And all it needed was a little trust.
I want to know what happened to me.
They looked at her, and then at each other. She could almost feel the intense buzz of their thoughts crackling through the air like the ionisation breakdown that presaged a thunderstorm.
The first of the surgeons projected calm and reassurance. [Skade…]
I said I want to know what happened to me.
[You are alive. You were injured, but you survived. You are still in need of…] The surgeon’s gloss of calm faltered.
In need of what?
[You still need to be properly healed. But everything can be made good.]
For some reason she could not see into any of their heads. For most Con-joiners, waking to experience such isolation would have been a profoundly disturbing experience. But Skade was equipped for it. She endured it stoically, reminding herself that she had experienced degrees of isolation almost as extreme during her time in the Closed Council. Those had ended; this would end. It would only be a matter of time until…
What is wrong with my implants?
[Nothing’s wrong with your implants.]
She knew that the surgeon was a man named Delmar. So why am I isolated?
But almost before she had phrased the question she knew what the answer would be. It was because they did not want her to be able to see what she looked like through their eyes. Because they did not want her to know the immediate truth of what had happened to her.
[Skade…]
Never mind…I know. Why did you bother waking me?
[There is someone to see you.]
She could not move her head, only her eyes. Through the blur of peripheral vision she saw Remontoire approach the bed, or table, or couch, where they had woken her. He wore an electric-white medical tunic against a background of pure white. His head was an oddly disconnected sphere bobbing towards her. Swan-necked medical servitors moved out of his way. The surgeon folded his arms across his chest and looked on with an expression of stern disapproval. His colleagues had made a discreet exit, leaving only the three of them in the room.
Skade peered ‘down’ towards the foot of the bed but could see only an out-of-focus whiteness that might have been illusory. There was a quiet mechanical humming, but nothing that she would not have expected in a medical room.
Remontoire knelt down beside her. [How much do you remember?]
You tell me what happened and I’ll tell you what I remember.
Remontoire glanced back at the surgeon. He allowed Skade to hear the thought he pushed into Delmar’s head. [I’m afraid you’ll have to leave us. Your machines as well, since I’m certain that they have recording devices.]
[We’ll leave you alone for exactly five minutes, Remontoire. Will that be sufficient?]
[It’ll have to do, won’t it?] Remontoire nodded and smiled as the man ushered his machines from the room, their swan-necks lowering elegantly to pass through the doorway. [Sorry…]
[Five minutes, Remontoire.]
Skade tried moving her head again, but still without success. Come closer, Remontoire. I can’t see you very easily. They won’t show me what happened.
[Do you remember the comet? Clavain was with us. You were showing him the buried ships.]
I remember.
[Clavain stole the corvette before you or I could get aboard. It was still tethered to the surface of the comet.]
She remembered taking Clavain to the comet but not the rest of it. And did he get away?
[Yes, but we’ll come to that. The problem is what happened during his escape. Clavain applied thrust until the tethers gave way under the strain. They whiplashed back towards the comet. I’m afraid one of them caught you.]
It was difficult to respond, though she had known from the moment of waking that something bad had happened to her. Caught me?
[You were injured, Skade. Badly. If you hadn’t been Conjoiner, hadn’t had the machines in your head to help your body cope with the shock, you would very probably not have survived, even with the assistance that your suit was able to give you.]
Show me, damn you.
[I would if there was a mirror in this room. But there isn’t, and I can’t bypass the neural blockades that Delmar has installed.]
Describe it, then. Describe it, Remontoire!
[This isn’t why I came, Skade… Delmar will put you back into a recuperative coma very shortly, and when you next wake you’ll be healed again. I came to ask you about Clavain.]
For a moment she pushed aside her own morbid curiosity. I take it he’s dead?
[Actually, they haven’t managed to stop him yet.]
As angry as she was, and despite her morbid curiosity, she had to admit that the matter of Clavain was at least as fascinating to her as her own predicament. And the two things were not unconnected, were they? She did not yet fully understand what had happened to her, but it was enough to know that it had been Clavain’s doing. It did not matter that it might not have been intentional.
There were no accidents in treason.
Where is he?
[That’s the funny thing. No one seems to know. They had a fix on his exhaust. He was heading towards Eridani — towards what we assumed would be Yellowstone or the Rust Belt.]
The Demarchists would crucify him.
Remontoire nodded. [Clavain especially. But now it doesn’t look as if he was going there at all — not directly, anyway. He turned away from the sunward vector. We don’t know how far into his journey, since we lost his drive flame.]
We have optical monitors strewn through the halo. Surely he’ll have fallen into the line of sight of another one by now.
[The problem is that Clavain knows the positions of those monitors. He can make sure his beam doesn’t sweep across them. We have to keep reminding ourselves that he’s one of ours, Skade.]
Were missiles launched?
[Yes, but they never got close enough to establish their own fixes. They didn’t have enough fuel to make it back to the Nest, so we had to detonate them.]
She felt drool loosen itself and trail down her chin. We have to stop him, Remontoire. Grasp that.
[Even if we pick up Clavain’s signal again, he’d be out of effective missile range. And no other ships can catch a corvette.]
She bit down on her fury. We have the prototype.
[Even Nightshade isn’t that fast, not over solar-system-type distances.]
Skade said nothing for several seconds, calculating how much she could prudently reveal. This was Inner Sanctum business, after all, sensitive even by the clandestine standards of Closed Council. It is, Remontoire.