Absolution Gap

TWENTY-THREE

Quaiche was alone in his garret, save for the scrimshaw suit. He heard only his own breathing and the attentive sounds of the couch on which he rested. The jalousies were half-drawn, the room scribed with parallel lines of fiery red.

He could feel, very faintly—and only because he had learned to feel it—the tiny residual side-to-side and back-to-front lurching of the Lady Morwenna as it progressed along the Way. Far from annoying him, the swaying was a source of reassurance. The instant the cathedral became rock steady, he would know that they were losing ground on Haldora. But the cathedral had not stopped for more than a century, and then only for a matter of hours during a reactor failure. Ever since then, even as it had grown in size, doubling and then quadrupling in height, it had kept moving, sliding along the Way at the exact speed necessary to keep Haldora fixed directly above, and therefore transmitted via the mirrors into his pinned-open, ever-watchful eyes. No other cathedral on the Way had such a record: the Lady Morwenna’s nearest rival, the Iron Lady, had failed for an entire rotation fifty-nine years earlier. The shame of that breakdown—having to wait in the same spot until the other cathedrals came around again after three hundred and twenty days—still hung heavy six decades later. Every other cathedral, including the Lady Morwenna, had a stained-glass window in commemoration of that humiliation.

The couch propelled him to the westerly window, tipping up slightly to improve his view. As he moved, the mirrors shuffled around him, maintaining sight-lines. No matter which way he steered the couch, Haldora was the predominant object reflected back to him. He was seeing it after multiple reflections, the light jogged through right angles, reversed and inverted again, magnified and diminished by achromatic lenses, but it was still the light itself, not some second- or third-hand image on a screen. It was always there, but the view was never quite the same from hour to hour. For one thing, the illumination of Haldora changed throughout the forty-hour cycle of Hela’s orbit: from fully lit face, to crescent, to storm-racked nightside. And even during any given phase the details of shading and banding were never quite the same from one pass to the next. It was enough, just, to stave off the feeling that the image had been branded into his brain.

It was not all that he saw, of course. Surrounding Haldora was a ring of black shading to silver grey, and then—packed into a band of indistinct detail—his immediate surroundings. He could look to one side and shift Haldora into his peripheral vision, for the mirrors were focusing the image on to his eyes, not just his pupils. But he did not do this very often, fearful that a vanishing would happen when the planet did not have his full attention.

Even with Haldora looming head-on, he had learned how to make the most of his peripheral vision. It was surprising how the brain was able to fill in the gaps, suggesting details that his eyes were really not capable of resolving. More than once it had struck Quaiche that if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was—how much of it was stitched to-gether not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork—they would go quietly mad.

He looked at the Way. In the far easterly distance, in the direction that the Lady Morwenna was headed, there was a distinct -twinkling. That was the northern limit of the Gullveig Mountains, the largest range in Hela’s southern hemisphere. It was the last major geological feature to be crossed before the relative ease of the Jarnsaxa Flats and the associated fast run to the Devil’s Staircase. The Way cut through the northern flanks of the Gullveig Range, pushing through foothills via a series of high-walled canyons. And that was where an icefall had been reported. It was said to be a bad one, hundreds of metres deep, completely blocking the existing alignment. Quaiche had personally interviewed the leader of the Permanent Way repair team earlier that day, a man named Wyatt Benjamin who had lost a leg in some ancient, unspecified accident.

“Sabotage, I’d say,” Benjamin had told him. “A dozen or so demolition charges placed in the wall during the last crossing, with delayed timing fuses. A spoiling action by trailing cathedrals. They can’t keep up, so they don’t see why anyone else should.”

“That would be quite a serious allegation to make in public,” Quaiche had said, as if the very thought had never occurred to him. “Still, you may be right, much as it pains me to admit it.”

“Make no mistake, it’s a stitch-up.”

“The question is, who’s going to clear it? It would need to be done in—what, ten days at the maximum, before we reach the obstruction?”

