By the time Dr. Valensin deemed that Khouri was ready for visitors, the latest storm had broken. The sky above the compound was a bleak powder-blue, marbled here and there by strands of feathered cirrus. Out to sea, the Nostalgia for Infinity gleamed shades of grey, like something freshly chiselled from dark rock.
They sat down on opposite sides of her bed—Clavain in one chair, Scorpio in another, but reversed so that he sat with his arms folded across the top of the backrest.
“I’ve read Valensin’s report,” Scorpio began. “We were all hoping he’d tell us you were insane. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And that gives me a really bad headache.”
Khouri pushed herself up in the bed. “I’m sorry about your headache, but can we skip the formalities and get on with rescuing my daughter?”
“We’ll discuss it when you’re up on your feet,” Clavain said.
“Why not now?”
“Because we still need to know exactly what’s happened. We’ll also need an accurate tactical assessment of any scenario involving Skade and your daughter. Would you define it as a hostage situation?” Clavain asked.
“Yes,” Khouri replied, grudgingly.
“Then until we have concrete demands from Skade, Aura is in no immediate danger. Skade won’t risk hurting her one asset. She may be cold-hearted, but she’s not irrational.”
Guardedly, Scorpio observed the old man. He appeared as alert and quick-witted as ever, yet to the best of Scorpio’s knowledge Clavain had allowed himself no more than two hours of sleep since returning to the mainland. Scorpio had seen that kind of thing in other elderly human men: they needed little sleep and resented its imposition by those younger than themselves. It was not that they necessarily had more energy, but that the division between sleep and waking had become an indistinct, increasingly arbitrary thing. He wondered how that would feel, drifting through an endless succession of grey moments, rather than ordered intervals of day and night.
“How much time are we talking about?” Khouri said. “Hours or days, before you act?”
“I’ve convened a meeting of colony seniors for later this morning,” Clavain said. “If the situation merits it, a rescue operation could be underway before sunset.”
“Can’t you just take my word that we need to act now?”
Clavain scratched his beard. “If your story made more sense, I might.”
“I’m not lying.” She gestured in the direction of one of the servitors. “The doctor gave me the all-clear, didn’t he?”
Scorpio smiled, tapping the medical report against the back of his chair. “He said you weren’t obviously delusional, but his examination raised as many questions as it answered.”
“You talk about a baby,” Clavain said before Khouri had a chance to interrupt, “but according to this report you’ve never given birth. Nor is there any obvious sign of Caesarean surgery having been performed.”
“It wouldn’t be obvious—it was done by Conjoiner medics. They can sew you up so cleanly it’s as if it never happened.“ She looked at each of them in turn, her anger and fear equally clear. ”Are you saying you don’t believe me?“
Clavain shook his head. “I’m saying we can’t verify your story, that’s all. According to Valensin there is womb distension consistent with you having very recently been pregnant, and there are hormonal changes in your blood that support the same conclusion. But Valensin admits that there could be other explanations.”
“They don’t contradict my story, either.”
“But we’ll need more convincing before we organise a military action,” Clavain said.
“Again: why can’t you just trust me?”
“Because it’s not only the story about your baby that doesn’t make sense,” Clavain replied. “How did you get here, Ana? Where’s the ship that should have brought you? You didn’t come all the way from the Resurgam system in that capsule, and yet there’s no sign of any other spacecraft having entered our system.”
“And that makes me a liar?”
“It makes us suspicious,” Scorpio said. “It makes us wonder if you’re what you appear to be.”
“The ships are here,” she said, sighing, as if spoiling a carefully planned surprise. “All of them. They’re concentrated in the immediate volume of space around this planet. Remon-toire, the Zodiacal Light, the two remaining starships from Skade’s taskforce—they’re all up there, within one AU of this planet. They’ve been in your system for nine weeks. That’s how I got here, Clavain.”
“You can’t hide ships that easily,” he said. “Not consistently, not all the time. Not when we’re actively looking for them.”
“We can now,” she said. “We have techniques you know nothing about. Things we’ve learned… things we’ve had to learn since the last time you saw us. Things you won’t believe.”
Clavain glanced at Scorpio. The pig tried to guess what was going through the old man’s mind and failed.
“Such as?” Clavain asked.
“New engines,” she said. “Dark drives. You can’t see them. Nothing sees them. The exhaust… slips away. Camouflaging screens. Free-force bubbles. Miniaturised cryo-arithmetic engines. Reliable control of inertia on bulk scales. Hypometric weapons.” She shivered. “I really don’t like the hypometric weapons. They scare me. I’ve seen what happens when they go wrong. They’re not right.”
“All that in twenty-odd years?” Clavain asked, incredulously.
“We had some help.”
“Sounds as if you had God on the end of the phone, taking down your wish list.”
“It wasn’t God, believe me. I should know. I was the one who did the asking.”
“And who exactly did you ask?”
“My daughter,” Khouri said. “She knows things, Clavain. That’s why she’s valuable. That’s why Skade wants her.”
Scorpio felt dizzy: it seemed that every time they scratched back one layer of Khouri’s story, there was something even less comprehensible behind it.
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t signal your arrival from orbit,” Clavain said.
“Partly because we didn’t want to draw attention to Ararat,” Khouri said. “Not until we had to. There’s a war going on up there, understand? A major space engagement, with heavily stealthed combatants. Any kind of signalling is a risk. There’s also a lot of jamming and disruption going on.”
“Between Skade’s forces and your own?”
“It’s more complicated than that. Until recently, Skade was fighting with us, rather than against us. Even now, aside from the personal business between Skade and myself, I’d say we’re in what you might call a state of uneasy truce.”
“Then who the hell are you fighting?” Clavain asked.
“The Inhibitors,” Khouri said. “The wolves, whatever you want to call them.”
“They’re here?” Scorpio asked. “Actually in this system?”
“Sorry to rain on your parade,” Khouri said.
“Well,” Clavain said, looking around, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but that certainly puts a dent in my day.”
“That was the idea,” Khouri said.
Clavain ran a finger down the straight line of his nose. “One other thing. Several times since you arrived here you’ve mentioned a word that sounds like ‘hella.’ You even said we had to get there. The name means nothing to me. What is its significance?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even remember saying it.”
TWELVE