Clavain didn’t answer him for several minutes. Through the window he saw Carousel New Copenhagen diminishing, the vast grey arc of the rim revealing itself to be merely one part of a spokeless wheel. The wheel itself grew smaller until it was nearly lost against the background of the other habitats and carousels that formed the Rust Belt.
‘Our intelligence says you don’t,’ Clavain said, ‘but our intelligence could be wrong, or incomplete. If the Demarchy had to get its hands on a lighthugger at very short notice, do you think it could?’ ‘What is this about, Clavain?’ Voi asked. ‘Just answer my question.’
Her face flared red at his insolence, but she held her temper well. Her voice remained calm, almost businesslike. ‘You know there are always ways and means. It just depends on the degree of desperation.’
I think you should start making plans. You will need a starship, more than one, if you can manage it. And troops and weapons.‘
‘We’re not exactly in a position to spare resources, Clavain,’ Perotet said, removing one glove completely. His hands were milky white and very fine-boned.
‘Why? Because you will lose the war? You’re going to lose it anyway. It’ll just have to happen a little sooner than you were expecting.’ Perotet replaced the glove. ‘Why, Clavain?’
‘Winning this war is no longer the Mother Nest’s primary concern. Something else has taken precedent. They’re going through the motions of winning now because they don’t want you or anyone else to suspect the truth.’
Voi asked, ‘Which is?’
‘I don’t know all the details. I had to make a choice between staying to learn more and defecting while I had a chance to do so. It wasn’t an easy decision, and I didn’t have a lot of time for second thoughts.’
‘Just tell us what you do know,’ Perotet said. ‘We’ll decide if the information merits further investigation. We’ll find out what you know eventually, you realise. We have trawls, just like your own side. Maybe not as fast, maybe not as safe… but they work for us. You’ll lose nothing by telling us something now.’ ‘I’ll tell you all that I know. But it’s valueless unless you act on it.’ Clavain felt the military ship adjust its course. They were headed for Yellowstone’s only large moon, Marco’s Eye, which orbited just beyond the Ferrisville Convention’s jurisdictional limit. ‘Go ahead,’ Perotet said.
‘The Mother Nest has identified an external threat, one that concerns all of us. There are aliens out there, machinelike entities that suppress the emergence of technological intelligences. It’s why the galaxy is such an empty place.
They’ve wiped it clean. I’m afraid we’re next on the list.‘
‘Sounds like supposition to me,’ Voi said.
It isn’t. Some of our own deep-space missions have already encountered them. They are as real as you or I, and you have my word that they’re coming closer.‘
‘We’ve managed fine until now,’ Perotet said.
‘Something we’ve done has alerted them. We may never know precisely what it was. All that matters is that the threat is real and the Conjoiners are fully aware of it. They do not think they can defeat it.’ He went on to tell them much the same story that he had already told Xavier and Antoinette about the Mother Nest’s evacuation fleet and the quest to recover the lost weapons.
‘These imaginary weapons,’ Voi asked. ‘Are we supposed to think that they’d make any practical difference against hostile aliens?’
‘I suppose if they were not considered to be of value, my people would not be so eager to recover them.’ ‘And where do we come in?’
‘I’d like you to recover the weapons first. That’s why you’ll need a starship. You could leave a few weapons behind for Skade’s exodus fleet, but beyond that…’ Clavain shrugged. ‘I think they’d be better off in the control of orthodox humanity.’
‘You’re quite a turncoat,’ Voi said admiringly.
‘I’ve tried not to make a career out of it.’
The ship lurched. There had been no warning until that moment, but Clavain had flown in enough ships to know the difference between a scheduled and unscheduled manoeuvre.
Something was wrong. He could see it instantly in Voi and Perotet: all composure dropped from their faces. Voi’s expression became a mask, her throat trembling as she went into subvocal communication with the shuttle’s shipmaster. Perotet moved to one window, making sure he had at least one limb attached to a grappling point.
The vessel lurched again. A hard blue flash lit the cabin. Perotet looked away, his eyes squinting against the glare.
