Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 22

Xavier was working on Storm Bird’s hull when the two peculiar visitors arrived at the repair shop. He checked on the monkeys, satisfying himself that they could be trusted to get on with things by themselves for a few minutes. He wondered who Antoinette had pissed off now. Like her father, she was pretty good at not pissing off the right people. That was how Jim Bax had stayed in business.

‘Mr Gregor Consodine?’ asked a man, standing up from a seat in the waiting area.

‘I’m not Gregor Consodine.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought this was…’

‘It is. I’m just minding things while he’s off in Vancouver for a couple of days. Xavier Liu.’ He beamed helpfully. ‘How may I be of assistance?’

‘We are looking for Antoinette Bax,’ the man said.

‘Are you?’

‘It’s a matter of some urgency. I gather that’s her ship parked in your service well.’

The back of Xavier’s neck bristled. ‘And you’d be…?’

‘I am called Mr Clock.’

Mr Clock’s face was an exercise in anatomy. Xavier could see the bones beneath the skin. Mr Clock looked like a man very close to death, and yet he moved with the light step of a ballet dancer or mime artiste.

But it was the other one that really bothered him. Xavier’s first careless glance at the visitors had revealed two men, one tall and thin like a storybook undertaker, the other short and wide, built like a professional wrestler. The more squat man had his head down and was thumbing through a brochure on the coffee table. Between his feet was a featureless black box the size of a toolkit.

Xavier looked at his own hands.

‘My colleague is Mr Pink.’

Mr Pink looked up. Xavier did his best to conceal a moment of surprise. The other man was a pig, not a baseline human at all. He had a smooth rounded brow beneath which little dark eyes studied Xavier. His nose was small and upturned. Xavier had seen humans with stranger faces, but that was not the point. Mr Pink never had been human.

‘Hello,’ the pig said, and then turned his attention back to his reading matter.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Clock said.

‘Your question?’

‘Concerning the ship. It does belong to Antoinette Bax, doesn’t it?’

‘I was just told to do some hull work on it. That’s all I know.’

Clock smiled and nodded. He stepped back to the office door and closed it. Mr Pink turned over a page and chuckled at something in the brochure. ‘That’s not quite the truth, is it, Mr Liu?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Have a seat, Mr Liu.’ Clock gestured at one of the chairs. ‘Please, take the weight off your feet. We need to have a little talk, you and me.’

‘I really need to get back to my monkeys.’

‘I’m sure they won’t get up to any mischief in your absence. Now.’ Clock gestured again and the pig looked up and fixed his gaze on Xavier. Xavier sunk down into the seat, weighing his options. ‘Concerning Miss Bax. Traffic records, freely available traffic records, indicate that her vessel is the one currently parked in the service bay, the one you are working on. You are aware of this, aren’t you?’

I might be.‘

‘Please, Mr Liu, there’s really no point in being evasive. The data we have amassed points to a very close working relationship between yourself and Miss Bax. You are perfectly aware that Storm Bird belongs to her. As a matter of fact, you know Storm Bird very well indeed, isn’t that true?’

‘What is this about?’

‘We’d like to have a little word with Miss Bax herself, if that isn’t too much trouble.’

‘I can’t help you there.’

Clock raised one fine, barely present eyebrow. ‘No?’

‘If you want to speak to her, you’ll have to find her yourselves.’

‘Very well. I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but…’ Clock looked at the pig. The pig put down the brochure and stood up. He had the bulky presence of a gorilla. When he walked it seemed as if he was engaged in a balancing act that was always on the point of collapsing. The pig pushed past him, carrying the black box.

‘Where’s he going?’ Xavier asked.

‘To her ship. He’s very good mechanically, Mr Liu. Very good at fixing things, but also, it must be said, very good at breaking things as well.’

H took him down another flight of steps, his broad-backed form descending one or two paces ahead of Clavain. Clavain looked down on the brilliant blue-black grooves of his greased hair. H appeared quite unconcerned that Clavain might attack him or attempt to make his escape from the monstrous black Chateau. And Clavain felt a strange willingness to co-operate with his new host. It was, he supposed, mostly curiosity. H knew things about Skade that Clavain did not, even if H himself did not pretend to know all the facts. Clavain, in turn, was clearly of interest to H. The two of them could indeed learn much from each other.

But this situation could not continue, Clavain knew. As urbane and interesting as his host might have been, Clavain had still been kidnapped. And he had business that needed to be attended to.

‘Tell me more about Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘What did she want from the Mademoiselle?’

‘It gets a little complicated. I shall do my best, but you must forgive me if I seem not to understand all the details. The truth of the matter is that I doubt that I ever will.‘

‘Start at the beginning.’

They arrived at a hallway. H strolled along it, passing many irregular sculptures resembling the sloughed scabs and scales of some immense metallic dragon, each of which rested on a single annotated plinth.

‘Skade was interested in technology, Mr Clavain.’

‘What kind?’

‘An advanced technology concerning the manipulation of the quantum vacuum. I am not a scientist, Mr Clavain, so I cannot pretend to have more than the shakiest grasp of the relevant principles. But it is my understanding that certain bulk properties of matter — inertia, for instance — stem directly from the properties of the vacuum in which they are embedded. Pure speculation, of course, but wouldn’t a means to control inertia be of use to the Con joiners?’

Clavain thought of the way Nightshade had been able to pursue him across the solar system at such great speed. A technique for suppressing inertia would have allowed that, and might also explain what Skade had been doing aboard the ship during the previous mission. She must have been fine-tuning her technology, testing it in the field. So the technology probably existed, albeit in prototype form. But H would have to learn that for himself.

‘I’ve no knowledge of a programme to develop that kind of ability,’ Clavain told him, choosing his words so as to avoid an outright lie.

‘Doubtless it would be secret, even amongst the Conjoiners. Very experimental and no doubt dangerous.’

‘Where did the technology come from in the first place?’

‘That’s the interesting part. Skade — and by extension the Conjoiners — seem to have had a well-developed idea of what they were looking for before they came here, as if what they sought here was merely the final part of a puzzle. As you know, Skade’s operation was viewed as a failure. She was the only survivor and she did not escape back to your Mother Nest with more than a handful of stolen items. Whether they were sufficient or not, I couldn’t guess…’ H glanced back over his shoulder with a knowing smile.

They reached the end of the corridor. They had arrived on a low-walled ledge that circumnavigated an enormous slope-floored room many storeys deep. Clavain peered over the edge, noting what appeared to be pipes and drainage vents set into the sheer black walls.

‘I’ll ask again,’ Clavain said. ‘Where did the technology come from in the first place?’

‘A donor,’ H answered. ‘Around a century ago I learned an astonishing truth. I gained knowledge of the whereabouts of an individual, an alien individual, who had been waiting undisturbed on this planet for many millions of years, shipwrecked and yet essentially unharmed.’ He paused, evidently watching Clavain’s reaction.

