“All that matters is that it’s something the wolves can’t track,” Khouri said. “Or at least not very easily. Maybe if they had a solid lock on us, they could sniff out something. But they’d have to get close for that.”
“What about the neutrinos coming from the reaction cores?” Scorpio asked.
“We don’t see them any more. We think they’ve been shifted into some flavour no one knew about.”
“And you hope the wolves don’t know about it either.”
“The one way to find out, Scorp, would be to get too close.”
She meant the shuttle. They knew a little more about it now: it was a blunt-hulled in-system vehicle with no transatmos-pheric capability, one example of what must have been tens of thousands of similar ships operating in Yellowstone space before the arrival of the wolves. Although a large ship by the standards of shuttles, it was still small enough to have been carried within the lighthugger. There was no guessing how much time the crew and passengers had had to board it, but a ship like that could easily have carried five or six thousand people; more if some of them were frozen or sedated in some way.
“I’m not turning my back on them,” Scorpio insisted.
“They could be wolves,” Vasko said.
“They don’t look like wolves to me. They look like people scared for their lives.”
“Scorp, listen to me,” Khouri said. “We picked up transmissions from some of those lighthuggers before they vanished. Omnidirectional distress broadcasts to anyone who was listening. The early ones, the first to go? They talked about being attacked by the wolves as we know them—machines made from black cubes, like the ones that brought down Skade’s ship. But the ships that went later, they said something different.”
“She’s right,” Vasko said. “The reports were sketchy—understandable, given that the ships were being overrun by wolf machines—but what came through was that the wolves don’t always look like wolves. They learn camouflage. They learn how to move amongst us, disguising themselves. Once they’d ripped apart one lighthugger, they began to learn how to make themselves look like our ships. They mimicked shuttles and other transports; made exhaust signatures and put out identification signals. It wasn’t perfect—you could tell the difference close up—but it was enough to fool some lighthuggers into staging rescue attempts. They thought they were being good Samaritans, Scorp. They thought they were helping other evacuees.”
“That’s fine, then,” Scorpio said. “Just gives us an excuse not even to think about rescuing those poor bastards, right?”
“If they’re wolves, everything we’ve done so far will have been wasted.” Vasko lowered his voice, as if afraid of disturbing Aura. “There are seventeen thousand people on this ship. They’re relatively safe. But you’d be gambling those seventeen thousand lives against the vague chance of saving only a few thousand more.”
“So we should just let them die, is that it?”
“If you knew there were only a few dozen people on that ship, what would you do then? Still take that risk?” Vasko argued.
“No, of course not.”
“Then where do you draw the line? When does the risk become acceptable?”
“It never does,” Scorpio said. “But this is where / draw the line. Here. Now. We’re saving that shuttle.”
“Maybe you should ask Aura what she thinks,” Vasko said, “because it’s not just about those seventeen thousand lives, is it? It’s about the millions of lives that might depend on Aura’s survival. It’s about the future of the human species.”
Scorpio looked at the little girl, at her white dress and neat hair, the absurdity of the situation pressing in on him like a concrete shroud. No matter her history, no matter what she had already cost them, no matter what else was going on inside her head, it all boiled down to this: she was still a six-year-old girl, sitting there with her mother, speaking when she was spoken to. And now he was going to consult her about a tactical situation upon which depended the lives of thousands.
“You have an opinion on the matter?” he asked her.
She looked to her mother first for approval. “Yes,” she said. Her small, clear voice filled the capsule like a flute. “I have an opinion, Scorpio.”
“I’d really like to hear it.”
“You shouldn’t rescue those people.”
“You mind if I ask why not?”
“Because they won’t be people any more,” she said. “And neither will we.”
SCORPIO SAT IN an oversized command chair, in a windowless room that in the days of the old Triumvirate had formed part of the Nostalgia for Infinity’s gunnery-control complex. He felt like a child in an adult’s world of huge furniture, his feet not even touching the chair’s grilled footrest.
He was surrounded by screens showing the cautious approach of the shuttle. Lasers picked it out of the darkness, scribing the boxy blunt-nosed rectangle of its hull. Three-dimensional realisations grew more detailed with each passing second. He could see docking gear, comms antennae, thrusters’ venturi tubes, airlock panels and windows.
“Be ready, Scorp,” Vasko said.
“I’m ready,” he replied, gripping the makeshift trigger he had ordered installed on the armrest of the command chair. It had been shaped for his trotters, but it still felt alien in his hand. One squeeze, that was all it would take. The three hypo-metric weapons had been spun up to discharge speed, corkscrewing even now in their shafts and ready for their first shot. They were locked on to the moving target of the shuttle, ready to attack if he squeezed the trigger. So was the one remaining cache weapon and all the other hull mounted defences. Scorpio hoped that the cache weapon would make some difference if the shuttle suddenly revealed itself to be a wolf machine, but he doubted that the hull-mounted defences would have any effect at all, other than giving the wolves something conspicuous to retaliate against. But there seemed little sense in underplaying his hand. Full-spectrum dominance, that was what Clavain had always said.
But even the hypometric weapons could not be relied upon at such short range. There was a savage, shifting relationship between the size of the target region and the certainty with which its radial distance and direction from the ship could be predetermined. When a target was distant—light-seconds away or further—the target volume could be made large enough to destroy a ship in one go. When the target was closer—when it was only hundreds of metres away, as was now the case—the degree of unpredictability increased vastly. The target volume had to be kept very small, mere metres across, so that it could be positioned with some reliability. The hypometric weapons each needed several seconds to spin up to their discharge speeds after firing, so the best Scorpio could hope for was to inflict an early, crippling wound. He doubted that he would have the chance to spin up and retire the hypometric weapons a second time.
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 v/hisper.
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.
“Sixty-five 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.
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