‘Is the guy going to pull through?’
‘Yes,’ he said, grudgingly.
Khouri shrugged. ‘Then chill out. What these people need now is a leader. What they don’t need is someone moping around with a guilty conscience.’
He stood up. ‘Thank you, Ana. Thank you.’
‘Did I help, or did I just screw things up even more?’
‘You helped.’
The seat melted back into the wall.
‘Good. Because, you know, I’m not the most eloquent of people. I’m just a grunt at heart, Scorp. A long way from home, with some weird stuff in my head, and a daughter I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. But really, I’m still just a grunt.’
‘It’s never been my policy to underestimate grunts,’ he said. Now, inevitably, it was his turn to feel ineloquent. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you. I hope one day…’ He looked around, noticing that Vasko was moving down the opaque line of the floor towards Aura’s niche. ‘Well, I don’t know. Just that you find something to make that rage a little smaller and brighter. Maybe when it gets small and bright enough it will just pop away.’
‘Would that be a good thing?’
‘I don’t know.’
She smiled. ‘Me neither. But I guess you and I are the ones who’ll find out.’
‘Scorpio?’ Vasko said.
‘Yes?’
‘You should see this. You, too, Ana.’
They woke Valensin. Vasko ushered them to a different part of the shuttle, then made some modifications to the hull to increase the visibility of the night sky, calling bulkheads into existence and enhancing the brightness of the transmitted light to compensate for the reflected glare from the shuttle’s wings. He did so with an ease that suggested he had been working with such systems for half his life, rather than the few days that was actually the case.
Above, Scorpio saw only the same appearing and fading scratches of light that he had noticed earlier. The nagging feeling that they meant something still troubled him, but the scratches made no more sense to him now than they had before.
‘I’m not seeing it, Vasko.’
‘I’ll have the hull add a latency, so that the marks take longer to fade out.’
Scorpio frowned. ‘Can you do that?’
‘It’s easy.’ Vasko patted the cold, smooth surface of the inner fuselage. ‘There’s almost nothing these old machines won’t do, if you know the right way to ask.’
‘So do it,’ Scorpio said.
All four of them looked up. Even Valensin was fully awake now, his eyes slits behind his spectacles.
Above, the scratches of light took longer to fade. Before, only two or three had ever been visible at the same time. Now dozens lingered, bright as the images scorched on to the retina by the setting sun.
And now they most definitely meant something.
‘My God,’ Khouri said.
THIRTY
In the glade, everything changed. The sky above had turned midnight-black; no birds moved from tree to tree now, and the trees themselves formed only a darker frame to the night sky, looming in on all sides like encroaching thunder clouds. The animals had fallen silent, and Antoinette could no longer hear the simmering hiss of the waterfall. Perhaps it had never been real.
When she turned her attention back to the Captain, he was sitting alone at the table. Again he had slipped forward some years, reiterating another slice from his history. The last time she had seen him, in the silver armoured suit, one of his arms had been mechanical. Now the process of mechanisation had marched on even more. It was difficult to judge how much of him had been replaced by prosthetic components because of the suit, but she could at least see his head since the helmet was resting in front of him on the table. His scalp was completely bald, his face hairless save for a moustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. It was the same mouth she remembered from the first apparition: compact, straight, probably not much given to small talk. But that was about the only point of reference she recognised. She couldn’t see his eyes at all. They were lost under a complicated-looking band of some sort that reached from one side of his face to the other. Optics twinkled beneath the band’s pearly coating. The skin across his scalp was quilted with fine white lines. Glued tight to his skull, it revealed irregular raised plates just under the skin.
‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Look up.’
She complied, and saw immediately that something had changed in the few scant minutes during which she had been studying the Captain’s latest manifestation. Scratches of light cut across the sky. She thought of someone making quick, neat, butcherlike gashes in soft skin. The scratches looked random at first, but then she began to discern the emergence of a pattern.
‘John…’
‘Keep looking.’
The scratches increased in frequency. They became a flicker, then a frenzy, then something that almost appeared permanent.
The scratches formed letters.
The letters formed words.
The words said: LEAVE NOW.
‘I just wanted you to know,’ John Brannigan said.
That was when she felt the entire floor of the glade rumble. She had barely had time to register this when she felt her own weight increasing. She was being pressed into the roughly formed wooden seat. It was a gentle pressure, but that was no surprise. A ship with a mass of several million metric tonnes didn’t just leap into space. Especially not when it had been sitting in a kilometre of water for twenty-three years.
Across the bay, lighting up the sea and land all the way to the horizon, a temporary day had come to Ararat. At first, all that Vasko could see was a mountain of steam, a scalding eruption of superheated water engulfing first the lower flanks of the ship and then the entire green-clad structure. A blue-white light shone out through the steam, like a lantern in a mound of tissue paper. It was painfully bright even through the darkening filter of the shuttle’s fuselage. It shaded to violet and left jagged pink shadows on his retinae. Even far away from the edge of the steam column, the water shone a luminous turquoise. It was beautiful and strange, like nothing he had seen in his twenty years of existence.
He saw now that the water was bellying up around the ship, the surface rising many hundreds of metres. Frightful energies were being released underwater, creating swelling bubbles of superdense, superhot plasma.
The wall of elevated water surged away from the
‘Did they get far enough beyond the headland?’ he asked.
‘We’re about to find out,’ Scorpio said.
The surface of the water was crusted with a scum of stiff green biomass. They watched it crack into disjointed plates, unable to flex fast enough to match the distortion as the wave passed. It was moving at hundreds of metres per second. In only a few moments it would hit the bay’s low rock shields.
Vasko looked back towards the source of the tidal wave. The ship was beginning to climb now, its nose emerging from the steam layer. The movement was awesomely smooth, almost as if he was seeing a fixed landmark — an ancient storm-weathered spire on a high promontory, perhaps — being revealed by the retreat of
