‘How many operational shuttles?’ Clavain asked.
Scorpio answered after a moment’s hesitation, perhaps wondering how much he should say in Vasko’s presence. ‘Four,’ he said.
Clavain walked on for half a dozen paces before saying, ‘There were five or six when I left. We can’t afford to lose shuttles, Scorp.’
‘We’re doing our best with very limited resources. Some of them may fly again, but I can’t promise anything.’
Scorpio was leading them towards the nearest of the low metal structures around the dome’s perimeter. As they walked away from the shuttle, many of the shadowy machines began to trundle towards it, extending manipulators or dragging umbilical cables across the ground. The way they moved made Vasko imagine injured sea monsters hauling ruined tentacles across dry land.
‘If we need to leave quickly,’ Clavain said, ‘could we do it? Could any of the other ships be used? Once the Zodiacal Light arrives, they only have to reach orbit. I’m not asking for full space-worthiness, just something that will make a few trips.’
‘Zodiacal Light will have its own shuttles,’ Scorpio said. ‘And even if it doesn’t, we still have the only ship we need to reach orbit.’
‘You’d better hope and pray we never have to use it,’ Clavain said.
‘By the time we need the shuttles,’ Scorpio said, ‘we’ll have contingencies in place.’
‘The time we need them might be this evening. Has that occurred to you?’
They had arrived at the entrance to the cordon of structures surrounding the dome. As they approached it, another pig stepped out into the night, moving with the exaggerated side-to-side swagger common to his kind. He was shorter and stockier than Scorpio, if such a thing were possible. His shoulders were so massive and yokelike that his arms hung some distance from the sides of his body, swinging like pendulums when he walked. He looked as if he could pull a man limb from limb.
The pig glared at Vasko, deep frown lines notching his brow. ‘Looking at something, kid?’
Vasko hurried out his answer. ‘No, sir.’
‘Relax, Blood,’ Scorpio said. ‘Vasko’s had a busy day. He’s just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Right, son?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The pig called Blood nodded at Clavain. ‘Good to have you back, old guy.’
Approaching Hela, 2615
Quaiche was still close enough to Morwenna for real-time communication. ‘You won’t like what I’m going to do,’ he said, ‘but this is for the good of both of us.’
Her reply came after a crackle of static. ‘You promised you wouldn’t be long.’
‘I still intend to keep that promise. I’m not going to be gone one minute longer than I said. This is more about you than me, actually.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘I’m worried that there might be something down on Hela apart from the bridge. I’ve been picking up a metallic echo and it hasn’t gone away. Could be nothing - probably is nothing - but I can’t take the chance that it might be a booby trap. I’ve encountered this kind of thing before and it makes me nervous.’
‘Then turn around,’ Morwenna said.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t. I really need to check out this bridge. If I don’t come back with something good, Jasmina’s going to have me for breakfast.’ He would leave it to Morwenna to figure out what that would mean for her, still buried in the scrimshaw suit with Grelier her only hope of escape.
‘But you can’t just walk into a trap,’ Morwenna said.
‘I’m more worried about you, frankly. The Daughter will take care of me, but if I trigger something it might start taking pot shots at anything it sees, up to and including the Dominatrix.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I thought about having you pull away from the Haldora/Hela system, but that would waste too much time and fuel. I’ve got a better idea: we’ll use what we’ve been given. Haldora is a nice, fat shield. It’s just sitting there doing nothing. I’m going to put it between you and whatever’s on Hela, make some bloody use of the thing.’
Morwenna considered the implications for a few seconds. There was a sudden urgency in her voice. ‘But that will mean . . .’
‘Yes, we’ll be out of line-of-sight contact, so we won’t be able to talk to each other. But it’ll only be for a few hours, six at the most.’ He got that in before she could protest further. ‘I’ll program the Dominatrix to wait behind Haldora for six hours, then return to its present position relative to Hela. Not so bad, is it? Get some sleep and you’ll barely realise I’m gone.’
‘Don’t do this, Horris. I don’t want to be in a place where I can’t talk to you.’
‘It’s only for six hours.’
When she responded she did not sound any calmer, but he could hear the shift in pitch in her voice that meant she had at least accepted the futility of argument. ‘But if something happens in that time - if you need me, or I need you - we won’t be able to talk.’
‘Only for six hours,’ he said. ‘Three hundred minutes or so. Nothing. Be done in a flash.’
‘Can’t you drop some relays, so we can still keep in touch?’
‘Don’t think so. I could sew some passive reflectors around Haldora, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that might lead a smart missile back to you. Anyway, it would take a couple of hours to get them into position. I could be down under the bridge by then.’
‘I’m frightened, Horris. I really don’t want you to do this.’
