Spatha, who was sweating, nodded at the arriving party. ‘Very good. You weren’t attempting to leave the ship, by any chance?’
‘We both know what happened,’ Quillon said.
‘What happened,’ Spatha said, ‘is that a crisis very nearly overtook the ship. If it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of security personnel, the consequences could have been catastrophic. But that was always your intention, wasn’t it?’
‘My intention was to help Ricasso produce the serum we need to save Spearpoint.’ Quillon glanced around the assembled onlookers, wondering who amongst them might be sympathetic to his side of the story. ‘That’s what I was doing. That’s all I was doing.’
Spatha pursed his lips, a pout that conveyed how deeply unimpressed he was with this line of argument. ‘But is it not the case, Doctor, that you were entrusted with access to that laboratory? That Ricasso gave you the means of entering it, knowing full well the dangers posed by his vorgs?’
‘I trusted Quillon,’ Ricasso said. ‘I still do.’
‘It was a risk to bring these things into Swarm in the first place,’ Spatha said. ‘It was practically cavalier to hand the keys to an outsider.’
‘Quillon has already saved Swarmer lives. We should be grateful to him, not suspecting him of sabotage.’ Now it was Ricasso’s turn to look around in the hope of finding allies. ‘I know what’s happening here. Quillon’s been set up to reflect badly on me. But he had nothing to do with this.’
‘What happened to the vorg’s forelimbs?’ Quillon asked.
Spatha looked at him mildly. ‘Why should that be a concern, Doctor?’ ‘It had them when it escaped - when, let’s be blunt about it, you followed me into the laboratory and forced me to release it.’
‘I’d be very careful about throwing around that kind of accusation,’ Spatha said, smiling at his audience as if he expected them to share the joke.
Just then a speaker grille erupted with sound. The harsh, breathless voice had been amplified by passing through a chain of resonant chambers, and in the process had lost much of what made it recognisable. But Quillon still identified it as belonging to Agraffe.
‘I’m down at the laboratory. We’ve got trouble, I’m afraid. The bastard must have doubled back and forced its way through the door. All the cages are open. Repeat, all the cages are open. All the vorgs are loose.’
Ricasso did something then that Quillon had not expected him capable of. He moved with startling, bearlike speed, shrugging off any attempts at restraint, and before anyone could react he had the speaking tube off the wall and up to his lips.
‘Agraffe, listen to me. There’s a coup in progress. Signal Curtana. She’ll know what to do. This must not spread beyond Purple Emperor!’
He had to shout the end of his statement as the tube was snatched from his hands, and he was manhandled away from the wall.
‘Everyone will have heard that,’ Spatha said. ‘Not just Agraffe and whoever’s with him.’
‘That’s what I’m counting on,’ Ricasso said. ‘And you can follow my announcement by putting the whole ship back on emergency alert. The vorgs haven’t finished with you, not by a long stretch. You know why this one was so easy to kill?’
There was a twitch of unease in the corner of Spatha’s mouth. ‘We cornered it.’
‘You cornered a cripple. Wondering where its forelimbs got to? I’ll tell you. The other vorgs took it apart. They cannibalised this one for anything they could use and then threw it to you like a scrap of meat. That’s what vorgs do. And somewhere aboard this ship there is almost certainly one that now has full locomotive functionality.’
Spatha’s facial twitch became more insistent. He cleared his throat. ‘Pass me the tube,’ he told one of his men, even though he was close enough to reach for it himself. ‘This is ... Commander Spatha. The vorg outbreak is not yet ... contained. All citizens and active staff to maximum vigilance.’
‘You might want to rethink that takeover,’ Meroka said. ‘Just until this shit is cleared up.’
That earned Meroka a jab in the belly from a crossbow stock, causing her to double up in pain, compounded no doubt by the wound she had already suffered.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Quillon said.
‘Be careful, Doctor,’ said Spatha. ‘A man in your position should watch what he says.’ Then he nodded at the two airmen who had brought them to him. ‘Bring the girl to me.’
