‘Not you though?’
Skarbo smiled. ‘I was lucky.’
‘That when you changed?’
Skarbo nodded. ‘The ship recovered me. The Baschet were going to re-body me anyway, so I decided to be – different. Insectoid looked like a good option.’
‘Why?’
‘Because.’ Skarbo smiled to himself. They had revived him enough for him to be able to make his own decisions, and then let him wander round the huge ship while he made them. Once, he had chanced on somewhere that probably shouldn’t have been open, and which contained a viewing system that probably shouldn’t have been working. He could still remember looking down at a magnified view of the smouldering city, and seeing clusters of black dots flowing purposefully across the scene, and realizing that the insects from the bowl were making themselves at home.
He had been interrupted, and politely removed, and as he had gone he had looked down at the burnt ruin of his fragile mammal body and made a decision about durability. They had gone along with it, to his surprise.
But because was good enough for The Bird. He smiled again. ‘Funny. For the second time in my lives, the Baschet destroy my world and then rescue me.’
The Bird gave a sharp cackle. ‘Funny for you. Not for them. Last time they won.’
Skarbo watched The Bird for a moment. Then he said slowly, ‘What do you mean?’
‘First listen, then think, then speak if needed. Huh! Last time they won. So this time they lost! Fleet blown out of the sky or captured. Not even in this war – years ago.’ It cackled again. ‘Serve the bastards right. This one got captured. Not even sure who owns it.’
Skarbo looked up at the ship that still loomed over them. Similar, but different – the ship that had murdered the capital city of the Mandate had been featurelessly pristine. Now this one was lit up by the reflected daylight he could see it was shadowed across by streaks and scars. ‘You might think it’s funny. I’d rather be rescued by something in better condition.’
‘So what? Dead in eighty-seven days. What do you care?’
It had a point. Skarbo looked down at his body. The leg he had injured when The Bird had shoved him aside was showing no signs of healing. It would probably drop off before he died. Down to four, but at least he would end up symmetrical. He sighed. ‘I wonder where they’ll take us?’
‘How should I know? Ask; coming back. Look.’ It waggled its head towards the entrance.
Skarbo followed the gesture, and felt the dizziness grow much worse. Hemfrets was indeed coming back, and this time it was flanked by two Companions.
‘Sorry for the wait.’ The voice was breezy. ‘If you’re ready, we’ll be off.’
Skarbo pointed. ‘With those things?’
‘Yes.’ Hemfrets shrugged. ‘I sense your discomfort but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just—’
‘—a tool. Yes, I know.’ Skarbo pulled himself upright. ‘Where are you going to take us?’
‘At the moment, let’s get you as far as the ship.’ There had been the slightest pause before the sentence, and there was another after it. ‘Please obey all instructions.’
The Bird gave a couple of noisy flaps. ‘Not good at that.’
Hemfrets glanced at it. ‘Get good. Follow me, please.’
They followed through tunnels that Skarbo remembered as being full of junk, but which were now picked clean of everything except dust. The Bird scuttled along the floor grumbling to itself. Every now and then it gave a few experimental flaps and then swore. Obviously its wing was still an issue; Skarbo found himself wondering how fast the thing was expecting to heal. It was just as well the junk had gone, otherwise the creature would have taken forever to hop over it.
Gone. He blinked, and stopped dead. Something that felt like a bundle of rags wrapped round a sharp stick bumped into his legs.
‘Ow! Fuck … what?’
‘Sorry.’ Skarbo turned round and looked down at the angry eyes. ‘But, it wasn’t just my models? Did they process the junk as well?’
‘Yes. Ancient things. Rare things. All dust. Thought you realized.’
Skarbo shook his head. ‘No … but there were thousands of cubic metres!’
‘Were. Still are. Just different shape. Useless shape! Vandals.’
From ahead they heard Hemfrets. It sounded testy. ‘Follow, please! No waiting.’
They followed. The Bird was still complaining, but now Skarbo barely noticed it.
