Yet there had come a point, inevitably, when it had suited one or other of the combatants to discard the stealth stratagem. Once one abandoned it, the others had to follow suit. Now it was a war not of stealth but of maximum transparency. Weapons, machines and forces were being tossed about with abandon.
Watching the battle from the observation capsule, Scorpio was reminded of something Clavain had said on more than one occasion, when viewing some distant engagement: war was beautiful, when you had the good fortune not to be engaged in it. It was sound and fury, colour and movement, a massed assault on the senses. It was bravura and theatrical, something that made you gasp. It was thrilling and romantic, when you were a spectator. But, Scorpio reminded himself, they were involved. Not in the sense that they were participants in the engagement around Ararat, but because their own fate depended critically on its outcome. And to a large extent he was responsible for that. Remontoire had wanted him to hand over all the cache weapons, and he had refused. Because of that, Remontoire could not guarantee that the covering action would be successful.
The console chimed, signifying that a specific chirp of gravitational radiation had just swept past the Nostalgia for Infinity.
“That’s it,” Vasko said, his voice hushed and businesslike. “The last cache weapon, assuming we haven’t lost count.”
“He wasn’t meant to use them up this quickly,” Khouri said. She was sitting with him in the observation capsule, with Aura cradled in her arms. “I think something’s gone wrong.”
“Wait and see,” Scorpio said. “Remontoire may just be changing the plan because he’s seen a better strategy.”
They watched a beam of something—bleeding visible light sideways so that it was evident even in vacuum—reach out with elegant slowness across the theatre of battle. There was something obscene and tonguelike about the way it extended itself, pushing towards some invisible wolf target on the far side of the battle. Scorpio did not like to think about how bright that beam must have been close-up, for it was visible now even without optical magnification or intensity enhancement. He had turned down all the lights in the observation capsule, dimming the navigation controls so that they had the best view of the engagement. Shields had been carefully positioned to screen out the glare and radiation from the engines.
The capsule lurched, something snapping free of the larger ship. Scorpio had learned not to flinch when such things happened. He waited while the capsule reoriented itself, picking its way to a new place of rest with the unhurried care of a tarantula, following the dictates of some ancient collision-avoidance algorithm.
Khouri looked through one of the portholes, holding Aura up to the view even though the baby’s eyes were still closed.
“It’s strange down here,” she said. “Like no other part of the ship. Who did this? The Captain or the sea?”
“The sea, I think,” Scorpio replied, “though I don’t know whether the Jugglers had anything to do with it or not. There was a whole teeming marine ecology below the Jugglers, just as on any other aquatic planet.”
“Why are you whispering?” Vasko asked. “Can he hear us in here?”
“I’m whispering because it’s beautiful and strange,” Scorpio said. “Plus, I happen to have a headache. It’s a pig thing. It’s because our skulls are a bit too small for our brains. It gets worse as we get older. Our optic nerves get squeezed and we go blind, assuming macular degeneration doesn’t get us first.” He smiled into darkness. “Nice view, isn’t it?”
“I only asked.”
“You didn’t answer his question,” Khouri said. “Can he hear us in here?”
“John?” Scorpio shrugged. “Don’t know. Me, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Only polite, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t think you ‘did’ polite,” Khouri said.
“I’m working on it.”
Aura gurgled.
The capsule stiffened its legs, pushing itself closer to the hull with a delicate clang of contacting surfaces. It hung suspended beneath the flattened underside of the great ship, where the Nostalgia for Infinity had come to rest on Ararat’s seabed. All around it, seen in dim pastel shades, were weird coral-like formations. There were grey-green structures as large as ships, forests of gnarled, downward-pointing fingers, like stone chandeliers. The growths had all formed during the ship’s twenty-three years of immersion, forming a charming rock-garden counterpoint to the brutalist transformations inflicted on the hull by the captain’s own plague-driven reshaping processes. They had remained intact even as the Jugglers had moved the Infinity to deeper water, and they had survived both the departure from Ararat and the subsequent engagement with wolf forces. Doubtless John Brannigan could have removed them, just as he had redesigned the ship’s lower extremities to permit it to land on Ararat in the first place. The entire ship was an ex-ternalisation of his psyche, an edifice chiselled from guilt, horror and the craving for absolution.
But there was no sign of any further transformations taking place here. Perhaps, Scorpio mused, it suited the Captain to carry these warts and scabs of dead marine life, just as it suited Scorpio to carry the scar on his shoulder, where he had effaced the scorpion tattoo. Remove evidence of that scar, and he would have been removing part of what made him Scorpio. Ararat, in turn, had changed the Captain. Scorpio was certain of that, certain also that the Captain felt it. But how had it changed him, exactly? Shortly, he thought, it would be necessary to put the Captain to the test.
Scorpio had already made the appropriate arrangements. There was a fistful of bright-red dust in his pocket.
Vasko stirred, the upholstery creaking. “Yes, it might pay to be polite to him,” he said. “After all, nothing’s going to happen around here without his agreement. I think we all recognise that.”
“You talk as if you think there’s going to be a clash of wills,” Scorpio said. He kept one eye on the extending beam of the cache weapon, watching as it scribed a bright scratch across the volume of battle. The scratch was now of a finite length, inching its way across space. Where the cache weapon had been was only a fading smudge of dying matter. The weapon had been a one-shot job, a throwaway.
“You think there won’t be?” Vasko asked.
“I’m an optimist. I think we’ll all see sense.”
“You won the battle over the cache weapons,” Vasko said. “Remontoire went along with it, and so did the ship. I’m not surprised about that: the ship felt safer with the weapons than without them. But we still don’t know that it was the right thing to do. What about next time?”
“Next time? I don’t see any disputes on the horizon,” Scorpio said.
But he did, and he felt isolated now that Remontoire and Antoinette had gone. Remontoire and the last of the Conjoin-ers had departed a day ago, taking with them their servitors, machines and the last of the negotiated number of cache weapons. In their place they had left behind working manufactories and the vast shining things Scorpio had watched them assemble. Remontoire had explained that the weapons and mechanisms had only been tested in a very limited fashion. Before they could be used they would require painstaking calibration, following a set of instructions the Conjoiner technicians had left behind. The Conjoiner technicians could not stay aboard and complete the calibrations: if they waited any longer, their small ships would be unable to return to the main battle group around Ararat. Even with inertia-suppressing systems, they were still horribly constrained by the exigencies of fuel reserves and delta-vee margins. Physics still mattered. It was not their own survival they cared about, but their usefulness to the Mother Nest. And so they had left, taking with them the one man Scorpio felt would have had the will to oppose Aura, if the circumstances merited it.