Wyatt Benjamin had nodded. “You may not want to be that close when it’s cleared, however.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not going to be chipping this one away.”

Quaiche had absorbed that, understanding exactly what the man meant. “There was a fall of that magnitude three, four years ago, wasn’t there? Out near Glum Junction? I seem to remember it was cleared using conventional demolition equipment. Shifted the lot in fewer than ten days, too.”

“We could do this one in fewer than ten days,” Benjamin told him, “but we only have about half of our usual allocation of equipment and manpower.”

“That sounds odd,” Quaiche had replied, frowning. “What’s wrong with the rest?”

“Nothing. It’s just that it’s all been requisitioned, men and machines. Don’t ask me why or who’s behind it. I only work for the Permanent Way. And I suppose if it was anything to do with Clocktower business, you’d already know, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose I would,” Quaiche had said. “Must be a bit lower down than Clocktower level. My guess? Another office of the Way has discovered something they should have fixed urgently already, a job that got forgotten in the last round. They need all that heavy machinery to get it done in a rush, before anyone notices.”

“Well, we’re noticing,” Benjamin had said. But he had seemed to accept the plausibility of Quaiche’s suggestion.

“In that case, you’ll just have to find another means of clearing the blockage, won’t you?”

“We already have another means,” the man had said.

“God’s Fire,” Quaiche had replied, forcing awe into his voice.

“If that’s what it takes, that’s what we’ll have to use. It’s why we carry it with us.”

“Nuclear demolitions should only ever be used as the absolute final last resort,” Quaiche had said, with what he hoped was the appropriate cautioning tone. “Are you quite certain that this blockage can’t be shifted by conventional means?”

“In ten days with the available men and equipment? Not a sodding hope.”

“Then God’s Fire it will have to be.” Quaiche had steepled the twigs of his fingers. “Inform the other cathedrals, across all ecumenical boundaries. We’ll take the lead on this one. The others had better draw back to the usual safe distance, unless they’ve improved their shielding since last time.”

“There’s no other choice,” Wyatt Benjamin had agreed.

Quaiche had placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. What has to be done, has to be done. God will watch over us.”

Quaiche snapped out of his reverie and smiled. The Permanent Way man was gone now, off to arrange the rare and hal-lowed deployment of controlled fusion devices. He was alone with the Way and the scrimshaw suit and the distant, alluring twinkle of the Gullveig Range.

“You arranged for that ice, didn’t you?”

He turned to the scrimshaw suit. “Who told you to speak?”

“No one.”

He fought to keep his voice level, betraying none of the fear he felt. “You aren’t supposed to talk until I make it possible.”

“Clearly this is not the case.” The voice was thin, reedy: the product of a cheap speaker welded to the back of the scrimshaw suit’s head, out of sight of casual guests. “We hear everything, Quaiche, and we speak when it suits us.”

It shouldn’t have been possible. The speaker was only supposed to work when Quaiche turned it on. “You shouldn’t be able to do this.”

The voice—it was like something produced by a cheaply made woodwind instrument—seemed to mock him. “This is only the start, Quaiche. We will always find a way out of any cage you build around us.”

“Then I should destroy you now.”

“You can’t. And you shouldn’t. We are not your enemy, Quaiche. You should know that by now. We’re here to help you. We just need a little help in return.”

“You’re demons…I don’t negotiate with demons.”

“Not demons, Quaiche. Just shadows, as you are to us.”

They had had this conversation before. Many times before. “I can think of ways to kill you,” he said.

“Then why not try?”

The answer popped unbidden into his head, as it always did: because they might be useful to him. Because he could control them for now. Because he feared what would happen if he killed them as much as if he let them live. Because he knew there were more where this lot came from.

Many more.

“You know why,” he said, sounding pitiable even to himself.

