The company changed. She was still sitting at a table surrounded by soldiers—she even recognised some of the faces—but now they all looked as if they had been through a few more years of war. Bad war, too. The Captain had a clunking prosthetic arm where there had been a good arm before. The suits were no longer made of insect spit, but were now sliding assemblages of lubricated plates. They were hyper-reflective, like scabs of frozen mercury.
“Fucking Demarchists,” the Captain said. “Let us keep all that fancy biotech shit until the moment we really needed it. We were really kicking the spiders. Then they pulled the licenses, said we were violating terms of fair use. All that neat squirmy stuff just fucking melted overnight. Bioweps, suits—gone. Now look what we’ve got to work with.”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Antoinette said. “Captain, listen to me. The Pattern Jugglers are moving the ship to safety. You have to give them time.”
“They’ve had time,” he said. It was a heartening moment of lucidity, a connection to the present.
“Not enough,” she said.
The steel fist of his new arm clenched. “You don’t understand. We have to leave Ararat. There are windows opening above us.”
The back of her neck tingled. “Windows, John?”
“I sense them. I sense a lot of things. I’m a ship, for fuck’s sake.”
Suddenly they were all alone. It was just the Captain and Antoinette. In the bright lustre of his reflective armour she saw a bird traverse the sky.
“You’re a ship. Good. So stop whining and start acting like one, beginning with a sense of responsibility to your crew. That includes me. What are these windows?”
He waited a while before answering. Had she just got through to him, or sent him scurrying ever deeper into labyrinths of regression?
“Opportunities for escape,” he said eventually. “Clear channels. They keep opening, and then closing.”
“You could be mistaken. It would be really, really bad if you were mistaken.”
“I don’t think I am.”
“We’ve been waiting, hoping, for a sign,” Antoinette said. “Some message from Remontoire. But there hasn’t been one.”
“Maybe he can’t get a message through. Maybe he’s been trying, and this is the best you’re going to get.”
“Give us a few more hours,” she said. “That’s all we’re asking for. Just enough time to move the ship to a safe distance. Please, John.”
“Tell me about the girl. Tell me about Aura.”
Antoinette frowned. She remembered mentioning the girl, but she did not think she had ever told the Captain her name. “Aura’s fine,” she said, guardedly. “Why?”
“What does she have to say on the matter?”
“She thinks we should trust the Pattern Jugglers,” Antoinette said.
“And beyond that?”
“She keeps talking about a place—somewhere called Hela. Something to do with a man named Quaiche.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. It may not even mean anything. It’s not even Aura speaking to us directly—it’s all coming via her mother. I don’t think Scorpio takes it that seriously. Frankly, I’m not sure I do either. They really, really want to think that Aura is something valuable because of what she cost them. But what if she isn’t? What if she’s just a kid? What if she knows a little, but nowhere near as much as everyone wants her to?”
“What does Malinin think?”
This surprised her. “Why Malinin?”
“They talk about him. I hear them. I heard about Aura the same way. All those thousands of people inside me, all their whispers, all their secrets. They need a new leader. It could be Malinin; it could be Aura.”
“There hasn’t even been an official announcement about the existence of Aura,” Antoinette said.
“You seriously believe that makes any difference? They know, all of them. You can’t keep a secret like that, Antoinette.”
“They have a leader already,” she said.
“They want someone new and bright and a little frightening. Someone who hears voices, someone they’ll allow to lead them in a time of uncertainties. Scorpio isn’t that leader.” The Captain paused, caressed his false hand with the scarred fingers of the other. “The windows are still opening and closing. I sense a growing urgency. If Remontoire is behind this, he may not be able to offer us many more opportunities for escape. Soon, very soon, I shall have to make my move.”
She knew she had wasted her time. She had thought at first that in showing her this place he was inviting her to a new level of intimacy, but his position had not changed at all. She had stated her case, and all he had done was listen.
“I shouldn’t have bothered,” she said.
“Antoinette, listen to me now. I like you more than you realise. You have always treated me with kindness and compassion. Because of that I care for you, and I care for your survival.”
She looked into his eyes. “So what, John?”
“You can leave. There is still time. But not much.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But—if it’s all right with you—I think I’ll stay for the ride.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking around. “This is about the only decent ship in town.”
Scorpio moved through the shuttle. He had turned almost all the fuselage surfaces transparent, save for a strip which marked the floor and a portion where Valensin waited with Khouri and her child. With all nonessential illumination turned down, he saw the outside world almost as if he were floating in the evening air.
With nightfall it had become obvious that the space battle was now very close to Ararat. The clouds had broken up, perhaps because of the excessive energies now being dumped into Ararat’s upper atmosphere. Reports of objects splashing down were coming in too rapidly to be processed. Gashes of fire streaked from horizon to horizon every few minutes as uniden-tified objects—spacecraft, missiles, or perhaps things for which the colonists had no name—knifed deep into Ararat’s airspace. Sometimes there were volleys of them; sometimes things moved in eerie lock-step formation. The trajectories were subject to violent, impossible-looking hairpins and reversals. It was clear that the major protagonists of the battle were deploying inertia-suppressing machinery with a recklessness that chilled Scorpio. Aura had already told them as much, through the mouthpiece of her mother. Clearly the appropriated alien technology was a little more controllable than it had been when Clavain and Skade had tested each other’s nerves with it on the long pursuit from Yellowstone to Resurgam space. But there were still people who told horror stories of the times when the technology had gone wrong. Pushed to its unstable limits, the inertia-suppressing machinery did vile things to both the flesh and the mind. If they were using it as a routine military tool—just another toy in the sandpit—then he dreaded to think what was now considered dangerous and cutting edge.
He thought about Antoinette for a moment, hoping that she was getting somewhere with the Captain. He was not greatly optimistic that she would succeed in changing the Captain’s mind once it was made up. But it still wasn’t absolutely clear whether or not he intended to take the ship up. Perhaps the revving-up of the Conjoiner drive engines was just his way of making sure they were in good working order, should they be needed at some point in the future. It didn’t have to mean that the ship was going to leave in the next few hours.
That kind of desperate, yearning optimism was foreign to Scorpio even now, and would have been quite alien during his Chasm City years. He was a pessimist at heart. Perhaps that was why he had never been very good at forward planning, at thinking more than a few days ahead. If you tended to believe on an innate level that things were always going to go from bad to worse, what was the point of even trying to intervene? All that was left was to make the best of the immediate situation.