unusual… but they won’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that she’s a plague ship.’
‘And when they get aboard?’ Khouri asked.
‘Now that might be a different story.’
Thorn, however, turned out to be more or less correct. The shocking excrescences and architectural flourishes of the ship’s mutated exterior looked pathological to Khouri, but she knew more about the plague than anyone on Resurgam. It turned out that relatively few of the passengers were as disturbed as she had expected. Most were prepared to accept that the flourishes of diseased design served some obscure military function. This, after all, was the ship that they believed had wiped out an entire surface colony. They had few preconceptions about what it should look like, other than that it was, by its very nature, evil.
‘They’re relieved that there’s a ship here at all,’ Thorn told her. ‘And most of them can’t get anywhere near a porthole anyway. They’re taking what they’re hearing with a large pinch of salt, or they just don’t care.’
‘How can they not care when they’ve thrown away their lives to come this far?’
‘They’re tired,’ Thorn told her. ‘Tired and past caring about anything except getting off this ship.’
The transfer craft executed a slow pass down the side of
‘That wasn’t there before,’ she said.
‘What?’
She kept her voice low and refrained from pointing. ‘That… scar. Do you see it?’
‘That thing? I can’t miss it.’
The scar was a meandering gash that wandered along the hull for several hundred metres. It appeared to be deep, very deep, in fact, gouging far into the ship, and it had every sign of being recent: the edges were sharp and there were no traces of any attempts at repair. Something squirmed in Khouri’s stomach.
‘It’s new,’ she said.
THIRTY-TWO
The transfer shuttle slid alongside the larger spacecraft, a single bubble drifting down the flank of a great scarred whale. Khouri and Thorn made their way to the rarely used flight deck, sealed the door behind them and then ordered some floodlights to be deployed. Fingers of light clawed along the hull, throwing the topology into exaggerated relief. The baroque transformations were queasily apparent — folds and whorls and acres of lizardlike scales — but there was no sign of any further damage.
‘Well?’ Thorn whispered. ‘What’s your assessment?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But one thing’s for sure. Normally we’d have heard from Ilia by now.’
Thorn nodded. ‘You think something catastrophic happened here, don’t you?’
‘We saw a battle, Thorn, or what looked like one. I can’t help jumping to conclusions.’
‘It was a long way off.’
‘You can be certain of that, can you?’
‘Fairly, yes. The flashes weren’t spread randomly around the sky. They were clustered, and they all lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. That means that whatever we saw was distant — tens of light-minutes, maybe even whole light-hours from here. If this ship was in the thick of it, we’d have seen a much larger spatial extent to the flashes.’
‘Good. You’ll excuse me if I don’t sound too relieved.’
‘The damage we’re seeing here can’t be related, Ana. If those flashes really were on the far side of the system, then the energy being unleashed was fearsome. This ship looks as if it took a hit of some kind, but it can’t have been a direct hit from the same weapons or there wouldn’t be a ship here.’
‘So it got hit by shrapnel or something.’
‘Not very likely…’
‘Thorn, something sure as fuck happened.’
There was a shiver of activity from the console displays. Neither of them had done anything. Khouri leaned over and queried the shuttle, biting her lip.
‘What is it?’ Thorn asked.
‘We’re being invited to dock,’ she told him. ‘Normal approach vector. It’s as if nothing unusual’s happened. But if that’s the case, why isn’t Ilia speaking to us?’
‘We’ve got two thousand people in our care. We’d better be sure we’re not walking into a trap.’
‘I do realise that.’ She skated a finger across the console, skipping through commands and queries, occasionally tapping a response into the system.
‘So what are you doing?’ Thorn asked.
‘Landing us. If the ship wanted to do something nasty, it’s had enough chances.’
Thorn pulled a face but offered no counter-argument. There was a tug of microgravity as the transfer shuttle inserted itself into the docking approach, moving under direct control of the larger ship. The hull loomed and then opened to reveal the docking bay. Khouri closed her eyes — the transfer shuttle only just appeared to fit through the aperture — but there was no collision, and then they were inside. The shuttle wheeled and then nudged itself into a berthing cradle. There was a tiny shove of thrust at the last moment, then a faint, faint tremor of contact. And then the console altered again, signifying that the shuttle had established umbilical linkage with the bay. Everything was absolutely normal.
‘I don’t like it,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s not like Ilia.’
‘She wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood the last time we met. Maybe she’s just having a very long sulk.’
‘Not her style,’ Khouri said, snapping her response and then immediately regretting it. ‘Something’s wrong. I just don’t know what.’
‘What about the passengers?’ he asked.
‘We keep ’em here until we know what’s going on. After fifteen hours, they can stand one or two more.’
‘They won’t like it.’
‘They’ll have to. One of your people can cook up an excuse, can’t they?’
‘I suppose one more lie at this point won’t make much difference, will it? I’ll think of something — an atmospheric pressure mismatch, maybe.’
‘That’ll do. It doesn’t have to be a show stopper. Just a plausible reason to keep them aboard for a few hours.’
Thorn went back to arrange matters with his aides. It would not be too difficult, Khouri thought: the majority of the passengers would not expect to be unloaded for several hours anyway, and so would not instantly realise anything was amiss. Provided word did not spread around the ship that no one was being let out, a riot could be held off for a while.
She waited for Thorn to return.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘We can’t leave by the main airlock or people will get suspicious if we don’t come back.’
‘There’s a secondary lock here,’ Khouri said, nodding at an armoured door set in one wall of the flight deck. ‘I’ve requested a connecting tube to be fed across from the bay. We can get on and off the ship without anyone knowing we’re away.’
The tube clanged against the side of the hull. So far, the larger ship was being very obliging. Khouri and Thorn donned spacesuits from the emergency locker even though the indications were that the air in the connecting tube was normal in mix and pressure. They propelled themselves to the door, opened it and crammed into the chamber on the other side. The outer door opened almost immediately since there was no pressure imbalance to be adjusted.
Something waited in the tunnel.
Khouri flinched and sensed Thorn do likewise. Her soldiering years had given her a deep-seated dislike for robots. On Sky’s Edge a robot was often the last thing you saw. She had learned to suppress that phobia since moving in other cultures, but she still retained the capacity to be startled when she encountered one
