‘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?’<
br />
‘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 the 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.’
NINETEEN
Clavain did not know whether to laugh or cry when he saw the weapons and realised how antiquated and ineffective they were compared with the oldest, lowest-lethality weapons of a Conjoiner corvette or Demarchist raider. They had obviously been cobbled together from several centuries’ worth of black market jumble sales, more on the basis of how sleek and nasty they looked than on how much damage they could really do. Apart from the handful of firearms stored inside the ship to be used to repel
boarders, the bulk of the weapons were stowed in concealed hull hatches or packed into dorsal or ventral pods that Clavain had earlier assumed held communications equipment or sensor arrays. Not all of the weapons were even functional. About a third of them had either never worked or had broken down, or had run out of whatever ammunition or fuel-source they needed to work.
To access the weapons, Antoinette had pulled back a hidden panel in the floor. A thick metal column had risen slowly from the well, unfolding control arms and display devices as it ascended. A schematic of Storm Bird rotated in one sphere, with the active weapons pulsing red. They were linked back into the main avionics web by snaking red data pathways. Other spheres and read-outs on the main panel showed the immediate volume of space around the ship at various magnifications. At the lowest magnification, the banshee ships were visible as indistinct radar-echo smudges creeping closer to the freighter.
‘Fifteen thousand klicks,’ Antoinette said.
‘I still say we should pull the evasive pattern,’ Xavier murmured.
‘Burn that fuel when you need it,’ Clavain said. ‘Not until then. Antoinette, are all those weapons deployed?’
‘Everything we’ve got.’
‘Good. Do you mind if I ask why you were unwilling to deploy them earlier?’
She tapped controls, finessing the weapons’ deployment, reallocating data flows through less congested parts of the web.
‘Two reasons, Clavain. One: it’s a hanging offence to even think of installing weps on a civilian ship. Two: all those juicy guns might just be the final incentive the banshees need to come in and rob us.’
‘It won’t come to that. Not if you trust me.’
‘Trust you, Clavain?’
‘Let me sit there and operate those weapons.’
She looked at Xavier. ‘Not a hope in hell.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 180