Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon.
Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend’s sanity, Clavain spoke. “When did it happen?” he asked. “When did this ‘thing’—whatever it is—arrive?”
“Probably in the last week,” Scorpio said. “We only found it a couple of days ago.”
There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline.
“And what exactly is it?”
“We can’t be absolutely certain. It’s a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it’s an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface.”
Clavain nodded, as if the news was of only minor interest. “And you’re certain it wasn’t left behind by Galiana?”
He said the woman’s name with ease, but Scorpio could only guess at the pain it caused him. Especially now, looking out to sea.
Scorpio had some inkling of what the ocean meant to Clavain: both loss and the cruellest kind of hope. In an unguarded moment, not long before his voluntary exile from island affairs, Clavain had said, “They’re all gone now. There’s nothing more the sea can do to me.”
“They’re still there,” Scorpio had replied. “They aren’t lost. If anything, they’re safer than they ever were.”
As if Clavain could not have seen that for himself.
“No,” Scorpio said, snapping his attention back to the present, “I don’t think Galiana left it.”
“I thought it might hold a message from her,” Clavain said. “But I’m wrong, aren’t I? There won’t be any messages. Not that way. Not from Galiana, not from Felka.”
“I’m sorry,” Scorpio said.
“There’s no need to be. It’s the way of things.”
What Scorpio knew of Clavain’s past was drawn as much from hearsay as from things the old man had told him directly. Memories had always been fickle, but in the present era they were as mutable as clay. There were aspects of his own past even Clavain could not now be sure of.
Yet there were some things that were certain. Clavain had once loved a woman named Galiana; their relationship had begun many centuries ago and had spanned many of those same centuries. It was clear that they had birthed—or created—a kind of daughter, Felka; that she had been both terribly damaged and terribly powerful; and that she had been loved and feared in equal measure.
Whenever Clavain spoke of those times, it was with a happiness tempered by the knowledge of what was to follow.
Galiana had been a scientist, fascinated by the augmentation of the human mind. But her curiosity had not stopped there. What she ultimately wanted was an intimate connection with reality, at its root level. Her neural experiments had only ever been a necessary part of this process. To Galiana, it had been natural that the next step should be physical exploration, pushing out into the cosmos. She wanted to go deeper, far beyond the ragged edge of mapped space, to see what was actually out there. So far the only indications of alien intelligence anyone had found had been ruins and fossils, but who was to say what might be found further into the galaxy? Human settlements at that time spanned a bubble two dozen light-years across, but Galiana intended to travel more than a hundred light-years before returning.
And she had. The Conjoiners had launched three ships, moving slightly slower than the speed of light, on an expedition into deep interstellar space. The expedition would take at least a century and a half; equally eager for new experience, Clavain and Felka had journeyed with her. All had progressed according to plan: Galiana and her allies visited many solar systems, and while they never found any unambiguous signs of active intelligence, they nonetheless catalogued many remarkable phenomena, as well as uncovering further ruins. Then came reports, already outdated, of a crisis back home: growing tensions between the Conjoiners and their moderate allies, the Demarchists. Clavain needed to return home to lend his tactical support to the remaining Conjoiners.
Galiana had considered it more important to continue with the expedition; their amicable separation in deep space left one of the ships returning home, carrying Clavain and Felka, while the two other craft continued to loop further into the plane of the galaxy.
They had intended to be reunited, but when Galiana’s ship finally returned to the Conjoiner Mother Nest, it did so on automatic pilot, damaged and dead. Somewhere out in space a parasitic entity had attacked both of the ships, destroying one. Immediately afterwards, black machines had clawed into the hull of Galiana’s ship, systematically anatomising her crew. One by one, they had all been killed, until only Galiana remained. The black machines had infiltrated her skull, squeezing into the interstices of her brain. Horribly, she was still alive, but utterly incapable of independent action. She had become the parasite’s living puppet.
With Clavain’s permission the Conjoiners had frozen her against the day when they might be able to remove the parasite safely. One day they might even have succeeded, but then a rift had opened in Conjoiner affairs: the beginning of the same crisis that had eventually brought Clavain to the Resurgam system and, latterly, to Ararat. In the conflict Galiana’s frozen body had been destroyed.
Clavain’s grief had been a vast, soul-sucking thing. It would have killed him, Scorpio thought, had not his people been in such desperate need of leadership. Saving the colony on Resurgam had given him something to focus on besides the loss he had suffered. It had kept him somewhere this side of sanity.
And, later, there had been a kind of consolation.
Galiana had not led them to Ararat, yet it turned out that Ararat was one of the worlds she had visited after her separation from Clavain and Felka. The planet had attracted her because of the alien organisms filling its ocean. It was a Juggler world, and that was vitally important, for few things that visited Juggler worlds were ever truly forgotten.
Pattern Jugglers had been encountered on many worlds that conformed to the same aquatic template as Ararat. After years of study, there was still no agreement as to whether or not the aliens were intelligent in their own right. But all the same it was clear that they prized intelligence themselves, preserving it with the loving devotion of curators.
Now and then, when a person swam in the seas of a Juggler planet, the microscopic organisms entered the swimmer’s nervous system. It was a kinder process than the neural invasion that had taken place aboard Galiana’s ship. The Juggler organisms only wanted to record, and when they had unravelled the swimmer’s neural patterns they would retreat. The mind of the swimmer would have been captured by the sea, but the swimmer was almost always free to return to land. Usually, they felt no change at all. Rarely, they would turn out to have been given a subtle gift, a tweak to their neurological architecture that permitted superhuman cognition or insight. Mostly it lasted for only a few hours, but very infrequently it appeared permanent.
There was no way to tell if Galiana had gained any gifts after she had swum in the ocean of this world, but her mind had certainly been captured. It was there now, frozen beneath the waves, waiting to be imprinted on the consciousness of another swimmer.
Clavain had guessed this, but he had not been the first to attempt communion with Galiana. That honour had fallen to Felka. For twenty years she had swum, immersed in the memories and glacial consciousness of her mother. In all that time Clavain had held back from swimming himself, fearing perhaps that when he encountered the imprint of Galiana he would find it in some sense wrong, untrue to his memory of what she had been. His doubts had ebbed over the years, but he had still never made the final commitment of swimming. Nonetheless, Felka—who had always craved the complexity of experience that the ocean offered—had swum regularly, and she had reported back her experiences to Clavain. Through his daughter he had again achieved some connection with Galiana, and for the time being, until he summoned the courage to swim himself, that had been enough.
But two years ago the sea had taken Felka, and she had not returned.
Scorpio thought about that now, choosing his next words with great care. “Nevil, I understand this is difficult for you, but you must also understand that this thing, whatever it is, could be a very serious matter for the settlement.”
“I get that, Scorp.”
“But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?”
“I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters.”
“Maybe we don’t. Me, I don’t really care about the bigger picture. It’s never been my strong point.”
“Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have.”
