Xavier tapped commands into his sleeve, disconnecting his comms from the subpersona. Let the bastard thing stew a hit , he thought. He glanced at the clock. Four hours, fifty-five minutes, and he was still no closer to identifying the problem. In fact, one or two lines of enquiry that had looked quite promising a few minutes earlier had turned out to be resolute dead ends. ‘Fuck this bastard piece of…’ Something pulsed green on his sleeve. Xavier studied it through a fog of irritation and mild panic. How ironic it would be, he thought, if the shop went out of business anyway, even though he had stayed behind… His sleeve was telling him that he was receiving an urgent signal from outside Carousel New Copenhagen. It was coming in right at that moment, routed through to the shop via the carousel’s general comms net. The message was talk-only, and there was no option to respond in real time, since whoever was transmitting was too far downstream. Which meant that whoever was sending was well outside the Rust Belt. Xavier told his sleeve to route the message through to his helmet, spooling back to the start of the transmission. ‘Xavier… I hope you get this. I hope that the shop is still in business, and that you haven’t called in too many favours recently. Because I’m going to have to ask you to call in a hell of a lot more.’ ‘Antoinette,’ he said aloud despite himself, grinning like an idiot. ‘All you need to know is what I’m about to tell you. The rest we can go over later, in person. I’m on my way back now, but I’ve got way too much delta-vee to make the Rust Belt. You need to get a salvage tug up to my speed, and pretty damn quickly. Haven’t they got a couple of Taurus IVs over at the Lazlo dock? One of those can handle Storm Bird easily. I’m sure they owe us for that job down to Dax-Autrichiem last year.’ She gave him coordinates and a vector and told him to be alert for banshee activity in the sector she had specified. Antoinette was right: she was moving very quickly indeed. Xavier wondered what had happened, but figured that he would find out soon enough. The timing was tight, too. She had left it to the last minute to transmit the message, which only gave him a narrow window to sort out the deal with the Taurus IVs. No more than half a day, or the tugs would not be able to reach her. Then the problem would be ten times harder to solve, and would require the calling-in of favours far outside Xavier’s range. Antoinette liked to live dangerously, he reflected. He turned his attention back to the hauler. He was no closer to solving the problem with the nav system, but somehow it no longer weighed on his mind with quite the same sense of extreme urgency. Xavier prodded his sleeve again, reconnecting with the subpersona. It buzzed immediately in his ear. It was as if it had been talking to him all along, even when he was no longer listening. ‘… fault yet? It is most strenuously urged that you remedy this error within the promised time period. Failure to comply with the terms of the repair bid will render you liable to penalty charges of not more than sixty thousand Ferris units, or not more than one hundred and twenty thousand if the failure to comply is…’ He unplugged his sleeve again. Blissful silence descended. Nimbly, Xavier climbed off the chassis of the hauler. He hopped the short distance back on to one of the bay’s repair ledges, landing amid tools and spooled cable. He turned off the grip in his palm and steadied himself, taking one last look at the hauler to make sure he had left no valuable tools lying around on it. He had not. Xavier flipped open a panel in the oil-smeared wall of the bay. There were many controls behind the wall, huge toylike, grease-smeared buttons and levers. Some controlled electrical power and lighting; others governed pres-surisation and temperature. He ignored all these, his palm coming to rest above a very prominent lever marked in scarlet: the control that undid the docking clamps. Xavier looked back towards the hauler. It was silly, really, what he was going to do. A little more work, an hour or so, perhaps, and he might stand a very good chance of tracking down the fault. Then the hauler could go on its way, there would be no penalty fees and the repair shop’s slide into insolvency would have been arrested, if only for the next couple of weeks. Set against that, however, was the possibility that he would continue working for the next five hours and still not find the problem. Then there would be penalty charges, not more than one hundred and twenty thousand Ferris, as the hauler had helpfully informed him, as if knowing the upper limit in some way lessened the sting, and the fact that he would be five hours late in arranging Antoinette’s rescue. It was no contest, really. Xavier tugged down the scarlet lever. He felt it lock into its new position with a satisfyingly old-fashioned mechanical clunk. Immediately, orange warning lights started flashing all around the bay. An alarm sounded in his helmet, telling him to keep well away from moving metal. The clamps retracted in a rapid flurry, like telegraphic relays. For a moment the hauler hung suspended, magically. Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier. Xavier was denied a view of the hauler dwindling into the distance — the carousel’s rotation snatched it out of his line of sight. He could wait until the next pass, but he had work to do. The hauler was unharmed, he knew. Once it was clear of Copenhagen another repair specialist would undoubtedly pick it up. In a few hours it would probably be back on its way to the House of Correction with its load of unfashionably mutated passengers. Of course, there would still be hell to pay from a number of quarters: the passengers themselves, if they ever got wind; Swift-Augustine, the habitat that had sent them; the cartel that owned the hauler; maybe even the House of Correction itself, for endangering its clients. They could all go fuck themselves. He had heard from Antoinette, and that was all that mattered. CHAPTER 8 Clavain looked at the stars.
He was outside the Mother Nest, alone, perched head-up or head- down — he could not decide which — on the practically weightless surface of the hollowed-out comet. There was no other human being visible in any direction, no evidence, in fact, of any kind of human presence at all. A passing observer, spying Clavain, would have assumed that he had been cruelly marooned on the surface of the comet without ship, supplies or shelter. There was no evidence whatsoever of the vast clockwork which spun at the comet’s heart.
The comet spun slowly, periodically lifting the pale jewel of Epsilon Eridani above Clavain’s horizon. The star was brighter than all the others in the sky, but it still looked like a star rather than a sun. He felt the immense chill of the empty space between himself and the star. It was a mere 100
