Absolution Gap

TWENTY-SEVEN

In the deep cloisters of the ship, Antoinette halted. “John?” she said. “It’s me again. I’ve come down to talk to you.”

Antoinette knew he was nearby. She knew that he was watching her, alert to her every gesture. When the wall moved, pushing itself into the bas-relief image of a spacesuited figure, she controlled her natural instinct to flinch. It was not quite what she had been expecting, but it was still an apparition.

“Thanks,” she said. “Good to see you again.”

The figure was a suggestion rather than an accurate sketch. The image shimmered, the wall’s deformations undergoing constant and rapid change, fluttering and rippling like a flag in a stiff gale. When the image occasionally broke up, fading back into the rough texture of the wall, it was as if the figure was being hidden by scarves of windblown Martian dust cutting horizontally across the field of view.

The figure gestured to her, raising an arm, touching one gloved hand to the narrow visor of its space helmet.

Antoinette raised her own hand in greeting, but the figure on the wall merely repeated the gesture, more emphatically this time.

Then she remembered the goggles that the Captain had given her the time before. She slipped them from her pocket and settled them over her eyes. Again the view through the goggles was synthetic, but this time—for now, at least—nothing was being edited out of her visual field. This reassured her. She had not enjoyed the feeling that large and possibly dangerous elements in her vicinity were being masked from her perception. It was shocking to think that for centuries people had accepted such manipulation of their environment as a perfectly normal aspect of life, regarding such perceptual filtering as no more remarkable than the wearing of sunglasses or earmuffs. It was even more shocking to think that they had allowed the machinery controlling that filtering to creep into their skulls, where it could make the trickery even more seamless. The Demarchists—and, for that matter, the Conjoiners—truly were strange people. She was sad about many things, but not the fact that she had been born too late to participate in such reality-modifying games. She liked to reach out for something and know it was really there.

But the goggles were a necessary evil. In the Captain’s realm, she had to consent to his rules.

The bas-relief image took a definite step towards her and then emerged from the wall, solid now, taking on form and detail, exactly as if a physical person had stepped out of a highly localised sandstorm.

Now she did flinch, for the illusion of presence was striking. She could not help but take a step backwards.

There was something different about the manifestation this time. The space helmet was not quite as ancient as the one she remembered, and it was covered in different symbols. The suit, while still of an old design, was not as utterly archaic as the first he had worn. The chest-pack was more streamlined, and the whole suit fitted its wearer more tightly. Antoinette was no expert, but she judged that the new suit must be fifty-odd years ahead of the one he had worn last time.

She wondered what that meant.

She was on the point of taking another step backwards when the Captain halted his approach and again raised a gloved hand. The gesture served to calm her, which was probably the intention. Then he began to work the mechanism of his visor, sliding it up with a conspicuous hiss of equalising air pressure.

The face inside the helmet was instantly recognisable, but it was also the face of an older man. There were lines where there had been none before, grey in the stubble that still shadowed his cheeks. There were wrinkles around his eyes, which appeared more deeply set. The cast of his mouth was different, too, curving downwards at the corners.

His voice, when he spoke, was both deeper and more ragged. “You don’t give up easily, do you?”

“As a rule, no. Do you remember the last chat we had, John?”

“Adequately.” With one hand he punched a matrix of controls set into the upper surface of the chest-pack, keying in a chain of commands. “How long ago was it?”

“Do you mind if I ask you how long ago you think it was?”

“No.”

She waited. The Captain looked at her, his expression blank.

“How long ago do you think it was?” she asked, eventually.

“A couple of months. Several years of shiptime. Two days. Three minutes. One point one eight milliseconds. Fifty-four years.”

“Two days is about right,” she said. 1 “I’ll take your word for it. As you’ll have gathered, my memory isn’t quite the razor-sharp faculty it once was.”

“Still, you did remember that I’d come before. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

“You’re a very charitable person, Antoinette.”

“I’m not surprised that your memory works in funny ways, John. But it’s enough for me that you remembered my name. Do you remember anything else we talked about?”

“Give me a clue.”

“The visitors, John? The presences in the system?”

“They’re still here,” he said. For a moment he was again distracted by the functions of his chest-pack. He looked more vigilant than concerned. She saw him tap the little bracelet of controls that encircled one wrist, then nod as if satisfied with some subtle change in the suit’s parameter settings.

“Yes,” she said.

“They’re also closer. Aren’t they?”

“We think so, John. That’s what Khouri told us was happening, and everything she’s said has checked out so far.”

“I’d listen to her, if I were you.”

