Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.
‘Hello,’ Clavain said aloud, his amplified voice booming out of his suit speaker.
The pig moved. The motion was sudden and springlike and none of them were expecting it. The pig lashed out with something long and metallic clutched in one fist. The object gleamed, its edge reverberating like a tuning fork. The pig daggered it hard into Clavain’s chest. The tip of the blade shivered across the armour, leaving only a narrow shining furrow, but found the point near Clavain’s shoulder where two plaques slid across each other. The blade slipped into the gap, Clavain’s suit registering the intrusion with a shrill pulsing alarm in his helmet. He jerked back before the blade was able to penetrate his inner suit layer and reach his skin, and then collided with a sharp crack against the wall behind him. The weapon tumbled from the pig’s grip, spinning away like a ship that had lost gyroscopic control. Clavain recognised it as a piezo-knife; he carried something similar on his own suit’s utility belt. The pig must have stolen it from one of the Demarchists.
Clavain got his breath back. ‘Let’s start again, shall we?’
The other Conjoiners had the pig pinned down. Clavain inspected his suit, calling up damage schematics. There was a mild loss of pressure integrity near the shoulder. He was in no danger of suffocating to death, but he was still mindful of the possibility of undiscovered contaminants aboard the enemy ship. Almost as a reflex action he unhitched a sealant spray from his belt, selected nozzle diameter and pasted the rapidly hardening epoxy around the general area of the knife wound, where it solidified in the form of a sinuous grey cyst.
Somewhere before the dawn of the Demarchist era, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, not far from the time of Clavain’s own birth, a spectrum of human genes had been spliced into those of the domestic pig. The intention had been to optimise the ease with which organs could be transplanted between the two species, enabling pigs to grow body parts that could be harvested later for human utilisation. There were better ways to repair or replace damaged tissue now, had been for centuries, but the legacy of the pig experiments remained. The genetic intervention had gone too far, achieving not just cross-species compatibility but something entirely unexpected: intelligence.
But no one, not even the pigs, really knew what had happened. There might not have been deliberate tinkering to bring their cognitive faculties up to human level, but the pigs had certainly not gained language by accident. Not all of them had it — there were distinct subgroups of pigs with various mental and vocal capacities — but those that could speak had been engineered that way by someone who had known exactly what they were doing. It was not simply that their brains had the right grammatical machinery wired in. They had also had their throats, lungs and jaws adapted so that they could form human speech sounds.
Clavain eased forwards to speak to the prisoner. ‘Can you understand me?’ he asked, first in Norte and then in Canasian, the Demarchists’ main language. ‘My name is Nevil Clavain. You’re in the custody of Conjoiners.’
The pig answered, his remodelled jaw and throat anatomy enabling him to form perfect human sounds. ‘I don’t care who I’m in the custody of. You can fuck off and die.’
‘Neither happens to be on my agenda for the day.’
The pig warily uncovered one pink-red eye. ‘Who the fuck are you anyway? Where are the rest of them?’
‘The shipmaster’s crew? I’m afraid they’re all dead.’
The pig showed no detectable gratitude at this news. ‘You killed them?’
‘No. They were already dead when we got aboard.’
‘And you are?’
‘As I said, Conjoiners.’
‘Spiders…’ The pig contorted its almost human mouth into a semblance of disgust. ‘You know what I do to spiders? I piss them off toilet seats.’
‘Very nice.’
Clavain could see this was going nowhere fast; subvocally he asked one of the nearby troops to get the prisoner sedated and ferried back to Nightshade. He had no idea who or what the pig represented, how it slotted into the spiralling endgame of the war, but he would know a great deal more once the pig had been trawled. And a dose of Conjoiner medichines would do wonders for the pig’s reticence.
Clavain remained on the enemy ship while the sweep teams completed the last of their checks, ensuring that the enemy had left behind no tactically useful information. But there was nothing; the ship’s data stores had been wiped clean. A parallel search revealed no technologies that were not already well understood by the Conjoiners, and no weapons systems that were worth appropriating. The standard procedure at this point was to destroy the searched vessel, to prevent it falling back into enemy possession.
