‘Captain. John. Listen to me. You need to focus on the present. We have a situation here on Ararat, all right? I know you know about it — we’ve talked about it already.’
‘Oh, that stuff,’ he said. He sounded like a child being reminded of homework on the first day of a holiday.
Antoinette thumped the table so hard that the wood bruised her fist. ‘I know you don’t want to deal with this, John, but we have to talk about it all the same. You cannot leave just when you feel like it. You may save a few thousand people, but many, many more are going to die in the process.’
The company changed. She was still sitting at a table surrounded by soldiers — she even recognised some of the faces — but now they all looked as if they had been through a few more years of war. Bad war, too. The Captain had a clunking prosthetic arm where there had been a good arm before. The suits were no longer made of insect spit, but were now sliding assemblages of lubricated plates. They were hyper-reflective, like scabs of frozen mercury.
‘Fucking Demarchists,’ the Captain said. ‘Let us keep all that fancy biotech shit until the moment we really needed it. We were really kicking the spiders. Then they pulled the licenses, said we were violating terms of fair use. All that neat squirmy stuff just fucking melted overnight. Bioweps, suits — gone. Now look what we’ve got to work with.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do fine,’ Antoinette said. ‘Captain, listen to me. The Pattern Jugglers are moving the ship to safety. You have to give them time.’
‘They’ve had time,’ he said. It was a heartening moment of lucidity, a connection to the present.
‘Not enough,’ she said.
The steel fist of his new arm clenched. ‘You don’t understand. We have to leave Ararat. There are windows opening above us.’
The back of her neck tingled. ‘Windows, John?’
‘I sense them. I sense a lot of things. I’m a ship, for fuck’s sake.’ Suddenly they were all alone. It was just the Captain and Antoinette. In the bright lustre of his reflective armour she saw a bird traverse the sky.
‘You’re a ship. Good. So stop whining and start acting like one, beginning with a sense of responsibility to your crew. That includes me. What are these windows?’
He waited a while before answering. Had she just got through to him, or sent him scurrying ever deeper into labyrinths of regression?
‘Opportunities for escape,’ he said eventually. ‘Clear channels.
They keep opening, and then closing.’
‘You could be mistaken. It would be really, really bad if you were mistaken.’
‘I don’t think I am.’
‘We’ve been waiting, hoping, for a sign,’ Antoinette said. ‘Some message from Remontoire. But there hasn’t been one.’
‘Maybe he can’t get a message through. Maybe he’s been trying, and this is the best you’re going to get.’
‘Give us a few more hours,’ she said. ‘That’s all we’re asking for. Just enough time to move the ship to a safe distance. Please, John.’
‘Tell me about the girl. Tell me about Aura.’
Antoinette frowned. She remembered mentioning the girl, but she did not think she had ever told the Captain her name. ‘Aura’s fine,’ she said, guardedly. ‘Why?’
‘What does she have to say on the matter?’
‘She thinks we should trust the Pattern Jugglers,’ Antoinette said.
‘And beyond that?’
‘She keeps talking about a place — somewhere called Hela. Something to do with a man named Quaiche.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all. It may not even mean anything. It’s not even Aura speaking to us directly — it’s all coming via her mother. I don’t think Scorpio takes it that seriously. Frankly, I’m not sure I do either. They really, really want to think that Aura is something valuable because of what she cost them. But what if she isn’t? What if she’s just a kid? What if she knows a little, but nowhere near as much as everyone wants her to?’
‘What does Malinin think?’
This surprised her. ‘Why Malinin?’
‘They talk about him. I hear them. I heard about Aura the same way. All those thousands of people inside me, all their whispers, all their secrets. They need a new leader. It could be Malinin; it could be Aura.’
‘There hasn’t even been an official announcement about the existence of Aura,’ Antoinette said.
‘You seriously believe that makes any difference? They know, all of them. You can’t keep a secret like that, Antoinette.’
‘They have a leader already,’ she said.
‘They want someone new and bright and a little frightening. Someone who hears voices, someone they’ll allow to lead them in a time of uncertainties. Scorpio isn’t that leader.’ The Captain paused, caressed his false hand with the scarred fingers of the other. ‘The windows are still opening and closing. I sense a growing urgency. If Remontoire is behind this, he may not be able to offer us many more opportunities for escape. Soon, very soon, I shall have to make my move.’
She knew she had wasted her time. She had thought at first that in showing her this place he was inviting her to a new level of intimacy, but his position had not changed at all. She had stated her case, and all he had done was listen.
‘I shouldn’t have bothered,’ she said.
‘Antoinette, listen to me now. I like you more than you realise. You have always treated me with kindness and compassion. Because of that I care for you, and I care for your survival.’
She looked into his eyes. ‘So what, John?’
‘You can leave. There is still time. But not much.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But — if it’s all right with you — I think I’ll stay for the ride.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking around. ‘This is about the only decent ship in town.’
Scorpio moved through the shuttle. He had turned almost all the fuselage surfaces transparent, save for a strip which marked the floor and a portion where Valensin waited with Khouri and her child. With all nonessential illumination turned down, he saw the outside world almost as if he were floating in the evening air.
