EIGHT

Hela, 2727

For the first day they travelled hard, putting as much distance between themselves and the badlands communities as possible. For hours on end they sped along white-furrowed trails, slicing through slowly changing terrain beneath a sable sky. Occasionally they passed a transponder tower; an outpost or even another machine moving in the other direction.

Rashmika gradually became used to the hypnotic, bouncing motion of the skis, and was able to walk around the icejammer without losing her balance. Now and then she sat in her personal compartment, her knees folded up to her chin, looking out of the window at the speeding landscape and imagining that every malformed rock or ice fragment contained a splinter of alien empire. She thought about the scuttlers a lot, picturing the blank pages of her book filling with neat handwriting and painstaking crosshatched drawings.

She drank coffee or tea, consumed rations and occasionally spoke to Culver, though not as often he would have wished.

When she had planned her escape—except “escape” wasn’t quite the right word, because it was not as if she was actually running from anything—but when she had planned it, anyway, she had seldom thought very far beyond the point when she left the village. The few times she had allowed her mind to wander past that point, she had always imagined herself feeling vastly more relaxed now that the difficult part:—actually leaving her home, and the village—was over.

It wasn’t like that at all. She was not as tense as when she had climbed out of her home, but only because it would have been impossible to stay in that state for very long. Instead she had come down to a plateau of continual tension, a knot in her stomach that would not undo. Partly it was because she was now thinking ahead, into the territory she had left vague until now. Suddenly, dealing with the churches was a looming concrete event in the near future. But she was also concerned about what she had left behind. Three days, even six, had not seemed like such a long time when she had been planning the trip to the caravans, but now she counted every hour. She imagined the village mobilising behind her, realising what had happened and uniting to bring her back. She imagined constabulary officers following the icejammer in fast vehicles of their own. None of them liked Crozet or Linxe to begin with. They would assume that the couple had talked her into it, that in some way they were the real agents of her misfortune. If they caught up, she would be chastised, but Crozet and Linxe would be ripped apart by the mob.

But there was no sign of pursuit. Admittedly Crozet’s machine was fast, but on the few occasions when they surmounted a rise, giving them a chance to look back fifteen or twenty kilometres along the trail, there was nothing behind them.

Nonetheless, Rashmika remained anxious despite Crozet’s assurances that there were no faster routes by which they might be cut off further on down the trail. Now and then, to oblige her, Crozet tuned into the village radio band, but most of the time he found only static. Nothing unusual about that, for radio reception on Hela was largely at the whim of the magnetic storms roiling around Haldora. There were other modes of communication—tight-beam laser-communication between satellites and ground stations, fibreoptic land lines—but most of these channels were under church control and in any case Crozet subscribed to none of them. He had means of tapping into some of them when he needed to, but now, he said, was not the time to risk drawing someone’s attention. When Crozet did finally tune into a non-garbled transmission from Vigrid, however, and Rashmika was able to listen to the daily news service for major villages, it was not what she had been expecting. While there were reports of cave-ins, power outages and the usual ups and downs of village life, there was no mention at all of anyone going missing. At seventeen, Rashmika was still under the legal care of her parents, so they would have had every right to report her absence. Indeed, they would have been breaking the law by failing to report her missing.

Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed.

When she had given the matter some further thought, she decided that her parents must be waiting to see what happened in the next few hours. She had, after all, not yet been away for more than half a day. If she had gone about her usual daily business, she would still have been at the library. Perhaps they were working on the assumption that she had left home unusually early that morning. Perhaps they had managed not to notice the note she had left for them, or the fact that her surface suit was missing from the locker.

But after sixteen hours there was still no news.

Her habits were erratic enough that her parents might not have worried about her absence for ten or twelve hours, but after sixteen—even if by some miracle they had missed the other rather obvious clues—there could be no doubt in their minds about what had happened. They would know she was gone. They would have to report it to the authorities, wouldn’t they?