“It’s not just a question of listening to Khouri now. We have her daughter. Her daughter knows things, or so we’ve been led to believe. We think we may have to start listening to what she tells us to do.”

“Clavain will guide you. Like me, he understands the reach of historical time. We’re both phantoms from the past, hurtling into futures neither of us expected to see.”

Antoinette bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. Clavain’s dead. He was killed saving Khouri’s daughter. We have Scorpio, but…”

The Captain was a long time answering. She wondered if the news of Clavain’s death had affected him more than she had anticipated. She had never thought of Clavain and the Captain as having any kinship, but now that the Captain put it like that, the two had a lot more in common with each other than with most of their peers.

“You don’t have absolute faith in Scorpio’s leadership?” he asked.

“Scorpio’s served us well. In a crisis, you couldn’t ask for a better leader. But he’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t think strategically.”

“Then find another leader.”

Something happened then that surprised her. Unbidden, she had a flashback to the earlier meeting in the High Conch. She saw Blood swaggering in at the start of it and then she saw Vasko Malinin arriving late for the same meeting. She saw Blood reprimanding him for his lateness and Vasko shrugging off that same reprimand as an irrelevance. And she realised, with hindsight, that she had accepted the young man’s insouciance as a necessary correlative to what he was and what he would become, and that she had, on some level, found it admirable.

She had seen a gleam of something shining through, like steel.

“This isn’t about leaders,” Antoinette said hastily. “It’s about you, John. Are you intending to leave?”

“You suggested I should give the matter some thought.”

She recalled those elevating neutrino levels. “You seem to be giving it a bit more than thought.”

“Perhaps.”

“We need to be careful,” she said. “We may well need to get into space at short notice, but we have to think about the consequences for those around us. It will take days to get everyone loaded aboard, even if everything goes without a hitch.”

“There are thousands aboard now. Their survival will have to be my main priority. I’m sorry about the others, but if they don’t get here in time they may have to be left behind. Does that sound callous to you?”

“I’m not the one to judge. Look, some people will choose to stay behind anyway. We may even encourage them, just in case leaving Ararat turns out to be a mistake. But if you leave now, you’ll kill everyone not already aboard.”

“Have you considered moving them aboard faster?”

“We’re doing what we can, and we’ve begun to make plans to relocate a limited number of people away from the bay. But by this time tomorrow there’ll still be at least a hundred thousand people we haven’t moved.”

I For a moment the Captain faded back into the dust storm. Antoinette stared at the rough leathery texture of the wall. She thought she had lost him and was about to turn away. Then he emerged again, stooping against an imagined wind.

He raised his voice over something only he could hear. “I’m sorry, Antoinette. I understand your concerns.”

“Does that mean you’ve listened to a word I said, or are you just going to leave when it suits you, regardless?”

He reached up to lower his visor. “You should do all that you can to get the others to safety, whether it’s aboard the ship or further from the bay.”

“That’s it, then, is it? Those that we haven’t moved will just have to take their chances?”

“None of this is easy for me.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to wait until we can get everyone to safety.”

“But it might, Antoinette. It might do exactly that.”

Antoinette turned away in disgust. “Remember what I told you last time? I was wrong. I see it now, even if I didn’t then.”

“What was that exactly?”

She looked back at him. She felt spiteful and reckless. “I said you’d paid for your crimes. I said you’d done it a hundred thousand times over. Nice dream, John, but it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t care a damn about those people. It was only ever about saving yourself.”

The Captain did not answer her. He pulled down the visor and vanished back into the storm, still angling his body against the tremendous lacerating force of that invisible wind. And Antoinette began to wonder whether this visit hadn’t after all been a grave mistake, exactly the sort of reckless behaviour that her father had always warned her about.

“No joy,” she told her companions back in the High Conch.

Around the table sat a quorum of colony seniors. She did not notice any obvious absences except for Pellerin, the swimmer. Even Scorpio was now present. It was the first she had seen of him since Clavain’s death, and there was, Antoinette thought, something in his gaze that she had never seen there before. Even when he looked directly at her his eyes were focused on something distant and almost certainly hostile—a glint on some imagined horizon, an enemy sail or the gleam of armour. She had seen that look somewhere else recently, but it took her a moment to remember where. The old man had been sitting in the same place at the table, fixated on the same remote threat. It had taken years of pain and suffering to bring Clavain to that state, but only days to do it to the pig.

