[You did well. Our collective eye had been on you for some time, Skade, but that was your chance to shine. It did not escape our attention. That is why we have made ourselves known to you now: because you are the kind of Conjoiner capable of the difficult work that lies ahead. This is not flattery, Skade, but a cold statement of the facts.]
It was true that she had been the only survivor of the Chasm City operation. The precise details of that job had necessarily been scrubbed from her memory, but she knew that it had been an exquisitely dangerous high-risk venture that had not played out according to Closed Council plans.
There was a paradox in Conjoiner operations. Those troops who could be deployed along battle lines, within Contested Volumes, could never be allowed to hold sensitive information in their heads. But deep insertions, covert forays into enemy space, were a different matter. They were highly delicate operations that drew on expert Conjoiners. More than that, they required the use of agents who had been psychologically primed to tolerate isolation from their fellows. Those individuals who could work alone, far behind enemy lines, were rare indeed, and regarded with ambivalence by the others. Clavain was one.
Skade was another.
When she had returned to the Mother Nest, the voice had entered her skull for the first time. It had told her that she must speak of the matter to no one.
[We value our secrecy, Skade. We will protect it at all costs. Serve us, and you will be serving the greater good of the Mother Nest. But betray us, even involuntarily, and we will be forced to silence you. It will not amuse us, but it will be done.]
Am I the first?
[No, Skade. There are others like you. But you will never know who they are. That is our will.]
What do you want of me?
[Nothing, Skade. For now. But you will hear from us when we have need of you.]
And so it had been. Over the months, and then years, that followed she had come to assume that the voice had been illusory, no matter how real it had seemed at the time. But the Night Council had returned, in a quiet moment, and its guidance had begun. The voice did not ask much of her at first: action by omission, mostly. Skade’s promotion into the Closed Council appeared to have been won through her own efforts, not the intervention of the voice. Later, the same could be said of her admission into the Inner Sanctum.
She often wondered who exactly made up the Night Council. Amongst the faces she saw in Closed Council sessions, and in the wider Mother Nest, it was certain that some belonged to the officially nonexistent Council which the voice represented. But there was never a hint, not even a glance that appeared out of place. In the wash of their thoughts there was never a suspicious note; never a sense that the voice was speaking to her through other channels. And she did her best not to think about the voice when she was not in its presence. At other times she merely did its bidding, refusing to examine the source of her compulsion. It felt good to serve something higher than herself.
By turns, Skade’s influence reached further and further. The Exordium programme had already been re-opened by the time Skade became one of the Conjoined, but she was instructed to manoeuvre herself into a position where she could dominate the programme, make maximum use of its discoveries and determine its future direction. As she ascended through layers of secrecy, Skade became aware of just how vital had been the technological items she had harvested from Chasm City. The Inner Sanctum had already made faltering attempts to construct inertia-suppressing machinery, but with the items from Chasm City — and still Skade did not remember exactly what had happened during that mission — the pieces fell into place with beguiling ease. Perhaps it was the case that there were other individuals serving the voice, as the voice itself had suggested, or perhaps it was simply that Skade was herself a skilled and ruthless organiser. The Closed Council was her shadow theatre. Its players moved to her will with contemptible eagerness.
And still the voice had urged her on. It drew her attention to the signal from the Resurgam system, to the diagnostic pulse that indicated that the remaining hell-class weapons had been re-armed.
[The Mother Nest needs those weapons, Skade. You must expedite their recovery.]
Why?
The voice had crafted images in her skull: a swarm of implacable black machines, dark and heavy and busy like a flutter of ravens’ wings. [There are enemies between the stars, Skade, worse than anything we have imagined. They are coming closer. We must protect ourselves.]
How do you know?
[We know, Skade. Trust us.]
She had felt something in that childlike voice that she had not sensed until then. It was pain, or torment, or both.
[Trust us. We know what they can do. We know what it is like to be harried by them.]
And then the voice had fallen silent again, as if it had said too much.
Now the voice pushed a new, nagging thought into her head, pulling her out of her reverie. [When can we be certain that he is dead, Skade?]
Ten, eleven hours. We’ll sweep through the kill zone and sift the interplanetary medium for an enhancement in trace elements, the kind we’d expect to find in this situation. And even if the evidence is not conclusive, we can be confident…
The response was brusque, petulant. [No, Skade. Clavain cannot be allowed to reach Chasm City.]
I’ve killed him, I swear.
[You are clever, Skade, and determined. But so is Clavain. He tricked you once. He can always trick you again.]
It doesn’t matter.
[No?]
If Clavain reaches Yellowstone, the information he has still won’t be of any ultimate benefit to the enemy or the Convention. They can attempt to recover the hell-class weapons for themselves, if they wish. But we have Exordium and the inertia-suppression machinery. They give us an edge. Clavain, and whatever bunch of allies he manages to surround himself with, won’t succeed.
The voice hovered in her head. For a moment she wondered if it had gone, leaving her alone.
She was wrong.
[So you think he might still be alive?]
She fumbled for an answer. I…
[He had better not be, Skade. Or we will be bitterly disappointed with you.]
