‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘I don’t know.’ Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘I’m just working on the assumption that we’re better off with him than without him.’
‘Good,’ Blood said doubtfully. ‘In which case you can skip the boat. We’re sending a shuttle.’
Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. ‘Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile.’
‘It was, but there’s been a development.’
‘The capsule?’
‘Spot on,’ Blood said. ‘It’s only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing’s sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It’s started waking whoever or whatever’s inside it.’
‘Right. Great. Excellent. And there’s nothing you can do about it?’
‘We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course…’
With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could.
‘How long have we got?’
‘About eleven hours.’
‘Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?’
‘I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you.’
Scorpio wrinkled his nose. ‘And if I’d told you I wasn’t?’
Blood laughed. ‘Then we’d be getting our boat back, wouldn’t we?’
‘You’re a funny pig, Blood, but don’t make a career out of it.’
Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain’s decision, avoided the question.
‘You can take back as much stuff as you like,’ Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled. ‘We don’t have to worry about capsizing now.’
Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. ‘I already have all I need.’
‘Fine,’ Scorpio said. ‘I’ll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent.’
‘The tent stays here,’ Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, ‘And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren’t listening, were you?’
‘I heard you,’ Scorpio said. ‘I just didn’t want to hear you.’
‘Start listening, friend. That’s all I ask of you.’ Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster.
‘A gun?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Something more reliable,’ Clavain said. ‘A knife.’
Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.
‘It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.’
‘What type of bridge?’ Morwenna asked.
‘A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.’
‘I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Quaiche said. He had thought of this already, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. ‘For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature… it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.’ Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. ‘Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database — that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.’
‘But someone must have been here before,’ Morwenna said, ‘or there wouldn’t be a bridge.’
Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. ‘That’s just the point. I don’t think anyone did build this bridge.’ He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. ‘No one human, at any rate.’
Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined.
‘You think you’ve stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?’
‘No,’ Quaiche said. ‘I don’t think I’ve stumbled on an alien artefact. I think I’ve stumbled on the fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I’ve found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe.’
‘What if it’s something natural?’
‘If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty, all the same. I’ve seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn’t believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds.’
‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘But this is something different. Trust me, all right?’
‘Of course I’ll trust you. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter.’
‘Not quite the answer I was hoping for,’ Quaiche said, ‘but I suppose it’ll have to do for now.’
He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche’s tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space.
With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the Scavenger’s Daughter. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness.
‘Easy, girl,’ Quaiche whispered.
The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull.
‘Open,’ Quaiche whispered.
The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space — lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs — was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself.