Antoinette Bax was married. Her husband, Xavier Liu, was a little older than her, his black hair now veined with silver, tied back in a modest tail. He had a small, neat goatee beard and he was missing two fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident down at the docks fifteen or so years ago. Liu was a genius with anything mechanical, especially cybernetic systems. Scorpio had always got on well with him. He was one of the few humans who genuinely didn’t seem to see a pig when he talked to him, just another mechanically minded soul, someone he could really talk to. Xavier was now in charge of the central machine pool, controlling the colony’s finite and dwindling reserve of functioning servitors, vehicles, aircraft, pumps, weapons and shuttles: technically it was a desk job, but whenever Scorpio called on him, Liu was usually up to his elbows in something. Nine times out of ten, Scorpio would find himself helping out, too.
Next to Blood was Pauline Sukhoi, a pale, spectral figure seemingly either haunted by something just out of sight, or else a ghost herself. Her hands and voice trembled constantly, and her episodes of what might be termed transient insanity were well known. Years ago, in the patronage of one of Chasm City’s most shadowy individuals, she had worked on an experiment concerning local alteration of the quantum vacuum. There had been an accident, and in the whiplash of severing possibilities that was a quantum vacuum transition, Sukhoi had seen something dreadful, something that had pushed her to the edge of madness. Even now she could barely speak of it. It was said that she passed her time sewing patterns into carpets.
Then there was Orca Cruz, one of Scorpio’s old associates from his Mulch days, one-eyed but still as sharp as a monofilament scythe. She was the toughest human he knew, Clavain included. Two of Scorpio’s old rivals had once made the mistake of underestimating Orca Cruz. The first Scorpio knew of it was when he heard about their funerals. Cruz wore much black leather and had her favourite firearm out on the table in front of her, scarlet fingernails clicking against the ornamented Japan-work of its carved muzzle. Scorpio thought the gesture rather gauche, but he had never picked his associates for their sense of decorum.
There were a dozen other senior colony members in the room, three of them swimmers from the Juggler contact section. Of necessity they were all young baseline humans. Their bodies were sleek and purposeful as otters‘, their flesh mottled by faint green indications of biological takeover. They all wore sleeveless tunics that showed off the broadness of their shoulders and the impressive development of their arm muscles. They had tattoos worked into the paisley complexity of their markings, signifying some inscrutable hierarchy of rank meaningful only to other swimmers. Scorpio, on balance, did not much like the swimmers. It was not simply that they had access to a luminous world that he, as a pig, would never know. They seemed aloof and scornful of everyone, including the other baseline humans. But it could not be denied that they had their uses and that in some sense they were right to be scornful. They had seen things and places no one else ever would. As colonial assets, they had to be tolerated and tapped.
The nine other seniors were all somewhat older than the swimmers. They were people who had been adults on Resurgam before the evacuation. As with the swimmers, the faces changed when new representatives were cycled in and out of duty. Scorpio, nonetheless, made it his duty to know them all, with the intimate fondness for personal details he reserved only for close friends and blood enemies. He knew that this curatorial grasp of personal data was one of his strengths, a compensation for his lack of forward-thinking ability.
It therefore troubled him profoundly that there was one person in the room that he hardly knew at all. Khouri sat nearly opposite him, attended by Dr. Valensin. Scorpio had no hold on her, no insights into her weaknesses. That absence in his knowledge troubled him like a missing tooth.
He was contemplating this, wondering if anyone else felt the same way, when the murmur of conversation came to an abrupt end. Everyone, including Khouri, turned towards Clavain, expecting him to lead the meeting.
Clavain stood, pushing himself up. “I don’t intend to say very much. All the evidence I’ve seen points to Scorpio having done an excellent job of running this place in my absence. I have no intention of replacing his leadership, but I will offer what guidance I can during the present crisis. I trust you’ve all had time to read the summaries Scorp and I put together, based onKhouri’s testimony?”
“We’ve read them,” said one of the former colonists—a bearded, corpulent man named Hallatt. “Whether we take any of it seriously is another thing entirely.”
“She certainly makes some unusual claims,” Clavain said, “but that in itself shouldn’t surprise us, especially given the things that happened to us after we left Yellowstone. These are unusual times. The circumstances of her arrival were bound to be a little surprising.”
“It’s not just the claims,” Hallatt said. “It’s Khouri herself. She was Ilia Volyova’s second-in-command. That’s hardly the best recommendation, as far as I’m concerned.”
Clavain raised a hand. “Volyova may well have wronged your planet, but in my view she also atoned for her sins with her last act.”
“She may believe she did,” Hallatt said, “but the gift of redemption lies with the sinned-against, rather than the sinner. In my view she was still a war criminal, and Ana Khouri was her accomplice.”
“That’s your opinion,” Clavain allowed, “but according to the laws that we all agreed to live under during the evacuation, neither Volyova nor Khouri were to be held accountable for any crimes. My only concern now is Khouri’s testimony, and whether we act upon it.”
“Just a moment,” Khouri said as Clavain sat down. “Maybe I missed something, but shouldn’t someone else be taking part in this little set-up?”
“Who did you have in mind?” Scorpio asked.
“The ship, of course. The one we happen to be sitting in.”
Scorpio scratched the fold of skin between his forehead and the upturned snout of his nose. “I don’t quite follow.”
“Captain Brannigan brought you all here, didn’t he?” Khouri asked. “Doesn’t that entitle him to a seat at this table?”
“Maybe you weren’t paying attention,” Pauline Sukhoi said. “This isn’t a ship any more. It’s a landmark.”
“You’re right to ask about the Captain,” Antoinette Bax said, her deep voice commanding immediate attention. “We’ve been trying to establish a dialogue with him almost since the Infinity landed.” Her many-ringed fingers were knitted together on the table, her nails painted a bright chemical green. “No joy,” she said. “He doesn’t want to talk.”
“Then the Captain’s dead?” Khouri said.
“No…” Bax said, looking around warily. “He still shows his face now and then.”
Pauline Sukhoi addressed Khouri again. “Might I ask something else? In your testimony you claim that Remontoire and his allies—our allies—have achieved significant breakthroughs in a range of areas. Drives that can’t be detected, ships that can’t be seen, weapons that cut through space-time… that’s quite a Jist.” Sukhoi’s frail, frightened voice always sounded on the verge of laughter. “All the more so given the very limited time that you’ve had to make these discoveries.”
“They weren’t discoveries,” Khouri said. “Read the summary. Aura gave us the clues to make those things, that’s all. We didn’t discover anything.”
“Let’s talk about Aura,” Scorpio said. “In fact, let’s go right back to the beginning, from the moment our two forces separated around Delta Pavonis. Zodiacal Light was badly damaged, we know that much. But it shouldn’t have taken more than two or three years for the self-repair systems to patch it up again, provided you fed them with enough raw material. Yet we’ve been waiting here for twenty-three years. What took you so long?”