She wondered. The authorities in the badlands were not exactly known for their ruthless efficiency. It was conceivable that the report of her absence had simply failed to reach the right desk. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia at all levels, it might not get there until the following day. Or perhaps the authorities were well informed but had decided not to notify the news channels for some reason. It was tempting to believe that, but at the same time she could think of no reason why they would delay.

Still, maybe there would be a security block around the next corner. Crozet didn’t seem to think so. He was driving as fast and-as nonchalantly as ever. His icejammer knew these old ice trails so well that he merely seemed to be giving it vague suggestions about which direction to head in.

Towards the end of the first day’s travel, when Crozet was ready to pull in for the night, they picked up the news channel one more time. By then Rashmika had been on the road for the better part of twenty hours. There was still no sign that anyone had noticed.

She felt dejected, as if for her entire life she had fatally overestimated her importance in even the minor scheme of things in the Vigrid badlands.

Then, belatedly, another possibility occurred to her. It was so obvious that she should have thought of it immediately. It made vastly more sense than any of the unlikely contingencies she had considered so far.

Her parents, she decided, were well aware that she had left. They knew exactly when and they knew exactly why. She had been coy about her plans in the letter she had left for them, but she had no doubt that her parents would have been able to guess the broad details with reasonable accuracy. They even knew that she had continued to associate with Linxe after the scandal.

No. They knew what she was doing, and they knew it was all about her brother. They knew that she was on a mission of love, or if not love, then fury. And the reason they had told no one was because, secretly, despite all that they had said to her over the years, despite all the warnings they had given her about the risks of getting too close to the churches, they wanted her to succeed. They were, in their quiet and secret way, proud of what she had decided to do.

When she realised this, it hit home with the force of truth.

“It’s all right,” she told Crozet. “There won’t be any mention of me on the news.”

He shrugged. “What makes you so certain now?”

“I just realised something, that’s all.”

“You look like you need a good night’s sleep,” Linxe said. She had brewed hot chocolate: Rashmika sipped it appreciatively. It was a long way from the nicest cup of hot chocolate anyone had ever made for her, but right then she couldn’t think of any drink that had ever tasted better.

“I didn’t sleep much last night,” Rashmika admitted. “Too worried about making it out this morning.”

“You did grand,” Linxe said. “When you get back, everyone will be very proud of you.”

“I hope so,” Rashmika said.

“I have to ask one thing, though,” Linxe said. “You don’t have to answer. Is this just about your brother, Rashmika? Or is there more to it than that?”

The question took Rashmika aback. “Of course it’s only about my brother.”

“It’s just that you already have a bit of a reputation,” Linxe said. “We’ve all heard about the amount of time you spend in the digs, and that book you’re making. They say there isn’t anyone else in the villages as interested in the scuttlers as Rashmika Els. They say you write letters to the church-sponsored archaeologists, arguing with them.”

“I can’t help it if the scuttlers interest me,” she said.

“Yes, but what exactly is it you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet about?”

The question was phrased kindly, but Rashmika couldn’t help sounding irritated when she said, “I’m sorry?”

“I mean, what is it you think everyone else has got so terribly wrong?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I’m as interested in hearing your side of the argument as anyone else’s.”

“Except deep down you probably don’t care who’s right, do you? As long as stuff keeps coming out of the ground, what does anyone really care about what happened to the scuttlers? All you care about is getting spare parts for your icejammer.”

“Manners, young lady,” Linxe admonished.

“I’m sorry,” Rashmika said, blushing. She sipped on the hot chocolate. “I didn’t mean it like that. But I do care about the scuttlers and I do think no one is very interested in the truth of what really happened to them. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Amarantin.”

Linxe looked at her. “The what?”

“The Amarantin were the aliens who evolved on Resurgam. They were evolved birds.” She remembered drawing one of them for her book—not as a skeleton, but as they must have looked when they were alive. She had seen the Amarantin in her mind’s eye: the bright gleam of an avian eye, the quizzical beaked smile of a sleek alien head. Her drawing had resembled nothing in the official reconstructions in the other archaeology texts, but it had always looked more authentically alive to her than those dead impressions, as if she had seen a living Amarantin and they had only had bones to go on. It made her wonder if her drawings of living scuttlers had the same vitality.

