The man’s voice rattled through the speaker grille. “Still concerned about plague traces? I thought we all had other things to worry about these days.”
“Can’t be too careful,” Scorpio said. “It’s nothing personal, of course.”
“I wouldn’t dream of complaining,” Brother Seyfarth replied.
In truth, they had been scanned from the moment they entered the Infinity’s airlock. Scorpio had to know whether there was anything hidden under that armour, and if there was, he had to know what it was.
He had studied the Nostalgia for Infinity’s history. Once, when the ship had been under the command of its old triumvirate, they had made the mistake of allowing someone aboard with a tiny anti-matter device implanted in the mechanism of their artificial eyes. That pin-sized weapon had enabled the entire ship to be hijacked. Scorpio didn’t blame Volyova and the others for having made that mistake: such devices were both rare and exquisitely difficult to manufacture, and you didn’t encounter them very often. But it was not the kind of mistake he was. going to allow on his watch, if there was anything he could do to stop it.
Elsewhere in the ship, Security Arm officers examined the spectral images of the scanned delegates, peering through smoky grey-green layers of armour to the flesh, blood and bone beneath. There were no obvious concealed weapons: no guns or knives. But that didn’t surprise Scorpio. Even if the delegates had ill intentions, they’d have known that even a cursory scan would pick up normal weapons. If they had anything, it was going to be a lot less obvious.
But perhaps they had nothing at all. Perhaps they were what they said they were, and nothing more. Perhaps he was only objecting to the delegates because he had not been consulted before they were allowed aboard.
But there was something about Brother Seyfarth that he didn’t like, something in the cruel set of his mouth that made him think of other violent men he had known. Something in the way he kept clenching and unclenching the metal fists of his gloves as he waited to be processed through the airlock.
Scorpio touched his earpiece. “Clear on concealed weapons,” he heard. “Clear on chemical traces for explosives, toxins or nerve agents. Clear on standard nanotech filters. Nothing pre-plague here, and no plague traces either.”
“Look for implants,” he said, “any mechanisms under those suits that don’t serve an obvious function. And check the ones that do, as well. I don’t want hot dust within a light-year of this ship.”
He was asking a lot of them, he knew. They couldn’t risk annoying the delegates by subjecting them to an obvious invasive examination. But—again—this was his watch. He had a reputation to live up to. It hadn’t been him who had invited the fuckers aboard.
“Clear on implants,” he heard. “Nothing large enough to contain a standard pinhead device.”
“Meaning that none of the delegates have implants of any kind?”
“Like I said, sir, nothing large enough…”
“Tell me about all the implants. We can’t assume anything.”
“One of them has something in his eye. Another has a prosthetic hand. A total of half a dozen very small neural implants spread throughout the whole delegation.”
“I don’t like the sound of any of that.”
“The implants aren’t anything we wouldn’t expect to see in a random sample of Hela refugees, sir. Most of them look inactive, anyway.”
“The one with the eye, the one with the hand—I want to know for sure that there isn’t any nasty stuff inside those things.”
“Going to be tricky, sir. They might not like it if we start bombarding them with protons. If there is anti-matter in those things, there’ll be local cell damage from the spallation products…”
“If there is anti-matter in those things, they’re going to have a lot more than cancer to worry about,” Scorpio said.
Trouble was, so would he.
He waited as the man sent a mantislike servitor into the airlock, a bright-red stick-limbed contraption equipped with a proton beam generator. Scorpio told the delegates it was just a more refined form of the plague scanners they had already used, designed to sniff out some of the less common strains. They probably knew this was a lie, but agreed to go along with it for the sake of avoiding a scene. Was that a good sign? he wondered.
The proton beam drilled through flesh and bone, too narrow to hurt major bodily structures. At worst, it would inflict some local tissue damage. But if it touched anti-matter, even a microgram nugget of anti-matter suspended in vacuum in an electromagnetic cradle, it would induce a burst of proton-antiproton reactions.
The servitor listened for the back-scatter of gamma rays, the incriminating sizzle of annihilation.
It heard nothing: not from the hand, not from the eye.
“They’re clean, sir,” the SA operative announced into Scorpio’s earpiece.
No, he thought, they weren’t. At least, he couldn’t be sure of it. He’d ruled out the obvious, done what he could. But the proton beam might have missed the cradles: there hadn’t been time to make an exhaustive sweep of either the hand or the eye. Or the cradles themselves might have been surrounded with deflection or absorption barriers: he’d heard of such things. Or the nuggets could be in the neural implants, hidden behind too many centimetres of bone and tissue for non-surgical scanning.
“Sir? Permission to let them through?”
Scorpio knew that there was nothing else he could do except keep a close watch on them.
“Open the door,” he said.
Brother Seyfarth stepped through the aperture and stood eye to eye with Scorpio. “Don’t trust us, sir?”
“Got a job to do,” Scorpio said. “That’s all.”
The leader nodded gravely. “Don’t we all? Well, no hard feelings. I take it you didn’t find anything suspicious?”
“I didn’t find anything, no.”
The man winked at him, as if the two of them were sharing a joke. The other nineteen delegates bustled through, Scorpio’s distorted reflection gleaming back at him in the buffed and polished plates of their armour. He looked worried.
Now that they were aboard he had to keep them where he wanted them. They didn’t need to see the whole of the ship, just the parts that related to their specific areas of interest. No tour of the cache weapon chambers, no tour of the hypometric weapon shafts or any of the other modifications installed after their departure from Ararat. He’d be careful to keep the delegates away from the weirder manifestations of the Captain’s transforming illness, too, although some of the changes were always going to be apparent. They bobbed along behind him like twenty ducklings, showing emphatic interest in everything he stopped to point out.
“Interesting interior design you have here,” the leader said, fingering—with vague distaste—a riblike extrusion sticking out from a wall. “We always knew that your ship looked a little odd from the outside, but we never imagined you’d have extended the theme all the way through.”
“It grows on you,” Scorpio said.
“I don’t suppose it makes very much difference, from our point of view. As long as the ship does what you’ve claimed it can, who are we to care about the decor?”
“What you really care about is our hull defences and long-range sensors, I imagine,” Scorpio said.
“Your technical specifications were very impressive,” Brother Seyfarth said. “Naturally, we’ll have to double check. The security of Hela depends on our knowing that you can deliver the protection you promised.”
“I don’t think you need lose any sleep over that,” Scorpio said.