Scorpio tried to fight him. They were eye to eye. The pig had the advantage in strength, Vasko was sure, but Vasko had leverage and dexterity.
“Drop the knife, Scorp.”
“I’ll kill you, Malinin.”
“Wait,” Valensin said mildly, taking off his spectacles and polishing them on the hem of his tunic. “Both of you, wait. You should look outside, I think.”
Still struggling over control of the knife, they did as he suggested.
Something was happening, something that in the heat of the struggle they had missed completely. The Nostalgia for Infinity was starting to fight back. Weapons had emerged from its hull, poking out through the intricate accretion of detail that marked the Captain’s transformations. These were not the cache weapons, Vasko realised, not the major Conjoiner ordnance that the ship carried deep inside it. Instead these were the conventional armaments that it had carried for much of its lifetime, designed primarily to intimidate trading customers and to warn off potential rivals or pirates. The same weapons that had been used against the colony on Resurgam, when the colony had been slow in handing over Dan Sylveste.
Scorpio relaxed his grip on Vasko, and slowly returned the knife to its sheath. “That won’t make much difference,” he said.
“It’s buying time,” Vasko said. He let go of the pig. The two of them glowered at each other. Vasko knew he had just crossed yet another line, one that could never be traversed in the opposite direction.
So be it. He had been serious in his promise to Clavain to protect Aura.
Lines of fire were stabbing out from the Nostalgia for Infinity, sweeping around and scything into the closing wall of wolf machinery. They were very high above Ararat now and there was little atmosphere left to make the beam weapons—or whatever they were—visible for more than few dozen metres along their course. Vasko guessed that the great ship, after so long in an atmosphere, was still bleeding trapped air and water from pockets in the folds and crevices of its hull. He watched the dark clots of wolf machinery squirm away from the impact points of the beams, like specks of iron being repelled by a magnet. The beams moved quickly, but the cubes moved faster, slipping from one point to another with dizzying rapidity. Vasko realised, dejectedly, that Scorpio was right. It was a gesture of defiance, nothing more. Everything they had learned about the wolves, in all the glancing contacts to date, had taught them that conventional human weapons had almost no effect on them whatsoever. They might slow the closing of the shell, but no more than that.
Perhaps Aura was right all along. Better for her to die now, before the machines drained every last scrap of knowledge from her head. She had told them that Hela was significant. Perhaps no one would survive to act on that knowledge. But if anyone did, they would at least be able to act without the wolves knowing their exact intentions.
He looked at the sheath where the pig kept his knife.
No. There had to be another way. If they started murdering children to gain a tactical advantage, the Inhibitors might as well win the war now.
“They’re backing off,” Valensin said. “Look. Something’s hurting them. I don’t think it’s the Infinity.”
The wall of machines was peppered with gaping, irregular holes. Carnations of colourless white light flashed from the cores of the cube structures. Chunks of cubic machinery veered into each other or dropped out of sight entirely. Tentacles of cubes thrashed purposelessly. The lightning pulsed in ugly, spavined shapes. And, suddenly, dashing through the gaps, machines appeared.
Vasko recognised the smooth, melted, muscular lines of spacecraft much like their shuttle. They moved like projections rather than solid objects, slowing down in an eyeblink.
“Remontoire,” Khouri breathed.
Beyond the ragged shell of Inhibitor machines, Vasko glimpsed a much wider battle, one that must have been encompassing many light-seconds of space around Ararat. He saw awesome eruptions of light, flashes that grew and faded in slow motion. He saw purple-black spheres simply appear, visible only when they formed against some brighter background, lingering for a few seconds, their wrinkled surfaces undulating, before popping out of existence.
Vasko faded out. When he came to, Valensin was inspecting his wound. “It’s clean and not too deep, but it will need treating,” he said.
“But it isn’t serious, is it?”
“No. I don’t think Aura really wanted to hurt you.”
Vasko felt some of the tension drain from his body. Then he realised that Scorpio had said very little since their scuffle over the knife. “Scorp,” he began, “we couldn’t just kill her like that.”
“It’s easy to say that now. It’s what she wanted of us that matters.”
Valensin dabbed at his wound with something that stung. Vasko drew in a sharp breath. “What did she mean when she spoke? She said something about shadows.”
Scorpio’s expression gave nothing away. As calm as he now appeared, Vasko did not think it likely that the pig had forgiven him for the struggle.
“I don’t know,” Scorpio said, “except Ididn’t like the sound of it very much.”
“What matters is Hela,” Khouri said. She sighed, rubbed at the fatigue-darkened skin under her eyes. Vasko thought it safe to assume that they were dealing with Ana rather than Aura now.
“And the other thing—the business with shadows?”
“We’ll find out when we get there.”
There was a call from the flight deck. “Incoming transmission from the Nostalgia for Infinity” said the pilot. “We’re being invited aboard.”
“By whom?” Scorpio asked.
“Antoinette Bax,” the pilot said, his voice trailing off hesitantly. “With—um—the compliments of Captain John Bran-nigan.”
“Good enough for me,” Scorpio said.
Vasko felt the shuttle turn, arrowing towards the much larger vessel. At the same time, one of the small, sleek human-controlled ships detached from its neighbours and accompanied them, making an almost painful effort not to outpace them there.
One further incident stuck in Rashmika’s mind before the caravan arrived at the Permanent Way. It was a day after the crossing of the bridge, and the caravan had finally climbed out of the Rift on to the bone-white level plateau of the Jarnsaxa Hats. To the north, the southern limits of the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands were visible as a roughness on the horizon, while to the east, Rashmika knew, lay the complex volcano fields of the Glistenheath and Ragnarok complexes, all currently dormant. By contrast, the Jarnsaxa Flats were mirror smooth and geologically stable. There were no scuttler digs in this area—whatever geological process had created the Flats had also erased or subducted any scuttler relics in this part of Hela—but there were still many small communities that made a direct living from their proximity to the Way. Now and then the caravan passed one of these dour little hamlets of surface bubbletents, or barrelled past a roadside shrine commemorating some recent but unspecified tragedy. Occasionally they saw pilgrims hauling their penitential life-support systems across the ice. To Rashmika they looked like returning hunters in some brown-hued painting by Brueghel, sledges topheavy with winter foodstock.
The buildings, shrines and figures slipped from horizon to horizon with indecent speed. With a broad, straight road ahead of it, the caravan had been able to move at maximum velocity for several hours, and now it seemed to have settled into a rhythm, an unstoppable stampede of machinery. Wheels rolled, tracks whirled around, traction limbs disappeared in a blur of pistoning motion. Visibly, Haldora moved closer to the zenith, until—by Rashmika’s estimation—they could not be more than a few tens of kilometres from the Way.