Antoinette had never known anything except a post-plague environment, so she had no expectations of actually finding any useful information, even if the data she was looking for might once have existed. The system’s data networks had been rebuilt almost from scratch during the post-plague years, and much that had been archived before then had been corrupted or erased during the crisis.
But to her surprise there was rather a lot out there about Clavain, or at least about a Clavain. The famous Clavain, the one that Xavier had known about, had been born on Earth way back in the twenty-second century, in one of the last perfect summers before the glaciers rolled in and the place became a pristine snowball. He had gone to Mars and fought against the Conjoiners in their earliest incarnation. Antoinette read that again and frowned: against the Conjoiners? But she read on.
Clavain had gained notoriety during his Martian days. They called him the Butcher of Tharsis, the man who had turned the course of the Battle of the Bulge. He had authorised the use of red-mercury, nuclear and foam-phase weapons against spider forces, gouging glassy kilometre-wide craters across the face of Mars. In some accounts his deeds made him an automatic war criminal. Yet according to some of the less partisan reports, Clavain’s actions could be interpreted as having saved many millions of lives, both spider and allied, that would otherwise have been lost in a protracted ground campaign. Equally, there were reports of his heroism: of Clavain saving the lives of trapped soldiers and civilians; of him sustaining many injuries, recovering and going straight back to the front line. He had been there when the spiders brought down the aerial docking tower at Chryse, and had been pinned in the rubble for eighteen days with no food or water except the supplies in his skinsuit. When they pulled him out they found him clutching a cat that had also been trapped in the ruins, its spine snapped by masonry and yet still alive, nourished by portions from Clavain’s own rations. The cat died a week later. It took Clavain three months to recover.
But that hadn’t been the end of his career. He had been captured by the spider queen, the woman called Galiana who had created the whole spider mess in the first place. For months Galiana had held him prisoner, finally releasing him when the cease-fire was negotiated. Thereafter, there had always been a weird bond between the two former adversaries. When the uneasy peace had begun to crumble, it had been Clavain who went down to try to iron things out with the spider queen. And it was on that mission that he was presumed to have ‘defected’, throwing in his lot with the Conjoiners, accepting their remodelling machines into his skull and becoming one of the hive-mind spiders.
And that was when Clavain more or less dropped out of history. Antoinette skimmed the remaining records and found numerous anecdotal reports of him popping up here and there over the next four-hundred-odd years. It was possible; she could not deny that. Clavain had been getting on a bit before he defected, but with freezing and the time dilation that naturally accompanied any amount of star travel, he might not have lived through more than a few decades of those four centuries. And that was not even allowing for the kind of rejuvenation therapies that had been possible before the plague. No, it could have been Clavain — but it could equally well have been someone else with the same name. What were the chances of Antoinette Bax’s life intersecting with that of a major historical figure? Things like that just didn’t happen to her.
Something disturbed her. There was a commotion outside the office, the sound of things toppling and scraping, Xavier’s voice raised in protest. Antoinette killed the terminal and went outside.
What she found made her gasp. Xavier was up against one wall, his feet an inch from the floor. He was pinned there — painfully, she judged — by one manipulator of a multi-armed gloss-black police proxy. The machine — again it made her think of a nightmarish collision of pairs of huge black scissors — had barged into the office, knocking over cabinets and potted plants.
She looked at the proxy. Although they all appeared to be more or less identical, she just knew this was the same one, being slaved by the same pilot, that had come to pay her visit aboard Storm Bird.
‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said.
‘Miss Bax.’ The machine lowered Xavier to the ground, none too gently. Xavier coughed, winded, rubbing a raw spot beneath his throat. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a series of hoarse hacking vowels.
‘Mr Liu was impeding me in the course of my inquiries,’ the proxy said.
Xavier coughed again. ‘I… just… didn’t get out of the way fast enough.’
