“Stay where you are.”
Valensin took a step towards the door. “Go ahead, then. Stop me, if it really means that much to you. You have the means.”
Scorpio’s face twisted into a mask of fury and hatred that Antoinette had never seen before. It astonished her that pigs had the necessary facial dexterity to produce such an extreme expression.
“I’ll stop you, trust me on that.” Scorpio reached into a pocket or sheath of his own—whatever it was lay hidden under the table—and removed his knife. It was not one Antoinette had seen before. The blade, at some command from the pig, grew blurred.
“Scorpio,” she said, standing up herself, “let him do it. He’s a doctor.”
“Hallatt dies.”
“There’ve been enough deaths already,” Antoinette said. “One more isn’t going to make anything better.”
The knife quivered in his grasp, as if not quite tamed. Antoinette expected it to leap from his hand at any moment.
Something chimed. The unexpected noise seemed to catch the pig unawares. His fury slipped down a notch. He looked for the source of the sound. It had come from his communications bracelet.
Scorpio quietened the knife. It grew solid again, and he returned it to the sheath or pocket where it had originated.
He looked at Valensin and said one word. “Go.”
The doctor nodded curtly—his own face still angry—and scurried after the aides who had carried the wounded man away.
Scorpio lifted the bracelet to his ear and listened to some small, shrill, distant voice. After a minute he frowned and asked the voice to repeat what it had said. As the message was reiterated his frown lessened, but did not entirely vanish.
“What is it?” Antoinette asked.
“The ship,” he said. “Something’s happening.”
Within ten minutes a shuttle had been commandeered and diverted from the ongoing evacuation effort. It came down within a block of the High Conch, descending between buildings, a Security Arm retinue clearing the area and providing safe access for the small party of colony seniors. Vasko was the last aboard, after Scorpio and Antoinette Bax, while Blood and the others remained on the ground as the plane hauled itself aloft once more. The shuttle threw hard white light against the sides of the buildings, the citizens below shielding their eyes but unwilling to look away. There was now no one in First Camp who did not urgently wish to be somewhere else. There was only room for the three who had just boarded because the shuttle’s bay was already loaded to near-capacity with evacuees.
Vasko felt the machine accelerate. He hung on to a ceiling handhold, hoping that the flight would be brief. The evacuees looked at him with stunned faces, as if waiting for an explanation he was in no position to give.
“Where are they supposed to be heading?” he asked the foreman in charge.
“The outlands,” he said quietly, meaning the sheltered ground, “but now they’ll be taken to the ship instead. We can’t afford to waste valuable time.”
The cold efficiency of this decision stunned Vasko. But he also found himself admiring it.
“What if they don’t like it?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“They can always lodge a complaint.”
The journey did not take very long. They had a pilot this time; some of the evacuation flights were being handled by autonomous craft, but this one had been deemed too unusual. They kept low, heading out to sea, and then executed a wide turn around the base of the ship. Vasko was lucky enough to be by the wall. He had made a window in it, peering into silvery mist. Around him, the evacuees crowded forwards for a better look.
“Close the window,” Scorpio said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I’d do it if I were you,” Antoinette said.
Vasko closed the window. If ever there was a day not to argue with the pig, he thought, then this was it. He had seen nothing in any case, just a hint of the ship’s looming presence.
They climbed, presumably continuing the spiralling flight path around the spire, and then he felt the shuttle slow and touch solid ground. After a minute or so a crack of light signalled the opening of the escape door and the evacuees were ushered out. Vasko did not get a good look at what lay beyond, in the reception area. He had only a brief glimpse of Security Arm guards standing alertly, shepherding the newcomers with an efficiency that went way beyond polite urgency. He had expected the people to show some anger when they realised they had been taken to the ship instead of the safe haven on the surface, but all he saw was docile acceptance. Perhaps they did not yet realise that this was the ship, and not some ground-level processing area on the other side of the island. If so, he did not care to be around when they learned about the change of plan.
Soon the shuttle was empty of evacuees. Vasko half-expected to be ushered off as well, but instead the three of them remained aboard with the pilot. The loading door closed again and the plane departed from the bay.
“You can open the window now,” Scorpio said.
Vasko made a generous window in the hull, large enough for the three of them to look out of, but for the moment there was nothing to see. He felt the shuttle lurch and yaw as it descended from the reception bay, but he could not tell if they were staying near the Nostalgia for Infinity or returning to First Camp.
“You said something was happening with the ship,” Vasko said. “Is it the neutrino levels?”
Scorpio turned to Antoinette Bax. “How are they looking?”
“Higher than the last time I reported,” she said, “but according to our monitor stations they haven’t been climbing at quite the same rate as before. Still going up, but not as fast. Maybe my little chat with John did some good after all.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Vasko asked.
Scorpio gestured at something through the window. “That,” he said.
Vasko followed the pig’s gaze. He saw the spire of the ship emerging from the silver sea haze. They had descended rapidly and were looking at the place where the ship thrust out of the water. It was here, only the night before, that Vasko had seen the ring of boats and the climbers trying to ascend to the ship’s entrance points. But everything had changed since then. There were no climbers, no boats. Instead of a ring of clear water around the base of the spire, the ship was hemmed by a thick, impenetrable layer of solid Juggler biomass. It was a fuzzy green colour, intricately textured. The layer reached out for perhaps a kilometre in all directions, connecting with other biomass clusters via floating bridges of the same verdant material. But that was not the whole of it. The layer around the ship was reaching up around the hull, forming a skin of biomass. It must have been tens of metres thick in places, dozens more where it flared upwards near the base. At that moment, by Vasko’s estimate, it had reached two or three hundred metres up the side of the ship. The uppermost limit was not a neatly regular circle but a ragged, probing thing, extending questing tendrils and fronds higher and higher. Faint green veins were already visible at least a hundred metres above the main mass. The whole sheath was moving even as he watched, creeping inexorably upwards. The main mass must have been moving at close to a metre a second. Assuming it could sustain that rate, it would have encased the entire ship within the hour.
“When did this start happening?” Vasko asked.
“Thirty, forty minutes ago,” Scorpio said. “We were alerted as soon as the concentration began to build up around the base.”
“Why now? I mean, after all the years that ship’s been parked here, why would they start attacking it now, of all days?” Vasko said.
“I don’t know,” Scorpio replied.