They loped away from the crashed shuttle, toward the dyke. The worms would be locking onto their seismic patterns already, if there were any nearby. They might be more interested in the shuttle for now, but that was nothing they could count on. Clavain knew the behaviour of worms intimately, knew the major routines which drove them; but that expertise did not guarantee his survival. It had almost failed him in Phobos.
The mask felt clammy against his face. The air at the base of the Great Wall was technically breathable even now, but there seemed no point in taking chances when speed was of the essence. His feet scuffed through the topsoil, and while he seemed to be crossing ground, the dyke obstinately refused to come any closer. It was larger than it looked from the crash; the distance further.
“Another worm,” Voi said.
White coils erupted through sand to the west. The Ouroborus was making undulating progress toward them, zig-zagging with predatorial calm, knowing that it could afford to take its time. In the tunnels of Phobos, they had never had the luxury of knowing when a worm was close. They struck from ambush, quick as pythons.
“Run,” Clavain said.
Dark figures appeared in the opening high in the rimwall. A rope-ladder unfurled down the side of the structure. Clavain, making for the base of it, made no effort to quieten his footfalls. He knew that the worm almost certainly had a lock on him by now.
He looked back.
The worm paused by the downed shuttle, then smashed its diamond-jawed head into the ship, impaling the hull on its body. The worm reared up, wearing the ship like a garland. Then it shivered and the ship flew apart like a rotten carcass. The worm returned its attention to Clavain and Voi. Like a sidewinder it pulled its thirty-meter-long body from the sand and rolled toward them on wheeling coils.
Clavain reached the base of the ladder.
Once, he could have ascended the ladder with his arms alone, in onegee, but now the ladder felt alive beneath his feet. He began to climb, then realised that the ground was dropping away much faster than he was passing rungs. The Conjoiners were hauling him aloft.
He looked back in time to see Voi stumble.
“Sandra! No!”
She made to stand up, but it was too late by then. As the worm descended on her, Clavain could do nothing but turn his gaze away and pray for her death to be quick. If it had to be meaningless, he thought, at least let it be swift.
Then he started thinking about his own survival. “Faster!” he shouted, but the mask reduced his voice to a panicked muffle. He had forgotten to assign the ship’s radio frequency to the suit.
The worm thrashed against the base of the wall, then began to rear up, its maw opening beneath him; a diamond-ringed orifice like the drill of a tunnelling machine. Then something eye-hurtingly bright cut into the worm’s hide. Craning his neck, Clavain saw a group of Conjoiners kneeling over the lip of the opening, aiming guns downward. The worm writhed in intense robotic irritation. Across the sand, he could see the coils of other worms coming closer. There must have been dozens ringing the nest. No wonder Galiana’s people had made so few attempts to leave by land.
They had hauled him within ten meters of safety. The injured worm showed cybernetic workings where its hide had been flensed away by weapons impacts. Enraged, it flung itself against the rim wall, chipping off scabs of concrete the size of boulders. Clavain felt the vibration of each impact through the wall as he was dragged upwards.
The worm hit again and the wall shook more violently than before. To his horror, Clavain watched one of the Conjoiners lose his footing and tumble over the edge of the rim toward him. Time oozed to a crawl. The falling man was almost upon him. Without thinking, Clavain hugged closer to the wall, locking his limbs around the ladder. Suddenly, he had seized the man by the arm. Even in Martian gravity, even allowing for the Conjoiner’s willowy build, the impact almost sent both of them toward the Ouroborus. Clavain felt his bones pop out of location, tearing at gristle, but he managed to keep his grip on both the Conjoiner and the ladder.
Conjoiners breathed the air at the base of the Wall without difficulty. The man wore only lightweight clothes, grey silk pyjamas belted at the waist. With his sunken cheeks and bald skull, the man’s Martian physique lent him a cadaverous look. Yet somehow he had managed not to drop his gun, still holding it in his other hand.
“Let me go,” the man said.
Below, the worm inched higher despite the harm the Conjoiners had inflicted on it. “No,” Clavain said, through clenched teeth and the distorting membrane of his mask. “I’m not letting you go.”
“You’ve no option.” The man’s voice was placid. “They can’t haul both of us up fast enough, Clavain.”
Clavain looked into the Conjoiner’s face, trying to judge the man’s age. Thirty, perhaps—maybe not even that, since the cadaverous look probably made him seem older than he really was. Clavain was easily twice his age; had surely lived a richer life; had comfortably cheated death on three or four previous occasions.
“I’m the one who should die, not you.”
“No,” the Conjoiner said. “They’d find a way to blame your death on us. They’d make it a pretext for war.” Without any fuss the man pointed the gun at his own head and blew his brains out.
As much in shock as recognition that the man’s life was no longer his to save, Clavain released his grip. The dead man tumbled down the rim wall, into the mouth of the worm which had just killed Sandra Voi.
Numb, Clavain allowed himself to be pulled to safety.
WHEN THE ARMOURED door to the hangar was shut the Conjoiners attacked his m-suit with enzymic sprays. The sprays digested the fabric of the m-suit in seconds, leaving Clavain wheezing in a pool of slime. Then a pair of Conjoiners helped him unsteadily to his feet and waited patiently while he caught his breath from the mask. Through tears of exhaustion he saw that the hangar was racked full of half-assembled spacecraft; skeletal geodesic shark-shapes designed to punch out of an atmosphere, fast.
“Sandra Voi is dead,” he said, removing the mask to speak.
There was no way the Conjoiners could not have seen this for themselves, but it seemed inhuman not to acknowledge what had happened.
“I know,” Galiana said. “But at least you survived.”
He thought of the man falling into the Ouroborus. “I’m sorry about your…” But then trailed off, because for all his depth of knowledge concerning the Conjoiners, he had no idea what the appropriate term was.
“You placed your life in danger in trying to save him.”
“He didn’t have to die.”
Galiana nodded sagely. “No; in all likelihood he didn’t. But the risk to yourself was too great. You heard what he said. Your death would be made to seem our fault; justification for a pre-emptive strike against our nest. Even the Demarchists would turn against us if we were seen to murder a diplomat.”
Taking another suck from the mask, he looked into her face. He had spoken to her over low-bandwidth video-links, but only in person was it obvious that Galiana had hardly aged in fifteen years. A decade and a half of habitual expression should have engraved existing lines deeper into her face—but Conjoiners were not known for their habits of expression. Galiana had seen little sunlight in the intervening time, cooped here in the nest, and Martian gravity was much kinder to bone structure than the one-gee of Deimos. She still had the cruel beauty he remembered from his time as a prisoner. The only real evidence of ageing lay in the filaments of grey threading her hair; raven-black when she had been his captor.
“Why didn’t you warn us about the worms?”
“Warn you?” For the first time something like doubt crossed her face, but it was only fleeting. “We assumed you were fully aware of the Ouroborus infestation. Those worms have been dormant—waiting—for years, but they’ve always been there. It was only when I saw how low your approach was that I realised…”