He was cradling an injured cat, its spine severed somewhere near the lower vertebrae so that its rear legs hung limply. He was trying to persuade it to sip water from the plastic teat of his skinsuit rations pack. His own legs were pinned under tonnes of collapsed masonry. The cat was blind, burned, incontinent and in obvious pain. But he would not give it the easy way out.
He mumbled a sentence, more for his own benefit than the cat’s. ‘You are going to live, my friend. Whether you want to or not.’
The words came out sounding like one sheet of sandpaper being scraped against another. He needed water badly. But there was only a tiny amount left in the rations pack, and it was the cat’s turn.
‘Drink, you little fucker. You’ve come this far…’
‘Let me… die,’ the cat told him.
‘Sorry, puss. Not the way it’s going to happen.’
He felt a breeze. It was the first time he had felt any stirring at all of the air bubble in which the cat and he lay trapped. From somewhere distant he heard the thunderous rumble of collapsing concrete and metal. He hoped to God that the sudden airflow was only caused by a shifting of the air bubble; that perhaps an obstruction had collapsed, linking one bubble to another. He hoped it was not part of the external wall giving way, or else the cat would shortly get its wish. The air bubble would depressurise and they would be left trying to breathe Martian atmosphere. He had heard that dying that way was not at all pleasant, despite what they tried to make you think in the Coalition’s morale-boosting holo-dramas.
‘Clavain… save yourself.’
‘Why, puss?’
‘I die anyway.’
The first time the cat had spoken to him he had assumed that he had begun to hallucinate, imagining a loquacious companion where none actually existed. Then, belatedly, he ha
d realised that the cat really was talking, that the animal was a rich tourist’s bioengineered affectation. A civilian dirigible had been parked on the top of the aerial docking tower when the spiders had hit it with their foam-phase artillery shells. The pet must have escaped from the dirigible gondola long before the attack itself, making its way down to the basement levels of the tower. Clavain thought that bioengineered talking animals were an affront against God, and he was reasonably certain that the cat was not a legally recognised sentient entity. The Coalition for Neural Purity would have had fits if it had known he had dared share his water rations with the forbidden creature. It hated genetic augmentation as much as it hated Galiana’s neural tinkering.
Clavain forced the teat into the cat’s mouth. Some reflex made it gulp down the last few drops of water.
‘We all get it one day, puss.’
‘Not so… soon.’
‘Drink up and stop moaning.’
The cat lapped up the last few drops. ‘Thank… you.’
That was when he felt the breeze again. It was stronger this time, and with it came a more insistent rumble of shifting masonry. In the dim illumination that was afforded by the biochemical thermal/light-stick he had cracked open an hour earlier, he saw dust and debris scud across the ground. The cat’s golden fur rippled like a field of barley. The injured animal tried to raise its head in the direction of the wind. Clavain touched the animal’s head with his hand, doing his best to comfort it. Its eyes were bloody sockets.
The end was coming. He knew it. This was no relocation of air within the ruin; it was a major collapse on the perimeter of the fallen structure. The cell of air was leaking out into the Martian cold.
When he laughed it was like scraping his own throat with razor wire.
‘Something… funny?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Not at all.’
Light speared through the darkness. A wave of pure cold air hit his face and rammed into his lungs.
He stroked the cat’s head again. If this was dying, then it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared.
‘Clavain.’
His name was being spoken calmly and insistently.
‘Clavain. Wake up.’
He opened his eyes, an effort that immediately sapped half the strength he felt he had left. He was somewhere so bright that he wanted to squint, resealing the eyelids that had nearly gummed shut. He wanted to retreat back into his own past, no matter how painful and claustrophobic the dream might be.
‘Clavain. I’m warning you… if you don’t wake up I’m going to…’
He forced his eyes as wide as he could, realising that just before him was a shape that had yet to shift into focus. It was leaning over him. It was the shape that was talking to him.
‘Fuck…’ he heard the woman’s voice say. I think he’s lost his mind or something.‘
Another voice, sonorous, deferential, but just the tiniest bit patronising, said, ‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but it would be unwise to assume anything. Especially if the gentleman in question is a Conjoiner.’
‘Hey, as if I needed reminding.’
‘One merely means to point out that his medical condition may be both complex and deliberate.’
‘Space him now,’ said another male voice.
‘Shut up, Xave.’
Clavain’s vision sharpened. He was bent over double in a small white-walled chamber. There were pumps and gauges set into the walls, along with decals and printed warnings that had been worn nearly away. It was an airlock. He was still wearing his suit, the one he had been wearing, he remembered now, when he had sent the corvette away, and the figure leaning over him was wearing a suit as well. She — for it was the woman — had been the one who had opened his visor and glare shield, allowing light and air to reach him.
He groped in the ruins of his memory for a name. ‘Antoinette?’
‘Got it in one, Clavain.’ She had her visor up as well. All that he could see of her face was a blunt blonde fringe, wide eyes and a freckled nose. She was attached to the wall of the lock by a metal line, and she had one hand on a heavy red lever.
