Her lips were grey and her eyebrows pure chrome white. She opened her eyes. In the torchlight her irises were a metallic blue-grey.
‘Talk to me,’ Clavain said.
She coughed and laughed at the same time. The appearance of a human expression on that stiff mask shocked them all.
Khouri leaned closer. ‘I’m only picking up mush,’ she said.
‘There’s something wrong with her,’ Clavain replied quietly. Then he held the woman’s head from behind, supporting it off the ice. ‘Listen to me carefully. We don’t want to hurt you. You’ve been injured, but if you help us we will take care of you. Can you understand me?’
The woman laughed again, a spasm of delight creasing her face. ‘You…’ she began.
Clavain leaned closer. ‘Yes?’
‘Clavain.’
Clavain nodded. ‘Yes, that’s me.’ He looked back at the others. ‘Damage can’t be too severe if she remembers me. I’m sure we’ll be able…’
She spoke again. ‘Clavain. Butcher of Tharsis.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Clavain. Defector. Traitor.’ She smiled again, coughed, and then hacked a mouthload of saliva into his face. ‘Betrayed the Mother Nest.’
Clavain wiped the spit from his face with the back of his glove. ‘I didn’t betray the Mother Nest,’ he said, with an alarming lack of anger. ‘It was actually Skade who betrayed it.’ He corrected her with avuncular patience, as if putting right some minor misapprehension about geography.
She laughed and spat at him again. The power of it surprised Scorpio. It caught Clavain in the eye and made him hiss in pain.
Clavain leant closer to the woman, keeping a hand over her mouth this time. ‘We have some work to do, I think. A little bit of re-education. A little bit of attitude adjustment. But that’s all right, I’ve got plenty of time.’
The woman coughed again. Her titanium-grey eyes were bright and joyful, even as she struggled for breath. There was something idiotic about her, Scorpio realised.
The armoured body started convulsing. Clavain kept hold of her head, his other hand still across her mouth.
‘Let her breathe,’ Khouri said.
He released the pressure across her mouth for an instant. The woman kept smiling, her eyes wide, unblinking. Something black squeezed between Clavain’s fingers, forcing its way through the gaps like some manifestation of demonic foulness. Clavain flinched back, letting go of the woman, dropping her head against the floor. The black stuff pulsed out of her mouth, out of her nostrils, the flows merging into a horrible black beard which began to engulf her face.
‘Live machinery,’ Clavain said, falling back. His own left hand was covered in ropes of the black stuff. He swatted it against the ice, but the black ooze refused to dislodge. The ropes combined into a coherent mass, a plaque covering his fingers to the knuckle. It was composed of hundreds of smaller versions of the same cubes they had seen elsewhere. They were swelling perceptibly, enlarging as they consolidated their hold on his hand. The black growth progressed towards his wrist in a series of convulsive waves, cubes sliding over each other.
From behind, something lit up the entire cavity of the wrecked ship. Scorpio risked a glance back, just long enough to see the barrel of Khouri’s cannon glowing cherry-red from a minimum-yield discharge. Jaccottet was aiming his own weapon at the corpse of the Conjoiner, but it was obvious that nothing more remained of the organic part of the Inhibitor victim. The emerging machines appeared totally unaffected: the blast had dispersed some of them from the main mass, but there was no sign that the energy had harmed them in any way whatsoever.
Scorpio had only glanced away for a second, but when he returned his attention to Clavain, he was horrified to see Clavain slumped back against the wall, grimacing.
‘They’ve got me, Scorp. It hurts.’
Clavain closed his eyes. The black plaque had now taken his hand to the wrist. At the finger end it had formed a rounded stump which was creeping slowly back as the wrist end advanced.
‘I’ll try to lever it off,’ Scorpio said, fumbling in his belt for something thin and strong, but not so sharp that it would damage Clavain’s hand.
Clavain opened his eyes. ‘It won’t work.’
With his good hand he reached into the pocket where he had put the knife. A moment earlier his face had been a grey testament to pain, but now there was an easing there, as if the agony had abated.
It hadn’t, Scorpio knew. Clavain had merely dulled off the part of his brain that registered it.
Clavain had the knife out. He held it by the haft, trying to make the blade come alive. It wasn’t happening. Either the control could never be activated single-handedly, or Clavain’s other hand was too numb from the cold to do the job. In error or frustration, the knife tumbled from his grip. He groped towards it, then abandoned the effort.
‘Scorp, pick it up.’
He took the knife. It felt odd in his trotter, like something precious he had stolen, something he had never been meant to handle. He moved to give it back to Clavain.
‘No. You have to do it. Activate the blade with that stud. Be carefuclass="underline" she kicks when the piezo-blade starts up. You don’t want to drop it. She’ll cut through hyperdiamond like a laser through smoke.’
‘I can’t do this, Nevil.’
‘You have to. It’s killing me.’
The black caul of Inhibitor machinery was eating back into his hand. There was no room in that thing for his fingertips, Scorpio realised. It had devoured them already.
He pressed the activation stud. The knife twisted in his hand, alive and eager. He felt the high-frequency buzz through the hilt. The blade had become a blur of silver, like the flicker of a hummingbird’s wing.
‘Take it off, Scorp. Now. Quickly and cleanly. A good inch above the machinery.’
‘I’ll kill you.’
‘No, you won’t. I’ll make it through this.’ Clavain paused. ‘I’ve shut down pain reception. Bloodstream implants will handle clotting. You’ve nothing to worry about. Just do it. Now. Before I change my mind, or that stuff finds a short cut to my head.’
Scorpio nodded, horrified by what he was about to do but knowing that he had no choice.
Making sure that none of the machinery touched his own flesh, Scorpio supported Clavain’s damaged arm at the elbow. The knife buzzed and squirmed. He held the locus of the blur close to the fabric of the sleeve.
He looked into Clavain’s face. ‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Scorp. Now. As a friend. Do it.’
Scorpio pushed the knife down. He felt no resistance as it ghosted through fabric, flesh and bone.
Half a second later the work was done. The severed hand — Scorpio had cut it off just above the wrist — dropped to the ice with a solid whack. With a moan Clavain slumped back against the wall, losing whatever strength he had mustered until then. He’d told Scorpio that he had blocked all pain signals, but some residual message must have reached his brain: either that or what Scorpio heard was a moan of desperate relief.
Jaccottet knelt down by Clavain, unhitching a medical kit from his belt. Clavain had been right: there was very little in the way of blood loss from the wound. He held the truncated forearm against his belly, pressing it tight, while Jaccottet prepared a dressing.
There was a rustle of movement from the hand. The black machines were detaching themselves, breaking free of the remaining flesh. They moved hesitantly, as if sapped of the energy they had drawn from the warmth of living bodies. The mass of cubes oozed away from the hand, slowed and then halted, becoming just another part of the dormant growth that filled the ship. The hand lay there, the flesh a contused landscape of recent bruises and older age spots, yet still largely intact save for the eroded stubs of the fingertips, which had been consumed down to the first joint.