‘What’s happening?’ Clavain asked.
‘We’re being attacked.’ He sounded fascinated and appalled at the same time. ‘Someone just took out one of the Ferrisville escort craft.’
‘This shuttle looks lightly armoured,’ Clavain said. ‘If someone was attacking us, wouldn’t we be dead by now?’
Another flash. The shuttle lurched and yawed, the hull vibrating as the engine load intensified. The shipmaster was applying an evasive pattern.
‘That’s two down,’ Voi said from the other side of the cabin.
‘Would you mind releasing me from this chair?’ Clavain asked.
‘I see something approaching us,’ Perotet called. ‘Looks like another ship — maybe two. Unmarked. Looks civilian, but can’t be. Unless…’
‘Banshees?’ suggested Clavain.
They appeared not to hear him.
‘There’s something on this side too,’ Voi said. ‘Shipmaster doesn’t know what’s happening either.’ Her attention flicked to Clavain. ‘Could your side have got this close to Yellowstone?’
‘They want me back pretty badly,’ Clavain said. ‘I suppose anything’s possible. But this is against every rule of war.’
‘Those could still be spiders,’ Voi said. ‘If Clavain’s right, then the rules of war don’t apply any more.’
‘Can you retaliate?’ Clavain asked.
‘Not here. Our weapons are electronically pacified inside Convention airspace.’ Perotet unhooked from one restraint and scudded to another on the far wall. ‘The other escort’s damaged — she must have taken a partial hit. She’s outgassing and losing navigational control. She’s falling behind us. Voi, how long until we’re back in the war zone?’
Her eyes glazed again. It was as if she had been stunned momentarily. ‘Four minutes to the frontier, then weps will depacify.’
‘You haven’t got four minutes,’ Clavain said. ‘Is there a spacesuit aboard this thing, by any chance?’
Voi looked at him oddly. ‘Of course. Why?’
‘Because it’s pretty obvious that it’s me they want. No sense in us all dying, is there?’
They showed him to the spacesuit locker. The suits were of Demarchist design, all ribbed silvery-red metal, and while they were neither more nor less technologically advanced than Conjoiner suits, everything worked differently on them. Clavain could not have put the suit on without the assistance of Voi and Perotet. Once the helmet had latched shut, the faceplate border lit up with a dozen unfamiliar status read-outs, worming traces and shifting histograms labelled with acronyms that meant nothing to Clavain. Periodically a small, polite feminine voice would whisper something in his ear. Most of the traces were green rather than red, which he took to be a good sign.
‘I keep thinking this must be a trap,’ Voi said. ‘Something you’d always planned. That you meant to come aboard our ship and then be rescued. Perhaps you’ve done something to us, or planted something…’
‘Everything I told you was true,’ Clavain said. ‘I don’t know who those people outside are, and I don’t know what they want with me. They could be Conjoiners, but if they are, their arrival’s nothing I’ve planned.’
‘I wish I could believe you.’
‘I admired Sandra Voi. I hoped that my knowing her might help my cause with you. I was perfectly sincere about that.’
‘If they are Conjoiners… will they kill you?’
‘I don’t k
now. I think they might have done that already, if that was what they wanted. I don’t think Skade would have spared you, but perhaps I’m misjudging her. If indeed it is Skade…’ Clavain shuffled into the airlock. ‘I’d best be going. I hope they leave you alone once they see I’m outside.’
‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’
Clavain smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’
‘It makes me think you might not be lying. The information you gave us…’
‘You really should act on it.’
He stepped into the lock. Voi did the rest. The traces on the faceplate registered the shift to vacuum. Clavain heard his suit creak and click in unfamiliar ways as it adjusted to space. The outer door heaved open on heavy pistons. He could see nothing but a rectangle of darkness. No stars; no worlds; no Rust Belt. Not even the marauding ships.
It always took courage to step out of any spacecraft, most especially in the absence of any means of returning. Clavain judged that single footstep and push-off to be amongst the two or three hardest things he had ever done in his life.
