before, but now the curved white plate that covered her abdomen detached itself from the rest of the suit. Skade placed it next to her, then returned her hands to her sides. Where the armour had been opened, a bulge of soft human flesh moved under the thin, crosshatched mesh of a vacuum suit inner layer.
‘We’re ready,’ she said.
Jaccottet moved towards her and knelt down, one knee resting on the mound of fused ice that covered Skade’s lower half. The black box of white surgical instruments sat splayed open at his side.
‘Pig,’ she said, ‘take a scalpel from the lower compartment. That will do for now.’
Scorpio’s trotter poked at the snugly embedded instrument. Khouri reached over and pulled it out for him. She placed it delicately in his grasp.
‘For the last time,’ Scorpio said, ‘don’t make me do this.’ Clavain sat down next to him, crossing his legs. ‘It’s all right, Scorp. Just do what she says. I’ve a few tricks up my sleeve she doesn’t know about. She won’t be able to block all my commands, even if she thinks she can.’
‘Tell him that if you think it makes it easier for him,’ Skade said.
‘He’s never lied to me,’ Scorpio said. ‘I don’t think he’d start now.’
The white instrument sat in his hand, absurdly light, an innocent little surgical tool. There was no evil in the thing itself, but at that moment it felt like the focus of all the inchoate badness in the universe, its pristine whiteness part of the same sense of malignity. Titanic possibilities were balanced in his palm. He could not hold the instrument the way its designers had intended. All the same, he could still manipulate it well enough to do harm. He supposed it did not really matter to Clavain how skilfully the work was done. A certain imprecision might even help him, dulling the white-hot edge of the pain Skade intended.
‘How do you want me to sit?’ Clavain asked.
‘Lie down,’ Skade said. ‘On your back. Hands at your sides.’
Clavain positioned himself. ‘Anything else?’
‘That’s up to you. If you have anything you want to say, now would be a good time. In a little while, you might find it difficult.’
‘Only one thing,’ Clavain said.
Scorpio moved closer. The dreadful task was almost upon him. ‘What is it, Nevil?’
‘When this is over, don’t waste any time. Get Aura to safety. That’s really all I care about.’ He paused, licked his lips. Around them the fine growth of his beard glistened with a haze of beautiful white crystals. ‘But if there’s time, and if it doesn’t inconvenience you, I’d ask you to bury me at sea.’
‘Where?’ Scorpio asked.
‘Here,’ Clavain said. ‘As soon as you can. No ceremony. The sea will do the rest.’
There was no sign that Skade had heard him, or cared what he had to say. ‘Let’s start,’ she said to Jaccottet. ‘Do exactly as I tell you. Oh, and Khouri?’
‘Yes?’ the woman asked.
‘You really don’t have to watch this.’
‘She’s my daughter,’ she said. ‘I’m staying right here until I get her back.’ Then she turned to Clavain, and Scorpio sensed a vast private freight of communication pass between them. Perhaps it was more than just his imagination. After all, they were both Conjoiners now.
‘It’s all right,’ Clavain said aloud.
Khouri knelt down and kissed him on the forehead. ‘I just wanted to say thank you.’
Behind her, Skade’s hand moved over the holoclavier again.
Outside the iceberg, on the spreading fringe of whiteness, Urton looked at Vasko the way a teacher would look at a truant child. ‘You took your time,’ she said.
Vasko fell to his knees. He vomited. It came from nowhere, with no warning. It left him feeling excavated, husked out.
Urton knelt down on the ice next to him. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Her voice was urgent.
But he couldn’t speak. He wiped a smear of vomit from his chin. His eyes stung. He felt simultaneously ashamed and liberated by his reaction, as if in that awful admission of emotional weakness he had also found an unsuspected strength. In that moment of hollowing, that moment in which he felt the core of himself evacuated, he knew that he had taken a step into the adult world that Urton and Jaccottet thought was theirs alone.
Above, the sky was a purple-grey bruise. The sea roiled, grey phantasms slipping between the waves.
‘Talk to me, Vasko,’ she said.
He pushed himself to his feet. His throat was raw, his mind as clear and clean as an evacuated airlock.
‘Help me with the incubator,’ he said.
TWENTY-TWO
Battle raged in the immediate volume of space around the Pattern Juggler planet. Near the heart of the engagement itself, and close to the geometric centre of his vast ship
Remontoire was not bored, nor was he about to doze off. Boredom was a condition of consciousness he barely remembered, like anger or hate or the thirst for mother’s milk. He had experienced many states of mind since leaving Mars nearly five hundred years earlier, including some that could only be approximated in the flat, limiting modalities of baseline human language. Being bored was not amongst them. Nor did he expect it to play a significant role in his mental affairs in the future, most certainly not while the wolves were still around. And he wasn’t very likely to experience sleep, either.
Now and then some part of him — his eyelids, or even his entire head — twitched minutely, betraying something of the extreme state of non-boredom he was actually experiencing. Tactical data surged incessantly through his mind with the icy clarity of a mountain torrent. He was actually running his mind at a dangerously high clock-rate, just barely within the cooling parameters of his decidedly old-fashioned Conjoiner mental architecture. Skade would have laughed at him now as he struggled to match a thought-processing rate that would — to her — have barely merited comment. Skade could think this fast and simultaneously fragment her consciousness into half a dozen parallel streams. And she could do it while moving around, exerting herself, whereas Remontoire had to sit in a state of trancelike stillness so as not to put additional loads on his already stressed body and mind. They really were creatures of different centuries.
But although Skade had been in his thoughts much of late, she was of no immediate concern now. He considered it likely she was dead. His suspicions had been strong enough even before he had permitted Khouri to descend into the planet’s atmosphere, following after Skade’s downed corvette, but he had been careful not to make too much of them. For if Skade was dead, then so was Aura.
Something changed: a tick and a whirr of the great dark orrery of war in which he floated. For hours the opposed forces — the baseline humans, Skade’s Conjoiners, the Inhibitors — had wheeled around the planet in a fixed formation, as if they had finally settled into some mathematical configuration of maximum stability. The other Conjoiners were cowed: for weeks they had been gaining an edge over Remontoire’s loose alliance of humans, pigs and Resurgam refugees. They had stolen Aura, and through her they had learned many of the secrets that had enabled Remontoire and his allies to outflank the Inhibitor forces around Delta Pavonis. Later, Remontoire had given them even more in return for Khouri. But since Skade’s disappearance the other Conjoiners had become confused and directionless, far more than would have been the case with an equivalent grouping from Remontoire’s generation. Skade had been too powerful, too effective at manipulation. During the war against the Demarchists (which seemed now, to Remontoire, like an innocently remembered childhood diversion) the ruthlessly democratic structure of Conjoiner politics had been gradually partitioned, with the creation of security layers: the Closed Council, the Inner Sanctum, even — perhaps — the rumoured Night Council. Skade was the logical end product of that process of compartmentalisation: highly skilled, highly resourceful, highly knowledgeable, highly adept at