Rashmika continued, “Something wiped them out a million years ago. When humans colonised Resurgam, no one wanted to consider the possibility that whatever had wiped out the Amarantin might come back to do the same to us. Except Dan Sylveste, of course.”

“Dan Sylveste?” Linxe asked. “Sorry—also not ringing any bells.”

It infuriated Rashmika: how could she not know these things? But she tried not to let it show. “Sylveste was the archaeologist in charge of the expedition. When he stumbled on the truth, the other colonists silenced him. They didn’t want to know how much trouble they were in. But as we know, he turned out to be right in the end.”

“I bet you feel a little affinity with him, in that case.”

“More than a little,” Rashmika said.


* * *

Rashmika still remembered the first time she had come across his name. It had been a casual reference in one of the archaeological texts she had uploaded on to her compad, buried in some dull treatise about the Pattern Jugglers. It was like lightning shearing through her skull. Rashmika had felt an electrifying sense of connection, as if her whole life had been a prelude to that moment. It was, she now knew, the instant when her interest in the scuttlers shifted from a childish diversion to something closer to obsession.

She could not explain this, but nor could she deny that it had happened.

Since then, in parallel with her study of the scuttlers, she had learned much about the life and times of Dan Sylveste. It was logical enough: there was no sense in studying the scuttlers in isolation, since they were merely the latest in a line of extinct galactic cultures to be encountered by human explorers. Sylveste’s name loomed large in the study of alien intelligence as a whole, so a passing knowledge of his exploits was essential.

Sylveste’s work on the Amarantin had spanned many of the years between 2500 and 2570. During most of that time he had either been a patient investigator or under some degree of incarceration, but even while under house arrest his interest in the Amarantin had remained steady. But without access to resources beyond anything the colony could offer, his ideas were doomed to remain speculative. Then Ultras had arrived in the Resurgam system. With the help of their ship, Sylveste had unlocked the final piece of the puzzle in the mystery of the Amarantin. His suspicions had turned out to be correct: the Amarantin had not been wiped out by some isolated cosmic accident, but by a response from a still-active mechanism designed to suppress the emergence of starfaring intelligence.

It had taken years for the news to make it to other systems. By then it was second or third hand, tainted with propaganda, almost lost in the confusion of human factional warfare. Independently, it seemed, the Conjoiners had arrived at similar conclusions to Sylveste. And other archaeological groups, sifting through the remains of other dead cultures, were coming around to the same unsettling view.

The machines that had killed the Amarantin were still out there, waiting and watching. They went by many names. The Conjoiners had called them wolves. Other cultures, now extinct, had named them the Inhibitors.

Over the last century, the reality of the Inhibitors had come to be accepted. But for much of that time the threat had remained comfortably distant: a problem for some other generation to worry about.

Recently, however, things had changed. There had long been unconfirmed reports of strange activity in the Resurgam system: rumours of worlds being ripped apart and remade into perplexing engines of alien design. There were stories that the entire system had been evacuated; that Resurgam was now an uninhabitable cinder; that something unspeakable had been done to the system’s sun.

But even Resurgam could be ignored for a while. The system was an archaeological colony, isolated from the main web of interstellar commerce, its government a totalitarian regime with a taste for disinformation. The reports of what had happened there could not be verified. And so for several more decades, life in the other systems of human-settled space continued more or less unaffected.

But now the Inhibitors had arrived around other stars.

The Ultras had been the first to bring the bad news. Communications between their ships warned them to steer clear of certain systems. Something was happening, something that transgressed the accepted scales of human catastrophe. This was not war or plague, but something infinitely worse. It had happened to the Amarantin and—presumably—to the scuttlers.

The number of human colonies known to have witnessed direct intervention by Inhibitor machines was still fewer than a dozen, but the ripples of panic spreading outwards at the speed of radio communications were almost as effective at collapsing civilisations. Entire surface communities were being evacuated or abandoned, as citizens tried to reach space or the hopefully safer shelter of underground caverns. Crypts and bunkers, disused since the dark decades of the Melding Plague, were hastily reopened. There were, invariably, too many people for either the evacuation ships or the bunkers. There were riots and furious little wars. Even as civilisation crumbled, those with an eye for the main chance accumulated small, useless fortunes. Doomsday cults flourished in the damp, inviting loam of fear, like so many black orchids. People spoke of End Times, convinced that they were living through the final days.

