But he hoped it was not going to come to that. When the shuttle was still at a safe distance, there had been talk of sending out one of their own vessels to meet it, so that a crew could verify that it was really what it appeared to be. But Scorpio had vetoed the idea. It would have taken too much time, delaying the rescue of the shuttle long enough for the other wolves to come dangerously close. And even if a human crew got aboard the shuttle and reported back that it was genuine, there would have been no way of knowing for sure that they had not been co-opted by the wolves, their memories sucked dry for codewords. By the same token, he could place no real reliance on the voices and faces of the shuttle’s crew that had been transmitted to the Infinity. They had seemed genuine enough, but the wolves had had millions of years to learn the art of expert, swift mimicry. Doubtless the crews of the lighthuggers had been certain that they were receiving friendly evacuees as well. No, there were only two choices, really: abandon it (probably destroying it to be on the safe side) or stake everything upon it being real. No half-measures. He was certain Clavain would have agreed with this analysis. The only thing he wasn’t certain of was which choice Clavain would have taken in the end. He could be a cold-hearted bastard when the situation demanded it.
Well, so can I, Scorpio thought to himself. But this wasn’t the time.
‘Two hundred metres,’ Vasko called, studying the laser ranger. ‘Getting close, Scorp. Are you certain you don’t have second thoughts?’
‘I’m certain.’
He became aware, joltingly, of Aura’s presence next to him. She appeared less childlike with each apparition. ‘This is too dangerous,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t take this risk, Scorpio. There’s too much to be lost.’
‘You don’t know any more about that shuttle than I do,’ he said.
‘I know that I don’t like it,’ she said.
He gritted his teeth. ‘This isn’t one of your little girl days, is it? This is one of your scary prophet days.’
‘She’s only telling us how she feels,’ Khouri said, sitting on Scorpio’s opposite side. ‘She has that right, doesn’t she, Scorp?’
‘I got the message already,’ he said.
‘Destroy it now,’ Aura said, golden-brown eyes aflame with authority.
‘One-fifty metres,’ Vasko said. ‘I think she means it, Scorp.’
‘I think she’d better shut up.’ But involuntarily his hand tightened on the trigger. He was one twitch away from doing it himself. He wondered how much warning the other ships had received before it was too late to do anything about it.
‘One-thirty. She’s within floodlight range now, Scorp.’
‘Light her up. Let’s see what happens.’
The view shuffled, making way for the grab from the optical cameras, the scene now illuminated by the floods. The shuttle was veering, turning end over end as it made its final approach. The light caught the texture of the hull: battered metal and ceramics, hyperdiamond viewing blisters, scratched and scuffed surface markings, glints of bare metal along the edges of panel lines, spirals of vapour from attitude jets. It looked terribly real, Scorpio thought. Too real, surely, to be the product of wolf camouflage. A wolf machine would only look human from a distance; up close, surely, it would reveal itself to be no more than a crude approximation shaped from myriad black cubes rather than metals and ceramics. There would be no smooth curves, no subtlety of detail, no uneven coloration or signs of damage and repair . . .
‘One-ten,’ Vasko said. ‘Ten metres closer and I’ll be disarming the cache weapon. You fine with that, Scorp?’
‘Copacetic.’
This had always been part of the plan. Any closer and the cache weapon stood a better than average chance of doing real damage to the Nostalgia for Infinity as well as the shuttle. Of course, if they needed the cache weapon in the first place . . . but Scorpio did not want to think about that.
‘Disarmed,’ Vasko said. ‘Ninety-five metres. Ninety.’
The shuttle’s slow tumble brought its tail-parts into view. Scorpio saw gaping exhaust nozzles packed together like multiple gunbarrels. They were still cooling down from operation, sliding down through the spectrum. Retracted tail-mounted landing gear, for dropping down on airless worlds, became visible. Blisters and pods of unguessable function. And something else: scabrous, black encrustations, stepped along geometric lines.
‘Wolf,’ Vasko said, his voice barely a whisper.
Scorpio looked at the ship, his heart frozen. Vasko was right. The black growths were exactly what they had seen around Skade’s ship, in the iceberg.
His hand tightened on the trigger. He could almost feel the hypometric weapons squirming in anticipation.
‘Scorp,’ Vasko said. ‘Kill it. Now.’
He did nothing.
‘Kill it!’ Vasko shouted.
‘It isn’t an impostor,’ Scorpio said. ‘It’s just been infect—’
Vasko seized the hypometric trigger from his hands, snapping it from the seat-rest. It trailed cables behind it. For a drawn-out moment, Vasko fumbled with it, struggling to get his fingers around the weird pig-specific trigger design. Scorpio fought back, leaning over in the seat until he was able to reach Vasko’s hand and wrestle the trigger under his own control once more. He plunged his hand into the complexity of the grip, using his other arm to hold Vasko back.
‘You’ll fucking pay for that,’ he snarled.
But the young man just said, ‘Kill it. Kill it now and deal with me later. It’s seventy-five fucking metres away, Scorp!’
