last place I wanted to hang around. And Beast wasn’t enjoying it one bit. The ship wanted out as much as I did. Problem is, we got tokamak failure on the up and out.’ ‘You were dead meat.’ ‘We should have been,’ Antoinette said, nodding. ‘Especially as the spiders were still nearby.’ Xavier leant back in his chair and swigged an inch of beer. Now that he had her safe, now that he knew how things had turned out, he was obviously enjoying hearing the story. ‘So what happened — did you get the tokamak to reboot?’ ‘Later, yes, when we were back in empty space. It lasted long enough to get me back to Yellowstone, but I needed the tugs for the slow-down.’ ‘So you managed to reach escape velocity, or were you still able to insert into orbit?’ ‘Neither, Xave. We were falling back to the planet. So I did the only thing I could, which was ask for help.’ She finished her own beer, watching his reaction. ‘Help?’ ‘From the spiders.’ ‘No shit? You had the nerve — the balls — to do that?’ ‘I’m not sure about the balls, Xave. But yes, I guess I had the nerve.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, what else was I going to do? Sit there and die? From my point of view, with a fuck of a lot of cloud coming up real fast, being conscripted into a hive mind suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.’ ‘I still can’t believe… even after that dream you’ve been replaying?’ ‘I figured that had to be propaganda. The truth couldn’t be quite that bad.’ ‘But maybe nearly as bad.’ ‘When you’re about to die, Xave, you take what you can get.’ He pointed the open neck of the beer bottle at her. ‘But…’ She read his mind. ‘I’m still here, yeah. I’m glad you noticed.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘They saved me.’ She said it again, almost having to reassure herself that it had really happened. ‘The spiders saved me. Sent down some kind of drone missile, or tug, or whatever it was. The thing clamped on to the hull and gave me a shove — a big shove — all the way out of Tangerine Dream’s gravity well. Next thing I knew I was falling back to Yellowstone. Had to get the tokamak up and running, but at least now I had more than a few minutes to do it in.’ ‘And the spiders… they left?’ She nodded vigorously. ‘Their main guy, this old geezer, he spoke to me just before they sent the drone. Gave me one hell of a warning, I admit. Said if we ever crossed paths again — like, ever — he’d kill me. I think he meant it, too.’ ‘I suppose you have to count yourself lucky. I mean, not everyone gets let off with a warning where the spiders are concerned.’ ‘I guess so, Xave.’ ‘This old man — the spider — anyone we’d have heard of?’ She shook her head. ‘Said his name was Clavain, that’s all. Didn’t mean shit to me.’ ‘Not the Clavain, obviously?’ She stopped fiddling with the beer mat and looked at him. ‘And who would the Clavain be, Xave?’ He looked at her as if she was faintly stupid, or at the very least worryingly forgetful. ‘History, Antoinette, that boring stuff about the past. You know — before the Melding Plague, all that jazz?’ ‘I wasn’t born then, Xave. It’s not even of academic interest to me.’ She held her bottle up to the light. ‘I need another one. What are the chances of getting it in the next hour, do you think?’ Xavier clicked a finger at the nearest servitor. The machine spun around, stiffened itself, took a step in their direction and fell over. But when she was back at their place, Antoinette began to wonder. In the evening, when she had blasted away the worst effects of the beer, leaving her head clear but ringingly delicate, she squirrelled herself into Xavier’s office, powered up the museum-piece terminal and set about querying the carousel’s data hub for information on Clavain. She had to admit that she was curious now, but even if she had been curious during the journey home from the gas giant she would have had to wait until now to access any extensive systemwide archives. It would have been too risky to send a query from Storm Bird , and the ship’s own memories were not the most compendious. Antoinette had never known anything except a post-plague environment, so she had no expectations of actually finding any useful information, even if the data she was looking for might once have existed. The system’s data networks had been rebuilt almost from scratch during the post-plague years, and much that had been archived before then had been corrupted or erased during the crisis. But to her surprise there was rather a lot out there about Clavain, or at least about a Clavain. The famous Clavain, the one that Xavier had known about, had been born on Earth way back in the twenty-second century, in one of the last perfect summers before the glaciers rolled in and the place became a pristine snowball. He had gone to Mars and fought against the Conjoiners in their earliest incarnation. Antoinette read that again and frowned: against the Conjoiners? But she read on. Clavain had gained notoriety during his Martian days. They called him the Butcher of Tharsis, the man who had turned the course of the Battle of the Bulge. He had authorised the use of red-mercury, nuclear and foam-phase weapons against spider forces, gouging glassy kilometre-wide craters across the face of Mars. In some accounts his deeds made him an automatic war criminal. Yet according to some of the less partisan reports, Clavain’s actions could be interpreted as having saved many millions of lives, both spider and allied, that would otherwise have been lost in a protracted ground campaign. Equally, there were reports of his heroism: of Clavain saving the lives of trapped soldiers and civilians; of him sustaining many injuries, recovering and going straight back to the front line. He had been there when the spiders brought down the aerial docking tower at Chryse, and had been pinned in the rubble for eighteen days with no food or water except the supplies in his skinsuit. When they pulled him out they found him clutching a cat that had also been trapped in the ruins, its spine snapped by masonry and yet still alive, nourished by portions from Clavain’s own rations. The cat died a week later. It took Clavain three months to recover. But that hadn’t been the end of his career. He had been captured by the spider queen, the woman called Galiana who had created the whole spider mess in the first place. For months Galiana had held him prisoner, finally releasing him when the cease-fire was negotiated. Thereafter, there had always been a weird bond between the two former adversaries. When the uneasy peace had begun to crumble, it had been Clavain who went down to try to iron things out with the spider queen. And it was on that mission that he was presumed to have ‘defected’, throwing in his lot with the Conjoiners, accepting
