rumours of those had become suitably exaggerated as they did the rounds. They had done him no real harm in the long run.
But those violent episodes had been justified. There had been no hatred behind them, no attempt to redress the sins visited upon Scorpio and his kind by their human elders. They had been necessary gestures. But what he had done to Hallatt had been personal, nothing whatsoever to do with the security of the planet.
He had failed himself, and in that sense he had also failed Ararat.
‘Scorp? Are you all right?’
It was Khouri, sitting in the darkened portion of the shuttle. Valensin’s servitors were still monitoring Aura’s incubator, but Khouri was keeping her own vigil. Once or twice he had heard her talking softly to the child, even singing to her. It seemed odd to him, given that they were already bonded on a neural level.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘You look preoccupied. Is it what happened in the iceberg?’
Her remark surprised him. Most of the time, his expressions were completely opaque to outsiders. ‘Well, there’s the small business of the war we’re caught up in, and the fact that I’m not sure any of us are going to make it into next week, but other than that…’
‘We’re all bothered by the war,’ she said, ‘but with you there’s something else. I didn’t see it before we went to find Aura.’
He had the shuttle form a chair for him, something at pig-height, and sat down next to her. He noticed that Valensin was snoozing, his head bobbing up at periodic intervals as he tried to stay awake. They were all exhausted, all functioning at the limits of endurance.
‘I’m surprised that you want to talk to me,’ he said.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because of what you asked of me, and what I refused to give you.’ In case his point was not obvious to her, he gestured at Aura. ‘I thought you’d hate me for that. You’d have had every right.’
‘I didn’t like it, no.’
‘Well, then.’ He offered her his palms, accepting his fate.
‘But it wasn’t
‘She’s beautiful,’ Scorpio said. He didn’t believe it, but it seemed the right sort of thing to say under the circumstances.
‘Really?’ she asked.
He looked at the wrinkled, pink-red child. ‘Really.’
‘I was worried you’d hate her, Scorp, because of what she cost.’
‘Clavain wouldn’t have hated her,’ he said. ‘That’s good enough for me.’
‘Thanks, Scorp.’
They sat in silence for a minute or so. Above, through the transparent hull, the light show continued. Something — some weapon or device in near-Ararat space — was scribing lines across the sky. There were arcs and angles and straight lines, and each mark took a few seconds to fade into the purple-black background. There was something nagging him about those lines, Scorpio thought, some sense that there was a meaning implicit in them, if only he had the quickness of mind to tease it out.
‘There’s something else,’ he said, quietly.
‘Concerning Aura?’
‘No. Concerning me, actually. You weren’t there, but I hurt a man today.’ Scorpio looked down at his small, childlike shoes. He had misjudged the height of the seat slightly, so that his toes did not quite reach the floor.
‘I’m sure you had your reasons,’ Khouri said.
‘That’s the problem: I didn’t. I hurt him out of blind rage. Something inside me snapped, something I’d kidded myself that I had under control for the last twenty-three years.’
‘We all have days like that,’ she said.
‘I try not to. For twenty-three years, all I’ve ever tried to do is get through the day without making that kind of mistake. And today I failed. Today I threw it all away, in one moment of weakness.’
She said nothing. He took that as permission to continue.
‘I used to hate humans. I thought I had good enough reasons.’ Scorpio reached up and undid the fastenings on his leather tunic, exposing his right shoulder. Three decades of ageing — not to mention the slow accretion of later, fresher wounds — had made the scar less obvious now. But still it made Khouri avert her eyes for an instant, before she looked back unflinchingly.
‘They did that to you?’
‘No. I did it to myself, using a laser.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was burning away something else.’ He traced the coastline of the scar, obedient to every inlet and peninsula of raised flesh. ‘There was a tattoo there, a green scorpion. It was a mark of ownership. I didn’t realise that at first. I thought it was a badge of honour, something to be proud of.’
‘I’m sorry, Scorp.’
‘I hated them for that, and for what I was. But I paid them back, Ana. God knows, I paid them back.’
He began to do up the tunic again. Khouri leaned over and helped with the fastenings. They were large, designed for clumsy fingers.
‘You had every right,’ she said.
‘I thought I was over it. I thought I’d got it out of my system.’
She shook her head. ‘That won’t ever happen, Scorp. Take it from me, you won’t ever lose that rage. What happened to me can’t compare with what they did to you — I’m not saying that. But I do know what it’s like to hate something you can’t ever destroy, something that’s always out of reach. They took my husband from me, Scorp. Faceless army clerks screwed up and ripped him away from me.’
‘Dead?’ he asked.
‘No. Just out of reach, at the wrong fucking end of a thirty-year starship crossing. Same thing, really. Except worse, I suppose.’
‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘That’s as bad as anything they did to me.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. It isn’t for me to make those comparisons. But all I know is this: I’ve tried to forgive and forget. I’ve accepted that Fazil and I will never see each other again. I’ve even accepted that Fazil’s probably long dead, wherever he really ended up. I have a daughter by another man. I suppose that counts as moving on.’
He knew that the father of her child was dead as well, but that was not obvious in the tone of her voice when she mentioned him.
‘Not moving on, Ana. Just staying alive.’
‘I knew you’d understand, Scorp. But you also understand what I’m saying about forgiving and forgetting, don’t you?’
‘That it ain’t gonna happen,’ he said.
‘Never in a million years. If one of those people came into this room — one of those fools who screwed up my life with one moment of inattention — I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself. What I’m saying is, the rage doesn’t go away. It gets smaller, but it also gets brighter. We just pack it deep down and kindle it, like a little fire we’re never going to let die. It’s what keeps us going, Scorp.’
‘I still failed.’
‘No, you didn’t. You did damn well to keep it bottled up for twenty-three years. So you lost it today.’ Suddenly she was angry. ‘So what? So fucking
‘You’ve got to go easy on yourself, man. What happened out there? It wasn’t a walk in the park. You earned the right to throw a few punches, OK?’
‘It was a bit more than a punch.’
