darkly threatening structure some of the pigs knew as the Chateau des Corbeaux, the one they said had the haunted cellar. And that he was the guest of the Chateau’s mysterious tenant, and was now putting together the fabled thing that had often been spoken of but which had never quite come into existence before. The army of pigs. Lasher had rejoined his old master and learned that the rumours were true. Scorpio was working for, or in some strange collaboration with, the old man they called Clavain. And the two of them were plotting the theft of a ship belonging to the Ultras, something that the orthodox criminal rulebook said could not even be contemplated, let alone attempted. Lasher had been intrigued and terrified, even more so when he learned that the theft was just the prelude to something even more audacious. How could he resist? And so here, light-years from Chasm City, light- years from anything he could call familiar, he was. He had served Scorpio and served him well, not just treading in his footsteps but anticipating them; even, sometimes, dancing ahead of his master, earning Scorpio’s quiet praise. He was near the shuttle now. It had the smooth worn-pebble look of Con-joiner machinery. It was completely dark. He tracked the floods across it, searching for the point where Clavain had told him he would find an airlock: an almost invisibly fine seam in the hull that would only reveal itself when he was close by. Distance to the hull was now fifteen metres, with a closing speed of one metre per second. The shuttle was small enough that he would have no difficulty finding the hostage aboard it, provided Skade had kept her word. It happened when he was ten metres from the hull. It grew from the heart of the Conjoiner spacecraft: a mote of light, like the first spark of the rising sun. Lasher did not have time to blink. Skade saw the fairy-light glint of the crustbuster proximity device. It was not difficult to recognise. There were no stars aft of Nightshade now, only an inky spreading pool of total blackness. Relativity was squeezing the visible universe into a belt that encircled the ship. But Clavain’s ship was in nearly the same velocity frame as Nightshade , so it still appeared to lie directly behind her. The pinprick flare of the weapon studded that darkness like a single misplaced star. Skade examined the light, corrected it for modest differential red shift and determined that the multiple-teratonne blast yield was consistent only with the device itself detonating, plus a small residual mass of antimatter. A shuttle-sized spacecraft had been destroyed by her weapon, but not a starship. The explosion of a lighthugger, a machine which had already sunk claws deep into the infinite energy well of the quantum vacuum, would have outshone the crustbuster by three orders of magnitude. So Clavain had been cleverer than her again. No, she corrected herself: not cleverer, but precisely as clever . Skade had made no mistakes yet, and though Clavain had parried all her attacks, he had yet to strike at her. The advantage was still hers, and she was certain that she had inconvenienced him with at least one of her attacks. At the very least she had forced him to burn fuel he would sooner have conserved. More probably she had made him divert his efforts into countering her attacks rather than preparing for the battle that lay ahead around Resurgam. In every military sense she had lost nothing except the ability ever to bluff convincingly again. But she had never been counting on that anyway. It was time to do what had to be done. ‘You lying fuck.’ Xavier looked up as Antoinette stormed into their quarters. He was lying on his back on the bunk, a compad balanced between his knees. Antoinette had a momentary glimpse of lines of source code scrolling down the ‘pad, the symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalised stanzas of some alien poetry. Xavier had a stylus gripped between his teeth. It dropped from his mouth as he opened it in shock. The compad tumbled to the floor. ‘Antoinette?’ ‘I know.’ ‘You know what?’ ‘About the Mandelstam Ruling. About Lyle Merrick. About Storm Bird . About Beast. About you.’ Xavier slid around on the bunk, his feet touching the floor. He pushed a few fingers through the black mop of his hair, bashfully. ‘About what?’ ‘Don’t lie to me, you fuck!’ Then she was on him in a blind, pummelling rage. There was no real violence behind her punches; under any other circumstances they would have been playful. But Xavier hid his face, absorbing her anger against his forearms. He was trying to say something to her. She was blanking him out in her fury, refusing to listen to his snivelling little justifications. Finally the rage turned to tears. Xavier stopped her from hitting him, taking her wrists gently. ‘Antoinette,’ he said. She hit him one last time, then started weeping in earnest. She hated him and loved him at the same time. ‘It’s not my fault,’ Xavier said. ‘I swear it’s not my fault.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He looked at her, she returning his gaze through the blur of her tears. ‘Why didn’t I tell you?’ ‘That’s what I asked.’ ‘Because your father made me promise not to.’ When Antoinette had calmed down, when she was ready to listen, Xavier told her something of what had happened. Jim Bax had been a friend of Lyle Merrick’s for many years. The two of them had been freighter pilots, both working within and around the Rust Belt. Normally two pilots operating in the same trading sphere would have found it difficult to sustain a genuine friendship through the ups and downs of a systemwide economy; there would have been too many occasions where their interests overlapped. But because Jim and Lyle operated in radically different niches with very different client lists, rivalry had never threatened their relationship. Jim Bax hauled heavy loads on rapid high-burn trajectories, usually at short notice and usually, though not always, more or less within the bounds of legality. Certainly Jim did not court criminal clients, although it was not exactly true to say that he turned them away, either. Lyle, by contrast, worked almost exclusively with criminals. They recognised that his slow, frail, unreliable chemical-drive scow was about the least likely ship to attract the attention of the Convention’s customs and excise cutters. Lyle could not guarantee that his loads would arrive at their destinations quickly, or sometimes at all, but he could almost always guarantee that they would arrive uninspected, and that there would be no inconvenient lines of questioning extending back to his clients. So, in a more than modest fashion, Lyle Merrick prospered. He went to a great deal of trouble to hide his earnings from the authorities, maintaining a fastidious illusion of being constantly on the edge of insolvency. But behind the scenes, and by the standards of the day, he was a moderately wealthy man, far wealthier, in fact, than Jim Bax would ever be. Wealthy enough, indeed, to afford to have himself backed-up once