Antoinette knew that something awful had happened in the iceberg. She had flinched from the details. When the others had told her she did not need to know—that she was much better off not knowing—she had decided to believe them. But although she had never been very good at reading the expressions of pigs, in Scorpio’s face half the story was already laid out for her inspection, the horror anatomised if only she had the wit to read the signs.

“What did you tell him?” Scorpio asked.

“I told him we’d be looking at tens of thousands of casualties if he decided to lift off.”

“And?”

“He more or less said ‘too bad.’ His only immediate concern was for the people already aboard the ship.”

“Fourteen thousand at the last count,” Blood commented.

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Vasko said. “That’s—what? Not far off a tenth of the colony already?”

Blood toyed with his knife. “You want to come and help us squeeze in the next five hundred, son, you’re more than welcome.”

“It’s that difficult?” Vasko asked.

“It gets worse with every consignment. We might manage to get it up to twenty thousand by dawn, but only if we start treating them like cattle.”

‘They’re human beings,“ Antoinette said. ”They deserve better treatment than that. What about the freezers? Aren’t they helping?“

“The caskets aren’t working as well as they used to,” Xavier Liu said, addressing his wife exactly as he would any other colony senior. “Once they’re cooled down they’re OK, but putting someone under means hours of supervision and tinkering. There’s no way to process them fast enough.”

Antoinette closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. She saw turquoise rings, like ripples in water. “This is about as bad as things can get, isn’t it?” Then she reopened her eyes and tried to shake some clarity into her head. “Scorp—any contact with Remontoire?”

“Nothing.”

“But you’re still convinced he’s up there?”

“I’m not convinced of anything. I’m merely acting on the best intelligence I have.”

“And you think we’d have seen a sign by now, some attempt to communicate with us, if he were up there.”

“Khouri was that sign,” Scorpio said.

‘Then why haven’t they sent down someone else?“ Antoinette replied. ”We need to know, Scorp: do we sit tight or get the hell off Ararat?“

“Believe me, I’m aware of the options.”

“We can’t wait for ever,” Antoinette said, frustration seeping into her voice. “If Remontoire loses the battle, we’ll be looking at a sky full of wolves. No way out once that happens, even if they don’t touch Ararat. We’ll be locked in.”

“As I said, I’m aware of the options.”

She had heard the menace in his voice. Of course he was aware. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… don’t know what else we can do.”

No one spoke for a while. Outside, an aircraft swept low overhead, curving away with another consignment of refugees. Antoinette did not know if they were being taken to the ship or the far side of the island. Once the need to get people to safety had been recognised, the evacuation effort had been split down the middle.

“Did Aura offer anything useful?” Vasko asked.

Scorpio turned to him, the leather of his uniform creaking. “What sort of thing were you thinking of?”

“It wasn’t Khouri that was the sign,” Vasko said, “it was Aura. Khouri may know things, but Aura is the hotline. She’s the one we really need to talk to, the one who might know the right thing to do.”

“I’m glad you’ve given the matter so much consideration,” Scorpio said.

“Well?” Vasko persisted.

Antoinette stiffened. The atmosphere in the meeting room had never exactly been relaxed, but now it made the hairs on the back of her hands tingle. She had never dared speak to Scorpio like that, and she did not know many who had.

But Scorpio answered calmly. “She—Khouri—said the word again.”

“The word?” Vasko repeated.

“Hela. She’s said it several times since we revived her, but we didn’t know what it meant, or even if it had any particular significance. But there was another word this time.” Again the leather creaked as he shifted his frame. For all that he appeared disconnected from events in the room, the violence of which he was capable was a palpable thing, waiting in the wings like an actor.

“The other word?” Vasko asked.

“Quaiche,” Scorpio replied.

The woman walked to the sea. Overhead the sky was a brutal, tortured grey and the rocks under her feet were slippery and unforgiving. She shivered, more in apprehension than cold, for the air was humid and oppressive. She looked behind her, along the shoreline towards the ragged edge of the encampment. The buildings on the fringe of the settlement had a deserted and derelict air to them. Some of them had collapsed and never been reoccupied. She thought it very unlikely that there was anyone around to notice her presence. Not, of course, that it mattered in the slightest. She was entitled to be here, and she was entitled to step into the sea. The fact that she would never have asked this of her own swimmers did not mean that her actions were in any way against colony rules, or even the rules of the swimmer corps. Foolhardy, yes, and very probably futile, but that could not be helped. The pressure to do something had grown inside her like a nagging pain, until it could not be ignored.

It had been Vasko Malinin who had tipped her over the edge. Did he realise the effect his words had had?