“So you think there are millions—billions—of people out there who are going to die? People we’ve never met, people we’ve never come within a light-year of in our lives?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well, sorry, but that isn’t the way my head works. I just can’t process that kind of threat. I don’t do mass extinction. I’m a lot more locally focused than that. And right now I have a local problem.”
“You think so?”
“I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That’s a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping.”
“But you didn’t actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?” Clavain did not wait for Scorpio’s answer. “And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a reentry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?”
“I don’t know,” Scorpio said. He couldn’t tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. “But whatever it is must have come down recently. It’s not like any of die other artefacts we’ve pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren’t so thick. This thing didn’t look as though it had been under for more than a few days.”
Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease.
They were returning to the tent.
“I watch the skies a lot, Scorp,” Clavain said. “At night, when there aren’t any clouds. Lately I’ve been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain’s just been pulled back for an instant. I’m guessing you think that makes me mad, don’t you?”
Scorpio didn’t know what he thought. “Alone out here, anyone would see things,” he said.
“But it wasn’t cloudy last night,” Clavain said, “or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn’t see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us.”
“We haven’t seen anything either.”
“How about radio transmissions? Laser squirts?”
“Not a peep. And you’re right: it doesn’t make very much sense. But like it or not, there’s still a capsule, and it isn’t going away. I want you to come and see it for yourself.”
Clavain shoved hair from his eyes. The lines and wrinkles in his face had become shadowed crevasses and gorges, like the contours of an improbably weathered landscape. Scorpio thought that he had aged ten or twenty years in the six months he had been on this island.
“You said something about there being someone inside it.”
While they had been talking, the cloud cover had begun to break up in swathes. The sky beyond had the pale, crazed blue of a jackdaw’s eye.
“It’s still a secret,” Scorpio said. “Only a few of us know that the thing’s been found at all. That’s why I came here by boat. A shuttle would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have been low-key. If people find out we’ve brought you back they’ll think there’s a crisis coming. Besides which, it isn’t supposed to be this easy to bring you back. They still think you’re somewhere halfway around the world.”
“You insisted on that lie?”
“What do you think would have been more reassuring? To let the people think you’d gone on an expedition—a potentially hazardous one, admittedly—or to tell them you’d gone away to sit on an island and toy with the idea of committing suicide?”
“They’ve been through worse. They could have taken it.”
“It’s what they’ve been through that made me think they could do without the truth,” Scorpio said.
“Anyway, it isn’t suicide.” He stopped and looked back out to sea. “I know she’s there, with her mother. I can feel it, Scorpio. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know she’s still here. I read about this sort of thing happening on other Juggler worlds, you know. Now and then they take swimmers, dismantle their bodies completely and incorporate them into the organic matrix of the sea. No one knows why. But swimmers who enter the oceans afterwards say that sometimes they feel the presence of the ones who vanished. It’s a much stronger impression than the usual stored memories and personalities. They say they experience something close to dialogue.”
Scorpio held back a sigh. He had listened to exactly the same speech before he had taken Clavain out to this island six months ago. Clearly the period of isolation had done nothing to lessen Clavain’s conviction that Felka had not simply drowned.
“So hop in and find out for yourself,” he said.
“I would, but I’m scared.”
“That the ocean might take you as well?”
“No.” Clavain turned to face Scorpio. He looked less surprised than affronted. “No, of course not. That doesn’t scare me at all. What does is the idea that it might leave me behind.”
Rashmika Els had spent much of her childhood being told not to look quite so serious. That was what they would have said if they could have seen her now: perched on her bed in the half-light, selecting the very few personal effects she could afford to carry on her mission. And she would have given them precisely the same look of affront she always mustered on those occasions. Except this time she would have known with a deeper conviction than usual that she was right and they were wrong. Because even though she was still only seventeen, she knew that she had every right to feel this serious, this frightened.
She had filled a small bag with three or four days’ worth of clothes, even though she expected her journey to take a lot longer than that. She had added a bundle of toiletries, carefully removed from the family bathroom without her parents noticing, and some dried-up biscuits and a small wedge of goat’s cheese, just in case there was nothing to eat (or, perhaps, nothing she would actually wish to eat) aboard Crozet’s icejammer. She had packed a bottle of purified water because she had heard that the water nearer the Way sometimes contained things that made you ill. The bottle would not last her very long, but it at least made her feel as if she was thinking ahead. And then there was a small plastic-wrapped bundle containing three tiny scuttler relics that she had stolen from the digs.
After all that, there was not much space left in the bag for anything else. It was already heavier than she had expected. She looked at the sorry little collection of items still spread on the bed before her, knowing that she only had room for one of them. What should she take?
There was a map of Hela, peeled from her bedroom wall, with the sinuous, equator-hugging trail of the Way marked in faded red ink. It wasn’t very accurate, but she had no better map in her compad. Did it matter, though? She had no means of reaching the Way without relying on other people to get her there, and if they didn’t know the direction, her map was unlikely to make very much difference.
She pushed the map aside.
There was a thick blue book, its edges protected with gold metal. The book contained her handwritten notes on the scuttlers, kept assiduously over the last eight years. She had started the book at the age of nine, when—in a perfect fit of precocity—she had first decided that she wanted to be a scuttler scholar. They had laughed at her, of course—in a kindly, indulgent way, naturally—but that had only made her more determined to continue with it.
Rashmika knew she did not have time to waste, but she could not stop herself from flicking through the book, the rough whisper of page against page harsh in the silence. In the rare moments when she saw it afresh, as if through someone else’s eyes, the book struck her as a thing of beauty. At the beginning, her handwriting was large and neat and childish. She used inks of many colours and underlined things with scrupulous care. Some of the inks had faded or blotted, and there were smears and stains where she had marked the paper, but that sense of damaged antiquity only added to the medieval allure of the artefact. She had made drawings, copying them from other sources. The first few were crude and childlike, but within a few pages her figures had the precision and confidence of Victorian naturalists’ sketches. They were painstakingly crosshatched and annotated, with the text crawling around them. There were drawings of scuttler artefacts, of course, with notes on function and origin, but there were also many pictures of the scuttlers themselves, their anatomies and postures reconstructed from the fossil evidence.
She flicked on through the book, through years of her life. The text grew smaller, more difficult to read. The coloured inks were used increasingly sparingly until, in the last few chapters, the writing and figures were worked in almost unrelieved black. The same neatness was there, the same methodical care applied to both text and figurework, but now it appeared to be the work of a scholar rather than an enthusiastic, gifted child. The notes and drawings were no longer recycled from other sources, but were now part of an argument she herself was advancing, independent of external thinking. The difference between the start and the end of the written parts of the book was shockingly obvious to Rashmika, a reminder of the distance she had travelled. There had been many times when she had been so embarrassed by her earlier efforts that she had wanted to discard the book and start another. But paper was expensive on Hela, and the book had been a gift from Harbin.