With nightfall it had become obvious that the space battle was now very close to Ararat. The clouds had broken up, perhaps because of the excessive energies now being dumped into Ararat’s upper atmosphere. Reports of objects splashing down were coming in too rapidly to be processed. Gashes of fire streaked from horizon to horizon every few minutes as unidentified objects — spacecraft, missiles, or perhaps things for which the colonists had no name — knifed deep into Ararat’s airspace. Sometimes there were volleys of them; sometimes things moved in eerie lock-step formation. The trajectories were subject to violent, impossible-looking hairpins and reversals. It was clear that the major protagonists of the battle were deploying inertia-suppressing machinery with a recklessness that chilled Scorpio. Aura had already told them as much, through the mouthpiece of her mother. Clearly the appropriated alien technology was a little more controllable than it had been when Clavain and Skade had tested each other’s nerves with it on the long pursuit from Yellowstone to Resurgam space. But there were still people who told horror stories of the times when the technology had gone wrong. Pushed to its unstable limits, the inertia-suppressing machinery did vile things to both the flesh and the mind. If they were using it as a routine military tool — just another toy in the sandpit — then he dreaded to think what was now considered dangerous and cutting edge.
He thought about Antoinette for a moment, hoping that she was getting somewhere with the Captain. He was not greatly optimistic that she would succeed in changing the Captain’s mind once it was made up. But it still wasn’t absolutely clear whether or not he intended to take the ship up. Perhaps the revving-up of the Conjoiner drive engines was just his way of making sure they were in good working order, should they be needed at some point in the future. It didn’t have to mean that the ship was going t
o leave in the next few hours.
That kind of desperate, yearning optimism was foreign to Scorpio even now, and would have been quite alien during his Chasm City years. He was a pessimist at heart. Perhaps that was why he had never been very good at forward planning, at thinking more than a few days ahead. If you tended to believe on an innate level that things were always going to go from bad to worse, what was the point of even trying to intervene? All that was left was to make the best of the immediate situation.
But here he was hoping — in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary — that the ship was going to stay on Ararat. Something had to be wrong for him to start thinking that way. Something had to be playing on his mind. He didn’t have far to look for it, either.
Only a few hours earlier he had broken twenty-three years of self-imposed discipline. In Clavain’s presence, he had made every effort to live up to the old man’s standards. For years he had hated baseline humans for what they had done to him during his years of indentured slave service. And if that was not enough to spur his animosity, he only had to think of the thing that he was: this swaying, comedic mongrel of human and pig, this compromise that had all the flaws of both and none of the advantages of either. He knew the litany of his disadvantages. He couldn’t walk as well as a human. He couldn’t hold things the way they could. He couldn’t see or hear as well as they did. There were colours he would never know. He couldn’t think as fluidly as they did and he lacked a well-developed capacity for abstract visualisation. When he listened to music all he heard was complex sequential sounds, lacking any emotional component. His predicted lifespan, optimistically, was about two-thirds that of a human who had received no longevity therapy or germline modifications. And — so some humans said, when they didn’t think they were in earshot of pigs — his kind didn’t even taste the way nature intended.
That hurt. That really fucking hurt.
But he had dared to think that he had put all that resentment behind him. Or if not behind him, then at least in a small, sealed mental compartment which he only ever opened in times of crisis.
And even then he kept the resentment under control, used it to give him strength and resolve. The positive side was that it had forced him to try to be better than they expected. It had made him delve inside himself for qualities of leadership and compassion he had never suspected he possessed. He would show them what a pig was capable of. He would show them that a pig could be as statesmanlike as Clavain; as forward-thinking and judicial; as cruel and as kind as circumstances merited.
And for twenty-three years it had worked, too. The resentment had made him better. But in all that time, he now realised, he had still been in Clavain’s shadow. Even when Clavain had gone to his island, the man had not really abdicated power.
Except that now Clavain was gone, and only a few dozen hours into this new regime, only a few dozen hours after stumbling into the hard scrutiny of real leadership, Scorpio had failed. He had lashed out against Hallatt, against a man who in that instant of rage had personified the entire corpus of baseline humanity. He knew it was Blood who had thrown the knife, but his own hand had been on it just as surely. Blood had merely been an extension of Scorpio’s intent.
He knew he had never really liked Hallatt. Nothing about that had changed. The man was compromised by his involvement in the totalitarian government on Resurgam. Nothing could be proved, but it was more than likely that Hallatt had at least been aware of the beatings and interrogation sessions, the state-sanctioned executions. And yet the evacuees from Resurgam had to be represented in some form. Hallatt had also done a lot of good during the final days of the exodus. People that Scorpio judged to be reasonable and trustworthy had been prepared to testify on his behalf. He was tainted, but he wasn’t incriminated. And — when one looked at the data closely — there was something unfortunate in the personal history of just about everyone who had come from Resurgam. Where did one draw the line? One hundred and sixty thousand evacuees had come to Ararat from the old world, and very few of them had lacked some association with the government. In a state like that, the machinery of government touched more lives than it left alone. You couldn’t eat, sleep or breathe without being in some small way complicit in the functioning of the machine.
