Skade reached down to her belly with both gauntleted hands. No seam had been visible in her armour before, but now the curved white plate that covered her abdomen detached itself from the rest of the suit. Skade placed it next to her, then returned her hands to her sides. Where the armour had been opened, a bulge of soft human flesh moved under the thin, crosshatched mesh of a vacuum suit inner layer.
‘We’re ready,’ she said.
Jaccottet moved towards her and knelt down, one knee resting on the mound of fused ice that covered Skade’s lower half. The black box of white surgical instruments sat splayed open at his side.
‘Pig,’ she said, ‘take a scalpel from the lower compartment. That will do for now.’
Scorpio’s trotter poked at the snugly embedded instrument. Khouri reached over and pulled it out for him. She placed it delicately in his grasp.
‘For the last time,’ Scorpio said, ‘don’t make me do this.’ Clavain sat down next to him, crossing his legs. ‘It’s all right, Scorp. Just do what she says. I’ve a few tricks up my sleeve she doesn’t know about. She won’t be able to block all my commands, even if she thinks she can.’
‘Tell him that if you think it makes it easier for him,’ Skade said.
‘He’s never lied to me,’ Scorpio said. ‘I don’t think he’d start now.’
The white instrument sat in his hand, absurdly light, an innocent little surgical tool. There was no evil in the thing itself, but at that moment it felt like the focus of all the inchoate badness in the universe, its pristine whiteness part of the same sense of malignity. Titanic possibilities were balanced in his palm. He could not hold the instrument the way its designers had intended. All the same, he could still manipulate it well enough to do harm. He supposed it did not really matter to Clavain how skilfully the work was done. A certain imprecision might even help him, dulling the white-hot edge of the pain Skade intended.
‘How do you want me to sit?’ Clavain asked.
‘Lie down,’ Skade said. ‘On your back. Hands at your sides.’
Clavain positioned himself. ‘Anything else?’
‘That’s up to you. If you have anything you want to say, now would be a good time. In a little while, you might find it difficult.’
‘Only one thing,’ Clavain said.
Scorpio moved closer. The dreadful task was almost upon him. ‘What is it, Nevil?’
‘When this is over, don’t waste any time. Get Aura to safety. That’s really all I care about.’ He paused, licked his lips. Around them the fine growth of his beard glistened with a haze of beautiful white crystals. ‘But if there’s time, and if it doesn’t inconvenience you, I’d ask you to bury me at sea.’
‘Where?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Here,’ Clavain said. ‘As soon as you can. No ceremony. The sea will do the rest.’
There was no sign that Skade had heard him, or cared what he had to say. ‘Let’s start,’ she said to Jaccottet. ‘Do exactly as I tell you. Oh, and Khouri?’
‘Yes?’ the woman asked.
‘You really don’t have to watch this.’
‘She’s my daughter,’ she said. ‘I’m staying right here until I get her back.’ Then she turned to Clavain, and Scorpio sensed a vast private freight of communication pass between them. Perhaps it was more than just his imagination. After all, they were both Conjoiners now.
‘It’s all right,’ Clavain said aloud.
Khouri knelt down and kissed him on the forehead. ‘I just wanted to say thank you.’
Behind her, Skade’s hand moved over the holoclavier again.
Outside the iceberg, on the spreading fringe of whiteness, Urton looked at Vasko the way a teacher would look at a truant child. ‘You took your time,’ she said.
Vasko fell to his knees. He vomited. It came from nowhere, with no warning. It left him feeling excavated, husked out.
Urton knelt down on the ice next to him. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Her voice was urgent.
But he couldn’t speak. He wiped a smear of vomit from his chin. His eyes stung. He felt simultaneously ashamed and liberated by his reaction, as if in that awful admission of emotional weakness he had also found an unsuspected strength. In that moment of hollowing, that moment in which he felt the core of himself evacuated, he knew that he had taken a step into the adult world that Urton and Jaccottet thought was theirs alone.
Above, the sky was a purple-grey bruise. The sea roiled, grey phantasms slipping between the waves.
