The console flickered. The hull’s opacity switched to absolute black. When the hull cleared and the console recovered he was looking at emergency warnings across the board, scribbled in fiery red Latinate script. It had been a bad hit.
Another shiver, another pack of missiles streaking away. They were tiny things, thumb-sized antimatter rockets with kilotonne yields.
Black-out again. A sensation of falling when he came round.
Another little avalanche; one fewer attacker on the display. One of the sentries was still out there, and he had no more ordnance to throw at it. But it wasn’t firing. Perhaps it was damaged—or maybe just reloading.
The Daughter dithered, caught in a maelstrom of possibilities.
“Executive override,” Quaiche said. “Get me out of here.”
The gee-force came hard and immediately. Again, curtains of red closed on his vision. But he did not black out this time. The ship was keeping the blood in his head, drying to preserve his consciousness for as long as possible.
He saw the landscape drop away below, saw the bridge from above.
Then something else hit him. The little ship stalled, thrust interrupted for a jaw-snapping instant. She struggled to regain power, but something—some vital propulsion subsystem—must have taken a serious hit.
The landscape hung motionless below him. Then it began to approach again.
He was going down.
Fade to black. Quaiche fell obliquely towards the vertical wall of the rift, slipping in and out of consciousness. He assumed he was going to die, smeared across that sheer cliff face in an instant of glittering destruction, but at the last moment before impact, the Scavenger’s Daughter used some final hoarded gasp of thrust to soften the crash.
It was still bad, even as the hull deformed to soften the blow. The wall wheeled around: now a cliff, now a horizon, now a flat plane pressing down from the sky. Quaiche blacked out, came to consciousness, blacked out again. He saw the bridge wheel around in the distance. Clouds of ice and rubble were still belching from the avalanche points in the sides of the cliff where his missiles had taken out the attacking sentries.
All the while, Quaiche and his tiny jewel of a ship tumbled towards the floor of the rift.
Vasko followed Clavain and Scorpio into the administration compound, Blood escorting them through a maze of underpopulated rooms and corridors. Vasko expected to be turned back at any moment: his Security Arm clearance definitely did not extend to this kind of business. But although each security check was more stringent than the last, his presence was ac-cepted. Vasko supposed it unlikely that anyone was going to argue with Scorpio and Clavain about their choice of guest.
Presently they arrived at a quarantine point deep within the compound, a medical centre housing several freshly made beds. Waiting for them in the quarantine centre was a sallow-faced human physician named Valensin. He wore enormous rhomboid-lensed spectacles; his thin black hair was glued back from his scalp in brilliant waves, and he carried a small scuffed bag of medical tools. Vasko had never met Valensin before, but as the highest-ranking physician on the planet, his name was familiar.
“How do you feel, Nevil?” Valensin asked.
“I feel like a man overstaying his welcome in history,” Clavain said.
“Never one for a straight answer, were you?” But even as he was speaking Valensin had whipped some silvery apparatus from his bag and was now shining it into Clavain’s eyes, squinting through a little eyepiece of his own.
“We ran a medical on him during the shuttle flight,” Scorpio said. “He’s fit enough. You don’t have to worry about him doing anything embarrassing like dropping dead on us.”
Valensin flicked the light off. “And you, Scorpio? Any immediate plans of your own to drop dead?”
“Make your life a lot easier, wouldn’t it?”
“Migraines?”
“Just getting one, as it happens.”
“I’ll look you over later. I want to see if that peripheral vision of yours has deteriorated any faster than I was anticipating. All this running around really isn’t good for a pig of your age.”
“Nice of you to remind me, particularly when I have no choice in the matter.”
“Always happy to oblige.” Valensin beamed, popping his equipment away. “Now, let me make a couple of things clear. When that capsule opens, no one so much as breathes on the occupant until I’ve given them an extremely thorough examination. And by thorough, of course, I mean to the limited degree possible under the present conditions. I’ll be looking for infectious agents. If I do find anything, and if I decide that it has even a remote chance of being unpleasant, then anyone who came into contact with the capsule can forget returning to First Camp, or wherever else they call home. And by unpleasant I’m not talking about genetically engineered viral weapons. I mean something as commonplace as influenza. Our antiviral programmes are already stretched to breaking point.”
“We understand,” Scorpio said.
Valensin led them into a huge room with a high domed ceiling of skeletal metal. The room smelt aggressively sterile. It was almost completely empty, save for an intimate gathering of people and machines near the middle. Half a dozen white-clad workers were fussing over ramshackle towers of monitoring equipment.
The capsule itself was suspended from the ceiling, hanging on a thin metal line like a plumb bob. The scorched-black egg-shaped thing was much smaller than Vasko had been expecting: it almost looked too small to hold a person. Though there were no windows, several panels had been folded back to reveal luminous displays. Vasko saw numbers, wobbling traces and trembling histograms.
“Let me see it,” Clavain said, pushing through the workers to get closer to the capsule.
At this intrusion, one of the workers surrounding the capsule made the mistake of frowning in Scorpio’s direction. Scorpio glared back at him, flashing the fierce curved incisors that marked his ancestry. At the same moment Blood signalled to the workers with a quick lateral stab of his trotter. Obediently they filed away, vanishing back into the depths of the compound.
Clavain gave no sign that he had even noticed the commotion. Still hooded and anonymous, he slipped between the obstructions and moved to one side of the capsule. Very gently he placed a hand near one of the illuminated panels, caressing the scorched matt hide of the capsule.
Vasko guessed it was safe to stare now.
Scorpio looked sceptical. “Getting anything?”
“Yes,” Clavain said. “It’s talking to me. The protocols are Conjoiner.”
“Certain of that?” asked Blood.
Clavain turned away from the machine, only the fine beard hairs on his jaw catching the light. “Yes,” he said.
Now he placed his other hand on the opposite side of the panel, bracing himself, and lowered his head until it lay against the capsule. Vasko imagined that the old man’s eyes would be shut, blocking off outward distraction, concentration clawing grooves into his forehead. No one was saying anything, and Vasko realised that he was even making an effort not to breathe loudly.
Clavain tilted his head this way and that, slowly and deliberately, in the manner of someone trying to find the optimum orientation for a radio antenna. He locked at one angle, his frame tensing through the fabric of the coat.