Khouri appeared to see the sense in his argument, even though she didn’t look very happy about it. She stepped back from the side of the berg. “I’m going in second,” she said.
“I’ll lead,” Scorpio said. He turned to the two Security Arm officers. “Jaccottet, you follow Khouri. Urton, stay here with Vasko. Keep an eye on the boats and watch out for anything emerging from any other part of the ice. The instant you see something unusual…” He paused, noticing the way his companions were looking around. ‘The instant you see something really unusual… let us know.“
He would let Clavain decide for himself what he did.
Scorpio negotiated the forest of impaling spikes. Daggers and fronds shattered with every movement, every breath. The air was a constant iridescent haze of crystals. With great effort he pulled himself through the aperture, his short stature and limbs making it more difficult for him than for any of the others. The tip of an icy blade kissed his skin, not quite breaking it but scraping painfully along the surface. He felt another push into his thigh.
Then he was through/landing on his feet on the other side. He dusted himself off and looked around. Everywhere, the ice gleamed with a neon-blue intensity. There were almost no shadows, just different intensities of that same pastel radiance. The spikes were here in abundance, as well as the rootlike structures that composed the fringe. They thrust through underfoot, thick as industrial pipes. He reminded himself that nothing here was static: the iceberg was growing, and this inclusion might only have existed for a few hours.
The air was as cold as steel.
Behind him, Khouri crunched to the ground. The muzzle of the Breitenbach cannon pulverised a whole fan of miniature stalactites as it swung around. Other weapons, too numerous to list, hung from her belt like so many shrunken trophies.
“What Vasko said… ” she began. “The low noise. I can hear it as well. It’s like a throbbing.”
“I don’t hear it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” Scorpio acknowledged.
“Skade’s here,” she said. “I know what you think: that she might be dead. But she’s alive. She’s alive and she knows we’ve landed.”
“And Aura?”
“I can’t feel her yet.”
Clavain emerged into the chamber, picking his way through the opening with the methodical slowness of a tarantula. His thin dark-clad limbs seemed built for precisely this purpose. Scorpio noticed that he managed to enter without breaking any of the ornamentation. He also noticed that the only weapon that Clavain appeared to be carrying was the short-bladed knife he had taken from his tent. He had it clutched in one hand, the blade vanishing when he turned it edge-on.
Behind Clavain came Jaccottet, much less stealthily. The Security Arm man stopped to brush the ice shards from his uniform.
Scorpio lifted his sleeve, revealing his communicator. “Blood, we’ve found a way inside the iceberg. We’re going deeper. I’m not sure what will happen to comms, but stay alert. Malinin and Urton are staying outside. If all else fails, we may be able to relay communications through them. I’m guessing we might be inside this thing for a couple of hours, maybe more.”
“Be careful,” Blood said.
What was this, Scorpio wondered: concern from Blood? Things were truly worse than he had feared. “I will be,” he said. “Anything else I need to know?”
“Nothing immediately related to your mission. Reports of enhanced Juggler activity from many of the monitoring stations, but that might just be a coincidence.”
“Right now I’m not sure if anything is a coincidence.”
“And—uh—just to cheer you up—some reports of lights in the sky. Not confirmed.”
“Lights in the sky? It gets better.”
“Probably nothing. If I were you, I’d put it all out of your mind. Concentrate on the job in hand.”
“Thanks. Sterling advice. All right, pal, speak to you later.”
Clavain had heard the conversation. “Lights in the sky, eh? Maybe next time you’ll believe an old man.”
“I didn’t not believe you for one instant.” Scorpio reached down to his own belt and pulled out a gun. “Here, take this. I can’t stand to see you walking around with just that silly little knife.”
“It’s a very good knife. Did I mention that it saved my life once?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a wonder I’ve held on to it all this time. Honestly, don’t you think there’s something very chivalrous about a knife?”
“Personally,” Scorpio said, “I think it’s time to stop thinking chivalry and start thinking artillery.”
