Three of them went out: Scorpio, Remontoire and Clavain.
There was mercifully little time to make the shuttle ready. Merciful because had Clavain been granted hours or days, he would have spent the entire time convulsed in doubt, endlessly balancing one additional weapon or piece of armour against the fuel that would be saved by leaving it behind. As it was they had to make do with one of the stripped-down shuttles that had been used to resupply the defence shuttle before they had brought the laser-powered shield sail into use. The shuttle was just a skeleton, a wispy geodesic sketch of black spars, struts and naked silvery subsystems, it looked, to Clavain’s eyes, faintly obscene. He was used to machines that kept their innards decently covered. But it would do the job well enough, he supposed. If Skade mounted any serious defence, armour wouldn’t help them anyway.
The flight deck was the only part of the ship that was shielded from space, and even then it was not pressurised. They would have to wear suits for the entire operation and take an additional suit with them for Felka to wear on the return leg. There was also room to stow a reefersleep casket if it turned out she was frozen. But in that case, Felka’s return mass would have to be offset by leaving behind weapons and fuel tanks at the halfway point.
Clavain took the middle seat, with the flight controls plugged into his suit. Scorpio sat on his left, Remontoire on his right; both could assume control of the avionics should Clavain need a rest.
‘Are you sure you trust me enough to have me along for the operation?’ Remontoire had asked with a playful smile when they were deciding who would go on the mission.
I guess I’ll find out, won’t; I?‘ Clavain had said.
‘I won’t be much use to you in an exoskeleton. You can’t put a standard suit over one, and we don’t have powered armour ready.’
Clavain had nodded at Blood, Scorpio’s deputy. ‘Get him out of the exoskeleton. If he tries anything, you know what to do.’
‘I won’t, Clavain,’ Remontoire had assured him.
‘I almost believe you. But I’m not sure I’d take the risk if there was someone else who knew Nightshade as well as you do. Or Skade, for that matter.’
‘I’m coming too,’ Scorpio had insisted.
‘We’re going to get Felka,’ Clavain had said. ‘Not to avenge Lasher.’
‘Perhaps.’ In so far as Clavain could read his expression, Scorpio had not looked fully convinced. ‘But let’s be honest. Once you’ve got Felka, you’re not going to walk out of there without doing some damage, are you?’
‘I’ll accept Skade’s surrender gratefully,’ Clavain had said.
‘We’ll take pinhead munitions,’ Scorpio had said. ‘You won’t miss a little hot dust, Clavain, and it’ll sure put a hole in Nightshade.’
‘I’m grateful for your help, Scorpio. And I understand your feelings towards Skade after what she did. But we need you here, to supervise the weapons programme.’
‘And we don’t need you?’
‘This is about me and Felka,’ Clavain had said.
Scorpio had put a hand on his arm. ‘So take help when it’s offered. I’m not in the habit of co-operating with people, Clavain, so make the most of this rare display of magnanimity and shut the fuck up.’
Clavain had shrugged. He had not felt optimistic about the mission, but Scorpio’s enthusiasm for a fight was oddly infectious.
He had turned to Remontoire. ‘Looks as if he’s along for the ride, Rem. Certain you want to be on the team now?’
Remontoire had looked at the pig, then back at Clavain. ‘We’ll manage,’ he had said.
Now that the mission had begun the two of them were silent, letting Clavain concentrate on the business of flying. He gunned the shuttle away from Zodiacal Light, homing in on the drifting Nightshade, trying not to think of how fast they were actually moving. The two major ships were falling through space at only two per cent below the speed of light, but there was still no strong visual cue that they were moving so rapidly. The stars had been shifted in both position and colour by relativistic effects, but they still appeared perfectly fixed and stationary, even at this high tau factor. Had their trajectory taken them close to a luminous body like a star, they might have seen it swing by in the night, squashed away from sphericity by Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. But even then it would not have slammed past unless they were nearly skimming its atmosphere. The exhaust flare of another ship, heading back to Yellowstone, would have been visible, but they had the corridor to themselves. And though the hulls of both ships glowed in the near infra-red, heated by the slow, constant abrasion of interstellar hydrogen and microscopic dust grains, this was nothing Clavain’s mind could process into any visceral sense of speed. He was aware that the same collisions were a problem for the shuttle, too, though its much smaller cross section made them less likely. But cosmic rays, relativistically boosted by their motion, were eating into him every second. That was why there was armour around the flight deck.
