“Skade . . . ?” he said, thinking of the injuries he had seen when he had visited her before their departure.
“Go ahead,” the crab said. “Have a look. I’m sure it will surprise you.”
Remontoire and Felka eased closer to the pod. There was a figure packed inside it, pink and foetal. Remontoire saw lines and catheters, and watched the figure move almost imperceptibly no more than once a minute. It was breathing.
It wasn’t Skade, or even what had remained of Skade. It definitely wasn’t human.
“What is it?” Felka asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“Scorpio,” Remontoire said. “The hyperpig, the one we found on the Demarchist ship.”
Felka touched the metal wall of the pod. Remontoire did likewise, feeling the rhythmic churning of life-support systems.
“Why is he here?” Felka asked.
“He’s on his way back to justice,” Skade said. “Once we’re near the inner system we’ll eject the pod and let the Ferrisville Convention recover him.”
“And then?”
“They’ll try him and find him guilty of the many crimes he is supposed to have committed,” Skade said. “And then, under the present legislation, they’ll kill him. Irreversible neural death.”
“You sound as if you approve.”
“We have to co-operate with the Convention,” Skade said. “They can make life difficult for us in our dealings around Yellowstone. The pig has to be handed back to them one way or another. It would have been very convenient for us if he had died in our custody, believe me. Unfortunately, this way he has a small chance of survival.”
“What kind of crimes are we talking about?” Felka asked.
“War crimes,” Skade said breezily.
“That doesn’t tell me anything. How can he be a war criminal if he isn’t affiliated to a recognised faction?”
“It’s very simple,” Skade said. “Under the terms of the Convention virtually any extralegal act committed in the war zone becomes a war crime, by definition. And there’s no shortage in Scorpio’s case. Murder. Assassination. Terrorism. Blackmail. Theft. Extortion. Eco-sabotage. Trafficking in unlicensed alpha-level intelligences. Frankly, he’s been involved in every criminal activity you can think of from Chasm City to the Rust Belt. If it were peacetime, they’d be serious enough. But in a time of war, most of those crimes carry a mandatory penalty of irreversible death. He’d have earned it several times over even if the nature of the murders themselves wasn’t taken into consideration.”
The pig breathed in and out. Remontoire watched the protective gel tremble as he moved and wondered if he were dreaming, and if so what shape those dreams assumed. Did pigs dream? He was not sure. He did not remember if Run Seven had had anything to say on the matter. But then, Run Seven’s mind had not exactly been put together like other pigs’. He had been a very early and imperfectly formed specimen, and his mental state had been a long way from anything Remontoire would have termed sane. Which was not to say that he had been stupid, or lacking in ingenuity. The tortures and methods of coercion that the pirate had used on Remontoire had been adequate testimony to his intelligence and originality. Even now, somewhere at the back of his mind (there were days when he did not notice it) there was a scream that had never ended; a thread of agony that connected him with the past.
“What exactly were these murders?” Felka repeated.
“He likes killing humans, Felka. He makes something of an art of it. I don’t pretend there aren’t others like him, criminal scum making the most of the present situation.” Skade’s crab hopped through the air and landed deftly on the side of the pod. “But he’s different. He revels in it.”
Remontoire spoke softly. “Clavain and I trawled him. The memories we dug out of his head were enough to have him executed there and then.”
“So why didn’t you?” asked Felka.
“Under more favourable circumstances, I think we might have.”
“The pig needn’t detain us,” Skade said. “It’s his good fortune that Clavain defected, forcing us to make this journey to the inner system, or we’d have had to return a corpse, packed into a high-burn missile warhead. That option was seriously considered. We’d have been perfectly within our rights.”
Remontoire stepped away from the pod. “I thought it might be you in there.”
“And were you relieved to find it wasn’t me?”
The voice startled him, because it had not come from the crab. He looked around and for the first time paid proper attention to the unfamiliar object he had only glanced at before. It had reminded him of a sculpture: a cylindrical silver pedestal in the middle of the room, supporting a detached human head.
The head vanished into the pedestal somewhere near the middle of the neck, joined to it by a tight black seal. The pedestal was only slightly wider than the head, flaring towards a thick base inset with various gauges and sockets. Now and then it gurgled and clicked with inscrutable medical processes.
The head swivelled slightly to greet them and then spoke, pushing thoughts into his head. [Yes, it’s me. I’m glad you were able to follow my proxy. We’re inside the range of the device now. Do you feel any ill effects?]
Only a little queasiness, Remontoire replied.
Felka stepped closer to the pedestal. “Do you mind if I touch you?”
[Be my guest.]
Remontoire watched her press her fingers lightly across Skade’s face, tracing its contours with horrified care. It is you, isn’t it? he asked.
[You seem a little surprised. Why? Does my state disturb you? I’ve experienced far more unsettling conditions than this, I assure you. This is merely temporary.]
But behind her thoughts he sensed chasms of horror; self-disgust so extreme that it had become something close to awe. He wondered if Skade was letting him taste her feelings deliberately, or whether her control was simply not good enough to mask what she really felt.
Why did you let Delmar do this to you?
[It wasn’t his idea. It would have taken too long to heal my entire body, and Delmar’s equipment was too bulky to bring along. I suggested that he remove my head, which was perfectly intact.]
She glanced down, though she could not tilt her head. [This life-support apparatus is simple, reliable and compact enough for my needs. There are some problems with maintaining the precise blood chemistry that my brain would experience if it were connected to a fully functioning body—hormones, that sort of thing—but apart from some slight emotional lability, the effects are pretty minor.]
Felka stepped back. “What about your body?”
[Delmar will have a replacement ready, fully clone-cultured, when I get back to the Mother Nest. The reattachment procedure won’t cause him any difficulties, especially since the decortication happened under controlled circumstances.]
“Well, that’s fine then. But unless I’m missing something, you’re still a prisoner.”
[No. I have a certain degree of mobility, even now.] The head spun around through a disconcerting two hundred and seventy degrees. From out of the room’s shadows stepped what Remontoire had until then taken to be a waiting general-utility servitor, the kind one might find in any well-appointed household. The bipedal androform machine had a dejected, slumped appearance. It was headless, with a circular aperture between its shoulders.
[Help me into it, please. The servitor can do it, but it always seems to take an eternity to do it properly.]
Help you into it? Remontoire queried.
[Grasp the support pillar immediately beneath my neck.]
Remontoire placed both hands around the silver pedestal and pulled. There was a soft click and the upper part, along with the head, came loose in his hands. He elevated it, finding it much heavier than he had imagined it would be. Hanging beneath the place where the pedestal had separated was a knot of slimy wriggling cables. They thrashed and groped like a fistful of eels.
[Now carry me—gently—to the servitor.]
Remontoire did as she asked. Perhaps the possibility of dropping the head flickered through his mind once or twice, though rationally he doubted that the fall would do Skade very much harm: the floor would most likely soften to absorb the impact. But he fought to keep such thoughts as well censored as he could.
[Now pop me down into the body of the servitor. The connections will establish themselves. Gently now . . . gently does it.]