Vasko realised his error as soon as he turned the corner next to the Security Arm compound. A huge grey mob was pressed up against the building, many hundreds of people crushed together with their belongings piled at their feet. A dozen or so SA guards were keeping order, standing on railed plinths with small weapons presented but not aimed directly at the crowd. Other Arm personnel, in addition to unarmed administration officials, were manning tables that had been set up outside the two-storey conch structure. Paperwork was being processed and stamped; personal effects were being weighed and labelled. Most of the people had obviously decided not to wait for the official rules: they were here, now, ready to depart, and very few of them looked as if they were having second thoughts.
Vasko made his way through the crowd, doing his best not to push and shove. There was no sign of Urton, but this was not her designated Arm centre. He stopped at one of the tables and waited for the officer manning it to finish processing one of the refugees.
“Are they still planning to start flying them out at noon?” Vasko asked quietly.
“Earlier,” the man replied, his voice low. “The pace has been stepped up. Word is we’re still going to have trouble coping.”
“There’s no way that ship can accommodate all of us,” Vasko said. “Not now. It’d take months to get us all into the sleep caskets.”
“Tell that to the pig,” the man said and went back to his work, stamping a sheet of paper almost without looking at it.
Sudden warmth kissed the back of Vasko’s neck. He looked up and squinted against the blinding-bright underside of a machine, an aircraft or shuttle sliding across the square. He expected it to slow and descend, but instead the machine curved away, heading beyond the shore, towards the spire. It slid under the clouds like a bright ragged flake of daylight.
“See, they’ve already begun moving ‘em out,” the man said. “As if that’s going to make everyone else calmer…”
“I’m sure Scorpio knows what he’s doing,” Vasko said. He turned away before the man was able to answer.
He pushed beyond the processing tables, through the rest of the crowd, and into the conch structure. Inside, it was the same story: people squeezed in everywhere, holding paperwork and possessions aloft, children crying. He could feel the panic increasing by the minute.
He passed through into the part of the building reserved for SA personnel. In the small curved chamber where he usually received his assignments, he found a trio of people sitting around a low table drinking seaweed tea. He knew them all.
“Malinin,” said Gunderson, a young woman with short red hair. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
He didn’t care for her tone. “I came for my duties,” he said.
“I didn’t think you mixed with the likes of us these days,” she sneered.
He reached across the tea-drinkers to rip the assignment sheet from the wall. “I mix with whoever I like,” he said.
The second of the trio, a pig named Flenser, said, “We heard you were more likely to be hanging around with administration stiffs.”
Vasko looked at the docket. He couldn’t see his name against any of the regular duties. “Like Scorpio, you mean?”
“I bet you know a lot more than we do about what’s going on,” Gunderson said. “Don’t you?”
“If I did, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about it.” Vasko pinned the sheet back on the wall. “Truthfully, I don’t know very much more.”
“You’re lying,” the third one—a man named Cory—said. “You want to climb that ladder, Malinin, you’d better learn how to lie better than that.”
“Thanks,” he said, smiling, “but I’ll settle for learning how to serve this colony.”
“You want to know where to go?” Gunderson asked him.
“It would help.”
“They told us to pass you a message,” she said. “You’re expected in the High Conch at eight.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.” He turned to leave.
“Fuck you, Malinin,” he heard her say to his back. “You think you’re better than us, is that it?”
“Not at all,” he replied, surprised by his calmness. He turned back to face her. “I think my abilities are average. I just happen to feel a sense of responsibility, an obligation to serve Ararat to the best of my abilities. I’d be astonished if you felt differently.”
“You think that now Clavain’s out of the picture, you can slime your way to the top?”
He looked at Gunderson with genuine surprise. “That thought never crossed my mind.”
“Well, that’s good, because if it had, you’d be making a se-rious mistake. You don’t have what it takes, Malinin. None of us have got what it takes, but you especially don’t have it.”
“No? And what exactly is it that I don’t have?”
“The balls to stand up against the pig,” she said, as if this should have been obvious to all present.
In the High Conch, Antoinette Bax was already seated at the table, a compad open in front of her. Cruz, Pellerin and several other colony seniors had joined her, and now Blood came in, swaggering like a wrestler.
“There’d better be a good reason for this,” he said. “It’s not as if I haven’t got a shitload of other things I really need to be taking care of.”
“Where’s Scorpio?” she asked.
“In the infirmary, checking on mother and daughter. He’ll be here as soon as he can,” Blood replied.
“And Malinin?”
“I had someone leave a message for him. He’ll get here eventually.” Blood collapsed into a seat. Reflexively, he took out his knife and began to scrape the blade against his chin. It made a thin, insectile noise.
“Well, we’ve got a problem,” Antoinette said. “In the last six hours, the neutrino flux from the ship has about trebled. If the flux increases another ten, fifteen per cent, that ship’s going to have nowhere to go but up.”
“There’s no exhaust yet?” asked Cruz.
“No,” Antoinette replied, “and I’m pretty worried about what will happen when those drives do start thrusting. No one was living around the bay when she came down. We need to think seriously about an evacuation to inland areas. I’d recommend moving everyone to the outlying islands, but I know that’s not possible given the existing load on aircraft and shuttles.”
“Yeah, dream on,” Blood said.
“All the same, we have to do something. When the Captain decides to take off, we’re going to have tidal waves, clouds of superheated steam, noise so loud it will deafen everyone within hundreds of kilometres, all kinds of harmful radiation spewing out… ” Antoinette trailed off, hoping she had made her point. “Basically, this isn’t going to be the kind of environment you want to be anywhere near unless you’re inside a spacesuit.”
Blood buried his face in his hands, making a mask of his stubby pig fingers. Antoinette had seen Scorpio do something similar when crises pressed on him from all sides. With Clavain gone and Scorpio absent, Blood was experiencing the responsibility he had always craved. Antoinette doubted that the novelty of command had lasted for more than about five minutes.
“I can’t evacuate the town,” he said.
“You have no choice,” Antoinette insisted.
He lowered his hands and jabbed a finger at the window. “That’s our fucking ship. We shouldn’t be speculating about what it’s going to do. We should be giving it orders, where and when it suits us.”
“Sorry, Blood, but that isn’t how it works,” Antoinette said.
“There’ll be panic,” Cruz said. “Worse than anything we’ve seen. All the processing stations wilt have to be closed down and relocated. It’ll delay exodus flights to the Infinity by at least a day. And where are those relocated people going to sleep tonight? There’s nothing for them inland—just a bunch of rocks. We’d have hundreds dead of exposure by daybreak.”