‘Talk to me, Vasko,’ she said.
He pushed himself to his feet. His throat was raw, his mind as clear and clean as an evacuated airlock.
‘Help me with the incubator,’ he said.
TWENTY-TWO
p Eridani 40, 2675
Battle raged in the immediate volume of space around the Pattern Juggler planet. Near the heart of the engagement itself, and close to the geometric centre of his vast ship Zodiacal Light, Remontoire sat in a posture of perfect zenlike calm. His expression betrayed only mild interest in the outcome of current events. His eyes were closed; his hands were folded demurely in his lap. He looked bored and faintly distracted, like a man about to doze off in a waiting room.
Remontoire was not bored, nor was he about to doze off. Boredom was a condition of consciousness he barely remembered, like anger or hate or the thirst for mother’s milk. He had experienced many states of mind since leaving Mars nearly five hundred years earlier, including some that could only be approximated in the flat, limiting modalities of baseline human language. Being bored was not amongst them. Nor did he expect it to play a significant role in his mental affairs in the future, most certainly not while the wolves were still around. And he wasn’t very likely to experience sleep, either.
Now and then some part of him - his eyelids, or even his entire head - twitched minutely, betraying something of the extreme state of non-boredom he was actually experiencing. Tactical data surged incessantly through his mind with the icy clarity of a mountain torrent. He was actually running his mind at a dangerously high clock-rate, just barely within the cooling parameters of his decidedly old-fashioned Conjoiner mental architecture. Skade would have laughed at him now as he struggled to match a thought-processing rate that would - to her - have barely merited comment. Skade could think this fast and simultaneously fragment her consciousness into half a dozen parallel streams. And she could do it while moving around, exerting herself, whereas Remontoire had to sit in a state of trancelike stillness so as not to put additional loads on his already stressed body and mind. They really were creatures of different centuries.
But although Skade had been in his thoughts much of late, she was of no immediate concern now. He considered it likely she was dead. His suspicions had been strong enough even before he had permitted Khouri to descend into the planet’s atmosphere, following after Skade’s downed corvette, but he had been careful not to make too much of them. For if Skade was dead, then so was Aura.
Something changed: a tick and a whirr of the great dark orrery of war in which he floated. For hours the opposed forces - the baseline humans, Skade’s Conjoiners, the Inhibitors - had wheeled around the planet in a fixed formation, as if they had finally settled into some mathematical configuration of maximum stability. The other Conjoiners were cowed: for weeks they had been gaining an edge over Remontoire’s loose alliance of humans, pigs and Resurgam refugees. They had stolen Aura, and through her they had learned many of the secrets that had enabled Remontoire and his allies to outflank the Inhibitor forces around Delta Pavonis. Later, Remontoire had given them even more in return for Khouri. But since Skade’s disappearance the other Conjoiners had become confused and directionless, far more than would have been the case with an equivalent grouping from Remontoire’s generation. Skade had been too powerful, too effective at manipulation. During the war against the Demarchists (which seemed now, to Remontoire, like an innocently remembered childhood diversion) the ruthlessly democratic structure of Conjoiner politics had b
een gradually partitioned, with the creation of security layers: the Closed Council, the Inner Sanctum, even - perhaps - the rumoured Night Council. Skade was the logical end product of that process of compartmentalisation: highly skilled, highly resourceful, highly knowledgeable, highly adept at manipulating others. In the pressure of the war against the Demarchists, his people had - unwittingly - made a tyrant for themselves.
And Skade had been a very good tyrant. She had only wanted the best for her people, even if that meant extinction for the rest of humanity. Her single-mindedness, her willingness to transcend the limits of the flesh and the mind, had been inspirational even to Remontoire. He had very nearly chosen to fight on her side rather than Clavain’s. It was no wonder those Conjoiners around her had forgotten how to think for themselves. In thrall to Skade, there had never been any need.
But now Skade was gone, and her army of swift, brilliant puppets didn’t know what to do next.
