‘It sounds a lot like self-sacrifice to me,’ Antoinette said.
‘It isn’t. I am pessimistic, but not totally without hope. There are still weapons we haven’t used and a number we haven’t even manufactured yet. Some of them may make a small difference, locally at least.’ He paused and reached into an invisible pocket in his tunic. His fingers vanished into the fabric, as if executing a conjuring trick, and then emerged clutching a small slate-grey sliver, which he placed on the table and then tapped with his forefinger. ‘Before I forget: schematics for several militarily useful technologies. Some of these Aura or Khouri may already have mentioned. We owe them all to Aura, of course, but while she showed us the way forward and gave us clues to the basic principles, there was still much that we had to work out from scratch. These files should be compatible with standard manufactory protocols.’
‘We have no manufactories,’ Antoinette said. ‘They all stopped working years ago.’
Remontoire pursed his lips. ‘Then we will provide you with new ones, good against most plague variants. I’ll have them dropped off before you leave the system, along with medical supplies and reefersleep components. Feed them the files and they will make weapons and devices. If you have any queries, phrase them appropriately to Aura and she should be able to help you.’
‘Thanks, Rem,’ said Antoinette.
‘This is a gift,’ he said. ‘We give it freely, just as we are happy for you to take Aura. She is yours now. But there is something that you can give us in return.’
‘Name it,’ Antoinette told him.
But Remontoire said nothing. He looked over his shoulder at a figure crunching towards them through the grass.
‘Hello, John,’ Antoinette said.
Scorpio sat back stiffly on the bench as the figure approached. At first glance it barely looked like a human being at all. It walked, and it had arms and legs and a head, but that was where the resemblance ended. One half of the man’s body - one arm and one leg, and one half of the torso - was, so far as he could tell, approximately flesh and blood. But the other half was hulking and mechanical, grotesquely so, with no effort having been expended to create an illusion of symmetry. There were pistons and huge articulated hinge points, sliding metal gleaming from constant polishing and lubrication. The arm on the mechanical side hung down to knee-level, terminating in a complex multipurpose tool-delivery system. The effect was as if a piece of earth-moving equipment had collided with a man at brutal speed, fusing them together in the process.
His head, by contrast, was almost normal. But only by contrast. Red multifaceted cameras were crammed into the orbits of his eyes. Tubes emerged from his nostrils, curving back around the side of his face to connect to some unseen mechanism. An oval grille covered his mouth, stitched into the flesh of his face. His scalp was bald save for a dozen or so matted locks emerging from the crown. They were tied back, knotted into a single braid that hung down the back of his neck. He had no ears. In fact, Scorpio realised, he had no visible orifices at all. Perhaps he had been redesigned to tolerate hard vacuum without the protection of a space helmet.
His voice appeared to emerge from the grille. It was small, tinny, like a broken toy. ‘Hey. The gang’s all here.’
‘Have a seat, John,’ Antoinette said. ‘Do you need to be brought up to speed? Remontoire was just explaining a technical trade-off. He’s giving us some cool new toys.’
‘In return for something else, I gather.’
‘No,’ Remontoire said. ‘The technical blueprints and the other items really are a gift. But if you are willing to consider offering us a reciprocal gift, we have something in mind.’
John Brannigan assumed his seat, lowering himself into place with a hiss and chuff of contracting pistons. ‘You want the remaining cache weapons,’ he said.
Remontoire dignified the remark with a nod. ‘You guess our desires well.’
‘Why do you want them?’ John Brannigan asked.
‘Our forecasts show that we will need them if we are to create a useful diversion. There is, necessarily, an element of uncertainty. Not all the weapons have known properties. But we can make some useful guesses.’
‘We will be running from the machines as well,’ Scorpio said. ‘Who’s to say we won’t need the weapons ourselves?’
‘No one,’ Remontoire replied. As always he was unflappable, like an adult suggesting parlour games for children. ‘You may very well need them. But you will be running from the wolves, not already engaged with them. If you are sensible, you will avoid further encounters for as long as possible.’