Marl Pellerin halted where the shoreline began to curve back around on itself, enclosing the waters of the bay. The shore was a vague grey scratch stretching as far as the eye could see, until it became lost in the mingled wall of sea-mist and cloud that locked in the bay in all directions. The spire of the ship was only intermittently visible in the silvery distance, and its size and remoteness varied from sighting to sighting as her brain struggled to cope with the meagre evidence available to it. Marl knew that the spire reached three kilometres into the sky, but at times it looked no larger than a medium-sized conch structure, or one of the communications antennae that ringed the settlement. She imagined the squall of neutrinos streaming out from the spire—actually from the submerged part of it, of course, where the engines lay underwater—as a shining radiance, a holy light knifing through her. The particles sang through her cell membranes, doing no damage as they sprinted for interstellar space at a hair’s breath below the speed of light. They meant that the engines were gearing up for star-flight. Nothing organic could detect those squalls, only the most sensitive kinds of machine. But was that really true? The Juggler organisms—taken as a single planet-spanning entity—constituted a truly vast biomass. The Juggler organisms on a single planet outweighed the cumulative mass of the entire human species by a factor of a hundred. Was it so absurd to think that the Jugglers in their entirety might not be as oblivious to that neutrino flux as people imagined? Perhaps they, too, sensed the Captain’s restlessness. And perhaps in their slow, green, nearly mindless fashion they comprehended something of what his departure would mean.

At the sea’s edge something caught Marl’s eye. She walked over to examine it, skipping nimbly from rock to rock. It was a lump of metal, blackened and twisted like some melted sugar confection, strange folds and creases marring its surface. Smoke coiled up from it. The thing buzzed and crackled, and an articulated part resembling the sectioned tail of a lobster twitched horribly. It must have come down recently, perhaps in the last hour. All around Ararat, wherever there were human observers, one heard reports of things falling from the sky. There were too many near these outposts to be accidental. Efforts were being concentrated above centres of human population. Someone—or something—was trying to get through. Occasionally, some small shard succeeded.

The thing disturbed her. Was it alien or human? Was it friendly-human or Conjoiner-human? Was anyone still making that kind of distinction?

Marl walked past the object and stopped at the water’s edge. She disrobed. Preparing to enter the sea, she had a weird flash of herself from the sea’s perspective. Her vision seemed to bob up and down from the water. She was a thin, naked thing, a pale upright starfish on the shore. The smashed object pushed a quill of smoke into the sky.

Marl wet her hands in water that had gathered in a rockpool. She splashed her face, wetting back her hair. The water stung her eyes, made them blur with tears. Even the water in the pools was fetid with Juggler life. Pellerin’s skin itched, especially in the band across her face where she already showed signs of Juggler takeover. The two colonies of micro-organisms—the one in the water and the one buried in her face—were recognising each other, fizzing with excitement.

Those who monitored such things considered Marl a marginal case. Her signs of takeover were by no means the worst anyone had ever seen. On statistical grounds, she ought to be safe for another dozen swims, at the very least. But there were always exceptions. Sometimes the sea consumed those who had only very slight indications of takeover. Rarely, it took complete newcomers the first time they swam.

That was the point about the Pattern Jugglers. They were alien. It, the Juggler biomass, was alien. It would not succumb to human analysis, to neatly circumscribed cause and effect. It was as quixotic and unpredictable as a drunkard. You could guess how it might behave given certain parameters, but once in a while you might be terribly, terribly wrong.

Marl knew this. She had never pretended otherwise. She knew that any swim brought risks.

She had been lucky so far.

She thought of Shizuko, waiting in the psychiatric section for one of Marl’s visits—except she wasn’t really waiting in the usual sense of the word. Shizuko might have been aware that Marl was due to arrive, and she might have varied her activities accordingly. But when Marl showed up, Shizuko merely looked at her with the distracted passing interest of someone who has seen a crack in a wall that they did not remember, or a fleeting suggestion of meaningful shape in a cloud. The flicker of interest was waning almost as soon as Marl had noticed it. Sometimes Shizuko would laugh, but it was an idiot’s laugh, like the chime of small, stupid bells.

Shizuko would then return to her scratching, her fingers always bleeding under the nails, ignoring the crayons and chalks offered to her as substitutes. Marl had stopped visiting some months ago. Once she had acknowledged and accepted that she now meant nothing to Shizuko, there had been an easing. Counterpointing it, however, had also been a dispiriting sense of betrayal and weakness.

She thought now of Vasko. She thought of his easy certainties, his conviction that the only thing that stood between the swimmers and the sea was fear.

She hated him for that.