Kalis tried to hold on to Nimcha, but her daughter was wrenched away from her and dragged over to Spatha.
‘They mean a lot to you, don’t they?’ Spatha asked Quillon.
‘They’re human beings.’
‘One of them, certainly. This one I’m not so sure about.’ He glanced at Kalis for an instant. ‘Do you mind?’ In a single quick movement he had one hand around Nimcha’s head, cupping her gently but firmly, while he used the other to part her hair. ‘It’s real, isn’t it? So neat and regular. Of course, we can’t really see it properly now; the hair’s in the way.’
‘It’s just a birthmark,’ Quillon said.
‘Of course it’s a birthmark, Doctor - what else could it be? The point is that it’s an eerily regular and intentional-looking birthmark.’
‘Let her go,’ Kalis said.
Spatha allowed Nimcha’s hair to fall back over the birthmark. Still holding her with the other hand, he reached into a sheath attached to his belt and drew an elegantly lethal-looking dagger. Kalis moved to tackle him, but Spatha was quicker; he brought the blade to within a hair’s breadth of Nimcha’s face and held it there.
‘Stay back. I’m not going to hurt her. I just want to get a better look at this ... thing.’
He started cutting her hair away in clumps, concentrating on the back of her head. The knife whispered through the matted strands, making barely a sound as it sliced. Nimcha trembled. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
‘What do you want from us?’ Quillon asked.
‘The truth, Doctor. No more lies. You had the chance to choose sides, but you made the wrong decision. Now Swarm’s turning over a new leaf. The citizenry deserve to know what they’ve been sheltering.’ He flung one of the clumps to the floor. Nimcha flinched as the blade touched her scalp, drawing a tiny nick of blood.
‘She’s just a girl,’ Quillon said. ‘That’s all.’
Spatha returned the knife to its sheath, his work completed. Aside from a few ragged tufts where the blade had missed it mark, he had removed most of the hair that had originally hidden the birthmark, leaving Nimcha with a bald spot like a misplaced tonsure.
He had only cut her in one or two spots, the blood already drying.
‘She’s a tectomancer,’ he said. Then he spun her around for the benefit of his audience. ‘They’re real. We’ve always known it. But I never thought we’d stumble across one.’
‘She doesn’t mean us any harm,’ Ricasso said.
‘Then why were her mother - and you - so determined to keep her true nature from us?’
‘Pricks like you might be a contributory factor,’ Meroka said, and was immediately on the floor again, coughing out a tooth this time from where she had been smacked in the face.
‘Return them to custody,’ Spatha said. ‘Proper holding cells this time - and make sure they’re separated, including the dirt-rats.’
‘You can’t separate the mother and daughter,’ Quillon said, raising his voice. ‘They’ve done nothing!’
He was hit in the chest with a rifle stock, punching the wind out of him in a single explosive gasp. He dropped his bag, crumpling to the carpet with his head only a span from the twitching, goggling head-assembly of the vorg.
‘I did warn you,’ Spatha said.
Quillon was dragged to his feet. He had no strength to resist; barely enough to stand up. He caught Ricasso’s eye and all Ricasso could offer him was a plaintive shake of his head, conveying the utter helplessness of their situation.
Several events then ensued in remarkably quick suc
cession. The first was a flash of movement from the hole in the wall where the vorg had burst through. The second was a discharge from a rifle as the airman who had been guarding the hole attempted to shoot at the steel-and-sinew thing that had sprung with jack-in-the-box speed through the gap. The third was a scream as the airman realised that the vorg had him, its blue metal fore-talons digging into his right arm, piercing flesh and muscle until they snagged bone, dragging him along as it retreated into darkness. The rifle clattered to the floor. The airman disappeared through the gap like a sack of garbage being hauled away for disposal. His screams continued, echoing around the confined space.
A second had passed, possibly two - sufficient time for those present to realise what had happened, but not enough for any of the armed airmen and guards to do anything about it. By the time they had swung their weapons towards the aperture, the vorg and its prey were gone. Only a scuttling, scraping sound - receding by the second - gave any sign that the creature was still on the move.