She fingered the unmarked pages. Her argument was not yet completed, but she could already see the trajectory it would take. She could almost see the words and figures on the pages, spectrally faint but needing only time and concentration to bring them into sharp focus. On a journey as long as the one she planned to take, there would surely be many opportunities to work on her book.
But she couldn’t take it. The book meant too much to her, and she could not bear the thought of losing it or having it stolen. At least if she left it here it would be safe until her return. She could still take notes while she was away, after all, refining her argument, ensuring that the edifice came together with no obvious flaws or weaknesses. The book would be all the stronger for it.
Rashmika clasped it shut, pushed it aside.
That left two things. One was her compad, the other a scuffed and dirty toy. The compad did not even belong to her, really; it was the family’s, and she only had it on extended loan while no one else needed it. But as no one had asked for it for months, it was unlikely to be missed during her absence. In its memory were many items relevant to her study of the scuttlers, sourced from other electronic archives. There were images and movies she had made herself, down in the digs. There were spoken testimonies from miners who had found things that did not quite accord with the standard theory of the scuttler extinction, but whose reports had been suppressed by the clerical authorities. There were texts from older scholars. There were maps and linguistics resources, and much that would guide her when she reached the Way.
She picked up the toy. It was a soft, pink thing, ragged and faintly pungent. She had had it since she was eight or nine, had picked it herself from the stall of an itinerant toymaker. She supposed it must have been bright and clean then, but she had no memory of the toy ever being anything other than well loved, grubby with affection. Looking at it now with the rational detachment of a seventeen-year-old, she had no idea what kind of creature the toy had ever been meant to represent. All she knew was that from the moment she saw it on the stall she had decided it was a pig. It didn’t matter that no one on Hela had ever seen a living pig.
“You can’t come with me either,” she whispered.
She picked up the toy and placed it atop the book, squeezing it down until it sat like a sentry. It wasn’t that she did not want it to come with her. She knew it was just a toy, but she also knew that there would be days ahead when she would feel terribly homesick, anxious for any connection to the safe environment of the village. But the compad was more useful, and this was not a time for sentiment. She pushed the dark slab into the bag, drew tight the bag’s vacuum seal and quietly left her room.
Rashmika had been fourteen when the caravans had last come within range of her village. She had been studying then and had not been allowed to go out to see the meeting. The time before that, she had been nine: she had seen the caravans then, but only briefly and only from a distance. What she now remembered of that spectacle was inevitably coloured by what had happened to her brother. She had replayed those events so many times that it was quite impossible to separate reliable memory from imagined detail.
Eight years ago, she thought: a tenth of a human life, by the grim new reckoning. A tenth of a life was not to be underestimated, even if eight years would once have been a twentieth or a thirtieth of what one could expect. But at the same time it felt vastly more than that. It was half of her own life, after all. The wait until she could next see the caravans had felt epochal. She really had been a little girl the last time she had seen them: a little girl from the Vigrid badlands with a reputation, however strange, for always telling the truth.
But now her chance had come again. It was near the hundredth day of the hundred and twenty-second circumnavigation that one of the caravans had taken an unexpected detour east of Hauk Crossing. The procession had veered north into the Gaudi Flats before linking up with a second caravan that happened to be heading south towards Glum Junction. This did not happen very often: it was the first time in nearly three revolutions that the caravans had come within a day’s travel of the villages on the southern slopes of the Yigrid badlands. There was, naturally, a great deal of excitement. There were parties and feasts, jubilation committees and invitations to secret drinking dens. There were romances and affairs, dangerous flirtations and secret liaisons. Nine months from now there would arrive a clutch of wailing new caravan babies.
Compared with the general austerity of life on Hela and the particular hardships of the badlands, it was a period of measured, tentative hope. It was one of those rare times when—albeit within tightly prescribed parameters—personal circumstances could change. The more sober-minded villagers did not allow themselves to show any visible signs of excitement, but privately they could not resist wondering if this was their turn for a change of fortune. They made elaborate excuses to allow themselves to travel out to the rendezvous point: excuses that had nothing to do with personal gain, but everything to do with the communal prosperity of the villages. And so, over a period of nearly three weeks, the villages sent out little caravans of their own, crossing the treacherous scabbed ground to rendezvous with the larger processions.
Rashmika had planned to leave her home at dawn, while her parents were still sleeping. She had not lied to them about her departure, but only because it had never been necessary. What the adults and the other villagers did not understand was that she was as capable of lying as any of them. More than that, she could lie with great conviction. The only reason why she had spent most of her childhood not lying was because until very recently she had failed to see the point in it.
Quietly she stole through the buried warrens of her home, treading with loping strides between shadowed corridors and bright patches beneath the overhead skylights. The homes in her village were almost all sunk below ground level, irregularly shaped caverns linked by meandering tunnels lined with yellowing plaster. Rashmika found the idea of living above ground faintly unsettling, but she supposed one could get used to it given time; just as one could eventually get used to life in the mobile caravans, or even the cathedrals that they followed. It was not as if life below ground was without its hazards, after all. Indirectly, the network of tunnels in the village was connected to the much deeper network of the digs. There were supposed to be pressure doors and safety systems to protect the village if one of the dig caverns collapsed, or if the miners penetrated a high-pressure bubble, but these systems did not always work as well as intended. There had been no serious dig accidents during Rashmika’s life, only near misses, but everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before another catastrophe of the kind her parents still talked about occurred. Only the week before, there had been an explosion on the surface: no one had been hurt, and there was even talk that the demolition charges had been let off deliberately, but it was still a reminder that her world was only ever one accident away from disaster.
It was, she supposed, the price that the villages paid for their economic independence from the cathedrals. Most of the settlements on Hela lay near the Permanent Way, not hundreds of kilometres to the north or south of it. With very few exceptions the settlements near the Way owed their existence to the cathedrals and their governing bodies, the churches, and by and large they subscribed to one or other of the major branches of the Quaicheist faith. That was not to say that there was no one of faith in the badlands, but the villages were run by secular committees and made their living from the digs rather than the elaborate arrangement of tithes and indulgences which bound the cathedrals and the communities of the Way. As a consequence they were free of many of the religious restrictions that applied elsewhere on Hela. They made their own laws, had less restrictive marriage practices and turned a blind eye to certain perversions that were outlawed along the Way. Visits from the Clocktower were rare, and whenever the churches did send their envoys they were viewed with suspi-cion. Girls like Rashmika were allowed to study the technical literature of the digs rather than Quaicheist scripture. It was not unthinkable that a woman should find work for herself.
But by the same token, the villages of the Vigrid badlands were beyond the umbrella of protection that the cathedrals offered. The settlements along the Way were guarded by a loose amalgamation of cathedral militia, and in times of crisis they turned to the cathedrals for help. The cathedrals held medicine far in advance of anything in the badlands, and Rashmika had seen friends and relatives die because her village had no access to that care. The cost to be paid for that care, of course, was that one submitted to the machinations of the Office of Blood-work. And once you had Quaicheist blood in your veins you couldn’t be sure of anything ever again.
