Vargovic was impressed by their teeth.
Afterwards, the Denizens returned to the cave to join their cousins. They moved more sluggishly now, as if the fury of the fight had drained them. For a few moments they were silent, their bioluminescence curiously subdued.
Slowly, though, Vargovic watched their colour return.
‘It was better that they not kill you,’ the leader said.
‘Damn right,’ Vargovic said. ‘They wouldn’t just have killed me, you know.’ He opened his fists, exposing his palms. ‘They’d have made sure you never got this.’
The Denizens — all of them — looked momentarily towards his open hands, as if there ought to have been something there.
‘I’m not sure you understand,’ the leader said, eventually.
‘Understand what?’
‘The nature of your mission.’
Fighting his fatigue — it was a black slick lapping at his consciousness — Vargovic said, ‘I understand perfectly well. I have the samples of hyperdiamond, in my hands—’
‘That isn’t what we want.’
He didn’t like this, not at all. It was the way the Denizens were slowly creeping closer to him, sidling around him to obstruct his exit from the cave.
‘What then?’
‘You asked why we haven’t attacked them before,’ the leader said, with frightening charm. ‘The answer’s simple: we can’t leave the vent.’
‘You can’t?’
‘Our haemoglobin. It’s not like yours.’ Again that awful shark-like smile — and now he was well aware of what those teeth could do, given the right circumstances. ‘It was tailored to allow us to work here.’
‘Copied from the ventlings?’
‘Adapted, yes. Later it became the means of imprisoning us. The DNA in our bone marrow was manipulated to limit the production of normal haemoglobin; a simple matter of suppressing a few beta-globin genes while retaining the variants that code for ventling haemoglobin. Hydrogen sulphide is poisonous to you, Vargovic. You probably already feel weak. But we can’t survive without it. Oxygen kills us.’
‘You leave the vent…’
‘We die, within a few hours. There’s more. The water’s hot here, so hot that we don’t need the glycoproteins. We have the genetic instructions to synthezise them, but they’ve also been turned off. But without the glycoproteins we can’t swim into colder water. Our blood freezes.’
Now he was surrounded by them; looming aquatic devils, flushed a florid shade of crimson. And they were coming closer.
‘But what do you expect me to do about it?’
‘You don’t have to do anything, Vargovic.’ The leader opened its chasmic jaw wide, as if tasting the water. It was a miracle an organ like that was capable of speech in the first place…
‘I don’t?’
‘No.’ And with that the leader reached out and seized him, while at the same time he was pinned from behind by another of the creatures. ‘It was Cholok’s doing,’ the leader continued. ‘Her final gift to us. Maunciple was her first attempt at getting it to us — but Maunciple never made it.’
‘He was too fat.’
‘All the defectors failed — they just didn’t have the stamina to make it this far from the city. That was why Cholok recruited you — an outsider.’
‘Cholok recruited me?’
‘She knew you’d kill her — you have, of course — but that didn’t stop her. Her life mattered less than what she was about to give us. It was Cholok who tipped off the Demarchy about your primary extraction site, forcing you to come to us.’
He struggled, but it was pointless. All he could manage was a feeble, ‘I don’t understand—’
‘No,’ the Denizen said. ‘Perhaps we never expected you to. If you had understood, you might have been less than willing to follow Cholok’s plan.’
‘Cholok was never working for us?’
‘Once, maybe. But her last clients were us.’
‘And now?’
‘We take your blood, Vargovic.’ Their grip on him tightened. He used his last draining reserves of strength to try to work loose, but it was futile.
‘My blood?’
‘Cholok put something in it. A retrovirus — a very hardy one, capable of surviving in your body. It reactivates the genes that were suppressed by the Demarchy. Suddenly, we’ll be able to make oxygen-carrying haemoglobin. Our blood will fill up with glycoproteins. It’s no great trick: all the cellular machinery for making those molecules is already present; it just needs to be unshackled.’
‘Then you need… what? A sample of my blood?’
‘No,’ the Denizen said, with genuine regret. ‘Rather more than a sample, I’m afraid. Rather a lot more.’
And then — with magisterial slowness — the creature bit into his arm, and as his blood spilled out, the Denizen drank. For a moment the others waited — but then they too came forward, and bit, and joined in the feeding frenzy.
All around Vargovic, the water was turning red.
WEATHER
We were at one-quarter of the speed of light, outbound from Shiva-Parvati with a hold full of refugees, when the Cockatrice caught up with us. She commenced her engagement at a distance of one light-second, seeking to disable us with long-range weapons before effecting a boarding operation. Captain Van Ness did his best to protect the Petronel, but we were a lightly armoured ship and Van Ness did not wish to endanger his passengers by provoking a damaging retaliation from the pirates. As coldly calculated as it might appear, Van Ness knew that it would be better for the sleepers to be taken by another ship than suffer a purposeless death in interstellar space.
As shipmaster, it was my duty to give Captain Van Ness the widest choice of options. When it became clear that the Cockatrice was on our tail, following us out from Shiva-Parvati, I recommended that we discard fifty thousand tonnes of nonessential hull material, in order to increase the rate of acceleration available from our Conjoiner drives. When the Cockatrice ramped up her own engines to compensate, I identified a further twenty thousand tonnes of material we could discard until the next orbitfall, even though the loss of the armour would marginally increase the radiation dosage we would experience during the flight. We gained a little, but the pirates still had power in reserve: they’d stripped back their ship to little more than a husk, and they didn’t have the mass handicap of our sleepers. Since we could not afford to lose any more hull material, I advised Van Ness to eject two of our three heavy shuttles, each of which massed six thousand tonnes when fully fuelled. That bought us yet more time, but to my dismay the pirates still found a way to squeeze a little more out of their engines.
Whoever they had as shipmaster, I thought, they were good at their work.
So I went to the engines themselves, to see if I could better my nameless opponent. I crawled out along the pressurised access tunnel that pierced the starboard spar, out to the coupling point where the foreign technology of the starboard Conjoiner drive was mated to the structural fabric of the Petronel. There I opened the hatch that gave access to the controls of the drive itself: six stiff dials, fashioned in blue metal, arranged in hexagon formation, each of which was tied to some fundamental aspect of the engine’s function. The dials were set into quadrant-shaped recesses, all now glowing a calm blue-green.
I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations to three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.