‘Continue,’ Clavain said, determined not to be fazed.

‘Unfortunately, I was not the first to learn of this hapless creature. Other people had discovered that he could give them something of considerable value provided that they held him prisoner and administered regular jolts of pain. This would have been abhorrent under any circumstances, but the creature in question was a highly social animal. Intelligent, too — his was a starfaring culture of great extent and antiquity. In fact, the wreck of his ship still contained functioning technologies. Do you see where this is heading?’

They had walked along one length of the vaultlike chamber. Clavain had still not deduced its function.

‘Those technologies,’ Clavain asked, ‘did they include the inertia-modifying process?’

‘So it would appear. I must confess that I had something of a head start in this matter. Some considerable amount of time ago I met another of these creatures, so I already knew a little of what to expect from this one.’

‘A less open-minded man than myself might find all this a tiny bit difficult to accept,’ Clavain said.

H paused at the corner, placing both hands on the top of the low marble walling. ‘Then I will tell you more, and perhaps you will begin to believe me. It cannot have escaped your attention that the universe is a hazardous place. I’m certain that the Conjoiners have learned this for themselves. What is the current toll — thirteen known extinct intelligent cultures, or is it fourteen now? And one or two possibly extant alien intelligences that unfortunately are so alien that they don’t do anything that might enable us to say for certain how intelligent they really are. The point being that the universe seems to have a way of stamping out intelligence before it gets too big for its boots.’

‘That’s one theory.’ Clavain did not reveal how well it chimed with what he already knew; how it was perfectly consistent with Galiana’s message about a cosmos stalked by wolves that slavered and howled at the scent of sapience.

‘More than a theory. The grubs — that’s the race-name of the species of which the unfortunate individual was a member — had been harried to the point of extinction themselves. They lived only between the stars, shying away from warmth and light. Even there they were nervous. They knew how little it would take to bring the killers down upon them again. In the end they evolved a rather desperate protective strategy. They were not naturally hostile, but they learned that other noisier species sometimes had to be silenced to protect themselves.’ H resumed his stroll, brushing one hand along the wall. It was his right hand, Clavain noticed, and it left behind a thin red smear.

‘How did you learn about the alien?’

‘It’s a long story, Mr Clavain, and one I don’t intend to detain you with. Suffice it only to say the following. I vowed to save the creature from his tormentors — part of my plan for personal atonement, you might say. But I could not do it immediately. It took planning, a vast amount of forethought. I amassed a team of trusted helpers and made elaborate preparations. Years passed but the moment was never right. Then a decade went by. Two decades. Every night I dreamed of that thing suffering, and every night I renewed my vow to help him.’

‘And?’

‘It’s possible that someone betrayed me. Or else her intelligence was better than my own. The Mademoiselle reached the creature before I did. She brought him here, to this room. How, I don’t know; that alone must have taken enormous planning.’

Clavain looked down again, struggling to comprehend what kind of animal had needed a room this large as a prison. ‘She kept the creature here, in the Chateau?’

H nodded. ‘For many years. It was no simple matter to keep him alive, but the people who had imprisoned him before her had worked out exactly what needed to be done. The Mademoiselle had no particular interest in torturing him, I think; she was not cruel in that sense. But every instant of the creature’s continued existence was a kind of torture, even when his nervous system was not being poked and prodded with high-voltage electrodes. But she refused to let him die. Not until she had learned all that she could from him.’

H went on to tell Clavain that the Mademoiselle had found a way to communicate with the creature. As clever as the Mademoiselle had been, it was the creature that had expended the greater effort.

‘I gather there was an accident,’ H said. ‘A man fell into the creature’s pen, from all the way up here. He died instantly, but before they could get him out the creature, which was unrestrained, ate what remained of him. They had been feeding him morsels, you see, and until that moment he did not have very much idea of what his captors actually looked like.’

H’s voice grew quietly enthusiastic. ‘Anyway, a strange thing happened. A day later a wound appeared in the creature’s skin. The wound enlarged, forming a hole. There was no bleeding, and the wound looked very symmetrical and well formed. Structures lurked behind it, moving muscles. The wound was becoming a mouth. Later, it began to make humanlike vowel sounds. Another day or so passed and the creature was attempting recognisable words. Another day, and he was stringing those words together into simple sentences. The chilling part, from what I have gathered, was that the creature had inherited more than just the means to make language from the man he had eaten. He had absorbed his memories and personality, fusing them with his own.‘

‘Horrible,’ Clavain said.

‘Perhaps.’ H appeared unconvinced. ‘Certainly, it might be a useful strategy for an interstellar trading species that expected to encounter many other cultures. Instead of puzzling over translation algorithms, why not simply decode language at the level of biochemical representation? Eat your trading partner and become more like him. It would require some co-operation from the other party, but perhaps this was an accepted form of business millions of years ago.’

‘How did you learn all this?’

‘Ways and means, Mr Clavain. Even before the Mademoiselle beat me to the alien, I had become dimly aware of her existence. I had my own webs of influence in Chasm City, and she had hers. For the most part we were discrete, but now and then our activities would brush against each other. I was curious, so I tried to learn more. But she resisted my attempts to infiltrate the Chateau for many years. It was only when she had the creature that I think she became distracted by him, consumed by his alien puzzle. Then I was able to get agents into the building. You’ve met Zebra? She was one of them. Zebra learned what she could and put in place the conditions I needed for the takeover. But that was long after Skade had come here.’

Clavain thought things through. ‘So Skade must have known something about the alien?’

‘Evidently. You’re the Conjoiner, Mr Clavain — shouldn’t you know?’

‘I’ve learned too much already. That’s why I chose to defect.’

They walked on, exiting the prison. Clavain was as relieved to be out of it as when he had left the room holding the palanquin. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he felt as if some of the creature’s isolated torment had imprinted itself on the room’s atmosphere. There was a feeling of intense dread and confinement that only abated once he had left the room.

‘Where are you taking me now?’

‘To the basement first, because I think there is something there that will interest you, and then I will take you to some people I would very much like you to meet.’

Clavain said, ‘Do these people have something to do with Skade?’

‘I think everything’s to do with Skade, don’t you? I think something may have happened to her when she visited the Chateau.’

H showed him to an elevator. The car was a skeletal affair fashioned from iron spirals and filigrees. The floor was a cold iron grillework with many gaps in it. H slid shut a creaking door formed from scissoring iron chevrons, latching it just as the elevator began its descent. At first the progress was ponderous, Clavain guessing that it would take the better part of an hour to reach the building’s lower levels. But the elevator, in its creaking fashion, accelerated faster and faster, until a substantial wind was ramming through the perforated flooring.

‘Skade’s mission was deemed a failure,’ Clavain said over the rumble and screech of the elevator’s descent.

‘Yes, but not necessarily from the Mademoiselle’s point of view. Consider: she had extended her web of influence into every facet of Chasm City life. Within limits, she could make anything happen that she wished. Her reach included the Rust Belt, all the major foci of Demarchist power. She even had, I think, some hold over the Ultras, or at least the means to make them work for her. But she had nothing on the Conjoiners.’

