Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 18

Thorn hovered above a world that was being prepared for death. They had made the trip from Nostalgia for Infinity in one of the smaller, nimbler ships that the two women had shown him in the hangar bay. The craft was a two-seat surface-to-orbit shuttle with the shape of a cobra’s head: a hoodlike wing curving smoothly into fuselage, with the cabin viewing windows positioned either side of the hull like snake eyes. The undercurve was scabbed and warted by sensors, latching pods and what he took to be various sorts of weapon. Two particle-beam muzzles jutted from the front like hinged venom fangs, and the ship’s entire skin was mosaiced with irregular scales of ceramic armour, shimmering green and black.

‘This will get us there and back?’ Thorn had asked.

‘It will,’ Vuilleumier had assured him. ‘It’s the fastest ship here, and probably the one with the smallest sensor footprint. Light armour, though, and the weapons are more for show than anything else. You want something better armoured, we’ll take it — just don’t complain if it’s slow and easily tracked.’

‘I’ll let you be the judge.’

‘This is very foolish, Thorn. There’s still time to chicken out.’

‘It isn’t a question of foolishness or otherwise, Inquisitor.’ He could not snap out of the habit of calling her that. ‘I simply won’t co-operate until I know that this threat is real. Until I can verify that for myself — with my own eyes, and not through a screen –1 won’t be able to trust you.’

‘Why would we lie to you?’

‘I don’t know, but you are, I think.’ He had studied her carefully, their eyes meeting, he holding her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. ‘About something. I’m not sure what, but neither of you are being totally honest with me. Yet some of the time you are, and that’s the part I don’t fully understand.’

‘All we want to do is save the people of Resurgam.’

‘I know. I believe that part, I really do.’

They had taken the snake-headed ship, leaving Irina back aboard the larger vessel. The departure had been rapid, and though he had done his best, Thorn had not been able to sneak a look backwards. He had still not seen Nostalgia for Infinity from the outside, not even on the approach from Resurgam. Why, he wondered, would the two of them go to such lengths to hide the outside of their ship? Perhaps he was just imagining it, and he would get that view on the way back.

‘You can take the ship yourself,’ Irina had told him. ‘It doesn’t need flying. We can program a trajectory into it and let the autonomics handle any contingency. Just tell us how close you want to get to the Inhibitors.’

‘It doesn’t have to be close. A few tens of thousands of kilometres should be good enough. I’ll be able to see that arc, if it’s bright enough, and probably the tubes that are being dropped into the atmosphere. But I’m not going out there on my own. If you want me badly enough, one of you can come with me. That way I’ll know it really isn’t a trap, won’t I?’

‘I’ll go with him,’ Vuilleumier had offered.

Irina had shrugged. ‘It’s been nice knowing you.’

The trip out had been uneventful. As on the journey from Resurgam, they had spent the boring part of it asleep — not in reefersleep, but in a dreamless drug-induced coma.

Vuilleumier did not wake them until they were within half a light-second of the giant. Thorn awoke with a vague sense of irritation, a bad taste in his mouth and various aches and pains where there had been none before.

‘Well, the good news is that we’re still alive, Thorn. The Inhibitors either don’t know we’re here, or they just don’t care.’

‘Why wouldn’t they care?’

‘They must know from experience that we can’t offer them any real trouble. In a little while we’ll all be dead, so why worry about one or two of us now?’

He frowned. ‘Experience?’

‘It’s in their collective memory, Thorn. We’re not the first species they’ve done this to. The success rate must be pretty high, or else they’d revise the strategy.’

They were in free-fall. Thorn unhitched from his seat, tugging aside the acceleration webbing, and kicked over to one of the slitlike windows. He felt a little better now. He could see the gas giant very clearly, and it did not look like a well planet.

The first things that he noticed were the three great matter streams curving in from elsewhere in the system. They twinkled palely in the light from Delta Pavonis, thin ribbons of translucent grey like great ghostly brushstrokes daubed across the sky, flat to the ecliptic and sweeping away to infinity. The flow of matter along the streams was just tangible, as one boulder or another caught the sun for an instant; it was a fine-grained creep that reminded Thorn of the sluggish currents in a river on the point of freezing. The matter was travelling at hundreds of kilometres per second, but the sheer immensity of the scene rendered even that speed glacial. The streams themselves were many, many kilometres wide. They were, he supposed, like planetary rings that had been unwound.

His gaze followed the streams to their conclusions. Near the gas giant, the smooth mathematical curves — arcs describing orbital trajectories — were curtailed by abrupt hairpins or doglegs as the streams were routed to particular moons. It was as if the artist painting the elegant swathes had been jolted at the last instant. The orientation of the moons with respect to the arriving streams was changing by the hour, of course, so the stream geometries were themselves subject to constant revision. Now and then a stream would have to be dammed back, the flow stopped while another intersected it. Or perhaps it was done with astonishingly tight timing, so that the streams passed through each other without any of the constituent masses actually colliding.