‘Are you all right, Xave?’ Antoinette asked
I’m all right,‘ he said, regaining some of the colour he had lost a moment earlier. He turned to the machine, which was occupying most of the office, flicking things over and examining other things with its multitude of limbs. ’What the fuck do you want?‘
‘Answers, Mr Liu. Answers to exactly the questions that were troubling me upon my last visit.’
Antoinette glared at the machine. ‘This fucker paid you a visit while I was away?’
The machine answered her. ‘I most certainly did, Miss Bax — seeing as you were so unforthcoming, I felt it necessary.’
Xavier looked at Antoinette.
‘He boarded Storm Bird,’ she confirmed
‘And?’
The proxy overturned a filing cabinet, rummaging with bored intent through the spilled paperwork. ‘Miss Bax showed me that she was carrying a passenger in a reefersleep casket. Her story, which was verified by Hospice Idlewild, was that there had been some kind of administrative confusion, and that the body was in the process of being returned to the Hospice.’
Antoinette shrugged, knowing she was going to have to bluff this one out. ‘So?’
‘The body was already dead. And you never arrived at the Hospice. You steered for interplanetary space shortly after I departed.’
‘Why would I have done that?’
‘That, Miss Bax, is precisely what I would like to know.’ The proxy abandoned the paperwork, kicking the cabinet aside with a whining flick of one sharp-edged piston-driven limb. ‘I asked Mr Liu, and he was no help at all. Were you, Mr Liu?’
‘I told you what I knew.’
‘Perhaps I should take a special interest in you too, Mr Liu — what do you think? You have a very interesting past, judging by police records. You knew James Bax very well, didn’t you?’
Xavier shrugged. ‘Who didn’t?’
‘You worked for him. That implies a more than passing knowledge of the man, wouldn’t you say?’
‘We had a business arrangement. I fixed his ship. I fix a lot of ships. It didn’t mean we were married.’
‘But you were undoubtedly aware that James Bax was a figure of concern to us, Mr Liu. A man not overly bothered about matters of right and wrong. A man not greatly troubled by anything so inconsequential as the law.’
‘How was he to know?’ Xavier argued. ‘You fuckers make the law up as you go along.’
The proxy moved with blinding speed, becoming a whirling black blur. Antoinette felt the breeze as it moved. The next thing she knew it had Xavier pinned to the wall again, higher this time, and with what looked like a good deal more force. He was choking, clawing at the machine’s manipulators in a desperate effort to free himself.
‘Did you know, Mr Liu, that the Merrick case has never been satisfactorily closed?’
Xavier couldn’t answer.
‘The Merrick case?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Lyle Merrick,’ the proxy replied. ‘You know the fellow. A trader, like your father. On the wrong side of the law.’
‘Lyle Merrick died…’
Xavier was beginning to turn blue.
‘But the case has never been closed, Miss Bax. There have always been a number of loose ends. What do you know of the Mandelstam Ruling?’
‘Another one of your fucking new laws, by any chance?’
The machine let Xavier fall to the floor. He was unconscious. She hoped he was unconscious.
‘Your father knew Lyle Merrick, Miss Bax. Xavier Liu knew your father. Mr Liu almost certainly knew Lyle Merrick. What with that and your propensity for ferrying dead bodies into the war zone for no logical reason that we can think of, it’s hardly any wonder that you two are of such interest to us, is it?’
‘If you touch Xavier one more time…’
‘What, Miss Bax?’
‘I’ll…’
‘You’ll do nothing. You’re powerless here. There aren’t even any security cameras or mites in this room. I know. I checked first.’
‘Fucker.’
The machine edged closer to her. ‘Of course, you could be carrying some form of concealed device, I suppose.’
Antoinette pressed herself back against one wall of the office. ‘What?’
The proxy extended a manipulator. She squeezed back even further, sucking in her breath, but it was no good. The proxy stroked its manipulator down the side of her face gently enough, but she was horribly aware of the damage it could do should the machine wish it. Then the manipulator caressed he; neck and moved down, lingering over her breasts.
‘You… fucker.’