Clavain was thinking about the best way to scuttle the ship — a missile or a demolition charge? — when he felt Remontoire’s presence invade his head.
[Clavain?]
What is it?
[We’re picking up a general distress message from the freighter.]
Antoinette Bax? I thought she was dead.
[She isn’t, but she might soon be. Her ship has engine problems — a tokamak failure, it seems. She hasn’t made escape velocity, and she hasn’t managed an orbital injection either.]
Clavain nodded, more for his benefit than Remontoire’s. He imagined the kind of parabolic trajectory Storm Bird had to be on. She might not have reached the apex of that parabola yet, but sooner or later Antoinette Bax was going to start sliding back towards the cloud deck. He imagined, too, the kind of desperation that would have led her to issue a general distress signal when the only ship within answering distance was a Conjoiner vessel. In Clavain’s experience, the majority of pilots would have chosen death rather than capture by the spiders.
[Clavain… you realise we can’t possibly acknowledge her call.]
I realise.
[That would set a precedent. We’d be endorsing illegal activity. At the very least, we’d have no choice but to recruit her.]
Clavain nodded again, thinking of the times he had seen prisoners scream and thrash as they were led to the recruitment theatres, where their heads would be pumped full of Conjoiner neural machinery. They were wrong to fear it; he knew that better than anyone, since he had once resisted it himself. But he understood how they felt.
And he wondered if he wanted to inflict that terror upon Antoinette Bax.
A little while later Clavain saw the bright blue spark as the enemy ship hit the gas giant’s atmosphere. The timing had been accidental, but she had hit on the dark side, illuminating stacked cloud layers in purple strobe flashes as she plummeted deeper. It was impressive, beautiful, even, and Clavain momentarily wanted to show it to Galiana, for it was exactly the kind of visual spectacle that would have delighted her. She would have approved of his scuttling method, too: nothing as wasteful as a missile or a demolition charge. Instead, he had attached three tractor rockets from Nightshade, tiny drones which had glued themselves to the enemy’s hull like remora. The tractors had whisked the enemy ship towards the gas giant, only detaching when she was minutes from re-entry. The angle of attack had been steep, and the enemy craft had incinerated impressively.
The tractors were haring home now, accelerating at high burn to catch up with Nightshade, which had already turned back towards the Mother Nest. Once the tractors had returned the operation could be considered closed; there would only be the matter of the prisoner to attend to, but the pig’s fate was of no great urgency. Of Antoinette Bax… well, irrespective of her motives, Clavain admired her bravery; not just because she had come so far into a war zone, but also because of the way she had so brazenly ignored the shipmaster’s warning and, when it became necessary, the way she had summoned the courage to ask the Conjoiners for help. She must have known that it was an unreasonable request; that by the illegality of her trespass into the war zone she had forfeited any right to assistance, and that a military ship was hardly likely to waste time or fuel h
elping her out. She must also have known that even if the Conjoiners did save her life, the penalty she would pay for that would be conscription into their ranks, a fate that the Demarchist propaganda machine had made to seem hellish in the extreme.
No. She could not have reasonably expected rescue. But it had been brave of her to ask.
Clavain sighed, teetering on the edge of self-disgust. He issued a neural command instructing Nightshade to tight-beam the stricken freighter. When the link was established, he spoke aloud. ‘Antoinette Bax… this is Nevil Clavain. I am aboard the Conjoiner vessel. Can you hear me?’
There was some timelag now, and the return signal was poorly focused. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from somewhere beyond the furthest quasar.
‘Why are you answering me now, you bastard? I can see you’ve left me to die.’
‘I’m curious, that’s all.’ He held his breath, half-expecting that she would not reply.
‘About what?’
‘About what made you ask for our help. Aren’t you terrified of what we’ll do to you?’