‘We don’t know how they steer them like that,’ Vuilleumier told him, her voice low and confidential. ‘There’s a lot of momentum in those streams, mass fluxes of billions of tonnes a second. Yet they change direction easily. Maybe they’ve got tiny little black holes positioned up there, so they can slingshot the streams around them. That’s what Irina thinks, anyway. Scares the hell out of me, I can tell you. Although she thinks they might also be able to turn off inertia when they need to, so they can make the streams swerve like that.’

‘That doesn’t sound much more encouraging.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But even if they can do that to inertia, or make black holes to order, they obviously can’t do it on a huge scale or we’d be dead already. They have their limitations. We have to believe that.’

The moons, a few dozen kilometres wide, were visible as tight knots of light, barbs on the ends of the infailing streams. The matter plunged into each moon through a mouthlike aperture, perpendicular to the plane of orbital motion. By rights, the unbalanced mass flux should have been forcing each moon into a new orbit. Nothing like that was happening, which suggested that, again, the normal laws of momentum conservation were being suppressed, or ignored, or put on hold until some later reckoning.

The outermost moon was laying the arc that would eventually enclose the gas giant. When Thorn had seen it from Nostalgia for Infinity it had been possible to believe that it was never destined for closure. No such assurance was possible now. The ends had continued moving outwards from the moon, the tube being extruded at a rate of a thousand kilometres every four hours. It was emerging as quickly as an express train, an avalanche of super-organised matter.

It was not magic, just industry. Thorn reminded himself of that, difficult as it was to believe it. Within the moon, mechanisms hidden beneath its icy crust were processing the incoming matter stream at demonic speed, forging the unguessable components that formed the thirteen-kilometre-wide tube. The two women had not speculated in his presence about whether the tube was solid or hollow or crammed with twinkling alien clockwork.

But it was not magic. Physical laws as Thorn understood them might be melting like toffee in the vicinity of the Inhibitor engines, but that was only because they were not the ultimate laws they appeared to be, rather mere statutes or regulations to be adhered to most of the time but broken under duress. Yet even the Inhibitors were constrained to some degree. They could work wonders, but not the impossible. They needed matter, for instance. They could work it with astonishing speed, but they could not, on the evidence gleaned so far, conjure it from nothing. It had been necessary to shatter three worlds to fuel this inferno of creativity.

And whatever they were doing, vast though it was, was necessarily slow. The arc had to be grown around the planet at a mere two hundred and eighty metres a second; it could not be created instantly. The machines were mighty, but not Godlike.

That was, Thorn decided, about all the consolation they were going to get.

He turned his attention to the two lower moons. The Inhibitors had moved them into perfectly circular orbits just above the cloud layer. Their orbits intersected periodically, but the slow, diligent cable-laying continued unabated.

This part of the process was much clearer now. Thorn could see the elegant curves of the extruded tubes emerging whip-straight from the trailing face of each moon, before flexing down towards the cloud deck. Several thousand kilometres aft of each moon, the tubes plunged into the atmosphere like syringes. The tubes were moving with orbital speed when they touched air — many kilometres per second — and they gouged livid claw marks into the atmosphere. There was a thin band of agitated rust-red immediately beneath the track of each moon which reached two or three times around the planet, each pass offset from the previous one because of the gas giant’s rotation. The two moons were etching a complex geometric pattern into the shifting clouds, a pattern that resembled an extravagant calligraphic flourish. On some level Thorn appreciated that it was beautiful, but it was also quietly sickening. Something atrocious and final was surely going to happen to the planet. The calligraphic marks were elaborate funerary rites for a dying world.

‘I take it you believe us now,’ Vuilleumier said.

‘I’m inclined to,’ Thorn said. He rapped the window. ‘I suppose this might not be glass, as it appears, but some three-dimensional screen… but I don’t think I’ll presume that much ingenuity on your behalf. Even if I went outside in a suit, to look at it for myself, I wouldn’t be certain that the faceplate was glass either.’

‘You’re a suspicious man.’

‘I’ve learned that it helps one get by.’ Thorn returned to his seat, having seen enough for the moment. ‘All right. Next question. What’s going on down there? What are they up to?’

‘It’s not necessary to know, Thorn. The fact that something bad is going to happen is information enough.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Those machines…’ Vuilleumier gestured at the window. ‘We know what they do, but not how they do it. They wipe out cultures, slowly and painstakingly. Sylveste brought them here — unwittingly, perhaps, although I wouldn’t take anything as read where that bastard’s concerned — and now they’ve come to do the job. That’s all you or any of us need to know. We just have to get everyone away from here as quickly as possible.’

‘If these machines are as efficient as you say, that won’t do us a great deal of good, will it?’

‘It’ll buy us time,’ she said. ‘And there’s something else. The machines are efficient, but they’re not quite as efficient as they used to be.’

‘You told me they were self-replicating machines. Why would they become less efficient? If anything they should keep getting cleverer and faster as they learn more and more.’

‘Whoever made them didn’t want them to get too clever. The Inhibitors created the machines to wipe out emergent intelligence. It wouldn’t have made much sense if the machines filled the niche they were supposed to be keeping empty.’

I suppose not…‘ Thorn was not going to let it lie that easily. ’There’s more you have to tell me, I think. But in the meantime I want to get closer.‘

‘How much closer?’ she asked guardedly.

‘This ship’s streamlined. It can take atmosphere, I think.’

