Even the smell and the stinging miasma had begun to lose something of their astringency. He supposed that meant he had done his duty. But above the sea, the black thing continued to push its branching extremities towards the iceberg.
He still had work to do.
Scorpio turned the boat around. By the time he reached the iceberg the other craft was already afloat: Vasko, Khouri, the incubator and the two Security Arm people were visible within it, the adults crouching down against the spray, the hull sinking low in the water. The Jugglers had redoubled their activity after the lull when the ocean received Clavain. Scorpio was certain now that it had something to do with the thing reaching down from the sky. The Jugglers didn’t like it: it was making them agitated, like a colony of small animals sensing the approach of a snake.
Scorpio didn’t blame them: it was no kind of weather phenomenon he had ever experienced. Not a tornado, not a sea-spout. Now that the swaying multi-armed thing was directly overhead, its artificial nature was sickeningly obvious. The entire thing — from the thick trunk descending down through the cloud layer to the thinnest of the branching extremities — was composed of the same cubic black elements they had seen in Skade’s ship. It was Inhibitor machinery, wolf machinery — whatever you wanted to call it. There was no guessing how much of it hovered above them, hidden behind the cloud deck. The trunk might even have reached all the way down through Ararat’s atmosphere.
It made him feel ill just to look at it. It simply wasn’t
He steered towards the other boat. Now that he had dealt with Clavain he felt a clarity of mind he’d lacked a few minutes before. It had probably been wrong to leave them on the iceberg with just that one boat for escape, but he had not wanted anyone else with him when he buried his friend. Selfish, perhaps, but it hadn’t been any of them doing the cutting.
‘Hold tight,’ he told them via the communicator. ‘We’ll even out the load as soon as I’m close enough.’
‘Then what?’ Vasko asked, looking fearfully up at the thing stretched across the sky.
‘Then we run like hell.’
The thing’s attention lingered over the iceberg. With slow, python-like movements it pushed a cluster of tentacles into the roof of the frozen structure, the needles and jags of ice shattering as the machinery forced its way through. Perhaps, Scorpio thought, it sensed the presence of other pieces of Inhibitor machinery, dormant or dead within the wreckage of the corvette. It needed to be reunited with them. Or perhaps it was after something else entirely.
The iceberg quivered. The sea responded to the movement, slow, shallow waves oozing away from the fringe. From somewhere within the structure came crunching sounds, like the shattering of bone. Flaws opened wide in the outer layer of the ice, exposing a lacy marrow of fabulously differentiated colour: pinks and blues and ochres.
Black machinery forced its way through the cracks. A dozen tentacles emerged from the iceberg, coiling and writhing, sniffing the air, splitting into ever-smaller components as they pushed outwards.
Scorpio’s boat kissed the hull of the other craft. ‘Give me the incubator,’ he shouted, above the screaming of the engine.
Vasko stood up, leaning between the boats, steadying himself with one hand on Scorpio’s shoulder. The young man looked pale, his hair plastered to his scalp. ‘You came back,’ he said.
‘Things changed,’ Scorpio said.
Scorpio took the incubator, feeling the weight of the child within it, and jammed it safely between his feet. ‘Now Khouri,’ he said, offering a hand to the woman.
She crossed over to his boat; he felt it sink lower in the water as she boarded. She met his gaze for a moment, seemed about to say something. He turned back to Vasko before she had a chance.
‘Follow me. I don’t want to hang around here a moment longer than necessary.’
The cracks in the iceberg had widened to plunging abysses, rifts that cut deep into its heart. The black machinery forced more of itself into the ice, insinuating itself in eager surges. More extremities emerged from the perimeter, waving and extending. The iceberg began to break up into distinct chunks, each as large as a house. Scorpio gunned his boat’s engine harder, slamming across the waves, but could not tear his attention from what was happening behind him. Chunks of the iceberg calved away, jagged pieces tipping into the sea with a powdery roar of displaced water. Now he could see a writhing tangle of black tentacles flexing and coiling around the ruined corvette. Not much remained of the iceberg now, just the ship that had grown it.
The machinery pulled the ship into the air. The black shapes forced themselves through the gaps in the hull, their movements delicate and thoughtful and vaguely apprehensive, like someone removing the last layer of wrapping from a present.
The other boat was lagging: it was slower in the water, with three adults aboard.
The corvette broke into sharp black pieces, all but the smallest of them still suspended in the sky. Coils and bows of perfect blackness wheeled around the parts.
The coils loosened their grip. Tentacles and sub-tentacles withdrew in a flurry of contracting motion. Layers of black cubes flowed across each other, swelling and shrinking in queasy unison. Scorpio only saw the details in the edges, where the machinery met the grey backdrop of the sky.
The pieces of the corvette — all of them, now — splashed into the sea.
But it still held something: a tiny, white, star-shaped form hung limply in the air. It was Skade, Scorpio realised. The machinery had found her in the wreckage, wrapped part of itself around her waist and plunged another, more delicate part of itself into her head. It was interrogating her, retrieving neural structures from her corpse.
It might, for a moment, feel like being alive again.
The black machinery pushed a new trunk of itself towards the fleeing boats. With that, something tightened in Scorpio’s stomach: some instinctive visceral response to the approach of a slithering predator.
He saw motion in the other boat: the glint as a muzzle was trained towards the sky. An instant later, the blinding electric-pink discharge of a Breitenbach cannon lit the grey sky. The beam lanced up towards the looming mass of alien machinery. It should have speared right through it, etching a searing line into the cloud deck. Instead, the beam veered around the machinery like a firehose.
Vasko kept firing, but the beam squirmed away from any point where it might have done damage.
The black machinery followed the thick trunk. The whole mass still hung from the sky, multi-armed, like some obscene chandelier.
It was taking a particular interest in the second boat.
The cannon sputtered out. Scorpio heard the crackle of small-arms fire.
None of it was going to make any difference.
Suddenly he felt a lancing pain in his ears. All around him, in the same instant, the sea bellied up three or four metres, as if a tremendous suction effect had pulled it into the sky. There was a thunderclap louder than anything he had ever heard. He looked up, his ears still roaring, and saw… something — a hint, for a fraction of a second, of a circular absence in the sky, a faint demarcation between the air and something within it. The circle was gone almost immediately, and as it ceased to exist he felt the same pain in his ears, the same sense of suction.
A few seconds later, it happened again.
This time, the circle intersected the main black mass of the hovering Inhibitor machinery. A huge misshapen clot of it fell towards the waves, severed from the rest. Even more of the mass had simply ceased to exist: it was as if everything within the spherical region above him had winked out of existence — not just air, but the Inhibitor machinery occupying the same volume. The limbs attached to the falling chunk thrashed wildly even as it fell. Scorpio sensed it slowing as it neared the surface of the water, but the rate of arrest was not sufficient to bring it to a halt. It hit, submerged, rebounded to the surface. The limbs continued to whip around the main core, threshing the sea.
Khouri leaned towards him. Her lips moved, but her voice was lost under the blood-tide roaring in his ears. He knew what she was saying, though: the three syllables were unmistakable. ‘Remontoire.’