Marl took a step into the water. A dozen or so metres out, a raft of green matter twirled in response, sensing that she had entered its realm. Marl took in a deep breath. She was impossibly scared. The itch across her face had become a burn. It made her want to swoon into the water.

“I’m here,” she said. And she stepped towards the mass of Juggler organisms, submerging up to her thighs, up to her waist, then deeper. Ahead, the biomass formed shapes with quickening intensity, the breeze of its transformations blowing over her. Alien anatomies shuffled through endless permuta-tions. It was a pageant of monsters. The water too deep now to walk through, she kicked off from the bed of rocks and began to swim towards the show.

Vasko looked at the others present. “Quaiche? That doesn’t mean anything more to me than the first word.”

“They meant nothing to me either,” Scorpio said. “I wasn’t even sure of the spelling of the first word. But now I’m certain. The second word locks it. The meaning is unambiguous.”

“So are you going to enlighten us?” Liu asked.

Scorpio gestured to Orca Cruz.

“Scorp’s right,” she said. “Hela means nothing significant in isolation. Query the databases we brought with us from Resurgam or Yellowstone and you’ll find thousands of possible explanations. Same if you try variant spellings. But put in Quaiche and Hela and it’s a different kettle of fish. There’s really only one explanation, bizarre as it seems.”

“I’m dying to hear it,” Liu said. Next to him, Vasko nodded in agreement. Antoinette said nothing and conveyed no visible interest, but her curiosity was obviously just as strong.

“Hela is a world,” Cruz said. “Not much of one, just a medium-sized moon orbiting a gas giant named Haldora. Still not ringing any bells?”

No one said anything.

“What about Quaiche?” Vasko asked. “Another moon?”

Cruz shook her head. “No. Quaiche is actually a man, the individual who assigned the names to Hela and Haldora. There’s no entry for Quaiche or his worlds in the usual nomenclature database, but we shouldn’t be too surprised about that—it’s been more than sixty years since it was updated by direct contact with other ships. But ever since we’ve been on Ararat, we’ve been picking up the occasional stray signal from other Ultra elements. A lot, recently—they’re using long-range wide-beam transmissions far more than they ever did in the past, and occasionally one of those signals sweeps over us by accident.”

“Why the change in tactics?” Vasko asked.

“Something’s got them scared,” Cruz said. “They’re becoming nervous, unwilling to do face-to-face trade. Some Ultras must have met something they didn’t like, and now they’re spreading the word, switching to long-range trading of data rather than material commodities.”

“No prizes for guessing what’s spooked them,” Vasko said.

“It works to our advantage, though,” Cruz said. “They may not be authoritative transmissions, and half of those we do intercept are riddled with errors and viruses, but over the years we’ve been able to keep our databases more up to date than we could ever have hoped given our lack of contact with external elements.”

“So what do we know about Quaiche’s system, then?” Vasko asked.

“Not as much as we’d like,” Cruz said. “There were no conflicts with prior assignments, which means that the system Quaiche was investigating must have been very poorly explored prior to his arrival.”

“So whatever Aura is referring to happened—what—fifty, sixty years ago?” Vasko asked.

“Easily,” Cruz said.

Vasko stroked his chin. It was clean-shaven, smooth as sandpapered wood. “Then it can’t mean much to us, can it?”

“Something happened to Quaiche,” Scorpio said. “Accounts vary. Seems he was doing scutwork for Ultras, getting his hands dirty exploring planetary environments they weren’t happy around. He witnessed something, something to do with Haldora.” Scorpio looked at them all, one by one, daring anyone—especially Vasko—to interrupt or quibble. “He saw it vanish. He saw the planet just cease to exist for a fraction of a second. And because of that he started up a kind of religion on Hela, Haldora’s moon.”

‘That’s it?“ Antoinette asked. ”That’s the message Aura came all this way to give us? The address of a religious lunatic?“

‘There’s more,“ Scorpio said.

“I sincerely hope there is,” she replied.

“He saw it happen more than once. So, apparently, did others.”

“Why am I not surprised?” she said.

“Wait,” Vasko said, holding up a hand. “I want to hear the rest. Go on, Scorp.”

The pig looked at him with an utter absence of expression. “Like I need your permission?”

“That’s not how I meant it to sound. I just…” Vasko looked around, perhaps wondering whom he might solicit for support. “I just think we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss anything we learn from Aura, no matter how little sense it seems to make.”

“No one’s dismissing anything,” Scorpio said.

“Please tell us what you learned,” Antoinette interrupted, sensing that things were about to get out of hand.

