‘If there’s a tranquiliser dart in there, it won’t work on me. My nervous system isn’t like yours. I only sleep when I choose to.’
‘That’s what I figured. It’s why I dialled the dose to five times its normal strength. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to give it a try and see what happens.’
Panic crossed her face. ‘Give me a suit,’ she said. ‘Give me a suit and then leave me alone, if you really want to help.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘We don’t have names, Inigo. At least nothing you could get your tongue around.’
‘I’m willing to try.’
‘Give me a suit. Then leave me alone.’
Van Ness started screaming in my ears again. I’d had enough. I pointed the muzzle at her, aiming for the flesh of her thigh, where she had her legs tucked under her. I squeezed the trigger and delivered the stun fléchette.
‘You fool,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. You have to leave me here, with this…’
That was all she managed before slumping into unconsciousness. She’d gone down much faster than I’d expected, as if she’d already been on her last reserves of strength. I just hoped I hadn’t set the stun dose too high. It was already strong enough to kill any normal human being.
Van Ness had been right to be concerned about our proximity to the Cockatrice. We’d barely doubled the distance between the two ships when her drive spar failed, allowing the port engine to drift away from its starboard counterpart. Several agonising minutes later, the distance between the two engine units exceeded sixteen hundred metres and the drives went up in a double burst that tested our shielding to its limits. The flash must have been visible all the way back to Shiva-Parvati.
The girl had been unconscious right up until that moment, but when the engines went up she twitched on the bunk where we’d placed her, just as if she’d been experiencing a vivid and disturbing dream. The rilled structures on the side of her crest throbbed with vivid colours, each chasing the last. Then she was restful again, for many hours, and the play of colours calmer.
I watched her sleeping. I’d never been near a Conjoiner before, let alone one like this. Aboard the ship, when we had been hunting her, she had seemed strong and potentially dangerous. Now she looked like some half-starved animal, driven to the brink of madness by hunger and something infinitely worse. There were awful bruises all over her body, some more recent than others. There were fine scars on her skull. One of her incisors was missing a point.
Van Ness still wasn’t convinced of the wisdom of bringing her aboard, but even his dislike of Conjoiners didn’t extend to the notion of throwing her back into space. All the same, he insisted that she be bound to the bunk by heavy restraints, in an armoured room under the guard of a servitor, at least until we had some idea of who she was and how she had ended up aboard the pirate ship. He didn’t want heavily augmented crew anywhere near her, either: not when (as he evidently believed) she had the means to control any machine in her vicinity, and might therefore overpower or even commandeer any crewperson who had a skull full of implants. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell him: Conjoiners could talk to machines, yes, but not all machines, and the idea that they could work witchcraft on anything with a circuit inside it was just so much irrational fearmongering.
Van Ness heard my reasoned objections, and then ignored them. I’m glad that he did, though. Had he listened to me, he might have put some other member of the crew in charge of questioning her, and then I wouldn’t have got to know her as well as I did. Because I only had the metal hand, the rest of me still flesh and blood, he deemed me safe from her influence.
I was with her when she woke.
I placed my left on her shoulder as she squirmed under the restraints, suddenly aware of her predicament. ‘It’s all right,’ I said softly. ‘You’re safe now. Captain made us put these on you for the time being, but we’ll get them off you as soon as we can. That’s a promise. I’m Inigo, by the way, shipmaster. We met before, but I’m not sure how much of that you remember.’
‘Every detail,’ she said. Her voice was low, dark-tinged, untrusting.
‘Maybe you don’t know where you are. You’re aboard the Petronel. The Cockatrice is gone, along with everyone aboard her. Whatever they did to you, whatever happened to you aboard that ship, it’s over now.’
‘You didn’t listen to me.’
‘If we’d listened to you,’ I said patiently, ‘you’d be dead by now.’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
I’d been ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but my reservoir of sympathy was beginning to dry up. ‘You know, it wouldn’t hurt to show a little gratitude. We put ourselves at considerable risk to get you to safety. We’d taken everything we needed from the pirates. We only went back in to help you.’
‘I didn’t need you to help me. I could have survived.’
‘Not unless you think you could have held that spar on by sheer force of will.’
She hissed back her reply. ‘I’m a Conjoiner. That means the rules were different. I could have changed things. I could have kept the ship in one piece.’
‘To make a point?’
‘No,’ she said, with acid slowness, as if that was the only speed I was capable of following. ‘Not to make a point. We don’t make points.’
‘The ship’s gone,’ I said. ‘It’s over, so you may as well deal with it. You’re with us now. And no, you’re not our prisoner. We’ll do everything I said we would: take care of you, get you to safety, back to your people.’
‘You really think it’s that simple?’
‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? I don’t see what the problem is.’
‘The problem is I can’t ever go back. Is that simple enough for you?’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Were you exiled from the Conjoiners, or something like that?’
She shook her elaborately crested head, as if my question was the most naive thing she had ever heard. ‘No one gets exiled.’
‘Then tell me what the hell happened!’
Anger burst to the surface. ‘I was taken, all right? I was stolen, snatched away from my people. Captain Voulage took me prisoner around Yellowstone, when the Cockatrice was docked near one of our ships. I was part of a small diplomatic party visiting Carousel New Venice. Voulage’s men ambushed us, split us up, then took me so far from the other Conjoiners that I dropped out of neural range. Have you any idea what that means to one of us?’
I shook my head, not because I didn’t understand what she meant, but because I knew I could have no proper grasp of the emotional pain that severance must have caused. I doubted that pain was a strong enough word for the psychic shock associated with being ripped away from her fellows. Nothing in ordinary human experience could approximate the trauma of that separation, any more than a frog could grasp the loss of a loved one. Conjoiners spent their whole lives in a state of gestalt consciousness, sharing thoughts and experiences via a web of implant-mediated neural connections. They had individual personalities, but those personalities were more like the blurred identities of atoms in a metallic solid. Beyond the level of individual self was the state of higher mental union that they called Transenlightenment, analogous to the fizzing sea of dissociated electrons in that same metallic lattice. And the girl had been ripped away from that, forced to come to terms with existence as a solitary mind, an island once more.