justify betraying the cargo?’
He pulled his aged features into a smile. ‘We made a deal, Irravel; the same way you made a deal about the greenfly. But you don’t remember that, do you?’
‘Maybe I sold the greenfly machines to the pig,’ she said. ‘If I did that, it was a calculated move to buy the safety of the cargo. You, on the other hand, cut a deal with Seven to save your neck.’
The other pirates were holding fire, nervously marking them. ‘I did it to save yours, actually. Does that make any sense?’ There was wonder in his eyes now. ‘Did you ever see Mirsky’s hand? That was never her own. The pirates swap limbs as badges of rank. They’re very good at connective surgery.’
‘You’re not making much sense, Markarian.’
Dislodged ice rained on them. Irravel looked around in time to see another pirate emerging from a crevasse. She recognised the suit artwork: it was Seven. He wore… things, strung around his utility belt in transparent bags like obscene fruit. She stared at them for a few seconds before their nature clicked into horrific focus: frozen human heads.
Irravel stifled an urge to vomit.
‘Yes,’ Run Seven said. ‘Ten of your compatriots, recently unburdened of their bodies. But don’t worry — they’re not harmed in any fundamental sense. Their brains are intact — provided you don’t warm them with an ill- aimed shot.’
‘I’ve got a clear line of fire,’ Mirsky said. ‘Just say the word and the bastard’s an instant anatomy lesson.’
‘Wait,’ Irravel said. ‘Don’t shoot.’
‘Sound business sense, Captain Veda. I see you appreciate the value of these heads.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Mirsky said.
‘Their neural patterns can be retrieved.’ It was Remontoire speaking now. ‘We Conjoiners have had the ability to copy minds onto machine substrates for some time now, though we haven’t advertised it. But that doesn’t matter — there have been experiments on Yellowstone that approach our early successes. And these heads aren’t even thinking: only topologies need to be mapped, not electrochemical processes.’
The pig took one of the heads from his belt and held it at eye level, for inspection. ‘The Conjoiner’s right. They’re not really dead. And they can be yours if you wish to do business.’
‘What do you want for them?’ Irravel asked.
‘Markarian, for a start. All that Demarchy expertise makes for a very efficient second-in-command.’
Irravel glanced down at her prisoner. ‘You can’t buy loyalty with a box and a few neural connections.’
‘No? In what way do our loyalty shunts differ from the psycho-surgery your world inflicted on you, Irravel, yoking your motherhood instinct to twenty thousand sleepers you don’t even know by name?’
‘We have a deal or not?’
‘Only if you throw in the Conjoiner as well.’
Irravel looked at Remontoire, some snake part of her mind weighing options with reptilian detachment.
‘No!’ he said. ‘You promised!’
‘Shut up,’ Seven said. ‘Or when you do get to rejoin your friends, it’ll be in instalments.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Irravel said. ‘I can’t lose even ten of the cargo.’
Seven tossed the first head down to her. ‘Now let Markarian go and we’ll see about the rest.’
Irravel looked down at him. ‘It’s not over between you and me.’
Then she released him, and he scrambled back up the ice towards Seven.
‘Excellent. Here’s another head. Now the Conjoiner.’
Irravel issued a subvocal command; watched Remontoire stiffen. ‘His suit’s paralysed. Take him.’
Two pirates worked down to him, checked him over and nodded towards Seven. Between them they hauled him back up the ice, vanishing into a crevasse and back into the Hideyoshi.
‘The other eight heads,’ Irravel said.
‘I’m going to throw them away from the ship. You’ll be able to locate them easily enough. While I’m doing that, I’m going to retreat, and you’re going to leave.’
‘We could end this now,’ Mirsky said.
‘I need those heads.’
‘They really fucked with your psychology big-time, didn’t they?’ Mirsky raised her weapon and began shooting at Seven and the other pirates. Irravel watched her carve up the remaining heads; splintering frozen bone into the vacuum.
‘No!’
‘Sorry,’ Mirsky said. ‘Had to do it, Veda.’
Seven clutched at his chest, fingers mashing the pulp of the heads still tethered to his belt. She’d punctured his suit. As he tried to stem the dam-burst, his face was carved with the intolerable knowledge that his reign had just ended.
But something had hit Irravel, too.
‘Where am I?’ Irravel asked. ‘How am I thinking this?’
The woman’s voice was the colour of mahogany. ‘Somewhere safe. You died on the ice, but we got you back in time.’
‘For what?’
Mirsky sighed, as if this was something she would rather not have had to explain this soon. ‘To scan you, just like we did with the two frozen heads. Copy you into the ship.’
Maybe she should have felt horror, or indignation, or even relief that some part of her had been spared.
Instead, she just felt impatience.
‘What now?’
‘We’re working on it,’ Mirsky said.
‘We saved her body after she died,’ Mirsky said, wheezing slightly. She found it difficult to move around under what to Irravel was the ship’s normal two and a half gees of thrust. ‘After the battle we brought her back aboard.’
Irravel thought of her mother dying on the other ship, the one they were chasing. For years they had deliberately not narrowed the distance, holding back but never allowing the Hideyoshi to slip from view.
Until now, it hadn’t even occurred to Irravel to ask why.
She looked through the casket’s window, trying to match her own features against what she saw in the woman’s face, trying to project her own fifteen years into Mother Irravel’s adulthood.
‘Why did you keep her so cold?’
‘We had to extract what we could from her brain,’ Mirsky said, ‘memories and neural patterns. We trawled them and stored them in the ship.’
‘What good was that?’
‘We knew they’d come in useful again.’
She’d been cloned from Mother Irravel. They were not identical — no Mixmaster expertise could duplicate the precise biochemical environment of Mother Irravel’s womb, or the shaping experiences of her early infancy, and their personalities had been sculpted centuries apart, in totally different worlds. But they were still close copies. They even shared memories: scripted into Irravel’s mind by medichines, so that she barely noticed each addition to her own experiences.
‘Why did you do this?’ she asked.
‘Because Irravel began something,’ Mirsky said. ‘Something I promised I’d help her finish.’
‘Why are you interested in our weapons?’ the Nestbuilder asked. ‘We are not aware of any wars within the chordate phylum at this epoch.’
‘It’s a personal matter,’ Irravel said.
The Nestbuilder hovered a metre above the trade floor, suspended in a column of microgravity. They were oxygen-breathing arthropods that had once ascended to spacefaring capability. No longer intelligent, yet supported by their self-renewing machinery, they migrated from system to system, constructing elaborate, space-filling