In the last ten hours, Remontoire’s forces had intercepted twenty-eight thousand separate invitations to negotiation from the remaining Conjoiner elements, squirted through the brief windows in the sphere of jammed communications afflicting the entire theatre of battle. After all the betrayals, after all the fragile alliances and spiteful enmities, they still thought he was a man they could do business with. There was, he thought, something else as well: hints that they were worried about something he had yet to identify. It might have been a gambit to snare his attention and encourage him to talk to them, but he wasn’t sure.
He had decided to keep them waiting just a little bit longer, at least until he had some concrete data from the surface.
Now, however, something had changed. He had detected the alteration in the disposition of battle forces one-fifteenth of a second earlier; in the ensuing time nothing had happened to suggest that it was anything but real.
The Inhibitors were moving. A clump of wolf machines - they moved in clumps, aggregations, flickering clouds, rather than ordered squadrons or detachments - had left its former position. Between ninety-five and ninety-nine per cent of the wolf assets around p Eridani 40 - estimated by mass, or volume (it was difficult to be sure how much wolf machinery had actually followed them from Delta Pavonis) - held station, but according to the sensor returns, which could not always be trusted, the small aggregate - between one and five per cent of the total force - was on its way to the planet.
It accelerated smoothly, leaving physics squirming in its wake. When Inhibitor machinery moved, it did so without any hint of Newtonian reaction. The recent modifications to the Conjoiner drives had approximated something of the same effect by making the exhaust particles undergo rapid decay into a non-observable quantum state. But the wolves used a different principle. Even up close, there was no hint of any thrusting medium. The best guess - and guess it was - was that the Inhibitor drives employed a form of the quantum Casimir effect, using the unbalanced vacuum pressure on two parallel plates to skip themselves through space-time. The fact that the machines accelerated several trillion times faster than theory allowed was deemed slightly less embarrassing than having no theory at all.
He ran a simulation, predicting the flight path of the aggregate. It might fracture into smaller elements, or combine with another, but if it continued on its present course, it was destined to skim the planet’s immediate airspace.
This troubled Remontoire. So far the alien machines had avoided coming that close. It was as if, scripted deep into their controlling routines, was an edict, a fundamental command to avoid unnecessary contact with Pattern Juggler worlds.
But humans had taken the battle to the waterlogged planet. How deep did that edict run? Perhaps the visible downing of Skade’s corvette had tripped some switch, the damage already done. Perhaps Inhibitor machinery had already entered the biosphere. In which case even this Juggler planet might not be safe for very much longer.
The aggregate had been underway for nearly a second, from Remontoire’s point of view. Assuming the usual acceleration curves, it would reach the planet’s airspace in under forty minutes. In his present state of consciousness, that would seem like an eternity. But Remontoire knew better than to believe that.
Remontoire’s trident-shaped ship departed from the parking bay in the side of the Zodiacal Light. Almost immediately he felt the spinal compression as the main drive came on, as hard and unforgiving as a fall on to concrete. The hull creaked and protested as the acceleration ramped up through five, six, seven gees. The single outrigger-mounted engine was a microminiature Conjoiner drive, engineered with watchmaker precision, every component squeezed down to neurotic tolerances. It would have made Remontoire nervous, had he permitted himself to feel nervousness.
He was the only living thing aboard the recently manufactured ship. Even he seemed something of an afterthought, crammed into a tiny eyelike hollow in the long carbon-black needle of the hull. There were no windows, and only the bare minimum of sensor apertures, but through his implants Remontoire barely perceived the little craft, sensing it only as a glassy extension of his personal space. Beyond the hard boundaries of the ship was a less tangible sphere of sensor coverage: passive and active contacts tickling the part of his brain associated with the proprioceptive knowledge of his own body image.
The thrust levelled out at eight gees. There was no inertial protection against that acceleration, even though bulk control of inertia had been within the reach of Conjoiner technology for more than half a century. It couldn’t be allowed. The other technology that the ship carried - the glittering, tinsel-like machinery of the hypometric weapon - was highly intolerant of alterations to the local metric. The hypometric weapons were difficult enough to use in nearly flat, unmolested space-time. But within the influence of inertial technology they became malevolently unpredictable, like spiteful imps. Remontoire would have liked to have accelerated even harder, but above eight gees there was a real danger of shifting the weapon’s tiny components out of alignment.