“Not much happened for decades,” Scorpio continued. “Quaiche’s miracle drew a few people to Hela. Some of them signed up for the religion, some of them became disillusioned and set up shop as miners. There are alien artefacts on Hela—nearly useless junk, but they export enough to sustain a few settlements. Ultras buy the junk off them and sell it on to curio collectors. Someone probably makes a bit of money out of it, but you can guess that it isn’t the poor idiots who dig the stuff out of the ground.”

“There are alien artefacts on a bunch of worlds,” Antoinette said. “I’m guessing this lot went the same way as the Amarantin and a dozen or so other civilisations, right?”

“The databases didn’t have much on the indigenous culture,” Scorpio said. “The people who run Hela don’t exactly encourage free-thinking scientific curiosity. But yes, reading between the lines, it looks as though they met the wolves.”

“And they’re extinct now?” she asked.

“So it would seem.”

“Help me out here, Scorp,” Antoinette said. “What do you think all this might mean to Aura?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Perhaps she wants us to go there,” Vasko said.

They all looked at him. His tone of voice had been reasonable, as if he was merely voicing something the rest of them were taking for granted. Perhaps that was even true, but hearing someone articulate it was like a small, quiet profanity in the most holy of audiences.

“Go there?” Scorpio said, frowning, the skin between his snout and forehead crinkling into rolls of flesh. “You mean actually go there?”

“If we conclude that she’s suggesting it would help us, then yes,” Vasko said.

“We can’t just go to this place on the basis of a sick woman’s delirious ramblings,” said Hallatt, one of the colony seniors from Resurgam who had never trusted Khouri.

“She isn’t sick,” said Dr. Valensin. “She has been tired, and she has been traumatised. That’s all.”

“I hear she wanted the baby put back inside her,” Hallatt said, a revolted sneer on his face, as if this was the most debased thing anyone had ever imagined.

“She did,” Scorpio said, “and I vetoed it. But it wasn’t an unreasonable request. She is the child’s mother, and the child was kidnapped before she could give birth to her. Under the circumstances, I thought it was an entirely understandable desire.”

“But you still turned her down,” Hallatt said.

“I couldn’t risk losing Aura, not after the price we paid for her.”

“Then you were cheated,” Hallatt said. “The price was too high. We lost Clavain and all we got back was a brain-damaged child.”

“You’re saying Clavain died in vain?” Scorpio asked him, his voice dangerously soft.

The moment stalled, elongated, like a fault in a recording. Antoinette realised with appalling clarity that she was not the only one who did not know what had happened in the iceberg. Hallatt, too, must be ignorant of the actual events, but his ignorance was of an infinitely more reckless kind, trampling and transgressing its own boundaries.

“I don’t know how he died. I don’t care and I don’t need to know. But if Aura was all it was about then no, it wasn’t worth it. He died in vain.” Hallatt locked his fingers together and pursed his lips in Scorpio’s direction. “You might not want to hear it, but that’s the way it is.”

Scorpio glanced at Blood. Something passed between them: an interplay of minute gestures too subtle, too familiar to each participant, ever to be unravelled by an outsider. The exchange only lasted for an instant. Antoinette wondered if anyone else even noticed it, or whether she had simply imagined it.

But another instant later, Hallatt was looking down at something parked in his chest.

Languidly, as if standing up to adjust a picture hung at a lopsided angle, Blood eased to his feet. He strolled towards Hallatt, swaying from side to side with the slow, effortless rhythm of a metronome.

Hallatt was making choking sounds. His fingers twitched impotently against the haft of Blood’s knife.

“Get him out of here,” Scorpio ordered.

Blood removed his knife from Hallatt, cleaned it against his thigh, sheathed it again. A surprisingly small amount of blood leaked from the wound.

Valensin moved to stand up.

“Stay where you are,” Scorpio said.

Blood had already called for a pair of SA aides. They arrived within the minute, reacting to the situation with only a momentary jolt of surprise. Antoinette gave them top marks for that. Had she walked into the room and found someone bleeding to death from an obvious knife wound, she would have had a hard time staying conscious, let alone calm.

“I’m going after him,” Valensin said, standing up again as the SA aides removed Hallett.

“I said, stay put,” Scorpio repeated.

The doctor hammered a fist on the table. “You just killed a man, you brutal little simpleton! Or at least you will have if he doesn’t get immediate medical attention. Is that something that you really want on your conscience, Scorpio?”

“Stay where you are.”

Valensin took a step towards the door. “Go ahead, then. Stop me, if it really means that much to you. You have the means.”