‘That wasn’t in the agreement.’

‘So sue me.’ He grinned. ‘I’m naturally inquisitive, just like you.’

Scorpio came to cold, clammy consciousness, shivering uncontrollably. He pawed at himself, peeling a glistening layer of fatty gel from his naked skin. It came away in revolting semitranslucent scabs, slurping as it detached from the underlying flesh. He was careful with the area around the burn scar on his right shoulder, fingering its perimeter with tentative fascination. There was no inch of the burn that he did not know intimately, but in touching it, tracing the wrinkled topology of its shoreline where smooth pig flesh changed to something with the leathery texture of cured meat, he was reminded of the duty that was his and his alone, the duty that he had set himself since escaping from Quail. He must never forget Quail, and nor must he forget that — as altered as the man had been — Quail was fully human in the genetic sense, and that it was humans who had to bear the brunt of Scorpio’s retribution.

There was no pain now, not even from the burn, but there was discomfort and disorientation. His ears roared continually, as if he had his head shoved up a ventilation duct. His vision was blurred, revealing little more than vague amorphic shapes. Scorpio reached up and peeled more of the transparent gel from his face. He blinked. Things were clearer now, but the roaring remained. He looked around, still shivering and cold, but alert enough to take note of where he was and what was happening to him.

He had awakened inside one half of what appeared to be a cracked metal egg, curled in an unnatural foetal position with his lower half still immersed in the revolting mucous gel. Plastic pipes and connectors lay around him. His throat and nasal passages were sore, as if the pipes had recently been shoved into him. They did not appear to have been removed with the utmost care. The other half of the metal egg lay just to one side, as if the two halves had only recently been disunited. Beyond it, and all around, was the instantly identifiable interior of a spacecraft: all polished blue metal and curved, perforated struts that reminded him of ribs. The roar in his ears was the sound of thrust. The ship was travelling somewhere, and the fact that he could hear the motors told him that the ship was probably a small one, not large enough for force-cradled engines. A shuttle, then, or something similar. Definitely in-system.

Scorpio flinched. A door had opened in the far end of the ribbed cabin revealing a little chamber with a ladder in it that led upwards. A man was just stepping off the last rung. He stooped through the opening and walked calmly towards Scorpio, evidently unsurprised to see Scorpio awake.

‘How do you feel?’ the man asked.

Scorpio forced his unwilling eyes to snap into focus. The man was known to him, though he had changed since their last meeting. His clothes were as neutral and dark as before, but now they were not of recognisably Conjoiner origin. His skull was covered with a very fine layer of black hair, where it had been shaven before. He looked a degree less cadaverous.

‘Remontoire,’ Scorpio said, spitting vile gobbets of gel from his mouth.

‘Yes, that’s me. Are you all right? The monitor told me you hadn’t suffered any ill effects.’

‘Where are we?’

‘In a ship, near the Rust Belt.’

‘Come to torture me again, have you?’

Remontoire did not look him quite in the eye. ‘It wasn’t torture, Scorpio… just re-education.’

‘When do you hand me over to the Convention?’

‘That’s no longer on the agenda. At least, it doesn’t have to be.’

Scorpio judged that the ship was small, probably a shuttle. It was entirely possible that he and Remontoire were the only two occupants. Likely, even. He wondered how he would fare trying to fly a Conjoiner-designed ship. Not well, perhaps, but he was willing to give it a try. Even if he crashed and burned, it had to be a lot better than a death sentence.

He lunged for Remontoire, springing out of the bowl in an explosion of gel. Pipes and tubing went flying. In an instant his ill-made hands were seeking the pressure points that would drop anyone, even a Conjoiner, into unconsciousness and then death.

Scorpio came around. He was in another part of the ship, strapped into a seat. Remontoire was sitting opposite him, hands folded neatly in his lap. Behind him was the impressive curve of a control panel, its surface covered with numerous read-outs, command systems and hemispherical navigation displays. It was lit up like a casino. Scorpio knew a thing or two about ship design. A Conjoiner control interface would have been minimalist to the point of invisibility, like something designed by New Quakers.

‘I wouldn’t try that again,’ Remontoire said.

Scorpio glared at him. ‘Try what?’

‘You had a go at strangling me. It didn’t work, and I’m afraid it never will. We put an implant in your skull, Scorpio — a very small one, around your carotid artery. Its only function is to constrict the artery in response to a signal from another implant in my head. I can send that signal voluntarily if you threaten me, but I don’t have to. The implant will emit a distress code if I suffer sudden unconsciousness or death. You will die shortly afterwards.’

‘I’m not dead now.’

‘That’s because I was nice enough to let you off with a warning.’

Scorpio was clothed and dry. He felt better than when he had come around in the egg. ‘Why should I care, Remontoire? Haven’t you just given me the perfect means to kill myself, instead of letting the Convention do it for me?’

‘I’m not taking you to the Convention.’

‘A little private justice, is that it?’

