‘We’ve already evacuated the Resurgam system,’ Urton said. ‘Not to mention seventeen thousand people from this one. I’d say that wipes the slate clean.’
‘This slate is never wiped clean,’ Cruz said.
Urton waved her hand across the table. ‘You’re forgetting something. The core systems are crawling with Ultras. There are dozens, hundreds of ships with the sleeper capacity of
‘You’d trust lives to Ultras? You’re dumber than you look,’ Orca said.
‘Of course I’d trust them,’ Urton said.
Aura laughed.
‘Why did she do that?’ Urton asked.
‘Because you lied,’ Khouri told her. ‘She can tell. She can
One of the refugee representatives — a man named Rintzen — coughed tactically. He smiled, doing his best to seem conciliatory. ‘What Urton means is that it simply isn’t our job. The motives and methods of the Ultras may be questionable — we all know that — but it is a simple fact that they have ships and a desire for customers. If the situation in the core systems does indeed reach a crisis point, then — might I venture to suggest — all we’d have is a classic case of demand being met by supply.’
Cruz shook her head. She looked disgusted. If Scorpio had walked in at that moment and only had her face to go by, he would have concluded that someone had just deposited a bowel movement on the table.
‘Remind me,’ she said. ‘When you came aboard this ship from Resurgam — how much did it cost you?’
The man examined his fingernails. ‘Nothing, of course… but that’s not the point. The situation was totally different.’
The lights dimmed. It was happening every few minutes now, as the weapons were spun up and discharged; often enough that everyone had stopped remarking on it, but that didn’t mean that the dimming went unnoticed. Everyone knew that it meant the wolves were still out there, still creeping closer to the
‘All right,’ Cruz said when the lights flicked back up to full strength. ‘Then what about this time, when you were evacuated from Ararat? How much did you cough up for the privilege?’
‘Again, nothing,’ Rintzen conceded. ‘And again, the two things can’t be compared…’
‘You revolt me,’ Cruz said. ‘I dealt with some slime down in the Mulch, but you’d have been in a league of your own, Rintzen.’
‘Look,’ said Kashian, another of the refugee representatives, ‘no one’s saying it’s right for the Ultras to make a profit out of the wolf emergency, but we have to be pragmatic. Their ships will always be better suited than this one to the task of mass evacuation.’ She looked around, inviting the others to do likewise. ‘This room may seem normal enough, but it’s hardly representative of the rest of the ship. It’s more like a hard, dry pearl in the slime of an oyster. There are still vast swathes of this ship that are not even mapped, let alone habitable. And let’s not forget that things are significantly worse than they were during the Resurgam evacuation. Most of the seventeen thousand who came aboard two weeks ago still haven’t been processed properly. They are living in unspeakable conditions.’ She shivered, as if experiencing some of that squalor by osmosis.
‘You want to talk about unspeakable conditions,’ Cruz said, ‘try death for a few weeks, see how it suits you.’
Kashian shook her head, looking in exasperation at the other seniors. ‘You can’t negotiate with this woman. She reduces everything to insult or absurdity.’
‘Might I say something?’ asked Vasko Malinin.
Scorpio shrugged in his direction.
Vasko stood up, leaning forwards across the table, his fingers splayed for support. ‘I won’t debate the logistics of helping the evacuation effort from Yellowstone,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it makes any difference. Irrespective of the needs of those refugees, we have been given a clear direction not to go there. We have to listen to Aura.’
‘She didn’t say we shouldn’t go to Yellowstone,’ Cruz interjected. ‘She just said we should go to Hela.’
Vasko’s expression was severe. ‘You think there’s a difference?’
‘Yellowstone could be our first priority, as I said. It doesn’t preclude a visit to Hela once the evacuation is complete.’
‘It will take decades to do that,’ Vasko said.
‘It’ll take decades whatever we do,’ Cruz said, smiling slightly. ‘That’s the nature of the game, kid. Get used to it.’
‘I know the nature of the game,’ Vasko told her, his voice low, letting her know that she had made a mistake in addressing him that way. ‘I’m also aware that we’ve been given a clear instruction about reaching Hela. If Yellowstone formed part of Aura’s plans, don’t you think she’d have told us?’
They all looked at the child. Sometimes Aura spoke: by now they had all become accustomed to her small, half-formed, liquid croak. Yet there were still days when she said nothing at all, or made only childlike noises. Then, as now, she appeared to have switched into some mode of extreme receptivity, taking in rather than giving out. Her development was accelerated, but it was not progressing smoothly: there were leaps and bounds, but there were also plateaux and unaccountable reversals.
‘She means for us to go to Hela,’ Khouri said. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘What about the other part?’ Scorpio asked. ‘The bit about negotiating with shadows?’
‘It was something that came through. Maybe a memory that came loose, but which she couldn’t interpret.’
‘What else came through at the same time?’
She looked at him, hesitating on the edge of answering. It was a lucky guess, but his question had worked. ‘I sensed something that frightened me,’ she said.
‘Something about these shadows?’
‘Yes. It was like the chill from an open door, like a draught of terror.’ Khouri looked down at the hair on her baby’s head. ‘She felt it as well.’
‘And that’s all you can tell me?’ Scorpio asked. ‘We have to go to Hela and negotiate with something that frightens both of you to death?’
‘It was just that the message carried a warning,’ Khouri said. ‘It said proceed with caution. But it also said it’s what we have to do.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ Scorpio persisted.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Maybe you interpreted the message wrongly. Maybe the “draught of terror” was there for a different reason. Maybe it was there to indicate that on no account should we have anything to do with… whatever these shadows are.’
‘Maybe, Scorp,’ Khouri said, ‘but in that case, why mention the shadows at all?’
‘Or Hela, for that matter,’ Vasko added.
Scorpio looked at him, drawing out the moment. ‘You done?’ he asked.
‘I guess so,’ Vasko said.
‘Then I think the decision needs to be taken,’ the pig said. ‘We’ve heard all the arguments, either way. We can go to Hela on the off chance that there might be something there worth our effort. Or we can take this ship to Yellowstone and save some lives, guaranteed. I think you all know my feelings on the matter.’ He nodded at the letters he had gouged into the table using Clavain’s old knife. ‘I think you also know what Clavain would have done, under the same circumstances.’
No one said anything.
‘But there’s a problem,’ Scorpio said. ‘And the problem is that it isn’t our choice to make. This isn’t a democracy. All we can do is present our arguments and let Captain John Brannigan make up his mind.’
He reached into a pocket in his leather tunic and pulled out the small handful of red dust he had carried there for days.
It was finely graded iron oxide, collected from one of the machine shops — as close to Martian soil as it was possible to get, twenty-seven light-years from Mars. It trailed between the short stubs of his fingers even as he stood up and held it over the centre of the table, between the Y and the H.