The trip to Nightshade passed quickly, perhaps because Clavain was fearful of what he would find upon his arrival. The trio spent most of the journey unconscious, conserving suit power, knowing that there was realistically nothing they could do should Skade launch an attack.
Clavain and his companions came around when they were in visual range of the crippled lighthugger.
She was dark, of course — they were in true interstellar space here — but Clavain could see her because Zodiacal Light was shining one of its optical lasers on to her hull. He could not make out all the details he wanted to, but he could see enough to feel decidedly ill at ease. The effect was that of moonlight on a foreboding gothic edifice. The shuttle threw a tracery of moving shadows across the larger ship, making it appear to squirm and move.
The weird augmentations looked even stranger up close. Their complexity had not really been apparent before, nor the extent to which they had been twisted and sheared by the accident. But Skade had been remarkably fortunate, since the damage was largely confined to the tapering rear part of her ship. The two Conjoiner drives, thrust out from either side of the thoraxlike hull, had suffered only superficial harm. Clavain steered the shuttle closer, convincing himself that any attack would already have happened. Delicately, he nosed the skeletal craft between the stingerlike curves and arcs of the ruined faster-than-light drive.
‘She was desperate,’ he said to his companions. ‘She must have known there was no way we were going to get to Resurgam ahead of her, but that wasn’t good enough for Skade. She wanted to get there years ahead of us.’
Scorpio said, ‘She had the means, Clavain. Why are you surprised that she used them?’
‘He’s right to be surprised,’ Remontoire cut in before Clavain could answer. ‘Skade was perfectly aware of the risks of toying with the state-four transition. She denied any interest in it when I asked her about it, but I had the impression she was lying. Her own experiments must already have revealed the risks.’
‘Once thing’s for sure,’ Scorpio said. ‘She wanted those guns badly, Clavain. They must mean a fuck of a lot to her.’
Clavain nodded. ‘But we’re not really dealing with Skade, I think. We’re dealing with whatever it was that got to her in the Chateau. The Mademoiselle wanted the weapons, and she just planted the idea in Skade’s mind.’
‘This Mademoiselle interests me greatly,’ Remontoire said. He had been told some of what had happened in Chasm City. ‘I’d have liked to have met her.’
‘Too late,’ Scorpio said. ‘H had her corpse in a box — didn’t Clavain tell you?’
‘He had something in a box,’ Remontoire said testily. ‘But evidently not the part of her that mattered. That part reached Skade. Is Skade now, for all we know.’
Clavain slid the shuttle through the last pair of scissorlike blades and back into open space. This side of Nightshade was pitch black, save where the shuttle’s own floods picked out details. Clavain crept along the hull, observing that the antiship weapons were all stowed behin
d their invisibly seamed hatches. It meant very little: it would only require an eyeblink to deploy them, but it was undeniably reassuring that they were not already pointed at the shuttle.
‘You two know your way around this thing?’ Scorpio said.
‘Of course,’ Remontoire said. ‘It used to be our ship. You should recognise it as well. It’s the same one that pulled you out of Maruska Chung’s cruiser.’
‘The only thing I remember about that is you trying to put the fear of the devil into me, Remontoire.’
With some relief, Clavain realised that they had reached the airlock he had been looking for. There was still no sign of a reaction from the crippled ship: no lights or indications of proximity sensors coming alive. Clavain guyed them to the hull with epoxy-tipped grapples, holding his breath as the suckerlike grapple feet adhered to the ablative hull armour. But nothing happened.
‘This is the difficult part,’ Clavain said. ‘Rem, I want you to remain here on the shuttle. Scorpio’s coming inside with me.’
