‘This isn’t good,’ Clavain said.
‘I can still feel Aura,’ Khouri said. ‘She’s in there, Clavain.’
‘There isn’t much of it left for her to be in,’ he told her.
Scorpio saw that for an instant the muzzle of Khouri’s Breitenbach cannon tipped towards Clavain, sweeping across him. It was only for an instant, and there was nothing in Khouri’s expression to suggest that she was on the point of losing control, but it still gave him pause for thought.
‘There’s still a ship here,’ Scorpio said. ‘It may be a wreck, Nevil, but someone could be aboard it. And something’s making that music. We shouldn’t give up yet.’
‘No one was about to give up,’ Clavain said.
‘The cold’s coming from the ship,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s pouring out of it, as if it’s bleeding cold.’
Clavain smiled. ‘Bleeding cold? You can say that again.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Old joke. One that doesn’t work too well in Norte.’
Khouri shrugged. They walked towards the wreck.
At the foot of the sloping green-lit corridor down which she had been invited, Antoinette found an echoing chamber of indistinct proportions. She estimated that she had descended five or six levels before the corridor flattened out, but there was no point attempting to plot her position on the pocket blow-up of the main ship map. It had already proven itself to be hopelessly out of date even before the apparitions had summoned her down here.
She halted, keeping the torch on for now. Green light poked through gill-like slats in the ceiling. Wherever she aimed the beam she found machinery, huge rusting piles of it reaching as far away as the torchlight penetrated. The metallic junk ranged from curved scabs of hull plating taller than Antoinette to thumb-sized artefacts covered in brittle green corrosive fur. In between were bronze pump parts and the damaged limbs and sensory organs of shipboard servitors, tossed into loose, teetering piles. The effect was exactly as if she had stumbled into the waste room of a mechanical abattoir.
‘Well, Captain,’ Antoinette said. Gently, she put the helmet down in front of her. ‘Here I am. I presume you’ve brought me here for a reason.’
The machinery stirred. One of the heaps moved as if being pushed by an invisible hand. The slurry of mechanical parts flowed and gyred, animated by the still-working servitor parts that lay embedded in the charnel pile. The articulated limbs twitched and flexed with a mesmerising degree of co-ordination. Antoinette held her breath. She supposed that she had been expecting something along these lines — a fully fledged class-three apparition, exactly as Palfrey had described — but the actuality of it was still unnerving. This close, the potential dangerousness of the machinery was stark. There were sharp edges that could cut or shear, hinged parts that could crush and maim.
But the machinery did not lurch towards her. Instead it continued to shuffle and organise itself. Bits dropped to the floor, twitching stupidly. Detached limbs flexed and grasped. Eye parts goggled and blinked. The red scratches of optical lasers rammed from the pyre, sliding harmlessly over Antoinette’s chest.
She was being triangulated.
The pile collapsed. A layer of useless slurry had avalanched away to reveal the thing that had been assembling at its core. It was a machine, an accumulation of junk parts in the schematic shape of a man. The skeleton — the main armature of the thing — was composed of perhaps a dozen servitor limbs, grasping each other by their manipulators. It stood expertly balanced on the scuffed metal bulbs of ball-and-socket joints. Cables and feedlines were wrapped around it like tinsel, lashing the looser parts together. The head was a ramshackle conglomeration of sensor parts, stacked in a way that vaguely suggested the proportions of a human skull and face. In places, the cables were still sparking from intermittent short circuits. The smell of hot soldered metal hit her, slamming her back to times when she had worked on the innards of Storm Bird under the watchful supervision of her father.
‘I suppose I should say hello,’ Antoinette said.
There was something in one of the Captain’s hands. She hadn’t noticed it before. The limb whipped towards her and the thing arced through the air, describing a graceful parabola. A reflex made her reach out and snatch the thing from the air.
It was a pair of goggles.
‘I guess you want me to put these on,’ Antoinette said.
The broken black hull loomed above them. There was a tall rent in the side, a gash fringed by a scurf of something black and crystalline. Scorpio watched silently as Jaccottet knelt down and examined it. The white pulse of his breath was as crisp as a vapour trail against the ruined armour. His gloved fingers touched the froth, tracing its peculiar angularity. It was a growth of dice-sized black cubes, arranged into neatly stepped structures.
‘Be careful,’ Khouri said. ‘I think I recognise that stuff.’
‘It’s Inhibitor machinery,’ Clavain said, his own voice barely a breath.
‘Here?’ Scorpio asked.
Clavain nodded gravely. ‘Wolves. They’re here, now, on Ararat. I’m sorry, Scorp.’
‘You’re absolutely sure? It couldn’t just be something weird that Skade was using?’
‘We’re sure,’ Khouri said. ‘Thorn and I got a dose of that stuff around Roc, in the last system. I haven’t seen it up close since then, but it’s not something you forget in a hurry. Scares the hell out of me just to see it again.’
‘It doesn’t seem to be doing much,’ Jaccottet said.
‘It’s inert,’ Clavain said. ‘Has to be. Galiana met this stuff as well, in deep space. It ripped through her ship, assembling itself into attack machinery. Took out her entire crew, section by section, until only Galiana was left. Then it got to her as well. Trust me: if it was functional, we’d be dead by now.’
‘Or we’d be having our skulls sucked dry of data,’ Khouri said. ‘And trust me as well, that’s not the preferred option.’
‘We’re all agreed on that,’ Clavain said.
Scorpio approached the gash after the others, making sure that they were not leaving themselves unprotected from the rear. The black crust of Inhibitor machinery had clearly erupted through the hull from the inside, haemorrhaging out under pressure. Perhaps it had happened before Skade’s ship had hit the surface, after the corvette was attacked in space.
Khouri began to squeeze through into the deeper blackness of the hull. Clavain reached out and touched her sleeve. ‘I wouldn’t rush this,’ he said. ‘For all we know, there’s active wolf machinery just inside.’
‘What other options have we got, guy? From where I’m standing they look a bit thin on the ground.’
‘None of the weapons we brought with us will be worth a damn against active Inhibitor machinery,’ Clavain said. ‘If that stuff wakes, it’d be like trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol.’
‘At least it’ll be quick,’ Jaccottet said.
‘Actually, the one thing it won’t be is quick,’ Khouri said, with what sounded like malicious pleasure. ‘Because you probably won’t be allowed to die. It suits the machinery to keep you alive while it drinks your skull dry. So if you have any doubts about whether you want to put yourself through that, I suggest you keep back one round for yourself. If you’re lucky, you can beat the black stuff before it hits your brain and hijacks motor control. After that, you’re fucked.’
‘If it’s so bad,’ Jaccottet said, ‘how did you get away from it?’
‘Divine intervention,’ Khouri replied. ‘But if I were you, it’s not something I’d put a lot of faith in.’
‘Thanks for the tip.’ Jaccottet’s hand moved involuntarily to a small weapon on his belt.