“The vanishings are increasing in frequency,” the scrimshaw suit said. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

“It means that these are the end times,” Quaiche said. “No more than that.”

“It means that the concealment is failing. It means that the machinery will soon be evident to all.”

“There is no machinery.”

“You saw it for yourself. Others will see it, too, when the vanishings reach their culmination. And sooner or later someone will want to do business with us. Why wait until then, Quaiche? Why not deal with us now, on the best possible terms?”

“I don’t deal with demons.”

“We are only shadows,” the suit said again. “Just shadows, whispering across the gap between us. Now help us to cross it, so that we can help you.”

“I won’t. Not ever.”

“There is a crisis coming, Quaiche. The evidence suggests it has already begun. You’ve seen the refugees. You know the stories they tell, of machines emerging from the darkness, from the cold. Engines of extinction. We’ve seen it happen before, in this very system. You won’t beat them without our help.”

“God will intervene,” Quaiche said. His eyes were watering, blurring the image of Haldora.

“There is no God,” the suit said. “There is only us, and we don’t have limitless patience.”

But then it fell silent. It had said its piece for the day, leaving Quaiche alone with his tears.

“God’s Fire,” he whispered.

When Vasko returned to the heart of the iceberg there was no more music. With the light bulk of the incubator hanging from one hand he made his way through the tangle of icy spars, following the now well-cleared route. The ice tinkled and creaked around him, the incubator knocking its way through obstructions. Scorpio had told him not to rush back to the ruined ship, but he knew that the pig had only been trying to spare him any unnecessary distress. He had made the call to Blood, told Urton what was happening and then returned with the incubator as fast as he dared.

But as he neared the gash in the ship’s side he knew it was over. There was a pillar of light ramming down from the ceiling of ice, where someone had blasted a metre-wide hole through to the sky. Scorpio stood in the circle of light at the foot of the pillar, his features sharply lit from above as if in some chiaroscuro painting. He was looking down, the thick mound of his head sunk into the wide yoke of his shoulders. His eyes were closed, the fine-haired skin of his forehead rendered blue-grey in the light’s dusty column. There was something in his hand, speckling red on to the ice.

“Sir?” Vasko asked.

“It’s done,” Scorpio said.

“I’m sorry you had to do that, sir.”

The eyes—pale, bloodshot pink—locked on to him. Scorpio’s hands were shaking. When he spoke his perfectly human voice sounded thin, like the voice of a ghost losing its grip on a haunt. “Not as sorry as I am.”

“I would have done it, if you’d asked me.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you,” Scorpio said. “I wouldn’t have asked it of anyone.”

Vasko fumbled for something else to say. He wanted to ask Scorpio how merciful Skade had allowed him to be. Vasko thought that he could not have been away for more than ten minutes. Did that mean, in some abhorrent algebra of hurting, that Skade had given Clavain some respite from the prolonged death she had promised? Was there any sense in which she could have been said to have shown mercy, if only by shaving scant minutes from what must still have been unutterable agony?

He couldn’t guess. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.

“I brought the incubator, sir. Is the child…”

“Aura’s all right. She’s with her mother.”

“And Skade, sir?”

“Skade is dead,” Scorpio told him. “She knew she couldn’t survive much longer.” The pig’s voice sounded dull, void of feeling. “She’d diverted her own bodily resources to keep Aura alive. There wasn’t much of Skade left when we opened her up.”

“She wanted Aura to live,” Vasko said.

“Or she wanted a bargaining position when we came with Clavain.”

Vasko held up the light plastic box, as if Scorpio had not heard him properly. “The incubator, sir. We should get the child into it immediately.”

Scorpio leaned down, wiping the blade of the scalpel against the ice. The red smear bled away into the frost in patterns that made Vasko think of irises. He thought Scorpio might discard the knife, but instead the pig slipped it into a pocket.

“Jaccottet and Khouri will put the child into the incubator,” he said. “Meanwhile, you and I can take care of Clavain.”