Scorpio’s face twisted into a mask of fury and hatred that Antoinette had never seen before. It astonished her that pigs had the necessary facial dexterity to produce such an extreme expression.

“I’ll stop you, trust me on that.” Scorpio reached into a pocket or sheath of his own—whatever it was lay hidden under the table—and removed his knife. It was not one Antoinette had seen before. The blade, at some command from the pig, grew blurred.

“Scorpio,” she said, standing up herself, “let him do it. He’s a doctor.”

“Hallatt dies.”

“There’ve been enough deaths already,” Antoinette said. “One more isn’t going to make anything better.”

The knife quivered in his grasp, as if not quite tamed. Antoinette expected it to leap from his hand at any moment.

Something chimed. The unexpected noise seemed to catch the pig unawares. His fury slipped down a notch. He looked for the source of the sound. It had come from his communications bracelet.

Scorpio quietened the knife. It grew solid again, and he returned it to the sheath or pocket where it had originated.

He looked at Valensin and said one word. “Go.”

The doctor nodded curtly—his own face still angry—and scurried after the aides who had carried the wounded man away.

Scorpio lifted the bracelet to his ear and listened to some small, shrill, distant voice. After a minute he frowned and asked the voice to repeat what it had said. As the message was reiterated his frown lessened, but did not entirely vanish.

“What is it?” Antoinette asked.

“The ship,” he said. “Something’s happening.”

Within ten minutes a shuttle had been commandeered and diverted from the ongoing evacuation effort. It came down within a block of the High Conch, descending between buildings, a Security Arm retinue clearing the area and providing safe access for the small party of colony seniors. Vasko was the last aboard, after Scorpio and Antoinette Bax, while Blood and the others remained on the ground as the plane hauled itself aloft once more. The shuttle threw hard white light against the sides of the buildings, the citizens below shielding their eyes but unwilling to look away. There was now no one in First Camp who did not urgently wish to be somewhere else. There was only room for the three who had just boarded because the shuttle’s bay was already loaded to near-capacity with evacuees.

Vasko felt the machine accelerate. He hung on to a ceiling handhold, hoping that the flight would be brief. The evacuees looked at him with stunned faces, as if waiting for an explanation he was in no position to give.

“Where are they supposed to be heading?” he asked the foreman in charge.

“The outlands,” he said quietly, meaning the sheltered ground, “but now they’ll be taken to the ship instead. We can’t afford to waste valuable time.”

The cold efficiency of this decision stunned Vasko. But he also found himself admiring it.

“What if they don’t like it?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“They can always lodge a complaint.”

The journey did not take very long. They had a pilot this time; some of the evacuation flights were being handled by autonomous craft, but this one had been deemed too unusual. They kept low, heading out to sea, and then executed a wide turn around the base of the ship. Vasko was lucky enough to be by the wall. He had made a window in it, peering into silvery mist. Around him, the evacuees crowded forwards for a better look.

“Close the window,” Scorpio said.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I’d do it if I were you,” Antoinette said.

Vasko closed the window. If ever there was a day not to argue with the pig, he thought, then this was it. He had seen nothing in any case, just a hint of the ship’s looming presence.

They climbed, presumably continuing the spiralling flight path around the spire, and then he felt the shuttle slow and touch solid ground. After a minute or so a crack of light signalled the opening of the escape door and the evacuees were ushered out. Vasko did not get a good look at what lay beyond, in the reception area. He had only a brief glimpse of Security Arm guards standing alertly, shepherding the newcomers with an efficiency that went way beyond polite urgency. He had expected the people to show some anger when they realised they had been taken to the ship instead of the safe haven on the surface, but all he saw was docile acceptance. Perhaps they did not yet realise that this was the ship, and not some ground-level processing area on the other side of the island. If so, he did not care to be around when they learned about the change of plan.

Soon the shuttle was empty of evacuees. Vasko half-expected to be ushered off as well, but instead the three of them remained aboard with the pilot. The loading door closed again and the plane departed from the bay.

“You can open the window now,” Scorpio said.

Vasko made a generous window in the hull, large enough for the three of them to look out of, but for the moment there was nothing to see. He felt the shuttle lurch and yaw as it descended from the reception bay, but he could not tell if they were staying near the Nostalgia for Infinity or returning to First Camp.

“You said something was happening with the ship,” Vasko said. “Is it the neutrino levels?”

Scorpio turned to Antoinette Bax. “How are they looking?”

“Higher than the last time I reported,” she said, “but according to our monitor stations they haven’t been climbing at quite the same rate as before. Still going up, but not as fast. Maybe my little chat with John did some good after all.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Vasko asked.