‘And Skade may have been her point of entry?’

I think it must be considered likely, Mr Clavain. It may not be accidental that Skade was allowed to survive when the rest of her team were killed.‘

‘But Skade is one of us,’ Clavain said feebly. ‘She would never betray the Mother Nest.‘

‘What happened to Skade afterwards, Mr Clavain? Did she by any chance widen her influence within the Conjoined?’

Clavain recalled that Skade had joined the Closed Council in the aftermath of the mission. ‘To some extent.’

‘Then I think the case is closed. That would always have been the Mademoiselle’s strategy, you see. Infiltrate and orchestrate. Skade might not even think she is betraying your people; the Mademoiselle was always clever enough to play on loyalty. And although Skade’s mission was judged a failure, she did recover some of the items of interest, did she not? Enough to benefit the Mother Nest?’

‘I’ve already told you that I don’t know about any secret project concerning the quantum vacuum.’

‘Mm. And I didn’t find your denial wholly convincing the first time, either.’

Clock, the one with the bald egg-shaped skull, told Xavier to call Antoinette.

‘I’ll call her,’ Xavier said. ‘But I can’t make her come here, even if Mr Pink starts damaging the ship.’

‘Find a way,’ Clock said, stroking the waxy olive leaf of one of the repair shop’s potted plants. ‘Tell her you found something you can’t fix, something that needs her expertise. I’m sure you can improvise, Mr Liu.’

‘We’ll be listening in,’ Mr Pink added. To Xavier’s relief, the pig had returned from inside Storm Bird without inflicting any obvious damage to the ship, although he had the impression that Mr Pink had merely been scoping out possibilities for inflicting harm later on.

He called Antoinette. She was halfway around Carousel New Copenhagen, engaged in a frantic round of business meetings. Ever since Clavain had left things had gone from bad to worse.

‘Just get here as quickly as you can,’ Xavier told her, one eye on his two visitors.

‘Why the big rush, Xave?’

‘You know how much it’s costing us to keep Storm Bird parked here, Antoinette. Every hour makes a difference. Just this phone call is killing us.’

‘Holy shit, Xave. Cheer me up, why don’t you?’

‘Just get here.’ He hung up on her. ‘Thanks for making me do that, you bastards.’

Clock said, ‘Your understanding is appreciated, Mr Liu. I assure you no harm will come to either of you, most especially not to Antoinette.’

‘You’d better not hurt her.’ He looked at both of them, unsure which one he trusted the least. ‘All right. She’ll be here in about twenty minutes. You can speak to her here, and then she can be on her way.’

‘We’ll talk to her in the ship, Mr Liu. That way there’s no chance of either of you running away, is there?’

‘Whatever,’ Xavier said, shrugging. ‘Just give me a minute to sort out the monkeys.’

The elevator slowed and came to a halt, shaking and creaking even though it was stationary. Far above Clavain, metallic echoes chased each other up and down the lift-shaft like hysterical laughter.

‘Where are we?’ he asked.

‘The deep basement of the building. We’re well below the old Mulch now, Mr Clavain, into Yellowstone bedrock.’ H ushered Clavain onwards. ‘This is where it happened, you see.’

‘Where what happened?’

‘The disturbing event.’

H led him along corridors — tunnels, more accurately — that had been bored through solid rock and then only lightly faced. Blue lanterns threw the ridges and bulges of the underlying geology into deep relief. The air was damp and cold, the hard stone floor uncomfortable beneath Clavain’s feet. They passed a room containing many upright silver canisters arrayed across the floor like milk churns, and then descended via a ramp that took them even deeper.

H said, ‘The Mademoiselle protected her secrets well. When we stormed the Chateau she destroyed many of the items she had recovered from the grub’s spacecraft. Others, Skade had taken with her. But enough remained for us to make a start. Recently, progress has been gratifyingly swift. Did you notice how easily my ships outran the Convention, how easily they slipped unnoticed through tightly policed airspace?’

Clavain nodded, remembering how quick the journey to Yellowstone had appeared. ‘You’ve learned how to do it too.’

‘In a very modest fashion, I admit. But yes, we’ve installed inertia-suppressing technology on some of our ships. Simply reducing the mass of a ship by four-fifths is enough to give us an edge over a Convention cutter. I imagine the Conjoiners have done rather better than that.’

Grudgingly, Clavain admitted, ‘Perhaps.’

‘Then they’ll know that the technology is extraordinarily dangerous. The quantum vacuum is normally in a very stable minimum, Mr Clavain, a nice deep valley in the landscape of possible states. But as soon as you start tampering with the vacuum — cooling it, to damp the fluctuations that give rise to inertia — you change the entire topology of that landscape. What were stable minima become precarious peaks and ridges. There are adjacent valleys that are associated with very different properties of immersed matter. Small fluctuations can lead to violent state transitions. Shall I tell you a horror story?’ ‘I think you’re going to.’

‘I recruited the very best, Mr Clavain, the top theorists from the Rust Belt. Anyone who had shown the slightest interest in the nature of the quantum vacuum was brought here and made to understand that their wider interests would be best served by helping me.’

‘Blackmail?’ Clavain asked.

‘Good grief, no. Merely gentle coercion.’ H glanced back at Clavain and grinned, revealing sharply pointed incisors. ‘For the most part it wasn’t even necessary. I had resources that the Demarchists lacked. Their own intelligence network was crumbling, so they knew nothing of the grub. The Conjoiners had their own programme, but to join them would have meant becoming Conjoined as well — no small price for scientific curiosity. The workers I approached were usually more than willing to come to the Chateau, given the alternatives.’ H paused, and his voice took on an elegiac tone it had lacked before. ‘One amongst their number was a brilliant defector from the Demarchists, a woman named Pauline Sukhoi.’

‘Is she dead?’ Clavain asked. ‘Or something worse than dead?’

‘No, not at all. But she has left my employment. After what happened — the disturbing event — she couldn’t bring herself to continue. I understood perfectly and made sure that Sukhoi found alternative employment back in the Rust Belt.’

‘Whatever happened, it must have been truly disturbing,’ Clavain said.

‘Oh, it was. For all of us, but especially for Sukhoi. Many experiments were in progress,’ said H. ‘Down here, in the basement levels of the Chateau, there were a dozen little teams working on different aspects of the grub technology. Sukhoi had been on the project for a year, and had shown herself to an excellent if fearless researcher. It was Sukhoi who explored some of the less stable state transitions.’

H led him past several doors that opened into large dark chambers, until they arrived at one in particular. He did not enter the room. ‘Something terrible happened here. No one associated with the work would ever go into this room afterwards. They say damp records the past. Do you feel it also, Mr Clavain? A sense of foreboding, an animal instinct that you should not enter?’

