crabs everywhere. The chamber in which they’d been cornered was littered with the bodies of the other crew members, pink trails of blood reaching across the ice from other tunnels. They’d been killed and dragged here.
Two words jumped to mind: kill yourself. But first she had to kill Markarian, in case he lacked the nerve to do it himself. She couldn’t see his face through his visor. That was good. Painfully, she pointed the gun towards him and squeezed the trigger. But instead of firing, the gun shivered in her hands, stowing itself into a quarter of its operational volume.
‘Thank you for using this weapon system,’ it said cheerfully.
Irravel let it drift to the ground.
A new voice rasped in her helmet. ‘If you’re thinking of surrendering, now might not be a bad time.’
‘Bastard,’ Irravel said, softly.
‘Really the best you can manage?’ The language was Canasian — what Irravel and Markarian had spoken on Fand — but heavily accented, as if the native tongue was Norte or Russish, or spoken with an impediment. ‘ “Bastard’s” quite a compliment compared to some of the things my clients come up with.’
‘Give me time; I’ll work on it.’
‘Positive attitude — that’s good.’ The lid of a crab hinged up, revealing the prone form of a man in a mesh of motion-sensors. He crawled from the mesh and stepped onto the ice, wearing a spacesuit formed from segmented metal plates. Totems had been welded to the armour, around holographic starscapes infested with serpentine monsters and scantily clad maidens.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Captain Run Seven.’ He stepped closer, examining her suit nameplate. ‘But you can call me Seven, Irravel Veda.’
‘I hope you burn in hell, Seven.’
Seven smiled — she could see the curve of his grin through his visor; the oddly upturned nostrils of his nose above it. ‘I’m sensing some negativity here, Irravel. I think we need to put that behind us, don’t you?’
Irravel looked at her murdered adjutants. ‘Maybe if you tell me which one was the traitor.’
‘Traitor?’
‘You seemed to have no difficulty finding us.’
‘Actually, you found us.’ It was a woman’s voice this time. ‘We use lures — tampering with commercial beacons, like the scavenger’s. ’ She emerged from one of the other attack machines wearing a suit similar to Seven’s, except that it displayed the testosterone-saturated male analogues of his space-maidens: all rippling torsos and chromed codpieces.
‘Wreckers,’ Irravel breathed.
‘Yeah. Ships home in on the beacons, then find they ain’t going anywhere in a hurry. We move in from the halo.’
‘Disclose all our confidential practices while you’re at it, Mirsky,’ Seven said.
She glared at him through her visor. ‘Veda would have figured it out.’
‘We’ll never know now, will we?’
‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘Gonna kill them anyway, aren’t you?’
Seven flashed an arc of teeth filed to points and waved a hand towards the female pirate. ‘Allow me to introduce Mirsky, our loose-tongued but efficient information-retrieval specialist. She’s going to take you on a little trip down memory lane, see if you can’t remember those access codes.’
‘What codes?’
‘It’ll come back to you,’ Seven said.
They were taken through the tunnels, past half-assembled mining machines, onto the surface and then into the pirate ship. The ship was huge, most of it living space. Cramped corridors snaked through hydroponics galleries of spring wheat and dwarf papaya, strung with xenon lights. The ship hummed constantly with carbon dioxide scrubbers, the foetid air making Irravel sneeze. There were children everywhere, frowning at the captives. The pirates obviously had no reefersleep technology: they stayed warm the whole time, and some of the children Irravel saw had probably been born after the Hirondelle had arrived there.
They arrived at a pair of interrogation rooms where they were separated. Irravel’s room held a couch converted from an old command seat, still carrying warning decals. A console stood in one corner. Painted torture scenes fought for wall space with racks of surgical equipment: drills, blades and ratcheted contraptions speckled with rust.
Irravel breathed deeply. Hyperventilation could have an anaesthetic effect. Her conditioning would in any case create a state of detachment: the pain would be no less intense, but she would feel it at one remove.
She hoped.
The pirates fiddled with her suit, confused by the modern design, until they stripped her down to her shipboard uniform.
Mirsky leaned over her. She was small-boned and dark-skinned, dirty hair rising in a topknot, eyes mismatched shades of azure. Something clung to the side of her head above the left ear: a silver box with winking status lights. She fixed a crown to Irravel’s head, then made adjustments on the console.
‘Decided yet?’ Captain Run Seven said, sauntering into the room. He was unlatching his helmet.
‘What?’
‘Which of our portfolio of interrogation packages you’re going to opt for.’
She was looking at his face now. It wasn’t really human. Seven had a man’s bulk and a man’s shape, but there was at least as much of the pig in his face. His nose was a snout, his ears two tapered flaps framing a hairless pink skull. His pale eyes evinced animal cunning.
‘What the hell are you?’
‘Excellent question,’ Seven said, clicking a finger in her direction. His bare hand was dark-skinned and feminine. ‘To be honest, I don’t really know. A genetics experiment, perhaps? Was I the seventh failure, or the first success?’
‘Do I get two guesses?’
He ignored her. ‘All I know is that I’ve been here — in the halo around Luyten 726-8 — for as long as I can remember.’
‘Someone sent you here?’
‘In a tiny automated spacecraft; perhaps an old lifepod. The ship’s governing personality raised me as well as it could, attempted to make of me a well-rounded individual…’ Seven trailed off momentarily. ‘Eventually I was found by a passing ship. I staged what might be termed a hostile takeover bid. From then on I’ve built an organisation largely recruited from my client base.’
‘You’re insane. It might have worked once, but it won’t work with us.’
‘Why should you be any different?’
‘Neural conditioning. I regard the cargo as my offspring — all twenty thousand of them. I can’t betray them in any way.’
Seven smiled his piggy smile. ‘Funny; the last client thought that, too.’
Sometime later, Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror she could imagine — so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything was the certainty that she had not given up the codes.
So why was she still alive?
Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the Hirondelle until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger ship.
She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.
Then she checked the twenty crew sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They’d been butchered, carved open for implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any recognisable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.