Against this background, it was hardly any wonder that so many people were drawn to Hela. In better times, Quaiche’s miracle would have attracted little attention, but now a miracle was precisely what people were looking for. Every new Ultra ship arriving in the system brought tens of thousands of frozen pilgrims. Not all of them were looking for a religious answer, but before very long, if they wanted to stay on Hela, the Office of Blood-work got to them anyway. Thereafter, they saw things differently.

Rashmika could not really blame them for coming to Hela. Had she not been born here, she sometimes thought she might well have made the same pilgrimage. But her motives would have been different. It was truth she was after: the same drive that had taken Dan Sylveste to Resurgam; the same drive that had brought him into conflict with his colony and which, ultimately, had led to his death.

She thought back to Linxe’s question. Was it really Harbin driving her towards the Permanent Way, or was Harbin just the excuse she had made up to conceal—as much from herself as anyone else—the real reason for her journey?

Her reply that it was all to do with Harbin had been so automatic and flippant that she had almost believed it. But now she wondered whether it was really true. Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely.

“It’s Harbin,” she whispered to herself. “Nothing else matters except finding my brother.”

But she could not stop thinking of the scuttlers, and when she dozed off with the mug of chocolate still clasped in her hands, it was the scuttlers that she dreamed of, the mad permutations of their insectile anatomy shuffling and reshuffling like the broken parts of a puzzle.


Rashmika snapped awake, feeling a rumble as the icejammer slowed, picking up undulations in the ice trail.

“I’m afraid this is as far as we can go tonight,” Crozet said. “I’ll find somewhere discreet to hide us away, but I’m near my limit.” He looked drawn and exhausted to Rashmika, but then again that was how Crozet always looked.

“Move over, love,” Linxe said to Crozet. “I’ll take us on for a couple of hours, just until we’re safe and sound. You can both go back and catch forty winks.”

“I’m sure we’re safe and sound,” Rashmika said.

“Never you mind about that. A few extra miles won’t hurt us. Now go back and try to get yourself some sleep, young lady. We’ve another long day ahead of us tomorrow and I can’t swear we’ll be out of the woods even then.”

Linxe was already easing into the driver’s position, running her thick babylike fingers over the icejammer’s timeworn controls. Until Crozet had mentioned pulling over for the night, Rashmika had assumed that the machine would keep travelling using some kind of autopilot, even if it had to slow down a little while it guided itself. It was a genuine shock to learn that they would be going nowhere unless someone operated the ice-jammer manually.

“I can do a bit,” she offered. “I’ve never driven one of these before, but if someone wants to show me…”

“We’ll do fine, love,” Linxe said, “It’s not just Crozet and me, either. Culver can do a shift in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t want…”

“Oh, don’t worry about Culver,” Crozet said. “He needs something else to occupy his hands.”

Linxe slapped her husband, but she was smiling as she did it. Rashmika finished her now-cold chocolate drink, dog-tired but glad that she had at least made it through the first day. She was under no illusions that she was done with the worst of her journey, but she supposed that every successful stage had to be treated as a small victory in its own right. She just wished she could tell her parents not to worry about her, that she had made good progress so far and was thinking of them all the time. But she had vowed not to send a message home until she had joined the caravan.

Crozet walked her back through the rumbling innards of the icejammer. It moved differently under Linxe’s direction. It was not that she was a worse or even a better driver than Crozet, but she definitely favoured a different driving style. The icejammer flounced, flinging itself through the air in long, weightless parabolic arcs. It was all quite conducive to sleep, but a sleep filled with uneasy dreams in which Rashmika found herself endlessly falling.


She woke the next morning to troubling and yet strangely welcome news.