‘Now that you’ve planted the suggestion that there’s something odd about the room, I can’t honestly say what I feel.’

‘Step inside,’ H said.

Clavain entered the room, stepping down to the smooth flat floor. The room was cold, but then again, the entire basement level had been cold. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, picking out the generous dimensions of the chamber. Here and there the floor and walls and ceiling were interrupted by metal struts or sockets, but no apparatus or analysis equipment remained. The room was completely empty and very clean.

He walked around the perimeter. He could not say that he enjoyed being in the room, but everything he felt — a mild sense of panic, a mild sense of presence — could have been psychosomatic. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

H spoke from the door. ‘There was an accident in this room, involving only Sukhoi’s project. Sukhoi was injured, but not critically, and she soon made a good recovery.’

‘And none of the other people in Sukhoi’s team were injured?’

‘That was the odd thing. There were no other people — Sukhoi had always worked alone. We had no other victims to worry about. The technology was slightly damaged, but soon showed itself to be capable of limited self-repair. Sukhoi was conscious and coherent, so we assumed that when she was on her feet again she would go back down to the basement.’

‘And?’

‘She asked a strange question. One that, if you will pardon the expression, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.’

Clavain rejoined H near the door. ‘Which was?’

‘She asked what had happened to the other experimenter.’

‘Then there was some neurological damage. False memories.’ Clavain shrugged. ‘Hardly surprising, is it?’

‘She was quite specific about the other worker, Mr Clavain. Even down to his name and history. She said that the man had been called Yves, Yves Mercier, and that he had been recruited from the Rust Belt at the same time that she had.’

‘But there was no Yves Mercier?’

‘No one of that name, or any name like it, had ever worked in the Chateau. As I said, Sukhoi had always tended to work alone.’

‘Perhaps she felt the need to attach the blame for the accident to another person. Her subconscious manufactured a scapegoat.’

H nodded. ‘Yes, we thought that something like that might have happened. But why transfer blame for a minor incident? No one had been killed, and no equipment had been badly damaged. As a matter of fact, we had learned much more from the accident that we had with weeks of painstaking progress. Sukhoi was blameless, and she knew it.’

‘So she made up the name for another reason. The subconscious is an odd thing. There doesn’t have to be a perfectly obvious rationale for anything she said.’

‘That’s precisely what we thought, but Sukhoi was adamant. As she recovered, her memories of working with Mercier only sharpened. She recalled the minutest details about him — what he had looked like, what he had liked to eat and drink, his sense of humour, even his background; what he had done before he came to the Chateau. The more we tried to convince her that Mercier had not been real, the more hysterical she became.’

‘She was deranged, then.’

‘Every other test said she wasn’t, Mr Clavain. If she had a delusional system, it was focused solely on the prior existence of Mercier. And so I began to wonder.’

Clavain looked at H and nodded for him to continue.

‘I did some research,’ H added. ‘It was easy enough to dig into Rust Belt records — those that had survived the plague, anyway. And I found that certain aspects of Sukhoi’s story checked out with alarming accuracy.’

‘Such as?’

‘There had been someone named Yves Mercier, born in the same carousel that Sukhoi claimed.’

‘It can’t be that unusual a name amongst Demarchists.’

‘No, probably not. But in fact there was only one. And his date of birth accorded precisely with Sukhoi’s recollections. The only difference was that this Mercier — the real one — had died many years earlier. He had been killed shortly after the Melding Plague destroyed the Glitter Band.’

Clavain forced a shrug, but with less conviction that he would have wished. ‘A coincidence, then.’

‘Perhaps. But you see, this particular Yves Mercier was already a student at the time. He was well advanced on studies into exactly the same quantum-vacuum phenomena that would, according to Sukhoi, eventually bring him into my orbit.’

Clavain no longer wanted to be in the room. He stepped up, back into the blue-lanterned corridor. ‘You’re saying her Mercier really existed?’

‘Yes, I am. At which point I found myself faced with two possibilities. Either Sukhoi was somehow aware of the dead Mercier’s life story, and for one reason or another chose to believe that he had not in fact died, or that she was actually telling the truth.’

‘But that isn’t possible.’

‘I rather think it may be, Mr Clavain. I think everything Pauline Sukhoi told me may have been the literal truth; that in some way we can’t quite comprehend, Yves Mercier never died for her. That she worked with him, here in the room you have just left, and that Merrier was present when the accident happened.’

‘But Merrier did die. You’ve seen the records for yourself.’

‘But suppose he didn’t. Suppose that he survived the Melding Plague, went on to work on general quantum-vacuum theory, and eventually attracted my attention. Suppose also that he ended up working with Sukhoi, together on the same experiment, exploring the less stable state transitions. And suppose then that there was an accident, one that involved a shift to a very dangerous state indeed. According to Sukhoi, Merrier was much closer to the field generator than she was when it happened.’

‘It killed him.’

‘More than that, Mr Clavain. It made him cease to have existed.’ H watched Clavain and nodded with tutorly patience. ‘It was as if his entire life story, his entire world-line, had been unstitched from our reality, right back to the point when he was killed during the Melding Plague. That, I suppose, was the most logical point at which he could have died in our mutual world-line, the one you and I share.’

‘But not for Sukhoi,’ Clavain said.

‘No, not for her. She remembered how things had been before. I suppose she was close enough to the focus that her memories were entangled, knotted-up with the prior version of events. When Merrier was erased, she nonetheless ’ retained her memories of him. So she was not mad at all, not remotely delusional. She was merely the witness to an event so horrific that it transcends all understanding. Does it chill you, Mr Clavain, to think that an experiment could have this outcome?‘

‘You already told me it was dangerous.’

‘More than we ever realised at the time. I wonder how many world-lines were wrenched out of existence before there was ever a witness close enough to feel the change?’

Clavain said, ‘What exactly was it that these experiments were related to, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘That’s the interesting part. State transitions, as I have said — exploring the more exotic quantum-vacuum manifolds. We can suck some of the inertia out of matter, and depending on the field state we can keep sucking it out until the matter’s inertial mass becomes asymptotic with zero. According to Einstein, matter with no mass has no choice but to travel at the speed of light. It will have become photonic, light-like.’

‘Is that what happened to Merrier?’

‘No — not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi’s work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon.’

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘The other side?’

‘The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply.’

‘You’re talking about tachyonic matter,’ Clavain said. ‘Matter travelling faster than light.’

‘Yes.’ Clavain’s host seemed pleased. ‘It appears that Merrier and Sukhoi’s final experiment concerned the transition between tardyonic — the matter we are familiar with — and tachyonic matter states. They were exploring the vacuum states that would allow the construction of a faster-than-light propulsion system.’

‘That’s simply not possible,’ Clavain said.

H put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Actually, I don’t think that is quite the right way to think about it. The grubs knew, of course. This technology had been theirs, and yet they chose to crawl between the stars. That should have told us all we needed to know. It is not that it is impossible, merely that it is very, very inadvisable.’

