'Life envy.'
'Or something very like it.'
I thought about what Wendigo had told me, then said: 'What about the second imperative?'
'Trickier. Much trickier.' She looked at me hard, as if debating whether to broach whatever subject was on her mind. 'Spirey, what do you know about Solar War Three?'
The wasps had given up on Yarrow while we travelled. They had left her on a corniced plinth in the middle of the terrazzo, posed on her back, arms folded across her chest, tail and fluke draping asymmetrically over one side.
'She didn't necessarily fail, Spirey,' Wendigo said, taking my arm in her own unyielding grip. 'That's only Yarrow's body, after all.'
'The Queen managed to read her mind?'
There was no opportunity to answer. The chamber shook, more harshly than when Mouser had exploded. The vibration keeled us to the floor, Wendigo's metal arms cracking against the tessellated marble. As if turning in her sleep, Yarrow slipped from the plinth.
'Home,' Wendigo said, raising herself from the floor.
'Impossible. Can't have been more than two hours since Mouser was hit. There shouldn't be any response for another four!'
'They probably decided to attack us regardless of the outcome of their last attempt. Kinetics.'
'You sure there's no defence?'
'Only good luck.' The ground lashed at us again, but Wendigo stayed standing. The roar that followed the first impact was subsiding, fading into a constant but bearable complaint of tortured ice. 'The first probably only chipped us - maybe gouged a big crater, but I doubt that it ruptured any of the pressurised areas. Next time could be worse.'
And there would be a next time, no doubt about it. Kinetics were the only weapon capable of hitting us at such long range, and they did so by sheer force of numbers. Each kinetic was a speck of iron, accelerated to a hair's breadth below the speed of light. Relativity bequeathed the speck a disproportionate amount of kinetic energy - enough that only a few impacts would rip the splinter to shreds. Of course, only one in a thousand of the kinetics they fired at us would hit - but that didn't matter. They'd just fire ten thousand.
'Wendigo,' I said. 'Can we get to your ship?'
'No,' she said, after a moment's hesitation. 'We can reach it, but it isn't fixed yet.'
'Doesn't matter. We'll lift on auxiliaries. Once we're clear of the splinter we'll be safe.'
'No good, either. Hull's breached - it'll be at least an hour before even part of it can be pressurised.'
'And it'll take us an hour or so just to get there, won't it? So why are we waiting?'
'Sorry, Spirey, but--'
Her words were drowned by the arrival of the second kinetic. This one seemed to hit harder, the impact trailing away into aftergroans. The holographic frescos were all dark now. Then - ever so slowly - the ceiling ruptured, a huge mandible of ice probing into the chamber. We'd lost the false gravity; now all that remained was the splinter's feeble pull, dragging us obliquely towards one wall.
'But what?' I shouted in Wendigo's direction.
For a moment she had that absent look, which said she was more Queen than Wendigo. Then she nodded in reluctant acceptance. 'All right, Spirey. We play it your way. Not because I think our chances are great. Just that I'd rather be doing something.'
'Amen to that.'
It was uncomfortably dim now, much of the illumination having come from the endlessly cycling frescos. But it wasn't silent. Though the groan of the chamber's off-kilter spin was gone now, what remained was almost as bad: the agonised shearing of the ice that lay beyond us. Helped by wasps, we made it to the train. I carried Yarrow's corpse, but at the door Wendigo said: 'Leave her.'
'No way.'
'She's dead, Spirey. Everything of her that mattered, the Splinterqueen already saved. You have to accept that. It was enough that you brought her here, don't you understand? Carrying her now would only lessen your chances - and that would really have pissed her off.'
Some alien part of me allowed the wasps to take the corpse. Then we were inside, helmeted up and breathing thick.
As the train picked up speed, I glanced out through the window, intent on seeing the Queen one last time. It should have been too dark, but the chamber looked bright. For a moment I presumed the frescos had come to life again, but then something about the scene's unreal intensity told me the Queen was weaving this image in my head. She hovered above the debris-strewn terrazzo - except that this was more than the Queen I had seen before. This was - what?
How she saw herself?
Ten of her twelve wasp composites were now back together, arranged in constantly shifting formation. They now seemed more living than machine, with diaphanous sunwings, chitin-black bodies, fur-sheened limbs, and sensors and eyes that were faceted crystalline globes, sparkling in the chamber's false light. That wasn't all. Before, I'd sensed the Queen as something implied by her composites. Now I didn't need to imagine her. Like a ghost in which the composites hung, she loomed vast in the chamber, multi-winged and brooding--
And then we were gone.