“Sir?”

“His last wish. He wanted to be buried at sea.” Scorpio turned to step back into the ship. “I think we owe him that much.”

“Was that the last thing he said, sir?”

Scorpio turned slowly back to face Vasko and studied him for a long moment, his head tilted. Vasko felt as if he was being measured again, just as the old man had measured him, and the experience induced exactly the same feeling of inadequacy. What did these monsters from the past want of him? What did they expect him to live up to?

“It wasn’t the last thing he said, no,” Scorpio replied quietly.

They laid the body bag down on the fringe of ice surrounding the iceberg. Vasko had to keep reminding himself that it was still only the middle of the morning: the sky was a wet grey, clouds jammed in from horizon to horizon, like a ceiling scraping the top of the iceberg. A few kilometres out to sea was a distinct and threatening smudge of wet ink in that same ceiling, like a black eye. It seemed to move against the wind, as if looking for something below. On the horizon, lightning scribed chrome lines against the tarnished silver of the sky. Distant rain came down in slow sooty streams.

Around the iceberg, the sea roiled in sullen grey shapes. In all directions, the surface of the water was being constantly interrupted by slick, moving phantasms of an oily turquoise-green colour. Vasko had seen them earlier: they broke the surface, lingered and then vanished almost before the eye had time to focus. The impression was that a vast shoal of vague whale-like things was in the process of surrounding the iceberg. The phantasms bellied and gyred between waves and spume. They merged and split, orbited and submerged, and their precise shape and size was impossible to determine. But they were not animals. They were vast aggregations of microorganisms acting in a coherent manner.

Vasko saw Scorpio looking at the sea. There was an expression on the pig’s face that he hadn’t seen before. Vasko wondered if it was apprehension.

“Something’s happening, isn’t it?” Vasko asked.

“We have to carry him beyond the ice,” Scorpio said. “The boat’s still good for a few hours. Help me get him into it.”

“We shouldn’t take too long over it, sir.”

“You think it makes the slightest difference how long it takes?”

“From what you’ve said, sir, it made a difference to Clavain.”

They heaved the bag into the black carcass of the nearest boat. In daylight the hull already looked far rougher than Vasko remembered it, the smooth metal surface pocked and pitted with spots of local corrosion. Some of them were deep enough to put his thumb into. Even as they lifted the bag over the side, bits of the boat came off in metallic scabs where Vasko’s knee touched it.

The two of them climbed aboard. Urton, who was to remain on the iceberg’s ledge, helped them on their way with a shove. Scorpio turned on the motor. The water fizzed and the boat inched back towards the sea, retreating along the channel it had cut into the fringe.

“Wait.”

Vasko followed the voice. It was Jaccottet, emerging from the iceberg. The incubator hung from his wrist, obviously heavier than when Vasko had carried it in.

“What is it?” Scorpio called, idling the engine.

“You can’t leave without us.”

“No one’s leaving.”

“The child needs medical attention. We must get her back to the mainland as soon as possible.”

“That’s just what’s going to happen. Didn’t you hear what Vasko said? There’s a plane on its way. Sit tight here and everything will be all right.“

“In this weather the plane might take hours, and we don’t know how stable this iceberg is.”

Vasko felt Scorpio’s anger. It made his skin tingle, the way static electricity did. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying we should leave now, sir, in both boats, just as we came in. Head south. The plane will pick us up by transponder. We’re bound to save time that way, and we don’t have to worry about this thing collapsing under us.”

“He’s right, sir, I think,” Vasko said.

“Who asked you?” Scorpio snapped.

“No one, sir, but I’d say we all have a stake in this now, don’t we?”

“You have no stake in anything, Malinin.”

“Clavain seemed to think I did.”

He expected the pig to kill him there and then. The possibility loomed in his mind even as his gaze drifted to that deep black eye in the clouds. It was closer now—no more than a kilometre from the iceberg—and it was bellying down, beginning to reach something nublike towards the sea. It was a tornado, Vasko realised: just what they needed.