‘Not that either.’ Remontoire swung his seat around so that he faced the lavish control panel. He played it like a pianist, hands outstretched, not needing to watch where his fingers were going. Above the panel and on either side of the cabin, windows puckered into what had been blue steel. The cabin illumination dropped softly. Scorpio heard the roar of the thrust change pitch and felt his stomach register a change in the axis of gravity. A vast ochre crescent hoved into view beyond. It was Yellowstone: most of the planet was in night. Remontoire’s ship was nearly in the same plane as the Rust Belt. The string of habitats was hardly visible against dayside ~ just a dark sprinkling, like a fine line of cinnamon — but beyond the terminator they formed a jewelled thread, spangling and twinkling as habitats precessed or trimmed their immense mirrors and floodlights. It was impressive, but Scorpio knew that it was only a shadow of what it had been. There had been ten thousand habitats before the plague; now only a few hundred were fully utilised. But against night the derelicts vanished, leaving only the fairy-dust trail of illuminated cities, and it was almost as if the wheel of history had never turned.

Beyond the Belt, Yellowstone looked hurtingly close. He could almost hear the urban hum of Chasm City droning up through the clouds like a seductive siren song. He thought of the warrens and strongholds that the pigs and their allies maintained in the deepest parts of the city’s Mulch, a festering outlaw empire composed of many interlocked criminal fiefdoms. After his escape from Quail, Scorpio had entered that empire at the very lowest level, a scarred immigrant with barely a single intact memory in his head, other than how to stay alive from hour to hour in a dangerous foreign environment, and — equally importantly — how to turn the apparatus of that environment to his advantage. That at least was something he owed Quail, if nothing else. But it did not mean that he was grateful.

Scorpio remembered very little of his life before meeting Quail. He was aware that much of what he did recall was second-hand memory, for although he had pieced together only the major details of his former existence — his life aboard the yacht — his subconscious had wasted no time in filling in the aching gaps that remained with all the enthusiasm of gas rushing into a vacuum. And as he remembered those memories, not quite real in themselves, he could not help but impress even more sensory details upon them. The memories might accord precisely with what had really happened, but Scorpio had no way of knowing for sure. And yet it made no difference as far as he was concerned. No one else was going to contradict him now. Those who might have been able to do so were dead, butchered at the hands of Quail and his friends.

Scorpio’s first clear memory of Quail was amongst the most frightening. He had come to consciousness after a long period of sleep, or something deeper than sleep, standing in a cold armoured room with eleven other pigs, disorientated and shivering, much as he had been upon waking aboard Remontoire’s ship. They wore crudely fashioned clothes, sewn together from stiff squares of dark, stained fabric. Quail had been there with them: a tall asymmetrically augmented human whom Scorpio identified as being either an Ultra or from one of the other occasionally chimeric factions, such as the Skyjacks or the Atmosphere Dredgers. There were other augmented humans, too, half a dozen of them crowding behind Quail. They all carried weapons, ranging from knives to wide-muzzled low-velocity slug-guns, and they all viewed the assembled pigs with undisguised anticipation. Quail, whose language Scorpio understood without effort, explained that the twelve pigs had been brought aboard his ship — for the room was inside a much larger vessel — to provide amusement for his crew after a run of unprofitable deals.

And in a sense, though perhaps not in quite the sense that Quail had intended, that was precisely what they had done. The crew had anticipated a hunt, and for a little while that was what they got. The rules were simple enough: the pigs were allowed free run of Quail’s ship, to hide anywhere they desired and to improvise tools and weapons from whatever was at hand. After five days an amnesty would be declared on any surviving pigs, or at least that was what Quail promised. It was up to the pigs to choose whether they hid en masse or split into smaller teams. They had six hours’ lead on the humans.

That turned out to make precious little difference. Half the pigs were dead by the end of the first day’s hunt. They had accepted the terms unquestioningly; even Scorpio had felt a strangely eager obligation to do whatever was asked of him, a sense that it was his duty to do whatever Quail — or any other human — required. Though he was afraid, and had an immediate desire to safeguard his own survival, it was to be nearly three days before he would think about striking back, and even then the thought only pushed its way into his head against great resistance, as if violating some sacrosanct personal paradigm.

At first Scorpio had sought shelter with two other pigs, one of them mute, the other only able to form broken sentences, but they had functioned well enough as a team, anticipating each other’s actions with uncanny ease. Scorpio knew, even then, that the twelve pigs had worked together before, though he could not yet assemble a single clear memory of his life before waking in Quail’s chamber. But even though the team had functioned well, Scorpio had chosen to go off on his own after the first eighteen hours. The other two wanted to remain hiding in the cubbyhole they had found, but Scorpio was sure that the only hope of survival lay in continuous ascent, moving ever upwards along the ship’s axis of thrust.

It was then that he had made the first of three discoveries. Crawling through a duct, he had ripped away part of his clothing, revealing the edge of a shining green shape that covered much of his right shoulder. He ripped away more of the clothing, but it was only when he found a reflective panel that he was able to examine the entire shape properly and see that it was a highly stylised green scorpion. As he touched the emerald tattoo, tracing the curved line of its tail, almost feeling the sting of its barb, he felt as if it was imbued with power, a personal force that he alone was able to channel and direct. He sensed that his identity was bound up with the scorpion; that everything that mattered about him was locked within the tattoo. The moment was a startling instant of self-revelation, for at last he realised that he had a name, or could at least give himself a name that had some significant connection with his past.

