The man with the pierced eyebrow replaced the yellow axe on the wall. He drew a finger across his own throat.
Then another voice, one that Clavain did not recognise, said, “Hello.”
Clavain looked around. The third person also wore a spacesuit, though it was much less cumbersome than the suits worn by her fellows. Despite its bulk she still managed to appear thin and spare. She hovered within the frame of a bulkhead door, resting calmly with her head cocked slightly to one side. Perhaps it was the play of light on her face, but Clavain thought he saw ghostly blades of faded black against the perfect white of her skin.
“I hope the Talkative Twins treated you well, Mr. Clavain.”
“Who are you?” Clavain said again.
“I am Zebra. That’s not my real name, of course. You won’t ever need to know my real name.”
“Who are you, Zebra? Why have you done this?”
“Because I was told to. What did you expect?”
“I didn’t expect anything. I was trying . . .” He paused and waited until his breath had returned. “I was trying to defect.”
“We know.”
“We?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Come with me, Mr. Clavain. Twins, secure and prepare for high-burn. The Convention will be swarming like flies by the time we get back to Yellowstone. It’s going to be an interesting trip home.”
“I’m not worth killing innocent people for.”
“No one died, Mr. Clavain. The two Convention escorts we destroyed were remotes, slaved to the third. We wounded the third, but its pilot won’t have been harmed. And we conspicuously avoided harming the zombies’ shuttle. Did they make you step outside, I wonder?”
He followed her forwards, through the bulkhead into a flight deck area. There was only one other person aboard as far as Clavain could tell: a wizened-looking man strapped into the pilot’s position. He was not wearing a suit. His ancient age-spotted hands gripped the controls like prehensile twigs.
“What do you think?” Clavain asked.
“It’s possible they might have, but I think it more likely that you chose to leave.”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ve got me.”
The ancient man glanced at Clavain with only a flicker of interest. “Normal insertion, Zebra, or do we take the long way home?”
“Follow the normal corridor, Manoukhian, but be ready to deviate. I don’t want to engage the Convention again.”
Manoukhian, if that was indeed his name, nodded and applied pressure to the ivory-handled control sticks. “Get the guest strapped down, Zebra. You too.”
The striped woman nodded. “Twins? Help me secure Mr. Clavain.”
The two men shifted Clavain’s suited form into a contoured acceleration couch. He let them do whatever they wanted; he was too weak to offer more than token resistance. His mind probed the immediate cybernetic environment of the spacecraft, and while his implants sensed something of the data traffic through the control networks, there was nothing he could influence. The people were also beyond his reach. He did not even think any of them had implants.
“Are you the banshees?” Clavain asked.
“Sort of, but not exactly. The banshees are a bunch of thuggish pirates. We do things with a little more finesse. But their existence gives us the cover we need for our own activities. And you?” The stripes on her face bunched as she smiled. “Are you really Nevil Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis?”
“You didn’t hear that from me.”
“That’s what you told the Demarchists. And those kids in Copenhagen. We have spies everywhere, you see. There’s not a lot that escapes us.”
“I can’t prove I’m Clavain. But then why should I bother?”
“I think you are,” Zebra said. “I hope you are, anyway. It would be such a letdown if you turned out to be an impostor. My boss wouldn’t be at all happy.”
“Your boss?”
“The man we’re on our way to meet,” Zebra said.
TWENTY-ONE
When they were safely clear of the atmosphere and the carnelian-red marble had vanished from the extreme range of her ship’s radar, Khouri found the courage to take hold of one of the black cubes that had been left behind when the main mass of Inhibitor machinery had fragmented. The cube was shockingly cold to the touch, and when she let go of it she left behind two thin films of detached flesh on opposite faces of the cube, like pink fingerprints. Her fingertips were now red-raw and smooth. For a moment she thought the removed skin would stay adhered to the smooth black sides, but after a few seconds the two sheets of flesh peeled away of their own accord, forming delicate translucent flakes like insects’ discarded wings. The cube’s cold black sides were as pitilessly dark and unmarred as before. But she noticed that the cube was shrinking, the contraction so odd and unexpected that her mind interpreted it as the cube receding into an impossible distance. All around her, the other cubes were echoing the contraction, their size diminishing by a half with every second that passed.
Within a minute there was nothing left in the cabin but films of grey-black ash. She even felt ash accumulate at the corners of her eyes, like a sudden attack of sleepy dust, and was reminded that the cubes had reached into her head before the marble had arrived.
“Well, you got your demonstration,” she said to Thorn. “Was it worth it, just to make a point?”
“I had to know. But I couldn’t know what was going to happen.”
Khouri rubbed circulation back into her hands where they had grown numb. It was good to be out of the restraint webbing that Thorn had put her in. He apologised for that, without very much in the way of conviction. She had to admit that she would never have confessed to the truth without such extreme coercion.
“What did happen, by the way?” Thorn added.
“I don’t know. Not all of it anyway. We provoked a response, and I’m pretty sure we were about to die, or at least to be swallowed up by that machinery.”
“I know. I had that feeling as well.”
They looked at each other, conscious that the period of union in the Inhibitor data-gathering network had permitted them a level of intimacy neither had expected. They had shared very little other than fear, but Thorn at least had been shown that her fear was every bit as intense as his own, and that the Inhibitor attack had not been something she had arranged for his benefit. But there had been something more than fear, hadn’t there? There had been concern for each other’s welfare. And when the third mind had arrived, there had also been something very close to remorse.
“Thorn . . . did you feel the other mind?” Khouri asked.
“I felt something. Something other than you, and something other than the machinery.”
“I know who it was,” she said, knowing that it was far too late for lies and evasion now, and that Thorn needed to be told as much of the truth as she understood. “At least, I think I recognised him. The mind was Sylveste’s.”
“Dan Sylveste?” he asked cautiously.
“I knew him, Thorn. Not well, and not for long, but enough to recognise him again. And I know what happened to him.”
“Start at the beginning, Ana.”
She rubbed the grit from the edge of her eye, hoping that the machinery was truly inert and not simply sleeping. Thorn was right. Her admission had been the first crack in an otherwise perfect façade. But the crack could not be unmade. It would spread, extending fracturing fingers. All she could offer now was damage limitation.
“Everything you think you know about the Triumvir is wrong. She isn’t the maniacal tyrant that the populace thinks. The government built up her image. It needed a demon, a hate figure. If the people hadn’t had the Triumvir to hate, they would have directed their anger, their sense of frustration, at the government itself. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.”