He thought, then, of Aura. It came to him with crystal clarity: she would be followed. She was a child who spoke of things beyond her reach. She had, in a way, already saved thousands of lives by preventing Scorpio from attacking the Jugglers as they tried to haul the Infinity to a safe distance from First Camp. She had known what the right thing to do was.
She was just a small thing now, encased in the transparent crib of the incubator, but she was growing. In ten years, what would she be like? It hurt him to have to think so far ahead. He did it anyway. He saw a flash of her then, a girl who looked older than her years, the expression on her face hovering somewhere between serene certainty and the stiff mask of a zealot, untroubled by the smallest flicker of doubt. She would be beautiful, in human terms, and she would have followers. He saw her wearing Skade’s armour—the armour as it had been when they had found Skade in the crashed ship, tuned to white, its chameleoflage permanently jammed on that one setting.
She might be right, he thought. She might know exactly what had to be done to make a difference against the Inhibitors. Given what she had already cost them, he desperately hoped that this would be the case. But what if she was wrong? What if she was a-weapon, implanted in their midst? What if her one function was to lead them all to extinction, by the most efficient means?
He didn’t really think that likely, though. If he had, he would have killed her already, and then perhaps himself. But the chance was still there. She might even be innocent, but still wrong. In some respects that was an even more dangerous possibility.
Vasko Malinin had already sided with her. So, Scorpio thought, had a number of the seniors. Others were uncommitted, but might turn either way in the coming days. Against this, against what would surely be the magnetic charisma of the girl, there had to be a balance, something stolid and unimaginative, not much given to crusades or the worship of zealots. He couldn’t step down. It might wear him out even sooner, but—somehow or other—he had to be there. Not as Aura’s antagonist, necessarily, but as her brake. And if it came to a confrontation with Aura or one of her supporters (he could see them now, rallying behind the white-armoured girl) then it would only vindicate his decision to stay.
The one thing Scorpio knew about himself was that when he made a decision it stayed made. In that respect, he thought, he had much in common with Clavain. Clavain had been a better forward-thinker than Scorpio, but at the end—when he had met his death in the iceberg—all his life had amounted to was a series of dogged stands.
There were, Scorpio concluded, worse ways to live.
“You’re quite happy with this?” Remontoire asked Scorpio.
They were sitting alone in a spider-legged inspection saloon, a pressurised cabin clutching the sheer clifflike face of the accelerating starship. From an aperture below them—a docking gate framed by bony structures that resembled fused spinal vertebrae—the cache weapons were being unloaded. It would have been a delicate operation at the best of times, but with the Nostalgia for Infinity continuing to accelerate away from Ararat, following the trajectory Remontoire and his projections had specified, it was one that required the utmost attention to detail.
“I’m happy,” Scorpio said. “I thought you’d be the one with objections, Rem. You wanted all of these things. I’m not letting you have them all. Doesn’t that piss you off?”
“Piss me off, Scorp?” There was a faint, knowing smile on his companion’s face. Remontoire had prepared a flask of tea and was now pouring it into minuscule glass tumblers. “Why should it? The risk is shared equally. Your own chance of sur-vival—according to our forecasts, at least—is now significantly reduced. I regret this state of affairs, certainly, but I can appreciate your unwillingness to hand over all the weapons. That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.”
“I don’t do faith,” Scorpio said.
“In truth, the cache weapons may not make very much difference in the long run. I did not want to say this earlier, for fear of dispiriting our associates, but the fact remains that our forecasts may be too optimistic. When Ilia Volyova rode Storm Bird into the heart of the wolf concentration around Delta Pavonis, the cache weapons she deployed made precious little impact.”
“As far as we know. Maybe she did slow things down a bit.”
“Or perhaps she did not deploy the weapons in the most effective manner possible—she was ill, after all—or perhaps those were not the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal. We shall never know.”
“What about these other weapons,” Scorpio asked, “the ones that they’re making for us now?”
“The hypometric devices? They have proven useful. You saw how the wolf concentration around your shuttle and the
Nostalgia for Infinity was dispersed. I also used a hypometric weapon against the wolf aggregate that was causing you difficulties on the surface of Ararat.“
Scorpio sipped at his tea, holding the little tumbler—it was barely larger than a thimble—in the clumsy vice of his hands. He felt as if at any minute he was going to shatter the glass. “These are the weapons Aura showed you how to make?”
“Yes.”
“And you still don’t really know any of it works?”
“Let’s just say that theory is lagging some distance behind practice, shall we?”
“All right. It’s not as if I’d be able to understand it even if you knew. But one thing does occur to me. If this shit is so useful, why aren’t the wolves using it against us?”
“Again, we don’t know,” Remontoire admitted.
“Doesn’t that worry you? Doesn’t it concern you that maybe there’s some kind of long-term problem with this new technology that you don’t know about?”
Remontoire arched an eyebrow. “You, thinking ahead, Scorpio? Whatever next?”
“It’s a legitimate point.”
“Conceded. And yes, it does, amongst other things, give me pause for concern. But given the choice between extinction now and dealing with an unspecified problem at a later point… well, it’s not much of a contest, is it?” Remontoire peered through the amber belly of his tiny glass, one eye looming large in distortion. “Anyway, there’s another possibility. The wolves may not have this technology.”
Beyond the observation spider, framed by the brass-ringed eye of one of its portholes, Scorpio saw one of the cache weapons emerge. The weapon—it was all bronze:green lustre and art deco flanges, like an old radio or cinema—was encased in a cradle studded with steering jets. The cradle, in turn, was being grasped by four tugs of Conjoiner manufacture.
“Then where did this technology come from?”
“The dead. The collective memories of countless extinct cultures, gathered together in the neutron-crust matrix of the Hades computer. Clearly it wasn’t enough to make a difference to those extinct species; maybe none of the other techniques Aura has given us will make a difference to our eventual fu-ture. But perhaps they have served to slow things down. It might be that all we need is time. If there is something else out there—something more significant, something more potent than the wolves—then all we need is time to discover it.”