Perhaps half a day later he made the second discovery: glimpsed through a window was another ship, much smaller. On closer inspection, Scorpio recognised the lean, efficient lines of an in-system yacht. The hull gleamed with pale green alloy, a lusciously streamlined manta shape with cowled air-intakes like the mouths of basking sharks. As he looked at the yacht, Scorpio could almost see its blueprint glowing beneath the skin. He knew that he could crawl aboard that yacht and make it fly almost without thinking, and that he could repair or remedy any technical fault or imperfection; he felt an almost overwhelming urge to do just that, sensing perhaps that only in the belly of the yacht, surrounded by machines and tools, would he be truly happy.

Tentatively, he formed his hypothesis: the twelve pigs must have been the crew of that yacht when Quail had captured their ship. The yacht had been taken as bounty, the crew put into deep freeze until they were required to spice up the humdrum existence on board Quail’s ship. That accounted for the amnesia, at least. He felt delight in discovering a link with his own past. It was still with him when he made the third discovery.

He had found the two pigs he had left behind in the cubbyhole. They had been caught and killed, just as he had feared. Quail’s hunters had suspended them by chains from the perforated spars bridging a corridor. They had been eviscerated and skinned, and at some point in the process Scorpio was certain that they had still been alive. He was also certain that the clothes they had been wearing — the clothes he continued to wear — were themselves made from the skins of other pigs. The twelve were not the first victims, but merely the latest in a game that had been playing for much longer than he had at first suspected; he began to feel a fury beyond anything he had known before. Something snapped; suddenly he was able to consider, at least as a theoretical possibility, what had previously been the unthinkable: he could imagine how it would feel to hurt a human, and to hurt a human very badly indeed. And he could even think of ways that he might go about it.

Scorpio, who turned out to be both resourceful and technically minded, began to infiltrate the machinery of Quail’s ship. He turned bulkhead doors into vicious scissoring traps. He turned elevators and transit pods into deadfalls or crushing pistons. He sucked air from certain parts of the ship and replaced it with poisonous gases or vacuum, and then fooled the sensors that would have alerted Quail and his company to the ruse. One by one he executed the pigs’ hunters, often with considerable artistry, until only Quail remained alive, alone and fearful, finally grasping the terrible error of judgement he had made. But by then the other eleven pigs were also dead, so Scorpio’s victory was mingled with a sour sense of abject personal failure. He had felt an obligation to protect the other pigs, most of who had lacked the language skills he took for granted. It was not simply that some of them were unable to talk, lacking the vocal mechanisms necessary for producing speech sounds, but they did not even comprehend spoken language with the same fluency that he did. A few words and phrases, perhaps, but nothing more than that. Their minds were wired differently from his, lacking the brain functions that coded and decoded language. For him it was second nature. There was no escaping it, but he was a lot closer to human than they were. And he had let them down, even though none of them had elected him as their protector.

Scorpio kept Quail alive until they were near circum-Yellowstone space, at which point he arranged for his own passage into Chasm City. He had taken the yacht. By the time he reached the Mulch Quail was dead, or was at least experiencing the final death agonies of the execution device Scorpio had made for him, crafted with loving care from the robotic surgery systems he had removed from the yacht’s medical bay.

He was almost home and dry, but there was one final discovery that had to be made: the yacht had never belonged to himself, or to any of the other pigs. The craft — Zodiacal Light — had been run by humans, with the twelve pigs serving as indentured slaves, crammed belowdecks, each with their own area of specialisation. Replaying the yacht’s video log, Scorpio saw the human crew being murdered by Quail’s boarders. It was a quick, clean series of murders, almost humane compared with the slow hunting of the pigs. And, via the same logs, Scorpio saw that the twelve pigs had all been tattooed with a different zodiacal sign. The symbol on his shoulder was a mark of identity, just as he had suspected, but it was also a mark of ownership and obedience.

Scorpio found a welding laser, adjusted the yield to its minimum setting and scorched it deep into tissue, watching with horrified fascination as it burned away the flesh, effacing the green scorpion in crackling stutters of pulsed light. The pain was indescribable, yet he chose not to smother it with anaesthetic from the medical kit. Nor did he do anything to assist the healing of the damaged skin. As much as he needed the pain as a symbolic bridge to be crossed, he needed that mark to show what he had done. Through the pain he reclaimed himself, snatched back his own identity. Perhaps he had never truly had one before, but in the agony he forged one for himself. The scarring would serve to remind him of what he had done, and if ever his hatred of humans began to lapse — if ever he was tempted to forgive — it would be there to guide him. Yet, and this was the thing he could never quite understand, he elected to keep the name. In calling himself Scorpio he would become an engine of hate directed at humanity. The name would become a synonym for fear, something that human parents would tell their children about at night to keep them from misbehaving.

