The crab arrived a few moments later, easing through a fist-sized hole in the wall. ‘This is unacceptable. Why have you…’
‘The engines are my responsibility,’ Remontoire said pleasantly, for he had rehearsed exactly what he would say. ‘They’re a highly delicate and dangerous technology, all the more so given the experimental nature of the new designs. Any deviation from the expected performance might indicate a serious, possibly catastrophic, problem.’
The crab waggled its manipulators. ‘You know perfectly well that there was nothing at all wrong with the engines. I demand that you restart them immediately. Every second we spend drifting is to Clavain’s advantage.’
‘Really?’ Felka said.
‘Only in the very loosest sense. If we’re delayed any further our only realistic option will be a remote kill, rather than a live capture.’
‘Not that that’s ever been under serious consideration, has it?’ Felka asked.
‘You’ll never know if Remontoire persists with this… insubordination. ’
‘Insubordination?’ Felka hooted. ‘Now you almost sound like a Demarchist.’
‘Don’t play games, either of you.’ The crab pivoted around on its suckered feet. ‘Reinstate the engines, Remontoire, or I’ll find a way to do it without you.’
It sounded like a bluff, but Remontoire was prepared to believe that overriding his commands was within the capabilities of an Inner Sanctum member. It might not be easy, certainly less easy than having him do what she wanted, but he did not doubt that Skade was capable of it.
‘I will… once you show me what your machinery does.’
‘My machinery?’
Remontoire reached over and prised the crab from the wall, each suckered foot detaching with a soft, faintly comical slurp. He held the crab at eye-level, looking into its tight assemblage of sensors and variegated weapons, daring Skade to hurt him. The little legs thrashed pathetically.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ he said. ‘I want to know what it is, Skade. I want to know what you’ve learned to do.’
They followed the proxy through Nightshade, navigating twisting grey corridors and vertical interdeck shafts, moving steadily away from the prow of the ship — ‘down’ as far as Remontoire’s inner ear was concerned. The acceleration was now one and three-quarter gees, Remontoire having agreed to reinstate the engines at a low level of thrust. His mental map of the other occupants showed that they were all still crammed into the volume of the ship immediately aft of the prow, and that Felka and he were the only people this far downship. He had yet to discover where Skade’s actual body was; she still had not spoken to him through any other medium than the crab’s voice box, and his usual omniscient knowledge of the ship’s layout had been replaced by a mental map riddled with precisely edited gaps, like the blocked-out text in a classified document.
‘This machinery… whatever it is…’
Skade cut him off. ‘You’d have found out about it sooner or later. As would all of the Mother Nest.’
‘Was it something you learned from Exordium?’
‘Exordium showed us the direction to follow, that’s all. Nothing was handed to us on a plate.’ The crab skittered ahead of them and reached a sealed bulkhead, one of the mechanical doors that had closed before the increase in acceleration. ‘We have to go through here, into the part of the ship I sealed off. I should warn you that things will feel a little different on the other side. Not immediately, but this barricade more or less marks the point at which the effects of the machinery rise above the threshold of human sensitivity. You may find it disturbing. Are you certain that you wish to continue?’
Remontoire looked at Felka; Felka looked back at him and nodded.
‘Lead on, Skade,’ said Remontoire.
‘Very well.’
The barricade wheezed open, revealing an even darker and deader space beyond it. They stepped through and then descended several further levels via vertical shafts, riding piston-shaped discs.
Remontoire examined his feelings but nothing was out of the ordinary. He raised a quizzical eyebrow in Felka’s direction, to which she responded with a short shake of her head. She felt nothing unusual either, and she was a good deal more attuned to such matters than he was.
They continued on through normal corridors, pausing now and then until they regained the energy to continue. Eventually they arrived at a plain stretch of walling devoid of any indicators — real, holographic or entoptic — to mark it as out of the ordinary. Yet the crab halted at a certain spot and after a moment a hole opened in the wall at chest height, enlarging to form an aperture shaped like a cat’s pupil. Red light spilled through the inverted gash.
‘This is where I live,’ the crab told them. ‘Please come in.’
They followed the crab into a large warm space. Remontoire looked around, realising as he did so that nothing he saw matched his expectations. He was simply in an almost empty room. There were a few items of machinery in it, but only one thing, resembling a small, slightly macabre piece of sculpture, that he did not instantly recognise. The room was filled with the soft hum of equipment, but again the sound was not unfamiliar.
The largest item was the first thing he had noticed. It was a black egg-shaped pod resting on a heavy rust-red pedestal inset with quivering analogue dials. The pod had the antique look of much modern space technology, like a relic from the earliest days of near-Earth exploration. He recognised it as an escape pod of Demarchist design, simple and robust. Conjoiner ships never carried escape pods.
This unit was marked with warning instructions in all the common languages — Norte, Russish, Canasian — along with icons and diagrams in bright primary colours. There were bee-stripes and cruciform thrusters; the grey bulges of sensors and communication systems; collapsed solar-wings and parachutes. There were explosive bolts around a door and a tiny triangular window in the door itself.
There was something in the pod. Remontoire saw a curve of pale flesh through the window, indistinct because it was embedded in a matrix of amber cushioning gel or some cloying medical nutrient. The flesh moved, breathing slowly.
‘Skade… ?’ he said, thinking of the injuries he had seen when he had visited her before their departure.
‘Go ahead,’ the crab said. ‘Have a look. I’m sure it will surprise you.’
Remontoire and Felka eased closer to the pod. There was a figure packed inside it, pink and foetal. Remontoire saw lines and catheters, and watched the figure move almost imperceptibly no more than once a minute. It was breathing.
It wasn’t Skade, or even what had remained of Skade. It definitely wasn’t human.
‘What is it?’ Felka asked, her voice barely a whisper.
‘Scorpio,’ Remontoire said. ‘The hyperpig, the one we found on the Demarchist ship.’
Felka touched the metal wall of the pod. Remontoire did likewise, feeling the rhythmic churning of life-support systems.
‘Why is he here?’ Felka asked.
‘He’s on his way back to justice,’ Skade said. ‘Once we’re near the inner system we’ll eject the pod and let the Ferrisville Convention recover him.’
‘And then?’
‘They’ll try him and find him guilty of the many crimes he is supposed to have committed,’ Skade said. ‘And then, under the present legislation, they’ll kill him. Irreversible neural death.’
‘You sound as if you approve.’
‘We have to co-operate with the Convention,’ Skade said. ‘They can make life difficult for us in our dealings around Yellowstone. The pig has to be handed back to them one way or another. It would have been very convenient for us if he had died in our custody, believe me. Unfortunately, this way he has a small chance of survival. ’