But Scorpio only snarled and powered up the engine again. “Are you with me or not? If not, get out and wait on the ice with the others.”

“I’m with you, sir,” Vasko said. “I just don’t see why we can’t do it the way Jaccottet says. We can leave with both boats and bury Clavain on the way.”

“Get out.”

“Sir?”

“I said get out. It isn’t up for negotiation.”

Vasko started to say something. Time and again, when he replayed the incident in his mind, it would never be clear to him just what he intended to say to the pig at that moment. Perhaps he already knew he had crossed the line at that point, and that nothing he could say or do would ever unmake that crossing.

Scorpio moved with lightning speed. He let go of the engine control, seized Vasko with both trotters and then levered him over the side. Vasko felt the top inch of the metal side of the boat crumble under his thigh, like brittle chocolate. Then his back hit a thin and equally brittle skein of ice, and finally he sank into water colder than anything he had ever imagined, the bitter chill ramming up his spine like a gleaming piston of shock and pain. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cry out or reach for anything solid. He could hardly remember his name, or why drowning was such a bad thing after all.

He saw the boat slide away into the sea. He saw Jaccottet place the incubator on the ground, Khouri stepping up behind him, and start walking quickly but carefully towards him.

Above, the sky was a blank cerebral grey, except for the shadowy focus of the stormy eye. The nub of blackness had almost reached the surface of the water. It was curling to one side, towards the iceberg.

Scorpio brought the boat to a standstill. It rocked in a metre-high swell, not so much floating in water now as resting on a moving raft of blue-green organic matter. The raft reached away in all directions for many dozens of metres, but it was thickest at its epicentre, which appeared to be precisely where the boat had come to rest. Surrounding it was a dark charcoal band of relatively uncontaminated water, and beyond that lay several other distinct islands of Juggler matter. Beneath the surface of the water, glimpsed intermittently between waves and foam, were suggestions of frondlike tentacular structures, thick as pipelines. They bobbed and swayed, and occasionally moved with the slow, eerie deliberation of prehensile tails.

Scorpio rummaged in the boat for something to wrap around his face. The smell was drilling into his brain. Humans said it was bad, or at least overwhelmingly strong and potent. It was the smell of rotting kitchen waste, compost, ammonia, sewage, ozone. For pigs it was unbearable.

He found a covering in a medical kit and wrapped it twice around his snout, leaving his eyes free. They were stinging, watering incessantly. There was nothing he could do about that now.

Standing up, careful not to overbalance himself or the boat, he took hold of the body bag. The fury he had felt when he had thrown Vasko overboard had sapped what little strength he had managed to conserve. Now the bag felt three times as heavy as it should, not twice. He gripped it, trotters either side of the head end, and began to inch backwards. He did not want to risk dropping the body over one of the sides, fearful that the boat would capsize with the weight of two adults so far from the midline. If he dragged the body to the front or the back, he might be safe.

He slipped. His trotters lost their grip. He went flying backwards, landing on the calloused swell of his buttocks, the body bag thumping down against the decking.

He wiped the tears from his eyes, but that only made matters worse. The air was clotted with micro-organisms, a green haze hovering above the sea, and all he had done was force that irritation deeper into himself.

He stood up again. He noticed, absently, the trunk of blackness reaching down from the sky. He grasped the bag once more and started to heave it towards the stern. The organic shapes congealed around the boat in a constant procession of disturbing effigies, bottle-green silhouettes forming and dissolving like the work of mad topiarists. When he looked at them directly, the shapes had no meaning, but from the corner of his eye he saw hints of alien anatomy: a menagerie of strangely joined limbs, oddly arranged faces and torsos. Mouths gaped wide. Multiple clusters of eyes regarded him with mindless scrutiny. Articulated wing parts spread open like fans. Horns and claws erupted from the greenery, lingering for an instant before collapsing back into formlessness. The constant changes in the physical structure of the Juggler biomass was accompanied by a warm, wet breeze and a rapid slurping and tearing sound.

