The shuttle slid over some intervening regions of darkness and then came to hover above a small outlying formation of structures that Vasko had never seen before. There was a dome and a surrounding accretion of metal structures, but the whole ensemble looked a good deal more formal than any other part of the town. Vasko realised that it was almost certainly one of the administration’s hidden encampments. The body of humans and pigs that ran the colony had offices in the city, but it was also a matter of public knowledge that they had secure meeting places not marked on any civilian map.
Remembering Clavain’s instructions, Vasko made the window seal itself up again and then waited for the touchdown. He barely noticed it when it came, but suddenly his two companions were clambering down the length of the cabin, back to-wards the boarding ramp. Belatedly, Vasko realised that the shuttle had never had a pilot.
They stepped down on to an apron of fused rock. Floodlights had snapped on at the last minute, bathing everything in icy blue. Clavain still wore his coat, but he had also donned a shapeless black hood tugged from the recesses of the collar. The hood’s low, wide cowl threw his face into shadow; he was barely recognisable as the man they had met on the island. During the flight, Scorpio had taken the opportunity to clean him up a little, trimming his beard and hair as neatly as circumstances allowed.
“Son,” Clavain said, “try not to stare at me with quite that degree of messianic fervour, will you?”
“I didn’t mean anything, sir.”
Scorpio patted Vasko on the back. “Act normally. As far as you’re concerned, he’s just some stinking old hermit we found wandering around.”
The compound was full of machines. Of obscure provenance, they squatted around the shuttle or loomed as vague suggestions in the dark interstices between the floodlights. There were wheeled vehicles, one or two hovercraft, a kind of skeletal helicopter. Vasko made out the sleek surfaces of two other aerial craft parked on the edge of the apron. He could not tell if they were the type that could reach orbit, as well as fly in the atmosphere.
“How many operational shuttles?” Clavain asked.
Scorpio answered after a moment’s hesitation, perhaps wondering how much he should say in Vasko’s presence. “Four,” he said.
Clavain walked on for half a dozen paces before saying, “There were five or six when I left. We can’t afford to lose shuttles, Scorp.”
“We’re doing our best with very limited resources. Some of them may fly again, but I can’t promise anything.”
Scorpio was leading them towards the nearest of the low metal structures around the dome’s perimeter. As they walked away from the shuttle, many of the shadowy machines began to trundle towards it, extending manipulators or dragging umbilical cables across the ground. The way they moved made Vasko imagine injured sea monsters hauling ruined tentacles across dry land.
“If we need to leave quickly,” Clavain said, “could we do it? Could any of the other ships be used? Once the Zodiacal Light arrives, they only have to reach orbit. I’m not asking for full space-worthiness, just something that will make a few trips.”
“Zodiacal Light will have its own shuttles,” Scorpio said. “And even if it doesn’t, we still have the only ship we need to reach orbit.”
“You’d better hope and pray we neyer have to use it,” Clavain said.
“By the time we need the shuttles,” Scorpio said, “we’ll have contingencies in place.”
“The time we need them might be this evening. Has that occurred to you?”
They had arrived at the entrance to the cordon of structures surrounding the dome. As they approached it, another pig stepped out into the night, moving with the exaggerated side-to-side swagger common to his kind. He was shorter and stockier than Scorpio, if such a thing were possible. His shoulders were so massive and yokelike that his arms hung some distance from the sides of his body, swinging like pendulums when he walked. He looked as if he could pull a man limb from limb.
The pig glared at Vasko, deep frown lines notching his brow. “Looking at something, kid?”
Vasko hurried out his answer. “No, sir.”
“Relax, Blood,” Scorpio said. “Vasko’s had a busy day. He’s just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Right, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
The pig called Blood nodded at Clavain. “Good to have you back, old guy.”
Quaiche was still close enough to Morwenna for real-time communication. “You won’t like what I’m going to do,” he said, “but this is for the good of both of us.”
Her reply came after a crackle of static. “You promised you wouldn’t be long.”
“I still intend to keep that promise. I’m not going to be gone one minute longer than I said. This is more about you than me, actually.”
“How so?” she asked.
“I’m worried that there might be something down on Hela apart from the bridge. I’ve been picking up a metallic echo and it hasn’t gone away. Could be nothing—probably is nothing—but I can’t take the chance that it might be a booby trap. I’ve encountered this kind of thing before and it makes me nervous.”
“Then turn around,” Morwenna said.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I really need to check out this bridge. If I don’t come back with something good, Jasmina’s going to have me for breakfast.” He would leave it to Morwenna to figure out what that would mean for her, still buried in the scrimshaw suit with Grelier her only hope of escape.
“But you can’t just walk into a trap,” Morwenna said.
“I’m more worried about you, frankly. The Daughter will take care of me, but if I trigger something it might start taking pot shots at anything it sees, up to and including the Dominatrix.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I thought about having you pull away from the Haldora/Hela system, but that would waste too much time and fuel. I’ve got a better idea: we’ll use what we’ve been given. Haldora is a nice, fat shield. It’s just sitting there doing nothing. I’m going to put it between you and whatever’s on Hela, make some bloody use of the thing.”
Morwenna considered the implications for a few seconds. There was a sudden urgency in her voice. “But that will mean…”
“Yes, we’ll be out of line-of-sight contact, so we won’t be able to talk to each other. But it’ll only be for a few hours, six at the most.” He got that in before she could protest further. “I’ll program the Dominatrix to wait behind Haldora for six hours, then return to its present position relative to Hela. Not so bad, is it? Get some sleep and you’ll barely realise I’m gone.”
“Don’t do this, Horris. I don’t want to be in a place where I can’t talk to you.”