Frankly, the trees alarmed him. They were so huge, so alive. What if they decided they didn’t like him?
“Scorp,” Antoinette said. “Put these on, will you?”
He took the goggles, frowning at them. “Any particular reason why?”
“So you can talk to John. Those of us without machines in our heads can’t see him most of the time. Don’t worry, you won’t be the only one looking silly.”
He fixed the goggles in place. They were designed for people, not pigs, but they were not too uncomfortable when he adjusted them for the shape of his face. Nothing happened when he looked through them.
“John’ll be here in a moment,” Antoinette reassured him.
This meeting had been convened very quickly. Around the table, in addition to Antoinette and himself, sat Vasko Malinin, Ana Khouri and her daughter—still inside a portable incubator, which Khouri rested on her lap—Dr. Valensin and three low-ranking colony representatives. The three representatives were simply the most senior of the fourteen thousand or so citizens who were already aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. The usual senior members—Orca Cruz, Blood, Xavier Liu, amongst others—were still on Ararat. Remontoire took the place opposite Scorpio, leaving only one vacant position.
“This will have to be brief,” Remontoire said. “In less than an hour I must be on my way.”
“You won’t be staying for lunch?” Scorpio asked, remembering belatedly that Remontoire had no sense of humour.
The Conjoiner shook the delicately veined egg that was his head. “I’m afraid not. The Zodiacal Light and the other Con-joiner assets will remain in this system, at least until you are into clear interstellar space. We will draw the Inhibitors away from you. Some elements may follow you, but they will almost certainly not constitute the main force.” He had made a thin-boned church of his fingers. “You should be able to handle them.”
“It sounds a lot like self-sacrifice to me,” Antoinette said.
“It isn’t. I am pessimistic, but not totally without hope. There are still weapons we haven’t used and a number we haven’t even manufactured yet. Some of them may make a small difference, locally at least.” He paused and reached into an invisible pocket in his tunic. His fingers vanished into the fabric, as if executing a conjuring trick, and then emerged clutching a small slate-grey sliver, which he placed on the table and then tapped with his forefinger. “Before I forget: schematics for several militarily useful technologies. Some of these Aura or Khouri may already have mentioned. We owe them all to Aura, of course, but while she showed us the way forward and gave us clues to the basic principles, there was still much that we had to work out from scratch. These files should be compatible with standard manufactory protocols.”
“We have no manufactories,” Antoinette said. “They all stopped working years ago.”
Remontoire pursed his lips. “Then we will provide you with new ones, good against most plague variants. I’ll have them dropped off before you leave the system, along with medical supplies and reefersleep components. Feed them the files and they will make weapons and devices. If you have any queries, phrase them appropriately to Aura and she should be able to help you.”
“Thanks, Rem,” said Antoinette.
“This is a gift,” he said. “We give it freely, just as we are happy for you to take Aura. She is yours now. But there is something that you can give us in return.”
“Name it,” Antoinette told him.
But Remontoire said nothing. He looked over his shoulder at a figure crunching towards them through the grass.
“Hello, John,” Antoinette said.
Scorpio sat back stiffly on the bench as the figure approached. At first glance it barely looked like a human being at all. It walked, and it had arms and legs and a head, but that was where the resemblance ended. One half of the man’s body—one arm and one leg, and one half of the torso—was, so far as he could tell, approximately flesh and blood. But the other half was hulking and mechanical, grotesquely so, with no effort having been expended to create an illusion of symmetry. There were pistons and huge articulated hinge points, sliding metal gleaming from constant polishing and lubrication. The arm on the mechanical side hung down to knee-level, terminating in a complex multipurpose tool-delivery system. The effect was as if a piece of earth-moving equipment had collided with a man at brutal speed, fusing them together in the process.
His head, by contrast, was almost normal. But only by contrast. Red multifaceted cameras were crammed into the orbits of his eyes. Tubes emerged from his nostrils, curving back around the side of his face to connect to some unseen mechanism. An oval grille covered his mouth, stitched into the flesh of his face. His scalp was bald save for a dozen or so matted locks emerging from the crown. They were tied back, knotted into a single braid that hung down the back of his neck. He had no ears. In fact, Scorpio realised, he had no visible orifices at all. Perhaps he had been redesigned to tolerate hard vacuum without the protection of a space helmet.
His voice appeared to emerge from the grille. It was small, tinny, like a broken toy. “Hey. The gang’s all here.”
“Have a seat, John,” Antoinette said. “Do you need to be brought up to speed? Remontoire was just explaining a technical trade-off. He’s giving us some cool new toys.”
“In return for something else, I gather.”
“No,” Remontoire said. “The technical blueprints and the other items really are a gift. But if you are willing to consider offering us a reciprocal gift, we have something in mind.”
John Brannigan assumed his seat, lowering himself into place with a hiss and chuff of contracting pistons. “You want the remaining cache weapons,” he said.
Remontoire dignified the remark with a nod. “You guess our desires well.”
“Why do you want them?” John Brannigan asked.
“Our forecasts show that we will need them if we are to ere-ate a useful diversion. There is, necessarily, an element of uncertainty. Not all the weapons have known properties. But we can make some useful guesses.”
“We will be running from the machines as well,” Scorpio said. “Who’s to say we won’t need the weapons ourselves?”
“No one,” Remontoire replied. As always he was unflappable, like an adult suggesting parlour games for children. “You may very well need them. But you will be running from the wolves, not already engaged with them. If you are sensible, you will avoid further encounters for as long as possible.”
“You said we might still have wolves on our tail,” Antoinette reminded him. “What do we do about them? Ask them nicely to go away?”
Remontoire again tapped the data recording he had placed on the table. “This will show you how to construct a hypo-metric weapon system. Our forecasts indicate that three of these devices will be sufficient to disperse a small wolf pursuit element.”
“And if your forecasts turn out to be wrong?” Scorpio asked.
“You will have other resources.”
“Not good enough,” the pig said. “Those cache weapons were the whole reason we went all the way out to the Resurgam system in the first place. They’re what got us into this steaming pile of shit. And now you’re saying we should just give them up?”
“I am still your ally,” Remontoire said. “I am merely proposing that the weapons be reassigned to their point of maximum usefulness.”
“I don’t get this,” Antoinette said, nodding at the data sliver. “You have the means to make stuff we can’t even dream of yet, and you still want those mouldy old cache weapons?”