Alastiar Reynolds

had felt her claw at his mind, understanding that he was attempting to escape. In that moment he sensed brutal neural power that he had never suspected before. Skade was unleashing everything that she had against him, damning caution and secrecy. He felt search-and-destroy algorithms scuttle across the vacuum on radio waves, burrowing into his skull, working their way through the layered strata of his mind, questing and grasping for the basal routines that would allow her to paralyse him, or throw him into unconsciousness, or simply kill him. Had he been a normal Conjoiner she would have succeeded in microseconds, instructing his neural implants to self- destruct in an incendiary orgy of heat and pressure, and he would have been lost. Instead he felt a pain as if someone were driving an iron piton into his skull, one cruel tap at a time.
He still slipped into unconsciousness. The moment could only have lasted two or three seconds, but when he emerged he felt a yawing dislocation, unable to remember where he was or what he was doing. All that remained was a searing chemical imperative, written in the adrenalin that was still flooding his blood. He didn’t quite know what had caused it, but the feeling was inescapable: an ancient mammalian fear. He was running away from something and his life was in great danger. He was suspended by one hand from a taut metal line. He glanced along the line — up — and saw a ship, a corvette, hovering above him, and knew, or hoped, that this was where he needed to be.
He started to tug himself up the line towards the waiting ship, half-remembering something that he had initiated and that he needed to continue. Then the pain notched itself higher and he fell back into unconsciousness.
Clavain came around as he drifted to a halt — Tell‘ was too strong a word for it — against the plastic membrane. Again he felt a basic urgency and struggled to make sense of the predicament he vaguely knew himself to be in. There above him was the ship — he remembered it from last time. He had been inching up the line, trying to reach it. Or had he been inching down it, trying to get away from something aboard it?
He looked laterally across the surface of wherever he was and saw two figures beckoning him.
note 200
The voice — the female presence in his head — was forceful but not entirely lacking in compassion. There was regret there, but it was the kind of regret a teacher might entertain for a promising pupil that had let her down. Was the voice disappointed because he was about to fail, or disappointed because he had nearly succeeded?
He didn’t know. He sensed that if he could only think things through, if only he could have a quiet minute alone, he could put all the pieces back together. There had been something, hadn’t there? A huge room full of dark, menacing shapes.
All he needed was peace and quiet.
But there was also a ringing tone in his head: a pressure-loss alarm. He glanced at his suit exterior, searching for the telltale pulse of pink that would highlight the wound. There it was: a smudge of rose across the back of his hand, the one that now held a knife. He returned the knife to the vacant position on his belt and reached instinctively for the sealant spray. Then he realised that he had already used the spray; that the smudge of pink was leaking around the sides of an intricately curved and curled scab of hardened sealant. The solidified grey worm appeared to form a complex runic inscription.
He looked at the glove from a different angle and saw a message scrawled in the tangled track of the worm: SHIP .
It was his handwriting.
The two figures had reached the ends of the wound-shaped gash in the ice and were now converging on his position as quickly as they were able. He judged that they would arrive at the base of the grapple in under a minute. It would take him almost as long to work his way along the line. He wondered about jumping for it, hoping that he could judge it correctly and not sail past the corvette, but at the back of his mind he knew that the adhesive membrane would not allow him to kick off. He would have to shin up the line hand-overhand, despite the pain in his head and the constant feeling that he was on the verge of teetering back into unconsciousness.
He blacked out again, but more briefly this time, and when he saw his glove and the figures converging below him he guessed that he was right to head for the ship. He reached the lock at the same time as the first of the figures — the one with the ridged helmet, he saw now — arrived at the barbed grapple.
His perceptions now told him that the surface of the comet was a vertical black wall, with the tether lines emerging horizontally. The two others were flies glued to that wall, crouched and foreshortened and about to traverse the same bridge he had just crossed. Clavain fell back into the lock and palmed the emergency repressurisation control. The outer door snicked silently shut; air began to flood in. Instantly he felt the pain in his head lessen, and gasped in the sheer relief of the moment.
The override permitted the inner door to open almost before the outer door had sealed. Clavain hurled himself into the corvette’s interior, kicked off from the far wall, knocked his skull against a bulkhead and then collided with the front of the flight deck. He did not bother getting into his seat or fastening restraints. He simply fired the corvette’s thrusters — full emergency burn — and heard a dozen klaxons scream at him that this was not an auspicious thing to do.
Advise immediate engine shutdown. Advise immediate engine shutdown.
‘Shut up!’ Clavain shouted.
For a moment the corvette pulled away from the comet’s surface. The ship made perhaps two and half meters before the grapple lines extended to their maximum tension and held taut. The jolt threw him against a wall; he felt something break like a dry twig somewhere between his heart and his waist. The comet had moved too, of course, but only imperceptibly; he might as well have been tethered to an immovable rock at the centre of the universe.
‘Clavain.’ The voice came over the corvette’s radio. It was extraordinarily calm. His memories had begun to reassemble, fitfully, and with some hesitation he felt able to apply a name to his tormentor.
‘Skade. Hello.’ He spoke through pain, certain that he had broken at least one rib and probably bruised one or two others.
‘Clavain… what exactly are you doing?’
‘I seem to be attempting to steal this ship.’
He pulled himself into the seat now, wincing at multiple flares of pain. He groaned as he stretched restraint webbing across his chest. The thrusters were threatening to go into autonomous shutdown mode. He threw desperate commands at the corvette. Grapple retraction wouldn’t help his situation: it would just reel in Skade and Remontoire — he remembered both of them now — and then the two of them would be on the outside of the hull, where they would have to stay. They would probably be safe if he abandoned them in space, drifting, but this was a Closed Council mission. Almost no one else would know they were out here.
‘Full thrust…’ Clavain said aloud, to himself. He knew a burst of full thrust would get him away from the comet. Either it would sever the grapple lines or it would rip chunks of the comet’s surface away with him.
‘Clavain,’ said a man’s voice, ‘I think you need to think about this.’
Neither of them could reach him neurally. The corvette would not allow those kinds of signals through its hull.
‘Thanks, Rem… but as a matter of fact, I’ve already given it a fair bit of thought. She wants those weapons too badly. It’s the wolves, isn’t it, Skade? You need the weapons for when the wolves come.’
‘I as good as spelled it out to you, Clavain. Yes, we need the weapons to defend ourselves against the wolves. Is that so reprehensible? Is ensuring our own survival