“But they’d arrived in-system by then,” Antoinette pointed out. “The battle was already here. How do we know the Captain wasn’t sensitive to that? He’s a ship. His senses reach out for light-hours in all directions. Being anchored to a planet doesn’t change that.”
“We don’t know that Khouri was telling the truth,” Blood said.
Antoinette used her red marker to add another star, one that corresponded to Palfrey’s report. “I’d say we do now,” she said.
“All right. One other thing. If the Cap’s woken up…”
She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Yes?”
“Do you think it means he wants something?”
Antoinette picked up the helmet, causing the map to roll back on itself with a snapping sound. “Guess one of us is going to have to ask him,” she replied.
Two hours before dawn something twinkled on the horizon.
“I see it, sir,” Vasko said. “It’s the iceberg, like we saw on the map.”
“I don’t see anything,” Urton said, after peering into the distance for half a minute.
“I do,” Jaccottet said, from the other boat. “Malinin’s right, I think. There’s something there.” He reached for binoculars and held them to his eyes. The wide cowl of the lenses stayed rigidly fixed on target even as the rest of the binoculars wavered in Jaccottet’s hands.
“What do you see?” Clavain asked.
“A mound of ice. At this range, that’s about all I can make out. Still no sign of a ship, though.”
“Good work,” Clavain said to Vasko. “We’ll call you Hawk-eye, shall we?”
On Scorpio’s order the boats slowed to half their previous speed, then veered gradually to port. They commenced a long encirclement of the object, viewing it from all sides in the slowly changing dawn light.
Within an hour, as the boats spiralled nearer, the iceberg had become a small round-backed hummock. There was, in Vasko’s opinion, something deeply odd about it. It sat on the sea and yet seemed a part of it as well, surrounded as it was by a fringe of white that extended in every direction for perhaps twice the diameter of the central core. It made Vasko think of an island, the kind that consisted of a single volcanic mountain, with gently sloping beaches reaching the sea on all sides. He had seen a few icebergs, when they drifted down to the latitude of First Camp, and this was unlike any iceberg in his experience.
The boats circled closer. Now and then, Vasko heard Scorpio speaking to Blood via his wrist radio. The western sky was a bruised purple, with only a scattering of bright stars showing. In the east it was a bleak shade of rose. Against either backdrop the pale mound of the iceberg threw back subtly distorted variations of the same hues.
“We’ve circled it twice,” Urton reported.
“Keep it up,” Clavain instructed. “Reduce our distance by half, but slow to half our present” speed. She may not be alert, and I don’t want to startle her.“
“Something’s not right about that iceberg, sir,” Vasko said.
“We’ll see.” Clavain turned to Khouri. “Can you sense her yet?”
“Skade?” she asked.
“I was thinking more of your daughter. I wondered if there might be some remote cross-talk between your mutual sets of implants.”
“We’re still a long way out.”
“Agreed, but let me know the instant you feel anything. My own implants may not pick up Aura’s emissions at all, or not until we’re much nearer. And in any case you are her mother. I am certain you’ll recognise her first, even if there is nothing unusual about the protocols.”
“I don’t need reminding that I’m her mother,” Khouri said.
“Of course. I just meant…”
“I’m listening for her, Clavain. I’ve been listening for her from the moment you pulled me out of that capsule. You’ll be the first to hear if I pick up Aura.”
Half an hour later they were close enough to make out more detail. It was clear to all of them now that this was no ordinary iceberg, even if one discounted the way it infiltrated the water around it. Indeed, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the thing was any kind of iceberg at all.
Yet it was made of ice.
The sides of the floating mass were weird and crystalline. Rather than facets or sheets, they consisted of a thickening tangle of white spars, a briar formed from interleaved spikes of ice. Stalagmites and stalactites daggered up and down like icy incisors. Vertical spikes bristled like rapiers. At the root of each spike was a flourish of smaller growths thrusting out in all directions, intersecting and threading through their neighbours. In all directions, the spikes varied in size. Some—the major trunks and branches of the structure—were as wide across as the boat. Others were so thin, so fine, that they formed only an iridescent haze in the air, as if the merest breeze would shatter them into a billion twinkling parts. From a distance, the berg had appeared to be a solid block. Now the mound seemed to be formed from a huge haphazardly tossed pile of glass needles. Unthinkable numbers of glass needles. It was a glistening cavity-filled thicket, as much hollow space as ice.
It was easily the most unsettling thing Vasko had ever seen in his life.
They circled closer.
Of all of them, only Clavain seemed unimpressed by the utter strangeness of what lay before them. “The smart maps were accurate,” he said. “The size of this thing… by my reckoning, you could easily hide a moray-class corvette inside it.”
Vasko raised his voice. “You still think there might be a ship inside that thing, sir?”
“Ask yourself a question, son. Do you really think Mother Nature had anything to do with this?”
“But why would Skade surround her ship with all this strange ice?” Vasko persisted. “I wouldn’t have thought it was much use as armour, and all it’s done so far is make her ship more visible on the maps.”
“What makes you so sure she had any choice, son?”
“I don’t follow, sir.”
Scorpio said, “He’s suggesting that all this might mean there’s something wrong with Skade’s ship. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s my working hypothesis,” Clavain said.
“But what…” Vasko abandoned his question before he got himself into even deeper water.
“Whatever’s inside,” Clavain said, “we still have to reach it. We don’t have tunnelling equipment or anything that can blast through thick ice. But if we’re careful, we won’t have,to. We just have to locate a route through to the middle.”
“What if Skade spots-us, sir?” Vasko asked.
“I’m hoping she does. The last thing I want is to have to knock on her front door. Now take us closer. Nice and slowly does it.”
Bright Sun rose. In the early minutes of dawn, the iceberg took on an entirely different character. Against the soft violet of the sky the whole structure seemed magical, as delicate as some aristocrat’s confection. The briar spikes and icy spars were shot through with gold and azure, the colours refracted with the untainted dazzle of cut diamond. There were glorious ha-los, shards and jangles of chromatic purity, colours Vasko had never seen in his life. Instead of shadows, the interior shone turquoise and opal with a radiance that groped and fingered its way to the surface through twisting corridors and canyons of ice. And yet within that shining interior there was a shadowy kernel, a hint of something cocooned.
The two boats had come within fifty metres of the outer edge of the island’s fringe. The water had been calm for much of their journey, but here in the immediate vicinity of the iceberg it moved with the languor of some huge sedated animal, as if every ripple cost the sea great effort. Closer to the edge of the fringe, the sea was already beginning to freeze. It had the slick blue-grey texture of animal hide. Vasko touched his fingers just beneath the surface of the water by the boat and then pulled them back out immediately. Even here, this far from the fringe, the water was much colder than it had been when they had left the shuttle.