The voice had come from behind him. But that simply wasn’t possible: he had been checking his rearguard constantly, and there had been no one coming along the corridor behind him when he knelt down to recover the slug-gun. Seyfarth was a good soldier: he never left his back uncovered for more than a few seconds.
But the voice sounded very near. Very familiar, too.
The safety catch was still off. He turned around slowly, olding the slug-gun at waist level. “I thought I took care of ou,” he said.
“I need a lot of taking care of,” the pig replied. He stood there, unarmed, not even a slug-gun to his name. Looming behind him, like an adult above an infant, stood the hollow shell of a spacesuit. Seyfarth’s lip twisted in a sneer of incomprehension. The pig, just possibly, could have hidden in the darkness, or even pretended to be a body. But the hulking spacesuit? There was no conceivable way he had walked past that without noticing it. And it didn’t seem very likely that the suit could have sprinted from the far end of the corridor in the few seconds during which he’d had his back turned.
“This is a trick,” Seyfarth said, “isn’t it?”
“I’d put down that gun if I were you,” the pig said.
Seyfarth’s finger squeezed the trigger. Part of him wanted to blow the snout-faced abortion away. Another part wanted to know why the pig thought he had the right to speak to him in that kind of tone.
Didn’t the pig know his place?
“I hung you out to dry,” Seyfarth said. He wasn’t mistaken: this was the same pig. He could even see the wounds from where he had pinned him to the wall.
“Listen to me,” the pig said. “Put down the gun and we’ll talk. There are things I want you to tell me. Like what the hell Quaiche wants with my ship.”
Seyfarth touched one finger to his helmeted head, as if scratching an itch. “Which one of lis is holding the gun, pig?”
“You are”
“Right. Just felt that needed clearing up. Now step away from the suit and kneel in the shit, where you belong.”
The pig looked at him, the sly white of an eye catching the light. “Or what?”
“Or we’ll be looking at pork.”
The pig made a move towards him. It was only a flinch, but it was enough for Seyfarth. There were questions he’d have liked answered, but they would all have to wait for now. Once they had taken the ship, there would be all the time in the world for a few forensic investigations. It would actually give him something to do.
He made to squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Furious, imagining that the slug-gun had jammed after all, Seyfarth glanced down at the weapon.
It wasn’t the weapon that was the problem. The problem was his arm. Two spikes had appeared through it: they had shot out from one wall, speared his forearm and emerged on the other side, their sharp tips a damp ruby-red.
Seyfarth felt the pain arrive, felt the spikes grinding against bone and tendon. He bit down on the agony, sneering at the pig. “Nice…” he tried to say.
The spikes slid out of his arm, making a slick, slithery sound as they retracted. Seyfarth watched, fascinated and appalled, as they vanished back into the smooth wall.
“Drop the gun,” the pig said.
Seyfarth’s arm quivered. He raised the barrel towards the pig and the suit, made one last effort to squeeze the trigger. But there was something badly amiss with the anatomy of his arm. His forefinger merely spasmed, tapping pathetically against the trigger like a worm wriggling on a hook.
“I did warn you,” the pig said.
All around Seyfarth, walls, floor and ceiling erupted spikes. He felt them slide into him, freezing him in place. The gun fell from his hand, clattering to the ground through the labyrinth of interlaced metal rods.
“That’s for Orca,” the pig said.
It went quickly after that. The Captain’s control over his own local transformations seemed to grow in confidence and dexterity with each kill. It was, at times, quite sickening to watch. How much more terrible it must have been for the Adventists, to suddenly have the ship itself come alive and turn against them. How shocking, when the supposedly fixed surfaces of walls and floors and ceilings became mobile, crushing and pinning, maiming and suffocating. How distressing, when the fluids that ran throughout the ship—the fluids that the bilge pumps strove to contain—suddenly became the liquid instruments of murder, gushing out at high pressure, drowning hapless Adventists caught in the Captain’s hastily arranged traps. Growing up on Hela, drowning probably hadn’t been amongst the ways they expected to die. But that, Scorpio reflected, was life: full of nasty little surprises.
The tide had been turning against the Adventists, but now it was in full ebb. Scorpio felt his strength redouble, tapping into some last, unexpected reserve. He knew he was going to pay for it later, but for now it felt good to be pushing the enemy back, doing—as the Captain had promised—some actual damage. The slug-gun wasn’t designed for a pig, but that didn’t stop him finding a way to fire it. Sooner or later he was able to trade up for a shipboard boser pistol, pig-issue. Then, as he had always liked to say in Chasm City, he was really cooking.
“Do what you have to do,” the Captain told him. “I can take a little pain, for now.”
Pushing through the ship, following the Captain’s lead, he soon met up with surviving members of the Security Arm. They were shell-shocked, confused and disorganised, but on seeing him they rallied, realising that the ship had not yet fallen to the Adventists. And when word began to spread that the Captain was assisting in the effort, they fought like devils. The nature of the battle changed from minute to minute. Now it was no longer a question of securing control of their ship, but of mopping up the few outstanding pockets of Adventist resistance holed-up in volumes of the ship where the Captain had only limited control.
“I could kill them now,” he told Scorpio. “I can’t reshape thoseparts of me, but I can depressurise them, or flood them. It will just take a little longer than usual. I could even turn the hy-pometric weapon against them.”
“Inside yourself?” Scorpio asked, remembering the last time that had happened, during the calibration exercise.
“I wouldn’t do it lightly.”
Scorpio tightened his grip on the boser pistol. His heart was hammering in his chest, his eyesight and hearing no better than when he had been revived.
None of that mattered.
“I’ll deal with them,” he said. “You’ve done your bit for the day, Captain.”
“I’ll leave things to you, then,” the suit said, stepping back into a perfectly formed aperture that had just appeared in the wall. The wall resealed itself. It was as if the Captain had never been with him.
Beyond the Nostalgia for Infinity, the Captain’s manifold attention was at least partly occupied by the progress of the cache weapon. Even as the battle raged within him, even as the ship was brought slowly back under orthodox control, he was mindful of the weapon, anxious that it should not be wasted. For years he had carried the forty hell-class weapons within him, treasuring them against the predations of theft and damage. His degree of transformation had been much less than it was now, but he still felt an intense bond of care towards the weapons that had played such a central role in his recent history. Besides, the weapons themselves had been the beloved playthings of the old Triumvir, Ilia Volyova. He still had fond thoughts for the Triumvir, despite what she had done to him. As long as he remembered Ilia—who had always found time to speak to the Captain, even when he had been at his least communicative—he was not going to let her down by misusing the last of those dark toys.
Telemetry from the cache weapon reached him through multiply secure channels. The Captain had already sown tiny spysat cameras around himself during the fiercest phase of the Cathedral Guard assault. Now that same swarm of eyes permitted continuous communication with the weapon, even as the Nostalgia for Infinity swung around the far side of Hela.