What possible good would Felka’s presence serve?
[That depends. If you intend to make this an execution squad she will be of no use to us at all. But if you have any intention of bringing Clavain back alive — and I think you must — then Felka’s usefulness cannot be underestimated.]
Skade knew he was right, though it pained her to admit it. Clavain would have been an immensely valuable asset to the operation to recover the hell-class weapons, and his loss would make the operation very much more difficult. On one level, she could see the attraction of bringing him back into the fold, so that he could be pinned down and his hard-won expertise sucked out like so much bone marrow. But a live capture would be inordinately more difficult than a long-range kill, and until she succeeded there would remain the possibility of him reaching the other side. The Demarchists would be fascinated to hear about the new shipbuilding programme, the rumours of evacuation plans and savage new weapons.
Skade could not be certain, but she thought that the news might be enough to reinvigorate the enemy, gaining them allies who had thus far remained neutral. If the Demarchists rallied and managed to launch some kind of last-ditch attack on the Mother Nest, with the support of the Ultras and any number of previously neutral factions, all could be lost.
No. She had to kill Clavain; that was simply not open to debate. Equally, she had to give every impression that she was ready to act reasonably, just as she would have done under any other state of war. Which meant that she had to accept Felka’s presence.
This is blackmail, isn’t it?
[Not blackmail, Skade. Just negotiation. If any one of us can talk Clavain out of this, it has to be Felka.]
He won’t listen to her, even if…
[Even if he thinks she’s his daughter? Is that what you were going to say?]
He’s an old man, Remontoire. An old man with delusions. They’re not my responsibility.
The servitors moved aside to allow him to leave. She watched the seemingly detached ovoid of his face bob out of the room like a balloon. There had been instants in their conversation when she had almost sensed cracks in the neural blockade, pathways that Delmar had — through understandable oversight — not completely disabled. The cracks had been like strobe flashes, opening up brief frozen windows into Remontoire’s skull. Very probably he had not even been aware of her intrusions. Perhaps she had even imagined them.
But if she had imagined them, she had also imagined the horror that went with them. And the horror came from what Remontoire was seeing.
Delmar…I really would like to know the facts…
[Later, Skade, after you’ve been healed. Then you can know. Until then, I’d rather put you back into coma.]
Show me now, you bastard.
He came closer to her side. The first of the swan-necked servitors towered over him, the chrome segments of its neck gleaming. The machine angled its head back and forth, digesting what lay below it.
[All right. But don’t say you weren’t warned.]
The blockades came down like heavy metal shutters: clunk, clunk, clunk through her skull. A barrage of neural data crashed in. She saw herself through Delmar’s eyes. The thing down on the medical couch was her, recognisably so — her head was bizarrely unharmed — but she was not remotely the right shape. She felt a twisting spasm of revulsion, as if she had just accessed a photograph from some bleak pre-industrial archive of medical nightmares. She wanted desperately to turn the page, to move on to the next pitiful atrocity.
She had been bisected.
The tether must have fallen across her from her left shoulder to her right hip, a precise diagonal severance. It had taken her legs and her left arm. Carapacial machinery hugged the wounds: gloss-white humming scabs of medical armour, like huge pus-filled blisters. Fluid lines erupted from the machinery and trailed into white modules squatting by her side. She looked as if she was bursting out of a white steel chrysalis. Or being consumed by it, transformed into something strange and phantasmagoric.
Delmar…
[I’m sorry, Skade, but I did warn…]
You don’t understand. This… state… doesn’t concern me at all. We’re Conjoiners, aren’t we? There isn’t anything we can’t repair, given time. I know you can fix me, eventually. She felt his relief.
[Eventually, yes…]
But eventually isn’t good enough. In a few days, three at the most, I need to be on a ship.
Chapter 13
THEY HAD TO drag Thorn to the Inquisitor’s office. The great doors creaked open and there she was, her back to him, standing by the window. He studied the woman through gummed-up eyes, never having seen her before. She looked smaller and younger than he had expected, almost like a girl wearing adult clothes. She wore highly polished boots and dark trousers under a side-buttoned leather tunic that appeared slightly too large for her, so that her gloved hands were almost lost in the sleeves. The tunic’s hem almost reached her knees. Her black hair was combed back from her forehead in tight, glistening rows that curved down to tiny curls like inverted question marks above the nape of her neck. Her face was in near-profile, her skin a tone darker than his, her thin nose hooked above a small, straight mouth.
She turned around and spoke to the guard waiting by the door. ‘You can leave us now.’
‘Ma’am…’
‘I said you can leave us now.’
The guard left. Thorn stood by himself, only wavering slightly. The woman moved in and out of focus. For a long, long time she just looked at him. Then she spoke, with the same voice he had heard coming out of the speaker grille. ‘Are you going to be all right? I’m sorry that they hurt you.’
‘Not as sorry as I am.’
‘I only wanted to talk to you.’
‘Maybe you should keep an eye on what happens to your guests, in that case.’ He tasted blood in his mouth as he spoke.
‘Will you come with me, please?’ She gestured across the room to what looked like a private chamber. ‘There’s something that we need to discuss.’