“There’s been an alert on the news service,” Crozet said. ‘The word’s gone out now, Rashmika. You’re officially missing and there’s a search operation in progress. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?“

“Oh,” she said, wondering what could have happened since the night before.

“It’s the constabulary,” Linxe said, meaning the law-enforcement organisation that had jurisdiction in the Vigrid region. “They’ve sent out search parties, apparently. But there’s a good chance we’ll make the caravan before they find us. Once we get you on the caravan, the constabulary can’t touch you.”

“I’m surprised they’ve actually sent out parties,” Rashmika said. “It’s not as if I’m in any danger, is it?”

“Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that,” Crozet said.

Linxe looked at her husband.

What did the two of them know that Rashmika didn’t? Suddenly she felt a tension in her belly, a line of cold trickling down her spine. “Go on,” she said.

“They say they want to bring you back for questioning,” Linxe said.

“For running away from home? Haven’t they got anything better to do with their time?”

“It’s not for running away from home,” Linxe said. Again she glanced at Crozet. “It’s about that sabotage last week. You know the one I mean, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Rashmika said, remembering the crater where the demolition store had been.

“They’re saying you did it,” Crozet said.


Hela, 2615

Out of orbit now, Quaiche felt his weight increasing as the Daughter slowed down to only a few thousand kilometres per hour. Hela swelled, its hectic terrain rising up to meet him. The radar echo—the metallic signature—was still there. So was the bridge.

Quaiche had decided to spiral closer rather than making a concerted dash for the structure. Even on the first loop in, still thousands of kilometres above Hela’s surface, what he had seen had been tantalising, like a puzzle he needed to assemble. From deep space the rift had been visible only as a change in albedo, a dark scar slicing across the world. Now it had palpable depth, especially when he examined it with the magnifying cameras. The gouge was irregular: there were places where there was a relatively shallow slope all the way down to the valley floor, but elsewhere the walls were vertical sheets of ice-covered rock towering kilometres high, as smooth and foreboding as granite. They had the grey sheen of wet slate. The floor of the rift varied between the flatness of a dry salt lake to a crazed, fractured quilt of tilted and interlocking ice panels separated by hair-thin avenues of pure sable blackness. The closer he came the more it indeed resembled an unfinished puzzle, tossed aside by a god in a tantrum.

Once every minute or so he checked the radar. The echo was still there, and the Daughter had detected no signs of imminent attack. Perhaps it was just junk after all. The thought troubled him, for it meant someone else must have come this close to the bridge without finding it remarkable enough to report to anyone else. Or perhaps they had meant to report it, but some subsequent misfortune had befallen them. He wasn’t sure that was any less worrying, on balance.

By the time he had completed the first loop he had reduced his speed to five hundred metres a second. He was close enough to the surface now to appreciate the texturing of the ground as it changed from jagged uplands to smooth plains. It was not all ice; most of the moon’s interior was rocky, and a great deal of fractured rocky material was embedded in the ice, or lying upon it. Ash plumes radiated away from dormant volcanoes. There were slopes of fine talus and up-rearing sharp-sided boulders as big as major space habitats; some poked through the ice, tipped at absurd angles like the sterns of sinking ships; others sat on the surface, poised on one side in the manner of vast sculptural installations.

The Daughter’s thrusters burned continuously to support it against Hela’s gravity. Quaiche fell lower, edging closer to the lip of the rift. Overhead, Haldora was a brooding dark sphere illuminated only along one limb. Amused and distracted for a moment, Quaiche saw lightning storms play across the gas giant’s darkened face. The electrical arcs coiled and writhed with mesmerising slowness, like eels.

Hela was still catching starlight from the system’s sun, but shortly its orbit around Haldora would take it into the largdr world’s shadow. It was fortuitous, Quaiche thought, that the source of the echo had been on this face of Hela, or else he would have been denied the impressive spectacle of the gas giant looming over everything. If he had arrived later in the world’s rotation cycle, of course, the rift would have been pointing away from Haldora. A difference of one hundred and sixty days and he would have missed this amazing sight.

Another lightning flash. Reluctantly, Quaiche turned his attention back to Hela.