‘... the fuck,’ Spatha said, and for a second his veneer of confidence was gone. When it returned there was something translucent and paper-thin about it, like a drumskin stretched too tight. ‘Into the service space. I want that man brought back!’
One of the airmen worked a lever on his gun. ‘Permission to use semi-automatic fire, sir.’
‘No ... no. Too many firesap lines. Single-fire only. Get after it!’
Three of the men ventured cautiously through the aperture. ‘It’s too dark, sir!’ one of them called, his voice muffled. ‘We can only see a few spans either way!’
‘Perhaps we should wait for daylight, sir - it’ll be easier to root them out,’ said another of the men.
Spatha drew his own weapon, the same one he had used to threaten Quillon, and ducked into the darkness. ‘Someone find a firesap torch,’ he called. ‘Quickly!’
‘It’s all right, sir,’ the first of the men shouted out excitedly. ‘We’ve found him - it’s not taken him very far!’ There was a pause as the airman clambered further into the service space, and then his voice turned softer. ‘Still breathing, sir - it must have decided he was too much trouble to carry.’
Spatha, who was still pausing on the threshold, said, ‘Bring him out - and then the rest of you carry on after the vorg. Fear and panic, where is my damned firesap torch!’
Scuffles and grunts of exertion signalled the unconscious airman being dragged out of the shaft. At last someone brought a firesap torch to Spatha - it was a detachable wall-lantern, but served the same effect - and he directed wavering illumination into the recess beyond the panelling. Quillon saw now why it would have been unwise to use automatic fire. The service space carried a multitude of red fuel lines, as well as communications tubes and aerodynamic control wires. In any situation other than a close-action engagement, it would have been madness to use machine guns.
‘Let me see him,’ Quillon said, as the airmen dragged their comatose comrade into the light, feet first. Still winded, he knelt down to recover his bag. Spatha’s men were being as gentle as circumstances allowed, so not very gentle at all. Aside from the pipes, there were reinforcing spars every few spans and the man’s body had to be dragged over them, his head clattering against metal every time.
‘His arm’s pretty gouged,’ one of the men said. ‘But the vorg didn’t take it, sir. Oh, wait. Oh no, sir ...’
‘What?’ Spatha said.
‘His head, sir.’ The man’s upper torso and head were finally dragged into the light, and for a moment all seemed well, the play of light and shadow hiding the worst of his wounds. But as Spatha brought the firesap torch closer, there could be no escaping the truth. The man’s skull had been punctured above the brow, a hole wide enough for a thumb to be pushed all the way into it. There was surprisingly little blood for a head wound, and despite the vorg’s brutal surgery, the man was still, in a technical sense, alive.
‘It’s harvested frontal cortex matter,’ Quillon said, staring down the tunnel of scarlet, white and grey. ‘Quite a lot of it, by the look of things.’
‘He’s still alive,’ another man said.
‘Technically speaking. But don’t expect him to pull his weight aboard ship any more.’
‘What are you saying, Doctor?’ Spatha asked.
‘I’m saying that it’s very unlikely that this man will ever lead anything resembling a normal life.’ Quillon hesitated. It was against his instincts to make such a casual diagnosis, but he saw little margin for doubt. ‘He’ll need to be cared for, treated like a child.’
Spatha suddenly sounded interested. ‘He’ll be a vegetable, you mean?’ ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but—’
Spatha aimed his gun and shot the man through the forehead. ‘We’re carrying enough ballast as it is. Just did him a favour.’ He looked around, irritated. ‘Now what’s wrong with her?’
Kalis had Nimcha back in her arms. Nimcha was convulsing, her spine arched, her neck bent back, her eyes rolled into their sockets. Her limbs were moving all the while, not so much kicking and punching as grasping and running on thin air, but her face was quite still, her mouth halfway open, a line of silvery drool spilling from her lips.
‘It’s got her again,’ Quillon said, Kalis giving a tiny, helpless nod in return.
‘What has her?’ Spatha asked.