‘You said we might still have wolves on our tail,’ Antoinette reminded him. ‘What do we do about them? Ask them nicely to go away?’
Remontoire again tapped the data recording he had placed on the table. ‘This will show you how to construct a hypometric weapon system. Our forecasts indicate that three of these devices will be sufficient to disperse a small wolf pursuit element.’
‘And if your forecasts turn out to be wrong?’ Scorpio asked.
‘You will have other resources.’
‘Not good enough,’ the pig said. ‘Those cache weapons were the whole reason we went all the way out to the Resurgam system in the first place. They’re what got us into this steaming pile of shit. And now you’re saying we should just give them up?’
‘I am still your ally,’ Remontoire said. ‘I am merely proposing that the weapons be reassigned to their point of maximum usefulness.’
‘I don’t get this,’ Antoinette said, nodding at the data sliver. ‘You have the means to make stuff we can’t even dream of yet, and you still want those mouldy old cache weapons?’
‘We cannot underestimate the cache weapons,’ Remontoire said. ‘They were a gift from the future. Until they have been exhaustively tested, we cannot assume that they are inferior to anything Aura has given us. You must agree with this reasoning as well.’
‘Guy’s got a point, I suppose,’ Antoinette said.
John Brannigan’s projected form moved with a hiss of locomotive systems. It must have been Scorpio’s imagination, but he thought he smelled lubricant. The Captain spoke again in his tinny voice. ‘He may well have a point, but Aura’s capabilities are equally untested. We have at least deployed a number of cache weapons and found them functional. I cannot sanction handing the rest of them over.’
‘Then we’ll have to arrive at a compromise position,’ Remontoire said.
The Captain looked at him, his grille-mouthed face expressionless. ‘I’m all ears,’ he said.
‘Our forecasts show a reduced but still statistically significant chance of success with only a subset of the available cache weapons.’
‘So you get some of ’em, but not all of ’em, right?’ Antoinette asked.
Remontoire dipped his head once. ‘Yes, but don’t assume that this position is arrived at lightly. With a reduced range of cache weapons at our disposal, it may not be possible to prevent a larger pursuit element coming after you.’
‘Yeah,’ Antoinette said, ‘but then we’ll have more to throw at them, right?’
‘Correct,’ Remontoire said, ‘but don’t underestimate the risk of failure.’
‘We’ll take that risk,’ Scorpio said.
‘Wait,’ Khouri said. She trembled, one hand steadying the incubator on her lap, the other gripping the wooden table with her fingernails. ‘Wait. I . . . Aura . . .’ Her eyes became all whites, the muscles in her neck pulling taut. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Definitely no.’
‘No what?’ Scorpio asked.
‘No. No no no. Do what Remontoire says. Give all the weapons. Will make a difference. Trust him.’ Her fingernails gouged raw white trails into the wood.
Vasko leant forwards and spoke for the first time during the meeting. ‘Aura might be right,’ he said.
‘I am right,’ Khouri said.
‘We should listen to her,’ Vasko said. ‘She seems pretty clear on this.’
‘How would she
know?’ Scorpio said. ‘She knows some stuff, I’ll buy that. But no one said anything about her seeing the future.’
The seniors nodded as one.
‘I’m with Scorp on this one,’ Antoinette said. ‘We can’t give Rem all those weapons. We’ve got to keep some back for ourselves. What if we can’t get the manufactories to work? What if the stuff they make doesn’t work either?’
‘They will work,’ Remontoire said, still utterly calm and relaxed, even though vast destinies hung in the balance.
Scorpio shook his head. ‘Not good enough. We’ll give you some of the cache weapons, but not all of them.’
‘Fine,’ said Remontoire, ‘as long as we’re agreed.’
‘Scorpio . . .’ Vasko said.
The pig had had enough. This was his colony, his ship, his crisis. He reached up and ripped away the goggles, breaking them in the process. ‘It’s decided,’ he snapped.