For a long time they stood in silence, on the threshold of the bleak room where Merrier had been unthreaded from existence.

‘Has anyone attempted those experiments again?’ Clavain asked.

‘No, not after what happened to Merrier. Quite frankly, no one was very keen to do any further work on the grub machinery. We’d learned enough as it was. The basement was evacuated. Almost no one ever comes down here these days. Those who do sometimes say they see ghosts; perhaps they’re the residual shadows of all those who suffered the same fate as Merrier. I’ve never seen the ghosts myself, I have to say, and people’s minds do play tricks on them.’ He forced false cheer into his voice, an effort that had the opposite effect to that intended. ‘One mustn’t credit such things. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Mr Clavain?’

‘I never used to,’ he said, wishing devoutly to be somewhere other than in the basement of the Chateau.

‘These are strange times,’ H said, with no little sympathy. ‘I sense that we live at the end of history, that great scores are soon to be settled. Difficult choices must soon be made. Now, shall we go and see the people I mentioned earlier on?’

Clavain nodded. ‘I can’t wait.’

Antoinette left the rim train at the closest station to the rented repair shop. Something about Xavier’s attitude had struck her as unusual, but it was nothing she could quite put her finger on. With some trepidation she checked out the repair shop’s waiting area and business desk. Nothing doing there, just a ‘closed for business’ sign on the door. She double-checked that the repair bay was pressurised and then pushed through to the interior of the bay itself. She took the nearest connecting catwalk, never looking down. The air in the bay was heady with aerosols. She was sneezing by the time she reached the ship’s own airlock, and her eyes were itching.

‘Xavier…’ she called.

But if he was deep inside Storm Bird he would never hear her. She would either have to find him or wait until he came out. She had told him she would arrive in twenty minutes.

She went through into the main flight deck. Everything looked normal. Xavier had called up some of the less commonly used diagnostic read-outs, some of which were sufficiently obscure that even Antoinette viewed them with mild incomprehension. But that was exactly what she would have expected when Xavier had half the ship’s guts out on the table.

‘I’m really, really sorry.’

She looked around, seeing Xavier standing behind her with an expression on his face that meant he was begging forgiveness for something. Behind him were two people she did not recognise. The taller of the two strangers indicated that she should follow them back into the lounge area aft of the main bridge.

‘Please do as I tell you, Antoinette,’ the man said. ‘This shouldn’t take long.’

Xavier said, ‘I think you’d better do it. I’m sorry I made you come here, but they said they’d start trashing the ship if I didn’t.’

Antoinette nodded, stooping back along the connecting corridor. ‘You did right, Xave. Don’t eat yourself up over it. Well, who are these clowns? Have they introduced themselves?’

‘The tall one’s Mr Clock. The other one, the pig, he’s Mr Pink.’

The two of them nodded in turn as Xavier spoke their names.

‘But who are they?’

‘They haven’t said, but here’s a wild stab in the dark. They’re interested in Clavain. I think they might possibly be spiders, or working for the spiders.’

‘Are you?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Hardly,’ Remontoire said. ‘And as for my friend here…’

Mr Pink shook his gargoylelike head. ‘Not me.’

‘I’d let you examine us if the circumstances were more amenable,’ Remontoire continued. ‘I assure you there are no Conjoiner implants in either of us.’

‘Which doesn’t mean you aren’t spider stooges,’ Antoinette said. ‘Now, what do I need to do in order for you to get the fuck off my ship?’

‘As Mr Liu correctly judged, we’re interested in Nevil Clavain. Have a seat…’ The one called Clock said it with steely emphasis this time. ‘Please, let’s be civil.’

Antoinette folded out a chair from the wall and parked herself in it. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone called Clavain,’ she said.

‘But your partner has.’

‘Yeah. Nice one, Xave.’ She gave him a look. Why couldn’t he have just pleaded ignorance?

‘It’s no good, Antoinette,’ Clock said. ‘We know that you brought him here. We are not in any way angry with you for doing that — it was the human thing to do, after all.’

She folded her arms. ‘And?’

‘All you have to do is tell us what happened next. Where Clavain went once you brought him to Carousel New Copenhagen.’

I don’t know.‘

‘So he just magically disappeared, is that it? Without a word of thanks, or any indication of what he was going to do next?’

‘Clavain told me the less I knew the better.’

Clock looked at the pig for a moment. Antoinette decided that she had scored a point. Clavain had wanted her to know as little as possible. It was only through her own efforts that she had found out a little more, but Clock did not have to know that.

She added, ‘Of course, I kept asking him. I was curious about what he was doing here. I knew he was a spider, too. But he wouldn’t tell me. Said it was for my own good. I argued, but he stuck to his guns. I’m glad he did now. There’s nothing you can force me to tell you because I simply don’t know.’

‘So just tell us exactly what happened,’ Clock said soothingly. ‘That’s all you have to do. We’ll work out what Clavain had in mind, and then we’ll be on our way. You’ll never hear from us again.’

I told you, he just left. No word of where he was going, nothing. Goodbye and thanks. That was all he said.‘

‘He wouldn’t have had documentation or money,’ Clock said, as if to himself, ‘so he couldn’t have got far without a little help from you. If he didn’t ask for money, he’s probably still on Carousel New Copenhagen.’ The thin, deathly pale man leaned toward her. ‘So tell me. Did he ask for anything?’

‘No,’ she said, with just the tiniest hesitation.

‘She’s lying,’ the pig said.

Clock nodded gravely. I think you’re right, Mr Pink. I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but there you have it. Needs must, as they say. Do you have the item, Mr Pink?‘

‘The item, Mr Clock? You mean…’

Between the pig’s feet was a perfectly black box, like an oblong of shadow. He pushed it forwards, leaned down and touched some hidden mechanism. The box shuffled open to reveal many more compartments than appeared feasible from its size. Each held a piece of polished silver machinery nesting in precisely shaped cushioning foam. Mr Pink took out one of the pieces and held it up for scrutiny. Then he took out another piece and connected the two together. Despite the clumsiness of his hands he worked with great care, his eyes focused sharply on the work in progress.

‘He’ll have it ready in a jiffy,’ Clock said. ‘It’s a field trawl, Antoinette. Of spider manufacture, I’m obliged to add. Do you know a great deal about trawls?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you anyway. It’s perfectly safe, isn’t it, Mr Pink?’

‘Perfectly safe, Mr Clock.’

‘Or at least, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. But field trawls are a different matter, aren’t they? They’re not nearly as proven as the larger models. They have a much higher probability of leaving the subject with neural damage. Even death isn’t entirely unheard of, is it, Mr Pink?’

The pig looked up from his activities. ‘One hears things, Mr Clock. One hears things.’

‘Well, I’m sure the detrimental effects are exaggerated… but nonetheless, it’s not at all advisable to use a field trawl when there are alternative procedures available.’ Clock made eye contact with Antoinette again. His eyes were sunk deep inside their sockets and his appearance made her want to look away. ‘Are you quite sure Clavain didn’t say where he was going?’

