The very notion was extreme, almost absurd. The Pattern Jugglers were harmless to all but a few unfortunate individuals. Collectively, they had never indicated any malicious intentions towards humanity. They were archives of lost knowledge, lost minds. But if the Pattern Jugglers were trying to destroy the Nostalgia for Infinity, what else could the humans do but retaliate? That simply could not be allowed to happen.
“Do you have weapons on this shuttle?” Khouri asked.
“Some,” Scorpio said. “Light ship-to-ship stuff, mainly.”
“Anything you could use against that biomass?”
“Some particle beams which won’t work too well in Ararat’s atmosphere. The rest? Too likely to take chunks out of the ship as well. We could try the particle beams…”
“No!”
The voice had come from Khouri’s mouth. But it had emerged explosively, like a vomit of sound. It almost didn’t resemble her voice at all.
“You just said…” Scorpio began.
Khouri sat down suddenly, falling—as if exhausted—into one of the couches that the shuttle had provided. She pressed a hand to her brow.
“No,” she said again, less stridently this time. “No. Leave. Leave alone. Help us.”
Wordlessly, Vasko, Scorpio, Valensin—and Khouri too—turned to look at the incubator, where Aura lay entombed in the care of machines. The tiny red-pink form within was moving, writhing gently against those restraints.
“Help us?” Vasko asked.
Khouri answered, but again the words seemed to emerge without her volition. She had to catch her breath between them. “They. Help us. Want to.”
Vasko moved over to the incubator. He had one eye on Khouri, another on her daughter. Valensin’s machines shuffled agitatedly. They did not know what to do, and their jointed arms were jerking with nervous indecision.
“They?” Vasko asked. “They as in the Pattern Jugglers?”
The pink form kicked her little legs, the tiny, perfectly formed nub of a fist clenched in front of the miniature scowl of her face. Aura’s eyes were sealed slits.
“Yes. They. Pattern Jugglers,” Khouri said.
Vasko turned to Scorpio. “I think we’ve got this all wrong,” he said.
“You do?”
“Wait. I need to talk to Antoinette.”
He went forward to the bridge without waiting for the pig’s permission. In the shuttle’s cockpit he found Antoinette and the pilot strapped into their command couches. They had turned the entire cockpit transparent, so that they appeared to be floating in midair, accompanied only by various disembodied read-out panels and controls. Vasko took a dizzy step back and then collected himself.
“Can we hover?” he asked.
Antoinette looked at him over her shoulder. “Of course.”
“Then bring us to a stop. Do you have any ranging equipment? Anticollision sensors, that sort of thing?”
“Of course,” she said again, as if both questions were amongst the least intelligent she had heard in a long while.
“Then shine something on the ship.”
“Any particular reason, Vasko? We can all see that the damned thing’s tilting.”
“Just do it, all right?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Her small hands, clinking with jewellery, worked the controls floating above her couch. Vasko felt the ship nudge to a halt. The view ahead rotated, bringing the leaning tower directly in front of them.
“Hold it there,” Vasko said. “Now get that ranging thing—whatever it is—on to the ship. Somewhere near the base if you can manage it.”
“That isn’t going to help us figure out the tilt angle,” Antoinette said.
“It’s not the tilt I’m interested in. I don’t think they’re really trying to topple it.”
“You don’t?”
Vasko smiled. “I think it’s just a by-product. They’re trying to move it.”
He waited for her to set up the ranging device. A pulsing spherical display floated in front of her, filled with smoky green structures and numbers. “There’s the ship,” she said, pointing to the thickest return in the radar plot.
“Good. Now tell me how far away it is.”
“Four hundred and forty metres,” she said, after a moment. “That’s an average. The green stuff is changing in thickness all the while.”
“All right. Keep an eye on that figure.”
“It’s increasing,” the pilot said.
Vasko felt hot breath on his neck. He turned around to see the pig looking over his shoulder.
“Vasko’s on to something,” Antoinette said. “Distance to the spire is now… four hundred and fifty metres.”
“You’re drifting,” Scorpio said.
“No, we’re not.” She sounded the tiniest bit affronted. “We’re rock steady, at least within the errors of measurement. Vasko’s right, Scorp—the ship’s moving. They’re dragging it out to sea.”
“How fast is it moving?” Scorpio asked.
“Too soon to say with any certainty. A metre, maybe two, per second.” Antoinette checked her own communicator bracelet. “The neutrino levels are still going up. I’m not sure exactly how long we have left, but I don’t think we’re looking at more than a few hours.”
“In which the case the ship isn’t going to be more than a few kilometres further away when it launches,” Scorpio said.
“That’s better than nothing,” Antoinette said. “If they can at least get it beyond the curve of the bay, so that we have some shelter from the tidal waves… that’s got to be better than nothing, surely?”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the pig replied.
Vasko felt a thrilling sense of affirmation. “Aura was right. They don’t want to hurt us. They only want to save us, by getting the ship away from the bay. They’re on our side.“
“Nice theory,” Scorpio said, “but how did they know we were in this mess in the first place? It’s not as if anyone went down into the sea and explained it to them. Someone would have had to swim for that.”
“Maybe someone did,” Vasko said. “Does it matter now? The ship’s moving. That’s all that counts.”
“Yeah,” Scorpio said. “Let’s just hope it isn’t too late to make a difference.”
Antoinette turned to the pilot. “Think you can get us close to that thing? The green stuff doesn’t seem too thick near the top. It might still be possible to get into the usual landing bay.”
“You’re joking,” the pilot said, incredulously.
Antoinette shook her head. She was already assigning full control back to the regular pilot. ‘“Fraid not, fella. If we want John to hold his horses until the ship’s clear of the bay, someone’s going to have go down and talk to him. And guess who just drew that straw?”
“I think she’s serious,” Vasko said.
“Do it,” Scorpio said.
The caravan threaded cautiously through tunnels and inched along ridiculously narrow ledges. It twisted and turned, at points doubling back on itself so that the rear parts advanced while the lead machines retreated. Once, navigating a rising hairpin, engines and traction limbs labouring, part of the caravan passed over itself, letting Rashmika look down on the racked Observers.
All the while the bridge grew larger. When she had first seen it, the bridge had the appearance of something lacy and low-relief, painted on a flat black backdrop in glittering iridescent inks. Now, slowly, it was taking on a faintly threatening three-dimensional solidity. This was not some mirage, some peculiar trick of lighting and atmospherics, but a real object, and the caravan was really going to cross it.