‘We die, within a few hours. There’s more. The water’s hot here, so hot that we don’t need the glycoproteins. We have the genetic instructions to synthezise them, but they’ve also been turned off. But without the glycoproteins we can’t swim into colder water. Our blood freezes.’
Now he was surrounded by them; looming aquatic devils, flushed a florid shade of crimson. And they were coming closer.
‘But what do you expect me to do about it?’
‘You don’t have to do anything, Vargovic.’ The leader opened its chasmic jaw wide, as if tasting the water. It was a miracle an organ like that was capable of speech in the first place…
‘I don’t?’
‘No.’ And with that the leader reached out and seized him, while at the same time he was pinned from behind by another of the creatures. ‘It was Cholok’s doing,’ the leader continued. ‘Her final gift to us. Maunciple was her first attempt at getting it to us — but Maunciple never made it.’
‘He was too fat.’
‘All the defectors failed — they just didn’t have the stamina to make it this far from the city. That was why Cholok recruited you — an outsider.’
‘Cholok recruited me?’
‘She knew you’d kill her — you have, of course — but that didn’t stop her. Her life mattered less than what she was about to give us. It was Cholok who tipped off the Demarchy about your primary extraction site, forcing you to come to us.’
He struggled, but it was pointless. All he could manage was a feeble, ‘I don’t understand—’
‘No,’ the Denizen said. ‘Perhaps we never expected you to. If you had understood, you might have been less than willing to follow Cholok’s plan.’
‘Cholok was never working for us?’
‘Once, maybe. But her last clients were us.’
‘And now?’
‘We take your blood, Vargovic.’ Their grip on him tightened. He used his last draining reserves of strength to try to work loose, but it was futile.
‘My blood?’
‘Cholok put something in it. A retrovirus — a very hardy one, capable of surviving in your body. It reactivates the genes that were suppressed by the Demarchy. Suddenly, we’ll be able to make oxygen-carrying haemoglobin. Our blood will fill up with glycoproteins. It’s no great trick: all the cellular machinery for making those molecules is already present; it just needs to be unshackled.’
‘Then you need… what? A sample of my blood?’
‘No,’ the Denizen said, with genuine regret. ‘Rather more than a sample, I’m afraid. Rather a lot more.’
And then — with magisterial slowness — the creature bit into his arm, and as his blood spilled out, the Denizen drank. For a moment the others waited — but then they too came forward, and bit, and joined in the feeding frenzy.
All around Vargovic, the water was turning red.
WEATHER
We were at one-quarter of the speed of light, outbound from Shiva-Parvati with a hold full of refugees, when the Cockatrice caught up with us. She commenced her engagement at a distance of one light-second, seeking to disable us with long-range weapons before effecting a boarding operation. Captain Van Ness did his best to protect the Petronel, but we were a lightly armoured ship and Van Ness did not wish to endanger his passengers by provoking a damaging retaliation from the pirates. As coldly calculated as it might appear, Van Ness knew that it would be better for the sleepers to be taken by another ship than suffer a purposeless death in interstellar space.
As shipmaster, it was my duty to give Captain Van Ness the widest choice of options. When it became clear that the Cockatrice was on our tail, following us out from Shiva-Parvati, I recommended that we discard fifty thousand tonnes of nonessential hull material, in order to increase the rate of acceleration available from our Conjoiner drives. When the Cockatrice ramped up her own engines to compensate, I identified a further twenty thousand tonnes of material we could discard until the next orbitfall, even though the loss of the armour would marginally increase the radiation dosage we would experience during the flight. We gained a little, but the pirates still had power in reserve: they’d stripped back their ship to little more than a husk, and they didn’t have the mass handicap of our sleepers. Since we could not afford to lose any more hull material, I advised Van Ness to eject two of our three heavy shuttles, each of which massed six thousand tonnes when fully fuelled. That bought us yet more time, but to my dismay the pirates still found a way to squeeze a little more out of their engines.
Whoever they had as shipmaster, I thought, they were good at their work.
So I went to the engines themselves, to see if I could better my nameless opponent. I crawled out along the pressurised access tunnel that pierced the starboard spar, out to the coupling point where the foreign technology of the starboard Conjoiner drive was mated to the structural fabric of the Petronel. There I opened the hatch that gave access to the controls of the drive itself: six stiff dials, fashioned in blue metal, arranged in hexagon formation, each of which was tied to some fundamental aspect of the engine’s function. The dials were set into quadrant-shaped recesses, all now glowing a calm blue-green.
I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations to three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.
The Petronel surged faster, still maintaining her former heading. It was only possible to make adjustments to the starboard engine, since the port engine had no external controls. That didn’t matter, because the Conjoiners had arranged the two engines to work in perfect synchronisation, despite them being a kilometre apart. No one had ever succeeded in detecting the signals that passed between two matched C-drives, let alone in understanding the messages those signals carried. But everyone who worked with them knew what would happen if, by accident or design, the engines were allowed to get more than sixteen hundred metres apart.
I completed my adjustments, satisfied that I’d done all I could without risking engine malfunction. Three of the five dials were now showing orange, indicating that those settings were now outside what the Conjoiners deemed the recommended envelope of safe operation. If any of the dials were to show red, or if more than three showed orange, than we’d be in real danger of losing the Petronel.
When Ultras meet on friendly terms, to exchange data or goods, the shipmasters will often trade stories of engine settings. On a busy trade route, a marginal increase in drive efficiency can make all the difference between one ship and its competitors. Occasionally you hear about ships that have been running on three orange, even four orange, for decades at a time. By the same token, you sometimes hear about ships that went nova when only two dials had been adjusted away from the safety envelope. The one thing every shipmaster agrees upon is that no lighthugger has ever operated for more than a few days of shiptime with one dial in the red. You might risk that to escape aggressors, but even then some will insist that the danger is too great; that those ships that lasted days were the lucky ones.
I left the starboard engine and retreated back into the main hull of the Petronel. Van Ness was waiting to greet me. I could tell by the look on his face — the part of it that I could read — that the news wasn’t good.
‘Good lad, Inigo,’ he said, placing his heavy gauntleted hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve bought us maybe half a day, and I’m grateful for that, no question of it. But it’s not enough to make a difference. Are you sure you can’t sweet-talk any more out of them?’
‘We could risk going to two gees for a few hours. That still wouldn’t put us out of reach of the Cockatrice, though.’
‘And beyond that?’
I showed Van Ness my handwritten log book, with its meticulous notes of engine settings, compiled over twenty years of shiptime. Black ink for my own entries, the style changing abruptly when I lost my old hand and
