“In ten days with the available men and equipment? Not a sodding hope.”
“Then God’s Fire it will have to be.” Quaiche had steepled the twigs of his fingers. “Inform the other cathedrals, across all ecumenical boundaries. We’ll take the lead on this one. The others had better draw back to the usual safe distance, unless they’ve improved their shielding since last time.”
“There’s no other choice,” Wyatt Benjamin had agreed.
Quaiche had placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. What has to be done, has to be done. God will watch over us.”
Quaiche snapped out of his reverie and smiled. The Permanent Way man was gone now, off to arrange the rare and hal-lowed deployment of controlled fusion devices. He was alone with the Way and the scrimshaw suit and the distant, alluring twinkle of the Gullveig Range.
“You arranged for that ice, didn’t you?”
He turned to the scrimshaw suit. “Who told you to speak?”
“No one.”
He fought to keep his voice level, betraying none of the fear he felt. “You aren’t supposed to talk until I make it possible.”
“Clearly this is not the case.” The voice was thin, reedy: the product of a cheap speaker welded to the back of the scrimshaw suit’s head, out of sight of casual guests. “We hear everything, Quaiche, and we speak when it suits us.”
It shouldn’t have been possible. The speaker was only supposed to work when Quaiche turned it on. “You shouldn’t be able to do this.”
The voice—it was like something produced by a cheaply made woodwind instrument—seemed to mock him. “This is only the start, Quaiche. We will always find a way out of any cage you build around us.”
“Then I should destroy you now.”
“You can’t. And you shouldn’t. We are not your enemy, Quaiche. You should know that by now. We’re here to help you. We just need a little help in return.”
“You’re demons..I don’t negotiate with demons.”
“Not demons, Quaiche. Just shadows, as you are to us.”
They had had this conversation before. Many times before. “I can think of ways to kill you,” he said.
“Then why not try?”
The answer popped unbidden into his head, as it always did: because they might be useful to him. Because he could control them for now. Because he feared what would happen if he killed them as much as if he let them live. Because he knew there were more where this lot came from.
Many more.
“You know why,” he said, sounding pitiable even to himself.
“The vanishings are increasing in frequency,” the scrimshaw suit said. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
“It means that these are the end times,” Quaiche said. “No more than that.”
“It means that the concealment is failing. It means that the machinery will soon be evident to all.”
“There is no machinery.”
“You saw it for yourself. Others will see it, too, when the vanishings reach their culmination. And sooner or later someone will want to do business with us. Why wait until then, Quaiche? Why not deal with us now, on the best possible terms?”
“I don’t deal with demons.”
“We are only shadows,” the suit said again. “Just shadows, whispering across the gap between us. Now help us to cross it, so that we can help you.”
“I won’t. Not ever.”
“There is a crisis coming, Quaiche. The evidence suggests it has already begun. You’ve seen the refugees. You know the stories they tell, of machines emerging from the darkness, from the cold. Engines of extinction. We’ve seen it happen before, in this very system. You won’t beat them without our help.”
“God will intervene,” Quaiche said. His eyes were watering, blurring the image of Haldora.
“There is no God,” the suit said. “There is only us, and we don’t have limitless patience.”
But then it fell silent. It had said its piece for the day, leaving Quaiche alone with his tears.
“God’s Fire,” he whispered.
Ararat, 2675
WHEN VASKO RETURNED to the heart of the iceberg there was no more music. With the light bulk of the incubator hanging from one hand he made his way through the tangle of icy spars, following the now well-cleared route. The ice tinkled and creaked around him, the incubator knocking its way through obstructions. Scorpio had told him not to rush back to the ruined ship, but he knew that the pig had only been trying to spare him any unnecessary distress. He had made the call to Blood, told Urton what was happening and then returned with the incubator as fast as he dared.
But as he neared the gash in the ship’s side he knew it was over. There was a pillar of light ramming down from the ceiling of ice, where someone had blasted a metre-wide hole through to the sky. Scorpio stood in the circle of light at the foot of the pillar, his features sharply lit from above as if in some chiaroscuro painting. He was looking down, the thick mound of his head sunk into the wide yoke of his shoulders. His eyes were closed, the fine-haired skin of his forehead rendered blue-grey in the light’s dusty column. There was something in his hand, speckling red on to the ice.
“Sir?” Vasko asked.
“It’s done,” Scorpio said.
“I’m sorry you had to do that, sir.”
The eyes—pale, bloodshot pink—locked on to him. Scorpio’s hands were shaking. When he spoke his perfectly human voice sounded thin, like the voice of a ghost losing its grip on a haunt. “Not as sorry as I am.”
“I would have done it, if you’d asked me.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you,” Scorpio said. “I wouldn’t have asked it of anyone.”
Vasko fumbled for something else to say. He wanted to ask Scorpio how merciful Skade had allowed him to be. Vasko thought that he could not have been away for more than ten minutes. Did that mean, in some abhorrent algebra of hurting, that Skade had given Clavain some respite from the prolonged death she had promised? Was there any sense in which she could have been said to have shown mercy, if only by shaving scant minutes from what must still have been unutterable agony?