In Chasm City his work had begun, and it was in Chasm City that it would continue, if he could escape from Remontoire. Even then he knew that it would be difficult to move freely, but once he made contact with Lasher his difficulties would be greatly diminished. Lasher had been one of his first real allies: a moderately well-connected pig with influence reaching to Loreanville and the Rust Belt. He had remained loyal to Scorpio. And even if he did end up being held prisoner by someone, which seemed at least likely given the circumstances, his captors would have to keep a very close watch on him indeed. The army of pigs, the loose alliance of gangs and factions which Scorpio and Lasher had webbed into something resembling a cohesive force, had struck against the authorities several times before, and while they had suffered dreadful losses, they had never been fully defeated. True, the conflicts had not cost the powers greatly — mostly it had been a matter of retaining pig-held manors of the Mulch — but Lasher and his associates were not afraid of widening the terms of reference. The pigs had allies in the banshees, which meant they had the means to expand their criminal activities far beyond the Mulch. Having been out of circulation for so long, Scorpio was curious to learn how that alliance now fared.

He nodded towards the line of habitats. ‘It still looks as if we’re headed for the Belt.’

‘We are,’ Remontoire told him. ‘But we’re not headed towards the Convention. There’s been a slight change of plan, which is why we put that nasty little implant into your head.’

‘You were right to.’

‘Because you’d have killed me otherwise? Perhaps. But you wouldn’t have got very far.’ Remontoire caressed the control panel and smiled apologetically. ‘You can’t operate this ship, I’m afraid. Beneath the surface the systems are entirely Conjoiner. But we have to pass muster as a civilian vessel.’

Tell me what’s going on.‘

Remontoire swung the seat around again. He parked his hands in his lap and leaned towards Scorpio; dangerously close, were it not for the implant. Scorpio was prepared to believe he would die if he tried anything again, so he let Remontoire speak, while imagining how good it would feel to murder him.

‘You met Clavain, I believe.’

Scorpio sniffed hard.

Remontoire continued, ‘He was one of us. A good friend of mine, in fact. Better than that: he was a good Conjoiner. He’d been one of us for four hundred years, and we wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for his deeds. He was the Butcher of Tharsis once, you know. But that’s ancient history now; I don’t imagine you’ve even heard of Tharsis. All that matters is that Clavain defected, or is in the process of defecting, and he must be stopped. Because he was — is — a friend, I would sooner that we stopped him alive rather than dead, but I accept that it might not be possible. We tried killing him once, when it was the only option we had. I’m almost glad that we failed. Clavain tricked us; he used his corvette to drop himself off in empty space. When we destroyed the corvette, he wasn’t aboard it.’

‘Clever guy. I like him better already.’

‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. Because you’re going to help me find him.’

He was good, Scorpio thought. The way Remontoire said it, it was almost as if he believed it might happen. ‘Help you?’

‘We think he was rescued by a freighter. We can’t be certain, but it looks as if it was the same one we encountered earlier, around the Contested Volume — just before we captured you, as a matter of fact. Clavain helped the pilot of the freighter then, and he must have hoped she’d pay back the favour. That ship just made an unscheduled, illegal detour into the war zone. It’s just possible that it rendezvoused with Clavain, picked him up from empty space.’

‘Then shoot the fucking thing down. I don’t see what your problem is.’

‘Too late, I’m afraid. By the time we pieced this together, the freighter had already returned to Ferrisville Convention airspace.’ Remontoire gestured over his shoulder to the line of habitats slashed across the darkening face of Yellowstone. ‘By now, Clavain will have gone to ground in the Rust Belt, which happens to be more your territory than mine. Judging by your record, you know it almost as intimately as you know Chasm City. And I’m sure you’ll be very eager to be my guide.’ Remontoire smiled and tapped a finger gently against his own temple. ‘Won’t you?’

‘I could still kill you. There are always ways.’

‘You’d die, though, and what good would that do? We have a bargaining position, you see. Assist us — assist the Conjoined — and we will ensure that you never reach Convention custody. We’ll supply the Convention with a body, an identical replica cloned from your own. We’ll tell them that you died in our care. That way you not only get your freedom, but you’ll also no longer have an army of Convention investigators after you. We can supply you with finances and credible false documentation. Scorpio will be dead, but there’s no reason why you can’t continue.’

‘Why haven’t you done that already? If you can fake my body, you could have given them a corpse by now.’

‘There’ll be repercussions, Scorpio, severe ones. It is not a path we would ordinarily choose. But at this point we need Clavain back rather more than we need the Convention’s good will.’

‘Clavain must mean a lot to you.’

Remontoire turned back to the control panel and played it again, his fingers arpeggiating like a maestro. ‘He does mean a lot to us, yes. But what he carries in his head means even more.’

Scorpio considered his position, his survival instincts clicking in with their usual ruthless efficiency, just as they always did in times of personal crisis. Once it was Quail, now it was a frail-looking Conjoiner with the power to kill him by thought alone. He had every reason to believe that Remontoire was sincere in his threat, and that he would be handed over to the Convention if he did not co-operate. With no opportunity to alert Lasher to his return, he was as good as dead if that happened. But if he assisted Remontoire he would at least be prolonging his arrest. Perhaps Remontoire was telling the truth when he said that he would be allowed to go free. But even if the Conjoiner was lying about that — and he did not think that he was — then there would be still more opportunities to contact Lasher and make his ultimate escape. It sounded like the sort of offer one would be very foolish to refuse. Even if it meant, for the time being at least, working with someone he still considered human. ‘You must be desperate,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I am,’ said Remontoire. ‘At the same time, I really don’t think it’s much of your business. So, are you going to do what I asked?’

