Absolution Gap

NINETEEN

The boats rammed through the thickening water on the periphery of the fringe, and then into the fringe itself. A blizzard of ice shards sprayed away on either side of the hulls. The boats surged forwards for ten or twelve metres and then scraped to a grinding halt, electric motors howling.

The rectangular hulls had cut neat channels into the fringe, but the oily grey water had no sooner stopped sloshing than it began to turn suspiciously immobile and pearly. Scorpio thought of coagulating blood, the way it turned sticky and viscid. In a few minutes, he estimated, the channels would be frozen solid again.

The two Security Arm people were the first out of the craft, establishing that the ice was firm enough to take the weight of the party. The others followed a minute later, carrying what weapons and equipment they could manage but leaving much else—including the incubator—in the boats. The firm part of the fringe formed a belt of land, five or six metres wide in most places, around the main peak of the iceberg. The huge crystalline structure rose up, steep-sided, above them. Scorpio, stiff-necked, found it awkward to look at the top for more than a few moments.

He waited for Clavain to disembark, then moved over to him. They stood shivering, stomping their feet up and down. The ice beneath them had a braided texture, thick tuberous strands woven together into a kind of matting. It was treacherous, both slippery and uneven. Every footfall had to be taken with caution.

“I was expecting a welcome by now,” Scorpio said. “The fact that we haven’t had one is starting to worry me.”

“Me, too.” Clavain kept his voice very low. “We haven’t discussed the possibility, but Skade could well be dead. I just don’t think…” He trailed off, eyeing Khouri. She was sitting on her haunches, assembling the remaining parts of the Breit-enbach cannon. “I just don’t think she is quite ready to deal with that yet.”

“You believe everything she’s said, don’t you?”

“I’m sure we’ll find a ship in here. But she had no reason to believe that Skade survived the crash.”

“Skade’s a survivor type,” Scorpio said.

“There is that, but I never thought I’d find myself wishing it were the case.”

“Sirs?”

They followed the voice. It was Vasko. He had made his way some distance around the fringe, until he was almost about to vanish around the corner.

“Sirs,” he said again, eyeing Scorpio and Clavain in turn, “there’s an opening here. I saw it from the sea. I think it’s the largest one all the way around.”

“How deep does it go?” Scorpio asked.

“Don’t know. More than a few metres, at least. I could easily squeeze through, I think.”

“Wait,” Scorpio said. “Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?”

They followed Vasko to the gap in the ice. As they neared the wall, it was necessary to duck under and between the jutting horizontal spikes, shielding their eyes and faces with the backs of their arms. Some instinct made Scorpio loath to harm any part of the structure. It was next to impossible not to, for even as he stepped cautiously around one spike, protecting himself against the rapierlike tip of another, he shattered half a dozen smaller ones. They tinkled as they broke into pieces, and set off a cascade of secondary fractures metres away.

“Is it still singing to you?” he asked Vasko.

“No, sir,” he said, “not the way it was just now. I think that was only when the sun was coming up.”

“But you can still hear something?”

“I don’t know, sir. It’s lower, much lower. It comes in waves. I might be imagining it.”

Scorpio could not hear a thing. He had not been able to hear the iceberg singing, either. Nor had Clavain. Clavain was an old man, with an old man’s ailing faculties. Scorpio was a pig, with faculties about as good as they had ever been.

“I’m ready to squeeze inside, sir”

The opening that Vasko had found was merely a larger-than-usual pocket between the ragged weave of interthreading ice branches and needle-pointed spurs. It began at chest height: a vaguely oval widening, with the hint of a larger clearing beyond it. It was impossible to tell how far in they could reach.

“Let me see,” Khouri said. She carried the cannon on a shoulder strap, slung down her back, its weight shifted on to one hip.

‘There are other ways in,“ Vasko said, ”but I think this is the easiest.“

“We’ll take it,” Khouri said. “Stand aside. I’m going first.”

“Wait,” Clavain said.

Her lip curled. “My daughter’s in there. Someone go fetch the incubator.”

