Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, ‘Have I let you down, ma’am?’
‘What kind of ship do you think I run, Quaiche? One where I can afford to carry baggage?’
‘I can feel my luck changing.’
‘A bit late for that. How many stopovers have we made since you joined the crew, Quaiche? Five, isn’t it? And what have we got to show for ourselves, after those five stopovers?’
He opened his mouth to answer her when he saw the scrimshaw suit lurking, almost lost, in the shadows behind her throne. Its presence could not be accidental.
It resembled a mummy, worked from wrought iron or some other industrial-age metal. There were various heavy-duty input plugs and attachment points, and a dark grilled-over rectangle where the visor should have been. There were scabs and fillets of solder where parts had been rewelded or braised. There was the occasional smooth patch of obviously new metal.
Covering every other part of the suit, however, was an intricate, crawling complexity of carvings. Every available square centimetre had been crammed with obsessive, eye-wrenching detail. There was far too much to take in at one glance, but as the suit gyrated above him Quaiche made out fanciful serpent-necked space monsters, outrageously phallic spacecraft, screaming faces and demons, depictions of graphic sex and violence. There were spiralling narratives, cautionary tales, boastful trade episodes writ large. There were clock faces and psalms. Lines of text in languages he didn’t recognise, musical stanzas, even swathes of lovingly carved numerals. Sequences of digital code or DNA base pairs. Angels and cherubim. Snakes. A lot of snakes.
It made his head hurt just to look at it.
It was pocked and gouged by the impact spots of micrometeorites and cosmic rays, its iron-grey tainted here and there with emerald-green or bronze discoloration. There were scratchlike striations where ultra-heavy particles had gouged out their own impact furrows as they sliced by at oblique angles. And there was a fine dark seam around the whole thing where the two armoured halves could be popped open and then welded shut again.
The suit was a punishment device, its existence no more than a cruel rumour. Until this moment.
The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship’s ablative shield.
The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the suit.
Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. ‘If you look at things one way, we didn’t really… we didn’t really do too badly… all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures…’ He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina.
‘That’s the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose.’
He shifted uneasily.
‘Yet in five systems all you found was junk.’
‘You chose the systems, not me. It isn’t my fault if there wasn’t anything worth finding.’
Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. ‘No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I’m afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger Faint Memory of Hokusai. Ring any bells?’
‘Not really…’
But it did.
‘The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was…’ The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. ‘Let’s see… “nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant… nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations”.’
Quaiche could see where this was heading. ‘And the Faint Memory of Hokusai?’
‘The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding.’ She looked at him expectantly. ‘Any comments, thoughts, on that?’
‘My report was honest,’ Quaiche said. ‘They must have got lucky, that’s all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?’
The queen smiled. ‘We’re always approaching another system. This time it’s a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn’t look much more promising than the last five. What’s to say you’re going to be any use this time?’
‘Let me take the Dominatrix,’ he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. ‘Let me take her down into that system.’
The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber’s twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen’s solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose.
‘Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?’
He sighed. ‘I suppose I have.’
‘Very well, then.’
She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche’s revival entered the room.
‘I’m done with him,’ the queen said.
‘And your intention?’ Grelier asked.
Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. ‘I haven’t changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit.’
FOUR
Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon.
Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend’s sanity, Clavain spoke. ‘When did it happen?’ he asked. ‘When did this “thing” — whatever it is — arrive?’
‘Probably in the last week,’ Scorpio said. ‘We only found it a couple of days ago.’
There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline.
‘And what exactly is it?’
‘We can’t be absolutely certain. It’s a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it’s an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface.’