‘Both.’
‘I wouldn’t be too harsh, mate. Scuttlers are paying your wages.’
‘We’ll give you fifty ecumenical credit units for it, Crozet. No more.’
‘Fifty ecus? Now you’re taking the piss.’
‘It’s a revolting object serving a revolting function. Fifty ecus is… quite excessively generous.’
Crozet looked at Rashmika. It was only a glance, but she was ready for it when it came. The system they had arranged was very simple: if the man was telling the truth — if this really was the best offer he was prepared to make — then she would push the sheet of paper a fraction closer to the middle of the table. Otherwise, she would pull it towards her by the same tiny distance. If the man’s reaction was ambiguous, she did nothing. This did not happen very often.
Crozet always took her judgement seriously. If the offer on the table was as good as it was going to get, he did not waste his energies trying to talk them up. On the other hand, if there was some leeway, he haggled the hell out of them.
In that first negotiating session, the buyer was lying. After a rapid-fire back and forth of offer and counter- offer, they reached an agreement.
‘Your tenacity does you credit,’ the buyer said with visible bad grace, before writing him out a chit for seventy ecus that was only redeemable within the caravan itself.
Crozet folded it neatly and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. ‘Pleasure doing business, mate.’
He had other scuttler plate cleaners, as well as several things that might have served some entirely different function. Now and then he came back to the negotiation sessions with something that Linxe or Culver had to help him carry. It might be an item of furniture, or some kind of heavy-duty domestic tool. Scuttler weapons were rare, appearing to have had only ceremonial value, but they sold the best of all. Once, he sold them what appeared to be a kind of scuttler toilet seat. He only got thirty-five ecus for that: barely enough, Crozet said, for a single servo- motor.
But Rashmika tried not to feel too sorry for him. If Crozet wanted the best pickings from the digs, the kinds of relics that picked up three- or four-figure payments, then he needed to rethink his attitude towards the rest of the Vigrid communities. The truth of the matter was that he liked scabbing around on the perimeter.
It went on like that for two days. On the third, the buyers suddenly demanded that Crozet be alone during the negotiations. Rashmika had no idea if they had guessed her secret. There was, as far as she was aware, no law against being an adept judge of whether people were lying or not. Perhaps they had just taken a dislike to her, as people often did when they sensed her percipience.
Rashmika was fine with that. She had helped Crozet out, paid him back a little more in addition to the scuttler relics for the help he had given her. He had, after all, taken an extra, unforeseen risk when he found out about the constabulary pursuing her.
No: she had nothing bad on her conscience.
Khouri protested as they took her away from the capsule into the waiting infirmary. ‘I don’t need an examination,’ she said. ‘I just need a boat, some weapons, an incubator and someone good with a knife.’
‘Oh, I’m good with a knife,’ Clavain said.
‘Please take me seriously. You trusted Ilia, didn’t you?’
‘We came to an arrangement. Mutual trust never had much to do with it.’
‘You respected her judgement, though?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, she trusted me. Isn’t that good enough for you? I’m not making excessive demands here, Clavain. I’m not asking for the world.’
‘We’ll consider your requests in good time,’ he said, ‘but not before we’ve had you examined.’
‘There isn’t
Within the infirmary, Dr Valensin waited with two aged medical servitors from the central machine pool. The swan-necked robots were a drab institutional green, riding on hissing air-cushion pedestals. Many specialised arms emerged from their slender chess-piece bodies. The physician would be keeping a careful eye on the machines while they did their work: left alone, their creaking circuits had a nasty habit of absent-mindedly switching into autopsy mode.
‘I don’t like robots,’ Khouri said, eyeing the servitors with evident disquiet.
‘That’s one thing we agree on,’ Clavain said, turning to Scorpio and lowering his voice. ‘Scorp, we’ll need to talk to the other seniors about the best course of action as soon as we have Valensin’s report. My guess is she’ll need some rest before she goes anywhere. But for now I suggest we keep as tight a lid on this as possible.’
‘Do you think she’s telling the truth?’ Scorpio asked. ‘All that stuff about Skade and her baby?’
Clavain studied the woman as Valensin helped her on to the examination couch. ‘I have a horrible feeling she might be.’
After the examination, Khouri fell into a state of deep and apparently dreamless sleep. She awakened only once, near dawn, when she summoned one of Valensin’s aides and again demanded the means to rescue her daughter. After that they administered more relaxant and she fell asleep for another four or five hours. Now and then she thrashed wildly and uttered fragments of speech. Whatever she was trying to say always sounded urgent, but the meaning never quite cohered. She was not properly awake and cognisant until the middle of the morning.
By the time Dr Valensin deemed that Khouri was ready for visitors, the latest storm had broken. The sky above the compound was a bleak powder-blue, marbled here and there by strands of feathered cirrus. Out to sea, the
They sat down on opposite sides of her bed — Clavain in one chair, Scorpio in another, but reversed so that he sat with his arms folded across the top of the backrest.
‘I’ve read Valensin’s report,’ Scorpio began. ‘We were all hoping he’d tell us you were insane. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘And that gives me a really bad headache.’
Khouri pushed herself up in the bed. ‘I’m sorry about your headache, but can we skip the formalities and get on with rescuing my daughter?’
‘We’ll discuss it when you’re up on your feet,’ Clavain said.
‘Why not now?’
‘Because we still need to know exactly what’s happened. We’ll also need an accurate tactical assessment of any scenario involving Skade and your daughter. Would you define it as a hostage situation?’ Clavain asked.
‘Yes,’ Khouri replied, grudgingly.
‘Then until we have concrete demands from Skade, Aura is in no immediate danger. Skade won’t risk hurting her one asset. She may be cold-hearted, but she’s not irrational.’
Guardedly, Scorpio observed the old man. He appeared as alert and quick-witted as ever, yet to the best of Scorpio’s knowledge Clavain had allowed himself no more than two hours of sleep since returning to the mainland. Scorpio had seen that kind of thing in other elderly human men: they needed little sleep and resented its imposition by those younger than themselves. It was not that they necessarily had more energy, but that the division between sleep and waking had become an indistinct, increasingly arbitrary thing. He wondered how that would feel, drifting through an endless succession of grey moments, rather than ordered intervals of day and night.
‘How much time are we talking about?’ Khouri said. ‘Hours or days, before you act?’
‘I’ve convened a meeting of colony seniors for later this morning,’ Clavain said. ‘If the situation merits it, a rescue operation could be underway before sunset.’
‘Can’t you just take my word that we need to act
Clavain scratched his beard. ‘If your story made more sense, I might.’
‘I’m not lying.’ She gestured in the direction of one of the servitors. ‘The doctor gave me the all-clear, didn’t he?’
Scorpio smiled, tapping the medical report against the back of his chair. ‘He said you weren’t obviously