‘I’m fine here, thank you.’
‘It wasn’t an invitation. I have no interest in whether you are fine or not, Thorn.’
He wondered if she had read his reaction — the minute dilation of his pupils that betrayed his guilt. Or perhaps she had a laser trained on the back of his neck, sampling his skin’s salinity. Either way, she might have a good idea of what he thought of her assertion. Perhaps she even had a trawl somewhere in this building. It was rumoured that Inquisition House had at least one, lovingly tended since the early days of the colony.
‘I don’t know who you think I am.’
‘Oh, but you do. So why play games? Come with me.’
He followed her into the smaller room. It was windowless. He glanced around, looking for signs of a trap or any indication that the room might double as an interrogation chamber, but it looked innocent enough. The walls were lined with bulging paperwork-stuffed shelves, except for one that was largely occupied by a map of Resurgam studded with many pins and lights. She offered him a chair on one side of the large desk that took up much of the floor space. Another woman was already seated opposite him, with her elbows propped on the edge of the desk, looking faintly bored. She was older than the Inquisitor, but possessed something of the same wiry build. She wore a cap and a heavy drab-coloured coat with a fleeced collar and cuffs. Both women struck him as faintly avian, thin yet quick and strong-boned. The one behind the desk was smoking.
He settled down into the seat that the Inquisitor had indicated.
‘Coffee?’
‘No thanks.’
The other woman pushed her pack of cigarettes towards him. ‘Have a smoke, then.’
‘I’ll pass on those as well.’ But he picked up the packet and turned it over, studying the odd markings and sigils. It hadn’t been manufactured in Cuvier. In fact, it didn’t look as if it had been manufactured anywhere on Resurgam. He pushed it back towards the older woman. ‘Can I go now?’
/> ‘No. We haven’t even started yet.’ The Inquisitor eased into her own seat, next to the other woman, and fixed herself a mug of coffee. ‘Introductions, I think. You know who you are, and we know who you are, but you probably don’t know much about us. You have an idea about me, of course… but probably not a very accurate one. My name is Vuilleumier. This is my colleague…’
Trina,‘ she said.
‘Irina… yes. And you, of course, are Thorn; the man who has done so much harm of late.’
‘I’m not Thorn. The government doesn’t have a clue who Thorn is.’
‘How would you know?’
‘I read the papers, like everyone else.’
‘You’re right. Internal Threats doesn’t have much of an idea who Thorn is. But only because I have been doing my best to keep that particular department off your trail. Have you any idea how much effort that’s cost me? How much personal anguish?’
He shrugged, doing his best to look neither interested nor surprised. ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’
‘Hardly the gratitude I was expecting, Thorn. But we’ll let it pass. You don’t know the big picture yet, so it’s understandable.’
‘What big picture?’
‘We’ll come to that in good time. But let’s talk about you for a moment.’ She patted a fat government folder resting at the edge of the desk and then pushed it over to him. ‘Go on, open it. Have a gander.’
He looked at her for several seconds before moving. He opened the folder at random and then thumbed back and forth through the paperwork jammed within. It was like opening a box of snakes. His whole life was here, annotated and cross-referenced in excruciating detail. His real name — Renzo; his personal details. Every public move he had made in the last five years. Every significant antigovernment action he had played any significant part in — voice transcripts, photographs, forensic evidence, long-winded reports.
‘Makes interesting reading, doesn’t it?’ said the other woman.
He flicked through the rest of it in horror, a plummeting sensation in his gut. There was enough to have him executed many times over, after ten separate show trials.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said feebly. He did not want to give up now — not after so long — but anything else suddenly seemed futile.
‘What don’t you understand, Thorn?’ asked Vuilleumier.
‘This department… it’s External Threats, not Internal Threats. You’re the person in charge of finding the Triumvir. I’m not the… Thorn isn’t the one you’re interested in.’
‘You are now.’ She knocked back some coffee.
The other woman puffed on a cigarette. ‘The fact is, Thorn, my colleague and I have been engaged in a concerted effort to sabotage the activities of Internal Threats. We’ve been doing our best to make sure they don’t catch you. That’s why we’ve needed to know at least as much about you as they do, if not more.’
She had a funny accent, this one. He tried to place it and found that he couldn’t. Except… had he heard it once before, when he was younger? He racked his memory but nothing came.
‘Why sabotage them?’ he asked.
‘Because we want you alive, not dead.’ She smiled, quick and fast like a monkey.
‘Well, that’s reassuring.’
‘You’ll want to know why next,’ said Vuilleumier, ‘so I’ll tell you. And this is where we start drifting into the arena of the big picture, if you get my drift, so please do pay attention.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘This office, the department of Inquisition House called External Threats, is not at all that it appears to be. The whole business of tracking down the war criminal Volyova has always been a front for a much more sensitive operation. Matter of fact, Volyova died years ago.’
He had the impression she was lying, but still telling him something that was far closer to the truth than he had ever heard before. ‘So why keep up the pretence of searching for her?’
‘Because it’s not her we really want. It’s her ship, or a means of reaching it. But by focusing on Volyova we were able to follow much the same lines of inquiry without bringing the ship into the discussion.’