‘If I say no…’

Remontoire smiled. ‘Then there won’t be any need for that cloned corpse.’

About once every eight hours Antoinette opened the airlock door long enough to pass him food and water. Clavain took what she had to offer gratefully, remembering to thank her and to show not the least sign of resentment that he was still a prisoner. It was enough that she had rescued him and that she was taking him back to the authorities. He imagined that in her shoes he would have been even less trusting, especially since he knew what a Conjoiner was capable of doing. He was much less her prisoner than she believed.

His confinement continued for a day. He felt the floor pitch and shift under him as the ship changed its thrust pattern, and when Antoinette appeared at the door she confirmed, before passing another bulb of water and a nutrition bar through to him, that they were en route back to the Rust Belt.

‘Those thrust changes,’ he said, peeling back the foil covering the bar. ‘What were they for? Were we in danger of running into military activity?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘What, then?’

‘Banshees, Clavain.’ She must have seen his look of incomprehension. ‘They’re pirates, bandits, brigands, rogues, whatever you want to call them. Real badass sons of bitches.’

I haven’t heard of them.‘

‘You wouldn’t have unless you were a trader trying to make an honest living.’

He chewed on the bar. ‘You almost said that with a straight face.’

‘Hey, listen. I bend the rules now and then, that’s all. But what these fuckers do — it makes the most illegal thing I’ve ever done look like, I don’t know, a minor docking violation.’

‘And these banshees… they used to be traders too, I take it?’

She nodded. ‘Until they figured out it was easier to steal cargo from the likes of me rather than haul it themselves.’

‘But you’ve never been directly involved with them before?’

‘A few run-ins. Everyone who hauls anything in or near the Rust Belt has been shadowed by banshees at least once. Normally they leave us alone. Storm Bird’s pretty fast, so it doesn’t make an easy target for a forced docking. And, well, we have a few other deterrents.’

Clavain nodded wisely, thinking that he knew exactly what she meant. ‘And now?’

‘We’ve been shadowed. A couple of banshees latched on to us for an hour, holding off at one-tenth of a light-second. Thirty-thou klicks. That’s pissing-distance out here. But we shook ’em off.‘

Clavain took a sip from the drinking bulb. ‘Will they be back?’

‘Dunno. It’s not normal to meet them this far from the Rust Belt. I’d almost say…’

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘What — that I might have something to do with it?’

‘It’s just a thought.’

‘Here’s another. You were doing something unusual and dangerous: traversing hostile space. From the banshees’ point of view it might have meant you had valuable cargo, something worthy of their interest.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I swear I had nothing to do with it.’

‘I didn’t think you did, Clavain — I mean, not intentionally. But there’s a lot of weird shit going down these days.’

He took another sip from the bulb. ‘Tell me about it.’

They let him out of the airlock eight hours later. That was when Clavain had his first decent look at the man Antoinette had called Xavier. Xavier was a rangy individual with a pleasing, cheerful face and a bowl-shaped mop of shiny black hair that gleamed blue under Storm Bird’s interior lighting. In Clavain’s estimation he was perhaps ten or fifteen years older than Antoinette, but he was prepared to believe that his guess might be seriously wrong and that she might be the older one of the partnership. That said, he was certain that neither of them had been born more than a few decades ago.

When the lock opened he saw that Xavier and Antoinette were still wearing their suits, with their helmets hitched to their belts. Xavier stood between the posts of the lock’s doorframe and pointed at Clavain.

‘Take your suit off. Then you can come into the rest of the ship.’

Clavain nodded and did as he was told. Removing the suit was awkward in the confined space of the lock — it was awkward enough anywhere — but he managed it within five minutes, stripping down to the skintight thermal layer.

‘I take it I can stop now?’

‘Yes.’

Xavier stood aside and let him move into the main body of the ship. They were under thrust, so he was able to walk. His socked feet padded against the cleated metal flooring.

‘Thank you,’ Clavain said.

‘Don’t thank me. Thank her.’

Antoinette said, ‘Xavier thinks you should stay in the lock until we get to the Rust Belt.’

‘I don’t blame him for that.’

‘But if you try anything…’ Xavier started.

‘I understand. You’ll depressurise the entire ship. I’ll die, since I’m not suited-up. That makes a lot of sense, Xavier. It’s exactly what I would have done in your situation. But can I show you something?’

They looked at each other.

‘Show us what?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Put me back in the airlock, then close the door.’

They did as he asked. Clavain waited until their faces appeared in the window, then sidled closer to the door itself, until his head was only a few inches from the locking mechanism and its associated control panel. He narrowed his eyes and concentrated, dredging up neural routines that he had not used in many years. His implants detected the electrical field generated by the lock circuitry, superimposing a neon maze of flowing pathways on to his view of the panel. He understood the lock’s logic and saw what needed to be done. His implants began to generate a stronger field of their own, suppressing certain current flows and enhancing others. He was talking to the lock, interfacing with its control system.

