‘Skade. Hello.’ He spoke through pain, certain that he had broken at least one rib and probably bruised one or two others.
‘Clavain… what exactly are you doing?’
‘I seem to be attempting to steal this ship.’
He pulled himself into the seat now, wincing at multiple flares of pain. He groaned as he stretched restraint webbing across his chest. The thrusters were threatening to go into autonomous shutdown mode. He threw desperate commands at the corvette. Grapple retraction wouldn’t help his situation: it would just reel in Skade and Remontoire — he remembered both of them now — and then the two of them would be on the outside of the hull, where they would have to stay. They would probably be safe if he abandoned them in space, drifting, but this was a Closed Council mission. Almost no one else would know they were out here.
‘Full thrust…’ Clavain said aloud, to himself. He knew a burst of full thrust would get him away from the comet. Either it would sever the grapple lines or it would rip chunks of the comet’s surface away with him.
‘Clavain,’ said a man’s voice, ‘I think you need to think about this.’
Neither of them could reach him neurally. The corvette would not allow those kinds of signals through its hull.
‘Thanks, Rem… but as a matter of fact, I’ve already given it a fair bit of thought. She wants those weapons too badly. It’s the wolves, isn’t it, Skade? You need the weapons for when the wolves come.’
‘I as good as spelled it out to you, Clavain. Yes, we need the weapons to defend ourselves against the wolves. Is that so reprehensible? Is ensuring our own survival such a damning thing to do? What would you prefer — that we capitulate, offer ourselves up to them?’
‘How do you know they’re coming?’
‘We don’t. We merely consider their arrival to be likely, based on the information available to us…’
‘There’s more to it than that.’ His fingers skated over the main thrust controls. In a few seconds he would have to use full burn or stay behind.
‘We just know, Clavain. That’s all you have to know. Now let us back aboard the corvette. We’ll forget all about this, I assure you.’
‘Not good enough, I’m afraid.’
He fired the main engine, working the other thrusters to steer the blinding violet arc of the drive flame away from the comet’s surface. He did not want to hurt either of them. Clavain disliked Skade but wished her no harm. Remontoire was his friend, and he had only left him on the comet because he did not see the point of implicating him in what he was about to do.
The corvette stretched against its guys. He could feel the vibration of the engine working its way through the hull, into his bones. Overload indicators were flicking into the red.
‘Clavain, listen to me,’ Skade said. ‘You can’t take that ship. What are you going to do with it — defect to the Demarchists?’
‘It’s a thought.’
‘It’s also suicide. You’ll never make it to Yellowstone. If we don’t kill you, the Demarchists will.’
Something snapped. The shuttle yawed and then slammed against the restraints of the remaining grapple lines. Through the cockpit window Clavain saw the severed line whiplash into the surface of the comet, slicing through the caul of stabilising membrane. It gashed a meter-wide wound in the surface. Black soot erupted out like octopus ink.
‘Skade’s right. You won’t make it, Clavain — there’s nowhere for you to go. Please, as a friend — I beg you not to do this.’
‘Don’t you understand, Rem? She wants those weapons so she can take them with her. Those twelve ships? They’re not all for the taskforce. They’re part of something bigger. It’s an evacuation fleet.’
He felt the jolt as another line snapped, coiling into the comet with savage energy.
‘So what if they are, Clavain?’ Skade said.
‘What about the rest of humanity? What are those poor fools meant to do when the wolves arrive? Take their own chances?’
‘It’s a Darwinian universe.’
‘Wrong answer, Skade.’
The final line snapped at that moment. Suddenly he was accelerating away from the comet at full burn, squashed into his seat. He yelped at the pain from his damaged ribs. He watched the indicators normalise, the needles trembling back into green or white. The motor pitch died away to subsonic; the hull oscillations subsided. Skade’s comet grew smaller.
By eye, Clavain orientated himself toward the sharp point of light that was Epsilon Eridani.
CHAPTER 11
Deep within Nostalgia for Infinity, Ilia Volyova stood at the epicentre of the thing that had once been her Captain, the thing that in another life had called itself John Armstrong Brannigan. She was not shivering, and that still struck her as wrong. Visits to the Captain had always been accompanied by extreme physical discomfort, lending the whole exercise the faintly penitential air of a pilgrimage. On the occasions when they were not visiting the Captain to measure the extent of his growth — which could be slowed, but not stopped — they had generally been seeking his wisdom on some matter or other. It seemed only right and proper that some burden of suffering should be part of the bargain, even if the Captain’s advice had not always been absolutely sound, or even sane.
They had kept him cold to arrest the progress of the Melding Plague. For a time, the reefersleep casket in which he was kept could maintain the cold. But the Captain’s relentless growth had finally encroached on the casket itself, subverting and incorporating its systems into his own burgeoning template. The casket had continued functioning, after a fashion, but it had proved necessary to plunge the entire area around it into cryogenic cold. Trips to the Captain required the donning of many layers of thermal clothing. It was not easy to breathe the chill air that infested his realm: each inhalation threatened to shatter the lungs into a million glassy shards. Volyova had chain-smoked during those visits, though they were easier for her than for the others. She had no internal implants, nothing that the plague could reach and corrupt. The others — all dead now — had considered her squeamish and weak for not having them. But she saw the envy in their eyes when they were forced to spend time in the vicinity of the Captain. Then, if only for a few minutes, they wanted to be her. Desperately.
Sajaki, Hegazi, Sudjic… she could barely remember their names, it seemed like such a long time ago.
Now the place was no cooler than any other part of the ship, and much warmer than some areas. The air was humid and still. Glistening films textured every surface. Condensation ran in rivulets down the walls, dribbling around knobbly accretions. Now and then, with a rude eructation, a mass of noxious shipboard effluent would burst from a cavity and ooze to the floor. The ship’s biochemical recycling processes had long ago escaped human control. Instead of crashing, they had evolved madly, adding weird feedback loops and flourishes. It was a constant and wearying battle to prevent the ship from drowning in its own effluent. Volyova had installed bilge pumps at thousands of locations, redirecting the slime back to major processing vats where crude chemical agents could degrade it. The drone of the bilge pumps provided a background to every thought, like a single sustained organ note. The sound was always there. She had simply stopped noticing it.
If one knew where to look, and if one had the particular visual knack for extracting patterns from chaos, one could just about tell where the reefersleep casket had been. When she had allowed him to warm — she had fired a flechette round into the casket’s control system — he had begun to consume the surrounding ship at a vastly accelerated rate, ripping it apart atom by atom and merging it with himself. The heat had been like a furnace. She had not waited to see what the effects of the transformations would be, but it had seemed clear enough that the Captain would continue until he had assimilated much of the ship. As horrific as that prospect had been, it had been preferable to letting the ship remain in the control of another monster: Sun Stealer. She had hoped that the Captain would succeed in wresting some control from the parasitic intelligence that had invaded Nostalgia for Infinity.