He was over the edge of Ginnungagap Rift. The ground tumbled away with unseemly haste. Even though the pull of gravity was only a quarter of a standard gee, Quaiche felt as much vertigo as he would have on a heavier world. It made perfect sense, for the drop was still fatally deep. Worse, there was no atmosphere to slow the descent of a falling object, no terminal velocity to create at least an outside chance of a survivable accident.

Never mind. The Daughter had never failed him, and he did not expect her to start now. He focused on the thing he had come to examine, and allowed the Daughter to sink lower, dropping below the zero-altitude surface datum.

He turned, vectoring along the length of the rift. He had drifted one or two kilometres out from the nearest wall, but the more distant one looked no closer than it had before he crossed the threshold. The spacing of the walls was irregular, but here at the equator the sides of the rift were never closer than thirty-five kilometres apart. The rift was a minimum of five or six kilometres deep, pitching down to ten or eleven in the deepest, most convoluted parts of the valley floor. The feature was hellishly vast, and Quaiche came to the gradual conclusion that he did not actually like being in it very much. It was too much like hanging between the sprung jaws of a trap.

He checked the clock: four hours before the Dominatrix was due to emerge from the far side of Haldora. Four hours was a long time; he expected to be on his way back well before then.

“Hang on, Mor,” he said. “Not long now.”

But of course she did not hear him.

He had entered the rift south of the equator and was now moving towards the northern hemisphere. The fractured mosaic of the floor oozed beneath him. Measured against the far wall, the motion of his ship was hardly apparent at all, but the nearer wall slid past quickly enough to give him some indication of his speed. Occasionally he lost his grasp of scale, and for a moment the rift would become much smaller. These were the dangerous moments, for it was usually when an alien landscape became familiar, homely and containable that it would reach out and kill you.

Suddenly he saw the bridge coming over the horizon between the pinning walls. His heart hammered in his chest. No doubt at all now, if ever there had been any: the bridge was a made thing, a confection of glistening thin threads. He wished Morwenna were here to see it as well.

He was recording all the while as the bridge came closer, looming kilometres above him: a curving arc connected to the walls of the rift at either end by a bewildering filigree of supporting scrollwork. There was no need to linger. Just one sweep under the span would be enough to convince Jasmina. They could come back later with heavy-duty equipment, if that was what she wished.

Quaiche looked up in wonder as he passed under the bridge. The roadbed—what else was he meant to call it?—bisected the face of Haldora, glowing slightly against the darkness of the gas giant. It was perilously thin, a ribbon of milky white. He wondered what it would be like to cross it on foot.

The Daughter swerved violently, the gee-force pushing red curtains into his vision.

“What…” Quaiche began.

But there was no need to ask: the Daughter was taking evasive action, doing exactly what she was meant to. Something was trying to attack him. Quaiche blacked out, hit consciousness again, blacked out once more. The landscape hurtled around him, pulsing bright light back at him, reflected from the Daughter’s steering thrusters. Blackout again. Fleeting consciousness. There was a roaring in his ears. He saw the bridge from a series of abrupt, disconnected angles, like jumbled snapshots. Below it. Above it. Below it again. The Daughter was trying to find shelter.

This wasn’t right. He should have been up and out, no questions asked. The Daughter was supposed to get him away from any possible threat as quickly as possible. This veering—this indecision—was not characteristic at all.

Unless she was cornered. Unless she couldn’t find an escape route.

In a window of lucidity he saw the situational display on the console. Three hostile objects were firing at him. They had emerged from niches in the ice, three metallic echoes that had nothing to do with the first one he had seen.

The Scavenger’s Daughter shook herself like a wet dog. Quaiche saw the exhaust plumes of his own miniature missiles whipping away, corkscrewing and zigzagging to avoid being shot down by the buried sentries. Blackout again. This time when he came around he saw a small avalanche oozing down one side of the cliff. One of the attacking objects was now offline: at least one of his missiles had found its mark.

The console flickered. The hull’s opacity switched to absolute black. When the hull cleared and the console recovered he was looking at emergency warnings across the board, scribbled in fiery red Latinate script. It had been a bad hit.

