There was no going back. But until this moment their course had been dictated solely by Remontoire’s plan, his trajectory designed merely to get them away from the wolves with the lowest probability of interception. It was only now, after two weeks, that they had the option to steer on a new heading. The pursuing wolves had no bearing on that decision: Scorpio had to assume that they would eventually be destroyed, long before the ship reached its final destination.
He stood up and waited for everyone to fall silent. Saying nothing himself, he pulled Clavain’s knife from its sheath. Without turning it on, he leant across the table and made two marks, one on either side of the centre line, each requiring only three scratches of the blade. One was a “Y,” the other an “H.” In the dark lacquer of the wood the scratches were the colour of pigskin.
They all watched him, expecting him to say something. Instead he returned the knife to its sheath and sat back down in his seat. Then he meshed his hands behind his neck and nodded at Orca Cruz.
Cruz was his only remaining ally from his Chasm City days. She looked at them all in turn, fixing everyone with her one good eye, black fingernails rasping against the table as she made her points.
“The last few weeks haven’t been easy,” she began. “We’ve all made sacrifices, all seen plans upturned. Some of us have lost loved ones or seen our families ripped apart. Every certainty that we had a month ago has been pulverised. We are deep into unfamiliar territory, and we don’t have a map. Worse, the man we had come to trust, the man who would have seen the right way forward, isn’t with us any more.” She fixed her gaze on Scorpio, waiting until everyone else was looking at him as well. “But we still have a leader,” she continued. “We still have a damned good leader, someone Clavain trusted to run things on Ararat when he wasn’t around. Someone we should trust to lead us, more now than ever. Clavain had faith in his judgement. I think it’s about time we took a leaf from the old man’s book.”
Urton, the Security Arm woman, shook her head. “This is all well and good, Orca. None of us has a problem with Scprpio’s leadership.” She gave the last word a heavy emphasis, leaving everyone to draw their own conclusions about just what problems they might have with the pig. “But what we want to hear now is where you think we should go.”
“It’s very simple,” Orca Cruz replied. “We have to go to Hela.”
Urton tried unsuccessfully to hide her surprise. “Then we’re in agreement.”
“But only after we’ve been to Yellowstone,” Cruz said. “Hela is… speculative, at best. We don’t really know what we’ll find there, if anything. But we know that we can do some good around Yellowstone. We have the capacity to take tens of thousands more sleepers. Another hundred and fifty thousand, easily. Those are human lives, Urton. They’re people we can save. Fate gave us this ship. We have to do something with it.”
“We’ve already evacuated the Resurgam system,” Urton said. “Not to mention seventeen thousand people from this one. I’d say that wipes the slate clean.”
“This slate is never wiped clean,” Cruz said.
Urton waved her hand across the table. “You’re forgetting something. The core systems are crawling with Ultras. There are dozens, hundreds of ships with the sleeper capacity of Infinity, in any system you care to name.”
“You’d trust lives to Ultras? You’re dumber than you look,” Orca said.
“Of course I’d trust them,” Urton said.
Aura laughed.
“Why did she do that?” Urton asked.
“Because you lied,” Khouri told her. “She can tell. She can always tell.”
One of the refugee representatives—a man named Rintzen—coughed tactically. He smiled, doing his best to seem conciliatory. “What Urton means is that it simply isn’t our job. The motives and methods of the Ultras may be questionable—we all know that—but it is a simple fact that they have ships and a desire for customers. If the situation in the core systems does indeed reach a crisis point, then—might I venture to suggest—all we’d have is a classic case of demand being met by supply.”
Cruz shook her head. She looked disgusted. If Scorpio had walked in at that moment and only had her face to go by, he would have concluded that someone had just deposited a bowel movement on the table.
“Remind me,” she said. “When you came aboard this ship from Resurgam—how much did it cost you?”
The man examined his fingernails. “Nothing, of course… but that’s not the point. The situation was totally different.”
The lights dimmed. It was happening every few minutes now, as the weapons were spun up and discharged; often enough that everyone had stopped remarking on it, but that didn’t mean that the dimming went unnoticed. Everyone knew that it meant the wolves were still out there, still creeping closer to the Nostalgia for Infinity.
“All right,” Cruz said when the light flicked back up to full strength. “Then what about this time, when you were evacuated from Ararat? How much did you cough up for the privilege?”
“Again, nothing,” Rintzen conceded. “And again, the two things can’t be compared…”
“You revolt me,” Cruz said. “I dealt with some slime down in the Mulch, but you’d have been in a league of your own, Rintzen.”
“Look,” said Kashian, another of the refugee representatives, “no one’s saying it’s right for the Ultras to make a profit out of the wolf emergency, but we have to be pragmatic. Their ships will always be better suited than this one to the task of mass evacuation.” She looked around, inviting the others to do likewise. “This room may seem normal enough, but it’s hardly representative of the rest of the ship. It’s more like a hard, dry pearl in the slime of an oyster. There are still vast swathes of this ship that are not even mapped, let alone habitable. And let’s not forget that things are significantly worse than they were during the Resurgam evacuation. Most of the seventeen thousand who came aboard two weeks ago still haven’t been processed properly. They are living in unspeakable conditions.” She shivered, as if experiencing some of that squalor by osmosis.
“You want to talk about unspeakable conditions,” Cruz said, “try death for a few weeks, see how it suits you.”
Kashian shook her head, looking in exasperation at the other seniors. “You can’t negotiate with this woman. She reduces everything to insult or absurdity.”
“Might I say something?” asked Vasko Malinin.
Scorpio shrugged in his direction.
Vasko stood up, leaning forwards across the table, his fingers splayed for support. “I won’t debate the logistics of helping the evacuation effort from Yellowstone,” he said. “I don’t believe it makes any difference. Irrespective of the needs of those refugees, we have been given a clear direction not to go there. We have to listen to Aura.”