“I know how you feel.” Clavain said.

“Do you?”

His voice was marvellously calm. “Yes, I do. Skade took Felka once. I went in after her, just the way you’re doing. I thought it was the right way to proceed. I see now that it was foolish and that I came very close to losing her. That’s why you shouldn’t be the first one in. Not if you want to see Aura again.”

“He’s right,” Scorpio said. “We don’t know what we’ll find in that thing, or how Skade will react when she knows we’re here. We might lose someone. The one person we can’t afford to lose is you.”

“You can still fetch the incubator.”

“No,” Scorpio said. “It stays out here, out of harm’s way. I don’t want it getting smashed in a firefight. And if turns out that we can negotiate our way through this, there’ll be time to come back and get it.”

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 middle 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 alive 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.”

Jaccottet knew better than to argue.

Scorpio and Clavain climbed in after Khouri. Clavain played his torch around the mangled interior of this part of the corvette, pausing now and then as the beam alighted on some recognisable but damaged structure. The black invasion resembled a prolific fungal growth that had all but consumed the fabric of the spacecraft.

The hull, Scorpio realised, was a shattered ruin, barely holding itself together. He watched where he put his feet.

“It subsumes,” Clavain said quietly, as if wary—despite the intermittent pulses of music—of alerting the machinery. “It only takes one element to invade a whole ship. Then it eats its way through the entire thing, converting as it goes.”

“What are those little black cubes made of?” asked Scorpio.

“Almost nothing,” Clavain told him. “Just pure force maintained by a tiny mechanism deep inside, like the nucleus of an atom. Except we never got a look at the mechanism.”

“I take it you had a go?”

“We removed some cubic elements from Galiana’s crew by mechanical force, breaking the inter-cube bonds. They just shrank away to nothing, leaving a tiny pile of grey dust. We presumed that was the machinery, but by then there wasn’t a lot it could tell us. Reverse engineering wasn’t really an option.”

“We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?” Scorpio said.

“Yes, we’re in trouble,” Khouri said. “You’re right about that part. Matter of fact, we probably don’t know how much trouble we really are in. But understand one thing: we’re not dead, not yet, and not while we have Aura.”

“You think she’ll make that much of a difference?” Clavain asked.

“She made a difference already, guy. We wouldn’t have made it to this system if she hadn’t.”

“Do you still think she’s here?” Scorpio asked her.

“She’s here. Just can’t say where.”

“I’m picking up signals as well,” Clavain said, “but they’re fractured and confused. Too many echoes from all the half-functioning systems in this ship. I can’t say if it’s one source or several.”

“So what do we do?” Scorpio asked.

Clavain angled his torch into the gloom. The beam knifed against fabulous crenellations and castellations of frozen black cubes. “Back there should be the propulsion systems compartment,” he said. “Not a very likely place to look for survivors.” He swung around, hunting with the beam, squinting at the un-familiarity of it all. ‘Through here, I think. It seems to be the source of the music, as well. Careful, it’ll be a tight squeeze.“

“Where will that take us?” Scorpio said.

“Habitat and flight deck. Assuming we recognise any of it when we get there.”

“It’s colder that way,” Khouri observed.

They stepped towards the part of the ship Clavain had indicated. There was a gap ahead, the remains of a bulkhead. The air felt as if it was only a breath away from freezing solid altogether. Scorpio glanced back, his mind playing tricks on him, conjuring languid ripples and waves of motion in the black tar of the wolf machinery.

Instead, something moved ahead. A section of shadow detached itself from the wall, black against black.

Khouri’s gun tipped towards it.

“No!” Clavain shouted.

Scorpio heard the click of the Breitenbach cannon’s trigger. He flinched, steeling himself for the energy discharge. It was not really the weapon of choice for close-quarters combat.

Nothing happened. Khouri lowered the weapon’s muzzle an inch. She had pulled back on the trigger, but not enough to fire.

Clavain’s knife trembled in his hand like an elver.