Scorpio felt something cold press against the side of his neck. He whipped his head around, and there was Urton. She was holding something against him. All he could see was a blur of silver in her hand. A gun, or a knife, or a hypodermic - it didn’t make much difference.
‘Drop it, Scorp,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’
‘What is this?’ he asked calmly. ‘A mutiny?’
‘No, nothing that dramatic. Just a regime change.’
Vasko took back the trigger, forced his hand into the guard. ‘Sixtyfive metres,’ he whispered, and closed the trigger.
The lights dimmed.
He was allowed to watch the off-loading of the shuttle’s refugees.
The shuttle had been brought into one of the smaller docking bays and the occupants were now filing off, marshalled by SA guards who were taking down their personal details. Some of the people did not seem entirely certain who they were, or who they were meant to be. Some of them looked relieved to have been rescued. Others just looked weary, as if sensing that this rescue was unlikely to be anything other than a temporary reprieve.
There were about twelve hundred of them, all told, including two dozen crew. None of them had been frozen: the shuttle had not carried reefersleep caskets, and when the wolf takeover of the lighthugger had commenced, there had barely been time to get those thousand-odd people aboard. Several hundred thousand people had been left behind on the lighthugger, to be reprocessed into wolf components. Mercifully, most of them had been frozen when it happened. The wolves might have sunk probes into their heads, but at least most of them would have been unconscious. And perhaps by that point the wolves had gathered all the tactical data they needed. Perhaps by then humans were really only useful to them for the trace elements contained in their bodies.
Interviewing the crew and passengers, they heard horror stories. Some of them had brought documentary recordings with them: first-hand evidence of the wolf onslaught - habitats being ripped apart in an orgy of transformative destructions, spewing out new wolf machines even as the structures crumbled to rubble; shots of Chasm City’s newly rebuilt domes being breached, life and property being sucked into the cold, rushing atmosphere of Yellowstone in spiralling vortices of escaping air; the wolf machines descending into the ruins of the city like clouds of purposeful ink, oblivious to gravity, coalescing around and copulating with the city’s warped and wizened buildings; the buildings swelling, engorged with wolf spawn. They didn’t
use killing energy when a process of grinding assimilation was just as efficient.
But when humans fought back, the Inhibitors lashed out with fire ripped from the vacuum itself.
The evacuees spoke of the chaos in the Rust Belt as people tried to get aboard the few remaining starships. Thousands had died in the panic, in the desperate, crowding rush for reefersleep slots. Towards the end, some survivors had been cutting their way into the hulls of lighthuggers, infesting them, hoping to find some liveable niche in the machine-crammed interior. Overwhelmed by the surge of evacuees, the Ultras had either fought back with their own weapons or let their ships be stormed. There had been no checking of documentation, no questions about names or medical histories. Whole identities had been discarded, lives flung aside in a moment of desperation. People carried only their own memories. But reefersleep did terrible things to memories.
They had allowed him to come down here and watch the unloading before he was taken away. He was not bound or cuffed - they had at least allowed him that dignity - but he was under no illusions. They felt that they owed him nothing. It was a privilege to be allowed to witness this process, and he was not going to be allowed to forget it.
The guards were processing an older man who appeared to have forgotten who he was. At some recent point in time he must have been thawed from reefersleep too hastily, perhaps during a transfer of frozen assets from one ship to another. He was gesticulating at the SA officials, trying to make them understand something that was obviously dearly important to him. The man had a grey-white moustache and a thick head of grey-white hair, combed back from his brow in neat grooves. For a moment he looked in Scorpio’s direction and their eyes met. There was something pleading in his expression, a burning desire to reach out and connect with one other living creature capable of understanding his predicament. He desperately wanted someone, somewhere, to understand him. Not to help him, necessarily - there was something in his expression that spoke clearly of tremendous self-reliance and dignity, even now - but just, for one moment, to acknowledge what he felt and share that emotional burden.
Scorpio looked away, knowing he could not give the man what he wanted. When he looked back the man had been processed, moved through the connecting door into the rest of the ship, and the SA officials were working on another lost soul. There were already seventeen thousand sleepers aboard the Infinity, he thought. It was very unlikely that their paths would ever cross again.
‘Seen enough, Scorpio?’ Vasko asked.
‘Guess I have,’ he said.
‘Still haven’t changed your mind?’
‘I guess not.’
‘You were right, Scorp. No one doubts that.’ Vasko looked at the people being processed. ‘We can all see that now. But it was still the wrong thing to do. It was still too much of a risk.’
‘That’s not what the Captain seemed to think. Surprised you, didn’t he?’
Vasko’s hesitation told him everything he needed to know. In truth, he had been as surprised as anyone else. When Vasko had fired the hypometric weapon, it had discharged on schedule. But the targeting had been altered. Rather than destroying the shuttle, the weapon had surgically excised the part where the wolf machinery had established a foothold. The Captain had agreed with Scorpio: the shuttle was not a wolf impostor, just a human ship that happened to have suffered a small degree of Inhibitor infestation. The initial seed must have been tiny, or else the entire shuttle would have been consumed by the time they reached it. But there had still been hope, the Captain had recognised. And in changing the target-setting of the weapon he had revealed that his control over the internal processes of the ship was far more developed than anyone had suspected.
