The question surprised him. ‘I’m floating next to you. I thought you might be able to hear my voice through the armour.’
‘All I can hear is your voice in my head. You sound a long way away. I’m scared, Horris. I don’t know if I can handle this.’
‘You’re not alone,’ he said. ‘I’m right by you. You’re probably safer in the suit than out of it. All you have to do is sit tight. We’ll be home and dry in a few weeks.’
Her voice had a desperate edge to it now. ‘A few weeks? You make it sound as if it’s nothing at all.’
‘I meant it’s better than years and years. Oh, Christ, Morwenna, I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll get you out of this.’ Quaiche screwed up his eyes in pain.
‘Horris?’
‘Yes?’ he asked, through tears.
‘Don’t leave me to die in this thing. Please.’
‘Morwenna,’ he said, a little while later, ‘listen carefully. I have to leave you now. I’m going up to the command deck. I have to check on our status.’
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘You’ll still be able to hear my voice. I must do this, Morwenna. I absolutely must. If I don’t, neither of us will have any kind of a future to look forward to.’
‘Horris.’
But he was already moving. He drifted away from the slowdown coffin and the scrimshaw suit, crossing the compartment space to reach a set of padded wall grips. He began to make his way down the narrow companionway towards the command deck, pulling himself along hand over hand. Quaiche had never developed a taste for weightlessness, but the needle-hulled survey craft was far too small for centrifugal gravity. It would be better once they were underway again, for then he would have the illusion of gravity provided by the Dominatrix’s engines.
Under pleasanter circumstances, he would have been enjoying the sudden isolation of being away from the rest of the crew. Morwenna had not accompanied him on most of his previous excursions, but, while he missed her, he had generally revelled in the enforced solitude of his periods away from the Gnostic Ascension. It was not strictly the case that he was antisocial; admittedly, during his time in mainstream human culture, Quaiche had never been the most gregarious of souls, but he had always ornamented himself with a handful of strong friendships. There had always been lovers, some tending towards the rare, exotic, or — in Morwenna’s case — the downright hazardous. But the environment of Jasmina’s ship was so overwhelmingly claustrophobic, so cloyingly saturated with the pheromonal haze of paranoia and intrigue, that he found himself longing for the hard simplicity of a ship and a mission.
Consequently the Dominatrix and the tiny survey craft it contained had become his private empire within the greater dominion of the Ascension. The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan. The more time he spent in it, the more it learned his whimsies and foibles. It played music that not only suited his moods, but was precisely calibrated to steer him from the dangerous extremes of morbid self-reflection or careless euphoria. It fed him the kinds of meals that he could never persuade the food synthesisers on the Ascension to produce, and seemed able to delight and surprise him whenever he suspected he had exhausted its libraries. It knew when he needed sleep and when he needed bouts of feverish activity. It amused him with fancies when he was bored, and simulated minor crises when he showed indications of complacency. Now and then it occurred to Quaiche that because the ship knew him so well he had in a sense extended himself into it, permeating its machine systems. The merging had even taken place on a biological level. The Ultras did their best to sterilise it every time it returned to its storage bay in the belly of the Ascension, but Quaiche knew that the ship now smelt different from the first time he had boarded it. It smelt of places he had lived in.
But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fiefdom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead.
‘Bitch,’ he said again.
Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot’s seat. The deck was necessarily tiny, for the Dominatrix was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space.
‘Avionics,’ he said.
Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved.
‘Orders, Quaiche?’
‘Just give me a moment,’ he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was welclass="underline" the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the Dominatrix’s belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born.
‘Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?’
‘None that were revealed to me.’
‘Well, that’s splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?’
‘I am receiving continuous telemetry from Gnostic Ascension. You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six- to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre.’
‘Affirmative.’ It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly.
‘Horris?’ said Morwenna. ‘Talk to me, please. Where are you?’
‘I’m up front,’ he said, ‘checking things out. Everything looks more or less OK at this point, but I want to make certain.’
‘Do you know where we are yet?’
‘I’m about to find out.’ He touched one of the input fields, enabling voice control of major ship systems. ‘Rotate plus one-eighty, thirty-second slew,’ he said.
The console display indicated compliance. Through the oval viewport, a sprinkling of faintly visible stars began to ooze from one edge to the other.
‘Talk to me,’ Morwenna said again.
‘I’m slewing us around. We were pointed tailfirst after slowdown. Should be getting a look at the system any moment now.’
‘Did Jasmina say anything about it?’
‘Not that I remember. What about you?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. For the first time since waking she sounded almost like her old self. He imagined it was a coping mechanism. If she acted normally, she would keep panic at bay. Panicking was the last thing she needed in the scrimshaw suit. Morwenna continued, ‘Just that it was another system that didn’t look particularly noteworthy. A star and some planets. No record of human presence. Dullsville, really.’
‘Well, no record doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t passed through here at some point, just like we’re doing. And they may have left something behind.’
‘Better bloody hope they did,’ Morwenna remarked caustically.
‘I’m trying to look on the optimistic side.’
‘I’m sorry. I know you mean well, but let’s not expect the impossible, shall we?’