‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
It was all meant to happen differently. In his imagination, Scorpio had often considered the possible circumstances of Clavain’s death. Assuming he would live long enough to witness it himself, he had always seen Clavain’s burial in heroic terms, some solemn fire-lit ceremony attended by thousands of onlookers. He had always assumed that if Clavain died it would be gently and in the belly of the colony, his last hours the subject of loving vigils. Failing that, in some courageous and unexpected action, going out heroically the way he had almost done a hundred times before, pressing a hand to some small, innocent-looking chest wound, his face turning the colour of a winter sky, holding on to breath and consciousness just long enough to whisper some message to those who would have to go on without him. In his imagination, it had always been Scorpio who passed on that valediction.
There would be dignity in his death, a sense of rightful closure. And his burial would be a thing of wonder and sadness, something to be talked about for generations hence.
That was not how it was happening.
Scorpio did not want to think about what was in the bag, or what had been done to it. He did not want to think about the enforced slowness of Clavain’s death, or the vital part he had played in it. It would have been bad enough to have been a spectator to what took place in the iceberg. To know that he had been a participant was to know that some irreplaceable part of himself had been hollowed out.
‘I won’t let them down,’ he said. ‘When you were away on your island, I always tried to do things the way you would have done them. That doesn’t mean I ever thought I was your equal. I know that won’t ever be true. I have trouble planning beyond the end of my nose. Like I always say, I’m a hands-on type.’
His eyes stung. He thought about what he had just said, the bitter irony of it.
‘I suppose that was the way it was, right to the end. I’m sorry, Nevil. You deserved better than this. You were a brave man and you always did the right thing, no matter what it cost you.’
Scorpio paused, catching his breath, quashing the vague feeling of absurdity he felt in talking to the bag. Speeches had never been his thing. Clavain would have made a much better job of it, had their roles been reversed. But he was here and Clavain was the dead man in the bag. He just had to do the best he could, fumbling through, the way he had done most things in his life.
Clavain would forgive him, he thought.
‘I’m going to let you go now,’ Scorpio said. ‘I hope this is what you wanted, pal. I hope you find what you were looking for.’
He gave the bag one last heave over the side. It vanished instantly into the green raft that surrounded the boat. In the moments after the bag had gone there was a quickening in the activity of the Juggler forms. The constant procession of alien shapes became more frenzied, shuffling towards some excited climax.
In the sky, the questing black trunk had curved nearly horizontal, groping towards the iceberg. The tip of the thing was no longer a blunt nub: it had begun to open, dividing into multiple black fingers that were themselves growing and splitting, writhing their way through the air.
There was nothing he could do about that now. He looked back at the play of Juggler shapes, thinking for an instant that he had even seen a pair of female human faces appear in the storm of images. The faces had been strikingly alike, but one possessed a maturity that the other lacked, a serene and weary resignation. It was as if entirely too much had been witnessed, entirely too much imagined, for one human life. Eyeless as statues, they stared at him for one frozen moment, before dissolving back into the flicker of masks.
Around him, the raft began to break up. The changing wall of shapes slumped, collapsing back into the sea. Even the smell and the stinging miasma had begun to lose something of their astringency. He supposed that meant he had done his duty. But above the sea, the black thing continued to push its branching extremities towards the iceberg.
He still had work to do.
Scorpio turned the boat around. By the time he reached the iceberg the other craft was already afloat: Vasko, Khouri, the incubator and the two Security Arm people were visible within it, the adults crouching down against the spray, the hull sinking low in the water. The Jugglers had redoubled their activity after the lull when the ocean received Clavain. Scorpio was certain now that it had something to do with the thing reaching down from the sky. The Jugglers didn’t like it: it was making them agitated, like a colony of small animals sensing the approach of a snake.
Scorpio didn’t blame them: it was no kind of weather phenomenon he had ever experienced. Not a tornado, not a sea-spout. Now that the swaying multi-armed thing was directly overhead, its artificial nature was sickeningly obvious. The entire thing — from the thick trunk descending down through the cloud layer to the thinnest of the branching extremities — was composed of the same cubic black elements they had seen in Skade’s ship. It was Inhibitor machinery, wolf machinery — whatever you wanted to call it. There was no guessing how much of it hovered above them, hidden behind the cloud deck. The trunk might even have reached all the way down through Ararat’s atmosphere.
It made him feel ill just to look at it. It simply wasn’t right.
He steered towards the other boat. Now that he had dealt with Clavain he felt a clarity of mind he’d lacked a few minutes before. It had probably been wrong to leave them on the iceberg with just that one boat for escape, but he had not wanted anyone else with him when he buried his friend. Selfish, perhaps, but it hadn’t been any of them doing the cutting.
‘Hold tight,’ he told them via the communicator. ‘We’ll even out the load as soon as I’m close enough.’
‘Then what?’ Vasko asked, looking fearfully up at the thing stretched across the sky.
‘Then we run like hell.’
The thing’s attention lingered over the iceberg. With slow, python-like movements it pushed a cluster of tentacles into the roof of the frozen structure, the needles and jags of ice shattering as the machinery forced its way through. Perhaps, Scorpio thought, it sensed the presence of other pieces of Inhibitor machinery, dormant or dead within the wreckage of the corvette. It needed to be reunited with them. Or perhaps it was after something else entirely.
The iceberg quivered. The sea responded to the movement, slow, shallow waves oozing away from the fringe. From somewhere within the structure came crunching sounds, like the shattering of bone. Flaws opened wide in the outer layer of the ice, exposing a lacy marrow of fabulously differentiated colour: pinks and blues and ochres.
Black machinery forced its way through the cracks. A dozen tentacles emerged from the iceberg, coiling and writhing, sniffing the air, splitting into ever-smaller components as they pushed outwards.
Scorpio’s boat kissed the hull of the other craft. ‘Give me the incubator,’ he shouted, above the screaming of the engine.
Vasko stood up, leaning between the boats, steadying himself with one hand on Scorpio’s shoulder. The young man looked pale, his hair plastered to his scalp. ‘You came back,’ he said.
‘Things changed,’ Scorpio said.
Scorpio took the incubator, feeling the weight of the child within it, and jammed it safely between his feet. ‘Now Khouri,’ he said, offering a hand to the woman.
She crossed over to his boat; he felt it sink lower in the water as she boarded. She met his gaze for a moment, seemed about to say something. He turned back to Vasko before she had a chance.
‘Follow me. I don’t want to hang around here a moment longer than necessary.’