without breaking any of the ornamentation. He also noticed that the only weapon that Clavain appeared to be carrying was the short-bladed knife he had taken from his tent. He had it clutched in one hand, the blade vanishing when he turned it edge-on.
Behind Clavain came Jaccottet, much less stealthily. The Security Arm man stopped to brush the ice shards from his uniform.
Scorpio lifted his sleeve, revealing his communicator. ‘Blood, we’ve found a way inside the iceberg. We’re going deeper. I’m not sure what will happen to comms, but stay alert. Malinin and Urton are staying outside. If all else fails, we may be able to relay communications through them. I’m guessing we might be inside this thing for a couple of hours, maybe more.’
‘Be careful,’ Blood said.
What was this, Scorpio wondered: concern from Blood? Things were truly worse than he had feared. ‘I will be,’ he said. ‘Anything else I need to know?’
‘Nothing immediately related to your mission. Reports of enhanced Juggler activity from many of the monitoring stations, but that might just be a coincidence.’
‘Right now I’m not sure if
‘And — uh — just to cheer you up — some reports of lights in the sky. Not confirmed.’
‘Lights in the sky? It gets better.’
‘Probably nothing. If I were you, I’d put it all out of your mind. Concentrate on the job in hand.’
‘Thanks. Sterling advice. All right, pal, speak to you later.’
Clavain had heard the conversation. ‘Lights in the sky, eh? Maybe next time you’ll believe an old man.’
‘I didn’t not believe you for one instant.’ Scorpio reached down to his own belt and pulled out a gun. ‘Here, take this. I can’t stand to see you walking around with just that silly little knife.’
‘It’s a very good knife. Did I mention that it saved my life once?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a wonder I’ve held on to it all this time. Honestly, don’t you think there’s something very
‘Personally,’ Scorpio said, ‘I think it’s time to stop thinking chivalry and start thinking artillery.’
Clavain took the gun the way one took a gift out of politeness, a gift of which one did not entirely approve.
They moved deeper into the iceberg, following the path of least resistance. The texture of the ice, braided and tangled like a wildly overgrown wood, made Scorpio think of some of the buildings in the Mulch layers of Chasm City. When the plague had hit them, their repair and redesign systems had produced something of the same organic fecundity. Here, it seemed, the growth of the ice was driven entirely by weird localised variations in temperature and air flow. Between one step and the next, the air shifted from lungcrackingly frigid to merely chilly, and any attempt to navigate by means of the draughts was doomed to failure. More than once he had the feeling he was inside a huge, cold, respiring lung.
But their path was always clear: away from the daylight, into the pastel blue core.
‘It’s music,’ Jaccottet said.
‘What?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Music, sir. That low noise. There were too many echoes before. I couldn’t make sense of it. But I’m sure it’s music now.’
‘Music? Why the
‘I don’t know, sir. It’s faint, but it’s definitely there. Advise caution.’
‘I can hear it, too,’ Khouri said. ‘And I advise hurrying the fuck up.’
She removed one of the weapons from her belt and shot at the thickest spar in front of her. It exploded into white marble dust. She stepped through the ruins and raised the gun towards another obstruction.
Clavain did something to his knife. It began to hum, just at the limit of Scorpio’s hearing. The blade became a blur. Clavain swept it through one of the smaller spars, severing it neatly and cleanly.
They moved on, further from the light. In waves, the air became colder still. They huddled deeper into their clothes and spoke only when it was strictly necessary. Scorpio had been grateful for his gloves, but now it felt as if he had forgotten to wear them at all. He had to keep looking down to remind himself they were still in place. It was said that hyperpigs felt the cold more acutely than baseline humans: some quirk of pig biochemistry that the designers had never seen any compelling reason to rectify.
He was thinking about that when Khouri spoke excitedly. She had pushed ahead of them all despite their best efforts to hold her back.
‘There’s something ahead,’ she said, ‘and I think I can feel Aura now. We must be near.’
Clavain was immediately behind her. ‘What can you see?’
‘The side of something dark,’ she said. ‘Not like the ice.’
‘Must be the corvette,’ Clavain said.
They advanced another ten or twelve metres, taking at least two minutes to gain that distance. The ice was so thick now that Clavain’s little knife could only hack and pare away insignificant parts of it, and Khouri was wise enough not to use her weapon so close to the heart of the iceberg. Around them, the ice formations had taken on an unsettling new character. Jaccottet’s torch beam glanced off conjunctions resembling thigh bones or weird sinewy articulations of bone and gristle.
Then the density of the obstructions thinned out. They were suddenly in the core of the iceberg. A sort of roof folded over them, veined and buttressed by enormous trunks of scaly ice rising up from the floor below. The thick weavelike tangle was also visible on the far side of the chamber.
In the middle was the ruin of a ship.
Scorpio did not consider himself any kind of an expert on Conjoiner spacecraft, but from what he did know, the moray-class corvette ought to have been a sleek ultra-black chrysalis of a vessel. It should have been flanged and spined like some awful instrument of interrogation. There should have been no hint of a seam in the light- sucking surface of its hull. And the ship should most certainly not have lain on one side, broken-backed, splayed open like a dissected specimen, its guts frozen in mid-explosion. The gore of machine entrails should not have surrounded the corpse, and nor should bits of the hull, as sharp and irregular as glass shards, have been lying around the wreck like so many toppled gravestones.
That wasn’t the only thing wrong with the ship. It was throbbing, making staccato purring noises at the low- frequency limit of Scorpio’s hearing. He felt it in his belly more than he heard it. It was the music.
‘This isn’t good,’ Clavain said.
‘I can still feel Aura,’ Khouri said. ‘She’s in there, Clavain.’
‘There isn’t much of it left for her to be in,’ he told her.
Scorpio saw that for an instant the muzzle of Khouri’s Breitenbach cannon tipped towards Clavain, sweeping across him. It was only for an instant, and there was nothing in Khouri’s expression to suggest that she was on the point of losing control, but it still gave him pause for thought.
‘There’s still a ship here,’ Scorpio said. ‘It may be a wreck, Nevil, but someone could be aboard it. And something’s making that music. We shouldn’t give up yet.’
‘No one was about to give up,’ Clavain said.
‘The cold’s coming from the ship,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s pouring out of it, as if it’s
Clavain smiled. ‘Bleeding cold? You can say that again.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Old joke. One that doesn’t work too well in Norte.’
Khouri shrugged. They walked towards the wreck.
At the foot of the sloping green-lit corridor down which she had been invited, Antoinette found an echoing chamber of indistinct proportions. She estimated that she had descended five or six levels before the corridor flattened out, but there was no point attempting to plot her position on the pocket blow-up of the main ship map. It had already proven itself to be hopelessly out of date even before the apparitions had summoned her down here.
She halted, keeping the torch on for now. Green light poked through gill-like slats in the ceiling. Wherever