‘I think you might be carrying a weapon, or drugs.’ There was a blur of metal, the same vile breeze. She flinched, but it was over in an instant. The proxy had torn her jacket off; her favourite plum jacket was ripped to shreds. Underneath she wore a tight black sleeveless vest with equipment pockets. She wriggled and swore, but the machine still held her tightly. It drew shapes on the vest, tugging it away from her skin.
‘I have to be sure, Miss Bax.’
She thought of the pilot, surgically inserted into a steel canister somewhere in the belly of the police cutter that had to be parked nearby, little more than a central nervous system and a few tedious add-ons.
‘You sick fuck.’
‘I am only being… thorough, Miss Bax.’
There was a crash and a clatter behind the machine. The proxy froze. Antoinette held her breath, just as puzzled. She wondered if the pilot had notified more proxies of the fun that was to be had.
The machine edged back from her and spun around very slowly. It faced a wall of shocking orange-brown and rippling black. By Antoinette’s estimate there were at least a dozen of them, six or seven orang-utans and about the same number of enhanced silverback gorillas. They had all been augmented for full bipedality and they were all carrying makeshift — in some cases not so makeshift — weapons.
The main silverback had a comically huge wrench in its hands. When it spoke its voice was almost pure subsonics, something Antoinette felt more in her stomach than heard. ‘Let her go.’
The proxy weighed its chances. Very probably it could have taken out all of the hyperprimates. It had tasers and glue-guns and other nasties. But there would have been a great deal of mess and a great deal of explaining to be done, and no guarantee that the proxy would not sustain a certain amount of damage before it had all the primates either pacified or dead.
It was not worth the bother, especially not when there were such powerful unions and political lobbies behind most of the hyperprimate species. The Ferrisville Convention would find it a lot harder to explain the death of a gorilla or orang-utan than a human, especially in Carousel New Copenhagen.
The proxy retreated, tucking most of its limbs away. For a moment the wall of hyperprimates refused to allow it to leave and Antoinette feared that there was going to bloodshed. But her rescuers only wanted to make their point.
The wall parted; the proxy scuttled out.
Antoinette let out a sigh. She wanted to thank the hyperprimates, but her first and most immediate concern was for Xavier. She knelt down by him and touched the side of his neck. She felt hot animal breath on hers.
‘He all right?’
She looked into the magnificent face of the silverback; it was like something carved from coal. ‘I think so. How did you know?’
The superbly low voice rumbled, ‘Xavier push panic button. We come.’
‘Thank you.’
The silverback stood up, towering over her. ‘We like Xavier. Xavier treat us good.’
Later, she inspected the remains of her jacket. Her father had given it to her on her seventeenth birthday. It had always been a little small for her — when she wore it, it looked more like a matador’s jacket — but despite that it had always been her favourite, and she always felt she had made it look right. Now it was ruined beyond any hope of repair.
When the primates had gone, and when Xavier was back on his feet, shaken but basically unharmed, they did what they could to tidy up the mess. It took several hours, most of which were spent putting the paperwork back into order. Xavier had always been meticulous about his book-keeping; even as the company slid towards bankruptcy, he said, he was damned if he was going to give the money-grabbing creditor bastards any more ammunition than they already had.
By midnight the place looked respectable again. But Antoinette knew it was not over. The proxy was going to come back, and next time it would make sure there would be no primate rescue party. Even if the proxy never did get to the bottom of what she had been doing in the war zone, there would be a thousand ways that the authorities could put her out of business. The proxy could have impounded Storm Bird already. All the proxy was doing, and she had to keep reminding herself that there was a human pilot behind it, was playing with her, making her life a misery of worry while giving itself, or himself, something amusing to do when it wasn’t harassing someone else.
She thought of asking Xavier why it was taking such an interest in her father’s associates, most specifically the Lyle Merrick case, but then she decided to put the whole thing out of her mind, at least until the morning.
Xavier went out and bought a couple more beers, and they finished them off while they were putting the last few items of furniture back into place.
‘Things will work out, Antoinette,’ he said.