So he didn’t like Hallatt. But Hallatt wasn’t a monster or a fugitive. And because of that — in that instant of incandescent rage — he had struck out against a fundamentally decent man that he just happened not to like. Hallatt had pushed him to the edge with his understandable scepticism about the matter of Aura, and Scorpio had allowed that provocation to touch him where it hurt. He had struck at Hallatt, but it could have been anyone. Even, had the provocation been severe enough, someone that he actually liked, like Antoinette, Xavier Liu or one of the other human seniors.
What almost made it worse was the way the rest of the party had reacted. When the rage had died, when the enormity of what he had done had begun to sink in, he had expected mutiny. He had at least expected some open questioning of his fitness for leadership.
But there had been nothing. It was almost as if they had all just turned a blind eye, regretting what he had done but accepting that this flash of madness was part of the package. He was a pig, and with pigs you had to tolerate that kind of thing.
He was sure that was what they were all thinking. Even, perhaps, Blood.
Hallatt had survived. The knife had touched no major organs. Scorpio didn’t know whether to put this down to spectacular accuracy on Blood’s behalf, or spectacular inaccuracy instead.
He didn’t want to know.
As it turned out, no one else really liked Hallatt either. The man’s days as a colony senior were over, his avowed distrust of Khouri not helping his case. But since the Resurgam representatives were cycled around anyway, Hallatt’s enforced standing-down was not the dramatic thing it might have been. The circumstances of his resignation would be kept secret, but something would inevitably filter out. There would be rumours of violence, and Scorpio’s name would surely feature somewhere in the telling.
Let it happen. He could live with that easily enough. There had been violent episodes in the past, and the rumours of those had become suitably exaggerated as they did the rounds. They had done him no real harm in the long run.
But those violent episodes had been justified. There had been no hatred behind them, no attempt to redress the sins visited upon Scorpio and his kind by their human elders. They had been necessary gestures. But what he had done to Hallatt had been personal, nothing whatsoever to do with the security of the planet.
He had failed himself, and in that sense he had also failed Ararat.
‘Scorp? Are you all right?’
It was Khouri, sitting in the darkened portion of the shuttle. Valensin’s servitors were still monitoring Aura’s incubator, but Khouri was keeping her own vigil. Once or twice he had heard her talking softly to the child, even singing to her. It seemed odd to him, given that they were already bonded on a neural level.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘You look preoccupied. Is it what happened in the iceberg?’
Her remark surprised him. Most of the time, his expressions were completely opaque to outsiders. ‘Well, there’s the small business of the war we’re caught up in, and the fact that I’m not sure any of us are going to make it into next week, but other than that…’
‘We’re all bothered by the war,’ she said, ‘but with you there’s something else. I didn’t see it before we went to find Aura.’
He had the shuttle form a chair for him, something at pig-height, and sat down next to her. He noticed that Valensin was snoozing, his head bobbing up at periodic intervals as he tried to stay awake. They were all exhausted, all functioning at the limits of endurance.
‘I’m surprised that you want to talk to me,’ he said.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because of what you asked of me, and what I refused to give you.’ In case his point was not obvious to
her, he gestured at Aura. ‘I thought you’d hate me for that. You’d have had every right.’
‘I didn’t like it, no.’
‘Well, then.’ He offered her his palms, accepting his fate.
‘But it wasn’t you, Scorp. You didn’t stop me taking her back inside me. It was the situation, the mess we’re in. You simply acted in the only way that made sense to you. I’m not over it, but don’t cut yourself up about it, all right? This is war. Feelings get hurt. I can cope. I still have my daughter.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ Scorpio said. He didn’t believe it, but it seemed the right sort of thing to say under the circumstances.
‘Really?’ she asked.
He looked at the wrinkled, pink-red child. ‘Really.’
‘I was worried you’d hate her, Scorp, because of what she cost.’
‘Clavain wouldn’t have hated her,’ he said. ‘That’s good enough for me.’
‘Thanks, Scorp.’
They sat in silence for a minute or so. Above, through the transparent hull, the light show continued. Something — some weapon or device in near-Ararat space — was scribing lines across the sky. There were arcs and angles and straight lines, and each mark took a few seconds to fade into the purple-black background. There was something nagging him about those lines, Scorpio thought, some sense that there was a meaning implicit in them, if only he had the quickness of mind to tease it out.
‘There’s something else,’ he said, quietly.
‘Concerning Aura?’
‘No. Concerning me, actually. You weren’t there, but I hurt a man today.’ Scorpio looked down at his small, childlike shoes. He had misjudged the height of the seat slightly, so that his toes did not quite reach the floor.
‘I’m sure you had your reasons,’ Khouri said.
‘That’s the problem: I didn’t. I hurt him out of blind rage. Something inside me snapped, something I’d kidded myself that I had under control for the last twenty-three years.’
‘We all have days like that,’ she said.
‘I try not to. For twenty-three years, all I’ve ever tried to do is get through the day without making that kind of mistake. And today I failed. Today I threw it all away, in one moment of weakness.’
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