aside, usurped, crushed into a small ineffectual corner of her own skull. Something inexpressibly sinister and ancient now had immediate tenancy, squatting behind her eyes.
She heard herself speak again.
‘Me, do you mean?’
Skade seemed only mildly taken aback. Galiana admired the other Conjoiner her nerve.
‘Perhaps. Who would you be, exactly?’
I don’t have a name other than the one she gave me.‘
‘“She”?’ Skade asked amusedly. But her crest was flickering with nervous pale greens, showing terror even though her voice was calm.
‘Galiana,’ the entity replied. ‘Before I took her over. She called us — my mind — the wolves. We reached and infiltrated her ship, after we had destroyed the other. We didn’t understand much of what they were at first. But then we opened their skulls and absorbed their central nervous systems. We learned much more then. How they thought; how they communicated; what they had done to their minds.’
Galiana tried to move, even though Skade had already placed her in a state of paralysis. She tried to scream, but the Wolf — for that was exactly what she had called it — had complete control of her voice.
It was all coming back now.
‘Why didn’t you kill her?’ Skade said.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ the Wolf chided. ‘The question you should be asking is a different one: why didn’t she kill herself before it came to this? She could have, you know; it was within her power to destroy her entire ship and everyone inside it simply by willing it.’
‘So why didn’t she?’
‘We came to an arrangement, after we had killed her crew and left her alone. She would not kill herself provided we allowed her to return home. She knew what it meant: I would invade her skull, rummage through her memories.’
‘Why her?’
‘She was your queen, Skade. As soon as we read the minds of her crew, we knew she was the one we really needed.’
Skade was silent. Aquamarines and jades chased each other in slow waves from brow to nape. ‘She would never have risked leading you here.’
‘She would, provided she thought the risk was outweighed by the benefit of an early warning. It was an accommodation, you see. She gave us time to learn, and the hope of learning more. Which we have, Skade.’
Skade touched a finger to her upper lip and then held it before her as if testing the direction of the wind. ‘If you truly are a superior alien intelligence, and you knew where we were, you’d already have come to us.’
‘Very good, Skade. And you’re right, in a sense. We don’t know exactly where Galiana has brought us. I know, but I can’t communicate that knowledge to my fellows. But that won’t matter. You are a starfaring culture — fragmented into different factions, it is true — but from our perspective those distinctions do not matter. From the memories we drank, and the memories in which we still swim, we know the approximate locus of space that you inhabit. You are expanding, and the surface area of your expansion envelope grows geometrically, always increasing the likelihood of an encounter between us. It has already happened once, and it may have happened elsewhere, at other points on the sphere’s boundary.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Skade asked.
‘To frighten you. Why else?’
But Skade was too clever for that. ‘No. There’s got to be another reason. You want to make me think you might be useful, don’t you?’
‘How so?’ the voice of the Wolf purred amusedly.
‘I could kill you here and now. After all, the warning has already been delivered.’
Had Galiana been able to move, or even just blink, she would have signalled an emphatic ‘yes’. She did want to die. What else had she to live for, now? Clavain was gone. Felka was gone. She was sure of that, as sure as she was that no amount of Conjoiner ingenuity would ever free her of the thing inside her head.
Skade was right. She had served her purpose, performed her final duty to the Mother Nest. It knew that the wolves were out there, were, in all likelihood, creeping closer, scenting human blood.
There was no reason to keep her alive a moment longer. The Wolf would always be looking for a chance to escape her head, no matter how vigilant Skade was. The Mother Nest might learn something from it, some marginal hint of a motive or a weakness, but against that had to be set the awful consequences of its escape.
Galiana knew. Just as the Wolf had access to her memories, so, by some faint and perhaps deliberate process of back-contamination, she sensed some of its own history. There was nothing concrete; almost nothing that she could actually put into words. But what she sensed was an aeons-old litany of surgical xenocide; of a dreadful process of cleansing waged upon emergent sentient species. The memories had been preserved with grim bureaucratic exactitude across hundreds of millions of years of Galactic time, each new extinction merely an entry in the ledger. She sensed the occasional frenzied cleansing — a cull that had been initiated later than was desirable. She even sensed the rare instance of brutal intercession where an earlier cull had not been performe satisfactorily.
But what she did not sense, ever, was ultimate failure.
Suddenly, shockingly, the Wolf eased aside. It was letting her speak.
‘Skade,’ Galiana said.
‘What is it?’
‘Kill me, please. Kill me now.’
CHAPTER 1
Antoinette Bax watched the police proxy unfold itself from the airlock. The machine was all planar black armour and sharp articulated limbs, like a sculpture made from many pairs of scissors. It was deathly cold, for it had been clamped to the outside of one of the three police cutters which now pinned her ship. A rime of urine- coloured propellant frost boiled off it in pretty little whorls and helices.
‘Please stand back,’ the proxy said. ‘Physical contact is not advised.’
The propellant cloud smelt toxic. She slammed down her visor as the proxy scuttled by.
‘I don’t know what you’re hoping to find,’ she said, following at a discreet distance.
I won’t know until I find it,‘ the proxy said. It had already identified the frequency for her suit radio.
‘Hey, look. I’m not into smuggling. I like not being dead too much.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘Why would anyone smuggle something to Hospice Idlewild? They’re a bunch of ascetic religious nuts, not contraband fiends.’
‘Know a thing or two about contraband, do you?’
‘I never said…’
‘Never mind. The point is, Miss Bax, this is war. I’d say nothing’s ruled out.’
The proxy halted and flexed, large flakes of yellow ice cracking away from its articulation points. The machine’s body was a flanged black egg from which sprouted numerous limbs, manipulators and weapons. There was no room for the pilot in there, just enough space for the machinery needed to keep the proxy in contact with the pilot. The pilot was still inside one of the three cutters, stripped of nonessential organs and jammed into a life- support canister.
‘You can check with the Hospice, if you like,’ she said.
I’ve already queried the Hospice. But in matters such as this, one likes to be absolutely certain that things are above board — wouldn’t you agree?‘
‘I’ll agree to anything you like if it gets you off my ship.’
‘Mm. And why would you be in such a hurry?’
‘Because I’ve got a slush… sorry, a cryogenic passenger. One I don’t want thawing on me.’
‘I’d like to see this passenger very much. Is that possible?’