“Do your best,” Scorpio said. “Everyone else—secure yourselves. It’s going to get rough.”
Vasko and Khouri went back to where Valensin and his machines were continuing their vigil over Aura. She was still moving, but had at least stopped crying. Vasko wished that there was something he could do to help her, some way to temper the voices screaming into her head. He could not imagine what it must be like for her. By rights she should not even have been born yet; should barely have had any sense of her own individuality or the wider world in which she existed. Aura was not an ordinary baby, that much was clear—she already had the language skills of a two- or three-year-old child, in Vasko’s estimation—but it was also unlikely that all parts of her mind were developing at the same accelerated rate. There was only room in that tiny wrinkled head for a certain amount of complexity; she must still have had an infant’s view of many things. When he had been two years older than Aura, Vasko’s own grasp of the world had barely reached further than the handful of rooms that made up his home. Everything else had been hazy, unimportant, subject to comic misapprehension.
The Nostalgia for Infinity was now further away from the shuttle than it had been: tens of kilometres distant, easily. The shuttle’s hull had still not turned fully transparent again, but in the light from its engines he caught the reflections of things moving closer. Not just moving, but fluttering, swirling, splin-tering and reforming, retreating and advancing in pulsing waves.
They came closer. Now the glare of the engines revealed hints of stepped structures: tiers, contours, zigzag edges. It was the same machinery they had found in Skade’s ship, the same stuff that had reached down from the clouds and ripped the corvette apart, but this time the scale was immeasurably larger—these cubes were almost as large as houses, forming structures hundreds of metres across. The wolf cubes were in constant, sliding motion: slithering across each other, swelling and contracting, larger structures organising and dissipating with hypnotic fluidity. Filaments of cubes spanned the larger structures; clusters of them fluttered from point to point like messengers. The scale was still difficult to judge, but the cubes were converging from nearly all sides and it seemed to Vasko that they had already formed a loose shell around both the shuttle and the Nostalgia for Infinity. What was certain was that the shell was tightening, the gaps becoming smaller.
“Ana?” Vasko asked. “You’ve seen these things before, haven’t you? They attacked your ship. Is this how it begins?”
“We’re in trouble,” she confirmed.
“What happens next, if we can’t escape?”
“They come inside.” Her voice was hollow, like a cracked bell. “They invade your ship and then they invade your head. You don’t want that to happen, Vasko. Trust me on this one.”
“How long will we have, if they reach the ship?”
“Seconds, if we’re lucky. Maybe not even that.” Then she convulsed, a whiplash movement that had her body slamming against the restraining surface that the ship had fashioned around her. Her eyes closed and then reopened, her pupils raised to the ceiling, the whites bright and frightened. “Kill me. Now.”
“Ana?”
“Aura,” she said. “Kill me. Kill us both. Now.”
“No,” he said. He looked at Valensin, hoping for some explanation.
The doctor simply shook his head. “I won’t do it,” he said. “No matter what she wants. I won’t take a life.”
“Listen to me,” she insisted. “What I know—too important. They can’t find out. Will read our minds. Cannot allow that to happen. Kill us now.“
“No, Aura. I won’t do it. Not now. Not ever,” Vasko said.
Valensin’s servitors moved nearer to the incubator. Their jointed limbs twitched, clicking against their drab bodies. One of the machines extended a manipulator towards the incubator, grasping it. The servitor then backed away, trying to tug the incubator away from the niche.
Vasko leapt forwards and wrestled the machine away from the baby. The machine was lighter than it looked, but much stronger than he had anticipated. The many limbs thrashed against him, hard articulated metal pressing into his skin.
“Valensin!” he shouted. “Do something!”
“They’re beyond my control,” Valensin said, calmly, as if all that followed was out of his hands.
Vasko sucked in his chest, making a cavity between his body and the machine in an attempt to avoid the swiping pass of a sharp-bladed manipulator. He wasn’t fast enough. He felt a nick through his clothing, the instant cold that told him he had been wounded. He fell back, hitting the wall, and tried to kick out at the wide base of the servitor. The machine toppled, clattering against its companion. The thrashing limbs entwined, knives sparking against knives.
He touched his chest, fingering through the gashed fabric. His hand came back lathered in blood. “Get Scorpio,” he said to Valensin.
But Scorpio was already on his way. Something gleamed in his right hand: a humming blur of metal, a knife-shaped smear of silver. He saw the machines, saw Vasko with blood on his fingers. The servitors had disentangled themselves and the one still standing had begun to pick at the base of the incubator, trying to claw it open. Scorpio snarled and slid the knife into the machine’s armour. The knife sailed through the drab green carapace as if it wasn’t there at all. There was a fizzle of shorting circuitry, a thrashing whirr of damaged mechanisms. The knife howled and twisted out of Scorpio’s grip, hitting the floor, where it continued to buzz and whirr.
The servitor had broken down. It remained frozen in place, limbs still extended but now immobile.
Scorpio knelt down and retrieved the piezo-knife, stilled the blade and returned it to its sheath.
Outside the shuttle, the wall of Inhibitor machinery looked close enough to touch. Jags of blue-pink lightning flickered and danced between different portions of it.
“Someone mind telling me what just happened?” Scorpio snapped.
“Aura,” said Vasko. He wiped his bloody hand against his trouser leg. “Aura tried to turn the servitors against herself.” He was breathing hard, forcing out each word between ragged gulps of air. “Trying to kill herself. She doesn’t want the cubes to reach her while she’s still alive.”
Khouri coughed. Her eyes were like a trapped animal’s. “Kill me, Scorp. Not too late. You have to do it.”
“After all we’ve been through?” he said.
“You have to go to Hela,” she said. “Find Quaiche. Negotiate with shadows. They will know.”
“Fuck,” Scorpio said.
Vasko watched as the pig pulled the knife from its sheath once more. Scorpio stared at the now-still blade, his lips curled in disgust. Did he really mean to use it, or was he simply thinking about throwing it away, before circumstances once again forced him to wield it against someone or something he cared for?
Despite himself, despite the fact that he felt his own strength draining away, Vasko reached out and took hold of the pig’s sleeve. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t kill them.”
The pig’s expression was something beyond fury. But Vasko had him. Scorpio couldn’t activate the knife one-handed; his anatomy wouldn’t allow it.
“Malinin. Let go now.”
“Scorp, listen to me. There has to be another way. The price we paid for her… we can’t just throw her away now, no matter how much she wants it.”
“You think I don’t know what she cost us?”
Vasko shook his head. He had no idea what else to say. His strength was very nearly gone. He did not think he had been seriously injured, but the wound was still deep, and he was already desperately tired.