When all was done and he was satisfied, he turned off the interference field. It was a weak form of defence, but more than was needed when dealing with such feeble daemons. Then he waited for the ball to roll off in the appropriate direction.
And nothing happened. Because the signal his daemon was supposed to find had gone. After he’d spent all day trying to find it, it had just stopped.
He sat at his desk, his head in his hands, thoroughly depressed. He’d wasted his time. He’d wasted so much of it, these past years. It hadn’t seemed to matter when he was sunk in a bottle, grieving over the accident that had taken his niece. But Crake had once been driven in his quest for knowledge. His pursuit of the Art had been headlong and reckless. And he was getting impatient with himself.
Daemonism was what he was. How long could he sit around and do nothing about it?
He heard the hiss and whine of hydraulics as the cargo ramp opened at the far end of the hold, beyond the tarpaulin curtain and the crates. Someone going out, or someone coming back. He didn’t care. Bess seemed content enough to sleep, or whatever it was she did when she stopped moving and the lights of her eyes went out. He thought he might go and read a little in his quarters, have an early night.
There was a noise from behind him. A soft rumble. He looked over his shoulder.
Slowly and steadily, the iron ball was rolling out of the circle.
Frey hummed a little ditty as he closed the cargo ramp behind him. He was feeling immensely pleased with himself. His dinner with Trinica had been a complete success. Not only that, but on receiving the bill he discovered that she’d ordered the house wine, the cheapest on the menu. She knew he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so she’d chosen to have mercy on his wallet. Such a small kindness may not have been remarkable in most women, but from Trinica it was epic.
After their dinner, they took a rickshaw to her hotel. She’d taken a room for the night, but she wouldn’t be staying there. It was purely to give her a place to change: to shed her fearsome outer skin after she left the Delirium Trigger, and to don it again before returning. Her crew would never know what she’d done for Frey. She was a terrible icon to them, a mistress to be adored, cold and distant as the moon. To show them the woman behind the mask would ruin her. To them, she was the mask.
Frey said goodbye at the hotel door. Had it been any other woman Frey would have attempted to charm his way inside, and into her bed. Instead, he kissed her on the cheek and promised to be at the Delirium Trigger in an hour with the relic. Every instinct he had demanded more from the encounter, but he mastered himself and walked away, antsy with sexual frustration.
The Delirium Trigger was already prepping for take-off when he got to the hangar where the frigate was berthed. They arrived in a pair of rickshaws, with Malvery and Pinn guarding the relic. Ashua took up the fourth seat. She didn’t trust Frey to collect her fee for her, and wisely so.
Balomon Crund, Trinica’s bosun, took delivery of the relic and paid them. Trinica chose not to make an appearance. Frey didn’t mind. He wanted to remember her the way he’d left her.
Ashua seemed surprised that Trinica had paid them off without trying to cheat them. She’d been wired up for an argument that never came. Now that their plan had actually worked out, she became giddy. She even gave Frey a hug, which in his current state of enforced celibacy was all but unbearable.
Malvery and Pinn wanted to go out on the town, and the doctor invited Ashua along in celebration of their victory. Frey didn’t feel like it tonight, so he said he’d take the money back to the Ketty Jay instead. He planned to take a couple of drops of Shine and lose himself in a blissful private reverie, dreaming of the woman he hoped to win back.
That was the only thing on his mind as the Ketty Jay ’s cargo ramp shut with a dull thump. But once the echoes had faded, he found himself faced with a hungry and threatening silence. The tune he was humming faltered and stalled. The hollow belly of the Ketty Jay seemed cold, despite the stifling air outside. Goose-pimples crept across his skin.
Something was very, very wrong.
Imperators.
His mind flew to the conclusion immediately. The Awakeners’ most dangerous operatives, beings that could paralyse a man with crushing, primal fear and drag out the secrets of his soul. He drew his revolver. It wouldn’t do any good, but it made him feel better.
They’ve found me.
The seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. His eyes roamed the hold. It was emptier than [empquo; ve fouusual, but that still left plenty of places to hide among the junk that Frey never got round to throwing out. The battered Rattletraps, which Frey had decided to keep hold of until Silo could repair them for resale, were belted down and silent.
He felt alone. His senses told him there was nobody else on board, and while he was certain that wasn’t true, he didn’t dare raise his voice to find out.
Were there Imperators here? Now he wasn’t sure. There was no question that the fear he felt was something unnatural, but it wasn’t anywhere near the intensity of an Imperator’s gaze, which could turn a man’s bowels to water. This was the sourceless dread of a bad drug trip, seeping into him like cold blood into a rag. The paranoia, the sense of wrongness and displacement.
Keep it together, Darian.
That was when he heard the sound.
At first he thought it was Slag. It seemed the kind of low, menacing yowl made by a cat at bay. But then the intruder hitched in a breath in a way a cat never would, and he recognised it.
There was a baby crying in the cargo hold.
‘You have got to be joking,’ he muttered to himself.
The crying came from behind a large pile of tarpaulin that had been stuffed in a net and tied down near the port side bulkhead. Frey crept towards it. He’d rather have gone the other way, but there was a certain dreamlike inevitability about this situation. Nothing felt quite real.
He flexed his hand nervously on the grip of his revolver. He wasn’t sure whether a crying baby merited a gun in his hand or not, but there was something unspeakably malevolent about that wail. It tugged at him with a sense of awful familiarity. He felt like he should know it, somehow.
He rounded the pile. Something was moving there. Something…
Repulsion battled with terror on his face as he saw what was hidden behind the tarpaulin.
His first impression was that it was some kind of giant maggot, a bloated, shapeless thing rolling in a puddle of fluid. It stank: a smell both sweet and rancid that ambushed Frey as it came into sight. The sheer impossibility of its being there, the horror of the thing, stunned him.
But it was no maggot. It was a sac. A grotesque, veined bag, whitish and slimy, with something bulging inside it, pushing against the skin. Something long-limbed, its joints bending unnaturally, turning inside the womb and Frey’s mind went treacherously to his own child, the baby that was never born. The baby that [he tify"›died inside Trinica when she tried to commit suicide as a young woman, broken by a lover’s betrayal. His betrayal.
The baby was still crying. It wasn’t coming from inside the sac. It was coming from everywhere.
This. Is. Not. Happening.
The sac stretched on one side as something long and narrow was pressed against it from within. For an instant it held, then it parted in one quick tear, the lips of the split sliding greasily down the length of the object that poked out.
A bayonet. A double-bladed Dakkadian bayonet, the same kind he’d been skewered by nine years ago, on the day his crew were massacred. The same kind that had almost taken his life yesterday.
He stared as it sliced downward, slitting the stringy tissue of the sac. Sweet-smelling amniotic fluid belched from the rupture and sloshed over the floor. Frey stepped back from it, disgusted. He took his eyes off the squirming sac for an instant, to avoid the wash of liquid. When he looked back he saw that something was forcing its way through the slit in the sac, moist with new birth, and damned if it wasn’t a muzzle, some kind of animal, and Something bumped against Frey’s boot heel. He swung around with a cry. His arm snapped out straight, revolver in hand.