‘The Eye of God. The Mire,’ Kalis said.
The Mire might have her, Quillon thought, but it was the distress of what had just happened that had opened the door to let it through.
‘Can she control it?’ he asked.
‘I do not think so,’ Kalis said.
From the next room came a languid thump. It was no more eventful than the sound of a consignment of dirty bedding arriving at the bottom of a laundry chute. For a few seconds no one even responded, so preoccupied were they with the dead man and Nimcha’s intensifying convulsions. But then one of the airmen looked through the door and saw what had happened. He let out a small, childlike gasp of surprise and horror. A body lay on the floor. It was another Swarmer, a woman this time, but dressed in off-duty clothes. She was on her back, her face turned their way, blood spreading out from beneath her. Quillon didn’t recognise her. She’d come through a hole in the ceiling, a dark square where a panel had been dislodged. There was just time to recognise the vorg - a vorg, he corrected himself, since he couldn’t be sure it was the same one - coiling back into the darkness, the pale tip of its segmented tail the last part of it to disappear.
Spatha ran to the spot where the woman had fallen and aimed his gun at the ceiling, tracking the sound of the vorg’s slithering, scuffling motion through the panels. He fired, drilling a line of bullet holes, not stopping until he had exhausted the magazine.
Quillon knelt and examined the woman. He didn’t need a pathologist’s table to tell him she was dead. Nothing in her face except frozen incomprehension. The vorg had snatched her quickly, and whatever it had done to her had been equally swift.
He rolled the woman onto her front. Where her spine should have been, from her coccyx to the base of her neck, was a bloody trench. The vorg had cut it out of her, through fabric and skin and subcutaneous fat, ripped that articulated structure of bone and nerves right out of her, then dumped what it didn’t need. He realised then that it hadn’t been the vorg’s tail he had seen vanishing into the ceiling.
He turned around, not wanting Nimcha to see any of this.
‘Keep her back—’ he started to say.
It came then, as he had half-anticipated. A pressure in his skull, a throb that built and built until it felt as if something was trying to lay an egg inside his brain, a burning white egg that was too large to fit, that would split the bones along their sutures. His vision tunnelled. Nausea tightened his throat. He could barely keep himself from blacking out, let alone organise his thoughts.
‘What’s happening?’ Spatha asked, the effort of speaking written on his face.
‘Zone tremor,’ Quillon said.
/> ‘We’re hundreds of leagues from the present boundary - a tremor can’t touch us at this range,’ Spatha said, his tone aiming for dismissive but betraying the frightened realisation of what he was witnessing.
‘Then it’s more than a shift. What you felt on the ground was just a hint of her abilities. She can change entire swathes of tectomorphic geography just by thinking about it.’
‘Then she ought to stop.’ He made to aim the gun at Nimcha - forgetting perhaps that it was empty, or trusting that no one else would have realised - and Kalis turned around to shield her daughter.
‘She might be the only thing that can save us!’ Ricasso bellowed. ‘The vorgs are only just alive! Push the zone too far, they won’t be able to survive at all.’
′Or us,’ Spatha said. He clicked the trigger, the gun dead in his hand. ‘Someone give me a revolver! If she pushes things in the wrong direction—’
‘She will not,’ Kalis said.
The effects of the zone transition continued to intensify. The floor of the gondola appeared to tilt and then return to the horizontal, signalling that Purple Emperor had lost propulsive power.
‘Nimcha,’ Quillon said, with all the forcefulness he could muster even as he felt his mind being squeezed in a vice. ‘You mustn’t make the change too strong, or it will break the engines for good. And we need those engines!’
Spatha had managed to snatch a service revolver from one of his men and was now holding the wavering barrel in Nimcha’s direction. But he wasn’t trying to fire. Either his nerve had left him, or he recognised that a zone storm might be the one thing that would hinder the vorgs, provided the shift was in the right direction.
‘Put the gun down,’ Ricasso said, with surprising tenderness. ‘It’s over, Spatha. You’re not going to win this one. You think you can take Swarm in the middle of a zone shift?’