He turned around so that the bag lay between him and the stern. Leaning over the bag, he grasped it near the shoulders and levered it on to the metal side of the stern. He blinked, trying to focus. All around him, the green frenzy continued unabated.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

It was all meant to happen differently. In his imagination, Scorpio had often considered the possible circumstances of Clavain’s death. Assuming he would live long enough to witness it himself, he had always seen Clavain’s burial in heroic terms, some solemn fire-lit ceremony attended by thousands of onlookers. He had always assumed that if Clavain died it would be gently and in the belly of the colony, his last hours the subject of loving vigils. Failing that, in some courageous and unexpected action, going out heroically the way he had almost done a hundred times before, pressing a hand to some small, innocent-looking chest wound, his face turning the colour of a winter sky, holding on to breath and consciousness just long enough to whisper some message to those who would have to go on without him. In his imagination, it had always been Scorpio who passed on that valediction.

There would be dignity in his death, a sense of rightful closure. And his burial would be a thing of wonder and sadness, something to be talked about for generations hence.

That was not how it was happening.

Scorpio did not want to think about what was in the bag, or what had been done to it. He did not want to think about the enforced slowness of Clavain’s death, or the vital part he had played in it. It would have been bad enough to have been a spectator to what took place in the iceberg. To know that he had been a participant was to know that some irreplaceable part of himself had been hollowed out.

“I won’t let them down,” he said. “When you were away on your island, I always tried to do things the way you would have done them. That doesn’t mean I ever thought I was your equal. I know that won’t ever be true. I have trouble planning beyond the end of my nose. Like I always say, I’m a hands-on type.” ‘

His eyes stung. He thought about what he had just said, the bitter irony of it.

“I suppose that was the way it was, right to the end. I’m sorry, Nevil. You deserved better than this. You were a brave man and you always did the right thing, no matter what it cost you.”

Scorpio paused, catching his breath, quashing the vague feeling of absurdity he felt in talking to the bag. Speeches had never been his thing. Clavain would have made a much better job of it, had their roles been reversed. But he was here and Clavain was the dead man in the bag. He just had to do the best he could, fumbling through, the way he had done most things in his life.

Clavain would forgive him, he thought.

“I’m going to let you go now,” Scorpio said. “I hope this is what you wanted, pal. I hope you find what you were looking for.”

He gave the bag one last heave over the side. It vanished instantly into the green raft that surrounded the boat. In the moments after the bag had gone there was a quickening in the activity of the Juggler forms. The constant procession of alien shapes became more frenzied, shuffling towards some excited climax.

In the sky, the questing black trunk had curved nearly horizontal, groping towards the iceberg. The tip of the thing was no longer a blunt nub: it had begun to open, dividing into multiple black fingers that were themselves growing and splitting, writhing their way through the air.

There was nothing he could about that now. He looked back at the play of Juggler shapes, thinking for an instant that he had even seen a pair of female human faces appear in the storm of images. The faces had been strikingly alike, but one possessed a maturity that the other lacked, a serene and weary resignation. It was as if entirely too much had been witnessed, entirely too much imagined, for one human life. Eyeless as statues, they stared at him for one frozen moment, before dissolving back into the flicker of masks.

Around him, the raft began to break up. The changing wall of shapes slumped, collapsing back into the sea. Even the smell and the stinging miasma had begun to lose something of their astringency. He supposed that meant he had done his duty. But above the sea, the black thing continued to push its branching extremities towards the iceberg.

He still had work to do.

