But the wolves were not getting their prize for free. Snowdrop’s weapons were formidable, and I took some small solace in the way they blasted holes through those curdling shells, annihilating or dispersing wolf elements as if they were no more than buzzing black flies. The shells became ragged, lacy and discontinuous, and then broke apart completely. But there were always more shells forming, like distant breakers marshalling for a charge against the shoreline. Wolf flows were funnelling in from multiple points around the Rust Belt, providing a near-limitless reservoir of reinforcements. As always with the wolves, they would accept surprisingly heavy losses in the early stages of an engagement while they probed and learned and adapted. Sooner or later the units would coordinate a modification to their force-generating mechanisms, either by rapid evolution or by dredging some proven response from their archives of prior encounters. They had workable countermeasures for every weapon we had ever invented, as well as the equivalent efforts of all the other species they had acted against. It was only ever a question of time before they found the right way to overcome Snowdrop, and in the meantime some losses were not only acceptable but perfectly unconcerning to them. These were not soldiers but elements of a single vast war machine, operating on a scale of light-years and a timescale of centuries.
What hope had we of defeating such a thing?
None at all, I thought to myself. To think anything else was species-level hubris.
But there might be other survival strategies. If we could force the wolves to a negotiated stand-off, a point where they recognised that we were too much trouble to annihilate completely, but could be contained, that would count nearly as well as victory. The wolves’ greatest strength was their patience, their willingness to sit out an enemy for millions of years. If we put up a sufficiently messy, obstinate struggle, they might move us into a holding category, a problem to be deferred for a galactic rotation or two. To the wolves, that would not count as defeat in any sense: merely a drawing of breath. But we were warm, fleet creatures who operated on timescales utterly beneath their comprehension. A mayfly would regard an extra hour as a welcome stay of execution.
We had to think like mayflies.
‘Put me through,’ Pinky said.
‘No,’ Lady Arek answered. ‘I can’t risk it. I’ve had no direct contact with Snowdrop for forty minutes. There’s too high a chance of wolf interception.’
‘Do it anyway.’
‘Dear Scorpio . . .’ Her voice broke on the name that came most naturally to her, the name he no longer wished to carry. ‘Dear friend.’
‘Do it,’ I said, speaking up. ‘I have a message for Snowdrop as well.’
There was a silence, broken only by the occasional static crackle as the weapons discharges burst into our comms circuits. ‘I’ve opened the link. Voice only, and no guarantee that it’ll hold. Snowdrop and I have already made our farewells.’
‘Then this is mine,’ I said. ‘Snowdrop: I hope you can hear me. I see what you’re doing, and it’s magnificent. It will fail, as you know it will fail, but your brave actions will have bought us the time and the distraction we need. For that I thank you.’
Her voice came through: a thinned, metallic approximation of the real thing. I might not have recognised it had I not already spent time with her.
‘Don’t feel sorry for me. Every hour that I haven’t been trapped in Swinehouse is an hour I never expected to live. The others feel the same way. We have always been ready for this. Make that exchange count. Will you do one thing for me?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Accept your true name. Glass went to a lot of trouble to find you. We were all counting on her to succeed. Now she’s brought you to us, you have to accept what you are. Promise me you will do this.’
My voice faltered. ‘I can’t promise what I don’t believe in.’
‘But you will, in time. So make that adjustment. No one’s asking you to forsake the memories of who you thought you were before Glass arrived. I know you had family, and she ripped them away. I’m sorry about that, Warren. But it was all only scar tissue. Become the man we need you to be. You are Sky Marshall Warren Clavain, a Knight of Cydonia.’
I intoned the words she wished me to say: ‘I am Sky Marshall Warren Clavain.’
‘Now say it like you mean it.’
‘I am Sky Marshall Warren Clavain,’ I said, more forcefully.
‘Shout it, soldier. Tell the world who you are.’
I raged: ‘I am Sky Marshall Warren Clavain!’
‘And the rest!’