His horror at the destruction of his lifetimes’ work was too big to feel. He knew he would feel it, maybe soon, but for now the numbness was the best he could do. But the basement junk, that was different. Even when he was selecting pieces to drop into the core of the little planet, even when he was teasing The Bird about it, he had really felt proprietorial; almost caring. Consigning things to the core had almost been his way of showing respect.
Now, he realized, he was mourning.
Well, he had to start somewhere.
The corridor ended abruptly, in a rough opening in a rock face. The edges of the opening looked fresh, compared with the eroded roundness of everything else, and so did the shuttle pad it led to – a simple, sharp-planed plateau fifty metres across, which had obviously been formed by just cutting off the top of a rounded hill. A bulbously ugly little ship squatted in the middle of it, its ovoid body supported on an asymmetrical tripod of legs that looked too thin for the job.
It was comprehensively battered, even more than the ship that hovered above them.
The Bird made a spitting sound. ‘Trust that? Pah. Worse state than Skarbo!’
Hemfrets stood still for a moment. Then it turned round. ‘Creature? I don’t have time for this. Be quiet, or I will request one of the Companions to heat your beak until your tongue cooks in your head.’
Skarbo looked down at The Bird. Its beak was closed.
Hemfrets walked over to the shuttle, stopped a few paces from it, and raised a hand. The ship dipped on its legs until one end was against the rock, and a hatch opened. Hemfrets turned.
‘Come on. Quickly, please.’ The breeziness had gone. Now it sounded tense.
Skarbo walked up a roughened metal ramp that made faint scratching sounds under his claws. Behind him The Bird’s feet clicked evenly, and he smiled to himself. The thing was calmer than it seemed.
Inside, the ship was utilitarian. There were metal bench seats that would do for humanoids but not for him, and the only light came through the open hatch. He looked around, and then shrugged and hunkered down on the floor. The Bird hopped about, swivelling its head and studying things. Then it settled by Skarbo’s head, briefly flexing its wings. The movement looked natural.
Skarbo watched it. He had never been good at deciphering its expressions, but then he had never seen much sign of anything to decipher; it had mostly seemed angry or impatient. Now it looked – watchful.
He looked away. Behind him, he heard a mechanical groan and clang, and for a moment there was darkness. He felt his eyes trying to adjust, but either there was so little light that even he couldn’t see anything or, more likely, age had caught up with his optics.
Then there was no need. Light flooded in. With no warning, the hull had become transparent. Below, the pad was already receding, although he had felt no acceleration, and above him the belly of the vast ship was expanding to fill the view. He looked round and saw Hemfrets sitting on one of the benches. Its eyes were closed and it didn’t seem to be doing anything.
He couldn’t see the Companions.
Then they passed to one side of the ship, and he stared down in shock at its upper surface. Beside him, The Bird let out a soft croak.
Half the ship was missing.
It was as if some huge serrated blade had been dragged across it, tearing a rough-edged wound hundreds of metres across that ran almost from end to end of the hull. The gash was deep, with torn canyon edges. As they flew over it they looked into dark hangars, saw glimpses of twisted structures that coul
d have been engineering spaces, and flicked through plumes of crystallized vapour leaking from the exposed entrails of the ship.
Skarbo found he was shaking. Without taking his eyes off the ship he said, ‘Hemfrets? What did that?’
‘A weapon, obviously.’
‘But, we can’t …’ Skarbo stopped, took a breath. ‘It’s a wreck. It’s going nowhere. What are you doing? You destroyed my life to put me on this?’
‘The ship is fully functional.’
Skarbo stared at the carnage for a while. Then he shook his head. ‘Well, I was going to die anyway.’
Something sharp tapped his leg. He looked down and met the eyes of The Bird. It shook its head very slowly.
Skarbo couldn’t be bothered working out what it meant. He looked away.