Yet she accepted the arrangement with the combination of pride and stubbornness common to all the badlanders. It was true that they endured hardships unknown along the Way. It was true that, by and large, few of them were fervent believers; even those of faith were usually troubled by doubt. Typically it was doubt that had driven them to the digs in the first place, to search for answers to questions that bothered them. And yet for all this, the villagers would not have had it any other way. They lived and loved as they pleased, and viewed the more pious communities of the Way with a lofty sense of moral superiority.
Rashmika reached the final chamber of her home, the heavy bag knocking against the small of her back. The house was quiet, but if she kept very still and listened intently she was certain that she could hear the nearly subliminal rumble of the distant excavations, reports of drilling and digging and earth-moving reaching her ears through snaking kilometres of tunnel. Now and then there was a percussive thud or a fusillade of hammer blows. The sounds were so familiar to Rashmika that they never disturbed her sleep; indeed, she would have snapped awake instantly had the mining ceased. But now she wished for a louder series of noises to conceal the sounds she would inevitably make as she left her home.
The final chamber contained two doors. One led horizontally into the wider tunnel network, accessing a thoroughfare that connected with many other homes and community cham-bers. The other door was set in the ceiling, ringed by handrails. At that moment the door was hinged open into the dark space above it. Rashmika opened a locker set into the smooth curve of the wall and removed her surface suit, taking care not to clatter the helmet and backpack against the three other suits hanging on the same rotating rack. She had to put the suit on three times a year during practice drills, so it was easy enough for her to work the latches and seals. Even then, it still took ten minutes, during which time she stopped and held her breath whenever she heard a sound somewhere in the house, whether it was the air-circulator clicking on and off or the low groan as a tunnel resettled.
Finally she had the suit on and ready, with the read-outs on her cuff all safely in the green. The tank wasn’t completely full of air—there must have been a slow leak in the suit as the tanks were usually kept fully topped-up—but there was more than enough in there for her needs.
But when she closed the helmet visor all she could hear was her own breathing; she had no idea how much sound she was making, or whether anyone else was stirring in the house. And the noisiest part of her escape was still to come. She would just have to be as careful and quick as possible, so that even if her parents did wake she could get to her meeting point before they caught up with her.
The suit doubled her weight, but even then she did not find it difficult to haul herself up into the dark space above the ceiling door. She had reached the surface access airlock. Every home had one, but they varied in size. Rashmika’s was large enough for two adults at a time. Even so, she had to sit in a stooped position while she lowered the inner door back down and turned the manual wheel to lock it tight.
In a sense, she was safe for a moment. Once she started the depressurisation cycle, there was no way her mother and father would be able to get into the chamber. It took two minutes for the lock to finish its business. By the time the lower door could again be reopened, she would be halfway across the village. Once she got away from the exit point, her footprints would quickly be lost amongst the confusion of marks left by other villagers as they went about their errands.
Rashmika checked her suit again, satisfying herself that the readings were still in the green. Only then did she initiate the depressurisation sequence. She heard nothing, but as the air was sucked from the chamber the suit’s fabric swelled out between the concertina joints and it took a little more effort to move her limbs. A separate read-out around the faceplate of her helmet informed her that she was now in vacuum.
No one had hammered on the bottom of the door. Rashmika had been a little worried that she might trip an alarm by using the lock. She was not aware that such a thing existed, but her parents might have chosen not to tell her, just in case she ever intended making this kind of escape. Her fears appeared to have been groundless, however: there was no alarm, no fail-safe, no hidden code that needed to be used before the door worked. She had run through this so many times in her imagination that it was impossible not to feel a small twinge of déjà vu.
When the chamber was fully evacuated, a relay allowed the outer door to be opened. Rashmika pushed hard, but at first nothing happened. Then the door budged—only by an inch, but it was enough to let in a sheet of blindingly bright daylight that scythed against her faceplate. She pushed harder and the door moved higher, hinging back as it did so. Rashmika pushed through until she was sitting on the surface. She saw now that the door had been covered in an inch of recent frost. It snowed on Hela, especially when the Kelda or Ragnarok gey-sers were active.
Although the house clock had said it was dawn, this meant very little on the surface. The villagers still lived by a twenty-six-hour clock (many of them were interstellar refugees from Yellowstone) despite the fact that Hela was a different world entirely, with its own complex cycles. A day en Hela was actually about forty hours long, which was the time it took Hela to complete one orbit around its mother world, the gas giant Hal-dora. Since the moon’s inclination to the plane of its orbit was essentially zero, all points on the surface experienced about twenty hours of darkness during each orbit. The Vigrid badlands were on the dayside now, and would remain so for another seven hours. There was another kind of night on Hela, for once in its orbit around Haldora the moon swung into the gas giant’s shadow. But that short night was only two hours long, brief enough to be of little consequence to the villagers. At any given time the moon was far more likely to be out of Haldora’s shadow than within it.
After a few seconds, Rashmika’s visor had compensated for the glare and she was able to get her bearings. She extracted her legs from the hole and carefully closed the surface door, latching it shut so that it would begin pressurising the lower chamber. Perhaps her parents were waiting below, but even if that was the case they could not reach the surface for another two minutes, even if they were already wearing suits. It would take them even longer to navigate the community tunnels to reach the next-nearest surface exit.
Rashmika stood up and began walking briskly but with what she hoped was no apparent sense of haste or panic. There was some more good fortune: she had expected to have to cross several dozen metres of unmarked ice, so that her trail would at first be easy to follow. But someone else had come this way recently, and their prints meandered away in a different direction from the one she intended to take. Anyone following her now would have no idea which set of prints to follow. They looked like her mother’s, for the shoe-prints were too small to have belonged to her father. What kind of business had her mother been on? It bothered Rashmika for a moment, for she did not recall anyone mentioning any recent trips to the surface.
Never mind: there was bound to be an innocent explanation. She had enough to think about without adding to her worries.
Rashmika followed a circuitous path between the black upright slabs of radiator panels, the squatting orange mounds of generators or navigation transponders and the soft snow-covered lines of parked icejammers. She had been right about the footprints, for when she looked back it was impossible to separate her own from the muddle of those that had been left before.
She rounded a huddle of radiator fins and there it was, looking much like the other parked icejammers except that the snow had melted from the flanged radiator above the engine cowlings. It was too bright to tell if there were lights on inside the machine. There were fan-shaped arcs of transparency in the windscreen where the mechanical wiper blades had flicked aside the snow. Rashmika thought she saw figures moving behind the glass.
Rashmika walked around the low, splayed-legged jammer. The black of its boat-shaped hull was relieved only by a glowing snake motif coiling along the side. The single front leg ended in a broad, upturned ski blade, with smaller skis tipping the two rear legs. Rashmika wondered if it was the right machine. She would look rather silly if she made a mistake now. She felt certain that there was no one in the village who would not recognise her, even though she had a suit on.