Another shiver, another pack of missiles streaking away. They were tiny things, thumb-sized antimatter rockets with kilotonne yields.

Black-out again. A sensation of falling when he came round.

Another little avalanche; one fewer attacker on the display. One of the sentries was still out there, and he had no more ordnance to throw at it. But it wasn’t firing. Perhaps it was damaged—or maybe just reloading.

The Daughter dithered, caught in a maelstrom of possibilities.

“Executive override,” Quaiche said. “Get me out of here.”

The gee-force came hard and immediately. Again, curtains of red closed on his vision. But he did not black out this time. The ship was keeping the blood in his head, drying to preserve his consciousness for as long as possible.

He saw the landscape drop away below, saw the bridge from above.

Then something else hit him. The little ship stalled, thrust interrupted for a jaw-snapping instant. She struggled to regain power, but something—some vital propulsion subsystem—must have taken a serious hit.

The landscape hung motionless below him. Then it began to approach again.

He was going down.

Fade to black. Quaiche fell obliquely towards the vertical wall of the rift, slipping in and out of consciousness. He assumed he was going to die, smeared across that sheer cliff face in an instant of glittering destruction, but at the last moment before impact, the Scavenger’s Daughter used some final hoarded gasp of thrust to soften the crash.

It was still bad, even as the hull deformed to soften the blow. The wall wheeled around: now a cliff, now a horizon, now a flat plane pressing down from the sky. Quaiche blacked out, came to consciousness, blacked out again. He saw the bridge wheel around in the distance. Clouds of ice and rubble were still belching from the avalanche points in the sides of the cliff where his missiles had taken out the attacking sentries.

All the while, Quaiche and his tiny jewel of a ship tumbled towards the floor of the rift.


Ararat, 2675

Vasko followed Clavain and Scorpio into the administration compound, Blood escorting them through a maze of underpopulated rooms and corridors. Vasko expected to be turned back at any moment: his Security Arm clearance definitely did not extend to this kind of business. But although each security check was more stringent than the last, his presence was ac-cepted. Vasko supposed it unlikely that anyone was going to argue with Scorpio and Clavain about their choice of guest.

Presently they arrived at a quarantine point deep within the compound, a medical centre housing several freshly made beds. Waiting for them in the quarantine centre was a sallow-faced human physician named Valensin. He wore enormous rhomboid-lensed spectacles; his thin black hair was glued back from his scalp in brilliant waves, and he carried a small scuffed bag of medical tools. Vasko had never met Valensin before, but as the highest-ranking physician on the planet, his name was familiar.

“How do you feel, Nevil?” Valensin asked.

“I feel like a man overstaying his welcome in history,” Clavain said.

“Never one for a straight answer, were you?” But even as he was speaking Valensin had whipped some silvery apparatus from his bag and was now shining it into Clavain’s eyes, squinting through a little eyepiece of his own.

“We ran a medical on him during the shuttle flight,” Scorpio said. “He’s fit enough. You don’t have to worry about him doing anything embarrassing like dropping dead on us.”

Valensin flicked the light off. “And you, Scorpio? Any immediate plans of your own to drop dead?”

“Make your life a lot easier, wouldn’t it?”

“Migraines?”

“Just getting one, as it happens.”

“I’ll look you over later. I want to see if that peripheral vision of yours has deteriorated any faster than I was anticipating. All this running around really isn’t good for a pig of your age.”

“Nice of you to remind me, particularly when I have no choice in the matter.”

“Always happy to oblige.” Valensin beamed, popping his equipment away. “Now, let me make a couple of things clear. When that capsule opens, no one so much as breathes on the occupant until I’ve given them an extremely thorough examination. And by thorough, of course, I mean to the limited degree possible under the present conditions. I’ll be looking for infectious agents. If I do find anything, and if I decide that it has even a remote chance of being unpleasant, then anyone who came into contact with the capsule can forget returning to First Camp, or wherever else they call home. And by unpleasant I’m not talking about genetically engineered viral weapons. I mean something as commonplace as influenza. Our antiviral programmes are already stretched to breaking point.”

