The creature was trying to clean its face, its one remaining forelimb thrashing awkwardly across its mouth- parts like a broken windscreen wiper. It looked at the quaestor with those blackcurrant eyes, which were not as uncomprehending as he might have wished.
‘If I don’t do what he wants, he’ll come back. But whatever he wants with that girl isn’t right. I can feel it. Can you? I didn’t like him at all. I knew he was trouble the moment he landed.’
The quaestor flattened out the letter again. It was brief, written in a clear but childish script. It was from someone called Harbin, to someone called Rashmika.
The flight to the
Scorpio had never really enjoyed trips to the
The shuttle dropped off its passengers in the topmost docking bay, then immediately returned to the sky on some other urgent colonial errand. A Security Arm guard was already waiting to escort them down to the meeting room. He touched a communications earpiece with one finger, frowning slightly as he listened to a distant voice, then he turned to Scorpio. ‘Room is secured, sir.’
‘Any apparitions?’
‘Nothing reported above level four hundred in the last three weeks. Plenty of activity in the lower levels, but we should have the high ship to ourselves.’ The guard turned to Vasko. ‘If you’d care to follow me.’
Vasko looked at Scorpio. ‘Are you coming down, sir?’
‘I’ll follow in a moment. You go ahead and introduce yourself. Say only that you are Vasko Malinin, an SA operative, and that you participated in the mission to recover Clavain — and then don’t say another word until I get there.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Vasko hesitated. ‘Sir, one other thing?’
‘What?’
‘What did he mean about apparitions?’
‘You don’t need to know,’ Scorpio said.
Scorpio watched them troop off into the bowels of the ship, waiting until their footsteps had died away and he was certain that he had the landing bay to himself. Then he made his way to the edge of the bay’s entrance, standing with the tips of his blunt, childlike shoes perilously close to the edge.
The wind scrubbed hard against his face, although today it was not especially strong. He always felt in danger of being blown out, but experience had taught him that the wind usually blew into the chamber. All the same, he remained ready to grab the left-hand edge of the door for support should an eddy threaten to tip him over the lip. Blinking against the wind, his eyes watering, he watched the claw-shaped aircraft bank and recede. Then he looked down, surveying the colony that, despite Clavain’s return, was still very much his responsibility.
Kilometres away, First Camp sparkled in the curve of the bay. It was too distant to make out any detail save for the largest structures, such as the High Conch. Even those buildings were flattened into near-insignificance by Scorpio’s elevation. The happy, bustling squalor and grime of the shanty streets were invisible. Everything appeared eerily neat and ordered, like something laid out according to strict civic rules. It could have been almost any city, on any world, at any point in history. There were even thin quills of smoke rising up from kitchens and factories. Yet other than the smoke there was nothing obviously moving, nothing that he could point to. But at the same time the entire settlement trembled with a frenzy of subliminal motion, as if seen through a heat haze.
For a long time, Scorpio had thought that he would never adjust to life beyond Chasm City. He had revelled in the constant roaring intricacy of that place. He had loved the dangers almost as much as the challenges and opportunities. On any given day he had known that there might be six or seven serious attempts on his life, orchestrated by as many rival groups. There would be another dozen or so that were too inept to be worth bringing to his attention. And on any given day Scorpio might himself give the order to have one of his enemies put to sleep. It was never business with Scorpio, always personal.
The stress of dealing with life as a major criminal element in Chasm City might have appeared crippling. Many did crack — they either burned out and retreated back to the limited spheres of petty crime that had bred them, or they made the kind of mistake it wasn’t possible to learn from.
But Scorpio had never cracked, and if he had ever screwed up it was one time only — and even then it had not exactly been his fault. It had been wartime by then, after all. The rules were changing so fast that now and then Scorpio had even found himself acting legally. Now
But the one mistake he had made had been nearly terminal. Getting caught by the zombies, and then the spiders… and because of
It had taken him a while to find out — in a way, he had only really found the answer when Clavain had left and the colony was entirely in Scorpio’s control.
He had simply woken up one morning and the longing for Chasm City was gone. His ambition no longer focused on anything as absurdly self-centred as personal wealth, or power, or status. Once, he had worshipped weapons and violence. He still had to keep a lid on his anger, but he struggled to remember the last time he had held a gun or a knife. Instead of feuds and scores, scams and hits, the things that crammed his days now were quotas, budgets, supply lines, the bewildering mire of interpersonal politics. First Camp was a smaller city — barely a city at all, really — but the complexity of running it and the wider colony was more than enough to keep him occupied. He would never have believed it back in his Chasm City days, but here he was, standing like a king surveying his empire. It had been a long journey, fraught with reversals and setbacks, but somewhere along the way — perhaps that first morning when he awoke without longing for his old turf — he had become something like a statesman. For someone who had started life as an indentured slave, without even the dignity of a name, it was hardly the most predictable of outcomes.
But now he worried that it was all about to slip away. He had always known that their stay on this world was only ever intended to be temporary, a port of call where this particular band of refugees would wait until Remontoire and the others were able to regroup. But as time went on, and the twenty-year mark had approached and then passed without incident, the seductive idea had formed in his mind that perhaps things might be more permanent. That perhaps Remontoire had been more than delayed. That perhaps the wider conflict between humanity and the Inhibitors was going to leave the settlement alone.
It had never been a realistic hope, and now he sensed that he was paying the price for such thinking. Remontoire had not merely arrived, but had brought the arena of battle with him. If Khouri’s account of things was accurate, then the situation truly was grave.
The distant town glimmered. It looked hopelessly transient, like a patina of dust on the landscape. Scorpio felt a sudden visceral sense that someone dear to him was in mortal danger.
He turned abruptly from the open door of the landing deck and made his way to the meeting room.
THIRTEEN
The meeting room lay deep inside the ship, in the spherical chamber that had once been the huge vessel’s main command centre. The process of reaching it now resembled the exploration of a large cave system: there