But Crozet had been very specific in his instructions. With some relief she saw a boarding ramp was already waiting for her, lowered down into the snow. She walked up the flexing metal slope and knocked politely on the jammer’s outer door. There was an agonising moment and then the door slid aside, revealing another airlock. She squeezed into it—there was only room for one person.
A man’s voice—she recognised it immediately as Crozet’s—came through on her helmet channel. “Yes?”
“It’s me.”
“Who is ‘me’?”
“Rashmika,” she said. “Rashmika Els. I think we had an arrangement.”
There was a pause—an agonising pause during which she began to think that, yes, she had made an error—when the man said, “It’s not too late to change your mind.”
“I think it is.”
“You could go home now.”
“My parents won’t be very pleased that I came this far.”
“No,” the man said, “I doubt that they’ll be thrilled. But I know your folks. I doubt that they’d punish you too severely.”
He was right, but she did not want to be reminded of that now. She had spent weeks psyching herself up for this, and the last thing she needed was a rational argument for backing out at the final minute.
Rashmika knocked on the inner door again, knuckling it hard with her gauntlet. “Are you going to let me in or not?”
“I just wanted to make sure you’re certain. Once we leave the village, we won’t turn back until we meet the caravan. That’s not open to negotiation. Step inside, you’re committed to a three-day trip. Six if you decide to come back with us. No amount of pissing and moaning is going to make me turn around.“
“I’ve waited eight years,” she said. “Three more days won’t kill me.”
He laughed, or sniggered—she wasn’t sure which. “You know, I almost believe you.”
“You should do,” Rashmika told him. “I’m the girl that never lies, remember?”
The outer door closed itself, cramming her even further into the tight cavity of the lock. Air began to skirl in through grilles. At the same time she felt motion. It was soft and rhythmic, like being rocked in a cradle. The jammer was on the move, propelling itself with alternating movements of its rear skis.
She supposed that her escape had begun the moment she crawled out of bed, but only now did it feel as if she was actually on her way.
When the inner door allowed Rashmika into the body of the jammer, she snapped off her helmet and hung it dutifully next to the three that were already there. The jammer had looked reasonably large from the outside, but she had forgotten how much of the interior volume would be occupied by its own engines, generators, fuel tanks, life-support equipment and cargo racks. Inside it was cramped and noisy, and the air made her want to put the helmet back on again. She imagined she could get used to it, but she wondered if three days would be anywhere near enough time.
The jammer lurched and yawed. Through one of the windows she saw the blazing white landscape tilt and tilt again. Rashmika reached for a handhold and was just beginning to make her way to the front when a figure stepped into view.
It was Crozet’s son, Culver. He wore grubby ochre overalls, tools cramming the many pockets. He was a year or two younger than Rashmika, blond-haired and with a permanent look of malnourishment. He viewed Rashmika with lecherous intent.
“Decided to stay aboard after all, did you? That’s good. We can get to know each other a bit better now, can’t we?”
“It’s only for three days, Culver. Don’t get any ideas.”
“I’ll help you get that suit off, then we can go up front. Dad’s busy steering us out of the village now. We’re having to take a detour because of the crater. That’s why it’s a bit bumpy.”
“I’ll manage my suit on my own, thank you.” Rashmika nodded encouragingly towards the icejammer’s cabin. “Why don’t you go back and see if your dad needs any help?”
“He doesn’t need any help. Mother’s there as well.”
Rashmika beamed approvingly. “Well, I expect you’re glad that she’s here to keep you two men out of trouble. Right, Culver?”
“She doesn’t mind what we get up to, so long as we stay in the black.” The machine lurched again, knocking Rashmika against the metal wall. “Fact of the matter is, she mostly turns a blind eye.”
“So I’ve heard. Well, I really need to get this suit off… would you mind telling me where I’m sleeping?”
Culver showed her a tiny compartment tucked away between two throbbing generators. There was a grubby mattress, a pillow and a blanket made of slippery quilted silver material. A curtain could be tugged across for privacy.
“I hope you weren’t expecting luxury,” Culver said.
“I was expecting the worst.”
Culver lingered. “You sure you don’t want any help getting that suit off?”
“I’ll manage, thanks.”
“Got something to wear afterwards, have you?”
“What I’m wearing under the suit, and what I brought with me.” Rashmika patted the bag which was now tucked beneath her life-support pack. Through the fabric she could feel the hard edge of her compad. “You didn’t seriously think I’d forget to bring any clothes with me, did you?”
“No,” Culver said, sullenly.
“Good. Now why don’t you run along and tell your parents that I’m safe and sound? And please let them know that the sooner we clear the village, the happier I’ll be.”
“We’re moving as fast as we can go,” Culver said.
“Actually,” Rashmika said, “that’s just what’s worrying me.”
“In a bit of a hurry, are you?”
“I’d like to reach the cathedrals as soon as I can, yes.”
Culver eyed her. “Got religion, have you?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “More like some family business I have to take care of.”
Quaiche awoke, his body insinuated into a dark form-fitting cavity.
There was a moment of blissful disconnection while he waited for his memories to return, a moment in which he had no cares, no anxieties. Then all the memories barged into his head at once, announcing themselves like rowdy gate-crashers before shuffling themselves into something resembling chronological order.
He remembered being woken, to be greeted with the unwelcome news that he had been granted an audience with the queen. He remembered her dodecahedral chamber, furnished with instruments of torture, its morbid gloom punctuated by the flashes of electrocuted vermin. He remembered the skull with the television eyes. He remembered the queen toying with him the way cats toyed with sparrows. Of all his errors, imagining that she had it in her to forgive him had been the most grievous, the least forgivable.
Quaiche screamed now, grasping precisely what had happened to him and where he was. His screams were muffled and soft, uncomfortably childlike. He was ashamed to hear such sounds coming out of his mouth. He could move no part of himself, but he was not exactly paralysed—rather there was no room to move any part of his body by more than a fraction of a centimetre.
The confinement felt oddly familiar.
Gradually Quaiche’s screams became wheezes, and then merely very hard rasping breaths. This continued for several minutes, and then Quaiche started humming, reiterating six or seven notes with the studied air of a madman or a monk. He must already be under the ice, he decided. There had been no entombment ceremony, no final chastising meeting with Jasmina. They had simply welded him into the suit and buried him within the shield of ice that Gnostic Ascension pushed ahead of itself. He could not guess how much time had passed, whether it was hours or larger fractions of a day. He dared not believe it was any longer than that.
As the horror hit him, so did something else: a nagging feeling that some detail was amiss. Perhaps it was the sense of familiarity he felt in the confined space, or perhaps it was the utter absence of anything to look at.
A voice said, “Attention, Quaiche. Attention, Quaiche. Deceleration phase is complete. Awaiting orders for system insertion.”
It was the calm, avuncular voice of the Dominatrix’s, cybernetic subpersona.