Scorpio gestured at something through the window. “That,” he said.

Vasko followed the pig’s gaze. He saw the spire of the ship emerging from the silver sea haze. They had descended rapidly and were looking at the place where the ship thrust out of the water. It was here, only the night before, that Vasko had seen the ring of boats and the climbers trying to ascend to the ship’s entrance points. But everything had changed since then. There were no climbers, no boats. Instead of a ring of clear water around the base of the spire, the ship was hemmed by a thick, impenetrable layer of solid Juggler biomass. It was a fuzzy green colour, intricately textured. The layer reached out for perhaps a kilometre in all directions, connecting with other biomass clusters via floating bridges of the same verdant material. But that was not the whole of it. The layer around the ship was reaching up around the hull, forming a skin of biomass. It must have been tens of metres thick in places, dozens more where it flared upwards near the base. At that moment, by Vasko’s estimate, it had reached two or three hundred metres up the side of the ship. The uppermost limit was not a neatly regular circle but a ragged, probing thing, extending questing tendrils and fronds higher and higher. Faint green veins were already visible at least a hundred metres above the main mass. The whole sheath was moving even as he watched, creeping inexorably upwards. The main mass must have been moving at close to a metre a second. Assuming it could sustain that rate, it would have encased the entire ship within the hour.

“When did this start happening?” Vasko asked.

“Thirty, forty minutes ago,” Scorpio said. “We were alerted as soon as the concentration began to build up around the base.”

“Why now? I mean, after all the years that ship’s been parked here, why would they start attacking it now, of all days?” Vasko said.

“I don’t know,” Scorpio replied.

“We can’t be certain that it’s an attack,” Antoinette said quietly.

The pig turned to her. “So what does it look like to you?”

“It could be anything,” she replied. “Vasko’s right—an attack doesn’t make any sense. Not now, after all these years. It has to be something else.” She added, “I hope.”

“You said it,” Scorpio replied.

The plane continued to circle the spire. All around it was the same story. It was like watching an accelerated film of some enormous stone edifice being covered in moss, or a statue with verdigris—purposeful, deliberate verdigris.

“This changes things,” Antoinette said. “I’m worried, Scorp. It might not be an attack, but what if I’m wrong? What about the people already aboard?”

Scorpio lifted up his bracelet and spoke in hushed tones.

“Who are you calling?” Antoinette asked.

He cupped a hand over the microphone. “Marl Pellerin,” he said. “I think it’s time the swimmer corps found out what’s going on.”

“I agree,” Vasko said. “I thought they should have swum already, as soon as the Juggler activity started up. Isn’t that what they’re for?”

“You wouldn’t say that if it was you that had to swim out there,” Antoinette said.

“It isn’t me. It’s them, and it’s their job.”

Scorpio continued to speak softly into the bracelet. He kept saying the same thing over and over again, as if repeating himself to different people. Finally he shook his head and lowered his sleeve.

“No one can find Pellerin,” he said.

“She must be somewhere,” Vasko said. “On stand-by or something, waiting for orders. Have you tried the High Conch?”

“Yes.”

“Leave it,” Antoinette said, touching the pig’s sleeve. “It’s chaos back there. I’m not surprised that the lines of communication are breaking down.”

“What about the rest of the swimmer corps?” Vasko asked.

“What about them?” Scorpio asked.

“If Pellerin can’t be bothered to do her job, what about the others? We’re always hearing about how vital they are to the security of Ararat. Now’s their chance to prove it.”

“Or die trying,” Scorpio said.

Antoinette shook her head. “Don’t ask any of them to swim, Scorp. It isn’t worth it. Whatever’s happening out there is the result of a collective decision taken by the biomass. A couple of swimmers aren’t going to make much difference now.”

“I just expected better of Marl,” Scorpio said.

“She knows her duty,” Antoinette said. “I don’t think she’d let us down, if she had any choice. Let’s just hope she’s safe.”

Scorpio moved away from the window and started towards the front of the aircraft. Even as the plane pitched, responding to the unpredictable thermals that spiralled around the huge ship, the pig remained rooted to the ground. Low and wide, he was more comfortable on his feet in the turbulent conditions than either of his human companions.

“Where are you going?” Vasko asked.

The pig looked back. “I’m telling him to change our flight plan. We’re supposed to be gqoing back to pick up more evacuees.”

“And we’re not?”

“Afterwards. First, I want to get Aura into the air. I think the sky might be the safest place right now.”