“Keep me posted,” he said.
The two mismatched figures—the Captain’s hulking, vacant suit and the childlike form of the pig—sloshed their way towards the scene of battle. They moved through corridors and passages that had never been fully reclaimed for human habitation: rat-ridden, rank with effluent and other toxins, crypt-dark save for the occasional weak and stuttering light source. When the Adventists had turned on him, Scorpio had known exactly where he was. But since then he had been following the Captain, allowing himself to be led into areas of the ship that were completely unfamiliar. As the tour progressed, and as the Captain ushered him through obscure hatchways and hidden apertures, he was struck by the increasing absence of the usual markers of ship wide authority: the jury-rigged electrical and hydraulic systems, the painted, luminescent direction arrows. There was only anatomy. They were navigating parts of the ship known only to the Captain, he realised: private corridors he must have haunted alone. It was his flesh and blood, Scorpio thought: up to him what he did with it.
The pig was under no illusion that he was actually in the Captain’s physical presence. The suit was just a focus for his attention; in every other respect the Captain was as omnipresent as ever, surrounding him in every sinew of the architecture. But for all that Scorpio would have preferred something with a face to talk to rather than the empty suit, it was a lot better than being on his own. He knew that he had been hurt badly by the Adventist leader, and that sooner or later he was going to feel the delayed shock of those injuries. How hard it would hit him, he couldn’t say. He’d have shrugged off the wounds twenty years ago. Now, shrugging off anything seemed unlikely. Yet while he had some form of companion, he felt he could keep delaying that moment of accounting. Just give me a few hours, he thought, just long enough to sort out this mess.
A few hours were all he needed; all he wanted.
“There’s something we need to discuss, Scorp. You and me. Before it’s too late.”
“Captain?”
“I need to do something before it becomes impractical. We came here on Aura’s instructions, in the hope that we’d find something that might make a difference against the Inhibitors. Quaiche and the scuttlers were always the key, which is why we sent Aura into Hela society nine years ago. She was to gather information, to infiltrate the cathedrals through the back door, without anyone ever suspecting her connection to us. That was a good plan, Scorp. It was the best we had at the time. But we mustn’t neglect Haldora itself.”
“No one’s neglecting it,” Scorpio said. “Aura already thinks she’s made contact with the shadows, via that suit. Isn’t that good enough for now?”
“It might have been if the Adventists hadn’t betrayed us. But we don’t control that suit: Quaiche does, and he’s no longer a man we can trust. It’s time to up the ante, Scorp. We can’t put all our faith in that one line of negotiation.”
“So we launch the instrument packages, just like we always planned.”
“The packages were only ever intended as a precursor. More than likely, they’d have told us nothing we haven’t already learned from Aura. Sooner or later we’d have had to bring in the big guns.”
For a moment Scorpio had forgotten his pain. “So what have you got in mind?”
“We need to know what’s inside Haldora,” the Captain said. “We need to break through the camouflage, and we can’t afford to sit around waiting for a vanishing.”
“The cache weapon,” Scorpio said, guessing his companion’s intentions. “You want to use it, don’t you? Fire it into the face of that planet, and see what happens?”
“Like I said, it’s time to bring out the big guns.”
“It’s the last one we’ve got. Make it count, Captain.”
The suit studied him with the blank aperture of its faceplate. “I’ll do my best,” it said.
Presently, the suit slowed its pace. The pig halted, using the wide bulk of the suit for cover.
“There’s something ahead, Scorp.”
Scorpio looked into darkness. “I don’t see anything.”
“I sense it, but I need the suit to take a closer look. I don’t have cameras here.”
They rounded a slight bend, easing their way through a knuckle of interconnected corridors. Suddenly they were back in a part of the ship Scorpio thought he recognised—one of the corridors he had taken the Adventists down earlier that day. Dull sepia light dribbled from sconces in the wall.
“There are bodies here, Scorp. It doesn’t look good.”
The suit strode ahead, sloshing through unspeakable fluids. The bodies were shadowed lumps, half-submerged in the muck. The suit’s head-light flicked on, playing over the forms. Feral janitor rats fled from the glare.
“They’re not Adventists,” Scorpio said.
The suit knelt down next to the closest of the bodies. “Do you recognise them?”
Scorpio squatted on his haunches, grimacing at the twin spikes of pain on either side of his chest. He touched the body nearest to the Captain, turning it over so that he could see the face. He fingered the rough leather of an eyepatch.
“It’s Orca Cruz,” he said.
His own voice sounded detached, matter-of-fact. She’s dead, he thought. This woman who was loyal to you for more than thirty years of your life is dead; this woman who aided you, protected you, fought for you and made you laugh with her stories, is dead, and she died because of your mistake, your stupidity in not seeing through the Adventists’ plans. And all you feel now is that something you own has been stepped on.
There was a hiss of pistons and servo-mechanisms. The monstrous gauntlet of the Captain’s suit touched him gently on the back. “It’s all right, Scorp. I know how you feel.”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s too soon, too sudden.”
Scorpio looked at the other bodies, knowing that they were all members of the Security Arm. Their weapons were gone, but there was no obvious indication of injury on any of them. But he wouldn’t forget the expression on Cruz’s face in a hurry.
“She was good,” he said. “She stuck by me when she could have carved out a little empire of her own in Chasm City. She didn’t deserve this. None of them deserved this.”
He forced himself to his full height, steadying himself against the wall. First Lasher, on the trip to Resurgam. Then he’d had to say goodbye to Blood, probably for ever. Now Cruz was gone: his last, precious link to that half-remembered life in Chasm City.
“I don’t know about you, Captain,” he said, “but I’m about ready to start taking things personally.”
“I’ve already started,” the empty suit said.
Battle continued to rage within the Nostalgia for Infinity. Slowly, however, the tide was turning against the Adventist boarders. Around the ship, the last elements of the Cathedral Guard had either tunnelled through to the interior or were being picked off by the hull-mounted defences. Damage had been sustained: fresh craters and scars gouged into the already treacherous landscape of the starship’s hull. The tiny ships that had reached the hull and anchored themselves in place—with projectile barbs, epoxy-pads, rocket grapples and drilling equipment—resembled mechanical ticks half-embedded in the flesh of some monstrous animal. Elsewhere, the mashed corpses of other ships lay entangled in the crevices and folds of the Nostalgia for Infinity’s architecture, quills of escaping air and fluid bleeding into space. Other ships had been ripped apart before they got close to the lighthugger, their hot, mangled wreckage trailing the larger vessel as it orbited Hela. No additional reinforcements had been launched from the moon: the assault had been designed to be total and overwhelming, and only a handful of Cathedral Guard units had not been mobilised during the first wave.