He realised, joltingly, that he was not in the iron suit at all, but rather inside the slowdown coffin of the Dominatrix, packed into a form-fitting matrix designed to shield him during the high-gee deceleration phase. Quaiche stopped humming, simultaneously affronted and disorientated. He was relieved, no doubt about that. But the transition from the prospect of years of torment to the relatively benign environment of the Dominatrix had been so abrupt that he had not had time to de-pressurise emotionally. All he could do was gasp in shock and wonderment.
He felt a vague need to crawl back into the nightmare and emerge from it mote gradually.
“Attention, Quaiche. Awaiting orders for system insertion.”
“Wait,” he said. His throat was raw, his voice gummy. He must have been in the slowdown coffin for quite some time. “Wait. Get me out of here. I’m…”
“Is everything satisfactory, Quaiche?”
“I’m a bit confused.”
“In what way, Quaiche? Do you need medical attention?”
“No, I’m…” He paused and squirmed. “Just get me out of here. I’ll be all right in a moment.”
“Very well, Quaiche.”
The restraints budged apart. Light rammed in through widening cracks in the coffin’s walls. The familiar onboard smell of the Dominatrix hit his olfactory system. The ship was nearly silent, save for the occasional tick of a cooling manifold. It was always like that after slowdown, when they were in coast phase.
Quaiche stretched, his body creaking like an old wooden chair. He felt bad, but not nearly as bad as he had felt after his last hasty revival from reefersleep on board the Gnostic Ascension. In the slowdown coffin he had been drugged into a state of unconsciousness, but most bodily processes had continued normally. He only spent a few weeks in the coffin during each system survey, and the medical risks associated with being frozen outweighed the benefits to the queen of arresting his ageing.
He looked around, still not quite daring to believe he had been spared the nightmare of the scrimshaw suit. He considered the possibility that he might be hallucinating, that he had perhaps gone mad after spending several months under the ice. But the ship had a hyper-reality about it that did not feel like any kind of hallucination. He had no recollection of ever dreaming in slowdown before—at least, not the kind of dreams that resulted in him waking screaming. But the more time that passed, and the more the ship’s reality began to solidify around him, the more that seemed to be the most likely explanation.
He had dreamed every moment of it.
“Dear God,” Quaiche said. With that came a jolt of pain, the indoctrinal virus’s usual punishment for blasphemy, but the feeling of it was so joyously real, so unlike the horror of being entombed, that he said it again. “Dear God, I’d never have believed I had that in me.”
“Had what in you, Quaiche?” Sometimes the ship felt obliged to engage in conversation, as if secretly bored.
“Never mind,” he said, distracted by something. Normally when he emerged from the coffin he had plenty of room to twist around and align himself with the long, thin axis of the little ship’s main companionway. But now something chafed his elbow, something that was not usually there. He turned to look at it, half-knowing as he did so exactly what it would be.
Corroded and scorched metal skin the colour of pewter. A festering surface of manic detail. The vague half-formed shape of a person with a dark grilled slot where the eyes would have been.
“Bitch,” he said.
“I am to inform you that the presence of the scrimshaw suit is a spur to success in your current mission,” the ship said.
“You were actually programmed to say that?”
“Yes.”
Quaiche observed that the suit was plumbed into the life-support matrix of the ship. Thick lines ran from the wall sockets to their counterparts in the skin of the suit. He reached out again and touched the surface, running his fingers from one rough welded patch to another, tracing the sinuous back of a snake. The metal was mildly warm to the touch, quivering with a vague sense of subcutaneous activity.
“Be careful,” the ship said.
“Why—is there something alive inside that thing?” Quaiche said. Then a sickening realisation dawned. “Dear God. Someone’s inside it. Who?”
“I am to inform you that the suit contains Morwenna.”
Of course. Of course. It made delicious sense.
“You said I should be careful. Why?”
“I am to inform you that the suit is rigged to euthanise its occupant should any attempt be made to tamper with the cladding, seams or life-support couplings. I am to inform you that only Surgeon-General Grelier has the means to remove the suit without euthanising the occupant.”
Quaiche pulled away from the suit. “You mean I can’t even touch it?”
“Touching it would not be your wisest course of action, given the circumstances.”
He almost laughed. Jasmina and Grelier had excelled themselves. First the audience with the queen to make him think that she had at last run out of patience with him. Then the charade of being shown the suit and made to think that punishment was finally upon him. Made to believe that he was about to be buried in ice, forced into consciousness for what might be the better part of a decade. And then this: the final, mocking reprieve. His last chance to redeem himself. And make no bones about it: this would be his last chance. That was clear to him now. Jasmina had shown him exactly what would happen if he failed her one more time. Idle threats were not in Jasmina’s repertoire.
But her cleverness ran deeper than that, for with Morwenna imprisoned in the suit he had no hope of doing what had sometimes occurred to him, which was to hide in a particular system until the Gnostic Ascension had passed out of range. No—he had no practical choice but to return to the queen. And then hope for two things: firstly, that he would not have disappointed her; and secondly, that she would free Morwenna from the suit.
A thought occurred to him. “Is she awake?”
“She is now approaching consciousness,” the ship replied.
With her Ultra physiology, Morwenna would have been much better equipped to tolerate slowdown than Quaiche, but it still seemed likely that the scrimshaw suit had been modified to protect her in some fashion.
“Can we communicate?”
“You can speak to her when you wish. I will handle ship-to-suit protocols.”
“All right, put me through now.” He waited a second, then said, “Morwenna?”
“Horris.” Her voice was stupidly weak and distant. He had trouble believing she was only separated from him by mere centimetres of metal: it might as well have been fifty light-years of lead. “Horris, where am I? What’s happened?”
Nothing in his experience gave him any clue about how you broke news like this to someone. How did you gently wend the topic of a conversation around to being imprisoned alive in welded metal suit? Well, funny you should mention incarceration …
“Morwenna, something’s up, but I don’t want you to panic. Everything will be all right in the end, but you mustn’t, mustn’t panic. Will you promise me that?”
“What’s wrong?” There was now a distinctly anxious edge to Morwenna’s voice.
Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
“Morwenna, tell me what you remember. Calmly and slowly.”
He heard the catch in her voice, the approaching onset of hysteria. “Where do you want me to begin?”
“Do you remember me being taken to see the queen?”
“Yes.”
“And do you remember me being taken away from her chamber?”
“Yes… yes, I do.”
“Do you remember trying to stop them?”
“No, I… ” She stopped and said nothing. He thought he had lost her—when she wasn’t speaking, the connection was silent. “Wait. Yes, I do remember.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing.”
“They took me to Grelier’s operating theatre, Morwenna. The one where he did all those other things to me.”
“No…” she began, misunderstanding, thinking that the dreadful thing had happened to Quaiche rather than herself.
“They showed me the scrimshaw suit,” he said. “But they put you in it instead. You’re in it now, and that’s why you mustn’t panic.”