‘You’re certain of that?’
‘You deserve it,’ he said. ‘You’re a good person. All you ever wanted to do was honour your father’s wishes.’
‘So why do I feel like such an idiot?’
‘You shouldn’t,’ he said, and kissed her.
They made love again — it felt like days since the last time — and then Antoinette fell asleep, sinking through layers of increasingly vague anxiety until she reached unconsciousness. And then the Demarchist propaganda dream began to take over: the one where she was on a liner that was raided by spiders; the one where she was taken to their cometary base and surgically prepared for induction into their hive mind.
But there was a difference this time. When the Conjoiners came to open her skull and sink their machines into it, the one who leant over her pulled down a white surgical mask to reveal the face she now recognised from the history texts, from the most recent anecdotal sightings. It was the face of a white-haired, bearded old patriarch, lined and characterful, sad and jolly at the same time, a face that might, under any other circumstances, have seemed kind and wise and grandfatherly.
It was the face of Nevil Clavain.
‘I told you not to cross my path again,’ he said.
The Mother Nest was a light-minute behind him when Clavain instructed the corvette to flip over and commence its deceleration burn, following the navigational data that Skade had given him. The starscape wheeled like something geared by well-oiled clockwork, shadows and pale highlights oozing over Clavain and the recumbent forms of his two passengers. A corvette was the nimblest vessel in the Conjoiner in-system fleet, but cramming three occupants into the hull resembled a mathematical exercise in optimal packing. Clavain was webbed into the pilot’s position, with tactile controls and visual read-outs within easy reach. The ship could be flown without blinking an eyelid, but it was also designed to withstand the kind of cybernetic assault that might impair routine neural commands. Clavain flew it via tactile control in any case, though he had barely moved a finger in hours. Tactical summaries jostled his
visual field, competing for attention, but there had been no hint of enemy activity within six light-hours.
Immediately to his rear, with their knees parallel to his shoulders, lay Remontoire and Skade. They were slotted into human-shaped spaces between the inner surfaces of weapons pods or fuel blisters and, like Clavain, they wore lightweight spacesuits. The black armoured surfaces of the suits reduced them to abstract extensions of the corvette’s interior. There was barely room for the suits, but there was even less room to put them on.
Skade?
[Yes, Clavain?]
I think it’s safe to tell me where we’re headed now, isn’t it?
Qust follow the flight plan and we’ll arrive there in good time. The Master of Works will be expecting us.]
Master of Works? Anyone I’ve met? He caught the sly curve of Skade’s smile, reflected in the corvette’s window.
[You’ll soon have the pleasure, Clavain.]
He didn’t need to be told that wherever they were going was still in the same part of the cometary halo that contained the Mother Nest. There was nothing out here but vacuum and comets, and even the comets were scarce. The Conjoiners had turned some comets into decoys to lure in the enemy, and had placed sensors, booby-traps and jamming systems on others, but he was not aware of any such activities taking place so close to home.
He tapped into systemwide newsfeeds as they flew. Only the most partisan enemy agencies pretended that there was any chance of a Demarchist victory now. Most of them were talking openly of defeat, though it was always worded in more ambiguous terms: cessation of hostilities; concession to some enemy demands; reopening of negotiations with the Conjoiners… the litany went on and on, but it was not difficult to read between the lines.
Attacks against Conjoiner assets had grown less and less frequent, with a commensurately dwindling success rate. Now the enemy was concentrating on protecting its own bases and strongholds, and even there they were failing. Most of the bases needed to be resupplied with provisions and armaments from the main production centres, which meant convoys of robot craft strung out on long, lonely trajectories across the system. The Conjoiners picked them off with ease; it was not even worth capturing their cargoes. The Demarchists had launched crash programmes to recover some of the expertise in nano-fabrication they had enjoyed before the Melding Plague, but the rumours coming out of their war labs hinted at grisly failures; of whole research teams turned into grey slurry by runaway replicators. It was like the twenty-first century all over again.
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