‘Careless,’ Merlin said.
A tightness pinched the corner of Baskin’s mouth. ‘The Tactician has always needed to be close to the theatre of battle, so that its input data is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. That was why our technicians made it portable, self-contained and self-reliant. Of course there are risks in having an asset of that nature.’
‘What happened?’ Teal asked. ‘Did Gaffurius capture it?’
‘Thankfully, no,’ Baskin answered. ‘But it’s very nearly as bad. The Tactician has fallen into the hands of a non-aligned third party. Brigands, mercenaries, call them what you will. Now they wish to extract a ransom for the Tactician’s safe return – or they will sell it on to the enemy. We know their location, an asteroid holdout, and if we massed a group of ships we could probably overwhelm their defences. But if Gaffurius guessed our intentions and moved first…’ Baskin lifted his glass, peering through it at Merlin and Teal, so that his face swam distorted, one mercurial eye wobbling to immensity while the other shrunk to a tight cold glint. ‘So there you have it. A simple proposition. The syrinx is yours, Merlin – provided you recover the Tactician for us.’
‘Maybe I still wouldn’t be fast enough.’
‘But you’ll be able to strike without warning, with Cohort weapons. I don’t see that it should pose you any great difficulty, given the evident capabilities of your ship.’ Baskin twirled his fingers around the stem of his goblet. ‘But then that depends on how badly you want our syrinx.’
‘Mm,’ Merlin said. ‘Quite badly, if I’m going to be honest.’
‘Would you do it?’
Merlin looked at Teal before answering. But she seemed distracted, her gaze caught by one of the portraits. It was the picture of King Curtal, the ancestor Baskin had mentioned only a little while earlier. While the style of dress might not have changed, the portrait was yellowing with old varnish, its colours time-muted.
‘I’d need guarantees,’ he said. ‘Starting with proof that this syrinx even exists.’
‘That’s easily arranged,’ Prince Baskin said.
Tyrant had a biometric lock on Merlin, and it would shadow the Renouncer all the way to Havergal. If it detected that Merlin was injured or under duress, Tyrant would deploy its own proctors to storm the cruiser. But Merlin had gauged enough of his hosts to conclude that such an outcome was vanishingly unlikely. They needed his cooperation much too badly to do harm to their guest.
Locrian showed Merlin and Teal to their quarters, furnished in the same sumptuous tones as the stateroom. When the door opened and Merlin saw that there was only one bed, albeit a large one, he turned to Teal with faked resignation.
‘It’s awkward for both of us, but if we want to keep them thinking you’ve been travelling with me for years and years, it’ll help if we behave as a couple.’
Teal waited until Locrian had shut the door on them and gone off on his own business. She walked to the bed, following the gently, dreamy up-curve of the floor. ‘You’re right,’ she said, glancing back at Merlin before she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘It will help. And at least for now I’d rather they didn’t know I was on the swallowship, so I’m keen to maintain the lie.’
‘Good. Very good.’
‘But we share the bed and nothing else. You’re of no interest to me, Merlin. Maybe you’re not a traitor or a fool – I’ll give you that much. But you’re still a fat, swaggering drunk who thinks far too much of himself.’ But Teal patted the bed. ‘Still, you’re right. The illusion’s useful.’
Merlin settled himself down on his side of the bed. ‘No room for manoeuvre there? Not even a little bit?’
‘None.’
‘Then we’re clear. Actually, it’s a bit of a relief. I meant to say…’
‘If this is about what I just spoke about?’
‘I just wanted to say, I understand how strange all this must be. Not everyone goes back to a place they were thirteen hundred years ago. In a way, it’s a good job it was such a long time ago. At least we don’t have to contend with any living survivors from those days, saying that they remember you being on the diplomatic team.’
‘It was forty three generations ago. No one remembers.’
Merlin moved to the window, watching the stars wheel slowly by outside. There was his own ship, a sharp sliver of darkness against the greater darkness of space. He thought of the loves he had seen ripped from by time and distance, and how the sting of those losses grew duller with each year but was never entirely healed. It was an old lesson for him, one he had been forced to learn many times. For Teal, this might be her first real taste of the cruelty of deep time – realising how far downstream she had come, how little chance she stood of beating those currents back to better, kinder times.
‘I’d remember,’ he said softly.
He could see her reflection in the window, Tyrant sliding through her like a barb, but Teal neither acknowledged his words nor showed the least sign that they had meant anything to her.
Five days was indeed ample time to prepare Merlin for the recovery operation, but only because the intelligence was so sparse. The brigands were holed up on an asteroid called Mundar, an otherwise insignificant speck of dirt on some complex, winding orbit that brought it into the territorial space of both Havergal and Gaffurius. Their leader was a man called Struxer, but beyond one fuzzy picture the biographical notes were sparse. Fortunately there was more on the computer itself. The Iron Tactician was a spherical object about four metres across, quilted from pole to pole in thick military-grade armour. It looked like some hard-shelled animal rolled up into a defensive ball. Merlin saw no obvious complications: it needed no external power inputs and would easily fit within Tyrant’s cargo hold.
Getting hold of it was another matter. Baskin’s military staff knew how big Mundar was and had estimates of its fortifications, but beyond that things were sketchy. Merlin skimmed the diagrams and translated documents, but told Baskin that he wanted Teal to see the originals. He was still looking out for any gaps between the raw material and what was deemed fit for his eyes, any hint of a cover-up or obfuscation.
‘Why are you so concerned?’ Teal asked him, halfway to Havergal, when they were alone in Baskin’s stateroom, the documents spread out on the table. ‘Eating away at your conscience, is it, that you might be serving the wrong paymasters?’
‘I’m not the one who chose sides,’ he said quietly. ‘You did, by selling the syrinx to one party instead of the other. Besides, the other lot won’t be any better. Just a different bunch of stuffed shirts and titles, being told what to do by a different bunch of battle computers.’
‘So you’ve no qualms.’
‘Qualms?’ Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. ‘I’ve so many qualms they’re in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn’t a qualm. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there’s a favour I can do for them. It’s that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.’
‘You’ll be killing those brigands.’
‘They’ll have every chance to hand over the goods. And I’ll exercise due restraint. I don’t want to damage the Tactician, not when it’s the only thing standing between me and the syrinx.’
‘What if you found out that Prince Baskin was a bloodthirsty warmonger?’
Merlin, suddenly weary, settled his head onto his hand, propped up with an elbow. ‘Shall I tell you something? This war of theirs doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn who wins or who loses, or how many lives end up being lost because of it. What matters – what my problem is – is the simple fact that the Huskers will wipe out every living trace of humanity if we allow them. That includes you, me, Prince Baskin, Struxer’s brigands, and every human being on either side of their little spat. And if a few people end up dying to make that Husker annihilation a little less likely, a few stupid mercenaries who should have known better than to play one side against the other, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears.’