THE CAPTAIN WAS tougher to crack than I’d expected. I’d assumed he would fold as soon as I explained our predicament—that we were going nowhere, and that Weather was the only factor that could improve our situation—but the captain simply narrowed his eyes and looked disappointed.
“Don’t you get it? It’s a ruse, a trick. Our engines were fine until we let her aboard. Then all of a sudden they start misbehaving, and she turns out to be the only one who can help us.”
“There’s also the matter of the other ship Weps says is closing on us.”
“That ship might not even exist. It could be a sensor ghost, a hallucination she’s making the Petronel see.”
“Captain—”
“That would work for her, wouldn’t it? It would be exactly the excuse she needs to force our hands.”
We were in his cabin, with the door locked: I’d warned him I had a matter of grave sensitivity that we needed to discuss. “I don’t think this is any of her doing,” I said calmly, vowing to hold my temper under better control than before. “She’s too far from the engines or sensor systems to be having any mental effect on them, even if we hadn’t locked her in a room that’s practically a Faraday cage to begin with. She says one or other of the engines was damaged during the engagement with the Cockatrice, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve that. I think you’re wrong about her.”
“She’s got us right where she wants us, lad. She’s done something to the engines, and now—if you get your way—we’re going to let her get up close and personal with them.”
“And do what?” I asked.
“Whatever takes her fancy. Blowing us all up is one possibility. Did you consider that?”
“She’d blow herself up as well.”
“Maybe that’s exactly the plan. Could be that she prefers dying to staying alive, if being shut out from the rest of the Spiders is as bad as you say it is. She didn’t seem to be real keen on being rescued from that wreck, did she? Maybe she was hoping to die aboard it.”
“She looked like she was trying to stay alive to me, Captain. There were a hundred ways she could have killed herself aboard the Cockatrice before we boarded, and she didn’t. I think she was just scared of us, scared that we were going to be like all the other Ultras. That’s why she kept running.”
“A nice theory, lad. It’s a pity so much is hanging on it, or I might be inclined to give it a moment’s credence.”
“We have no choice but to trust her. If we don’t let her try something, most of us won’t ever see another system.”
“Easy for you to say, son.”
“I’m in this as well. I’ve got just as much to lose as anyone else on this ship.”
Van Ness studied me for what felt like an eternity. Until now his trust in my competence had always been implicit, but Weather’s arrival had changed all that.
“My wife didn’t die in a terraforming accident,” he said slowly, not quite able to meet my eyes as he spoke. “I lied to you about that, probably because I wanted to start believing the lie myself. But now it’s time you heard the truth, which is that the Spiders took her. She was a technician, an expert in Martian landscaping. She’d been working on the Schiaparelli irrigation scheme when she was caught behind Spider lines during the Sabaea Offensive. They stole her from me, and turned her into one of them. Took her to their recruitment theatres, where they opened her head and pumped it full of their machines. Rewired her mind to make her think and feel like them.”
“I’m sorry,” I began. “That must have been so hard—”
“That’s not the hard part. I was told that she’d been executed, but three years later I saw her again. She’d been taken prisoner by the Coalition for Neural Purity, and they were trying to turn her back into a person. They hadn’t ever done it before, so my wife was to be a test subject. They invited me to their compound in Tychoplex, on Earth’s Moon, hoping I might be able to bring her back. I didn’t want to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to work; that it was always going to be easier thinking that she was already dead.”
“What happened?”
“When she saw me, she remembered me. She called me by name, just as if we’d only been apart a few minutes. But there was a coldness in her eyes. Actually, it was something beyond coldness. Coldness would mean she felt some recognisably human emotion, even if it was dislike or contempt. It wasn’t like that. The way she looked at me, it was as if she was looking at a piece of broken furniture, or a dripping tap, or a pattern of mould on the wall. As if it vaguely bothered her that I existed, or was the shape I was, but that she could feel nothing stronger than that.”
“It wasn’t your wife any more,” I said. “Your wife died the moment they took her.”
“That’d be nice to believe, wouldn’t it? Trouble is, I’ve never been able to. And trust me, lad: I’ve had long enough to dwell on things. I know a part of my wife survived what they did to her in the theatres. It just wasn’t the part that gave a damn about me any more.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling as if I’d been left drifting in space while the ship raced away from me. “I had no idea.”
“I just wanted you to know: with me and the Spiders, it isn’t an irrational prejudice. From where I’m sitting, it feels pretty damn rational.” Then he drew an enormous intake of breath, as if he needed sustenance for what was to come. “Take the girl to the engine if you think it’s the only way we’ll get out of this mess. But don’t let her out of your sight for one second. And if you get the slightest idea that she might be trying something—and I mean the slightest idea—you kill her, there and then.”
I CLAMPED THE collar around Weather’s neck. It was a heavy ring fashioned from rough black metal. “I’m sorry about this,” I told her, “but it’s the only way Van Ness will let me take you out of this room. Tell me if it hurts, and I’ll try to do something about it.”
“You won’t need to,” she said.
The collar was a crude old thing that had been lying around the Petronel since her last bruising contact with pirates. It was modified from the connecting ring of a space helmet, the kind that would amputate and shock-freeze the head if it detected massive damage to the body below the neck. Inside the collar was a noose of monofilament wire, primed to tighten to the diameter of a human hair in less than a second. There were complicated moving parts in the collar, but nothing that a Conjoiner could influence. The collar trailed a thumb-thick cable from its rear, which ran all the way to an activating box on my belt. I’d only need to give the box a hard thump with the heel of my hand, and Weather would be decapitated. That wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d die instantly—with all those machines in her head, Weather would be able to remain conscious for quite some time afterwards—but I was reasonably certain it would limit her options for doing harm.
“For what it’s worth,” I told her as we made our way out to the connecting spar, “I’m not expecting to have to use this. But I want you to be clear that I will if I have to.”
She walked slightly ahead of me, the cable hanging between us. “You seem different, Inigo. What happened between you and the captain, while you were gone?”
The truth couldn’t hurt, I decided. “Van Ness told me something I didn’t know. It put things into perspective. I understand now why he might not feel positively disposed towards Conjoiners.”