consciousness. Unlike Skade, his brain was not built to support that kind of thing for more than one or two actual seconds, and he had suffered the equivalent of a massive and sudden heatstroke.
But there had been no lasting ill effects and he had earned their trust. It was a price he was more than willing to pay. For the remainder of the trip he was free to move around the ship as he pleased, while the other two gradually divested themselves of their outer spacesuit layers. The banshees never came back, and
I can’t really blame you for not trusting me before,‘ Clavain said, when he and Xavier were alone.
‘I care about her.’
‘It’s obvious. And she took a hell of a risk coming out here to rescue me. If I’d been in your shoes I’d have tried to talk her out of it as well.’
‘Don’t take it personally.’
Clavain dragged a stylus across the compad he had balanced on his knees, rerouting a number of logic pathways between the control web and the dorsal communications cluster. ‘I won’t.’
‘What about you, Clavain? What’s going to happen when we get to the Rust Belt?’
Clavain shrugged. ‘Up to you. You can drop me wherever it suits you. Carousel New Copenhagen’s as good as anywhere else.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’ll hand myself over to the authorities.’
‘The Demarchists?’
He nodded. ‘Although it’d be much too dangerous for me to approach them directly, out here in open space. I’ll need to go through a neutral party, such as the Convention.’
Xavier nodded. ‘I hope you get what you’re hoping for. You took a risk as well’
‘Not the first, I assure you.’ Clavain paused and lowered his voice. It was unnecessary — they were many dozens of metres away from Antoinette — but he felt the need all the same. ‘Xavier… while we’re alone… there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
Xavier peered at him through scuffed grey data-visualisation goggles. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I gather you knew her father, and that you handled the repair of this ship when he was running it.’
‘True enough.’
‘Then I suppose you know all about it. Perhaps more than Antoinette?’
‘She’s a damned good pilot, Clavain.’
Clavain smiled. ‘Which is a polite way of saying she’s not very interested in the technical aspects of this ship?’
‘Nor was her father,’ Xavier said, with a touch of defensiveness. ‘Running a commercial operation like this is enough trouble without worrying about every subroutine.’
‘I understand. I’m no expert myself. But I couldn’t help noticing back there, when the subpersona intervened…’ He left the remark hanging.
‘You thought that was odd.’
‘It nearly got us killed,’ Clavain said. ‘It fired too soon, against my direct orders.’
‘They weren’t orders, Clavain, they were recommendations.’
‘My mistake. But the point is, it shouldn’t have happened. Even if the subpersona had some control over the weapons — and in a civilian ship I’d regard that as unusual, to say the least — it still shouldn’t have acted without a direct command. And it definitely shouldn’t have panicked.’
Xavier’s laugh was hard and nervous. ‘Panicked?’
‘That’s what it felt like to me.’ Clavain couldn’t see Xavier’s eyes behind the data goggles.
‘Machines don’t panic, Clavain.’
‘I know. Especially not gamma-level subpersonae, which is what Beast would have to be.’
Xavier nodded. ‘Then it can’t have been panic, can it?’
‘I suppose not.’ Clavain frowned and returned to his compad, dragging the stylus through the bright ganglia of logic pathways like someone stirring a plate of spaghetti.
They docked in Carousel New Copenhagen. Clavain was prepared to go on his way there and then, but Antoinette and Xavier were having none of it. They insisted that he join them for a farewell meal elsewhere in the carousel. After giving the matter a few moments’ thought, Clavain happily assented; it would only take a couple of hours and it would give him a valuable chance to acclimatise before he commenced what he imagined would be a perilous solo journey. And he still felt he owed them thanks, especially after Xavier allowed him to take whatever he wanted from his wardrobe.
Clavain was taller and thinner than Xavier, so it took some creativity to both dress himself and not feel that he was taking anything particularly valuable. He retained the skintight spacesuit inner layer, slipping on a bulging high-collared vest that looked faintly like the kind of inflatable jacket pilots wore when they ditched in water. He found a pair of loose black trousers that came down to his shins, which looked terrible, even with the skintight, until he found a pair of rugged black boots that reached nearly to his knees. When he inspected himself in a mirror he concluded that he looked odd rather than bizarre, which he supposed was a step in the right direction. Finally he trimmed his beard and moustache and neatened his hair by combing it back from his brow in snowy waves.
Antoinette and Xavier were waiting for him, already freshened up. They took an intra-rim train from one part of Carousel New Copenhagen to another. Antoinette told him that the line had been put in after the spokes were destroyed; until then the quickest way to get about had been to go up to the hub and down again, and by the time the intra-rim line was installed it could not take the most direct route. It zigzagged its way along the rim, swerving and veering and occasionally taking detours out on to the skin of the habitat, just to avoid a piece of precious interior real estate. As the train’s direction of travel shifted relative to the carousel’s spin vector, Clavain felt his stomach knot and unknot in a variety of queasy ways. It reminded him of dropship insertions into the atmosphere of Mars.
He snapped back to the present as the train arrived in a vast interior plaza. They disembarked on to a glass- floored and glass-walled platform that was suspended many tens of metres above an astonishing sight.
Beneath their feet, thrusting through the inner wall of the carousel’s rim, was the front of an enormous spacecraft. It was a blunt-nosed, rounded design, scratched, gouged and scorched, with all its appendages — pods, spines and antennae — ripped clean away. The spacecraft’s cabin windows, which ran around the pole of the nose in a semicircle, were shattered black apertures, like eye-sockets. Around the collar of the ship where it met the fabric of the carousel was a congealed grey foam of solidified emergency sealant that had the porous texture of pumice.
‘What happened here?’ Clavain asked.
‘A fucking idiot called Lyle Merrick,’ Antoinette said.
Xavier took over the story. ‘That’s Merrick’s ship, or what’s left of it. Thing was a chemical-rocket scow, about the most primitive ship still making a living in the Rust Belt. Merrick stayed in business because he had the right clients — people the authorities would never, ever suspect of trusting their cargo to such a shit-heap. But Merrick got into trouble one day.’
‘It was about sixteen, seventeen years ago,’ Antoinette said. ‘The authorities were chasing him, trying to force him to let them board and inspect his cargo. Merrick was trying to get under cover — there was a repair well on the far side of the carousel that could just accommodate his ship. But he didn’t make it. Fluffed his approach, or lost control, or just bottled out. Stupid twat rammed straight into the rim.’
‘You’re only looking at a small part of his ship,’ Xavier said. ‘The rest of it, trailing behind, was mostly fuel tank. Even with foam-phase catalysis you need a lot of fuel for a chemical rocket. When the front hit, she went clean through the carousel’s rim, deforming it with the force of the impact. Lyle made it, but the fuel tanks blew up. There’s one hell of a crater out there, even now.’
‘Casualties?’ Clavain asked.
‘A few,’ Xavier said.
‘More than a few,’ said Antoinette. ‘A few hundred.’
They told him that suited hyperprimates had sealed the rim, with only a few deaths amongst the emergency
