She nodded. She was there now. No more pussyfooting here either. ‘The police proxy knew, didn’t it? Just couldn’t get the evidence together, I guess — or maybe it was just letting me stew, waiting to see how much I knew.’ The mask slipped again. ‘I’m not entire…’ ‘I guess Xavier had to be in on it. He knows this ship like the back of his hand, every subsystem, every Goddamned wire. He certainly would have known how to hide Lyle Merrick aboard it.’ ‘Lyle Merrick, Little Miss?’ ‘You know. You remember. Not the Lyle Merrick, of course, just a copy of him. Beta– or alpha-level, I don’t know. Don’t very much care either. Wouldn’t have made a fuck of a lot of difference in a court of law, would it?’ ‘Now…’ ‘It’s you, Beast. You’re him. Lyle Merrick died when the authorities executed him for the collision. But that wasn’t the end, was it? You kept on going. Xavier hid a copy of Lyle aboard my father’s fucking ship. You’re it.’ Beast said nothing for several seconds. Antoinette watched the slow, hypnotic play of colours and numerics on the console. She felt as if a part of her had been violated, as if everything in the universe she had ever felt she could trust had just been wadded up and thrown away. When Beast answered, the tone of his voice was mockingly unchanged. ‘Little Miss… I mean Antoinette… You’re wrong.’ ‘Of course I’m not wrong. You’ve as good as admitted it.’ ‘No. You don’t understand.’ ‘What part don’t I understand?’ ‘It wasn’t Xavier who did this to me. Xavier helped — Xavier knew all about it — but it wasn’t his idea.’ ‘No?’ Tt was your father, Antoinette. He helped me.‘ She hit the console again, harder this time. And then walked out of her ship, intending never to set foot in it again. Lasher the pig slept for most of the trip out from Zodiacal Light . There was nothing for him to do, Scorpio had said, except at the very end of the operation, and even then there was only a one-in-four chance that he would be required to do anything other than turn his ship around. But at the back of his mind he had always known it would be him who had to do the dirty work. He registered no surprise at all when the tight-beam message from Zodiacal Light told him that his shuttle was the one in the right quadrant of the sky to intercept the vessel Skade had dropped behind her larger ship. ‘Lucky old Lasher,’ he said to himself. ‘You always wanted the glory. Now’s your big chance.’ He did not take the duty lightly, nor underestimate the risks to himself. The recovery operation was fraught with danger. The amount of fuel his shuttle carried was precisely rationed, just enough so that he could get back home again with a human-mass payload. But there was no room for error. Clavain had made it clear that there were to be no pointless heroics. If the trajectory of Skade’s shuttle took it even a kilometre outside the safe volume in which a rendezvous was possible, Lasher — or whoever the lucky one was — was to turn back, ignoring it. The only concession to be made was that each of Clavain’s shuttles carried a single modified missile, the warhead stripped out and replaced with a transponder. If they got within range of Skade’s shuttle they could attach the beacon to its hull. The beacon would keep emitting its signal for a century of subjective time, five hundred years of worldtime. It would not be easy, but there would remain a faint chance of homing in on it again, before it fell beyond the well-mapped sphere of human space. It was enough to know that they would not have abandoned Felka entirely. Lasher saw it now. His shuttle had homed in on Skade’s, following updated coordinates from Zodiacal Light . Skade’s shuttle was now in free-fall, having burned its last microgram of antimatter. It was visible in his forward window: a gunmetal barb illuminated by his forward floods. He opened the channel back to the lighthugger. ‘This is Lasher. I see it now. It’s definitely a shuttle. Can’t tell you what type, but it doesn’t look like one of ours.‘ He slowed his approach. It would have been nice to wait for Scorpio’s response, but that was a luxury he did not have. There was already a twenty-minute timelag back to Zodiacal Light , and the distance was stretching continually as the larger ship maintained its ten-gee acceleration. He was permitted exactly thirty minutes here, and then he had to begin his return journey. If he stayed a minute longer he would never catch up with the lighthugger. It would be just enough time to establish airlock connections between two unfamiliar ships, just enough time for him to get aboard and find Clavain’s daughter, or whoever she was. He didn’t care who he was rescuing, only that Scorpio had told him to do it. So what if Scorpio was only doing what Clavain had told him to do? It didn’t matter, did not reduce in any way the burning soldierly admiration Lasher felt for his leader. He had followed Scorpio’s career almost from the moment Scorpio had arrived in Chasm City. It was impossible to underestimate the effect of Scorpio’s coming. Before, the pigs had been a squabbling rabble, content to snuffle around in the shiftiest layers of the fallen city. Scorpio had galvanised them. He had become a criminal messiah, a figure so mythic that many pigs doubted that he even existed. Lasher had collected Scorpio’s crimes, committing them to memory with the avidity of a religious acolyte. He had studied them, marvelling at their brutal ingenuity, their haiku-like simplicity. How must it feel, he had wondered, to have been the author of such jewel-like atrocities? Later, he had moved into Scorpio’s realm of influence, and then ascended through the shadowy hierarchies of the criminal underworld. He remembered his first meeting with Scorpio, the sense of mild disappointment when he turned out to be just another pig like himself. Gradually, however, that realisation had only sharpened his admiration. Scorpio was flesh and blood, and that made his achievements all the more remarkable. Lasher, nervously at first, became one of Scorpio’s main operatives, and then one of his deputies. And then Scorpio had vanished. It was said that he had gone into space, off to engage in sensitive negotiations with some other criminal group elsewhere in the system — the Skyjacks, perhaps. It was unsafe for Scorpio to move at any time, but most especially during war. Lasher had forced himself to deal with the likely but unpalatable truth: Scorpio was probably dead. Months had passed. Then Lasher had heard the news: Scorpio was in custody, or a kind of custody. The spiders had captured him, it turned out, maybe after the zombies had already picked him up. And now the spiders were being pressured into turning Scorpio over to the Ferrisville Convention. That was it, then. Scorpio’s bright, inglorious reign had come to an end. The Convention could make any charge stick, and in wartime there was almost no crime that didn’t carry the death penalty. They had Scorpio, the prize they had sought for so long. There would be a show trial and then an execution, and Scorpio’s passage into legend would be complete. But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the usual contradictory rumours, but some of them had spoken of the same thing — that Scorpio was alive and well, and no longer in anyone’s custody; that Scorpio had made it back to Chasm City and was now holed up in the