But it had to be done.
He was outside. He turned slowly, the claw-shaped Demarchist shuttle coming into view and then passing by him. It was unharmed, save for one or two scorch marks on the hull where it had been struck by scalding fragments from the escort ships. On the sixth or seventh turn the engines pulsed and the shuttle began to put increasing distance between itself and him. Good. There was no sense sacrificing himself if Voi did not take advantage of it.
He waited. Perhaps four minutes passed before he became aware of the other ships. Evidently they had moved away after the attack. There were three of them, as Perotet and Voi had thought.
Their hulls were black, stencilled with neon skulls, eyes and sharks’ teeth. Now and then a thruster aperture would bark a pulse of steering gas, and the flash would pick out more details, limning the sleek curves of transatmospheric surfaces and the cowled muzzles of retractable weapons or hinged grappling gear. The weapons could be packed away and the ships would look innocent enough: sleek rich kids’ toys, but nothing you would bet on against armed Convention escorts.
One of the three banshees broke from the pack and loomed large. A yellow-lit airlock irised open in the belly of her hull. Two figures bustled out, black as space themselves. They jetted towards Clavain and braked expertly when they were on the point of colliding with him. Their spacesuits were like their ships: civilian in origin but augmented with armour and weapons. They made no effort to speak to him on the suit channel; all he heard as he was snared and taken aboard the black ship was the repetitious soft voice of the suit subpersona.
There was just room for the three of them in the belly airlock. Clavain looked for markings on the suits of the other two, but even up close they were perfectly black. The faceplate visors were heavily tinted, so that all he caught was the occasional flash of an eye.
His status indicators shifted again, registering the return of air pressure. The inner door irised open and he was pushed forwards into the main body of the black ship. The spacesuited pair followed him. Once they were inside, their helmets detached themselves automatically and flew away to storage points. Two men had brought him aboard the ship. They could easily have been twins, even down to the nearly identical broken nose on each face. One of the men had a gold ring through one eyebrow, the other through the lobe of one ear. Both were bald except for an exceptionally narrow line of dyed-green hair that bisected their skulls from temple to nape. They wore wraparound tortoiseshell goggles and neither man had any trace of a mouth.
The one with the ring through his eyebrow motioned to Clavain that he should remove his own helmet. Clavain shook his head, unwilling to do that until he was certain that he was in breathable air. The man shrugged and reached for something racked on the wall. It was a bright-yellow axe.
Clavain raised a hand and began to fiddle with the connecting latch of the Demarchist suit. He could not find the release mechanism. After a moment the man with the pierced ear shook his head and brushed Clavain’s hand aside. He worked the latch and the soft voice in Clavain’s ear became shriller, more insistent. The status displays flicked mostly into red.
The helmet came off with a gasp of air. Clavain’s ears popped. The pressure on the black ship was not quite Demarchist standard. He breathed cold air, his lungs working hard.
‘Who… who are you?’ he asked, when he had the energy for words.
The man with the pierced eyebrow replaced the yellow axe on the wall. He drew a finger across his own throat.
Then another voice, one that Clavain did not recognise, said, ‘Hello.’
Clavain looked around. The third person also wore a spacesuit, though it was much less cumbersome than the suits worn by her fellows. Despite its bulk she still managed to appear thin and spare. She hovered within the frame of a bulkhead door, resting calmly with her head cocked slightly to one side. Perhaps it was the play of light on her face, but Clavain thought he saw ghostly blades of faded black against the perfect white of her skin.
I hope the Talkative Twins treated you well, Mr Clavain.‘
‘Who are you?’ Clavain said again.
‘I am Zebra. That’s not my real name, of course. You won’t ever need to know my real name.’
‘Who are you, Zebra? Why have you done this?’
‘Because I was told to. What did you expect?’
‘I didn’t expect anything. I was trying…’ He paused and waited until his breath had returned. ‘I was trying to defect.’
‘We know.’
