“We’d like to see them fire up, if that’s possible,” Brother Seyfarth said.
“Not exactly standard procedure while we’re holding orbit,” Scorpio said.
“Just for a moment,” Seyfarth said. “They don’t have to operate at full capacity.”
“I thought it was the defences you were interested in.”
‘Those as well.“
Scorpio spoke into his cuff. “Give me a burst of drive, counteracted by the steering jets. I don’t want to feel this ship move one inch”
The order was implemented almost instantly. Theoretically, one of his people had to send the command into the ship’s control system, whereupon Captain Brannigan might or might not choose to act upon it. But he suspected that the Captain had made the engines fire before the command had ever been entered.
The great ship groaned as the engines lit up. Through the dark glass of the porthole, the exhaust was a scratch of purple-white—visible only because the stealthing modifications to the drives had been switched off during the Nostalgia for Infinity’s, final approach to the system. At the other end of the hull, multiple batteries of conventional fusion rockets were balancing the thrust from the main drives. The ancient hull creaked and moaned like some vast living thing as it absorbed the compressive forces. The ship could take a lot more punishment than this, Scorpio knew, but he was still grateful when the drive flame flicked out. He felt a tiny lurch, evidence of the minutest lack of synchrony between the shutting down of the fusion rockets and the drives, but then all was motionless. The great, saurian protestations of stressed ship fabric died away like diminishing thunder.
“Good enough for you, Brother Seyfarth?”
“I think so,” the leader said. “They seem to be in excellent condition. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find well-maintained Conjoiner drives now that their makers are no longer with us.”
“We do our best,” Scorpio said. “Of course, it’s the weapons you’re really interested in, isn’t it? Shall I show them to you, and then we can call it a day? There’ll be plenty of time for a more detailed examination later.” He was fed up with small talk, fed up with showing the twenty intruders around his empire.
“Actually,” Brother Seyfarth said, when they were safely back inside one of the rotating sections, “we’re more interested in the engines than we admitted.”
There was an itch at the back of Scorpio’s neck. “You are?”
“Yes,” Seyfarth said, nodding to the nineteen others.
In one smoothly choreographed blur, the twenty delegates touched parts of their suits, causing them to fly apart in irregular scablike pieces, as if spring-loaded. The hard-shelled components rained down around them, clattering in untidy piles at their feet. Beneath the suits, as he already knew from the scans, they wore only flimsy inner layers.
He wondered what he had missed. There were still no obvious weapons; still no guns or knives.
“Brother,” he said, “think very carefully about this.”
“I’ve already thought about it,” Seyfarth replied. Along with the other delegates, he knelt down and—his hands still gloved—rummaged with quick efficiency through the pile of sloughed suit parts.
His fist rose clutching something sharp-edged and aerodynamically formed. It was a shard of suit, viciously curved along its leading edge. Seyfarth raised himself on one knee and flicked his wrist. Tumbling end over end, the projectile wheeled through the air towards Scorpio. He heard it coming: the chop, chop, chop of its whisking approach. The fraction of a second of its flight stretched to a subjective eternity. A small, plaintive voice—lacking any tone of recrimination—told him it had been the suits all along. He had been looking so hard through them, so convinced they had to be hiding something, that he had missed the suits themselves.
The suits were the weapons.
The tumbling thing speared into his shoulder, the brutality of its impact knocking him against the slick, ribbed side of the corridor. It pinned him, through leather and flesh, to the wall itself. He thrashed in pain, but the shard had anchored itself firmly.
Seyfarth stood up, a bladed weapon in each hand. There was nothing accidental about them: their lines were too spare and deliberate for that. The suits must have been primed to fall apart along precise flaw lines etched into them with angstrom precision.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said.
“You’re a dead man.”
“And you’d be a dead pig if I’d intended to kill you.” Scorpio knew it was true: the casual way Seyfarth had tossed the weapon towards him had betrayed an easy fluency in its use. It would have cost him no more effort to sever Scorpio’s head. “But instead I’ve spared you. I’ll spare all your crew if we have the co-operation we request.”
“No one’s co-operating with anything. And you won’t get far with knives, no matter how clever you think you are.”
“It’s not just knives,” Seyfarth said.
Behind him, two of the other Adventist delegates stood up. They were holding something between them: a rig containing the lashed-together parts of their air-tanks. One of them was pointing the open nozzle of a hose in Scorpio’s direction.
“Show him,” Seyfarth said, “just so he gets the picture.”
Fire roared from the nozzle, jetting five or six metres beyond the pair of Adventists. The curving plume of the flame scythed against the corridor wall, blistering the surface. Again the ship groaned. Then the flames died, the only sound the hiss of fuel escaping from the nozzle.
“This is a bit of a surprise,” Scorpio said.
“Do what we say and no one will come to any harm,” Seyfarth said. Behind him, the other delegates were looking around: they had heard that groan as well. Perhaps they thought the ship was still settling down after the drive burn, creaking like an old house after sunset.
The moment stretched. Scorpio felt strangely calm. Perhaps, he thought, that was what being old did to you. “You’ve come to take my ship?” he asked.
“Not take it,” Seyfarth said, with urgent emphasis. “We just want to borrow it for a while. When we’re finished, you can have it back.”
“I think you picked the wrong ship,” Scorpio said.
“On the contrary,” Seyfarth replied, “I think we picked exactly the right ship. Now stay there, like a good pig, and we’ll all come away from this as friends.”
“You can’t seriously expect to take my ship with just twenty of you.”
“No,” Seyfarth said. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”
Scorpio tried to free himself. He could not move his arm enough to bring the communicator up to his face. The weapon had pinned him too tightly. He shifted, the pain of movement like so many shards of glass twisting within his shoulder. It was that shoulder: the one he had burned.
Seyfarth shook his head. “What did I say about being a good pig?” He knelt down, examined another weapon, something like a dagger this time. He walked slowly over to Scorpio. “I’ve never been overly fond of pigs, truth be told.”
“Suits me.”
“You’re quite an old one, aren’t you? What are you—forty, fifty years old?”
“Young enough to take the shine off your day, pal.”
“We’ll see about that.”