They were closer to the ship and he could see deeper into the gash. There was movement in there. Things flickered at the corner of his vision, and every now and then something larger happened; the torn edges were busy with blocky devices that seemed to change shape as they moved, like clumps of rectangular pixels that were constantly reorganizing.
Then his brain processed the image properly and his eyes widened. The pixels were Companions, in flocks of – what? Thousands? And then, as he watched, one of the flocks spread itself over part of the gash. The pixels brightened, blurred, and coalesced and then there was just ship. A hundred-metre length of the gash had been healed, leaving an irregular strip of bright clean hull where there had been mortal damage – and another group of Companions was already gathering next to it.
At this rate the whole tear would be closed in minutes.
‘Impressed?’
It was The Bird; either it had forgotten about Hemfrets’s threat or it didn’t care.
He nodded.
‘Huh. Ask where it got them.’
‘What?’ Skarbo didn’t understand.
‘The Companions. Ask it!’
He half turned towards Hemfrets, but the creature spoke first.
‘The Bird knows. It can tell you, if it’s feeling so casual about the state of its tongue.’
Skarbo sighed. ‘One of you? Please?’
‘Ha. From you! Got them from you.’ The Bird hopped from one leg to the other. ‘Your stuff! All the play planets, all the junk.’
‘What?’
‘Forgotten already? Senile? Processed, remember?’
Skarbo stared at it. ‘And made all those? Overnight?’ He turned to Hemfrets and took a breath, but the other cut him off.
‘No, not overnight. And I didn’t make them. They made themselves. It took a couple of hours. Now will both of you please be quiet?’
They had passed over almost the whole width of the huge ship. The gash was half healed now; just before it passed out of sight, another section knitted itself together.
Skarbo shook his head.
The last time Skarbo had been on a ship like this – the only time – it had seemed, if not new, then sleek and purposeful and full of people. They had been triumphant, of course, fresh from their murder of seven planets.
This one looked empty and half demolished. The corridor walls were heavily scarred as if massive things had been dragged along them, and there were many empty spaces that looked as if they shouldn’t be empty.
Then the word came to him. Not demolished – cannibalized. And his mind leapt the rest of the way.
He turned to Hemfrets. ‘Who does this ship really belong to?’
They were in a control space, a twenty-metre hemisphere walled by screens, half of which weren’t working. The ones that were showed enhanced views of the outside. Skarbo searched for his planet, and found it. It looked forlorn, and fuzzy-edged through a halo of dust. He sighed, and said, ‘Hemfrets?’
‘It belongs to me, currently.’ Hemfrets didn’t turn round. It was standing in front of a console that looked much newer than the rest of the ship, and its shoulders were rigid.
‘Have you stolen it?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing that you need to understand. We’re at war, Skarbo. People at war don’t give things away. You told me you hadn’t heard of the Warfront.’
‘Yes.’
‘You have been very remote – but also very introverted. I will explain.’
And it did.
The Warfront had started as a collection of ideas that had coalesced into a movement. There was nothing much to unify it at the beginning apart from general discontent, but that had provided enough impulsion for the movement to become organized.
Then the first planetary military had lost patience with what it saw as a group of unruly kids and unleashed a messy coup d’état that had left a million casualties on the home planet and a lot of angry survivors.
Suddenly the Warfront had a sense of purpose. It was anti-commerce, anti-establishment (to begin with, until it grew enough to become a sort of establishment itself) and generally anti-status quo. It was ecological, preferring real worlds to virtual ones, with a muscular back-to-basics ethos. It excelled at attracting the shy, the angry and the excluded, and it was sweeping across the Mandate, gaining numbers as it went.
Skarbo stared at Hemfrets. ‘It sounds like a big protest march.’
‘That might have been how it started out. Skarbo, the Warfront was – was – a few million angry kids and some adults who should have known better. Now it is much more than that. It is an opportunity, you see? A thing within which all kinds of political ambitions can be played out. There are proxy wars within it, and factions, and an emerging leadership with a new focus.’