‘Might I ask why?’
‘Yes, although I was hoping you wouldn’t. Scorp has more experience of hand-to-hand combat than you do, almost more than me. But the main reason is I don’t trust you enough to have you inside.’
‘You trusted me to come this far.’
‘And I’m prepared to trust you to sit tight on the shuttle until we get out.’ Clavain checked the time. ‘In thirty-five minutes we’re out of return range. Wait half an hour and then leave. Not a minute more, even if Scorp and I are already coming back out of the airlock.’
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘We’ve budgeted enough fuel to return the three of us plus Felka. If you return alone you’ll have fuel to spare — fuel that we’ll badly need later. That’s what I trust you with, Rem: that responsibility.’
‘But not to come aboard,’ Remontoire said.
‘No. Not with Skade on that ship. I can’t run the risk of you defecting back to her side.’
‘You’re wrong, Clavain.’
‘Am I?’
‘I didn’t defect. Neither did you. It was Skade and the rest of them that changed sides, not us.’
‘C’mon,’ Scorpio said, tugging at Clavain’s arm. ‘We’ve got twenty-nine minutes now.’
The two of them crossed over to Nightshade. Clavain fumbled around the rim of the airlock until he found the nearly invisible recess that concealed the external controls. It was just wide enough to take his gloved hand. He felt the familiar trinity of manual switches — standard Conjoiner design — and tugged them to the open position. Even if there had been a general shipwide power failure, cells within the lock would have retained power to open the door for about a century. Even if that failed, there was a manual mechanism on the other side of the rim.
The door slid aside. Blood-red lighting glared back from the interior chamber. His eyes had become highly dark-adapted. He waited for them to adjust to the brightness and then ushered Scorpio into the generously proportioned space. He followed the pig, their bulky suits knocking together, and then sealed and pressurised the chamber. It took an eternity.
The inner door opened. The interior of the ship was bathed in the same blood-red emergency lighting. But at least there was power. That meant there might be survivors, too.
Clavain studied the ambient data read-out in his faceplate field of view, then turned off his suit air and slid up the faceplate. These clumsy old suits, the best that Zodiacal Light had been able to provide, had limited air and power, and he saw no sense in wasting resources. He motioned for Scorpio to do likewise.
The pig whispered, ‘Where are we?’
‘Amidships,’ Clavain told him in a normal speaking voice. ‘But everything looks different in this light, and without gravity. The ship doesn’t feel as familiar as I had expected. I wish I knew how many crew we could expect to find.’
‘Skade never gave any indication?’ he hissed back.
‘No. You could run a ship like this with a few experts, and no more. There’s no need to whisper either, Scorp. If there’s anyone around to know we’re here, they know we’re here.’
‘Remind me why we didn’t come with guns?’
‘No point, Scorp. They’d have heavier and better armaments here. Either we take Felka painlessly or we negotiate our way out.’ Clavain tapped his utility belt. ‘Of course, we do have a negotiating aid.’
They had brought pinheads aboard Skade’s ship. The microscopic fragments of antimatter suspended in a pin-sized containment system, which was in turn shielded within a thumb-sized armoured grenade, would blow Nightshade cleanly out of the sky.
They moved down the red-lit corridor hand over hand. Every now and then, randomly, one of them would unclip a pinhead device, smear it with epoxy and push it into place in a corner or shadow. Clavain was confident that a well-organised search would be able to locate all the pinheads in a few tens of minutes. But a well-organised search looked like exactly the kind of thing the ship was not going to be capable of mounting for quite some time.
They had been working their way along for eight minutes when Scorpio broke the silence. They had reached a trifurcation in the corridor. ‘Recognise anything yet?’
‘Yes. We’re near the bridge.’ Clavain pointed one way. ‘But the reefersleep chamber is down here. If she has Felka frozen, that’s where she might be. We’ll check it first.’
‘We’ve got twenty minutes, then we have to be out.’