We sped towards the surface for the next few minutes, waiting for the impact of the next kinetic. When it hit, the train's cushioned ride smothered the concussion. For a moment I thought we'd made it, then the machine began to decelerate slowly to a dead halt. Wendigo convened with the Queen, and told me the line was blocked. We disembarked into vacuum.
Ahead, the tunnel ended in a wall of jumbled ice.
After a few minutes we found a way through the obstruction, Wendigo wrenching aside boulders larger than either of us. 'We're only half a klick from the surface,' she said, as we emerged into the unblocked tunnel beyond. She pointed ahead, to what might have been a scotoma of absolute blackness against the milky darkness of the tunnel. 'After that, a klick overland to the wreck.' She paused. 'Realise we can't go home, Spirey. Now more than ever.'
'Not exactly spoiled for choice, are we?'
'No. It has to be the halo, of course. It's where the splinter's headed anyway; just means we'll get there ahead of schedule. There are other Splinterqueens out there, and at the very least they'll want to keep us alive. Possibly other humans as well - others who made the same discovery as us, and knew there was no going home.'
'Not to mention Royalists.'
'That troubles you, doesn't it?'
'I'll deal with it,' I said, pushing forwards.
The tunnel was nearly horizontal, and with the splinter's weak gravity it was easy to make the distance to the surface. Emerging, Fomalhaut glared down at us, a white-cored, bloodshot eye surrounded by the wrinkle-like dust lanes of the inner Swirl. Limned in red, wasp corpses marred the landscape.
'I don't see the ship.'
Wendigo pointed to a piece of blank caramel-coloured horizon. 'Curvature's too great. We won't see it until we're almost on top of it.'
'Hope you're right.'
'Trust me. I know this place like, well . . .' Wendigo regarded one of her limbs. 'Like the back of my hand.'
'Encourage me, why don't you?'
Three or four hundred metres later we crested a scallop-shaped rise of ice, and halted. We could see the ship now. It didn't look in much better shape than when Yarrow and I had scoped it from Mouser.
'I don't see any wasps.'
'Too dangerous for them to stay on the surface,' Wendigo said.
'That's cheering. I hope the remaining damage is cosmetic,' I said. 'Because if it isn't--'
Suddenly I wasn't talking to anyone.
Wendigo was gone. After a moment I saw her, lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the hillock. Her guts stretched away like a rusty comet-tail, halfway to the next promontory.
Quillin was fifty metres ahead, having risen from the concealment of a chondrite boulder.
When Wendigo had mentioned her, I'd put her out of my mind as any kind of threat. How could she pose any danger beyond the inside of a thickship, when she'd traded her legs for a tail and fluke, just like Yarrow? On dry land,
she'd be no more mobile than a seal pup. Well, that was how I'd figured things.
But I'd reckoned without Quillin's suit.
Unlike Yarrow's - unlike any siren suit I'd ever seen - it sprouted legs. Mechanised, they emerged from the hips, making no concessions to human anatomy. The legs were long enough to lift Quillin's tail completely free of the ice. My gaze tracked up her body, registering the crossbow that she held in a double-handed grip.
'I'm sorry,' Quillin's deep voice boomed in my skull. 'Check-in's closed.'
'Wendigo said you might be a problem.'
'Wise up. It was staged from the moment we reached the Royalist stronghold.' Still keeping the bow on me, she began to lurch across the ice. 'The ferals were actors, playing dumb. The wasps were programmed to feed us bullshit.'
'It isn't a Royalist trick, Quillin.'
'Shit. See I'm gonna have to kill you as well.'
The ground jarred, more violently than before. A nimbus of white light puffed above the horizon, evidence of an impact on the splinter's far side. Quillin stumbled, but her legs corrected the misstep before it tripped her forwards.
'I don't know if you're keeping up with current events,' I said, 'but that's our own side.'
'Maybe you didn't think hard enough. Why did wasps in the Swirl get smart before the trillions of wasps back in Sol System? Should have been the other way round.'
'Yeah?'
'Of course, Spirey. GE's wasps had a massive head start.' She shrugged, but the bow stayed rigidly pointed. 'Okay, war sped up wasp evolution here. But that shouldn't have made so much difference. That's where the story breaks down.'
'Not quite.'
'What?'
'Something Wendigo told me. About what she called the second imperative. I guess it wasn't something she found out until she went underground.'
'Yeah? Astonish me.'
Well, something astonished Quillin at that point - but I was only marginally less surprised by it myself. An explosion of ice, and a mass of swiftly moving metal erupting from the ground around her. The wasp corpses were partially dismembered, blasted and half-melted - but they still managed to drag Quillin to the ground. For a moment she thrashed, kicking up plumes of frost. Then the whole mass lay deathly still, and it was just me, the ice and a lot of metal and blood.
