He didn’t know. He sensed that if he could only think things through, if only he could have a quiet minute alone, he could put all the pieces back together. There had been something, hadn’t there? A huge room full of dark, menacing shapes.
All he needed was peace and quiet.
But there was also a ringing tone in his head: a pressure-loss alarm. He glanced at his suit exterior, searching for the telltale pulse of pink that would highlight the wound. There it was: a smudge of rose across the back of his hand, the one that now held a knife. He returned the knife to the vacant position on his belt and reached instinctively for the sealant spray. Then he realised that he had already used the spray; that the smudge of pink was leaking around the sides of an intricately curved and curled scab of hardened sealant. The solidified grey worm appeared to form a complex runic inscription.
He looked at the glove from a different angle and saw a message scrawled in the tangled track of the worm:
It was his handwriting.
The two figures had reached the ends of the wound-shaped gash in the ice and were now converging on his position as quickly as they were able. He judged that they would arrive at the base of the grapple in under a minute. It would take him almost as long to work his way along the line. He wondered about jumping for it, hoping that he could judge it correctly and not sail past the corvette, but at the back of his mind he knew that the adhesive membrane would not allow him to kick off. He would have to shin up the line hand-overhand, despite the pain in his head and the constant feeling that he was on the verge of teetering back into unconsciousness.
He blacked out again, but more briefly this time, and when he saw his glove and the figures converging below him he guessed that he was right to head for the ship. He reached the lock at the same time as the first of the figures — the one with the ridged helmet, he saw now — arrived at the barbed grapple.
His perceptions now told him that the surface of the comet was a vertical black wall, with the tether lines emerging horizontally. The two others were flies glued to that wall, crouched and foreshortened and about to traverse the same bridge he had just crossed. Clavain fell back into the lock and palmed the emergency repressurisation control. The outer door snicked silently shut; air began to flood in. Instantly he felt the pain in his head lessen, and gasped in the sheer relief of the moment.
The override permitted the inner door to open almost before the outer door had sealed. Clavain hurled himself into the corvette’s interior, kicked off from the far wall, knocked his skull against a bulkhead and then collided with the front of the flight deck. He did not bother getting into his seat or fastening restraints. He simply fired the corvette’s thrusters — full emergency burn — and heard a dozen klaxons scream at him that this was not an auspicious thing to do.
‘Shut up!’ Clavain shouted.
For a moment the corvette pulled away from the comet’s surface. The ship made perhaps two and half meters before the grapple lines extended to their maximum tension and held taut. The jolt threw him against a wall; he felt something break like a dry twig somewhere between his heart and his waist. The comet had moved too, of course, but only imperceptibly; he might as well have been tethered to an immovable rock at the centre of the universe.
‘Clavain.’ The voice came over the corvette’s radio. It was extraordinarily calm. His memories had begun to reassemble, fitfully, and with some hesitation he felt able to apply a name to his tormentor.
‘Skade. Hello.’ He spoke through pain, certain that he had broken at least one rib and probably bruised one or two others.
‘Clavain… what exactly are you doing?’
‘I seem to be attempting to steal this ship.’
He pulled himself into the seat now, wincing at multiple flares of pain. He groaned as he stretched restraint webbing across his chest. The thrusters were threatening to go into autonomous shutdown mode. He threw desperate commands at the corvette. Grapple retraction wouldn’t help his situation: it would just reel in Skade and Remontoire — he remembered both of them now — and then the two of them would be on the outside of the hull, where they would have to stay. They would probably be safe if he abandoned them in space, drifting, but this was a Closed Council mission. Almost no one else would know they were out here.
‘Full thrust…’ Clavain said aloud, to himself. He knew a burst of full thrust would get him away from the comet. Either it would sever the grapple lines or it would rip chunks of the comet’s surface away with him.
‘Clavain,’ said a man’s voice, ‘I think you need to think about this.’
Neither of them could reach him neurally. The corvette would not allow those kinds of signals through its hull.
‘Thanks, Rem… but as a matter of fact, I’ve already given it a fair bit of thought. She wants those weapons too badly. It’s the wolves, isn’t it, Skade? You need the weapons for when the wolves come.’
‘I as good as spelled it out to you, Clavain. Yes, we need the weapons to defend ourselves against the wolves. Is that so reprehensible? Is ensuring our own survival such a damning thing to do? What would you prefer — that we capitulate, offer ourselves up to them?’
‘How do you know they’re coming?’
‘We don’t. We merely consider their arrival to be likely, based on the information available to us…’
‘There’s more to it than that.’ His fingers skated over the main thrust controls. In a few seconds he would have to use full burn or stay behind.
‘We just know, Clavain. That’s all you have to know. Now let us back aboard the corvette. We’ll forget all about this, I assure you.’
‘Not good enough, I’m afraid.’
He fired the main engine, working the other thrusters to steer the blinding violet arc of the drive flame away from the comet’s surface. He did not want to hurt either of them. Clavain disliked Skade but wished her no harm. Remontoire was his friend, and he had only left him on the comet because he did not see the point of implicating him in what he was about to do.
The corvette stretched against its guys. He could feel the vibration of the engine working its way through the hull, into his bones. Overload indicators were flicking into the red.
‘Clavain, listen to me,’ Skade said. ‘You can’t take that ship. What are you going to do with it — defect to the Demarchists?’
‘It’s a thought.’
‘It’s also suicide. You’ll never make it to Yellowstone. If we don’t kill you, the Demarchists will.’
Something snapped. The shuttle yawed and then slammed against the restraints of the remaining grapple lines. Through the cockpit window Clavain saw the severed line whiplash into the surface of the comet, slicing through the caul of stabilising membrane. It gashed a meter-wide wound in the surface. Black soot erupted out like octopus ink.
‘Skade’s right. You won’t make it, Clavain — there’s nowhere for you to go. Please, as a friend — I beg you not to do this.’
‘Don’t you understand, Rem? She wants those weapons so she can take them with her. Those twelve ships? They’re not all for the taskforce. They’re part of something bigger. It’s an evacuation fleet.’
He felt the jolt as another line snapped, coiling into the comet with savage energy.
‘So what if they are, Clavain?’ Skade said.
‘What about the rest of humanity? What are those poor fools meant to do when the wolves arrive? Take their own chances?’
‘It’s a Darwinian universe.’
‘Wrong answer, Skade.’
The final line snapped at that moment. Suddenly he was accelerating away from the comet at full burn, squashed into his seat. He yelped at the pain from his damaged ribs. He watched the indicators normalise, the needles trembling back into green or white. The motor pitch died away to subsonic; the hull oscillations subsided. Skade’s comet grew smaller.
By eye, Clavain orientated himself toward the sharp point of light that was Epsilon Eridani.