Clavain knew that the time limit was, in a sense, artificially imposed. Zodiacal Light could backtrack and recover the shuttle even if they delayed their departure, but only at a wasteful expenditure of time, one that would instil a lethal seed of complacency into the rest of the crew. He had considered the risks and concluded that it would be better for all three of them to die — or at least be marooned here — rather than let that happen. Their deputies and sub-deputies could continue the operation even if Remontoire did not make it back alive, and they had to believe that every second really counted. As indeed it did. It was tough. But that was war, and it was a long way from the toughest decision Clavain had ever had to make.
They worked their way down to the reefersleep chamber.
‘Something ahead,’ Scorpio said, after they had crawled and clambered wordlessly for several minutes.
Clavain slowed his progress, peering into the same red gloom, envious of Scorpio’s augmented eyesight. ‘Looks like a body,’ he said.
They approached it carefully, pulling themselves along from one padded wall-staple to another. Clavain was mindful of every minute that elapsed; every half-minute of each minute; every cruel second.
They reached the body.
‘Do you recognise it?’ Scorpio asked, fascinated.
‘I’m not sure whether anyone would be able to recognise it for certain,’ Clavain said, ‘but it isn’t Felka. I don’t think it could have been Skade, either.’
Something dreadful had happened to the body. It had been sliced down the middle, exactly and neatly, in the fastidious fashion of an anatomical model. The interior organs were packed into tightly coiled or serpentine formations, glistening like glazed sweetmeats. Scorpio reached out a gloved trotter and pushed the half-figure; it drifted slackly away from the slick walling where it had come to rest.
‘Where do you think the rest of it is?’ he asked.
‘Somewhere else,’ Clavain replied. ‘This half must have drifted here.’
‘What did that to it? I’ve seen what beam-weapons can do and it isn’t nice, but there isn’t any sign of scorching on this body.’
‘It was a causal gradient,’ said a third voice.
‘Skade…’ Clavain breathed.
She was behind them. She had approached with inhuman silence, not even breathing. Her armoured bulk filled the corridor, black as night save for the pale oval of her face.
‘Hello, Clavain. And hello, Scorpio, too, I suppose.’ She looked at him with mild interest. ‘So you didn’t die th
en, pig?’
‘Actually, Clavain was just pointing out how lucky 1 am to have met the Conjoiners.’
‘Sensible Clavain.’
Clavain looked at her, horrified and awestruck at the same time. Remontoire had forewarned him about Skade’s accident, but that warning had been insufficient to prepare him for this meeting. Her mechanical armour was androform, even — in an exaggerated, faintly medieval way — feminine, swelling at the hips and with the suggestion of breasts moulded into the chest plate. But Clavain knew now that it was not armour at all but a life-support prosthesis; that the only organic part of her was her head. Skade’s crested skull was plugged stiffly into the neckpiece of the armour. The brutal conjunction of flesh and machinery screamed wrongness, a wrongness that became even more acute when Skade smiled.
‘You did this to me,’ she said, obviously speaking aloud for Scorpio’s benefit. ‘Aren’t you proud?’
‘I didn’t do it to you, Skade. 1 know exactly what happened. I hurt you, and I’m sorry it happened that way. But it wasn’t intentional and you know it.’
‘So your defection was involuntary? If only it were that easy.’
‘I didn’t cut your head off, Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘By now Delmar could have healed the injuries I gave you. You’d be whole again. But that didn’t fit with your plans.’
‘You dictated my plans, Clavain. You and my loyalty to the Mother Nest.’
‘I don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.’
Scorpio whispered, ‘Thirteen minutes, Clavain. Then we have to be out of here.’
Skade’s attention snapped on to the pig. ‘In a hurry, are you?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ Scorpio said.
‘You’ve come for something. I don’t doubt that your weapons could already have destroyed Nightshade were that your intention.’
‘Give me Felka,’ Clavain said. ‘Give me Felka, then we’ll leave you alone.’
‘Does she mean that much to you, Clavain, that you’d have held back from destroying me when you had the chance?’