The proxy retreated, tucking most of its limbs away. For a moment the wall of hyperprimates refused to allow it to leave and Antoinette feared that there was going to bloodshed. But her rescuers only wanted to make their point.
The wall parted; the proxy scuttled out.
Antoinette let out a sigh. She wanted to thank the hyperprimates, but her first and most immediate concern was for Xavier. She knelt down by him and touched the side of his neck. She felt hot animal breath on hers.
‘He all right?’
She looked into the magnificent face of the silverback; it was like something carved from coal. ‘I think so. How did you know?’
The superbly low voice rumbled, ‘Xavier push panic button. We come.’
‘Thank you.’
The silverback stood up, towering over her. ‘We like Xavier. Xavier treat us good.’
Later, she inspected the remains of her jacket. Her father had given it to her on her seventeenth birthday. It had always been a little small for her — when she wore it, it looked more like a matador’s jacket — but despite that it had always been her favourite, and she always felt she had made it look right. Now it was ruined beyond any hope of repair.
When the primates had gone, and when Xavier was back on his feet, shaken but basically unharmed, they did what they could to tidy up the mess. It took several hours, most of which were spent putting the paperwork back into order. Xavier had always been meticulous about his book-keeping; even as the company slid towards bankruptcy, he said, he was damned if he was going to give the money-grabbing creditor bastards any more ammunition than they already had.
By midnight the place looked respectable again. But Antoinette knew it was not over. The proxy was going to come back, and next time it would make sure there would be no primate rescue party. Even if the proxy never did get to the bottom of what she had been doing in the war zone, there would be a thousand ways that the authorities could put her out of business. The proxy could have impounded Storm Bird already. All the proxy was doing, and she had to keep reminding herself that there was a human pilot behind it, was playing with her, making her life a misery of worry while giving itself, or himself, something amusing to do when it wasn’t harassing someone else.
She thought of asking Xavier why it was taking such an interest in her father’s associates, most specifically the Lyle Merrick case, but then she decided to put the whole thing out of her mind, at least until the morning.
Xavier went out and bought a couple more beers, and they finished them off while they were putting the last few items of furniture back into place.
‘Things will work out, Antoinette,’ he said.
‘You’re certain of that?’
‘You deserve it,’ he said. ‘You’re a good person. All you ever wanted to do was honour your father’s wishes.’
‘So why do I feel like such an idiot?’
‘You shouldn’t,’ he said, and kissed her.
They made love again — it felt like days since the last time — and then Antoinette fell asleep, sinking through layers of increasingly vague anxiety until she reached unconsciousness. And then the Demarchist propaganda dream began to take over: the one where she was on a liner that was raided by spiders; the one where she was taken to their cometary base and surgically prepared for induction into their hive mind.
But there was a difference this time. When the Conjoiners came to open her skull and sink their machines into it, the one who leant over her pulled down a white surgical mask to reveal the face she now recognised from the history texts, from the most recent anecdotal sightings. It was the face of a white-haired, bearded old patriarch, lined and characterful, sad and jolly at the same time, a face that might, under any other circumstances, have seemed kind and wise and grandfatherly.
It was the face of Nevil Clavain.
‘I told you not to cross my path again,’ he said.
The Mother Nest was a light-minute behind him when Clavain instructed the corvette to flip over and commence its deceleration burn, following the navigational data that Skade had given him. The starscape wheeled like something geared by well-oiled clockwork, shadows and pale highlights oozing over Clavain and the recumbent forms of his two passengers. A corvette was the nimblest vessel in the Conjoiner in-system fleet, but cramming three occupants into the hull resembled a mathematical exercise in optimal packing. Clavain was webbed into the pilot’s position, with tactile controls and visual read-outs within easy reach. The ship could be flown without blinking an eyelid, but it was also designed to withstand the kind of cybernetic assault that might impair routine neural commands. Clavain flew it via tactile control in any case, though he had barely moved a finger in hours. Tactical summaries jostled his visual field, competing for attention, but there had been no hint of enemy activity within six light-hours.
Immediately to his rear, with their knees parallel to his shoulders, lay Remontoire and Skade. They were slotted into human-shaped spaces between the inner surfaces of weapons pods or fuel blisters and, like Clavain, they wore lightweight spacesuits. The black armoured surfaces of the suits reduced them to abstract extensions of the corvette’s interior. There was barely room for the suits, but there was even less room to put them on.
Skade?
[Yes, Clavain?]
I think it’s safe to tell me where we’re headed now, isn’t it?
Qust follow the flight plan and we’ll arrive there in good time. The Master of Works will be expecting us.]
Master of Works? Anyone I’ve met? He caught the sly curve of Skade’s smile, reflected in the corvette’s window.
[You’ll soon have the pleasure, Clavain.]
He didn’t need to be told that wherever they were going was still in the same part of the cometary halo that contained the Mother Nest. There was nothing out here but vacuum and comets, and even the comets were scarce. The Conjoiners had turned some comets into decoys to lure in the enemy, and had placed sensors, booby-traps and jamming systems on others, but he was not aware of any such activities taking place so close to home.
He tapped into systemwide newsfeeds as they flew. Only the most partisan enemy agencies pretended that there was any chance of a Demarchist victory now. Most of them were talking openly of defeat, though it was always worded in more ambiguous terms: cessation of hostilities; concession to some enemy demands; reopening of negotiations with the Conjoiners… the litany went on and on, but it was not difficult to read between the lines.
Attacks against Conjoiner assets had grown less and less frequent, with a commensurately dwindling success rate. Now the enemy was concentrating on protecting its own bases and strongholds, and even there they were failing. Most of the bases needed to be resupplied with provisions and armaments from the main production centres, which meant convoys of robot craft strung out on long, lonely trajectories across the system. The Conjoiners picked them off with ease; it was not even worth capturing their cargoes. The Demarchists had launched crash programmes to recover some of the expertise in nano-fabrication they had enjoyed before the Melding Plague, but the rumours coming out of their war labs hinted at grisly failures; of whole research teams turned into grey slurry by runaway replicators. It was like the twenty-first century all over again.
And the more desperate they got, the worse the failures became.
Conjoiner occupation forces had successfully seized a number of outlying settlements and quickly established puppet regimes, enabling day-to-day life to continue much as it had before. They had not so far embarked on mass neural conversion programmes, but their critics said it would only be a matter of time before the populaces were subjugated by Conjoiner implants, enslaved into their crushingly uniform hive mind. Resistance groups had made several damaging strikes against Conjoiner power in those puppet states, with loose alliances of Skyjacks, pigs, banshees and other systemwide ne’er-do-wells banding together against the new authority. All they were doing, Clavain thought, was hastening the likelihood that some form of neural conscription would have to take place, if only for the public good.