Remontoire spread his fingers wide. ‘We’ll make the arrangements, then. Cargo tugs will be sent to assist in the transfer of the weapons. Another shuttle will arrive with the new manufactories and some prefabricated items. Conjoiners will arrive to help with the installation of the hypometric weapons and the other new technologies. Is it necessary to airlift any remaining personnel from the surface?’
‘Yes,’ Antoinette said.
‘A major evacuation is out of the question,’ Remontoire said. ‘We can open safe passage to and from the surface on one, possibly two further occasions - enough for a couple of shuttle flights, but no more than that.’
‘That’ll do,’ Antoinette said.
‘What about the rest of them?’ asked one of the seniors.
‘They had their chance,’ Scorpio said.
Remontoire smiled primly, as if someone had committed a faux pas in polite company. ‘They aren’t necessarily in immediate peril,’ he said. ‘If the Inhibitors wished to destroy Ararat’s biosphere, they could have done so already.’
‘But they’ll be prisoners down there,’ Antoinette said. ‘The wolves won’t ever let them leave.’
‘But they will still be alive,’ Remontoire said. ‘And we may stand a chance of reducing the wolf presence around Ararat. Without access to the full complement of cache weapons, however, that cannot be guaranteed.’
‘Could you guarantee it if you had all the weapons?’ Scorpio asked.
After a moment’s consideration Remontoire shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No guarantees, not even then.’
Scorpio looked around at the assembled delegates, realising for the first time that he was the only pig amongst them. Where the Captain had been sitting only a vacant space now remained, a focus towards which everyone else’s attention was being subtly attracted. The Captain was still there, Scorpio thought. He was still there, still listening. He even thought he could still smell the lubricant.
‘Then I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,’ Scorpio said.
Antoinette came to see Scorpio after the meeting. He had taken the elevator back upship, to assist with the ongoing efforts to process the evacuees. There were people everywhere, huddled into filthy, dank, winding corridors as far as the eye could see.
He walked along one of these corridors, absorbing the frightened faces, fielding questions when he was able to, but saying nothing about the wider plans for the ship and its passengers. He told them only that they would be taken care of, that some of them would be frozen, but that every effort would be taken to make the process as painless and safe as possible. He believed it, too, for a while. But then it dawned on him, after navigating one corridor, that he had seen only a few hundred evacuees out of the thousands supposedly aboard.
He met Antoinette in a junction, where Security Arm militia were directing people to functioning elevators that would take them to different processing centres much further down the ship.
‘It’s going to be all right, Scorp,’ she said.
‘Am I that easy to read?’
‘You look worried, as if you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.’
‘Funny, but that’s more or less how I feel.’
‘You’ll hack it. Do you remember how it was with Clavain, when we were in the Mademoiselle’s Château?’
‘That was a while back.’
‘Well, I remember even if you don’t. He looked just the way you look now, Scorp, as if his whole life had been a sequence of errors, culminating in that one moment of absolute failure. He nearly lost it then. But he didn’t. He kept it together. And it worked out. In the end, that sequence of errors turned out to be exactly the right set of choices.’
He smiled. ‘Thanks for the pep talk, Antoinette.’
‘I just thought you should know. Things are getting complicated, Scorp, and I know you sometimes don’t think that’s exactly your ideal milieu, if you get my drift. But you’re wrong. Your kind of leadership is just what we need now: blunt and to the point. You’re not a politician, Scorp. Thank God for that. Clavain would have agreed, you know.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know so. I’m just asking you not to have a crisis on us. Not now.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
She sighed and punched him playfully on the arm. ‘I just wanted you to know that before I leave.’
‘Leave?’
‘I’ve made my mind up: I’m going back down to Ararat on one of Remontoire’s shuttles. Xavier’s down there.’
‘That’ll be risky,’ he warned. ‘Why not just let Remontoire bring Xavier back up here? He’s already agreed to bring Orca back from Ararat. I hate to be blunt - sorry - but at least that way we’d only lose one of you if the wolves take out the shuttle.’
‘Because I’m not coming back,’ she said. ‘I’m going down to Ararat and I’m staying there.’