She took it well, better than “he had been expecting. Poor, brave Morwenna. She had always been the more courageous half of their partnership. If she’d been given the chance to take the punishment upon herself, he knew she would have done so. Equally, he knew that he lacked that strength. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Not a bad man, but not exactly one to be admired either. It was the flaw that had shaped his life. Knowing this did not make it any easier.
“You mean I’m under the ice?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “No, it’s not that bad.” He realised as he spoke how absurdly little difference it made whether she was buried under ice or not. “You’re in the suit now, but you’re not under the ice. And it isn’t because of anything you did. It’s because of me. It’s to force me to act in a certain way.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re with me, aboard the Dominatrix. I think we just completed slowdown into the new system.”
“I can’t see or move.”
He had been looking at the suit while he spoke, holding an image of her in his mind. Although she was clearly doing her best to hide it, he knew Morwenna well enough to understand that she was terribly frightened. Ashamed, he looked sharply away. “Ship, can you let her see something?”
“That channel is not enabled.”
“Then fucking well enable it.”
“No actions are possible. I am to inform you that the occupant can only communicate with the outside world via the cur-rent audio channel. Any attempt to instate further channels will be viewed as…”
He waved a hand. “All right. Look, I’m sorry, Morwenna. The bastards won’t let you see anything. I’m guessing that was Grelier’s little idea.”
“He’s not my only enemy, you know.”
“Maybe not, but I’m willing to bet he had more than a little say in the matter.” Quaiche’s brow was dripping with condensed beads of zero-gravity sweat. He mopped himself with the back of his hand. “All of this is my fault.”
“Where are you?”
The question surprised him. “I’m floating next to you. I thought you might be able to hear my voice through the armour.”
“All I can hear is your voice in my head. You sound a long way away. I’m scared, Horris. I don’t know if I can handle this.”
“You’re not alone,” he said. “I’m right by you. You’re probably safer in the suit than out of it. All you have to do is sit tight. We’ll be home and dry in a few weeks.”
Her voice had a desperate edge to it now. “A few weeks? You make it sound as if it’s nothing at all.”
“I meant it’s better than years and years. Oh, Christ, Morwenna, I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll get you out of this.” Quaiche screwed up his eyes in pain.
“Horris?”
“Yes?” he asked, through tears.
“Don’t leave me to die in this thing. Please.”
“Morwenna,” he said, a little while later, “listen carefully. I have to leave you now. I’m going up to the command deck. I have to check on our status.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“You’ll still be able to hear my voice. I must do this, Morwenna. I absolutely must. If I don’t, neither of us will have any kind of a future to look forward to.”
“Horris.”
But he was already moving. He drifted away from the slowdown coffin and the-scrimshaw suit, crossing the compartment space to reach a set of padded wall grips. He began to make his way down the narrow companionway towards the command deck, pulling himself along hand over hand. Quaiche had never developed a taste for weightlessness, but the needle-hulled survey craft was far too small for centrifugal gravity. It would be better once they were underway again, for then he would have the illusion of gravity provided by the Dominatrix’s engines.
Under pleasanter circumstances, he would have been enjoying the sudden isolation of being away from the rest of the crew. Morwenna had not accompanied him on most of his previous excursions, but, while he missed her, he had generally revelled in the enforced solitude of his periods away from the Gnostic Ascension. It was not strictly the case that he was antisocial; admittedly, during his time in mainstream human culture, Quaiche had never been the most gregarious of souls, but he had always ornamented himself with a handful of strong friendships. There had always been lovers, some tending towards the rare, exotic, or—in Morwenna’s case—the downright hazardous. But the environment of Jasmina’s ship was so overwhelmingly claustrophobic, so cloyingly saturated with the pheromonal haze of paranoia and intrigue, that he found himself longing for the hard simplicity of a ship and a mission.
Consequently the Dominatrix and the tiny survey craft it contained had become his private empire within the greater dominion of the Ascension. The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan. The more time he spent in it, the more it learned his whimsies and foibles. It played music that not only suited his moods, but was precisely calibrated to steer him from the dangerous extremes of morbid self-reflection or careless euphoria. It fed him the kinds of meals that he could never persuade the food synthesisers on the Ascension to produce, and seemed able to delight and surprise him whenever he suspected he had exhausted its libraries. It knew when he needed sleep and when he needed bouts of feverish activity. It amused him with fancies when he was bored, and simulated minor crises when he showed indications of complacency. Now and then it occurred to Quaiche that because the ship knew him so well he had in a sense extended himself into it, permeating its machine systems. The merging had even taken place on a biological level. The Ultras did their best to sterilise it every time it returned to its storage bay in the belly of the Ascension, but Quaiche knew that the ship now smelt different from the first time he had boarded it. It smelt of places he had lived in.
But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fief dom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead.
“Bitch,” he said again.
Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot’s seat. The deck was necessarily tiny, for the Dominatrix was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space.
“Avionics,” he said.
Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved.
“Orders, Quaiche?”
“Just give me a moment,” he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was well: the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the Dominatrix’s belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born.
“Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?”
“None that were revealed to me.”
“Well, that’s splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?”
“I am receiving continuous telemetry from Gnostic Ascension. You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six- to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre.”
“Affirmative.” It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly.
“Horris?” said Morwenna. “Talk to me, please. Where are you?”
“I’m up front,” he said, “checking things out. Everything looks more or less OK at this point, but I want to make Certain.”
“Do you know where we are yet?”
“I’m about to find out.” He touched one of the control fields, enabling voice control of major ship systems. “Rotate plus one-eighty, thirty-second slew,” he said.
The console display indicated compliance. Through the oval view port, a sprinkling of faintly visible stars began to ooze from one edge to the other.
“Talk to me,” Morwenna said again.
“I’m slewing us around. We were pointed tailfirst after slowdown. Should be getting a look at the system any moment now.”
“Did Jasmina say anything about it?”
“Not that I remember. What about you?”
“Nothing,” she said. For the first time since waking she sounded almost like her old self. He imagined it was a coping mechanism. If she acted normally, she would keep panic at bay. Panicking was the last thing she needed in the scrimshaw suit. Morwenna continued, “Just that it was another system that didn’t look particularly noteworthy. A star and some planets. No record of human presence. Dullsville, really.”
“Well, no record doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t passed through here at some point, just like we’re doing. And they may have left something behind.”
“Better bloody hope they did,” Morwenna remarked caustically.
“I’m trying to look on the optimistic side.”
“I’m sorry. I know you mean well, but let’s not expect the impossible, shall we?”
“We may have to,” he said under his breath, hoping that the ship would not pick it up and relay it to Morwenna.
By then the ship had just about completed its rotation, flipping nose-to-tail. A prominent star slid into view and centred itself in the oval. At this distance it was really more a sun than a star: without the command deck’s selective glare shields it would have been uncomfortably bright to look at.