Scorpio turned the boat around. By the time he reached the iceberg the other craft was already afloat: Vasko, Khouri, the incubator and the two Security Arm people were visible within it, the adults crouching down against the spray, the hull sinking low in the water. The Jugglers had redoubled their activity after the lull when the ocean received Clavain. Scorpio was certain now that it had something to do with the thing reaching down from the sky. The Jugglers didn’t like it: it was making them agitated, like a colony of small animals sensing the approach of a snake.

Scorpio didn’t blame them: it was no kind of weather phenomenon he had ever experienced. Not a tornado, not a sea-spout. Now that the swaying multi-armed thing was directly overhead, its artificial nature was sickeningly obvious. The entire thing—from the thick trunk descending down through the cloud layer to the thinnest of the branching extremities—was composed of the same cubic black elements they had seen in Skade’s ship. It was Inhibitor machinery, wolf machinery—whatever you wanted to call it. There was no guessing how much of it hovered above them, hidden behind the cloud deck. The trunk might even have reached all the way down through Ararat’s atmosphere.

It made him feel ill just to look at it. It simply wasn’t right.

He steered towards the other boat. Now that he had dealt with Clavain he felt a clarity of mind he’d lacked a few minutes before. It had probably been wrong to leavethem on the iceberg with just that one boat for escape, but he had not wanted anyone else with him when he buried his friend. Selfish, perhaps, but it hadn’t been any of them doing the cutting.

“Hold tight,” he told them via the communicator. “We’ll even out the load as soon as I’m close enough.”

“Then what?” Vasko asked, looking fearfully up at the thing stretched across the sky.

“Then we run like hell.”

The thing’s attention lingered over the iceberg. With slow, pythonlike movements it pushed a cluster of tentacles into the roof of the frozen structure, the needles and jags of ice shattering as the machinery forced its way through. Perhaps, Scorpio thought, it sensed the presence of other pieces of Inhibitor machinery, dormant or dead within the wreckage of the corvette. It needed to be reunited with them. Or perhaps it was after something else entirely.

The iceberg quivered. The sea responded to the movement, slow, shallow waves oozing away from the fringe. From somewhere within the structure came crunching sounds, like the shattering of bone. Flaws opened wide in the outer layer of the ice, exposing a lacy marrow of fabulously differentiated colour: pinks and blues and ochres.

Black machinery forced its way through the cracks. A dozen tentacles emerged from the iceberg, coiling and writhing, sniffing the air, splitting into ever-smaller components as they pushed outwards.

Scorpio’s boat kissed the hull of the other craft. “Give me the incubator,” he shouted, above the screaming of the engine.

Vasko stood up, leaning between the boats, steadying himself with one hand on Scorpio’s shoulder. The young man looked pale, his hair plastered to his scalp. “You came back,” he said.

“Things changed,” Scorpio said.

Scorpio took the incubator, feeling the weight of the child within it, and jammed it safely between his feet. “Now Khouri,” he said, offering a hand to the woman.

She crossed over to his boat; he felt it sink lower in the water as she boarded. She met his gaze for a moment, seemed about to say something. He turned back to Vasko before she had a chance.

“Follow me. I don’t want to hang around here a moment longer than necessary.”

The cracks in the iceberg had widened to plunging abysses, rifts that cut deep into its heart. The black machinery forced more of itself into the ice, insinuating itself in eager surges. More extremities emerged from the perimeter, waving and extending. The iceberg began to break up into distinct chunks, each as large as a house. Scorpio gunned his boat’s engine harder, slamming across the waves, but could not tear his attention from what was happening behind him. Chunks of the iceberg calved away, jagged pieces tipping into the sea with a powdery roar of displaced water. Now he could see a writhing tangle of black tentacles flexing and coiling around the ruined corvette. Not much remained of the iceberg now, just the ship that had grown it.

The machinery pulled the ship into the air. The black shapes forced themselves through the gaps in the hull, their movements delicate and thoughtful and vaguely apprehensive, like someone removing the last layer of wrapping from a present.

The other boat was lagging: it was slower in the water, with three adults aboard.