The black presence became a person in black vacuum armour. The armour moved stiffly, as if rusted into seizure. It clutched a dark shape in one hand. The figure took another step and then keeled towards them. It hit the ground with a crack of metal against ice. Black cubes splintered away in all directions, frosted with ice. The weapon—or whatever it was—skidded away and knocked against the wall.

Scorpio knelt down to pick it up.

“Careful,” Clavain said again.

Scorpio’s trotters closed on the rounded contours of the Conjoiner side arm. He tried to close his hand around the grip in such a way that he could still depress the trigger. It wasn’t possible. The grip had never been engineered for use by pigs.

In fury he tossed it to Clavain. “Maybe you can get this thing to work.”

“Easy, Scorp.” Clavain pocketed the weapon. “It won’t work for me, either, not unless Skade was very careless with her defences. But we can keep it out of harm’s way, at least.”

Khouri shouldered the cannon and lowered herself down next to the crashed armour of the figure. “It ain’t Skade,” she said. “Too big, and the helmet crest isn’t the right shape. You picking up anything, Clavain?”

“Nothing intelligible,” he said. He stilled the shivering blade of his knife and slipped it back into one of his pockets. “But let’s get that helmet off and see where we are, shall we?”

“We don’t have time to waste,” Scorpio said.

Clavain started working the helmet seals. “This will only take a moment.”

The extremities of Scorpio’s hands were numb, his coordination beginning to show signs of impairment. He did not doubt that Clavain was suffering much the same thing; it must have taken real strength and precision to unlock the intricate mechanism of the helmet seal.

There was a latching sound, then a scrape of metal against metal and a gasp of equalising air pressure. The helmet popped off, trapped between Clavain’s trembling fingertips. He placed it gently on to the ice, rim down.

The face of a young female Conjoiner looked back at them. She had something of the same sleekly sculpted look as her mentor, but she was clearly not Skade. Her face was wide and flat-featured, her bloodless skin the colour of static on a monitor. Her neural crest—the heat-dissipating ridge of bone and cartilage running from the very top of her forehead to the nape of her neck—was less extravagant than the one Scorpio remembered seeing on Skade, and was almost certainly a much less useful indicator of her state of mind. It probably incorporated a more advanced set of neural mechanisms, with lower heat-dissipation burdens.

Her lips were grey and her eyebrows pure chrome white. She opened her eyes. In the torchlight her irises were a metallic blue-grey.

“Talk to me,” Clavain said.

She coughed and laughed at the same time. The appearance of a human expression on that stiff mask shocked them all.

Khouri leaned closer. “I’m only picking up mush,” she said.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Clavain replied quietly. Then he held the woman’s head from behind, supporting it off the ice. “Listen to me carefully. We don’t want to hurt you. You’ve been injured, but if you help us we will take care of you. Can you understand me?”

The woman laughed again, a spasm of delight creasing her face. “You…” she began.

Clavain leaned closer. “Yes?”

“Clavain.”

Clavain nodded. “Yes, that’s me.” He looked back at the others. “Damage can’t be too severe if she remembers me. I’m sure we’ll be able…”

She spoke again. “Clavain. Butcher of Tharsis.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Clavain. Defector. Traitor? She smiled again, coughed, and then hacked a mouthload of saliva into his face. ”Betrayed the Mother Nest.“

Clavain wiped the spit from his face with the back of his glove. “I didn’t betray the Mother Nest,” he said, with an alarming lack of anger. “It was actually Skade who betrayed it.” He corrected her with avuncular patience, as if putting right some minor misapprehension about geography.

She laughed and spat at him again. The power of it surprised Scorpio. It caught Clavain in the eye and made him hiss in pain.

Clavain leant closer to the woman, keeping a hand over her mouth this time. “We have some work to do, I think. A little bit of re-education. A little bit of attitude adjustment. But that’s all right, I’ve got plenty of time.”

The woman coughed again. Her titanium-grey eyes were bright and joyful, even as she struggled for breath. There was something idiotic about her, Scorpio realised.