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘I just have to.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘I’m afraid the plan is already under way,’ Quaiche replied gently. ‘I’ve sent the necessary commands to the Dominatrix. It’s moving, love. It’ll be inside Haldora’s shadow in about thirty minutes.’
There was silence. He thought for a moment that the link might already have broken, that his calculations had been in error. But then she said, ‘So why did you bother to ask me if you’d already made up your mind?’
EIGHT
Hela, 2727
For the first day they travelled hard, putting as much distance between themselves and the badlands communities as possible. For hours on end they sped along white-furrowed trails, slicing through slowly changing terrain beneath a sable sky. Occasionally they passed a transponder tower, an outpost or even another machine moving in the other direction.
Rashmika gradually became used to the hypnotic, bouncing motion of the skis, and was able to walk around the icejammer without losing her balance. Now and then she sat in her personal compartment, her knees folded up to her chin, looking out of the window at the speeding landscape and imagining that every malformed rock or ice fragment contained a splinter of alien empire. She thought about the scuttlers a lot, picturing the blank pages of her book filling with neat handwriting and painstaking crosshatched drawings.
She drank coffee or tea, consumed rations and occasionally spoke to Culver, though not as often he would have wished.
When she had planned her escape - except ‘escape’ wasn’t quite the right word, because it was not as if she was actually running from anything - but when she had planned it, anyway, she had seldom thought very far beyond the point when she left the village. The few times she had allowed her mind to wander past that point, she had always imagined herself feeling vastly more relaxed now that the difficult part - actually leaving her home, and the village - was over.
It wasn’t like that at all. She was not as tense as when she had climbed out of her home, but only because it would have been impossible to stay in that state for very long. Instead she had come down to a plateau of continual tension, a knot in her stomach that would not undo. Partly it was because she was now thinking ahead, into the territory she had left vague until now. Suddenly, dealing with the churches was a looming concrete event in the near future. But she was also concerned about what she had left behind. Three days, even six, had not seemed like such a long time when she had bee
n planning the trip to the caravans, but now she counted every hour. She imagined the village mobilising behind her, realising what had happened and uniting to bring her back. She imagined constabulary officers following the icejammer in fast vehicles of their own. None of them liked Crozet or Linxe to begin with. They would assume that the couple had talked her into it, that in some way they were the real agents of her misfortune. If they caught up, she would be chastised, but Crozet and Linxe would be ripped apart by the mob.
But there was no sign of pursuit. Admittedly Crozet’s machine was fast, but on the few occasions when they surmounted a rise, giving them a chance to look back fifteen or twenty kilometres along the trail, there was nothing behind them.
Nonetheless, Rashmika remained anxious despite Crozet’s assurances that there were no faster routes by which they might be cut off further on down the trail. Now and then, to oblige her, Crozet tuned into the village radio band, but most of the time he found only static. Nothing unusual about that, for radio reception on Hela was largely at the whim of the magnetic storms roiling around Haldora. There were other modes of communication - tight-beam laser-communication between satellites and ground stations, fibre-optic land lines - but most of these channels were under church control and in any case Crozet subscribed to none of them. He had means of tapping into some of them when he needed to, but now, he said, was not the time to risk drawing someone’s attention. When Crozet did finally tune into a non-garbled transmission from Vigrid, however, and Rashmika was able to listen to the daily news service for major villages, it was not what she had been expecting. While there were reports of cave-ins, power outages and the usual ups and downs of village life, there was no mention at all of anyone going missing. At seventeen, Rashmika was still under the legal care of her parents, so they would have had every right to report her absence. Indeed, they would have been breaking the law by failing to report her missing.
Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed.
When she had given the matter some further thought, she decided that her parents must be waiting to see what happened in the next few hours. She had, after all, not yet been away for more than half a day. If she had gone about her usual daily business, she would still have been at the library. Perhaps they were working on the assumption that she had left home unusually early that morning. Perhaps they had managed not to notice the note she had left for them, or the fact that her surface suit was missing from the locker.
But after sixteen hours there was still no news.
Her habits were erratic enough that her parents might not have worried about her absence for ten or twelve hours, but after sixteen - even if by some miracle they had missed the other rather obvious clues - there could be no doubt in their minds about what had happened. They would know she was gone. They would have to report it to the authorities, wouldn’t they?
She wondered. The authorities in the badlands were not exactly known for their ruthless efficiency. It was conceivable that the report of her absence had simply failed to reach the right desk. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia at all levels, it might not get there until the following day. Or perhaps the authorities were well informed but had decided not to notify the news channels for some reason. It was tempting to believe that, but at the same time she could think of no reason why they would delay.
Still, maybe there would be a security block around the next corner. Crozet didn’t seem to think so. He was driving as fast and as nonchalantly as ever. His icejammer knew these old ice trails so well that he merely seemed to be giving it vague suggestions about which direction to head in.
