were cold, snaking warrens of corridor, spiralling tunnels, junctions and dizzying shafts. There were echoing sub- chambers and claustrophobic squeeze-points. Weird, unsettling growths clotted the walls: here a leprous froth, there a brachial mass horribly suggestive of petrified lung tissue. Unguents dripped constantly from ceiling to floor. Scorpio dodged the obstacles and oozing fluids with practised ease. He knew that there was nothing really hazardous about the ship’s exudations — chemically they were quite uninteresting — but even for someone who had lived in the Mulch, the sense of revulsion was overpowering. If the ship had only ever been a mechanical thing, he could have taken it. But there was no escaping the fact that much of what he saw stemmed in some arcane sense from the memory of the Captain’s biological body. It was a matter of semantics as to whether he walked through a ship that had taken on certain biological attributes or a body that had swollen to the size and form of a ship.
He didn’t care which was more accurate: both possibilities revolted him.
Scorpio reached the meeting room. After the gloom of the approach corridors it was overwhelmingly bright and clean. They had equipped the ship’s original spherical command chamber with a false floor and suitably generous wooden conference table. A refurbished projector hung above the table like an oversized chandelier, shuffling through schematic views of the planet and its immediate airspace.
Clavain was already waiting, garbed in the kind of stiff black dress uniform that would not have looked outrageously unfashionable at any point in the last eight hundred years. He had allowed someone to further tidy his appearance: the lines and shadows remained on his face, but with the benefit of a few hours’ sleep he was at least recognisable as the Clavain of old. He stroked the neat trim of his beard, one elbow propped on the table’s reflective black surface. His other hand drummed a tattoo against the wood.
‘Something kept you, Scorp?’ he asked mildly.
‘I needed a moment of reflection.’
Clavain looked at him and then inclined his head. ‘I understand.’
Scorpio sat down. A seat had been reserved for him next to Vasko, amid a larger group of colony officials.
Clavain was at the head of the table. To his left sat Blood, his powerful frame occupying the width of two normal spaces. Blood, as usual, managed to look like a thug who had gate-crashed a private function. He had a knife in one trotter and was digging into the nails of the other with the tip of the blade, flicking excavated dirt on to the floor.
In stark contrast was Antoinette Bax, sitting on Clavain’s right side. She was a human woman Scorpio had known since his last days in Chasm City. She had been young then, barely out of her teens. Now she was in her early forties — still attractive, he judged, but certainly heavier around the face, and with the beginnings of crow’s- feet around the corners of her eyes. The one constant — and the thing that she would probably take to her grave — was the stripe of freckles that ran across the bridge of her nose. It always looked as if it had just been painted on, a precisely stippled band. Her hair was longer now, pinned back from her forehead in an asymmetrical parting. She wore complex locally made jewellery. Bax had been a superb pilot in her day, but lately there had been few opportunities for her to fly. She complained about this with good humour, but at the same time knuckled down to solid colony work. She had turned out to be a very good mediator.
Antoinette Bax was married. Her husband, Xavier Liu, was a little older than her, his black hair now veined with silver, tied back in a modest tail. He had a small, neat goatee beard and he was missing two fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident down at the docks fifteen or so years ago. Liu was a genius with anything mechanical, especially cybernetic systems. Scorpio had always got on well with him. He was one of the few humans who genuinely didn’t seem to see a pig when he talked to him, just another mechanically minded soul, someone he could really talk to. Xavier was now in charge of the central machine pool, controlling the colony’s finite and dwindling reserve of functioning servitors, vehicles, aircraft, pumps, weapons and shuttles: technically it was a desk job, but whenever Scorpio called on him, Liu was usually up to his elbows in something. Nine times out of ten, Scorpio would find himself helping out, too.
Next to Blood was Pauline Sukhoi, a pale, spectral figure seemingly either haunted by something just out of sight, or else a ghost herself. Her hands and voice trembled constantly, and her episodes of what might be termed transient insanity were well known. Years ago, in the patronage of one of Chasm City’s most shadowy individuals, she had worked on an experiment concerning local alteration of the quantum vacuum. There had been an accident, and in the whiplash of severing possibilities that was a quantum vacuum transition, Sukhoi had seen something dreadful, something that had pushed her to the edge of madness. Even now she could barely speak of it. It was said that she passed her time sewing patterns into carpets.
Then there was Orca Cruz, one of Scorpio’s old associates from his Mulch days, one-eyed but still as sharp as a monofilament scythe. She was the toughest human he knew, Clavain included. Two of Scorpio’s old rivals had once made the mistake of underestimating Orca Cruz. The first Scorpio knew of it was when he heard about their funerals. Cruz wore much black leather and had her favourite firearm out on the table in front of her, scarlet fingernails clicking against the ornamented Japanwork of its carved muzzle. Scorpio thought the gesture rather gauche, but he had never picked his associates for their sense of decorum.
There were a dozen other senior colony members in the room, three of them swimmers from the Juggler contact section. Of necessity they were all young baseline humans. Their bodies were sleek and purposeful as otters’, their flesh mottled by faint green indications of biological takeover. They all wore sleeveless tunics that showed off the broadness of their shoulders and the impressive development of their arm muscles. They had tattoos worked into the paisley complexity of their markings, signifying some inscrutable hierarchy of rank meaningful only to other swimmers. Scorpio, on balance, did not much like the swimmers. It was not simply that they had access to a luminous world that he, as a pig, would never know. They seemed aloof and scornful of everyone, including the other baseline humans. But it could not be denied that they had their uses and that in some sense they were right to be scornful. They
The nine other seniors were all somewhat older than the swimmers. They were people who had been adults on Resurgam before the evacuation. As with the swimmers, the faces changed when new representatives were cycled in and out of duty. Scorpio, nonetheless, made it his duty to know them all, with the intimate fondness for personal details he reserved only for close friends and blood enemies. He knew that this curatorial grasp of personal data was one of his strengths, a compensation for his lack of forward-thinking ability.
It therefore troubled him profoundly that there was one person in the room that he hardly knew at all. Khouri sat nearly opposite him, attended by Dr Valensin. Scorpio had no hold on her, no insights into her weaknesses. That absence in his knowledge troubled him like a missing tooth.
He was contemplating this, wondering if anyone else felt the same way, when the murmur of conversation came to an abrupt end. Everyone, including Khouri, turned towards Clavain, expecting him to lead the meeting.
Clavain stood, pushing himself up. ‘I don’t intend to say very much. All the evidence I’ve seen points to Scorpio having done an excellent job of running this place in my absence. I have no intention of replacing his leadership, but I will offer what guidance I can during the present crisis. I trust you’ve all had time to read the summaries Scorp and I put together, based on Khouri’s testimony?’
‘We’ve read them,’ said one of the former colonists — a bearded, corpulent man named Hallatt. ‘Whether we take any of it seriously is another thing entirely.’
‘She certainly makes some unusual claims,’ Clavain said, ‘but that in itself shouldn’t surprise us, especially given the things that happened to us after we left Yellowstone. These are unusual times. The circumstances of her arrival were bound to be a little surprising.’
‘It’s not just the claims,’ Hallatt said. ‘It’s Khouri herself. She was Ilia Volyova’s second-in-command. That’s hardly the best recommendation, as far as I’m concerned.’
Clavain raised a hand. ‘Volyova may well have wronged your planet, but in my view she also atoned for her sins with her last act.’
‘
‘That’s your opinion,’ Clavain allowed, ‘but according to the laws that we all agreed to live under during the evacuation, neither Volyova nor Khouri were to be held accountable for any crimes. My only concern now is Khouri’s testimony, and whether we act upon it.’