Clavain took the gun the way one took a gift out of politeness, a gift of which one did not entirely approve.
They moved deeper into the iceberg, following the path of least resistance. The texture of the ice, braided and tangled like a wildly overgrown wood, made Scorpio think of some of the buildings in the Mulch layers of Chasm City. When the plague had hit them, their repair and redesign systems had produced something of the same organic fecundity. Here, it seemed, the growth of the ice was driven entirely by weird localised variations in temperature and air flow. Between one step and the next, the air shifted from lung-crackingly frigid to merely chilly, and any attempt to navigate by means of the draughts was doomed to failure. More than once he had the feeling he was inside a huge, cold, respiring lung.
But their path was always clear: away from the daylight, into the pastel blue core.
“It’s music,” Jaccottet said.
“What?” Scorpio asked.
“Music, sir. That low noise. There were too many echoes before. I couldn’t make sense of it. But I’m sure it’s music now.”
“Music? Why the fuck would there be music?”
“I don’t know, sir. It’s faint, but it’s definitely there. Advise caution.”
“I can hear it, too,” Khouri said. “And I advise hurrying the fuck up.”
She removed one of the weapons from her belt and shot at the thickest spar in front of her. It exploded into white marble dust. She stepped through the ruins and raised the gun towards another obstruction.
Clavain did something to his knife. It began to hum, just at the limit of Scorpio’s hearing. The blade became a blur. Clavain swept it through one of the smaller spars, severing it neatly and cleanly.
They moved on, further from the light. In waves, the air became colder still. They huddled deeper into their clothes and spoke only when it was strictly necessary. Scorpio had been grateful for his gloves, but now it felt as if he had forgotten to wear them at all. He had to keep looking down to remind himself they were still in place. It was said that hyperpigs felt the cold more acutely than baseline humans: some quirk of pig biochemistry that the designers had never seen any compelling reason to rectify.
He was thinking about that when Khouri spoke excitedly. She had pushed ahead of them all despite their best efforts to hold her back.
“There’s something ahead,” she said, “and I think I can feel Aura now. We must be near.”
Clavain was immediately behind her. “What can you see?
“The side of something dark,” she said. “Not like the ice.”
“Must be the corvette,” Clavain said.
They advanced another ten or twelve metres, taking at least two minutes to gain that distance. The ice was so thick now that Clavain’s little knife could only hack and pare away insignificant parts of it, and Khouri was wise enough not to use her weapon so close to the heart of the iceberg. Around them, the ice formations had taken on an unsettling new character. Jaccottet’s torch beam glanced off conjunctions resembling thigh bones or weird sinewy articulations of bone and gristle.
Then the density of the obstructions thinned out. They were suddenly in the core of the iceberg. A sort of roof folded over them, veined and buttressed by enormous trunks of scaly ice rising up from the floor below. The thick weavelike tangle was also visible on the far side of the chamber.
In the middl
e was the ruin of a ship.
Scorpio did not consider himself any kind of an expert on Conjoiner spacecraft, but from what he did know, the moray-class corvette ought to have been a sleek ultra-black chrysalis of a vessel. It should have been flanged and spined like some awful instrument of interrogation. There should have been no hint of a seam in the light-sucking surface of its hull. And the ship should most certainly not have lain on one side, broken-backed, splayed open like a dissected specimen, its guts frozen in mid-explosion. The gore of machine entrails should not have surrounded the corpse, and nor should bits of the hull, as sharp and irregular as glass shards, have been lying around the wreck like so many toppled gravestones.
That wasn’t the only thing wrong with the ship. It was throbbing, making staccato purring noises at the low-frequency limit of Scorpio’s hearing. He felt it in his belly more than he heard it. It was the music.
“This isn’t good,” Clavain said.
“I can still feel Aura,” Khouri said. “She’s in there, Clavain.”
“There isn’t much of it left for her to be in,” he told her.