‘I told you, he didn’t…’

‘Continue, Mr Pink.’

‘Wait,’ Xavier said.

They all looked at him, even the pig. Xavier started to say something else. And then the ship began to shake, quite without warning, yawing and twisting against its docking constraints. Its chemical thrusters were firing, loosing pulses of gas in opposing directions, the din of it like a cannonade.

The airlock behind Antoinette closed. She grabbed at a railing for support, and then tugged a belt across her waist.

Something was happening. She had no idea what, but it was definitely something. Through the nearest window she saw the repair bay choking in dense orange propellant fumes. Something broke free with a screech of severed metal. The ship lurched even more violently.

‘Xavier…’ she mouthed.

But Xavier had already got himself into a seat.

And they were falling.

She watched the pig and Clock scramble for support. They folded down their own seats and webbed themselves in. Antoinette seriously doubted that they had much more of an idea than she did about what was going on. Equally, they were smart enough not to want to be untethered aboard a ship that gave every indication that it was about to do something violent.

They hit something. The collision compressed every bone in her spine. The repair bay door, she thought — Xavier had pressurised the well so he and his monkeys could work without suits. The ship had just rammed into the door.

The ship rose again. She felt the lightness in her belly.

And then it dropped.

This time there was only a muffled bump as they hit the door. Through the window Antoinette saw the orange smoke vanish in an instant. The repair bay had just lost all its air. The walls slid past as the ship pushed its way into space.

‘Make this stop,’ Clock said.

‘It’s out of my hands, buddy,’ Xavier told him.

‘This is a trick,’ the spider said. ‘You wanted us aboard the ship all along.’

‘So sue me,’ Xavier said.

‘Xavier…’ Antoinette did not have to shout. It was perfectly silent aboard Storm Bird, even as she scraped through what remained of the bay door. ‘Xavier… please tell me what’s happening.’

‘I rigged an emergency program,’ Xavier said. ‘Figured it’d come in handy one day, if we ever got into just this situation.’

‘Just this situation?’

I guess it was worth it,‘ he said.

‘Is that why there were no monkeys working?’

‘Hey.’ He feigned insult. ‘Credit me with some foresight, will you?’

They were weightless. Storm Bird fell away from Carousel New Copenhagen, surrounded by a small constellation of debris. Fascinated despite herself, Antoinette inspected the damage they had left behind. They had punched a ship-shaped hole through the door.

‘Holy shit, Xave. Have you any idea what that’ll cost us?’

‘So we’ll be a little bit longer in the red. I figured it was an acceptable tradeoff.’

‘It won’t help you,’ Clock said. ‘We’re still here, and there’s nothing you can do to us that won’t hurt yourselves at the same time. So forget about depressurisation, or executing high-gee-load thrust patterns. They won’t work. The problem you had to deal with five minutes ago hasn’t gone away.’

‘The only difference,’ Mr Pink said,‘ is that you just burned a lot of goodwill’

‘You were about to rip her head open to get at her memories,’ Xavier said. ‘If that’s your idea of goodwill, you can stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.’

Mr Pink’s half-assembled trawl was floating through the cabin. He had let go of it during the escape.

‘You wouldn’t have learned anything anyway,’ Antoinette said, ‘because I don’t know what Clavain was going to do. Maybe I’m not putting that in sufficiently simple terms for you.’

‘Get the trawl, Mr Pink,’ Remontoire said. The pig glared at him until Clock added, with distinct overemphasis, ‘Please, Mr Pink.’

‘Yes, Mr Clock,’ the pig said, with the same snide undertone.

The pig fumbled at his webbing. He was almost out of it when the ship surged forward. The trawl was the only thing not tied down. It smashed against one of Storm Bird’s unyielding walls, breaking into half a dozen glittering pieces.

Xavier couldn’t have programmed that in, could he? Antoinette wondered.

‘Clever,’ Clock said. ‘But not clever enough. Now we’ll have to get it out of you via some other means, won’t we?’

The ship was under constant steady thrust now. Still Antoinette heard nothing, and that started her worrying. Chemical rockets were noisy: they transmitted their sound right through the framework of the hull even though the ship was in vacuum. Ion thrust was silent, but it couldn’t sustain this kind of acceleration. But the tokamak fusion motor was totally silent, suspended in a loom of magnetic fields.

They were on fusion thrust.

Holy shit…

There was a mandatory death sentence for using fusion motors within the Rust Belt. Even using nuclear rockets this close to a carousel would have brought heinous penalties; almost certainly she would never have flown in space again. But fusion thrust was an instrument of potential lethality. A misdirected fusion flame could sever a carousel in seconds…

‘Xavier, if you can do anything about this, get us back on to chems immediately.’

‘Sorry, Antoinette, but I figured this was for the best.’

‘You did, did you?’

‘Yes, and I’ll take the rap for it if it comes to that. But listen, we’re being held hostage here. That changes the rules. Right now we want the police to pay us a visit. All I’m doing is waving a flag.’

‘That sounds great in theory, Xave, but…’

‘No buts. It’ll work. They’ll see that I deliberately kept the flame away from habitations. Matter of fact, there’s even an SOS modulation buried in the pulse pattern, though it’s much too rapid for us to feel.’

‘You think the cops’ll notice that?’

‘No, but they’ll sure as hell be able to verify it afterwards, which is all that matters. They’ll see that this was a clear attempt at signalling for help.’

‘I admire your optimism,’ Clock said. ‘But it won’t come to a court of law. They’ll simply shoot you out of the sky for violating protocol. You’ll never have a chance to explain yourself.’

‘He’s right,’ Mr Pink said. ‘You want to live, you’d better turn this ship around and scuttle back to Carousel New Copenhagen.’

‘Back to square one? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘It’s that or die, Mr Liu.’

Xavier undid his seat restraints. ‘You two,’ he said, pointing at the two visitors, ‘had better stay put. It’s for your own good.’

‘What about me?’ Antoinette said.

‘Stay where you are — it’s safer. I’ll be back in a minute.’

She had no choice but to trust him. Only Xavier knew the details of the program he had loaded into Beast, and if she started moving around as well she might come to harm if the ship made another violent thrust change. There would be arguments later, she knew — she was not happy that he had installed this set of tricks without even telling her — but for now she had to admit that Xavier had the upper hand. Even if all it might gain them was a few minutes of breathing time.

Xavier was gone, off towards the flight deck.

She glared at Clock. ‘I liked Clavain a lot better than you, you know.’

Xavier entered Storm Bird’s flight deck, making sure the door was sealed behind him, and settled into the pilot’s seat. The console displays were still in deep-diagnostic mode, not at all what one would expect of a ship in mid-flight. Xavier spent his first thirty seconds restoring the normal avionics readouts, bringing the ship into something resembling routine flight status. Immediately a synthetic voice started screeching at him that he needed to shut down fusion thrust, because according to at least eight local transponder beacons he was still within the Rust Belt, and thereby obliged to use nothing more energetic than chemical rockets…

‘Beast?’ Xavier whispered. ‘Better do it. They’ll have seen us by now, I’m pretty sure.’