‘Why should I be terrified?’
She sounded nonchalant but Clavain wasn’t fooled. ‘It’s generally our policy to assimilate captured prisoners, Bax. We’d bring you aboard and feed our machines into your brain. Doesn’t that concern you?’
‘Yes, but I’ll tell you what concerns me a fuck of a lot more right now, and that’s hitting this fucking planet.’
Clavain smiled. ‘That’s a very pragmatic attitude, Bax. I admire it.’
‘Good. Now will you fuck off and let me die in peace?’
‘Antoinette, listen to me carefully. There’s something I need you to do for me, with some urgency.’
She must have detected the change of tone in his voice, although she still sounded suspicious. ‘What?’
‘Have your ship transmit a blueprint of itself to me. I want a complete map of your hull’s structural integrity profile. Hardpoints, that kind of thing. If you can persuade your hull to colour itself to reveal maximum stress contours, all the better. I want to know where I can safely put a load without having your ship fold under the strain.’
‘There’s no way you can save me. You’re too far away. Even if you turned around now, it’d be too late.’
‘There’s a way, trust me. Now, that data, please, or I’ll have to trust my instincts, and that may not be for the best.’
She did not answer for a moment. He waited, scratching his beard, and only breathed again when he felt Nightshade’s acknowledgement that the data had been uploaded. He filtered the transmission for neuropathic viruses and then allowed it into his skull. Everything he needed to know about the freighter bloomed in his head, crammed into short-term memory.
‘Thank you very much, Antoinette. That will do nicely.’
Clavain sent an order to one of the returning tractor rockets. The tractor peeled away from its brethren at whiplash acceleration, executing a hairpin reversal that would have reduced an organic passenger to paste. Clavain authorised the tractor to ignore all its internal safety limits, removing the need for it to conserve enough fuel for a safe return to Nightshade.
‘What are you going to do?’ Bax asked.
‘I’m sending a drone back. It will latch on to your hull and drag you to clear space, out of the Jovian’s gravity well. I’ll have the tractor give you a modest nudge in the direction of Yellowstone, but I’m afraid you’ll be on your own from then. I hope you can fix your tokamak, or else you’ll be in for a verv long fall home.’
It seemed to take an eternity for his words to sink in. ‘You’re not going to take me prisoner?’
‘Not today, Antoinette. But if you ever cross my path again, I promise one thing: I’ll kill you.’
He had not enjoyed delivering the threat, but hoped it might knock some sense into her. Clavain closed the link before she could answer.
CHAPTER 4
In a building in Cuvier, on the planet Resurgam, a woman stood at a window, facing away from the door with her hands clasped tightly behind her back.
‘Next,’ she said.
While she waited for the suspect to be dragged in, the woman remained at the window, admiring the tremendous and sobering view that it presented. The raked windows reached from floor to ceiling, leaning outwards at the top. Structures of utilitarian aspect marched away in all directions, cubes and rectangles piled atop one another. The ruthlessly rectilinear buildings inspired a sense of crushing conformity and subjugation; mental waveguides designed to exclude the slightest joyful or uplifting thought.
Her office, which was merely one slot in the much larger Inquisition House itself, was situated in the rebuilt portion of Cuvier. Historical records — the Inquisitor had not been there herself during the events — established that the building lay more or less directly above the ground-zero point where the True Path Inundationists had detonated the first of their terrorist devices. With a yield in the two-kilotonne range, the pinhead-sized antimatter bombs had not been the most impressive destructive devices in her experience. But, she supposed, it was not how big your weapon was that mattered, but what you did with it.
The terrorists could not have picked a softer target, and the results had been appropriately calamitous.
‘Next…’ the Inquisitor repeated, a little louder this time.
The door creaked open a hand’s width. She heard the voice of the guard who stood outside. ‘That’s it for today, ma’am.’
Of course — Ibert’s file had been the last in the pile.