‘Which is?’
Hemfrets smiled. ‘The same as yours. The Spin. The Warfront is coming, Skarbo, and it is already hundreds of thousands of ships strong.’
‘I see.’ Then something struck Skarbo. ‘We’re at war, you said. Are you part of the Warfront, then? Or part of something else?’
‘I’m not part of anything. I’m hoping never to be. Now please excuse me. And watch, if you like.’
‘Watch what?’ But as he spoke Skarbo caught a movement on the screens. He peered, and then moved closer.
Something had taken off from his planet – a fierce speck climbing on a short needle of light.
Hemfrets nodded. ‘Good.’
‘What?’ Skarbo had meant to say more but before he could the little planet flared white, incandesced for a searing moment, and then simply collapsed to a point and disappeared.
From somewhere he heard a quiet croak. He looked down and saw The Bird watching him steadily.
‘Sad,’ it said simply.
He nodded. ‘Sad.’ The word seemed utterly insufficient, but he couldn’t think of a meaningful improvement so he simply repeated it. ‘Sad.’
Hemfrets turned from the display. ‘I’m sorry. Do you need time to grieve?’
Skarbo stared at the creature. ‘Time? Time before what?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, I believe you don’t.’ Skarbo walked back to the seats that were suitable for humans and perched himself awkwardly. ‘You have destroyed my home, and my work, of nearly eight lifetimes. I will die in eighty-seven days. Do you think that leaves me long enough to grieve for what you have taken?’
The words had come out calmly. He was surprised at himself. He didn’t feel calm.
Hemfrets shook its head. ‘Probably not.’ It took a few steps towards Skarbo and halted. ‘Look, I’m sorry about your planet. Would it help if I explained things?’
‘Possibly.’ Skarbo shook his head. ‘Although I doubt it.’
‘Let me try.’ It walked over to the bench and sat down, somehow managing to look as uncomfortable as Skarbo felt. ‘You’ve been researching the Spin for hundreds of years. You watched it – running down. Yes?’
‘Yes.’ And added to himself, a metaphor for my own decline.
‘So you saw it dying but you said nothing. Why?’
Skarbo blinked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s clear enough. You were able to predict the death, to put it that way, of a whole cluster of civilizations. Trillions of people. You had an audience – you were published, you were read – but you said nothing.’
‘But that was …’ Skarbo paused. He had been about to say that it had been private, but as the words formed he knew they were unsayable. He gathered himself. ‘It was unproven.’
Hemfrets shook its head. ‘You know that isn’t how science works. You form a theory, and you expose it to challenge. But you kept yours in the dark.’
Skarbo shrugged. ‘Why should I do different? What difference would it have made?’
‘I don’t know.
‘Because it was hopeless!’ The words were out before he had thought about them. ‘I saw it, I modelled it, and I knew no one could stop it. Is that enough for you?’
The silence seemed long.
Eventually Hemfrets squared its shoulders. ‘Enough, indeed. But now the question is different. Will it be enough for others?’ It stood up. ‘There is a new focus on the Spin, Skarbo, and therefore there is a new focus on you. There are quarters for you. Follow me.’
Skarbo followed. He barely registered the regular click of The Bird, following him.
The quarters were in better condition than the rest of the ship – just. There were two adjoining spaces – one plain grey-walled cylinder a couple of metres high and a bit less across, and one flattened sphere the same height but several paces across. They were softly lit, although Skarbo couldn’t see any light source.
They both seemed empty. Skarbo looked at Hemfrets. ‘Quarters?’
It smiled, the thin lips making a hard line. ‘The ship will adapt things when I leave. I advise you to stand in the middle of the larger space, without moving. You might find it more comfortable to shut your eyes until it’s finished.’
It gave a shallow bow, and left. A section of wall healed itself seamlessly after it.
The Bird clawed briefly at the floor. ‘Know what I think?’
‘No.’
‘It’s scared.’
‘Really?’
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