He was a little out of practice, but even so it was almost childishly simple to achieve what he wanted. The lock clicked. The door slid open, revealing Antoinette and Xavier. They stood there wearing horrified expressions.

‘Space him,’ Xavier said. ‘Space him now.’

‘Wait,’ Clavain said, holding up his hands. ‘I did that for one reason only: to show you how easy it would have been for me to do it before. I could have escaped at any time. But I didn’t. That means you can trust me.’

‘It means we should kill you now, before you try something worse,’ Xavier said.

‘If you kill me you’ll be making a terrible mistake, I assure you. This is about more than just me.’

‘And that’s the best defence you can offer?’ Xavier asked.

‘If you really feel you can’t trust me, weld me into a box,’ Clavain said reasonably. ‘Give me a means to breathe and some water and I’ll survive until we reach the Rust Belt. But please don’t kill me.’

‘He sounds like he means it, Xave,’ Antoinette said.

Xavier was breathing heavily. Clavain realised that the man was still desperately afraid of what he might do.

‘You can’t mess with our heads, you know. Neither of us has any implants.’

‘It’s not something I had in mind.’

‘Or the ship,’ Antoinette added. ‘You were lucky with that airlock, but a lot of the mission-critical systems are opto-electronic’

‘You’re right,’ he said, offering his palms. I can’t touch those.‘

‘I think we have to trust him,’ Antoinette said.

‘Yes, but if he so much…’ Xavier halted and looked at Antoinette. He had heard something.

Clavain had heard it too: a chime from somewhere else in the ship, harsh and repetitious.

‘Proximity alert,’ Antoinette breathed.

‘Banshees,’ Xavier said.

Clavain followed them through the clattering metal innards of the ship until they reached a flight deck. The two suited figures slipped ahead of him, buckling into massive antique-looking acceleration couches. While he searched for somewhere to anchor himself, Clavain appraised the flight deck, or bridge, or whatever Antoinette called it. Though it was about as far from a corvette or Nightshade as a space vessel could be in terms of capability, function and technological elegance, he had no difficulty orientating himself. It was easy when you had lived through so many centuries of ship design, seen so many cycles of technological boom-and-bust. It was simply a question of dusting off the right set of memories.

There,‘ Antoinette said, jabbing a finger at a radar sphere. Two of the fuckers, just like before.’ Her voice was low, evidently intended for Xavier’s ears alone.

Twenty-eight thousand klicks,‘ he replied, in the same near-whisper, looking over her shoulder at the tumbling digits of the distance indicator. ’Closing at… fifteen klicks a second, on a near-perfect intercept trajectory. They’ll start slowing soon, ready for final approach and forced hard docking.‘

‘So they’ll be here in… what?’ Clavain ran some numbers through his head. Thirty, forty minutes?‘

Xavier stared back at him with a strange look on his face. ‘Who asked you?’

‘I thought you might value my thoughts on the matter.’

‘Have you dealt with banshees before, Clavain?’ Xavier asked.

‘Until a few hours ago I don’t think I’d ever heard of them.’

Then I don’t think you’re going to be a fuck of a lot of use, are you?‘

Antoinette spoke softly again. ‘Xave… how long do you think we’ve got before they’re on us?’

‘Assuming the usual approach pattern and deceleration tolerances… thirty… thirty-five minutes.’

‘So Clavain wasn’t far off.’

‘A lucky guess,’ Xavier said.

‘Actually, it wasn’t a lucky guess at all,’ Clavain said, folding down a flap from the wall and strapping himself to it. ‘I may not have dealt with banshees before, but I’ve certainly dealt with hostile approach-and-boarding scenarios.’ He decided they could stand not knowing that he had often been the one doing the hostile boarding.

‘Beast,’ Antoinette said, raising her voice, ‘you ready with those evasion patterns we ran through before?’

The relevant routines are uploaded and ready for immediate execution, Little Miss. There is, however, a not inconsiderable problem.‘

Antoinette sighed. ‘Lay it on me, Beast.’

‘Our fuel-consumption margins are already slender, Little Miss. Evasive patterns eat heavily into our reserve supplies.’

‘Do we have enough left to throw another pattern and still make it back to the Belt before hell freezes over?’

‘Yes, Little Miss, but with very little…’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Antoinette’s gauntleted hands were already on the controls, ready to execute the ferocious manoeuvres that would convince the banshees not to bother with this particular freighter.

‘Don’t do it,’ Clavain said.

Xavier looked at him with an expression of pure contempt. ‘What?’

‘I said don’t do it. You can assume these are same banshees as before. They’ve already seen your evasive patterns, so they know exactly what you’re capable of doing. It may have given them pause for thought once, but you can be certain they’ve already decided that the risk is worth it.’

‘Don’t listen…’ Xavier said.

‘All you’ll do is burn fuel you might need later. It won’t make a blind bit of difference. Trust me. I’ve been here a thousand times, in about as many wars.’

Antoinette looked at him questioningly. ‘So what the fuck do you want me to do, Clavain? Just sit here and lap it up?’

He shook his head. ‘You mentioned additional deterrents earlier on. I had a feeling I knew what you meant.’

‘Oh no.’

‘You must have weapons, Antoinette. In these times you’d be foolish not to.’