Towards the end of the first day’s travel, when Crozet was ready to pull in for the night, they picked up the news channel one more time. By then Rashmika had been on the road for the better part of twenty hours. There was still no sign that anyone had noticed.
She felt dejected, as if for her entire life she had fatally overestimated her importance in even the minor scheme of things in the Vigrid badlands.
Then, belatedly, another possibility occurred to her. It was so obvious that she should have thought of it immediately. It made vastly more sense than any of the unlikely contingencies she had considered so far.
Her parents, she decided, were well aware that she had left. They knew exactly when and they knew exactly why. She had been coy about her plans in the letter she had left for them, but she had no doubt that her parents would have been able to guess the broad details with reasonable accuracy. They even knew that she had continued to associate with Linxe after the scandal.
No. They knew what she was doing, and they knew it was all about her brother. They knew that she was on a mission of love, or if not love, then fury. And the reason they had told no one was because, secretly, despite all that they had said to her over the years, despite all the warnings they had given her about the risks of getting too close to the churches, they wanted her to succeed. They were, in their quiet and secret way, proud of what she had decided to do.
When she realised this, it hit home with the force of truth.
‘It’s all right,’ she told Crozet. ‘There won’t be any mention of me on the news.’
He shrugged. ‘What makes you so certain now?’
‘I just realised something, that’s all.’
‘You look like you need a good night’s sleep,’ Linxe said. She had brewed hot chocolate: Rashmika sipped it appreciatively. It was a long way from the nicest cup of hot chocolate anyone had ever made for her, but right then she couldn’t think of any drink that had ever tasted better.
‘I didn’t sleep much last night,’ Rashmika admitted. ‘Too worried about making it out this morning.’
‘You did grand,’ Linxe said. ‘When you get back, everyone will be very proud of you.’
‘I hope so,’ Rashmika said.
‘I have to ask one thing, though,’ Linxe said. ‘You don’t have to answer. Is this just about your brother, Rashmika? Or is there more to it than that?’
The question took Rashmika aback. ‘Of course it’s only about my brother.’
‘It’s just that you already have a bit of a reputation,’ Linxe said.
‘We’ve all heard about the amount of time you spend in the digs, and that book you’re making. They say there isn’t anyone else in the villages as interested in the scuttlers as Rashmika Els. They say you write letters to the church-sponsored archaeologists, arguing with them.’
‘I can’t help it if the scuttlers interest me,’ she said.
‘Yes, but what exactly is it you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet about?’
The question was phrased kindly, but Rashmika couldn’t help sounding irritated when she said, ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I mean, what is it you think everyone else has got so terribly wrong?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I’m as interested in hearing your side of the argument as anyone else’s.’
‘Except deep down you probably don’t care who’s right, do you? As long as stuff keeps coming out of the ground, what does anyone really care about what happened to the scuttlers? All you care about is getting spare parts for your icejammer.’
‘Manners, young lady,’ Linxe admonished.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rashmika said, blushing. She sipped on the hot chocolate. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. But I do care about the scuttlers and I do think no one is very interested in the truth of what really happened to them. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Amarantin.’
Linxe looked at her. ‘The what?’
‘The Amarantin were the aliens who evolved on Resurgam. They were evolved birds.’ She remembered drawing one of them for her book - not as a skeleton, but as they must have looked when they were alive. She had seen the Amarantin in her mind’s eye: the bright gleam of
an avian eye, the quizzical beaked smile of a sleek alien head. Her drawing had resembled nothing in the official reconstructions in the other archaeology texts, but it had always looked more authentically alive to her than those dead impressions, as if she had seen a living Amarantin and they had only had bones to go on. It made her wonder if her drawings of living scuttlers had the same vitality.
Rashmika continued, ‘Something wiped them out a million years ago. When humans colonised Resurgam, no one wanted to consider the possibility that whatever had wiped out the Amarantin might come back to do the same to us. Except Dan Sylveste, of course.’
‘Dan Sylveste?’ Linxe asked. ‘Sorry - also not ringing any bells.’ It infuriated Rashmika: how could she not know these things? But she tried not to let it show. ‘Sylveste was the archaeologist in charge of the expedition. When he stumbled on the truth, the other colonists silenced him. They didn’t want to know how much trouble they were in. But as we know, he turned out to be right in the end.’
‘I bet you feel a little affinity with him, in that case.’
‘More than a little,’ Rashmika said.
Rashmika still remembered the first time she had come across his name. It had been a casual reference in one of the archaeological texts she had uploaded on to her compad, buried in some dull treatise about the Pattern Jugglers. It was like lightning shearing through her skull. Rashmika had felt an electrifying sense of connection, as if her whole life had been a prelude to that moment. It was, she now knew, the instant when her interest in the scuttlers shifted from a childish diversion to something closer to obsession.
She could not explain this, but nor could she deny that it had happened.
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