Scorpio saw that for an instant the muzzle of Khouri’s Bre-itenbach cannon tipped towards Clavain, sweeping across him. It was only for an instant, and there was nothing in Khouri’s expression to suggest that she was on the point of losing control, but it still gave him pause for thought.
“There’s still a ship here,” Scorpio said. “It may be a wreck, Nevil, but someone could be aboard it. And something’s making that music. We shouldn’t give up yet.”
“No one was about to give up,” Clavain said.
“The cold’s coming from the ship,” Khouri said. “It’s pouring out of it, as if it’s bleeding cold.”
Clavain smiled. “Bleeding cold? You can say that again.”
“Sorry?”
“Old joke. One that doesn’t work too well in Norte.”
Khouri shrugged. They walked towards the wreck.
AT THE FOOT of the sloping green-lit corridor down which she had been invited, Antoinette found an echoing chamber of indistinct proportions. She estimated that she had descended five or six levels before the corridor flattened out, but there was no point attempting to plot her position on the pocket blow-up of the main ship map. It had already proven itself to be hopelessly out of date even before the apparitions had summoned her down here.
She halted, keeping the torch on for now. Green light poked through gill-like slats in the ceiling. Wherever she aimed the beam she found machinery, huge rusting piles of it reaching as far away as the torchlight penetrated. The metallic junk ranged from curved scabs of hull plating taller than Antoinette to thumb-sized artefacts covered in brittle green corrosive fur. In between were bronze pump parts and the damaged limbs and sensory organs of shipboard servitors, tossed into loose, teetering piles. The effect was exactly as if she had stumbled into the waste room of a mechanical abattoir.
“Well, Captain,” Antoinette said. Gently, she put the helmet down in front of her. “Here I am. I presume you’ve brought me here for a reason.”
The machinery stirred. One of the heaps moved as if being pushed by an invisible hand. The slurry of mechanical parts flowed and gyred, animated by the still-working servitor parts that lay embedded in the charnel pile. The articulated limbs twitched and flexed with a mesmerising degree of coordination. Antoinette held her breath. She supposed that she had been expecting something along these lines—a fully fledged class-three apparition, exactly as Palfrey had described—but the actuality of it was still unnerving. This close, the potential dangerousness of the machinery was stark. There were sharp edges that could cut or shear, hinged parts that could crush and maim.
But the machinery did not lurch towards her. Instead it continued to shuffle and organise itself. Bits dropped to the floor, twitching stupidly. Detached limbs flexed and grasped. Eye parts goggled and blinked. The red scratches of optical lasers rammed from the pyre, sliding harmlessly over Antoinette’s chest.
She was being triangulated.
The pile collapsed. A layer of useless slurry had avalanched away to reveal the thing that had been assembling at its core. It was a machine, an accumulation of junk parts in the schematic shape of a man. The skeleton—the main armature of the thing—was composed of perhaps a dozen servitor limbs, grasping each other by their manipulators. It stood expertly balanced on the scuffed metal bulbs of ball-and-socket joints. Cables and feedlines were wrapped around it like tinsel, lashing the looser parts together. The head was a ramshackle conglomeration of sensor parts, stacked in a way that vaguely suggested the proportions of a human skull and face. In places, the cables were still sparking from intermittent short circuits. The smell of hot soldered metal hit her, slamming her back to times when she had worked on the innards of Storm Bird under the watchful supervision of her father.
“I suppose I should say hello,” Antoinette said.
There was something in one of the Captain’s hands. She hadn’t noticed it before. The limb whipped towards her and the thing arced through the air, describing a graceful parabola. A reflex made her reach out and snatch the thing from the air.
It was a pair of goggles.
“I guess you want me to put these on,” Antoinette said.
THE BROKEN BLACK hull loomed above them. There was a tall rent in the side, a gash fringed by a scurf of something black and crystalline. Scorpio watched silently as Jaccottet knelt down and examined it. The white pulse of his breath was as crisp as a vapour trail against the ruined armour. His gloved fingers touched the froth, tracing its peculiar angularity. It was a growth of dice-sized black cubes, arranged into neatly stepped structures.