‘A Knight of Cydonia!’
‘Good . . . good.’ Snowdrop became quieter, seemingly satisfied. ‘That’s better. Deep down, you already know. Avenge us, Sky Marshall. You have the Gideon stones. Now slay some wolves.’
‘Goodbye, Snowdrop,’ I said.
‘Goodbye, Sky Marshall. And now, could I speak to Pinky, please? We’ve a few things to say to each other, all of them private.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The pigs were in a state of consternation, which had nothing to do with our impending arrival at Lady Arek’s ship. They were already being dealt with by Scythe: dozens of sphere robots had bustled out of somewhere (I had only ever seen a few of them at a time before) and were now encouraging, or in some cases forcing, the refugees to adopt fixed postures with their backs to the floor. Once they obeyed, the area of floor beneath them puckered in as if it were made of rubber, forming a partial enclosure around the recumbent form. The floor did not close over completely – it left a snug opening so that the occupant could still breathe and communicate. But in all other senses they were totally imprisoned by the floor, unable to move their limbs or in any way free themselves.
I understood instantly: the ship was making provision for the deceleration burst. But to the refugees, it was as if they were being forcibly absorbed into the floor like so many trophies. Some, including Barras, were trying to impose some kind of calm, insisting that this had to be part of some plan for their protection. But for too many of the refugees the whole experience must have brought back sharp memories of imprisonment and torture in the Swinehouse. The worst of the resistors were being pinned in place by the spheres, literally pressed into the yielding floor until the floor swaddled itself around their forms and stopped them thrashing.
Barras was one of the ones not yet interred.
‘Tell me this is for our benefit.’
‘It will be,’ I said, equally astonished and enraged that the ship had not thought fit to tell me that my concerns had been noted and acted upon. ‘When this weightless phase is over, which will be in about eighty minutes, Scythe will have to brake very hard. If you were left to float around, I don’t think many of you would survive the process. This way it will be uncomfortable but survivable.’
‘Some of us only just made it through the last one.’
‘I know, and this will be worse. I’m sorry, Barras.’ I looked out among the confusion of refugees and sphere robots, a storm of rags and scraps littering the air as the unwilling patients resisted their fates. ‘It will be all right. Can you give them my word that this isn’t anything bad, and they’ll be let out of the floor once our manoeuvres are complete?’
Barras eyed me quizzically. ‘You know that for a fact?’
‘I don’t, but everything I’ve seen so far suggests to me that this ship wants to protect its occupants, including you.’
‘They’d feel better if that reassurance came from Pinky.’
I wondered how much of the truth to share with him. Then decided that any trust was better consolidated by absolute openness, no matter how unpalatable the news.
‘Snowdrop is going to die, Barras. The wolves have hit Lady Arek’s stronghold. There are a few folk still inside, and they’re using whatever weapons they have to delay the wolf incursion. Ultimately, none of what they have will work. But that delaying action helps us.’
Barras absorbed what I had said. I hardly dared wonder about the shared hist
ory that existed between this man, Snowdrop and Pinky. It was none of my business and yet I still sensed the edge of something as harrowing and wonderful as any human story of friendship and resilience. They did not have to be human to be people. All had been through far more than I could imagine; far more than I wished to imagine.
‘Is he with her now?’
‘Some final words,’ I said softly. ‘Lady Arek was against establishing a link, but we persuaded her.’
Barras met my eyes, a mutual understanding passing between us.
‘Some things matter too much. After what Pinky went through in the Swinehouse . . . this doesn’t seem fair.’
‘Nothing is. Cold as it seems, that’s probably the safest philosophy to live by.’
‘I’ll tell them there’s nothing to fear,’ Barras said, looking doubtfully out at the unruly chaos of pigs, shredded clothing and dogged, kindly robots trying to do their best. ‘And I hope I don’t live to regret that promise.’
‘Thank you.’