‘Thank you,’ the Inquisitor replied. I don’t suppose you’ve heard any news on the Thorn inquiry?‘
The guard answered with a trace of unease, as well he might given that he was passing information between two rival government departments. ‘They’ve released a man after questioning, I gather. He had a watertight alibi, though it took a little persuasion to get it out of him. Something about being with a woman other than his wife.’ He shrugged. The usual story…‘
‘And the usual persuasion, I imagine — a few unfortunate trips down the stairs. So they’ve no additional leads on Thorn?’
They’re no closer to catching him than you are to catching the Triumvir. Sorry. You know what I mean, ma’am.‘
‘Yes…’ She prolonged the word tortuously.
‘Will that be all, ma’am?’
‘For now.’
The door creaked shut.
The woman whose official title was Inquisitor Vuilleumier returned her attention to the city. Delta Pavonis was low in the sky, beginning to shade the sides of the buildings in various faint permutations of rust and orange. She looked at the view until dusk fell, comparing it in her mind’s eye with her memories of Chasm City and, before that, Sky’s Edge. It was always at dusk that she decided whether she liked a place or not. She remembered once, not long after her arrival in Chasm City, asking a man named Mirabel whether there had ever come a point when he had decided he liked the city. Mirabel had, like her, been a native of Sky’s Edge. He had told her that he had found ways of getting used to it. She had doubted him, but in the end he had been proven right. But it was only when she was wrenched away from Chasm City that she had begun to look back on it with anything resembling fondness.
She had never reached that state on Resurgam.
The lights of government-issue electric cars stirred silver rivers between the buildings. She turned from the window and walked across the room to her private chamber. She closed the door behind her.
Security considerations dictated that the chamber was windowless. She eased herself into a padded seat behind a vast horseshoe-shaped desk. It was an old escritoire whose dead cybernetic innards had been reamed out and replaced by much cruder systems. A pot of stale, tepid coffee sat on a heated coil at one end of the desk. A buzzing electric fan gave off the tang of ozone.
Three walls, including most of the wall she had stepped through, were lined with shelves containing bound reports detailing fifteen years’ wo
rth of effort. It would have been an absurdity for an entire department of government to be dedicated to the capture of a single individual: a woman who could not with certainty be said to be still alive, much less on Resurgam. Therefore the remit of the Inquisitor’s office extended to the gathering of intelligence on a range of external threats to the colony. But it was a fact that the Triumvir had become the most celebrated of the still-open cases, in the same way that the apprehension of Thorn, and the dismantling of the movement he fronted, dominated the work of the neighbouring department, Internal Threats. Though it was more than sixty years since she committed her crimes, high-ranking officials continued to bray for the Triumvir’s arrest and trial, using her as a focus for public sentiments that might otherwise have been directed at the government. It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure. The Inquisitor had a great many other things she would rather be doing than pursuing the war criminal. But if her department failed to show the necessary enthusiasm for the task, another would surely take its place, and that could not be tolerated. There was the faintest of possibilities that a new department might succeed.
So the Inquisitor maintained the pretence. The Triumvir case remained legitimately open because the Triumvir was an Ultra, and could therefore be assumed to be still alive despite the time that had passed since her criminal activities. On her case alone there were lists of tens of thousands of potential suspects, transcriptions of thousands of interviews. There were hundreds of biographies and case summaries. Some individuals, around a dozen, each merited a good portion of a shelf. And this was just a fraction of the office’s archive; just the paperwork that had to be immediately on hand. Down in the basement, and at other sites around the city, were many more miles of documentation. A marvellous and largely secret network of pneumatic tubes enabled files to be whisked from office to office in seconds.
On her desk were a few opened files. Various names had been ringed, underscored or connected by spidery lines. Photographs were stapled to summary cards, blurry long-lens acquisitions of faces moving through crowds. She leafed through them, aware that she had to give a convincing impression of actually following up these apparent leads. She had to listen to her field agents and digest the snippets of information passed on by informers. She had to give every indication that she was actually interested in finding the Triumvir.
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