‘You’re younger than I thought,’ he said.
‘Are you all right, Clavain?’
‘I’ve felt better,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be all right in a few moments. I put myself into deep sleep, almost a coma, to conserve my suit’s resources. Just in case you were a little late.’
‘What if I hadn’t arrived at all?’
‘I assumed you would, Antoinette.’
‘You were wrong. I very nearly didn’t come. Isn’t that right, Xave?’
One of the other voices — the third — he had heard earlier answered, ‘You don’t realise how lucky you are, man.’
‘No,’ Clavain said. ‘I probably don’t.’
‘I still say we should space him,’ the third voice repeated.
Antoinette looked over her shoulder, through the window of the inner airlock door. ‘After we came all this way?’
‘It’s not too late. Teach him a lesson about taking things for granted.’
Clavain made to move. ‘I didn’t…’
‘Whoah!’ Antoinette had extended a hand, clearly indicating that it would be very unwise of him to move another muscle. She nodded towards the lever she held in her other hand. ‘Check this out, Clavain. You do one thing that I don’t like — like so much as bat an eyelid — and I pull this lever. Then it’s back into space again, just like Xave said.’
He mulled over his predicament for several seconds. ‘If you weren’t prepared to trust me, at least slightly, you wouldn’t have come out to rescue me.’
‘Maybe I was curious.’
‘Maybe you were. But maybe you also felt I might have been sincere. I saved your life, didn’t I?’
With her free hand she worked the other airlock controls. The inner door slid aside, offering Clavain a brief glimpse into the rest of her ship. He saw another spacesuited figure waiting on the far side, but no sign of anyone else.
‘I’m going now,’ Antoinette said.
In one deft movement she undipped her restraint line, slipped through the open doorway and then made the inner airlock door close again. Clavain stayed still, waiting until her face appeared in the window. She had removed her helmet and was running her fingers through the unruly mop of her hair.
‘Are you going to leave me here?’ he asked.
‘Yes. For now. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I can still space you if you do anything I don’t like.’
Clavain reached up and removed his own helmet, twisting it free. He let it drift away, tumbling across the lock like a small metal moon. ‘I’m not planning on doing anything that might annoy any of you.’
‘That’s good.’
‘But listen to me carefully. You’re in danger just being out here. We need to get out of the war zone as quickly as possible.’
‘Relax, guy,’ the man said. ‘We’ve got time to service some systems. There aren’t any zombies for light-minutes in any direction.’
‘It’s not the Demarchists you need to worry about. I was running from my own people, from the Conjoiners. They have a stealthed ship out here. Not nearby, I grant you, but it can move quickly, it has long-range missiles and I guarantee that it is looking for me.’
Antoinette said, I thought you said you’d faked your death.‘
He nodded. ‘I’m assuming Skade will have taken out my corvette with those same long-range missiles. She’ll have assumed I’m aboard it. But she won’t stop there. If she’s as thorough as I think she is, she’ll sweep the area with Nightshade just to make sure, searching for trace atoms.’
‘Trace atoms? You’re joking. By the time they get to where the blast happened…’ Antoinette shook her head.
Clavain shook his in return. ‘There’ll still be a slightly enhanced density — one or two atoms per cubic metre — of the kind of elements you don’t normally find in interplanetary space. Hull isotopes, that kind of thing. Nights
hade’s hull will sample and analyse the medium. The hull is covered with epoxy-coated patches that will snare anything larger than a molecule, and then there are mass spectrometers that will sniff the atomic constituency of the vacuum itself. Algorithms will process the forensic data, comparing the curves and histograms of abundance and isotope ratios against plausible scenarios for the destruction of a vessel of the corvette’s composition. The results won’t be unambiguous, for the statistical errors will be almost as large as the effects Skade’s attempting to measure. But I’ve seen it done before. The pull of the data will be in favour of there having been very little organic matter aboard the corvette.’ Clavain reached up and touched the side of his head, slowly enough that it could not be seen as threatening. ‘And then there are the isotopes in my implants. They’ll be harder to detect, a lot harder, but Skade will expect to find them if she looks hard enough. And when she doesn’t…’
‘She’ll figure out what you did,’ Antoinette said.
Again Clavain nodded. ‘But I took all that into consideration. It will take time for Skade to make a thorough search. You can still make it back into neutral territory, but only if you start home immediately.’
‘You’re really that keen to get to the Rust Belt, Clavain?’ asked Antoinette. ‘They’ll eat you alive, whether it’s the Convention or the zombies.’
‘No one said defecting was a risk-free activity.’
‘You defected once already, right?’ Antoinette asked.
Clavain caught his drifting helmet and secured it to his belt by the helmet’s chin loop. ‘Once. It was a long time ago. Probably a bit before your time.’
‘Like four hundred years before my time?’
He scratched his beard. ‘Warm.’
‘Then it is you. You are him.’
‘Him?’
‘That Clavain. The historical one. The one everyone says has to be dead by now. The Butcher of Tharsis.’
Clavain smiled. ‘For my sins.’