretend there aren’t others like him, criminal scum making the most of the present situation.’ Skade’s crab hopped through the air and landed deftly on the side of the pod. ‘But he’s different. He revels in it.’

Remontoire spoke softly. ‘Clavain and I trawled him. The memories we dug out of his head were enough to have him executed there and then.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ asked Felka.

‘Under more favourable circumstances, I think we might have.’

‘The pig needn’t detain us,’ Skade said. ‘It’s his good fortune that Clavain defected, forcing us to make this journey to the inner system, or we’d have had to return a corpse, packed into a high-burn missile warhead. That option was seriously considered. We’d have been perfectly within our rights.’

Remontoire stepped away from the pod. I thought it might be you in there.‘

‘And were you relieved to find it wasn’t me?’

The voice startled him, because it had not come from the crab. He looked around and for the first time paid proper attention to the unfamiliar object he had only glanced at before. It had reminded him of a sculpture: a cylindrical silver pedestal in the middle of the room, supporting a detached human head.

The head vanished into the pedestal somewhere near the middle of the neck, joined to it by a tight black seal. The pedestal was only slightly wider than the head, flaring towards a thick base inset with various gauges and sockets. Now and then it gurgled and clicked with inscrutable medical processes.

The head swivelled slightly to greet them and then spoke, pushing thoughts into his head. [Yes, it’s me. I’m glad you were able to follow my proxy. We’re inside the range of the device now. Do you feel any ill effects?]

Only a little queasiness, Remontoire replied.

Felka stepped closer to the pedestal. ‘Do you mind if I touch you?’

[Be my guest.]

Remontoire watched her press her fingers lightly across Skade’s face, tracing its contours with horrified care. It is you, isn’t it? he asked.

[You seem a little surprised. Why? Does my state disturb you? I’ve experienced far more unsettling conditions than this, I assure you. This is merely temporary.]

But behind her thoughts he sensed chasms of horror; self-disgust so extreme that it had become something close to awe. He wondered if Skade was letting him taste her feelings deliberately, or whether her control was simply not good enough to mask what she really felt.

Why did you let Delmar do this to you?

[It wasn’t his idea. It would have taken too long to heal my entire body, and Delmar’s equipment was too bulky to bring along. I suggested that he remove my head, which was perfectly intact.]

She glanced down, though she could not tilt her head. [This life-support apparatus is simple, reliable and compact enough for my needs. There are some problems with maintaining the precise blood chemistry that my brain would experience if it were connected to a fully functioning body — hormones, that sort of thing — but apart from some slight emotional lability, the effects are pretty minor.]

Felka stepped back. ‘What about your body?’

[Delmar will have a replacement ready, fully clone-cultured, when I get back to the Mother Nest. The reattachment procedure won’t cause him any difficulties, especially since the decortication happened under controlled circumstances.]

‘Well, that’s fine then. But unless I’m missing something, you’re still a prisoner.’

[No. I have a certain degree of mobility, even now.] The head spun around through a disconcerting two hundred and seventy degrees. From out of the room’s shadows stepped what Remontoire had until then taken to be a waiting general-utility servitor, the kind one might find in any well-appointed household. The bipedal androform machine had a dejected, slumped appearance. It was headless, with a circular aperture between its shoulders.

[Help me into it, please. The servitor can do it, but it always seems to take an eternity to do it properly.]

Help you into it? Remontoire queried.

[Grasp the support pillar immediately beneath my neck.]

Remontoire placed both hands around the silver pedestal and pulled. There was a soft click and the upper part, along with the head, came loose in his hands. He elevated it, finding it much heavier than he had imagined it would be. Hanging beneath the place where the pedestal had separated was a knot of slimy wriggling cables. They thrashed and groped like a fistful of eels.

[Now carry me — gently — to the servitor.]

Remontoire did as she asked. Perhaps the possibility of dropping the head flickered through his mind once or twice, though rationally he doubted that the fall would do Skade very much harm: the floor would most likely soften to absorb the impact. But he fought to keep such thoughts as well censored as he could.

[Now pop me down into the body of the servitor. The connections will establish themselves. Gently now… gently does it.]

He slid the silver core into the machine until he encountered resistance. Is that it?

[Yes.] Skade’s eyes widened perceptibly, and her skin took on a blush it had lacked before. [Yes. Connection established. Now, let’s see… motor control…]

The servitor’s forearm jerked violently forwards, the fist clenching and unclenching spasmodically. Skade pulled it back and held the outspread hand before her eyes, studying the mechanical anatomy of gloss-black and chrome with rapt fascination. The servitor was of a quaint design that resembled medieval armour; it was both beautiful and brutal.

You seem to have the hang of it.

The servitor took a shuffling step forwards, both arms held slightly in front of it. [Yes… This is my quickest adjustment yet. It almost makes me think I should instruct Delmar not to bother.]

‘Not to bother doing what?’ asked Felka.

[Healing my old body. I think I prefer this one. That’s a joke, incidentally.]

‘Of course,’ Felka said uneasily.

[But you should be grateful that this has happened to me. It makes me more likely to try to bring Clavain back into our possession alive.]

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I would very much like him to see what he has done to me.’ Skade turned around with a creak of metal. ‘Now, there is something else you wanted to see, I think. Shall we continue?’

The suit of armour led them out of the room.