The weapon itself wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Shrouded in a cigar-shaped nacelle flung out as an extension from the same outrigger that held the drive, there was no muzzle, no exhaust, no surface detailing of any kind. The only design constraint had been to arrange for the weapon to be as far from the human occupant as possible. It was, Remontoire thought, a measure of the device’s threatening glamour that he actually felt safer with the dangerous, unstable miniature Conjoiner drive between him and the quixotic weapon.
He checked the progress of the Inhibitor aggregate, neither gratified nor disappointed to see that it was exactly where he had predicted it would be. Something had changed, though: his departure from the Zodiacal Light had drawn the attention of the other protagonists. One of Skade’s former allies was moving on an intercept trajectory with his ship at a higher acceleration than he could sustain. The other Conjoiner craft would engage him within fifteen minutes. Five or six minutes after that, a second aggregate would have reached him.
Remontoire allowed himself a flicker of disquiet, just enough to pump some adrenalin into his blood. Then he blocked it, the way one slammed the door on a boisterous party.
He knew, rationally, that the logical thing would have been to remain on the Zodiacal Light, where his co-ordination and insight were most valued. He could have programmed a beta-level simulation of himself to fly this ship, or asked for a volunteer. There would have been dozens of willing candidates, some of whom had been equipped with Conjoiner implants of their own. But he had insisted on taking the ship himself. It wasn’t just because he had spent more time than most of them learning the ways of the hypometric weapon. There was also a sense of obligation: it was something he had to do.
It was, he knew, because of Ana Khouri. He had made a mistake in letting her travel down to the planet on her own. From a military perspective it had been exactly the right thing to do: no point committing already overstretched resources when there was every likelihood that Aura was already dead. More than that, he thought, wh
en there was every chance that Aura had already been as useful to them as she was ever going to be. Also, nothing much larger than an escape capsule had stood a chance of reaching the surface anyway, with the Inhibitor blockade in maximum effect.
But Clavain wouldn’t have seen it that way. Nine times out of ten he had based his decisions upon the strict application of military sense. He wouldn’t have lived through five hundred years otherwise. But one time out of ten he would disregard the rules entirely and do something that made no sense except on a humane level.
Remontoire thought it likely that this would have been one of those occasions. No matter that Skade and Aura were probably both dead: Clavain would have gone down with Khouri even if the rescue attempt itself was almost guaranteed to end in their deaths.
Time and again over the years Remontoire had examined the minutiae of Clavain’s life, the critical points, trying to work out if those irrational acts had helped or hindered his old friend. He reviewed Clavain’s decisions once more while he waited for the Conjoiner ship to meet him. As always he arrived at no satisfactory answer. But he had decided that this was a time when he needed to live by Clavain’s rules rather than the rigid gamesmanship of tactical analysis.
A clock rang in his brain. His fifteen minutes were up.
There had been no point thinking about the approaching Conjoiner ship before it arrived: a quick review of the options had shown him that nothing would be gained by deviating from his present course.
The other ship pushed through his concentric sensor boundaries like a fish nosing through sharply defined sea currents. In his mind’s eye it became a tangible thing rather than a vague hint in the sensor data.
It was a moray-class corvette like Skade’s craft, just as light-suckingly black as Remontoire’s ship, but shaped more like a weirdly barbed fish-hook than the trident form of his own machine. Even at close range, the spectral whisper of its highly stealthed drives was barely detectable. On average, its hull radiated at a chill 2.7 kelvin above absolute zero. Up close, in the microwave spectrum, it was a quilt of hot and cold spots. He mapped the emplacement of cryo-arithmetic engines; observed those that were functioning less efficiently than their neighbours; observed also those that were running worryingly cold, teetering on the edge of algorithmic-cycle runaway. The occasional blue flicker sparked as one of the nodes dropped below 1 kelvin, before being dragged back into lockstep with its cohorts.
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