“So it was Burdock’s word against Campion’s?” Fescue turned to the impostor. “Does this make the slightest sense to you?”
The impostor shrugged and looked at me with something between pity and spite.
“Hear us out,” Purslane insisted. “All Campion was hoping to do was provoke the raising of anti-collision shields. The ship that destroyed Grisha’s people… we had data on its field resonance, but we needed to see our own fields before we could establish a match.” Purslane swallowed and regained some measure of calm. “I’m broadcasting the resonance data to all ships. See it for yourselves. See what those bastards did to Grisha’s people.”
There was a moment, a lull, while the crowd assessed the data Purslane had just made public. She had taken a frightful risk in revealing the information, for now our enemies had every incentive to move against us, even if that meant killing everyone else on the island. But I agreed with what she had done. We were out of options.
Except one.
“Very impressive,” Fescue admitted. “But we’ve no evidence that you didn’t forge this data.”
“The authentication stamp ties it to Burdock,” Purslane said.
Fescue looked regretful. “Authentication can always be faked, with sufficient ingenuity. You’ve already admitted that you broke into his ship, after all. Disavow your involvement in this, Purslane, before it’s too late.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
Fescue nodded at a number of the people around him, including a handful of senior Advocates.
“Restrain the two of them,” he said.
I fingered the metal shape under my flame-coloured costume. My hand closed on the haft and removed Grisha’s particle gun. The crowd silenced as the evil little thing glinted in the lantern light. Earlier, unwitnessed, I had primed the weapon onto Burdock. I squeezed a jewelled button and the gun moved as if in an invisible grip, nearly dragging itself from my fist. It swivelled onto Burdock and locked steady as a snake. Even if I released my hold on the gun, it would keep tracking its designated target.
“Stand aside, please,” I said.
“Don’t do anything silly,” Fescue said, even as the crowd parted around Burdock’s impostor.
The moment closed around me like a vice. I had seen the real, dying Burdock aboard his ship—at least, I believed I had. When I squeezed the trigger, I would be killing a mindless automaton, a biomechanical construct programmed to duplicate Burdock’s responses with a high degree of accuracy… but not a living thing. Nothing with a sense of self.
But what if the dying figure on the ship was the impostor, and this was still the real Burdock? What if the whole story about Grisha and the assassination agent had been the lie, and the real Burdock was standing in front of me? I had no idea why such an elaborate charade might have been staged… but I couldn’t rule it out, either. And there was one possibility that sprang to mind. What if Burdock had enemies among the line, and they wanted him dead, with someone else to pin the blame on? Suddenly I felt dizzy, lost in mazelike permutations of bluff and double bluff. I had to make a simple choice. I had to trust my intuitive sense of what was true and what was false.
“If this is a mistake,” I said, “forgive me.”
I squeezed the trigger. The particle beam sliced its way across space, piercing the figure in the chest.
Burdock’s impostor touched a hand to the smoking wound, opened its mouth as it speak, and fell lifeless to the floor. The crowd screamed their horror, revolted at the idea that a member of the Gentian Line had murdered another.
My work done, I let go of the particle gun. It remained floating before me, as if inviting me to take another shot. Burdock’s impostor lay on its side, with one dry hand open to the sky. He had touched the wound and there had been no blood. I allowed myself a moment of relief. The others would see that the thing I had killed was not a man, but a bloodless construct. But even as these thoughts formed, the body retched and coughed a mouthful of dark blood onto the perfect white marble of the terrace. Its face was a mask of fear and incomprehension. Then it was still.
The crowd surged. They were on me in seconds, swatting aside the gun. They pulled me from the plinth and smothered me to the ground. The breath was knocked out of me. They began to pull at my clothing with animal fury. I heard shouts as some of the revellers tried to pull the others off me, but the collective anger—the collective repulsion—was too great to be resisted. I felt something crack in my chest, tasted my own blood as someone smashed a fist into my jaw. I thrashed out, survival instincts kicking in, but there were too many of them. Most of them were still wearing carnival masks.
Then something happened. Just before I was about to go under, the attack calmed. Someone landed a final punch in my chest, sending a bolt of pain up my spine, and then pulled away. I received a desultory kick, and then they left me there, sprawled on the ground, my mouth wet, my body bruised. I knew they hadn’t finished with me. They were just leaving me alone while something else attracted their attention.
In their hundreds, they were pressing against the low railing that encircled the balcony. They were looking out to sea, drawn by something going on beyond the island. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled to the slumped form of Purslane. They had not hurt her as badly as me, but there was still a cut on her lip where someone had slapped her.
“Are you all right?” I said, my mouth thick with blood.
“Better than you,” she said.
“I don’t think they’re done with us. There’s a distraction now… maybe we could reach our ships?”
She shook her head and used her finger to wipe blood from my chin. “We started this, Campion. Let’s finish it.”
“It’s Fescue,” I said. “He’s the one.”
We followed the onlookers to the balcony. No one gave us a second glance, even as we pushed forward to the front. All round us the revellers were looking at the sea. Sleek dark forms were surfacing from the midnight waters, black as night themselves. They lolled and bellied in the waves, pushing great flukes and flippers into the sky, jetting white spouts of water from blowholes.
Purslane asked me what was happening.
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully.
“You planned this, Campion. This has to be something to do with Thousandth Night.”
“I know.” I winced at the pain in my chest, certain that the mob had broken a rib. “But I don’t remember what I planned. I thought the meteor shower was an end to it.”
They were everywhere now, surfacing in multitudes. “It’s as if they’re gathering in readiness for something,” Purslane said. “Like the start of a migration.”
“To where?”
“You tell me, Campion.”
But I didn’t have to tell her. It was soon obvious. In ones and twos they started leaving the ocean, rising into the air. Curtains of water drained off their flanks as they parted company with the sea. Ones and twos at first, then whole schools of them, rising into the sky between the hovering cliffs of our ships, as if they were born to fly.
“This is… impossible,” I said. “They’re aquatics. They don’t… fly.”
“Unless you made them that way. Unless you always planned this.”
Pink-tinged aurorae flickered around the rising forms, hinting at the fields that allowed them to fly, and which would—I presumed—sustain them when the air thinned out, high above us. Some ghost of a memory now pushed its way into my consciousness. Had I truly engineered these aquatics for flight, equipping them with implanted field generators, and enough animal wisdom to use them? The memory beckoned, and then shrivelled under my attention.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Good,” Purslane said. “But now the next question: why?”