‘And?’ I managed before coughing racked my body again.
Pagan looked up, his thoughts disturbed. ‘Basically, They are, as far as we can tell, autonomous colonies of what we consider to be naturally occurring nanites, right?’
We all nodded as if we knew what he was talking about. Mudge nodded very enthusiastically.
‘Well, presumably he’s using the energy to manufacture more of… well, himself, I guess,’ Pagan said. ‘But I am guessing.’
‘So it’s a transformation?’ Morag asked. Once again, although Gregor sounded and to a degree thought like my friend, I was having it driven home just how alien this thing actually was.
‘I would imagine so,’ Pagan said.
‘Butterfly!’ Mudge added.
‘Into what?’ Gibby asked, running his fingers up the fretboard of his guitar.
‘Butterfly!’ Mudge interjected again. Morag tried to kick him.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Pagan answered.
‘A warrior,’ Rannu said. He sounded pretty sure of himself.
Pagan shrugged. ‘Perhaps. It would certainly be a form that will be of use to him, and hopefully us, for whatever this mission will involve. Perhaps he’s disguising himself as one of Them, I don’t know.’
‘What if he wakes up and decides he wants to eat us all?’ Gibby asked. ‘Or insem… insem…’
‘Inseminate us?’ Morag asked.
‘Yep,’ Gibby said.
‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.
‘Or eat us then inseminate us?’ Gibby suggested. We just looked at him.
‘There’s very little on this ship worth inseminating,’ I pointed out.
‘Hey!’ Morag objected.
‘I’d inseminate you,’ Gibby said. He was largely going through the motions of banter. He knew what was expected of him but his heart wasn’t really in it. Morag smiled and I glared at him.
‘Thanks, Gibby. That’s sweet,’ Morag said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, letting out an exaggerated sigh. ‘There’s very little worth inseminating on this ship bar Morag, as I’m too sick. Basically, I think you’re safe except from maybe Mudge.’
‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.
Gibby glared at him. ‘I want you to know I’m heavily armed.’
‘It is a serious point…’ Pagan said.
‘What, Mudge inseminating Gibby?’ I asked, unable to help myself. Pagan tried to ignore me.
‘I mean what comes out of the cocoon and whether or not it’s going to be hostile to us.’
‘Why wait until now?’ Morag asked. ‘Seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to take us out.’
I wondered if her life had become so strange that things like someone cocooning himself were becoming commonplace to her.
‘Besides, we’re well armed,’ I pointed out. Even as I said this I knew what a stupid thing it was to say.
‘Did you see him on the Spoke?’ Rannu asked. Everyone went quiet. I didn’t really have an answer, or rather I did, but I didn’t think they wanted to hear that we’d all just get killed.
‘So what do we do?’ Gibby asked after an uncomfortable silence.
‘We wait,’ Morag said. She sounded a lot less troubled by this than I was.
‘But we don’t know what Gregor has planned. We don’t know where Crom is going to be or how he intends to deal with it or even get to it. We don’t know if the Black Squadrons will be there or anything,’ I said. I was pissed off about this. If Gregor wanted to turn into a beautiful butterfly he should’ve done it on his own time.
‘Where are we going to arrive?’ Rannu asked Gibby.
‘Far side of Sirius, way beyond fleet-controlled space and deep in Them space. Gregor gave me the coordinates. He also said we had to be very quiet when we got there.’
‘We’re going to the Teeth?’ Pagan asked. Gibby nodded. There was an uneasy silence in the cabin that I decided to break.
‘Well, we know it’s going to be a stealth operation,’ I said, and that was about it. That was about all we knew. I was doing my second least favourite thing, space travel, on my way to do my least favourite thing, EVA, to my least favourite place, Sirius, deep inside territory controlled by a whole alien race that was still hostile towards us.
I was listening to the spacecraft. That’s kind of a contradiction. It was very quiet, though you could feel the hum of the power plant throughout the vessel, but it was something you were more aware of than could actually hear. Every movement made a kind of booming echo through the skeletal black metal of the ship’s interior.
I was just lying there, listening and dying. It was a bad day. I’d had two heart attacks despite the augmentations to my heart. Any time I’d tried to speak I just coughed up blood, and during one particularly bad fit of coughing I’d actually managed to bring up a component of my artificial lung. Rannu had kept me alive – it turned out that he was a pretty accomplished medic. I was alive because of Rannu, the automed and Mudge’s ad hoc narcotic pharmacy.
We were four days in and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to Sirius, let alone back to Earth. I hadn’t been expecting Balor when the door opened. I’d seen very little of him on the journey. He’d mostly been working on the Dog Soldier and I reckoned his warrior credo didn’t cope well with weakness like mine. I think he thought I should have walked out into the wilderness to die so I could stop using up the tribe’s valuable resources. I also think the kicking he’d got at Rolleston’s hands had given him a fright. I looked at his chest. They had rebuilt his chest armour on the Atlantis Spoke, recreated it as well as they could. I wasn’t entirely sure it matched the rest of his skin. Still, he’d brought a bottle of good whisky and I was determined to have some of that regardless of how bad I felt and how much damage it did.
He lit a cigarette for me. Again I was determined to smoke it even though I knew it meant coughing up blood. How stupid am I? I managed to hold it between my lips and inhale a bit before Balor had to take it away. I must’ve looked awful. I was pretty much a hollow sack of skin full of disintegrating internal organs and machinery. The strange thing was, it wasn’t pity or sympathy or disgust I saw on Balor’s face, it was resolve and something else, maybe fear. I took a sip from the whisky; it didn’t even taste nice any more. It just hurt. What a waste.
‘What’s this, my wake?’ I asked. He didn’t smile. That worried me.
‘You’re going to die,’ he said.
‘No shit,’ I replied, wondering where this was going and getting ready to call for help.
‘You shouldn’t have to die like this,’ he said. I said nothing; I just stared at him. He drew his dive knife from its ankle sheath and placed it on the table next to the automed. Next he drew the shotgun pistol and placed that on the table. Finally he took an antique, stainless-steel pill box from the pocket of his cut-off combat trousers and placed that on the table as well. I looked at the three items and then back up at Balor.
‘Everyone feels sorry for you but nobody is prepared to do anything about it,’ he said. I struggled to sit up. If Mudge was going to get me up for the job it had better be one hell of a drug cocktail. I looked him straight in his one good reptile-styled lens.
‘I’m going to die on the job just like everyone else,’ I said. ‘If I wanted to be killed I’d do it myself. Understand?’ Balor said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. He was gauging me, sizing me up, trying to come to a decision.
‘What…’ he began, and then stopped.
‘What if I’m too weak to do my job?’ I finished for him. He nodded. ‘I’m dead anyway, so you don’t have to worry about looking out for me, but if I can pull a trigger I’ll help where we’re going. But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?’