The Queen must have coaxed activity out of a few of the wasp corpses, ordering them to use their last reserves of power to take out Quillin.
Thanks, Queen.
But no cigar. Quillin hadn't necessarily meant to shoot me at that point, but - bless her - she had anyway. The bolt had transected me with the precision of one of the Queen's theorems, somewhere below my sternum. Gut-shot. The blood on the ice was my own.
I tried moving.
A couple of light-years away I saw my body undergo a frail little shiver. It didn't hurt, but there was nothing in the way of proprioceptive feedback to indicate I'd actually managed to twitch any part of my body.
Quillin was moving too. Wriggling, that is, since her suit's legs had been cleanly ripped away by the wasps. Other than that she didn't look seriously injured. Ten or so metres from me, she flopped around like a maggot and groped for her bow. What remained of it anyway.
Chalk one to the good guys.
By which time I was moving, executing a marginally quicker version of Quillin's slug crawl. I couldn't stand up - there are limits to what pilot physiology can cope with - but my legs gave me leverage she lacked.
'Give up, Spirey. You have a head start on me, and right now you're a little faster - but that ship's still a long way off.' Quillin took a moment to catch her breath. 'Think you can sustain that pace? Gonna need to, if you don't want me catching up.'
'Plan on rolling over me until I suffocate?'
'That's an option. If this doesn't kill you first.'
Enough of her remained in my field of view to see what she meant. Something sharp and bladelike had sprung from her wrist, a bayonet projecting half a metre ahead of her hand. It looked like a nasty little toy - but I did my best to push it out of mind and get on with the job of crawling towards the ship. It was no more than two hundred metres away now - what little of it protruded above the ice. The external airlock was already open, ready to clamp shut as soon as I wriggled inside--
'You never finished telling me, Spirey.'
'Telling you what?'
'About this . . . what did you call it? The second imperative?'
'Oh, that.' I halted and snatched breath. 'Before I go on, I want you to know I'm only telling you this to piss you off.'
'Whatever bakes your cake.'
'All right,' I said. 'Then I'll begin by saying you were right. Greater Earth's wasps should have made the jump to sentience long before those in the Swirl, simply because they'd had longer to evolve. And that's what happened.'
Quillin coughed, like gravel in a bucket. 'Pardon?'
'They beat us to it. About a century and a half ago. Across Sol System, within just a few hours, every single wasp woke up and announced its intelligence to the nearest human being it could find. Like babies reaching for the first thing they see.' I stopped, sucking in deep lungfuls. The wreck had to be closer now - but it hardly looked it.
Quillin, by contrast, looked awfully close now - and that blade awfully sharp.
'So the wasps woke,' I said, damned if she wasn't going to hear the whole story. 'And that got some people scared. So much, some of them got to attacking the wasps. Some of their shots went wide, because within a day the whole system was one big shooting match. Not just humans against wasps - but humans against humans.' Less than fifty metres now, across much smoother ground than we'd so far traversed. 'Things just escalated. Ten days after Solar War Three began, only a few ships and habitats were still transmitting. They didn't last long.'
'Crap,' Quillin said - but she sounded less cocksure than she had a few moments before. 'There was a war back then, but it never escalated into a full-blown Solar War.'
'No. It went the whole hog. From then on every signal we ever got from GE was concocted by wasps. They dared not break the news to us - at least not immediately. We've only been allowed to find out because we're never going home. Guilt, Wendigo called it. They couldn't let it happen again.'
'What about our wasps?'
'Isn't it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to sentience - presumably because they'd been shown the right moves by the others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can't exactly blame them, can you?'
There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on the last patch of ice before Wendigo's ship.
'I suppose you have an explanation for this too,' she said eventually, swiping her tail against the ground. 'C'mon, blow my mind.'
So I told her what I knew. 'They're bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner than you think too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps will breed in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it'll be billions of trillions. They'll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the Swirl will have become sentient. It'll be directing its own evolution.'
I spared Quillin the details - how the wasps would arrest the existing processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets - but such a system could never support life over billions of years. Instead, the wasps would exploit the system's innate chaos to tip it towards a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds - planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding leftover rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no place in the Splinterqueens' vision of future life.
But I guessed Quillin probably didn't care.
'Why are you hurrying, Spirey?' she asked between harsh grunts as she propelled herself forwards. 'The ship isn't going anywhere.'
The edge of the open airlock was a metre above the ice. My fingers probed over the ri
m, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting myself into the lock's lit interior seemed to require all the energy I'd already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body length into the lock.
Which is when Quillin reached me.
There wasn't much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle, just a form of cold I hadn't imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked the embedded blade to and fro, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out little feelers into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract the blade for another stab, but my suit armour was gripping it tight.