He couldn’t guess. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
“I brought the incubator, sir. Is the child…”
“Aura’s all right. She’s with her mother.”
“And Skade, sir?”
“Skade is dead,” Scorpio told him. “She knew she couldn’t survive much longer.” The pig’s voice sounded dull, void of feeling. “She’d diverted her own bodily resources to keep Aura alive. There wasn’t much of Skade left when we opened her up.”
“She wanted Aura to live,” Vasko said.
“Or she wanted a bargaining position when we came with Clavain.”
Vasko held up the light plastic box, as if Scorpio had not heard him properly. “The incubator, sir. We should get the child into it immediately.”
Scorpio leaned down, wiping the blade of the scalpel against the ice. The red smear bled away into the frost in patterns that made Vasko think of irises. He thought Scorpio might discard the knife, but instead the pig slipped it into a pocket.
“Jaccottet and Khouri will put the child into the incubator,” he said. “Meanwhile, you and I can take care of Clavain.”
“Sir?”
“His last wish. He wanted to be buried at sea.” Scorpio turned to step back into the ship. “I think we owe him that much.”
“Was that the last thing he said, sir?”
Scorpio turned slowly back to face Vasko and studied him for a long moment, his head tilted. Vasko felt as if he was being measured again, just as the old man had measured him, and the experience induced exactly the same feeling of inadequacy. What did these monsters from the past want of him? What did they expect him to live up to?
“It wasn’t the last thing he said, no,” Scorpio replied quietly.
THEY LAID THE body bag down on the fringe of ice surrounding the iceberg. Vasko had to keep reminding himself that it
was still only the middle of the morning: the sky was a wet grey, clouds jammed in from horizon to horizon, like a ceiling scraping the top of the iceberg. A few kilometres out to sea was a distinct and threatening smudge of wet ink in that same ceiling, like a black eye. It seemed to move against the wind, as if looking for something below. On the horizon, lightning scribed chrome lines against the tarnished silver of the sky. Distant rain came down in slow sooty streams.
Around the iceberg, the sea roiled in sullen grey shapes. In all directions, the surface of the water was being constantly interrupted by slick, moving phantasms of an oily turquoise-green colour. Vasko had seen them earlier: they broke the surface, lingered and then vanished almost before the eye had time to focus. The impression was that a vast shoal of vague whale-like things was in the process of surrounding the iceberg. The phantasms bellied and gyred between waves and spume. They merged and split, orbited and submerged, and their precise shape and size was impossible to determine. But they were not animals. They were vast aggregations of microorganisms acting in a coherent manner.
Vasko saw Scorpio looking at the sea. There was an expression on the pig’s face that he hadn’t seen before. Vasko wondered if it was apprehension.
“Something’s happening, isn’t it?” Vasko asked.
“We have to carry him beyond the ice,” Scorpio said. “The boat’s still good for a few hours. Help me get him into it.”
“We shouldn’t take too long over it, sir.”
“You think it makes the slightest difference how long it takes?”
“From what you’ve said, sir, it made a difference to Clavain.”
They heaved the bag into the black carcass of the nearest boat. In daylight the hull already looked far rougher than Vasko remembered it, the smooth metal surface pocked and pitted with spots of local corrosion. Some of them were deep enough to put his thumb into. Even as they lifted the bag over the side, bits of the boat came off in metallic scabs where Vasko’s knee touched it.
The two of them climbed aboard. Urton, who was to remain on the iceberg’s ledge, helped them on their way with a shove. Scorpio turned on the motor. The water fizzed and the boat inched back towards the sea, retreating along the channel it had cut into the fringe.
“Wait.”
Vasko followed the voice. It was Jaccottet, emerging from the iceberg. The incubator hung from his wrist, obviously heavier than when Vasko had carried it in.
“What is it?” Scorpio called, idling the engine.
“You can’t leave without us.”
“No one’s leaving.”
“The child needs medical attention. We must get her back to the mainland as soon as possible.”
“That’s just what’s going to happen. Didn’t you hear what Vasko said? There’s a plane on its way. Sit tight here and everything will be all right.“
“In this weather the plane might take hours, and we don’t know how stable this iceberg is.”
Vasko felt Scorpio’s anger. It made his skin tingle, the way static electricity did. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying we should leave now, sir, in both boats, just as we came in. Head south. The plane will pick us up by transponder. We’re bound to save time that way, and we don’t have to worry about this thing collapsing under us.”
“He’s right, sir, I think,” Vasko said.
“Who asked you?” Scorpio snapped.
“No one, sir, but I’d say we all have a stake in this now, don’t we?”
“You have no stake in anything, Malinin.”
“Clavain seemed to think I did.”
He expected the pig to kill him there and then. The possibility loomed in his mind even as his gaze drifted to that deep black eye in the clouds. It was closer now—no more than a kilometre from the iceberg—and it was bellying down, beginning to reach something nublike towards the sea. It was a tornado, Vasko realised: just what they needed.
But Scorpio only snarled and powered up the engine again. “Are you with me or not? If not, get out and wait on the ice with the others.”
