Scorpio knew what he was thinking: would he be fast enough, if the moment came? Or would he wait that fatal instant too long?
Clavain moved, his knife humming in his hand. ‘We’ll have to trust that the stuff remains dormant,’ he said.
‘It’s stayed dormant this long,’ Jaccottet said. ‘Why would it wake up now?’
‘We’re heat sources,’ Clavain said. ‘That might make a tiny bit of difference.’
Khouri pushed through into the belly of the ruined ship. Her torchlight bounced back through the gash, picking out the stepped edges of the froth. Under a fine patina of ice the machinery gleamed like freshly hewn coal. Where Jaccottet had rubbed his fingers across it, however, the stuff was pure black, lacking any highlights or lustre.
‘There’s more of the shit in here,’ she said. ‘It’s spread over everything, like black vomit.’ The torchlight played around again, their shadows wheeling over the walls like stalking ogres. ‘But it doesn’t seem to be any more active than the stuff outside.’
‘All the same,’ Clavain said, ‘don’t touch it, just to be on the safe side.’
‘It wasn’t on my to-do list,’ Khouri replied.
‘Good. Anything else?’
‘The music’s louder. It comes in blasts, speeded up. It’s almost as if I recognise it.’
‘I do recognise it,’ Clavain said. ‘It’s Bach — Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, if I’m not mistaken.’
Scorpio turned to his Security Arm man. ‘I want you to stay out here. I can’t afford to leave this exit uncovered.’
Jaccottet knew better than to argue.
Scorpio and Clavain climbed in after Khouri. Clavain played his torch around the mangled interior of this part of the corvette, pausing now and then as the beam alighted on some recognisable but damaged structure. The black invasion resembled a prolific fungal growth that had all but consumed the fabric of the spacecraft.
The hull, Scorpio realised, was a shattered ruin, barely holding itself together. He watched where he put his feet.
‘It subsumes,’ Clavain said quietly, as if wary — despite the intermittent pulses of music — of alerting the machinery. ‘It only takes one element to invade a whole ship. Then it eats its way through the entire thing, converting as it goes.’
‘What are those little black cubes made of?’ asked Scorpio.
‘Almost nothing,’ Clavain told him. ‘Just pure force maintained by a tiny mechanism deep inside, like the nucleus of an atom. Except we never got a look at the mechanism.’
‘I take it you had a go?’
‘We removed some cubic elements from Galiana’s crew by mechanical force, breaking the inter-cube bonds. They just shrank away to nothing, leaving a tiny pile of grey dust. We presumed that was the machinery, but by then there wasn’t a lot it could tell us. Reverse engineering wasn’t really an option.’
‘We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?’ Scorpio said.
‘Yes, we’re in trouble,’ Khouri said. ‘You’re right about that part. Matter of fact, we probably don’t know how much trouble we really are in. But understand one thing: we’re not dead, not yet, and not while we have Aura.’
‘You think she’ll make that much of a difference?’ Clavain asked.
‘She made a difference already, guy. We wouldn’t have made it to this system if she hadn’t.’
‘Do you still think she’s here?’ Scorpio asked her.
‘She’s here. Just can’t say where.’
‘I’m picking up signals as well,’ Clavain said, ‘but they’re fractured and confused. Too many echoes from all the half-functioning systems in this ship. I can’t say if it’s one source or several.’
‘So what do we do?’ Scorpio asked.
Clavain angled his torch into the gloom. The beam knifed against fabulous crenellations and castellations of frozen black cubes. ‘Back there should be the propulsion systems compartment,’ he said. ‘Not a very likely place to look for survivors.’ He swung around, hunting with the beam, squinting at the unfamiliarity of it all. ‘Through here, I think. It seems to be the source of the music, as well. Careful, it’ll be a tight squeeze.’
‘Where will that take us?’ Scorpio said.
‘Habitat and flight deck. Assuming we recognise any of it when we get there.’
‘It’s colder that way,’ Khouri said.
They stepped towards the part of the ship Clavain had indicated. There was a gap ahead, the remains of a bulkhead. The air felt as if it was only a breath away from freezing solid altogether. Scorpio glanced back, his mind playing tricks on him, conjuring languid ripples and waves of motion in the black tar of the wolf machinery.
Instead, something moved ahead. A section of shadow detached itself from the wall, black against black.
Khouri’s gun tipped towards it.
‘No!’ Clavain shouted.
Scorpio heard the click of the Breitenbach cannon’s trigger. He flinched, steeling himself for the energy discharge. It was not really the weapon of choice for close-quarters combat.
Nothing happened. Khouri lowered the weapon’s muzzle an inch. She had pulled back on the trigger, but not enough to fire.
Clavain’s knife trembled in his hand like an elver.
The black presence became a person in black vacuum armour. The armour moved stiffly, as if rusted into seizure. It clutched a dark shape in one hand. The figure took another step and then keeled towards them. It hit the ground with a crack of metal against ice. Black cubes splintered away in all directions, frosted with ice. The weapon — or whatever it was — skidded away and knocked against the wall.
Scorpio knelt down to pick it up.
‘Careful,’ Clavain said again.
Scorpio’s trotters closed on the rounded contours of the Conjoiner side arm. He tried to close his hand around the grip in such a way that he could still depress the trigger. It wasn’t possible. The grip had never been engineered for use by pigs.
In fury he tossed it to Clavain. ‘Maybe you can get this thing to work.’
‘Easy, Scorp.’ Clavain pocketed the weapon. ‘It won’t work for me, either, not unless Skade was very careless with her defences. But we can keep it out of harm’s way, at least.’
Khouri shouldered the cannon and lowered herself down next to the crashed armour of the figure. ‘It ain’t Skade,’ she said. ‘Too big, and the helmet crest isn’t the right shape. You picking up anything, Clavain?’
‘Nothing intelligible,’ he said. He stilled the shivering blade of his knife and slipped it back into one of his pockets. ‘But let’s get that helmet off and see where we are, shall we?’
‘We don’t have time to waste,’ Scorpio said.
Clavain started working the helmet seals. ‘This will only take a moment.’
The extremities of Scorpio’s hands were numb, his co-ordination beginning to show signs of impairment. He did not doubt that Clavain was suffering much the same thing; it must be taking real strength and precision to unlock the intricate mechanism of the helmet seal.
There was a latching sound, then a scrape of metal against metal and a gasp of equalising air pressure. The helmet popped off, trapped between Clavain’s trembling fingertips. He placed it gently on to the ice, rim down.
The face of a young female Conjoiner looked back at them. She had something of the same sleekly sculpted look as her mentor, but she was clearly not Skade. Her face was wide and flat-featured, her bloodless skin the colour of static on a monitor. Her neural crest — the heat-dissipating ridge of bone and cartilage running from the very top of her forehead to the nape of her neck — was less extravagant than the one Scorpio remembered seeing on Skade, and was almost certainly a much less useful indicator of her state of mind. It probably incorporated a more advanced set of neural mechanisms, with lower heat-dissipation burdens.