‘Then we’d better not make any more screw-ups, had we?’ Hirz was directing her words at Celestine.
I had expected an angry rebuttal. Celestine would have been perfectly correct to remind Hirz that — had the rest of us been forced to make that choice — our chances of hitting the correct answer would have been a miserable one in six.
But instead Celestine just spoke with the flat, soporific tones of one who could not quite believe she had made such an error.
‘I’m sorry… I must have…’
‘Made the wrong decision. Yes.’ I nodded. ‘And there’ll undoubtedly be others. You did your best, Celestine — better than any of us could have managed.’
‘It wasn’t good enough.’
‘No, but you narrowed the field down to two possibilities. That’s a lot better than six.’
‘He’s right,’ Childe said. ‘Celestine, don’t cut yourself up about this. Without you we wouldn’t have got as far as we did. Now go ahead and press the other answer — the one you settled on originally — and we’ll get Forqueray back to base camp.’
The Ultra glared at him. ‘I’m fine, Childe. I can continue.’
‘Maybe you can, but it’s still time for a temporary retreat. We’ll get that arm looked at properly, and then we’ll come back with lightweight suits. We can’t carry on much further with these, anyway — and I don’t particularly fancy continuing with no armour at all.’
Celestine turned back to the frame. ‘I can’t promise that this is the right one, either.’
‘We’ll take that chance. Just hit them in sequence — best choice first — until the Spire opens a route back to the start.’
She pressed the symbol that had been her first choice, before she had analysed the problem more deeply and seen a phantom trap.
As always, Blood Spire did not oblige us with an instant judgement on the choice we had made. There was a moment when all of us tensed, expecting the javelins to come again… but this time we were spared further punishment.
The door opened, exposing the next chamber.
We did not step through, of course. Instead, we turned around and made our way back through the succession of rooms we had already traversed, descending all the while, almost laughing at the childish simplicity of the very earliest puzzles compared to those we had faced before the attack.
As the doors opened and closed in sequence, the air thinned out and the skin of Blood Spire became colder; less like a living thing, more like an ancient, brooding machine. But still that distant, throbbing respiratory vibration rattled the floors, lower now, and slower: the Spire letting us know it was aware of our presence and, perhaps, the tiniest bit disappointed at this turning back.
‘All right, you bastard,’ Childe said. ‘We’re retreating, but only for now. We’re coming back, understand?’
‘You don’t have to take it personally,’ I said.
‘Oh, but I do,’ Childe said. ‘I take it very personally indeed.’
We reached the first chamber, and then dropped down through what had been the entrance hole. After that, it was just a short flight back to the waiting shuttle.
It was dark outside.
We had been in the Spire for more than nineteen hours.
FOUR
‘It’ll do,’ Forqueray said, tilting his new arm this way and that.
‘Do?’ Trintignant sounded mortally wounded. ‘My dear fellow, it is a work of exquisite craftsmanship; a thing of beauty. It is unlikely that you will see its like again, unless of course I am called upon to perform a similar procedure.’
We were sitting inside the shuttle, still parked on Golgotha’s surface. The ship was a squat, aerodynamically blunt cylinder which had landed tail-down and then expanded a cluster of eight bubbletents around itself: six for our personal quarters during the expedition, one commons area, and a general medical bay equipped with all the equipment Trintigant needed to do his work. Surprisingly — to me, at least, who admitted to some unfamiliarity with these things — the shuttle’s fabricators had been more than able to come up with the various cybernetic components that the Doctor required, and the surgical tools at his disposal — glistening, semi-sentient things which moved to his will almost before they were summoned — were clearly state-of-the-art by any reasonable measure.
‘Yes, well, I’d have rather you’d reattached my old arm,’ Forqueray said, opening and closing the sleek metal gauntlet of his replacement.
‘It would have been almost insultingly trivial to do that,’ Trintignant said. ‘A new hand could have been cultured and regrafted in a few hours. If that did not appeal to you, I could have programmed your stump to regenerate a hand of its own accord; a perfectly simple matter of stem-cell manipulation. But what would have been the point? You would be very likely to lose it as soon as we suffer our next punishment. Now you will only be losing machinery — a far less traumatic prospect.’
‘You’re enjoying this,’ Hirz said, ‘aren’t you?’
‘It would be churlish to deny it,’ Trintignant said. ‘When you have been deprived of willing subjects as long as I have, it’s only natural to take pleasure in those little opportunities for practice that fate sees fit to present.’
Hirz nodded knowingly. She had not heard of Trintignant upon our first meeting, I recalled, but she had lost no time in forming her subsequent opinion of the man. ‘Except you won’t just stop with a hand, will you? I checked up on you, Doc — after that meeting in Childe’s house. I hacked into some of the medical records that the Stoner authorities still haven’t declassified, because they’re just too damned disturbing. You really went the whole hog, didn’t you? Some of the things I saw in those files — your victims — they stopped me from sleeping.’
And yet still she had chosen to come with us, I thought. Evidently the allure of Childe’s promised reward outweighed any reservations she might have had about sharing a room with Trintignant. But I wondered about those medical records. Certainly, the publicly released data had contained more than enough atrocities for the average nightmare. It chilled the blood to think that Trintignant’s most heinous crimes had never been fully revealed.
‘Is it true?’ I said. ‘Were there really worse things?’
‘That depends,’ Trintignant said. ‘There were subjects upon whom I pushed my experimental techniques further than is generally realised, if that is what you mean. But did I ever approach what I considered were the true limits? No. I was always hindered.’
‘Until, perhaps, now,’ I said.
The rigid silver mask swivelled to face us all in turn. ‘That is as maybe. But please give the following matter some consideration. I can surgically remove all your limbs now, cleanly, with the minimum of complications. The detached members could be put into cryogenic storage, replaced by prosthetic systems until we have completed the task that lies ahead of us.’
‘Thanks…’ I said, looking around at the others. ‘But I think we’ll pass on that one, Doctor.’
Trintigant offered his palms magnanimously. ‘I am at your disposal, should you wish to reconsider.’
We spent a full day in the shuttle before returning to the Spire. I had been mortally tired, but when I finally slept, it was only to submerge myself in yet more labyrinthine dreams, much like those Childe had pumped into our heads during the reefersleep transition. I woke feeling angry and cheated, and resolved to confront him about it.
But something else snagged my attention.
There was something wrong with my wrist. Buried just beneath the skin was a hard rectangle, showing darkly through my flesh. Turning my wrist this way and that, I admired the object, acutely — and strangely — conscious of its rectilinearity. I looked around me, and felt the same visceral awareness of the other shapes which