It took a moment for that to sink in. ‘But you made it out,’ he said.
‘No, Scorp, I came up with the Infinity because I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. But my responsibilities are down there, with the thousands we’ll be leaving behind. Oh, they don’t really need me, I suppose, but they definitely need Xavier. He’s about the only one who knows how to fix anything when it goes wrong.’
‘I’m sure you’ll make yourself useful,’ Scorpio said, smiling.
‘Well, if they let me fly something now and then, I guess I won’t go totally insane.’
‘We could still use you up here. I could use an ally any time of the day.’
‘You’ve got allies, Scorp; you just don’t know it yet.’
‘You’re doing a brave thing,’ he said.
‘It’s not such a dreadful place,’ she replied. ‘Don’t make me out to be too much of a martyr. I never really minded Ararat. I liked the sunsets. I guess I’ve even developed a taste for seaweed tea after all these years. All I’m really doing is staying at home.’
‘We’ll miss you,’ he said.
She looked down. He had the feeling that she could not look at his face. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen now, Scorp. Maybe you’ll take this ship to Hela, like Aura says. Maybe you’ll go somewhere else. But I’ve a feeling we won’t ever meet again. It’s a big universe out there, and the chances of our paths ever crossing again . . .’
‘It’s a big place,’ he said, ‘but on the other hand, I guess that also makes it big enough for a few coincidences.’
‘For some people, maybe, but not for the likes of you and me, Scorp.’ She looked up then, staring hard into his eyes. ‘I was scared of you when I met you, I don’t mind admitting that now. Scared and ignorant. But I’m glad everything happened the way it did. I’m glad I got to know you for a few years.’
‘It was half my life.’
‘They were good years, Scorp. I won’t forget them.’ Once more she looked down. He wondered if she was looking at his small, childlike shoes. Suddenly he felt self-conscious, wishing he was larger, more human, less like a pig and more like a man. ‘Remontoire’s going to have that shuttle ready so
on,’ she said. ‘I’d better be going. Take care of yourself, all right? You’re a good man. A good pig.’
‘I try,’ Scorpio said.
She hugged him, then kissed him.
Then she was gone. He never saw her again.
THIRTY-TWO
Hela, 2727
The caravan sidled up to the kerb of the Way, overtaking one cathedral after another. Monstrous machinery loomed over Rashmika. She was too overwhelmed to take it all in, retaining only a blurred impression of great dark-grey mechanisms, projected to an inhuman scale. As the caravan wormed between them, the cathedrals appeared to remain completely still, as fully rooted to the landscape as the buildings she had seen on the Jarnsaxa Flats. Except, of course, that these buildings were true skyscrapers, jagged fingers clawing across the face of Haldora. And that stillness, Rashmika knew, was only an illusion born of the caravan’s speed. Were they to stop, one or other of the cathedrals would be rolling over them within a few minutes.
It was said that the cathedrals never stopped. It was also said that they seldom deviated from their paths unless a given obstacle was too large to be safely crushed beneath their traction mechanisms.
The Way was much narrower than she had expected. She recalled what Quaestor Jones had said: that it was never more than two hundred metres wide, and usually much less than that. Distances were difficult to judge in the absence of any familiar landmarks, but she did not think the Way was more than one hundred metres wide at any point along this stretch. Some of the larger cathedrals were almost that wide themselves, squatting across the full width of the Way like mechanical toads. The smaller cathedrals were able to travel two abreast, but only by allowing parts of their superstructures to lean out over the edges of the Way. Here, it did not really matter: the Way was just a smoothed and cleared strip across the otherwise flat and unobstructed expanse of the Flats. Any one of the cathedrals could have diverted off the path prepared ahead of it, taking its chances on the slightly rougher ground on either side. But clearly no such risk-taking was on the cards today, and the relative order of the procession looked set to remain unchallenged for the time being. This was the normal way of things: the jockeying, jousting and general dirty tricks that one heard about in the badlands were very much the exception rather than the rule, and such stories, Rashmika had long suspected, enjoyed a degree of exaggeration as they travelled north.
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