Well, so can I, Scorpio thought to himself. But this wasn’t the time.
“Two hundred metres,” Vasko called, studying the laser ranger. “Getting close, Scorp. Are you certain you don’t have second thoughts?”
“I’m certain.”
He became aware, joltingly, of Aura’s presence next to him. She appeared less childlike with each apparition. “This is too dangerous,” she said. “You mustn’t take this risk, Scorpio. There’s too much to be lost.”
“You don’t know any more about that shuttle than I do,” he said.
“I know that I don’t like it,” she said.
He gritted his teeth. “This isn’t one of your little girl days, is it? This is one of your scary prophet days.”
“She’s only telling us how she feels,” Khouri said, sitting on Scorpio’s opposite side. “She has that right, doesn’t she, Scorp?”
“I got the message already,” he said.
“Destroy it now,” Aura said, golden-brown eyes aflame with authority.
“One-fifty metres,” Vasko said. “I think she means it, Scorp.”
“I think she’d better shut up.” But involuntarily his hand tightened on the trigger. He was one twitch away from doing it himself. He wondered how much warning the other ships had received before it was too late to do anything about it.
“One-thirty. She’s within floodlight range now, Scorp.”
“Light her up. Let’s see what happens.”
The view shuffled, making way for the grab from the optical cameras, the scene now illuminated by the floods. The shuttle was veering, turning end over end as it made its final approach. The light caught the texture of the hulclass="underline" battered metal and ceramics, hyperdiamond viewing blisters, scratched and scuffed surface markings, glints of bare metal along the edges of panel lines, spirals of vapour from attitude jets. It looked terribly real, Scorpio thought. Too real, surely, to be the product of wolf camouflage. A wolf machine would only look human from a distance; up close, surely, it would reveal itself to be no more than a crude approximation shaped from myriad black cubes rather than metals and ceramics. There would be no smooth curves, no subtlety of detail, no uneven coloration or signs of damage and repair…
“One-ten,” Vasko said. “Ten metres closer and I’ll be disarming the cache weapon. You fine with that, Scorp?”
“Copacetic.”
This had always been part of the plan. Any closer and the cache weapon stood a better than average chance of doing real damage to the Nostalgia for Infinity as well as the shuttle. Of course, if they needed the cache weapon in the first place… but Scorpio did not want to think about that.
“Disarmed,” Vasko said. “Ninety-five metres. Ninety.”
The shuttle’s slow tumble brought its tail-parts into view. Scorpio saw gaping exhaust nozzles packed together like multiple gunbarrels. They were still cooling down from operation, sliding down through the spectrum. Retracted tail-mounted landing gear, for dropping down on airless worlds, became visible. Blisters and pods of unguessable function. And something else: scabrous, black encrustations, stepped along geometric lines.
“Wolf,” Vasko said, his voice barely a v/hisper.
Scorpio looked at the ship, his heart frozen. Vasko was right. The black growths were exactly what they had seen around Skade’s ship, in the iceberg.
His hand tightened on the trigger. He could almost feel the hypometric weapons squirming in anticipation.
“Scorp,” Vasko said. “Kill it. Now.”
He did nothing.
“Kill it!” Vasko shouted.
“It isn’t an impostor,” Scorpio said. “It’s just been infect—”
Vasko seized the hypometric trigger from his hands, snapping it from the seat-rest. It trailed cables behind it. For a drawn-out moment, Vasko fumbled with it, struggling to get his fingers around the weird pig-specific trigger design. Scorpio fought back, leaning over in the seat until he was able to reach Vasko’s hand and wrestle the trigger under his own control once more. He plunged his hand into the complexity of the grip, using his other arm to hold Vasko back.
“You’ll fucking pay for that,” he snarled.
But the young man just said, “Kill it. Kill it now and deal with me later. It’s seventy-five fucking metres away, Scorp!”
Scorpio felt something cold press against the side of his neck. He whipped his head around, and there was Urton. She was holding something against him. All he could see was a blur of silver in her hand. A gun, or a knife, or a hypodermic—it didn’t make much difference.
“Drop it, Scorp,” she said. “It’s over.”
“What is this?” he asked calmly. “A mutiny?”
“No, nothing that dramatic. Just a regime change.”
Vasko took back the trigger, forced his hand into the guard.
“Sixty-five metres,” he whispered, and closed the trigger. The lights dimmed.
He was allowed to watch the off-loading of the shuttle’s refugees.
The shuttle had been brought into one of the smaller docking bays and the occupants were now filing off, marshalled by SA guards who were taking down their personal details. Some of the people did not seem entirely certain who they were, or who they were meant to be. Some of them looked relieved to have been rescued. Others just looked weary, as if sensing that this rescue was unlikely to be anything other than a temporary reprieve.
There were about twelve hundred of them, all told, including two-dozen crew. None of them had been frozen: the shuttle had not carried reefersleep caskets, and when the wolf takeover of the lighthugger had commenced, there had barely been time to get those thousand-odd people aboard. Several hundred thousand people had been left behind on the lighthugger, to be reprocessed into wolf components. Mercifully, most of them had been frozen when it happened. The wolves might have sunk probes into their heads, but at least most of them would have been unconscious. And perhaps by that point the wolves had gathered all the tactical data they needed. Perhaps by then humans were really only useful to them for the trace elements contained in their bodies.
Interviewing the crew and passengers, they heard horror stories. Some of them had brought documentary recordings with them: first-hand evidence of the wolf onslaught—habitats being ripped apart in an orgy of transformative destructions, spewing out new wolf machines even as the structures crumbled to rubble; shots of Chasm City’s newly rebuilt domes being breached, life and property being sucked into the cold, rushing atmosphere of Yellowstone in spiralling vortices of escaping air; the wolf machines descending into the ruins of the city like clouds of purposeful ink, oblivious to gravity, coalescing around and copulating with the city’s warped and wizened buildings; the buildings swelling, engorged with wolf spawn. They didn’t use killing energy when a process of grinding assimilation was just as efficient.