“We understand,” Scorpio said.

Valensin led them into a huge room with a high domed ceiling of skeletal metal. The room smelt aggressively sterile. It was almost completely empty, save for an intimate gathering of people and machines near the middle. Half a dozen white-clad workers were fussing over ramshackle towers of monitoring equipment.

The capsule itself was suspended from the ceiling, hanging on a thin metal line like a plumb bob. The scorched-black egg-shaped thing was much smaller than Vasko had been expecting: it almost looked too small to hold a person. Though there were no windows, several panels had been folded back to reveal luminous displays. Vasko saw numbers, wobbling traces and trembling histograms.

“Let me see it,” Clavain said, pushing through the workers to get closer to the capsule.

At this intrusion, one of the workers surrounding the capsule made the mistake of frowning in Scorpio’s direction. Scorpio glared back at him, flashing the fierce curved incisors that marked his ancestry. At the same moment Blood signalled to the workers with a quick lateral stab of his trotter. Obediently they filed away, vanishing back into the depths of the compound.

Clavain gave no sign that he had even noticed the commotion. Still hooded and anonymous, he slipped between the obstructions and moved to one side of the capsule. Very gently he placed a hand near one of the illuminated panels, caressing the scorched matt hide of the capsule.

Vasko guessed it was safe to stare now.

Scorpio looked sceptical. “Getting anything?”

“Yes,” Clavain said. “It’s talking to me. The protocols are Conjoiner.”

“Certain of that?” asked Blood.

Clavain turned away from the machine, only the fine beard hairs on his jaw catching the light. “Yes,” he said.

Now he placed his other hand on the opposite side of the panel, bracing himself, and lowered his head until it lay against the capsule. Vasko imagined that the old man’s eyes would be shut, blocking off outward distraction, concentration clawing grooves into his forehead. No one was saying anything, and Vasko realised that he was even making an effort not to breathe loudly.

Clavain tilted his head this way and that, slowly and deliberately, in the manner of someone trying to find the optimum orientation for a radio antenna. He locked at one angle, his frame tensing through the fabric of the coat.

“Definitely Conjoiner protocols,” Clavain said. He remained silent and perfectly still for at least another minute, before adding, “I think it recognises me as another Conjoiner. It’s not allowing me complete system access—not yet, anyway—but it’s letting me query certain low-level diagnostic functions. It certainly doesn’t look like a bomb.”

“Be very, very careful,” Scorpio said. “We don’t want you being taken over, or something worse.”

“I’m doing my best,” Clavain said.

“How soon can you tell who’s in it?” Blood asked.

“I won’t know for sure until it cracks open,” Clavain said, his voice low but cutting through everything else with quiet authority. “I’ll tell you this now, though: I don’t think it’s Skade.”

“You’re absolutely sure it’s Conjoiner?” Blood insisted.

“It is. And I’m fairly certain some of the signals I’m picking up are coming from the occupant’s implants, not just from the capsule itself. But it can’t be Skade: she’d be ashamed to have anything to do with protocols this old.” He pulled his head away from the capsule and looked back at the company. “It’s Remontoire. It has to be.”

“Can you make any sense of his thoughts?” Scorpio asked.

“No, but the neural signals I’m getting are at a very low level, just routine housekeeping stuff. Whoever’s inside this is probably still unconscious.”

“Or not a Conjoiner,” Blood said.

“We’ll know in a few hours,” Scorpio said. “But whoever it is, there’s still the problem of a missing ship.”

“Why is that a problem?” Vasko asked.

“Because whoever it is didn’t travel twenty light-years in that capsule,” Blood said.

“But couldn’t he have come into the system quietly, parked his ship somewhere we wouldn’t see it and then crossed the remaining distance in the capsule?” Vasko suggested.

Blood shook his head. “He’d still have needed an in-system ship to make the final crossing to our planet.”

“But we could have missed a small ship,” Vasko said. “Couldn’t we?”

“I don’t think so,” Clavain said. “Not unless there have been some very unwelcome developments.”

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