Before he turned to the others, he had one last question for me. ‘There is a plan, isn’t there? I mean, if we can’t go back to the stronghold, then I don’t suppose there’s any safety to be found in the Rust Belt at all. That means we have to live somewhere else.’ He paused and repeated himself, this time with a more plaintive note. ‘There is a plan?’
‘There will be,’ I said.
The comms had ceased.
Lady Arek’s surveillance assets had gone dark across the Rust Belt.
Flares garlanded Yellowstone as the wolves turned against the largest of the surviving structures. In some cases there was still enough air inside them for fires to burn.
Nothing diverted Scythe or caused it to recalculate its approach. It was only quite near the end, in the last minutes of our flight, that we had verification that we were closing in on the right object: a speck of debris that was a little warmer than its neighbours, but not so much that it stood out across thousands of kilometres. Then our darkdrives went into emergency reverse thrust, ten gees of sudden deceleration, and instead of whipping right past our objective we were on it, coming to a bruising but precise standstill only twenty metres from Lady Arek. After that, everything happened very quickly. Scythe had already modelled the optimum approach for docking, and we orientated and latched on with indecent, hull-clanging haste. It helped that Glass and Lady Arek had already agreed and coordinated a common lock interface, so there was no need for Scythe to go through the troubling business of adapting itself to the other, slower-witted spacecraft.
Just as swiftly, Lady Arek and Probably Rose came aboard with the Gideon stones, as well as several cases of supplies and weapons. We were nearly ready to detach. Almost certainly the wolves had picked up on something happening here, for that ten-gee slowdown had forced the darkdrives to operate at a level where their reaction products lingered in this universe a little longer than otherwise.
‘We will speak of what you went through later,’ Lady Arek said, hugging Pinky. ‘Never think for a second that this debt will be forgotten.’
‘It’s nothing compared to what we owe Snowdrop and the others.’ He eased himself from her embrace. ‘You did all right, Rash. So did Stinky.’
‘You think he might be cut from the old cloth, after all?’
‘Jury’s still deliberating. But . . . he didn’t let us down.’
‘I must look at your injuries, Clavain, yes,’ Probably Rose said, eyeing where I had been shot.
‘What am I, pork?’ Pinky asked.
‘You are made of injuries. If I treated one, I’d have to treat them all, and then where would it end?’
‘Fair point,’ the pig acknowledged.
‘Besides,’ Probably Rose went on. ‘You are not the one who was shot. Have you recovered from the haemoclast?’
‘I’m all right,’ I admitted. ‘Lady Arek’s aim was true, and the suits flushed the haemoclast out of us while we were still on Yellowstone.’
‘Was it as bad as they say?’
‘No. Much worse. But I’m feeling much better with my own blood back in me, and my wounds have been fixed up well enough. This leg of mine can wait for the time being. Somewhere in here is an exoskeleton Glass provided me for when we were leaving Sun Hollow. If I can find it again, I won’t need to put any load on my leg.’
‘If you find it, see if you can find some others,’ Lady Arek said. ‘We may all have need before very long. Probably Rose, can you see what can be done for the evacuees?’
Probably Rose steeled herself for work. ‘Show me to them. And send medical servitors and supplies, yes.’
Lady Arek turned to me. ‘Is there any word on Hourglass?’
‘I found her floating in a bottle, about to be put into a medical coma.’
A sharp shake of her head. ‘Now is not the time for her to abdicate control of this ship.’
‘I don’t think she likes it either, but it’s what needs to be done. Glass will come back to us when she can. Until then we’re on our own. But the ship will oblige, I think, especially if we can help it understand our requirements.’ I nodded over her shoulder, into the still-open lock. ‘Is there anything else inside that shuttle that we need to unload?’
‘All essential items have already come aboard.’
‘Then we’d better close up and we’ll be under way,’ I said, wondering why Omori was taking so long to leave the shuttle.