The armoured body started convulsing. Clavain kept hold of her head, his other hand still across her mouth.

“Let her breathe,” Khouri said.

He released the pressure across her mouth for an instant. The woman kept smiling, her eyes wide, unblinking. Something black squeezed between Clavain’s fingers, forcing its way through the gaps like some manifestation of demonic foulness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.

“Live machinery,” Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.

From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.

Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.

“They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.”

Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.

“I’ll try to lever it off,” Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.

Clavain opened his eyes. “It won’t work.”

With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.

It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.

Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade Come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.

“Scorp, pick it up.”

He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.

“No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be careful: she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.”

“I can’t do this, Nevil.”

“You have to. It’s killing me.”

The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.

He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.

“Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.” Clavain paused. “I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it. Now. Before I change my mind, or that stuff finds a short cut to my head.”

Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.

Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to fabric of the sleeve.

He looked into Clavain’s face. “Are you sure about this?”

“Scorp. Now. As a friend. Do it.”

Scorpio pushed the knife down. He felt no resistance as it ghosted through fabric, flesh and bone.

Half a second later the work was done. The severed hand—Scorpio had cut it off just above the wrist—dropped to the ice with a solid whack. With a moan Clavain slumped back against the wall, losing whatever strength he had mustered until then. He’d told Scorpio that he had blocked all pain signals, but some residual message must have reached his brain: either that or what Scorpio heard was a moan of desperate relief.

Jaccottet knelt down by Clavain, unhitching a medical kit from his belt. Clavain had been right: there was very little in the way of the blood loss from the wound. He held the truncated forearm against his belly, pressing it tight, while Jaccottet prepared a dressing.

There was a rustle of movement from the hand. The black machines were detaching themselves, breaking free of the remaining flesh. They moved hesitantly, as if sapped of the energy they had drawn from the warmth of living bodies. The mass of cubes oozed away from the hand, slowed and then halted, becoming just another part of the dormant growth that filled the ship. The hand lay there, the flesh a contused landscape of recent bruises and older age spots, yet still largely intact save for the eroded stubs of the fingertips, which had been consumed down to the first joint.

Scorpio made the knife stop shivering and put it on the ground. “I’m sorry, Nevil.”

“I’ve lost it once already,” Clavain said. “It really doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m grateful that you did what you had to do.” Then he leant back against the wall and closed his eyes for another few seconds. His breathing was sharply audible and irregular. It sounded like someone making inexpert saw cuts.

“Are you going to be all right?” Scorpio asked Clavain, eyeing the severed hand.

Clavain did not respond.

“I don’t know enough about Conjoiners to say how much shock he can take,” Jaccottet said, keeping his voice low, “but I know this man needs rest and a lot of it. He’s old, for a start, and no one’s been around to fine-tune all those machines in his blood. It might be hitting him a lot worse than we think.”

“We have to move on,” Khouri said.

“She’s right,” Clavain said, stirring again. “Here, someone help me to my feet. Losing a hand didn’t stop me last time; it won’t now.”

“Wait a moment,” Jaccottet said, finishing off the emergency dressing.

“You need to stay here, Nevil,” Scorpio said.

“If I stay here, Scorp, I will die.” Clavain groaned with the effort of trying to stand up on his own. “Help me, God damn you. Help me!”

Scorpio eased him to his feet. He stood unsteadily, still holding the bandaged stump against his belly.

“I still think you’d be better off waiting here,” Scorpio said.

“Scorp, we’re all staring hypothermia in the face. If I can feel it, so can you. Right now the only thing that’s holding it off is adrenalin and movement. So I suggest we keep moving.” Then Clavain reached down and picked up the knife from where Scorpio had put it down. He slipped it back into his pocket. “Glad I brought it with me now,” he said.

Scorpio glanced down at the ground. “What about the hand?”

“Leave it. They can grow me a new one.”

They followed the draught of cold towards the front portion of Skade’s wrecked ship.

“Is it me,” Khouri said, “or has the music just changed?”

“It’s changed,” Clavain said. “But it’s still Bach.”