The corvette broke into sharp black pieces, all but the smallest of them still suspended in the sky. Coils and bows of perfect blackness wheeled around the parts.

It’s looking for something, Scorpio thought.

The coils loosened their grip. Tentacles and sub-tentacles withdrew in a flurry of contracting motion. Layers of black cubes flowed across each other, swelling and shrinking in queasy unison. Scorpio only saw the details in the edges, where the machinery met the grey backdrop of the sky.

The pieces of the corvette—all of them, now—splashed into the sea.

But it still held something: a tiny, white, star-shaped form hung limply in the air. It was Skade, Scorpio realised. The machinery had found her in the wreckage, wrapped part of itself around her waist and plunged another, more delicate part of itself into her head. It was interrogating her, retrieving neural structures from her corpse.

It might, for a moment, feel like being alive again.

The black machinery pushed a new trunk of itself towards the fleeing boats. With that, something tightened in Scorpio’s stomach: some instinctive visceral response to the approach of a slithering predator. Get away from it. He tried to push the boat harder. But the boat was already giving him all it had.

He saw motion in the other boat: the glint as a muzzle was trained towards the sky. An instant later, the blinding electric-pink discharge of a Breitenbach cannon lit the grey sky. The beam lanced up towards the looming mass of alien machinery. It should have speared right through it, etching a searing line into the cloud deck. Instead, the beam veered around the machinery like a firehose.

Vasko kept firing, but the beam squirmed away from any point where it might have done damage.

The black machinery followed the thick trunk. The whole mass still hung from the sky, multi-armed, like some obscene chandelier.

It was taking a particular interest in the second boat.

The cannon sputtered out. Scorpio heard the crackle of small-arms fire.

None of it was going to make any difference.

Suddenly he felt a lancing pain in his ears. All around him, in the same instant, the sea bellied up three or four metres, as if a tremendous suction effect had pulled it into the sky. There was a thunderclap louder than anything he had ever heard. He looked up, his ears still roaring, and saw… something—a hint, for a fraction of a second, of a circular absence in the sky, a faint demarcation between the air and something within it. The circle was gone almost immediately, and as it ceased to exist he felt the same pain in his ears, the same sense of suction.

A few seconds later, it happened again.

This time, the circle intersected the main black mass of the hovering Inhibitor machinery. A huge misshapen clot of it fell towards the waves, severed from the rest. Even more of the mass had simply ceased to exist: it was as if everything within the spherical region above him had winked out of existence—not just air, but the Inhibitor machinery occupying the same volume. The limbs attached to the falling chunk thrashed wildly even as it fell. Scorpio sensed it slowing as it neared the surface of the water, but the rate of arrest was not sufficient to bring it to a halt. It hit, Submerged, rebounded to the surface. The limbs continued to whip around the main core, threshing the sea.

Khouri leaned towards him. Her lips moved, but her voice was lost under the blood-tide roaring in his ears. He knew what she was saying, though: the three syllables were unmistakable. “Remontoire.”

He nodded. He didn’t need to know the details: it was enough that he had intervened. “Thank you, Rem,” he said, hearing his own voice as if underwater.

The grey-green mass of the Juggler material was coalescing around the floating, thrashing mass of black machinery. Above, the intruder had begun to pull itself back into the cloud deck, the curved surfaces of its wounds still obvious. Scorpio was beginning to wonder about the other part—whether it would repair itself, shrug off the Juggler biomass and continue to cause them trouble—when it and the Jugglers and an entire hundred-metre-wide hemispherical scoop of sea vanished. He watched as the sloping, seamless wall of water around the absence seemed to freeze there, as if unwilling to reclaim the volume taken away from it. Then it crashed in, a tower of dirty green surging into the air above the epicentre, and an ominous ramp of water sped towards them.

Scorpio tightened his grip on both the boat and the incubator. “Hold on,” he shouted to Khouri.