‘We?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough. Come with me, Mr Clavain. Twins, secure and prepare for high-burn. The Convention will be swarming like flies by the time we get back to Yellowstone. It’s going to be an interesting trip home.’
‘I’m not worth killing innocent people for.’
‘No one died, Mr Clavain. The two Convention escorts we destroyed were remotes, slaved to the third. We wounded the third, but its pilot won’t have been harmed. And we conspicuously avoided harming the zombies’ shuttle. Did they make you step outside, I wonder?’
He followed her forwards, through the bulkhead into a flight deck area. There was only one other person aboard as far as Clavain could tell: a wizened-looking man strapped into the pilot’s position. He was not wearing a suit. His ancient age-spotted hands gripped the controls like prehensile twigs.
‘What do you think?’ Clavain asked.
‘It’s possible they might have, but I think it more likely that you chose to leave.’
‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ve got me.’
The ancient man glanced at Clavain with only a flicker of interest. ‘Normal insertion, Zebra, or do we take the long way home?’
‘Follow the normal corridor, Manoukhian, but be ready to deviate. I don’t want to engage the Convention again.’
Manoukhian, if that was indeed his name, nodded and applied pressure to the ivory-handled control sticks. ‘Get the guest strapped down, Zebra. You too.’
The striped woman nodded. ‘Twins? Help me secure Mr Clavain.’
The two men shifted Clavain’s suited form into a contoured acceleration couch. He let them do whatever they wanted; he was too weak to offer more than token resistance. His mind probed the immediate cybernetic environment of the spacecraft, and while his implants sensed something of the data traffic through the control networks, there was nothing he could influence. The people were also beyond his reach. He did not even think any of them had implants.
‘Are you the banshees?’ Clavain asked.
‘Sort of, but not exactly. The banshees are a bunch of thuggish pirates. We do things with a little more finesse. But their existence gives us the cover we need for our own activities. And you?’ The stripes on her face bunched as she smiled. ‘Are you really Nevil Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis?’
‘You didn’t hear that from me.’
‘That’s what you told the Demarchists. A
nd those kids in Copenhagen. We have spies everywhere, you see. There’s not a lot that escapes us.’
‘I can’t prove I’m Clavain. But then why should I bother?’
‘I think you are,’ Zebra said. ‘I hope you are, anyway. It would be such a letdown if you turned out to be an impostor. My boss wouldn’t be at all happy.’
‘Your boss?’
‘The man we’re on our way to meet,’ Zebra said.
Chapter 21
WHEN THEY WERE safely clear of the atmosphere and the carnelian-red marble had vanished from the extreme range of her ship’s radar, Khouri found the courage to take hold of one of the black cubes that had been left behind when the main mass of Inhibitor machinery had fragmented. The cube was shockingly cold to the touch, and when she let go of it she left behind two thin films of detached flesh on opposite faces of the cube, like pink fingerprints. Her fingertips were now red-raw and smooth. For a moment she thought the removed skin would stay adhered to the smooth black sides, but after a few seconds the two sheets of flesh peeled away of their own accord, forming delicate translucent flakes like insects’ discarded wings. The cube’s cold black sides were as pitilessly dark and unmarred as before. But she noticed that the cube was shrinking, the contraction so odd and unexpected that her mind interpreted it as the cube receding into an impossible distance. All around her, the other cubes were echoing the contraction, their size diminishing by a half with every second that passed.
Within a minute there was nothing left in the cabin but films of grey-black ash. She even felt ash accumulate at the corners of her eyes, like a sudden attack of sleepy dust, and was reminded that the cubes had reached into her head before the marble had arrived.
‘Well, you got your demonstration,’ she said to Thorn. ‘Was it worth it, just to make a point?’
‘I had to know. But I couldn’t know what was going to happen.’
Khouri rubbed circulation back into her hands where they had grown numb. It was good to be out of the restraint webbing that Thorn had put her in. He apologised for that, without very much in the way of conviction. She had to admit that she would never have confessed to the truth without such extreme coercion.