And in a sense, though perhaps not in quite the sense that Quail had intended, that was precisely what they had done. The crew had anticipated a hunt, and for a little while that was what they got. The rules were simple enough: the pigs were allowed free run of Quail’s ship, to hide anywhere they desired and to improvise tools and weapons from whatever was at hand. After five days an amnesty would be declared on any surviving pigs, or at least that was what Quail promised. It was up to the pigs to choose whether they hid en masse or split into smaller teams. They had six hours’ lead on the humans.
That turned out to make precious little difference. Half the pigs were dead by the end of the first day’s hunt. They had accepted the terms unquestioningly; even Scorpio had felt a strangely eager obligation to do whatever was asked of him, a sense that it was his duty to do whatever Quail — or any other human — required. Though he was afraid, and had an immediate desire to safeguard his own survival, it was to be nearly three days before he would think about striking back, and even then the thought only pushed its way into his head against great resistance, as if violating some sacrosanct personal paradigm.
At first Scorpio had sought shelter with two other pigs, one of them mute, the other only able to form broken sentences, but they had functioned well enough as a team, anticipating each other’s actions with uncanny ease. Scorpio knew, even then, that the twelve pigs had worked together before, though he could not yet assemble a single clear memory of his life before waking in Quail’s chamber. But even though the team had functioned well, Scorpio had chosen to go off on his own after the first eighteen hours. The other two wanted to remain hiding in the cubbyhole they had found, but Scorpio was sure that the only hope of survival lay in continuous ascent, moving ever upwards along the ship’s axis of thrust.
It was then that he had made the first of three discoveries. Crawling through a duct, he had ripped away part of his clothing, revealing the edge of a shining green shape that covered much of his right shoulder. He ripped away more of the clothing, but it was only when he found a reflective panel that he was able to examine the entire shape properly and see that it was a highly stylised green scorpion. As he touched the emerald tattoo, tracing the curved line of its tail, almost feeling the sting of its barb, he felt as if it was imbued with power, a personal force that he alone was able to channel and direct. He sensed that his identity was bound up with the scorpion; that everything that mattered about him was locked within the tattoo. The moment was a startling instant of self-revelation, for at last he realised that he had a name, or could at least give himself a name that had some significant connection with his past.
Perhaps half a day later he made the second discovery: glimpsed through a window was another ship, much smaller. On closer inspection, Scorpio recognised the lean, efficient lines of an in-system yacht. The hull gleamed with pale green alloy, a lusciously streamlined manta shape with cowled air-intakes like the mouths of basking sharks. As he looked at the yacht, Scorpio could almost see its blueprint glowing beneath the skin. He knew that he could crawl aboard that yacht and make it fly almost without thinking, and that he could repair or remedy any technical fault or imperfection; he felt an almost overwhelming urge to do just that, sensing perhaps that only in the belly of the yacht, surrounded by machines and tools, would he be truly happy.
Tentatively, he formed his hypothesis: the twelve pigs must have been the crew of that yacht when Quail had captured their ship. The yacht had been taken as bounty, the crew put into deep freeze until they were required to spice up the humdrum existence on board Quail’s ship. That accounted for the amnesia, at least. He felt delight in discovering a link with his own past. It was still with him when he made the third discovery.
He had found the two pigs he had left behind in the cubbyhole. They had been caught and killed, just as he had feared. Quail’s hunters had suspended them by chains from the perforated spars bridging a corridor. They had been eviscerated and skinned, and at some point in the process Scorpio was certain that they had still been alive. He was also certain that the clothes they had been wearing — the clothes he continued to wear — were themselves made from the skins of other pigs. The twelve were not the first victims, but merely the latest in a game that had been playing for much longer than he had at first suspected; he began to feel a fury beyond anything he had known before. Something snapped; suddenly he was able to consider, at least as a theoretical possibility, what had previously been the unthinkable: he could imagine how it would feel to hurt a human, and to hurt a human very badly indeed. And he could even think of ways that he might go about it.
Scorpio, who turned out to be both resourceful and technically minded, began to infiltrate the machinery of Quail’s ship. He turned bulkhead doors into vicious scissoring traps. He turned elevators and transit pods into deadfalls or crushing pistons. He sucked air from certain parts of the ship and replaced it with poisonous gases or vacuum, and then fooled the sensors that would have alerted Quail and his company to the ruse. One by one he executed the pigs’ hunters, often with considerable artistry, until only Quail remained alive, alone and fearful, finally grasping the terrible error of judgement he had made. But by then the other eleven pigs were also dead, so Scorpio’s victory was mingled with a sour sense of abject personal failure. He had felt an obligation to protect the other pigs, most of who had lacked the language skills he took for granted. It was not simply that some of them were unable to talk, lacking the vocal mechanisms necessary for producing speech sounds, but they did not even comprehend spoken language with the same fluency that he did. A few words and phrases, perhaps, but nothing more than that. Their minds were wired differently from his, lacking the brain functions that coded and decoded language. For him it was second nature. There was no escaping it, but he was a lot closer to human than they were. And he had let them down, even though none of them had elected him as their protector.
Scorpio kept Quail alive until they were near circum-Yellowstone space, at which point he arranged for his own passage into Chasm City. He had taken the yacht. By the time he reached the Mulch Quail was dead, or was at least experiencing the final death agonies of the execution device Scorpio had made for him, crafted with loving care from the robotic surgery systems he had removed from the yacht’s medical bay.
He was almost home and dry, but there was one final discovery that had to be made: the yacht had never belonged to himself, or to any of the other pigs. The craft — Zodiacal Light — had been run by humans, with the twelve pigs serving as indentured slaves, crammed belowdecks, each with their own area of specialisation. Replaying the yacht’s video log, Scorpio saw the human crew being murdered by Quail’s boarders. It was a quick, clean series of murders, almost humane compared with the slow hunting of the pigs. And, via the same logs, Scorpio saw that the twelve pigs had all been tattooed with a different zodiacal sign. The symbol on his shoulder was a mark of identity, just as he had suspected, but it was also a mark of ownership and obedience.