“Definitely Conjoiner protocols,” Clavain said. He remained silent and perfectly still for at least another minute, before adding, “I think it recognises me as another Conjoiner. It’s not allowing me complete system access—not yet, anyway—but it’s letting me query certain low-level diagnostic functions. It certainly doesn’t look like a bomb.”
“Be very, very careful,” Scorpio said. “We don’t want you being taken over, or something worse.”
“I’m doing my best,” Clavain said.
“How soon can you tell who’s in it?” Blood asked.
“I won’t know for sure until it cracks open,” Clavain said, his voice low but cutting through everything else with quiet authority. “I’ll tell you this now, though: I don’t think it’s Skade.”
“You’re absolutely sure it’s Conjoiner?” Blood insisted.
“It is. And I’m fairly certain some of the signals I’m picking up are coming from the occupant’s implants, not just from the capsule itself. But it can’t be Skade: she’d be ashamed to have anything to do with protocols this old.” He pulled his head away from the capsule and looked back at the company. “It’s Remontoire. It has to be.”
“Can you make any sense of his thoughts?” Scorpio asked.
“No, but the neural signals I’m getting are at a very low level, just routine housekeeping stuff. Whoever’s inside this is probably still unconscious.”
“Or not a Conjoiner,” Blood said.
“We’ll know in a few hours,” Scorpio said. “But whoever it is, there’s still the problem of a missing ship.”
“Why is that a problem?” Vasko asked.
“Because whoever it is didn’t travel twenty light-years in that capsule,” Blood said.
“But couldn’t he have come into the system quietly, parked his ship somewhere we wouldn’t see it and then crossed the remaining distance in the capsule?” Vasko suggested.
Blood shook his head. “He’d still have needed an in-system ship to make the final crossing to our planet.”
“But we could have missed a small ship,” Vasko said. “Couldn’t we?”
“I don’t think so,” Clavain said. “Not unless there have been some very unwelcome developments.”
NINE
Quaiche came around, upside down. He was still. Everything, in fact, was immensely stilclass="underline" the ship, the landscape, the sky. It was as if he had been planted here centuries ago and had only just opened his eyes.
But he did not think he could have been out for long: his memories of the terrifying attack and the dizzying fall were very clear. The wonder of it, really, was not that he remembered those events, but that he was alive at all.
Moving very gently in his restraints, he tried to survey the damage. The tiny ship creaked around him. At the limit of his vision, as far as he could twist his neck (which seemed not to be broken), he saw dust and ice still settling from one of the avalanche plumes. Everything was blurred, as if seen through a thin grey veil. The plume was the only thing moving, and it confirmed to him that he could not have been under for more than a few minutes. He could also see one end of the bridge, the marvellous eye-tricking complexity of scrolls supporting the gently curving roadbed. There had been a moment of anxi-ety, as he watched his ordnance rip away, when he had worried about destroying the thing that had brought him here. The bridge was huge, but it also looked as delicate as tissue paper. But there was no evidence that he had inflicted any damage. The thing must be stronger than it looked.
The ship creaked again. Quaiche could not see the ground with any clarity. The ship had come to rest upside down, but lad it really reached the bottom of Ginnungagap Rift?
He looked at the console but couldn’t focus on it properly. Couldn’t—now that he paid attention to the fact—focus on much at all. It was not so bad if he closed his left eye. The gee-force might have knocked a retina loose, he speculated. It was precisely that kind of fixable damage that the Daughter was prepared to inflict in the interests of bringing him back alive.
With his right eye open he appraised the console. There was a lot of red there—Latinate script proclaiming systems defects—but also many blank areas where there should have been something. The Daughter had clearly sustained heavy damage, he realised: not just mechanical, but also to the cybernetic core of her avionics suite. The ship was in a coma.
He tried speaking. “Executive override. Reboot.”
Nothing happened. Voice recognition might be one of the lost faculties. Either that or the ship was as alive as she was ever going to be.
He tried again, just to be on the safe side. “Executive override. Reboot.”
But still nothing happened. Close down that line of enquiry, he thought.
He moved again, shifting an arm until his hand came into contact with one of the tactile control clusters. There was discomfort as he moved, but it was mostly the diffuse pain of heavy bruising rather than the sharpness of broken or dislocated limbs. He could even shift his legs without too much unpleasantness. A screaming jag of pain in his chest didn’t bode well for his ribs, however, but his breathing seemed normal enough and there were no odd sensations anywhere else in his chest or abdomen. If a few cracked ribs and a detached retina were all he had suffered, he had done rather well.
“You always were a jammy sod,” he said to himself as his fingers groped around the many stubs and stalks of the tactile control cluster. Every voice command had a manual equivalent; it was just a question of remembering the right combinations of movements.
He had it. Finger there, thumb there. Squeeze. Squeeze again.
The ship coughed. Red script flickered momentarily into view where there had been nothing a moment before.
Getting somewhere. There was still juice in the old girl. He tried again. The ship coughed and hummed, trying to reboot herself. Flicker of red, then nothing.
“Come on,” Quaiche said through gritted teeth.
He tried again. Third time lucky? The ship spluttered, seemed to shiver. The red script appeared again, faded, then came back. Other parts of the display changed: the ship explored her own functionality as she came out of the coma.
“Nice one,” Quaiche said as the ship squirmed, reshaping her hull—probably not intentional, just some reflex adjustment back to the default profile. Rubble sputtered against the armour, dislodged in the process. The ship pitched several degrees, Quaiche’s view shifting.
“Careful…” he said.
It was too late. The Scavenger’s Daughter had begun to roll, keeling off the ledge where it had come to temporary rest. Quaiche had a glimpse of the floor, still a good hundred metres below, and then it was coming up to meet him, fast.
Subjective time stretched the fall to an eternity.
Then he hit the deck; although he didn’t black out, the tumbling series of impacts felt as if something had him in its jaws and was whacking him against the ground until he either snapped or died.
He groaned. This time it seemed unlikely that he was going to get away so lightly. There was heavy pressure on his chest, as if someone had placed an anvil there. The cracked ribs had given in, most likely. That was going to hurt when he had to move. He was still alive, though. And this time the Daughter had landed right-way-up. He could see the bridge again, framed like a scene in a tourist brochure. It was as if Fate were rubbing it in, reminding him of just what it was that had got him into this mess in the first place.