“We cannot underestimate the cache weapons,” Remontoire said. “They were a gift from the future. Until they have been exhaustively tested, we cannot assume that they are inferior to anything Aura has given us. You must agree with this reasoning as well.”
“Guy’s got a point, I suppose,” Antoinette said.
John Brannigan’s projected form moved with a hiss of locomotive systems. It must have been Scorpio’s imagination, but he thought he smelt lubricant. The Captain spoke again in his tinny voice. “He may well have a point, but Aura’s capabilities are equally untested. We have at least deployed a number of cache weapons and found them functional. I cannot sanction handing the rest of them over.”
“Then we’ll have to arrive at a compromise position,” Remontoire said.
The Captain looked at him, his grille-mouthed face expressionless. “I’m all ears,” he said.
“Our forecasts show a reduced but still statistically significant chance of success with only a subset of the available cache weapons.”
“So you get some of ‘em, but not all of ’em, right?” Antoinette asked.
Remontoire dipped his head once. “Yes, but don’t assume that this position is arrived at lightly. With a reduced range of cache weapons at our disposal, it may not be possible to prevent a larger pursuit element coming after you.”
“Yeah,” Antoinette said, “but then we’ll have more to throw at them, right?”
“Correct,” Remontoire said, “but don’t underestimate the risk of failure.”
“We’ll take that risk,” Scorpio said.
“Wait,” Khouri said. She trembled, one hand steadying the incubator on her lap, the other gripping the wooden table with her fingernails. “Wait. I… Aura…” Her eyes became all whites, the muscles in her neck pulling taut. “No,” she said. “No. Definitely no.”
“No what?” Scorpio asked.
“No. No no no. Do what Remontoire says. Give all the weapons. Will make a difference. Trust him.” Her fingernails gouged raw white trails into the wood.
Vasko leant forwards and spoke for the first time during the meeting. “Aura might be right,” he said.
“I am right,” Khouri said.
“We should listen to her,” Vasko said. “She seems pretty clear on this.”
“How would she know?” Scorpio said. “She knows some stuff, I’ll buy that. But no one said anything about her seeing the future.”
The seniors nodded as one.
“I’m with Scorp on this one,” Antoinette said. “We can’t give Rem all those weapons. We’ve got to keep some back for ourselves. What if we can’t get the manufactories to work? What if the stuff they make doesn’t work either?”
“They will work,” Remontoire said, still utterly calm and relaxed, even though vast destinies hung in the balance.
Scorpio shook his head. “Not good enough. We’ll give you some of the cache weapons, but not all of them.”
“Fine,” said Remontoire, “as long as we’re agreed.”
“Scorpio…” Vasko said.
The pig had had enough. This was his colony, his ship, his crisis. He reached up and ripped away the goggles, breaking them in the process. “It’s decided,” he snapped.
Remontoire spread his fingers wide. “We’ll make the arrangements, then. Cargo tugs will be sent to assist in the transfer of the weapons. Another shuttle will arrive with the new manufactories and some prefabricated items. Conjoiners will arrive to help with the installation of the hypometric weapons and the other new technologies. Is it necessary to airlift any remaining personnel from the surface?”
“Yes,” Antoinette said.
“A major evacuation is out of the question,” Remontoire said. “We can open safe passage to and from the surface on one, possibly two further occasions—enough for a couple of shuttle flights, but no more than that.”
“That’ll do,” Antoinette said.
“What about the rest of them?” asked one of the seniors.
“They had their chance,” Scorpio said.
Remontoire smiled primly, as if someone had committed a faux pas in polite company. “They aren’t necessarily in immediate peril,” he said. “If the inhibitors wished to destroy Ararat’s biosphere, they could have done so already.”
“But they’ll be prisoners down there,” Antoinette said. “The wolves won’t ever let them leave.”
“But they will still be alive,” Remontoire said. “And we may stand a chance of reducing the wolf presence around Ararat. Without access to the full complement of cache weapons, however, that cannot be guaranteed.”
“Could you guarantee it if you had all the weapons?” Scorpio asked.
After a moment’s consideration Remontoire shook his head. “No,” he said. “No guarantees, not even then.”
Scorpio looked around at the assembled delegates, realising for the first time that he was the only pig amongst them. Where the Captain had been sitting only a vacant space now remained, a focus towards which everyone else’s attention was being subtly attracted. The Captain was still there, Scorpio thought. He was still there, still listening. He even thought he could still smell the lubricant.
“Then I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” Scorpio said.
Antoinette came to see Scorpio after the meeting. He had taken the elevator back upship, to assist with the ongoing efforts to process the evacuees. There were people everywhere, huddled into filthy, dank, winding corridors as far as the eye could see.
He walked along one of these corridors, absorbing the frightened faces, fielding questions when he was able to, but saying nothing about the wider plans for the ship and its passengers. He told them only that they would be taken care of, that some of them would be frozen, but that every effort would be taken to make the process as painless and safe as possible. He believed it, too, for a while. But then it dawned on him, after navigating one corridor, that he had seen only a few hundred evacuees out of the thousands supposedly aboard.
He met Antoinette in a junction, where Security Arm militia were directing people to functioning elevators that would take them to different processing centres much further down the ship.
“It’s going to be all right, Scorp,” she said.
“Am I that easy to read?”
“You look worried, as if you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Funny, but that’s more or less how I feel.”
“You’ll hack it. Do you remember how it was with Clavain, when we were in the Mademoiselle’s Chateau?”
“That was a while back.”
“Well, I remember even if you don’t. He looked just the way you look now, Scorp, as if his whole life had been a sequence of errors, culminating in that one moment of absolute failure. He nearly lost it then. But he didn’t. He kept it together. And it worked out. In the end, that sequence of errors turned out to be exactly the right set of choices.”
He smiled. “Thanks for the pep talk, Antoinette.”
“I just thought you should know. Things are getting complicated, Scorp, and I know you sometimes don’t think that’s exactly your ideal milieu, if you get my drift. But you’re wrong. Your kind of leadership is just what we need now: blunt and to the point. You’re not a politician, Scorp. Thank God for that. Clavain would have agreed, you know.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I’m just asking you not to have a crisis on us. Not now.”
“I’ll try not to.”
She sighed and punched him playfully on the arm. “I just wanted you to know that before I leave.”
“Leave?”
“I’ve made my mind up: I’m going back down to Ararat on one of Remontoire’s shuttles. Xavier’s down there.”