“I’ve got something,” Quaiche said. His fingers skated across the console. “Let’s see. Spectral type’s a cool G. Main sequence, about three-fifths solar luminosity. A few spots, but no worrying coronal activity. About twenty AU out.”
“Still pretty far away,” Morwenna said.
“Not if you want to be certain of including all the major planets in the same volume.”
“What about theworlds?”
“Just a sec.” His nimble fingers worked the console again and the forward view changed, coloured lines of orbits springing on to the read-out, squashed into ellipses, each flattened hoop tagged by a box of numbers showing the major characteristics of the world belonging to that orbit. Quaiche studied the parameters: mass, orbital period, day length, inclination, diameter, surface gravity, mean density, magnetospheric strength, the presence of moons or ring systems. From the confidence limits assigned to the numbers he deduced that they had been calculated by the Dominatrix, using its own sensors and interpretation algorithms. If they had been dredged out of some pre-existing database of system parameters they would have been significantly more precise.
The numbers would improve as the Dominatrix got closer to the system, but until then it was worth keeping in mind that this region of space was essentially unexplored. Someone else might have passed through, but they had probably not stayed long enough to file an official report. That meant that the system stood a chance of containing something that someone, somewhere, might possibly regard as valuable, if only on novelty grounds.
“In your own time,” the ship said, anxious to begin its work.
“All right, all right,” Quaiche said. “In the absence of any anomalous data, we’ll work our way towards the sun one world at a time, and then we’ll take those on the far side as we head back into interstellar space. Given those constraints, find the five most fuel-efficient search patterns and present them to me. If there’s a significantly more efficient strategy that requires skipping a world and returning to it later, I’d like to know about it as well.“
“Just a moment, Quaiche.” The pause was barely enough time for him to pick his nose. “Here we are. Given your specified parameters, there is no strongly favoured solution, nor is there a significantly more favourable pattern with an out-of-order search.”
“Good. Now display the five options in descending order of the time I’d need to spend in slowdown.”
The options reshuffled themselves. Quaiche stroked his chin, trying to decide between them. He could ask the ship to make the final decision itself, applying some arcane selection criteria of its own, but he always preferred to make this final selection himself. It wasn’t simply a question of picking one at random, for there was always a solution that for one reason or another just happened to look more right than the others. Quaiche was perfectly willing to admit that this amounted to decision by hunch, rather than any conscious process of elimination. But he did not think it was any less valid for that. The whole point of having Quaiche conduct these in-system surveys was precisely to use those slippery skills that could not be easily cajoled into the kind of algorithmic instruction sets that machines ran. Intervening to select the pattern that best pleased him was just what he was along to do.
This time it was far from obvious. None of the solutions were elegant, but he was used to that: the arrangement of the planets at a given epoch could not be helped. Sometimes he got lucky and arrived when three or four interesting worlds were lined up in their orbits, permitting a very efficient straight-line mapping path. Here, they were all strung out at various angles from each other. There was no search pattern that did not look like a drunkard’s walk.
There were consolations. If he had change direction regularly, then it would not cost him much more fuel to slow down completely and make close-up inspections of whichever worlds caught his eye. Rather than just dropping instrument packages as he made high-speed flybys, he could take the Scavenger’s Daughter out and have a really good look.
For a moment, as the thought of flying the Daughter took hold, he forgot about Morwenna. But it was only for an instant. Then he realised that if he were to leave the Dominatrix, he would be leaving her as well.
He wondered how she would take that.
“Have you made a decision, Quaiche?” the ship asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We’ll take search pattern two, I think.”
“Is that your final answer?”
“Let’s see: minimal time in slowdown; one week for most of the larger planets, two for that gas-giant system with a lot of moons… a few days for the tiddlers… and we should still have fuel to spare in case we find anything seriously heavy.”
“I concur.”
“And you’ll tell me if you notice anything unusual, won’t you, ship? I mean, you haven’t been given any special instructions in that area, have you?”
“None whatsoever, Quaiche.”
“Good.” He wondered if the ship detected his note of distrust. “Well, tell me if anything crops up. I want to be informed.”
“Count on me, Quaiche.”
“I’ll have to, won’t I?”
“Horris?” It was Morwenna now. “What’s happening?”
The ship must have locked her out of the audio channel while they discussed the search pattern.
“Just weighing the options. I’ve picked us a sampling strategy. We’ll be able to take a close look-see at anything we like down there.”
“Is there anything of interest?”
“Nothing startling,” he said. “It’s just the usual single star and a family of worlds. I’m not seeing any obvious signs of a surface biosphere, or any indications that anyone’s been here before us. But if there are small artefacts dotted around the place, we’d probably miss them at this range unless they were making an active effort to be seen, which, clearly, they aren’t. But I’m not despondent yet. We’ll go in closer and take a very good look around.”
“We’d better be careful, Horris. There could be any number of unmapped hazards.”
“There could,” he said, “but at the moment I’m inclined to consider them the least of our worries, aren’t you?”
“Quaiche?” the ship asked before Morwenna had a chance to answer. “Are you ready to initiate the search?”
“Do I have time to get to the slowdown tank?”
“Initial acceleration will be one gee only, until I have completed a thorough propulsion diagnostic. When you are safely in slowdown, acceleration will increase to the safe limit of the slowdown tank.”
“What about Morwenna?”
“No special instructions were received.”
“Did we make the deceleration burn at the usual five gees, or were you told to keep it slower?”
“Acceleration was held within the usual specified limits.”
Good. Morwenna had endured that, so there was every indication that whatever modifications Grelier had made to the scrimshaw suit offered at least the same protection as the slow-down tank. “Ship,” he said, “will you handle Morwenna’s transitions to slowdown buffering?”
“The transitions will be managed automatically.”
“Excellent. Morwenna—did you hear that?”
“I heard it,” she said. “Maybe you can ask another question, too. If it can put me to sleep when it needs to, can it put me under for the whole journey?”
“You heard what she asked, ship. Can you do it?”
“If required, it can be arranged.”
Stupidly, it had never occurred to Quaiche to ask the same question. He felt ashamed not to have thought of it first. He had, he realised, still not adequately grasped what it must be like for her in that thing.
“Well, Mor, do you want it now? I can have you put asleep immediately. When you wake up we’ll be back aboard the Ascension?
“And if you fail? Do you think I’ll ever be allowed to wake up?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did. But I’m not planning to fail.”
“You always sound so sure of yourself,” she said. “You always sound as if everything’s about to go right.”
“Sometimes I even believe it as well.”
“And now?”
“I told Jasmina that I thought I could feel my luck changing. I wasn’t lying.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
“So are you going to sleep?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll stay awake with you. When you sleep, I’ll sleep. For now. I don’t rule out changing my mind.”
“I understand.”
“Find something out there, Horris. Please. For both of us.”
“I will,” he said. And in his gut he felt something like certainty. It made no sense, but there it was: hard and sharp as a gallstone.
“Ship,” he said, “take us in.”