“I’m with you, sir,” Vasko said. “I just don’t see why we can’t do it the way Jaccottet says. We can leave with both boats and bury Clavain on the way.”
“Get out.”
“Sir?”
“I said get out. It isn’t up for negotiation.”
Vasko started to say something. Time and again, when he replayed the incident in his mind, it would never be clear to him just what he intended to say to the pig at that moment. Perhaps he already knew he had crossed the line at that point, and that nothing he could say or do would ever unmake that crossing.
Scorpio moved with lightning speed. He let go of the engine control, seized Vasko with both trotters and then levered him over the side. Vasko felt the top inch of the metal side of the boat crumble under his thigh, like brittle chocolate. Then his back hit a thin and equally brittle skein of ice, and finally he sank into water colder than anything he had ever imagined, the bitter chill ramming up his spine like a gleaming piston of shock and pain. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cry out or reach for anything solid. He could hardly remember his name, or why drowning was such a bad thing after all.
He saw the boat slide away into the sea. He saw Jaccottet place the incubator on the ground, Khouri stepping up behind him, and start walking quickly but carefully towards him.
Above, the sky was a blank cerebral grey, except for the shadowy focus of the stormy eye. The nub of blackness had almost reached the surface of the water. It was curling to one side, towards the iceberg.
SCORPIO BROUGHT THE boat to a standstill. It rocked in a metre-high swell, not so much floating in water now as resting on a moving raft of blue-green organic matter. The raft reached away in all directions for many dozens of metres, but it was thickest at its epicentre, which appeared to be precisely where the boat had come to rest. Surrounding it was a dark charcoal band of relatively uncontaminated water, and beyond that lay several other distinct islands of Juggler matter. Beneath the surface of the water, glimpsed intermittently between waves and foam, were suggestions of frondlike tentacular structures, thick as pipelines. They bobbed and swayed, and occasionally moved with the slow, eerie deliberation of prehensile tails.
Scorpio rummaged in the boat for something to wrap around his face. The smell was drilling into his brain. Humans said it was bad, or at least overwhelmingly strong and potent. It was the smell of rotting kitchen waste, compost, ammonia, sewage, ozone. For pigs it was unbearable.
He found a covering in a medical kit and wrapped it twice around his snout, leaving his eyes free. They were stinging, watering incessantly. There was nothing he could do about that now.
Standing up, careful not to overbalance himself or the boat, he took hold of the body bag. The fury he had felt when he had thrown Vasko overboard had sapped what little strength he had managed to conserve. Now the bag felt three times as heavy as it should, not twice. He gripped it, trotters either side of the head end, and began to inch backwards. He did not want to risk dropping the body over one of the sides, fearful that the boat would capsize with the weight of two adults so far from the midline. If he dragged the body to the front or the back, he might be safe.
He slipped. His trotters lost their grip. He went flying backwards, landing on the calloused swell of his buttocks, the body bag thumping down against the decking.
He wiped the tears from his eyes, but that only made matters worse. The air was clotted with micro-organisms, a green haze hovering above the sea, and all he had done was force that irritation deeper into himself.
He stood up again. He noticed, absently, the trunk of blackness reaching down from the sky. He grasped the bag once more and started to heave it towards the stern. The organic shapes congealed around the boat in a constant procession of disturbing effigies, bottle-green silhouettes forming and dissolving like the work of mad topiarists. When he looked at them directly, the shapes had no meaning, but from the corner of his eye he
saw hints of alien anatomy: a menagerie of strangely joined limbs, oddly arranged faces and torsos. Mouths gaped wide. Multiple clusters of eyes regarded him with mindless scrutiny. Articulated wing parts spread open like fans. Horns and claws erupted from the greenery, lingering for an instant before collapsing back into formlessness. The constant changes in the physical structure of the Juggler biomass was accompanied by a warm, wet breeze and a rapid slurping and tearing sound.
He turned around so that the bag lay between him and the stern. Leaning over the bag, he grasped it near the shoulders and levered it on to the metal side of the stern. He blinked, trying to focus. All around him, the green frenzy continued unabated.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It was all meant to happen differently. In his imagination, Scorpio had often considered the possible circumstances of Clavain’s death. Assuming he would live long enough to witness it himself, he had always seen Clavain’s burial in heroic terms, some solemn fire-lit ceremony attended by thousands of onlookers. He had always assumed that if Clavain died it would be gently and in the belly of the colony, his last hours the subject of loving vigils. Failing that, in some courageous and unexpected action, going out heroically the way he had almost done a hundred times before, pressing a hand to some small, innocent-looking chest wound, his face turning the colour of a winter sky, holding on to breath and consciousness just long enough to whisper some message to those who would have to go on without him. In his imagination, it had always been Scorpio who passed on that valediction.
There would be dignity in his death, a sense of rightful closure. And his burial would be a thing of wonder and sadness, something to be talked about for generations hence.
That was not how it was happening.
Scorpio did not want to think about what was in the bag, or what had been done to it. He did not want to think about the enforced slowness of Clavain’s death, or the vital part he had played in it. It would have been bad enough to have been a spectator to what took place in the iceberg. To know that he had been a participant was to know that some irreplaceable part of himself had been hollowed out.
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