Beast said nothing.

‘It’s safe,’ Xavier said, still whispering. ‘Antoinette’s staying downship with the two creeps. She’s not going anywhere soon.’

When the ship spoke to him, its voice was much lower and softer than it ever was when it addressed Antoinette. ‘I hope we did the right thing, Xavier.’

The ship rumbled as fusion thrust was smoothly supplanted by nuclear rockets. Xavier was pretty sure they were still within fifty kilometres of Carousel New Copenhagen, which meant even using nuclear rockets was in contravention of a list of rules as long as his arm, but he still wanted to attract some attention.

‘I do too, Beast. Guess we’ll know soon enough.’

‘I can depressurise, I think. Can you get Antoinette into a suit without the other two causing any trouble?’

‘Not going to be easy. I’m already worried about leaving them alone down there. I don’t know how long it will be before they decide to risk moving around. I suppose if I could get them into one compartment, and her into another…’

‘I might be able to selectively depressurise, yes. Never tried it before, though, so I don’t know if it’ll work first time.’

‘Maybe it won’t come to that, if the Convention’s goons get to us first.’

‘Whatever happens, there’s going to be trouble.’

Xavier read Beast’s tone of voice well enough. ‘Antoinette, you mean?’

‘She might have some difficult questions for you to answer, Xavier.’

Xavier nodded grimly. It was the last thing he needed to be reminded about now, but the point was inarguable. ‘Clavain had his doubts about you, but had the good sense not to ask Antoinette what was going on.’

‘Sooner or later she’s going to have to know. Jim never meant for this to be a secret her whole life.’

‘But not today,’ Xavier said. ‘Not here, not now. We’ve got enough to deal with for the moment.’

That was when something on the console caught his eye. It was on the three-dimensional radar plot: three icons daggering in from the direction of the carousel. They were moving quickly, on vectors that would bring them around Storm Bird in a pincer movement.

‘Well, you wanted a response, Xavier,’ Beast said. ‘Looks like you’ve got one.’

These days, the Convention’s cutters were never very far from Carousel New Copenhagen. If they were not harassing Antoinette — and usually they were — then it was someone else. Very likely the authorites had been alerted that something unusual was happening as soon as Storm Bird had left the repair bay. Xavier just hoped it was not the particular Convention officer who had taken such an interest in Antoinette’s affairs.

‘Do you think it’s true, that they’d kill us without even asking why we were on fusion thrust?’

‘I don’t know, Xavier. At the time I wasn’t exactly spoilt for other options.’

‘No… you did fine. It’s what I would have done. What Antoinette would have done, probably. And definitely what Jim Bax would have done.’

‘The ships will be within boarding range in three minutes.’

‘Make it easy for them. I’ll go back and see how the others are doing.’

‘Good luck, Xavier.’

He worked his way back to where Antoinette was waiting. To his relief, Clock and the pig were still in their seats. He felt his weight diminishing as Beast cut power to the nuclear rockets.

‘Well?’ Antoinette asked.

‘We’re OK,’ Xavier said, with more confidence than he felt. ‘The police will be here any moment.’

He was in his seat by the time they were weightless. A few seconds later he felt a series of bumps as the police craft grappled on to the hull. So far, so good, he thought: they were at least going to get a boarding, which was better than being shot out of the sky. He would be able to argue his case, and even if the bastards insisted that someone still had to die, he thought he could keep Antoinette out of too much trouble.

He felt a breeze. His ears popped. It felt like decompression, but it was over before he had started to feel real fear. The air was still again. Distantly, he heard clunks and squeals of buckling and shearing metal.

‘What just happened?’ asked Mr Pink.

‘Police must have cut their way through our airlock,’ Xavier said. ‘Slight pressure differential between their air and ours. There was nothing to stop them coming in normally, but I guess they weren’t prepared to wait for the lock to cycle.’

Now he heard approaching mechanical sounds.

‘They’ve sent a proxy,’ Antoinette said. ‘I hate proxies.’

It arrived less than a minute later. Antoinette flinched as the machine unfolded itself into the room, enlarging like a vile black origami puzzle. It swept rapier-edged limbs through the room in lethal arcs. Xavier flinched as one bladed arm passed inches from his eyes, parting air with a tiny whipcrack. Even the pig looked as if there were places he would rather be.

‘This wasn’t clever,’ Mr Pink said.

‘We weren’t going to hurt you,’ Clock added. ‘We just wanted information. Now you’re in a great deal more trouble.’

‘You had a trawl,’ Xavier said.

‘It wasn’t a trawl,’ Mr Pink said. ‘It was just an eidetic playback device. It wouldn’t have harmed you.’

The proxy said, ‘The registered owner of this vessel is Antoinette Bax.’ The machine moved to crouch over her, close enough that she could hear the constant low humming that it gave out and smell the tingle of ozone from the sparking taser. ‘You have contravened Ferrisville Convention regulations relating to the use of fusion propulsion within the Rust Belt, formerly known as the Glitter Band. This is a category-three civil offence that carries the penalty of irreversible neural death. Please submit for genetic identification.’

‘What?’ said Antoinette.

‘Open your mouth, Miss Bax. Do not move.’

‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

‘Me, Miss Bax?’ The machine whipped out a pair of rubber-tipped manipulators and braced her head. It hurt, and continued to hurt, as if her skull were being slowly compressed in a vice. Another manipulator whisked out of a previously concealed part of the machine. It ended in a tiny curved blade, like a scythe.

‘Open your mouth.’

‘No…’ She felt tears coming.

‘Open your mouth.’

The evil little blade — which was still large enough to nip off a finger — hovered an inch from her nose. She felt the pressure increase. The machine’s humming intensified, becoming a low orgasmic throb.

‘Open your mouth. This is your last warning.’

She opened her mouth, but it was as much to groan in pain as to give the proxy what it wanted. Metal blurred, much to quick for her to see. There was a moment of coldness in her mouth, and the feeling of metal brushing her tongue for an instant.

Then the machine withdrew the blade. The limb articulated, tucking the blade into a separate aperture in the proxy’s compact central chassis. Something hummed and clicked within: a rapid sequencer, no doubt, tallying her DNA against the Convention’s records. She heard the rising whine of a centrifuge. The proxy still had her head in a vicelike grip.

‘Let her go,’ Xavier said. ‘You’ve got what you want. Now let her go.’

The proxy released Antoinette. She gasped for breath, wiping tears from her face. Then the machine turned towards Xavier.

