“I’m not Gregor Consodine.”
“I’m sorry. I thought this was . . .”
“It is. I’m just minding things while he’s off in Vancouver for a couple of days. Xavier Liu.” He beamed helpfully. “How may I be of assistance?”
“We are looking for Antoinette Bax,” the man said.
“Are you?”
“It’s a matter of some urgency. I gather that’s her ship parked in your service well.”
The back of Xavier’s neck bristled. “And you’d be . . . ?”
“I am called Mr. Clock.”
Mr. Clock’s face was an exercise in anatomy. Xavier could see the bones beneath the skin. Mr. Clock looked like a man very close to death, and yet he moved with the light step of a ballet dancer or mime artiste.
But it was the other one that really bothered him. Xavier’s first careless glance at the visitors had revealed two men, one tall and thin like a storybook undertaker, the other short and wide, built like a professional wrestler. The more squat man had his head down and was thumbing through a brochure on the coffee table. Between his feet was a featureless black box the size of a toolkit.
Xavier looked at his own hands.
“My colleague is Mr. Pink.”
Mr. Pink looked up. Xavier did his best to conceal a moment of surprise. The other man was a pig, not a baseline human at all. He had a smooth rounded brow beneath which little dark eyes studied Xavier. His nose was small and upturned. Xavier had seen humans with stranger faces, but that was not the point. Mr. Pink never had been human.
“Hello,” the pig said, and then turned his attention back to his reading matter.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Clock said.
“Your question?”
“Concerning the ship. It does belong to Antoinette Bax, doesn’t it?”
“I was just told to do some hull work on it. That’s all I know.”
Clock smiled and nodded. He stepped back to the office door and closed it. Mr. Pink turned over a page and chuckled at something in the brochure. “That’s not quite the truth, is it, Mr. Liu?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Have a seat, Mr. Liu.” Clock gestured at one of the chairs. “Please, take the weight off your feet. We need to have a little talk, you and me.”
“I really need to get back to my monkeys.”
“I’m sure they won’t get up to any mischief in your absence. Now.” Clock gestured again and the pig looked up and fixed his gaze on Xavier. Xavier sunk down into the seat, weighing his options. “Concerning Miss Bax. Traffic records, freely available traffic records, indicate that her vessel is the one currently parked in the service bay, the one you are working on. You are aware of this, aren’t you?”
“I might be.”
“Please, Mr. Liu, there’s really no point in being evasive. The data we have amassed points to a very close working relationship between yourself and Miss Bax. You are perfectly aware that Storm Bird belongs to her. As a matter of fact, you know Storm Bird very well indeed, isn’t that true?”
“What is this about?”
“We’d like to have a little word with Miss Bax herself, if that isn’t too much trouble.”
“I can’t help you there.”
Clock raised one fine, barely present eyebrow. “No?”
“If you want to speak to her, you’ll have to find her yourselves.”
“Very well. I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but . . .” Clock looked at the pig. The pig put down the brochure and stood up. He had the bulky presence of a gorilla. When he walked it seemed as if he was engaged in a balancing act that was always on the point of collapsing. The pig pushed past him, carrying the black box.
“Where’s he going?” Xavier asked.
“To her ship. He’s very good mechanically, Mr. Liu. Very good at fixing things, but also, it must be said, very good at breaking things as well.”
But this situation could not continue, Clavain knew. As urbane and interesting as his host might have been, Clavain had still been kidnapped. And he had business that needed to be attended to.
“Tell me more about Skade,” Clavain said. “What did she want from the Mademoiselle?”
“It gets a little complicated. I shall do my best, but you must forgive me if I seem not to understand all the details. The truth of the matter is that I doubt that I ever will.”
“Start at the beginning.”
They arrived at a hallway. H strolled along it, passing many irregular sculptures resembling the sloughed scabs and scales of some immense metallic dragon, each of which rested on a single annotated plinth.
“Skade was interested in technology, Mr. Clavain.”
“What kind?”
“An advanced technology concerning the manipulation of the quantum vacuum. I am not a scientist, Mr. Clavain, so I cannot pretend to have more than the shakiest grasp of the relevant principles. But it is my understanding that certain bulk properties of matter—inertia, for instance—stem directly from the properties of the vacuum in which they are embedded. Pure speculation, of course, but wouldn’t a means to control inertia be of use to the Conjoiners?”
Clavain thought of the way Nightshade had been able to pursue him across the solar system at such great speed. A technique for suppressing inertia would have allowed that, and might also explain what Skade had been doing aboard the ship during the previous mission. She must have been fine-tuning her technology, testing it in the field. So the technology probably existed, albeit in prototype form. But H would have to learn that for himself.
“I’ve no knowledge of a programme to develop that kind of ability,” Clavain told him, choosing his words so as to avoid an outright lie.
“Doubtless it would be secret, even amongst the Conjoiners. Very experimental and no doubt dangerous.”
“Where did the technology come from in the first place?”
“That’s the interesting part. Skade—and by extension the Conjoiners—seem to have had a well-developed idea of what they were looking for before they came here, as if what they sought here was merely the final part of a puzzle. As you know, Skade’s operation was viewed as a failure. She was the only survivor and she did not escape back to your Mother Nest with more than a handful of stolen items. Whether they were sufficient or not, I couldn’t guess . . .” H glanced back over his shoulder with a knowing smile.
They reached the end of the corridor. They had arrived on a low-walled ledge that circumnavigated an enormous slope-floored room many storeys deep. Clavain peered over the edge, noting what appeared to be pipes and drainage vents set into the sheer black walls.
“I’ll ask again,” Clavain said. “Where did the technology come from in the first place?”
“A donor,” H answered. “Around a century ago I learned an astonishing truth. I gained knowledge of the whereabouts of an individual, an alien individual, who had been waiting undisturbed on this planet for many millions of years, shipwrecked and yet essentially unharmed.” He paused, evidently watching Clavain’s reaction.