“Be careful,” Khouri said. “I think I recognise that stuff.”
“It’s Inhibitor machinery,” Clavain said, his own voice barely a breath.
“Here?” Scorpio asked.
Clavain nodded gravely. “Wolves. They’re here, now, on Ararat. I’m sorry, Scorp.”
“You’re absolutely sure? It couldn’t just be something weird that Skade was using?”
“We’re sure,” Khouri said. “Thorn and I got a dose of that stuff around Roc, in the last system. I haven’t seen it up close since then, but it’s not something you forget in a hurry. Scares the hell out of me just to see it again.”
“It doesn’t seem to be doing much,” Jaccottet said.
“It’s inert,” Clavain said. “Has to be. Galiana met this stuff as well, in deep space. It ripped through her ship, assembling itself into attack machinery. Took out her entire crew, section by section, until only Galiana was left. Then it got to her as well. Trust me: if it was functional, we’d be dead by now.”
“Or we’d be having our skulls sucked dry of data,” Khouri said. “And trust me as well, that’s not the preferred option.”
“We’re all agreed on that,” Clavain said.
Scorpio approached the gash after the others, making sure that they were not leaving themselves unprotected from the rear. The black crust of Inhibitor machinery had clearly erupted through the hull from the inside, haemorrhaging out under pressure. Perhaps it had happened before Skade’s ship had hit the surface, after the corvette was attacked in space.
Khouri began to squeeze through into the deeper blackness of the hull. Clavain reached out and touched her sleeve. “I wouldn’t rush this,” he said. “For all we know, there’s active wolf machinery just inside.”
“What other options have we got, guy? From where I’m standing they look a bit thin on the ground.”
“None of the weapons we brought with us will be worth a damn against active Inhibitor machinery,” Clavain insisted. “If that stuff wakes, it’d be like trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol.”
“At least it’ll be quick,” Jaccottet said.
“Actually, the one thing it won’t be is quick,” Khouri said, with what sounded like malicious pleasure. “Because you probably won’t be allowed to die. It suits the machinery to keep you a
live while it drinks your skull dry. So if you have any doubts about whether you want to put yourself through that, I suggest you keep back one round for yourself. If you’re lucky, you can beat the black stuff before it hits your brain and hijacks motor control. After that, you’re fucked.”
“If it’s so bad,” Jaccottet said, “how did you get away from it?”
“Divine intervention,” Khouri replied. “But if I were you, it’s not something I’d put a lot of faith in.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Jaccottet’s hand moved involuntarily to a small weapon on his belt.
Scorpio knew what he was thinking: would he be fast enough, if the moment came? Or would he wait that fatal instant too long?
Clavain moved, his knife humming in his hand. “We’ll have to trust that the stuff remains dormant,” he said.
“It’s stayed dormant this long,” Jaccottet said. “Why would it wake up now?”
“We’re heat sources,” Clavain said. “That might make a tiny bit of difference.”
Khouri pushed through into the belly of the ruined ship. Her torchlight bounced back through the gash, picking out the stepped edges of the froth. Under a fine patina of ice the machinery gleamed like freshly hewn coal. Where Jaccottet had rubbed his fingers across it, however, the stuff was pure black, lacking any highlights or lustre.
“There’s more of the shit in here,” she said. “It’s spread over everything, like black vomit.” The torchlight played around again, their shadows wheeling over the walls like stalking ogres. “But it doesn’t seem to be any more active than the stuff outside.”
“All the same,” Clavain said, “don’t touch it, just to be on the safe side.”
“It wasn’t on my to-do list,” Khouri replied.
“Good. Anything else?”
“The music’s louder. It comes in blasts, speeded up. It’s as if I almost recognise it.”
“I do recognise it,” Clavain said. “It’s Bach—Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, if I’m not mistaken.”
Scorpio turned to his Security Arm man. “I want you to stay out here. I can’t afford to leave this exit uncovered.”
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