‘There’s a difficulty,’ Lady Arek said, looking back over her shoulder to the airlock where our two ships were still mated. ‘We took some incoming fire from the Swinehouse, after I sent you that signal. Omori had to fly her out on manual control, and now she won’t accept our commands to go away.’
‘Then we abandon that part of the plan and make a run for it anyway. If the wolves converge on this point in space they’ll find a drifting shuttle and assume that was the source of the emissions.’
Lady Arek turned back again. ‘Omori! We shall think of something else!’ Then, to me: ‘I will audit the systems as soon as I can. But in the meantime, you can help me. Does this vehicle still have drone missiles, the ones Hourglass uses for reconnaissance?’
‘I think so,’ I said, unwilling to commit to an answer since the control of those missiles was another question entirely. ‘I suppose we could attach one of them to the shuttle, boost it that way . . . as long as it made enough noise and light, it would serve . . . ?’
I trailed off, realising what was happening in the same instant as Lady Arek. Omori had closed the airlock connection from the shuttle’s side and was already initiating a forced un-docking, severing our two ships.
Lady Arek hammered on the now sealed lock. ‘Omori! No! You do not need to do this!’
But Omori was doing it anyway.
The shuttle detached from Scythe. We watched it through the false windows either side of the lock, easing away from us on attitude jets until Omori had created enough of a safe margin to engage the engines. The shuttle corkscrewed, then dashed away on an arcing trajectory. I watched it numbly, aware of the sacrifice I had just witnessed, unable to comprehend how it must have felt to Lady Arek. She seemed paralysed, stunned into inaction. I was about to suggest that we would be wasting Omori’s sacrifice unless we moved immediately, but I had gravely underestimated her.
‘He has made his choice and there is nothing I can do about it,’ she stated. ‘Now we had better make it count. There’s nowhere safe for us in this system; nothing to delay our departure for Ararat. We’ll need to run the darkdrives to the limit of detection, but not one thrust increment beyond that threshold.’
‘The ship should understand,’ I said. ‘The deeper question is whether it can keep all of us alive. I only saw two reefersleep caskets.’
‘Then it will need to make more. I imagine that will be comfortably within its capabilities.’
‘Aren’t you taking rather a lot on faith?’
She looked at me patiently. ‘Let me explain something about survival. You do not worry a
bout the third or fourth stepping stone until you have successfully traversed the first and second. Anything beyond them is a diversion of energies away from the immediate moment. And we are in that moment now.’
I smiled, accepting my lesson. ‘Rash?’
‘Lady Aura-Rashmika-Els-Khouri,’ Pinky said. ‘Arek is much less of a mouthful.’
‘Show me to the injured,’ Probably Rose requested.
We fled.
The wolf concentration around Lady Arek’s former stronghold was a thick black coating now, the machines pressing in on each other like demented puzzle pieces, locking into some secret configuration. They jostled and surged, settling into denser and denser formations even as more machines arrived from around the Rust Belt, converging along sooty flows that we only saw because they blocked all forms of light. Lady Arek’s weapons had either expired or were no longer capable of blasting through any part of that screen. We had to assume the worst: that the inner layer of machines would shortly penetrate the locks and passages that led into the habitable parts of the stronghold, or simply grind their way through rock and rubble until they reached the same objective. No signals were now possible between us, and perhaps that was a mercy. There was nothing we could do for them, and no news they could offer us that would not have been harrowing. It was conceivable, likely even, that Snowdrop and her associates were already dead, and all that remained was the last dogged defiance of a few housekeeping programmes. But the reactors had not blown, to the best of our knowledge.
Nor had wolves yet caught up with Omori. But they were on their way. We could detect sub-flows breaking away from the main movement within the Rust Belt, being assigned to this new target. From four points, spaced around Yellowstone at roughly equal divisions, black wisps were fingering in the direction of the shuttle. They were not wasting energy moving any faster than they needed to. That, I think, was the most terrifying thing of all: that this alien killing system knew that it did not need to be hasty, not against such trifling creatures as ourselves. It would get us in the end.
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