Vasko shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to factor it into our long-term planning. It’s nothing we can’t deal with. The ship’s still headed for Hela, isn’t it? Even the Captain sees that’s the right place to go now.’
‘Just make sure you keep on his right side,’ Scorpio said. ‘Place could get a little uncomfortable otherwise.’
‘The Captain isn’t a problem.’
‘Nor am I, now.’
‘It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s your call, Scorp.’
Yes, his call: whether to stand down from command on the grounds of medical unsuitability, or save his dignity by going back into the casket. What was it Valensin had told him? He had a fifty-fifty chance of making it out alive next time. But even if the casket didn’t kill him he would be a wreck, surviving only by a kind of chemical momentum. One more trip into the casket after that and he’d be pushing the statistics to breaking point.
‘You’re still not going to admit this is mutiny?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Vasko said. ‘We still value your input as a colony senior. No one has ever said otherwise. You’ll still be nominally in charge. It’s just that your role will become more of a consultative one.’
‘Rubber-stamping whatever you and Urton and the rest of your gang decide is the next policy decision?’
‘That sounds terribly cynical.’
‘I should have drowned you when I had the chance,’ Scorpio said.
‘You shouldn’t say that. I’ve learned as much from you as I did from Clavain.’
‘You knew Clavain for about a day, kid.’
‘And how long did you know him, Scorp? Twenty, thirty years? That still wasn’t a scratch against his lifetime. You think it really makes any difference? If you want to make a point of it, then neither of us knew him.’
‘Maybe I didn’t know him,’ Scorpio said, ‘but I know he’d have let that shuttle in, just the way I did.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Vasko said, ‘but it would still have been a mistake. He wasn’t infallible, you know. They didn’t call him the Butcher of Tharsis for nothing.’
‘You’d have deposed him as well, is that what you’re saying?’
Vasko considered the point and then nodded. ‘He’d have been getting old as well. Sometimes you just have to cut out the dead wood.’
Aura came to see him before they put him under again. She stood in front of her mother, knees together, hands together. Khouri was straightening her daughter’s hair, fussing her fringe into shape. They both wore white.
‘I’m sorry, Scorpio,’ Aura said. ‘I didn’t want them to get rid of you.’
He felt like saying something angry, something that would hurt her, but the words stalled in his mouth. He knew, on some fundamental level, that none of this was Aura’s fault. She had not asked for the things that had been put in her head.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They’re not getting rid of me. I’m just going to go back to sleep again until they remember how useful I am.’
‘It won’t take them long,’ Khouri said. She knelt down so that her head was at the same level as her daughter’s. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘No matter what advice Aura gave you, and no matter what the others said, it was the right thing to do. The brave thing. The day we forget that is the day we might as well start calling ourselves wolves as well.’
‘That’s the way I saw it,’ Scorpio said. ‘Thanks for your support. It’s not that I don’t have allies, I just don’t have as many as I need.’
‘None of us are going anywhere in a hurry, Scorp. We’ll still be around when you wake up.’
He acknowledged that with a nod, but kept his thoughts to himself. She knew as well as he did that there was nothing certain about his chances of waking up again.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Planning to sleep this one out?’
He had expected Khouri to answer: the question had been addressed at her. But it was Aura who spoke. ‘No, Scorpio,’ she said. ‘I’m going to stay awake. I’m six now. I want to be older when we reach Hela.’
‘You have it all worked out, don’t you?’
‘Not all of it,’ she said, ‘but I’m remembering more and more each day.’
‘About the shadows?’ he asked.
‘They’re
people,’ she said. ‘Not exactly like us, but closer than you’d think. They just live on the other side of something. But it’s very bad there. Something’s gone wrong with their home. That’s why they can’t live there any longer.’
‘Sometimes she speaks of brane worlds,’ Khouri said, ‘mumbles mathematics in her sleep, stuff about folded branes and gravitic signalling across the bulk. We think the shadows are entities, Scorp: the inhabitants of an adjacent universe.’
‘That’s quite a leap.’
‘It’s all there, in the old theories. They might only be a few millimetres away, in the hyperspace of the bulk.’
‘And what does this have to do with us?’
‘Like Aura says, they can’t live there any longer. They want out. They want to come across the gap, into this brane, but they need help from someone on this side to do it.’
‘Just like that? Would there be something in it for us, as well?’
‘She’s always talked about negotiation, Scorp. I think what she meant was that the shadows might be able to help us out with our own local problem.’
‘Provided we let them cross the gap,’ Scorpio said.
‘That’s the idea.’
‘You know what?’ he said, as the technicians began to plumb him in. ‘I think I’m going to have to sleep on this one.’
‘What are you holding in your hand?’ Khouri asked.
He opened his fist, showing her the shard of conch material Remontoire had given him. ‘It’s for luck,’ he said.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Hela, 2727
Rashmika was on her way to the Clocktower when Grelier emerged from the shadows between two pillars. She wondered how long he had been skulking there, waiting on the off chance that she would select this particular route from her quarters.
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