It made him feel ill just to look at it. It simply wasn’t right.
He steered towards the other boat. Now that he had dealt with Clavain he felt a clarity of mind he’d lacked a few minutes before. It had probably been wrong to leavethem on the iceberg with just that one boat for escape, but he had not wanted anyone else with him when he buried his friend. Selfish, perhaps, but it hadn’t been any of them doing the cutting.
“Hold tight,” he told them via the communicator. “We’ll even out the load as soon as I’m close enough.”
“Then what?” Vasko asked, looking fearfully up at the thing stretched across the sky.
“Then we run like hell.”
The thing’s attention lingered over the iceberg. With slow, pythonlike movements it pushed a cluster of tentacles into the roof of the frozen structure, the needles and jags of ice shattering as the machinery forced its way through. Perhaps, Scorpio thought, it sensed the presence of other pieces of Inhibitor machinery, dormant or dead within the wreckage of the corvette. It needed to be reunited with them. Or perhaps it was after something else entirely.
The iceberg quivered. The sea responded to the movement, slow, shallow waves oozing away from the fringe. From somewhere within the structure came crunching sounds, like the shattering of bone. Flaws opened wide in the outer layer of the ice, exposing a lacy marrow of fabulously differentiated colour: pinks and blues and ochres.
Black machinery forced its way through the cracks. A dozen tentacles emerged from the iceberg, coiling and writhing, sniffing the air, splitting into ever-smaller components as they pushed outwards.
Scorpio’s boat kissed the hull of the other craft. “Give me the incubator,” he shouted, above the screaming of the engine.
Vasko stood up, leaning between the boats, steadying himself with one hand on Scorpio’s shoulder. The young man looked pale, his hair plastered to his scalp. “You came back,” he said.
“Things changed,” Scorpio said.
Scorpio took the incubator, feeling the weight of the child within it, and jammed it safely between his feet. “Now Khouri,” he said, offering a hand to the woman.
She crossed over to his boat; he felt it sink lower in the water as she boarded. She met his gaze for a moment, seemed about to say something. He turned back to Vasko before she had a chance.
“Follow me. I don’t want to hang around here a moment longer than necessary.”
The cracks in the iceberg had widened to plunging abysses, rifts that cut deep into its heart. The black machinery forced more of itself into the ice, insinuating itself in eager surges. More extremities emerged from the perimeter, waving and extending. The iceberg began to break up into distinct chunks, each as large as a house. Scorpio gunned his boat’s engine harder, slamming across the waves, but could not tear his attention from what was happening behind him. Chunks of the iceberg calved away, jagged pieces tipping into the sea with a powdery roar of displaced water. Now he could see a writhing tangle of black tentacles flexing and coiling around the ruined corvette. Not much remained of the iceberg now, just the ship that had grown it.
The machinery pulled the ship into the air. The black shapes forced themselves through the gaps in the hull, their movements delicate and thoughtful and vaguely apprehensive, like someone removing the last layer of wrapping from a present.
The other boat was lagging: it was slower in the water, with three adults aboard.
The corvette broke into sharp black pieces, all but the smallest of them still suspended in the sky. Coils and bows of perfect blackness wheeled around the parts.
It’s looking for something, Scorpio thought.
The coils loosened their grip. Tentacles and sub-tentacles withdrew in a flurry of contracting motion. Layers of black cubes flowed across each other, swelling and shrinking in queasy unison. Scorpio only saw the details in the edges, where the machinery met the grey backdrop of the sky.
The pieces of the corvette—all of them, now—splashed into the sea.
But it still held something: a tiny, white, star-shaped form hung limply in the air. It was Skade, Scorpio realised. The machinery had found her in the wreckage, wrapped part of itself around her waist and plunged another, more delicate part of itself into her head. It was interrogating her, retrieving neural structures from her corpse.
It might, for a moment, feel like being alive again.
The black machinery pushed a new trunk of itself towards the fleeing boats. With that, something tightened in Scorpio’s stomach: some instinctive visceral response to the approach of a slithering predator. Get away from it. He tried to push the boat harder. But the boat was already giving him all it had.
He saw motion in the other boat: the glint as a muzzle was trained towards the sky. An instant later, the blinding electric-pink discharge of a Breitenbach cannon lit the grey sky. The beam lanced up towards the looming mass of alien machinery. It should have speared right through it, etching a searing line into the cloud deck. Instead, the beam veered around the machinery like a firehose.
Vasko kept firing, but the beam squirmed away from any point where it might have done damage.
The black machinery followed the thick trunk. The whole mass still hung from the sky, multi-armed, like some obscene chandelier.
It was taking a particular interest in the second boat.
The cannon sputtered out. Scorpio heard the crackle of small-arms fire.
None of it was going to make any difference.
Suddenly he felt a lancing pain in his ears. All around him, in the same instant, the sea bellied up three or four metres, as if a tremendous suction effect had pulled it into the sky. There was a thunderclap louder than anything he had ever heard. He looked up, his ears still roaring, and saw… something—a hint, for a fraction of a second, of a circular absence in the sky, a faint demarcation between the air and something within it. The circle was gone almost immediately, and as it ceased to exist he felt the same pain in his ears, the same sense of suction.
A few seconds later, it happened again.
This time, the circle intersected the main black mass of the hovering Inhibitor machinery. A huge misshapen clot of it fell towards the waves, severed from the rest. Even more of the mass had simply ceased to exist: it was as if everything within the spherical region above him had winked out of existence—not just air, but the Inhibitor machinery occupying the same volume. The limbs attached to the falling chunk thrashed wildly even as it fell. Scorpio sensed it slowing as it neared the surface of the water, but the rate of arrest was not sufficient to bring it to a halt. It hit, Submerged, rebounded to the surface. The limbs continued to whip around the main core, threshing the sea.
Khouri leaned towards him. Her lips moved, but her voice was lost under the blood-tide roaring in his ears. He knew what she was saying, though: the three syllables were unmistakable. “Remontoire.”
He nodded. He didn’t need to know the details: it was enough that he had intervened. “Thank you, Rem,” he said, hearing his own voice as if underwater.
The grey-green mass of the Juggler material was coalescing around the floating, thrashing mass of black machinery. Above, the intruder had begun to pull itself back into the cloud deck, the curved surfaces of its wounds still obvious. Scorpio was beginning to wonder about the other part—whether it would repair itself, shrug off the Juggler biomass and continue to cause them trouble—when it and the Jugglers and an entire hundred-metre-wide hemispherical scoop of sea vanished. He watched as the sloping, seamless wall of water around the absence seemed to freeze there, as if unwilling to reclaim the volume taken away from it. Then it crashed in, a tower of dirty green surging into the air above the epicentre, and an ominous ramp of water sped towards them.