The other woman, the one he thought had called herself Irina, nodded. ‘Essentially this entire government department is engaged in recovering her ship, and nothing else. Everything else is a smokescreen. A hugely complex one, and one that has involved internecine warfare with half a dozen other departments, but a smokescreen all the same.’
‘Why does it have to be so secret?’
The two woman exchanged glances.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Irina, just as the other one started to say something. ‘The operation to find the ship had to be kept maximally secret for the simple reason that there would have been intense civil disorder if it ever came to light.’
I don’t follow.‘
‘It’s a matter of panic,’ she said, waving her cigarette for emphasis. ‘The government’s official policy has always been pro-terraforming, right back to the old Inundationist days under Girardieau. That policy only deepened after the Sylveste crisis. Now they’re fully wedded to it in ideological terms. Anyone who criticises the programme is guilty of incorrect thought. You of all people shouldn’t need to be told this.’
‘So where the does the ship come in?’
‘As an escape route. One branch of government has determined a singularly disturbing fact.’ She puffed on her cigarette. ‘There’s an external threat to the colony, but not quite the kind they originally imagined. Studies of the threat have been ongoing for some time. The conclusion is inescapable: Resurgam must be evacuated, perhaps within no more than one or two years. Half a decade at the optimistic side — and that’s probably being very optimistic’
She watched him, undoubtedly waiting to observe the effects her words would have. Perhaps she assumed that she would need to repeat herself, that he would be too slow to take it all in at first go.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, but you’re going to have to try better than that.’
Irina, or whoever she was, looked pained. ‘You don’t believe my story?’
I wouldn’t be the only one, either.‘
The Inquisitor said, ‘But you’ve always wanted to leave Resurgam. You’ve always said the colony was in danger.’
I wanted to leave. Who wouldn’t?‘
‘Listen to me,’ Vuilleumier said sharply. ‘You’re a hero to thousands of people. Most of them wouldn’t trust the government to tie their shoelaces. A certain fraction of those people have long believed that you know the whereabouts of one or two shuttles, and that you are planning a mass exodus into space for your believers.’
He shrugged. ‘And?’
‘It’s not true, of course — the shuttles never existed — but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might have, given everything that’s gone on. Now.’ She leant forwards again. ‘Consider the following hypothesis. A special covert branch of government determines that there is an imminent global threat to Resurgam. The same branch of government, after much work, determines the whereabouts of Volyova’s ship. An inspection of the ship indicates that it is damaged but flightworthy. More importantly, it has a passenger-carrying capacity. A vast passenger-carrying capacity. Enough to evacuate the entire planet, if some sacrifices are made.’
‘Like an ark?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, clearly pleased by his answer. ‘Exactly like an ark.’
Vuilleumier’s friend cradled her cigarette elegantly between two fingers. Her exceedingly thin hands reminded Thorn of the splayed-out bones in a bird’s wing. ‘But having a ship we can use as an ark is only half of the solution,’ she said. ‘The question is, might the government’s announcement of the existence of such a ship be viewed with a trace of scepticism? Of course it would.’ She stabbed the cigarette in his direction. ‘That’s where you come in. The people’ll trust you where they won’t trust us.’
Thorn leant back in his seat un
til it was balancing on only two legs. He laughed and shook his head, the two women watching him impassively. ‘Was that why I was beaten up downstairs? To soften me into accepting a piece of drivel like this?’
Vuilleumier’s friend held up the packet of cigarettes again. ‘These came from her ship.’
‘Did they? That’s nice. I thought you said you had no means of reaching orbit.’
‘We didn’t. But now we do. We hacked into the ship from the ground, got it to send down a shuttle.’
He pulled a face, but could not swear that such a thing was impossible. Difficult, yes — unlikely, very probably — but certainly not impossible.
‘And you’re going to evacuate an entire planet with one shuttle?’
‘Two, actually.’ Vuilleumier coughed and retrieved another folder. ‘The most recent census put the population of Resurgam at just under two hundred thousand. The largest shuttle can move five hundred people into orbit, where they can transfer to an in-system craft with a capacity about four times that. That means we’ll need to make four hundred surface-to-orbit flights. The in-system ship will need to make about one hundred round trips to Volyova’s ship. That’s the real bottleneck, though — each of those round trips will take at least thirty hours, and that’s assuming almost zero time for loading and unloading at either end. Better assume forty hours to be on the safe side. That means we’re looking at nearly six standard months. We can shave some time off that by pressing another surface-to-orbit ship into service, but we’ll be doing very well if we get it much below five months. And that, of course, is assuming that we can have two thousand people ready and waiting to be moved off Resurgam every forty hours…’ Vuilleumier smiled. He could not help but like her smile, for all that he felt he should be associating it with pain and fear. ‘You begin to see why we need you, I think.’
‘Assuming I refuse to offer my assistance… just how would the government go about this?’
‘Mass coercion would seem to be the only other option available to us,’ Irina said, as if this was a perfectly reasonable statement. ‘Martial law… internment camps… you get the idea. It wouldn’t be pretty. There’d be civil disobedience, riots. There’s a good chance a lot of people would end up dead.’