“You’re worried it’ll have done something to him, aren’t you?” Urton asked.
“How would you take it if you had to murder your best friend in cold blood? And slowly, with an audience?”
“I don’t think I’d take it too well. But then I’m not Scorpio.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s led us competently while Clavain was away, Vasko, and I know that you think well of him, but that doesn’t make him an angel. You already said that the pig and Clavain went all the way back to Chasm City.”
Vasko watched lights slide across the zenith, trailing annular rings like the pattern he sometimes saw when he pressed his fingertips against his own closed eyelids. “Yes,” he said, grudgingly.
“Well, what do you think Scorpio was doing in Chasm City in the first place? It wasn’t feeding the needy and the poor. He was a criminal, a murderer.”
“He broke the law in a time when the law was brutal and inhuman,” Vasko said. “That’s not quite the same thing, is it?”
“So there was a war on. I’ve studied the same history books as you have. Yes, the emergency rule verged on the Draconian, but does that excuse murder? We’re not just talking about self-preservation or self-interest here. Scorpio killed for sport.”
“He was enslaved and tortured by humans,” Vasko said. “And humans made him what he is: a genetic dead end.”
“So that lets him off the hook?”
“I don’t quite see where you’re going with this, Urton.”
“All I’m saying is, Scorpio isn’t the thin-skinned individual you like to think. Yes, I’m sure he’s upset by what he did to Clavain…”
“What he was made to do,” Vasko corrected.
“Whatever. The point is the same: he’ll get over it, just like he got over every other atrocity he perpetrated.” She lifted the peak of her cap, scrutinising him, her eyes flicking from point to point as if alert for any betraying facial tics. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“Right now I’m not sure.”
“You have to believe it, Vasko.” He noticed that she had stopped calling him Malinin. “Because the alternative is to doubt his fitness for leadership. You wouldn’t go that far, would you?”
“No, of course not. I’ve got total faith in his leadership. Ask anyone here tonight and you’ll get the same answer. And guess what? We’re all right.”
“Of course we are.”
“What about you, Urton? Do you doubt him?”
“Not in the slightest,” she said. “Frankly, I doubt that he’ll have lost much sleep at all over anything that happened today.”
“That sounds incredibly callous.”
“I want it to be callous. I want him to be callous. That’s the point. It’s exactly what we want—what we need—in a leader now. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know,” he said, feeling a huge weariness begin to slide over him. “All I know is that I didn’t come out here tonight to talk about what happened today. I came out here to clear my head and try to forget some of it.”
“So did I,” Urton said. Her voice had softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rake over what happened. I suppose talking about it is my way of coping with it. It was pretty harrowing for all of us.”
“Yes, it was. Are you done now?” He felt his temper rising, a scarlet tide lapping against the defences of civility. “For most of yesterday and today you looked as if you couldn’t stand to be in the same hemisphere as me, let alone the same room. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“Because I regret the way I acted,” she said.
“If you don’t mind my saying, it’s a little late in the day for second thoughts.”
“It’s the way I cope, Vasko. Cut me some slack, all right? There was nothing personal about it.”
“Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”
“We were going into a dangerous situation. We were all trained for it. We all knew each other, and we all knew we could count on each other. And then you show up at the last minute, someone I don’t know, yet whom I’m suddenly expected to trust with my life. I can name a dozen SA officers who could have taken your position in that boat, any one of whom I’d have felt happier about covering my back.”
Vasko saw that she was leading him towards the shore, where the crowd thinned out. The dark shapes of boats blocked the gloom between land and water. Some were moored ready for departure, some were aground.
“Scorpio chose to include me in the mission,” Vasko said. “Once that decision was taken, you should have had the guts to live with it. Or didn’t you trust his judgement?”
“One day you’ll be in my shoes, Vasko, and you won’t like it any more than I did. Come and give me a lecture about trusting judgement then, and see how convincing it sounds.” Urton paused, watching the sky as a thin scarlet line transacted it from horizon to horizon. She had evaded his question. “This is all coming out wrong. I didn’t pick you out of the crowd to start another fight. I wanted to say I was sorry. I also wanted you to understand why I’d acted the way I did.”
He kept the lid on his anger. “All right.”
“And I admit I was wrong.”
“You weren’t to know what was about to happen,” he said.
She shrugged and sighed. “No, I don’t suppose I was. No matter what they say, he walked the walk, didn’t he? When it came to putting his life on the line, he went and did it.”
They had reached the line of boats. Most of those still left on land were wrecks: their hulls had gaping holes in them near the waterline, where they had been consumed by seaborne organisms. Sooner or later they would have been hauled away to the smelting plant, to be remade into new craft. The metalworkers were fastidious about reusing every possible scrap of recyclable metal. But the amount recovered would never have been equal to that in the original boats.
“Look,” Urton said, pointing across the bay.
Vasko nodded. “I know. They’ve already encircled the base of the ship.”
“That’s not what I mean. Look a bit higher, Hawkeye. Can you see them?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes. My God. They’ll never make it.”
They were tiny sparks of light around the base of the ship, slightly higher than the bobbing ring of boats Vasko had already noticed. He estimated that they could not have climbed more than a few dozen metres above the sea. There were thousands of metres of the ship above them.
“How are they climbing?” Vasko said.
“Hand over hand, I guess. You’ve seen what that thing looks like close-up, haven’t you? It’s like a crumbling cliff wall, full of handholds and ledges. It’s probably not that difficult.”
“But the nearest way in must be hundreds of metres above the sea, maybe more. When the planes come and go they always land near the top.” Again he said, “They’ll never make it. They’re insane.”
“They’re not insane,” Urton said. “They’re just scared. Really, really scared. The question is, should we be joining them?”
Vasko said nothing. He was watching one of the tiny sparks of light fall back towards the sea.
They stood and watched the spectacle for many minutes. Nobody else appeared to fall, but the other climbers continued their relentless slow ascent undaunted by the failure that many of them had doubtless witnessed. Around the sheer footslopes, where the boats must have been rocking and crashing against the hull, new climbers were beginning their ascent. Boats were returning from the ship, scudding slowly back across the bay, but progress was slow and tension was rising amongst those waiting on the shoreline. The Security Arm officials were increasingly outnumbered by the angry and frightened people who were waiting for passage to the ship. Vasko saw one of the SA men speaking urgently into his wrist communicator, obviously calling for assistance. He had almost finished talking when someone shoved him to the ground.