Haldora, from the cache weapon’s perspective, now swallowed half the sky. The gas giant was a striped behemoth of primal cold oozing exotic chemistries, its bands of colour so wide that you could drown a rocky world in them. It looked very reaclass="underline" every sensor on the cache weapon’s harness reported exactly what would have been expected this close to a gas giant. It sniffed the cruel strength of its magnetic field, felt the hard sleet of charged particles entrained by that field. Even at extreme magnification, the whorls and flurries of the atmosphere looked absolutely convincing.
The Captain had listened to the conversations of the humans in his care, to their speculations concerning the nature of the Haldora enigma. He knew what they expected to find behind this mask of a world: a mechanism for signalling between adjacent realities, entire universes fluttering there like ribbons, adjacent braneworlds in the higher dimensional reality of the bulk: a kind of radio, capable of tuning into the whisper of gravitons. The details, as yet, didn’t matter. What they needed, now, was to make contact with the entities on the other side as quickly as possible. The suit in the Lady Morwenna was one possible means—perhaps the easiest, since it was already open—but it couldn’t be relied upon. If Quaiche destroyed it, then they would need to find another way to contact the shadows. Quaiche had waited until a vanishing occurred before sending his probe into the planet. They didn’t have time for that.
They needed to provoke a vanishing, to-expose the machinery for themselves.
The weapon began to slow, taking up its firing posture. Within it, grave preparations were being made. Arcane physical processes began to occur: sequences of reactions, tiny at first, but growing towards an irreversible cascade. The commanding sentience of the device had settled into a state of calm acceptance. After so many years of inaction, it was now going to do the thing for which it had been created. The fact that it would die in the process did not alarm it in the slightest. It felt only a microscopic glimmer of regret that it was the last of its kind, and that no other cache weapons would be around to witness its furious proclamation.
That was the one thing their human masters had never grasped: cache weapons were intensely vain.
Scorpio sat at the conference table, scowling. He was alone except for a handful of seniors. Valensin was tending to his wounds: there was a small museum’s worth of antiquated medical equipment spread out on a bloodstained sheet before the pig, including bandages, scalpels, scissors, needles and various bottled ointments and sterilising agents. The doctor had already cut away part of his tunic, exposing the twin wounds where the Adventist’s throwing knives had pinned him to the wall.
“You’re lucky,” Valensin said, when he had cleaned away most of the blood and began sealing the entrance and exit wounds with an adhesive salve. “He knew what he was doing. You probably weren’t meant to die.”
“And that makes me lucky? It wasn’t remotely unlucky to end up impaled on a wall in the first place? Just a thought.”
“All I’m saying is, it could have been worse. It looks to me as if they were under orders to minimalise casualties, as far as possible.”
“Tell that to Orca.”
“Yes, the nerve gas was unfortunate. At some point, obviously, they were prepared to kill, but in general it appears that they considered themselves to be on holy business, like crusaders. The sword was to be used only as an instrument of last resort. But they must have known some blood would be shed.”
Urton leant across the table. Her arm was in a sling and there was a vivid purple bruise across her right cheek, but she was otherwise unhurt. “The question is, what now? We can’t just sit here and not react, Scorp. We have to take this back to Quaiche.”
The pig winced as Valensin tugged two folds of skin together, drawing a slug of adhesive across them. “That thought’s crossed my mind, believe me.”
“And?” Jaccottet asked.
“I’d like nothing more than to target all our hull defences on that cathedral and turn the fucker into a smouldering pile of rubble. But that‘ isn’t an option, not while we’ve got people aboard it.”
“If we could get a message to Vasko and Khouri,” Urton said, “they could start doing some damage themselves. At the very least, they could find their way to safety.”
Scorpio sighed. Of all of them, why did it fall to him—the one who had the least-developed capacity for forward thinking—to point out the problems?
“This isn’t about revenge,” he said. “Believe me, I’m big on revenge. I wrote the book on retribution.” He paused, catching his breath while Valensin started fussing around with another wound, snipping away at leather and scabbed blood. “But we came here for a reason. I don’t know what Quaiche wanted with our ship, and it doesn’t look as if any of the surviving Adventists have much of an idea either. My guess is we just got caught up in some local power game, something that probably has damn all to do with the shadows. As tempting as it might be to take revenge now, it’d be the worst thing we could do in terms of our mission objective. We still have to make contact with the shadows, and our quickest route to them is inside a metal spacesuit inside the Lady Morwenna. That, people, is what we need to focus on, not on giving Quaiche the kicking he so richly deserves because he betrayed us. We can do that later, once we’ve established contact with the shadows. Believe me, I’ll be the first in line. And I won’t be operating on a minimum-casualties basis, either.”
No one said anything for a moment. There was a hiatus, a stillness in the room. It reminded him of something, but it took a while to remember what it was. When he did, he almost flinched away from the memory: Clavain. There had been a similar pause whenever the old man had finished one of his rabble-rousing monologues.
“We could still storm the cathedral,” Urton said, her voice low. “There’s time. We’ve taken losses, but we have operational shuttles. How about it, Scorp: a precision raid on the Lady Morwenna, in and out, snatch the suit and our people?”
“It’d be dangerous,” said another of the Security Arm people. “We don’t just have Khouri and Malinin to worry about. There’s Aura. What if Quaiche suspects she’s one of us?”
“He won’t,” Urton said. “There’s no reason for him to do that.”
Scorpio wrestled away from Valensin long enough to lift up his sleeve and inspect the plastic and metal ruin of his communicator. He did not remember when he had damaged it, just as he did not recall where all the additional bruises and cuts had come from.
“Someone get me a line to the cathedral,” he said. “I want to talk to the man in charge.”
“You never used to think much of negotiation,” Urton said. “You said all it ever got you was a world of pain.”
‘Trouble is,“ Scorpio acknowledged ruefully, ”sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.“
“You’re wrong about this,” Urton said. “This isn’t the way to handle things.”
“Like I was wrong about letting those twenty Adventists aboard the ship? That wasn’t my bright idea, the last time I checked.”
“They slipped past your security checks,” Urton said.
“You wouldn’t let me examine them as thoroughly as I’d have liked.”
Urton glanced at her fellows. “Look, we’re grateful for your help in regaining control. Deeply grateful. But now that the situation is stable again, wouldn’t it be better if—”