Druin shrugged. “You’ll have seen me around.”
Fergal’s weapon was instantly aimed square at Druin’s gut. My companion made a twitch towards his rifle strap, then raised both hands above his head. The other two tinkers brought their rifles to bear at the same moment.
“I know who you are,” Fergal said slowly, “and what you are. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you now.”
Druin took a deep breath. “Och, man, if you have to ask that there is no help for you,” he said in a steady voice. I looked at him sideways, frozen except for a severe shaking in my jaw and my knees. “You see,” Druin went on conversationally, “if you were to kill me, now, my friend Clovis here would some time soon have to kill you. He would kill you and cut your head from your neck, and carry it to my widow and my weans to prove that you were dead and the matter was at an end.”
He glanced at me. “You would, aye?”
“I would,” I swore. I had eaten under Druin’s roof, and could not well refuse the task, if required. The thought of it made me feel sick, but it didn’t shake my resolve. I had no idea why Fergal might want to kill Druin in the first place, and I didn’t care. That he was willing to contemplate murder told me all I needed to know about him.
“Well, there you are,” said Druin. “You could kill Clovis too, I suppose, but that would just double your problem.”
I did not find this last consideration quite as definite and reassuring as Druin made it sound.
Fergal’s glance flicked between the two of us, his tongue unconsciously touching his lips. He backed off a little.
“Put down your weapons,” he said, then added, as we lowered our rifles, “all of them.”
As I unbuckled my belt I looked at Druin. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. I placed my knife and pistol and multi-tool beside the rifle.
“The sgean dhu as well.”
I felt naked when I stood up. Quick hands passed over or patted my body.
“They’re clean.”
Fergal picked up my gear, and one of the other tinkers picked up Druin’s. Fergal jerked his chin at the exit and moved around behind us.
“This way.”
We walked forward to the end of the corridor. Beyond it was the open interior space of the old power-station; we descended a short flight of steps to a concrete floor and were told to halt. Behind us I could hear some low-voiced consultation. We waited for its decision, hands on our heads, and I looked about. The turbine, of course, was long since gone, as were most of the original fittings; all that remained was a haunting afterlife of odours, of flaked paint and rusted metal and antique brickwork. Above these whiffs rose the newer smells of concrete and solder. The whole big cuboidal building, with its long windows, had been turned into a complex factory full of workshops and walkways, noisy and bright with the screech and sparks of metalwork. From the number of people I glimpsed at their benches or hurrying along, I guessed that about a hundred tinkers were at work in the building.
Strangely I felt on safer ground here, amid those scores of busy people, and hard by the road and rail of civilisation. I knew this comfort was delusory, but clung to it anyway. The thought of calling out for help crossed my mind; then I reflected that Fergal and his comrades would hardly be so bold if their actions were unknown to the rest.
Suddenly the tinkers clattered down the steps behind us and we were each roughly jostled away, in opposite directions. I heard a door slam, from the other side of the stair, just before I was pushed through another.
The room into which I stumbled was a few metres square, with an overhead light, a table and a couple of chairs. Along its sides rough stacks of copper piping, coils of cable, sacks and so forth suggested that the room was one that currendy didn’t have a definite use, and was used indifferently as a store, a meeting-place and—now—an interrogation cell. There was even, as somehow seemed inevitable, a sink and an electric kettle and some grotty opened bags of coffee, sugar and tea.
Fergal stepped past me, spun a chair into place on the opposite side of the table and gestured to the other.
“Have a seat.”
He put the weapons he’d taken off me on the draining-board, keeping his own rifle trained on me all the while. Then he sat down, not at the table but tilting his chair against the far wall, and cradling the black rifle with its odd, curving ammunition clip.
“OK, man,” he said. “Looks like I underestimated you, Clovis.” I let this flattery pass. He rocked the chair forward again, gazing at me intently. You’ve got yourself into a bit of a mess,” he continued in a confidential tone, “and the others are pretty riled with you, but I think I can square it with them. We can sort this out.”
I said nothing.
“Do you know what Drain is?”
After waiting a moment for some response, he went on, “He’s a management spy, that’s what. He works for the site security committee of the ISS at Kishorn. He reports on union activists, among other things.”
Fergal said this in such a tone of loathing that I was surprised. The minor hassles between the unions and the contractors and subcontractors seemed to me hardly a matter for such moral outrage, let alone death threats. I folded my arms and cocked my head slightly to one side. Fergal leaned back again.
“He pushed to have you sacked, you know,” he said. “That’s why he was in the bar at The Carron-ade.”
I admit I felt slightly shaken by this, because it was entirely plausible and because it implied that someone in the bar had been watching us, but I still made no reply.
“He has not come here, with you, to spy on us. He’s here to spy on you, to find out what your real connections to us are.”
“If that’s what he’s doing, it sounds reasonable enough to me,” I said, goaded at last. “I’m sure none of what you’re doing is a threat to the project, anyway. That’s why I helped Menial in the first place. So what’s the problem with his being here?”
“Oh, it has nothing to do with that. Menial told you the truth—we think there’s a possible threat to the ship, we’re investigating it urgently and if we find evidence for it we’ll present the evidence to the project’s management. No. Druin—and whoever is behind him—are looking for any stick to beat the tinkers with. He’s out to discredit us, and arouse hostility to us.”
I shook my head. “No—he’s never shown any hostility to the tinkers, as far as I know.”
“Naturally,” Fergal said derisively.
“Why should he or anyone want to do that, anyway?”
“God, you are so fucking naive!” Fergal waved a hand to indicate everything outside the room and inside the building. “We’re a somewhat privileged group, by virtue of our monopoly on skills which, frankly, are not hard to learn. Why should you depend on us to build and run your computers?” He laughed. “You’ve seen how we make them. It’s an ancient technology, called nanotech. We don’t understand it, but we can apply it. A farmer could do it, just as a farmer can grow crops without understanding how the molecular genetics and replication work. A competent mechanic, with maybe a skilled jeweller or watchmaker for the fiddly bits, could incorporate the seer-stones, as you call them, into machinery.”
“They’d have to know the white logic.”
“That too is not hard to learn. So what’s stopping you?”
“Me?”
Tour peopled he said impatiently.
“Funnily enough,” I said, “I asked Druin that very question. He said it was—well, tradition, you would call it. It works, it goes back to the Deliverance, no point questioning it. That’s what he said.”
“No doubt. And it wouldn’t have been long before he was complimenting you, saying he’d mulled it over and he thought it was a good question.”