It was enough to make him laugh. One weapon left. One fucking weapon, out of the nearly forty they had begun with.
“Let’s hope we saved the best until last,” he said, when he felt he could manage a sentence. “What about the hypometrics? Are you saying they’re just so much junk?”
“Not yet. Maybe in time, but the local wolves don’t seem to have evolved the defence that the others used. We still have a window of usefulness.”
“Oh, good. You said ‘local.’ Local to where?”
“We’ve reached Yellowstone,” the man said. “Or rather, we’ve reached the Epsilon Eridani system, but it isn’t good. We can’t slow down to system speeds, just enough to make the turn for Hela.”
“Why can’t we slow down? Is something wrong with the ship?”
“No,” the man replied. Scorpio had realised by then that he was talking to an older version of Vasko Malinin. Not a young man now, a man. “But there is something wrong with Yellowstone.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “Show me,” Scorpio said.
Before they showed him, he met Aura. She walked into the reefersleep chamber with her mother. The shock of it nearly floored him. He didn’t want to believe it was her, but there was no mistaking those golden-brown eyes. Glints of embedded metal threw prismatic light back at him like oil in water.
“Hello,” she said. She held her mother’s hand, standing hip-high against Khouri’s side. “They said they were waking you, Scorpio. Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” he replied, which was as much as he was prepared to commit. “It was always a risk, going in that thing.” Understatement of the century, he thought. “How are you, Aura?”
“I’m six,” she said.
Khouri gripped her daughter’s hand. “She’s having one of her child days, Scorp, when she acts more or less the way you’d expect a six-year-old to act. But she isn’t always like this. I just thought you should be prepared.”
He studied the two of them. Khouri looked a little older, but not dramatically so. The lines in her face had a little more definition, as if an artist had taken a soft-edged sketch of a woman and gone over it with a sharp pencil, lovingly delineating each crease and fold of skin. She had grown her hair to shoulder length, parted it to one side, clasping it there with a small slide the colour of ambergris. There were veins of white and silver running through her hair, but these served only to emphasise the blackness of the rest of it. Folds of skin he didn’t remember marked her neck, and her hands were somehow thinner and more anatomical. But she was still Khouri, and had he no knowledge that six years had passed he might not have noticed these changes.
The two of them wore white. Khouri was dressed in a floor-length ruffled skirt and a high-collared white jacket over a scoop-necked blouse. Her daughter wore a knee-length skirt over white leggings, with a simple long-sleeved top. Aura’s hair was a short, tomboyish black crop, the fringe cut straight above her eyes. Mother and daughter stood before him like angels, too clean to be a part of the ship he knew. But perhaps things had changed. It had been six years, after all.
“Have you remembered anything?” he asked Aura.
“I’m six,” she said. “Do you want to see the ship?”
He smiled, hoping it wouldn’t frighten the child. “That would be nice. But someone told me there was something else I had to deal with first.”
“What did they tell you?” Khouri asked.
“That it wasn’t good.”
“Understatement of the century,” she replied.
But Valensin would not let him out of the reefersleep chamber without a full medical examination. The doctor made him lie back on a couch and submit to the silent scrutiny of the green medical servitors. The machines fussed over his abdomen with scanners and probes while Valensin peeled back Scorpio’s eyelids and shone a migraine-inducing light into his head, tutting to himself as if he had found something slightly sordid hidden away inside.
“You had me asleep for six years,” Scorpio said. “Couldn’t you have made your examinations then?”
“It’s the waking that kills you,” Valensin said breezily. “That and the immediate period after revival. Given the antiquity of the casket you just came out of and the unavoidable idiosyncrasies of your anatomy, I’d say you have no more than a ninety-five per cent chance of making it through the next hour.”
“I feel fine.”
“If you do, that’s quite some achievement.” Valensin held up a hand, flicking his fingers around Scorpio’s face. “How many?”
“Three.”
“Now?”
“Two.”
“And now?”
“Three.”
“And now?”
“Three. Two. Is there a point to this?”
“I’ll need to run some more exhaustive tests, but it looks to me as if you’re exhibiting a ten or fifteen per cent degradation in your peripheral vision.” Valensin smiled, as if this was exactly the sort of news Scorpio needed: just the ticket for getting him off the couch and putting a spring in his step.
“I’ve just come out of reefersleep. What do you expect?”
“More or less what I’m seeing,” Valensin said. “There was some loss of peripheral vision before we put you under, but it has definitely worsened now. There may be some slight recovery over the next few hours, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you never get back to where you were.”
“But I haven’t aged. I was in the casket all the time.”
“It’s the transitions,” Valensin said, spreading his hands apologetically. “In some respects, they’re as hard on you as staying awake. I’m sorry, Scorp, but this technology just wasn’t made for pigs. The best I can say is that if you’d stayed awake, the loss in vision would have been five to ten per cent worse.”
“Well, that’s fine, then. I’ll bear it in mind next time. Nothing I like better than having to choose between two equally fucked-up options.”
“Oh, you made the right decision,” Valensin said. “From a hard-nosed statistical viewpoint, it was your best chance of surviving through the last six years. But I’d think very carefully about the ‘next time,’ Scorp. The same hard-nosed statistical viewpoint gives you about a fifty per cent chance of surviving another reefersleep immersion. After that, it drops to about ten per cent. Throughout your body, your cells will be putting their affairs in order, settling their debts and making sure their wills are up to date.”
“What does that mean? That I’ve got one more shot in that thing?”
“About that. You weren’t planning on going back in there in a hurry, were you?”
“What, with your bedside manner to cheer me up? I’d be mad to.”
“It’s the lowest form of wit,” Valensin said.
“It beats a kick in the teeth.”
Scorpio pushed himself off the couch, sending Valensin’s robots scurrying for cover. Check-out time for the pig, he thought.
Symbols floated in the sphere of a holographic display, resolving into suns, worlds, ships and ruins. Scorpio, Vasko, Khouri and Aura stood before it, their reflections looming spectrally in the sphere’s glass. With them were half a dozen other ship seniors, including Cruz and Urton.
“Scorp,” Khouri said, “take it easy, all right? Valensin’s a certified prick, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore what he said. We need you in one piece.”
“I’m still here,” he said. “Anyway, you woke me for a reason. Let’s get the bad news over with, shall we?”