‘Interfering in the activities of an official or officially designated mechanism of the Ferrisville Convention is a category-one…’

It did not bother to complete the sentence. Contemptuously, it flicked the taser arm across Xavier so that the sparking electrodes skimmed his chest. Xavier made a barking noise and convulsed. Then he was very still, his eyes open and his mouth agape.

‘Xavier…’ Antoinette gasped.

‘It’s killed him,’ Clock said. He started unfastening his restraint webbing. ‘We must do something.’

Antoinette snapped, ‘What the fuck do you care? You brought this about.’

‘Difficult as it may be to believe, I do care.’ Then he was up from his seat, grappling for the nearest anchorage point. The machine gyred to face him. Clock stood his ground, the only one of them who had not flinched when the proxy had arrived. ‘Let me through. I want to examine him.’

The machine lurched towards Clock. Perhaps it expected him to feint out of the way at the last moment, or huddle protectively. But Clock did not move at all. He did not even blink. The proxy halted, humming and clicking furiously. Evidently it did not know quite what to make of him.

‘Get back,’ it ordered.

‘Let me through, or you will have committed murder. I know there is a human brain driving you, and that you understand the concept of execution as well as I do.’

The machine brought the taser up again.

‘It won’t do any good,’ Clock said.

It pressed the taser against him, just below his collarbone. The sparking bar of current dancing between the poles like a trapped eel ate into the fabric of his clothes. But Clock remained unparalysed. There was no trace of pain on his face.

‘It won’t work on me,’ he said. ‘I am a Conjoiner. My nervous system is not fully human.’

The taser was beginning to chew into his skin. Antoinette smelt what she knew without ever having smelt it before to be burning flesh.

Clock was trembling, his skin even more pale and waxy than it had been before. ‘It won’t…’ His voice sounded strained. The machine pulled back the taser, revealing a scorched-black trench half an inch deep. Clock was still trying to complete the sentence he had started.

The machine knocked him sideways with the blunt circular muzzle of its Gatling gun. Bone cracked; Clock crashed against the wall and was immediately still. He looked dead, but then again there had never been a time when he had looked particularly alive. The stink of his burned skin still filled the cabin. It was not something Antoinette was going to forget in a hurry.

She looked at Xavier again. Clock had been on his way to do something for him. He had been ‘dead’ for perhaps half a minute already. Unlike Clock, unlike any spider, Xavier did not have an ensemble of fancy machines in his head to arrest the processes of brain damage that accompanied loss of circulation. He did not have much more than another minute…

‘Mr Pink…’ she pleaded.

The pig said, ‘Sorry, but it isn’t my problem. I’m dead anyway.’

Her head still hurt. The bones were bruised, she was sure of it. The proxy had nearly shattered her skull. Well, they were dead anyway. Mr Pink was right. So what did it matter if she got hurt some more? She couldn’t let Xavier stay like that, without doing something.

She was out of her seat.

‘Stop,’ the proxy said. ‘You are interfering with a crime scene. Interference with a designated crime scene is a category…’

She carried on moving anyway, springing from handhold to handhold until she was next to Xavier. The machine advanced on her — she heard the crackle of the taser intensify. Xavier had been dead for a minute. He was not breathing. She felt his wrist, trying to locate a pulse. Was that the right way to do it, she wondered frantically? Or was it the side of the neck…

The proxy heaved her aside as easily as if she were a bundle of sticks. She went at it again, angrier than she had ever been in her life, angry and terrified at the same time. Xavier was going to die — was, in fact, already dead. She, it seemed, would soon be following him. Holy shit… half an hour ago all she had been worried about had been bankruptcy.

‘Beast!’ she cried out. ‘Beast, if you can do something… now might not be a bad time.’

‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but one is unable to do anything that would not inconvenience you more than it would inconvenience the proxy.’ Beast paused and added, ‘I am really, really sorry.’

Antoinette glanced at the walls, and a moment of perfect stillness enclosed her, an eye in the storm. Beast had never sounded like that before. It was as if the subpersona had spontaneously clicked into a different identity program. When had it ever called itself ‘1’ before?

‘Beast…’ she said calmly. ‘Beast…?’

But then the proxy was on her, the diamond-hard, scimitar-sharp alloy of its limbs scissoring around her, Antoinette thrashing and screaming as the machine pried her away from Xavier. She could not help cutting herself against the proxy’s limbs. Her blood welled out from each wound in long beadlike processions, tracing ruby-red arcs through the air. She began to feel faint, consciousness lapping away.

The pig moved. Mr Pink was on the machine. The pig was small but immensely strong for his size and the proxy’s servitors whined and hummed in protest as the pig fought the bladed limbs. The whips and whorls of his own shed blood mingled with Antoinette’s. The air hazed scarlet as the beads broke down into smaller and smaller droplets. She watched the machine inflict savage gashes in Mr Pink. He bled curtains of blood, rippling out of him like aurorae. Mr Pink roared in pain and anger, and yet he kept fighting. The taser arced a stuttering blue curve through the air. The muzzle of the Gatling gun began to rotate even more rapidly, as if the proxy were preparing to spray the cabin.

Antoinette crawled her way back to Xavier. Her palms were crisscrossed with cuts. She touched Xavier’s forehead. She could have saved him a few minutes ago, she thought, but it was pointless trying now. Mr Pink was fighting a brave battle, but he was, inexorably, losing. The machine would win, and it would pick her off Xavier again; and then, perhaps, it would kill her too.

It was over. And all she should have done, she thought, was follow her father’s advice. He had told her never to get involved with spiders, and although he could not have guessed the circumstances that would entangle her with them, time had proved him right.

Sorry, Dad, Antoinette thought. You were right, and I thought I knew better. Next time 1 promise I’ll be a good girl…

The proxy stopped moving, its servo motors falling instantly silent. The Gatling gun spun down to a low rumble and then stopped. The taser buzzed, sparked and then died. The centrifuge wound down until Antoinette could no longer hear it. Even the humming had ended. The machine was simply frozen there, immobile, a vile blood-lathered black spider spanning the cabin from wall to wall.

She found some strength. ‘Mr Pink… what did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Mr Pink said. And then the pig nodded at Xavier. ‘I’d concentrate on him, if I were you.’

‘Help me. Please. I’m not strong enough to do this myself.’

‘Help yourself.’

Mr Pink, she saw, was quite seriously injured himself. But though he was losing blood, he appeared not to have suffered anything beyond cuts and gashes; he did not seem to have lost any digits or received any broken bones.

‘I’m begging you. Help me massage his chest.’

‘I said I’d never help a human, Antoinette.’

She began to work Xavier’s chest anyway, but each depression sapped more strength from her, strength that she did not have to spare.

‘Please, Mr Pink…’

‘I’m sorry, Antoinette. It’s nothing personal, but…’

She stopped what she was doing. Her own anger was supreme now. ‘But what?’

‘I’m afraid humans just aren’t my favourite species.’

‘Well, Mr Pink, here’s a message from the human species. Fuck you and your attitude.’

She went back to Xavier, mustering the strength for one last attempt.