Remontoire did not look him quite in the eye. ‘It wasn’t torture, Scorpio… just re-education.’ ‘When do you hand me over to the Convention?’ ‘That’s no longer on the agenda. At least, it doesn’t have to be.’ Scorpio judged that the ship was small, probably a shuttle. It was entirely possible that he and Remontoire were the only two occupants. Likely, even. He wondered how he would fare trying to fly a Conjoiner-designed ship. Not well, perhaps, but he was willing to give it a try. Even if he crashed and burned, it had to be a lot better than a death sentence. He lunged for Remontoire, springing out of the bowl in an explosion of gel. Pipes and tubing went flying. In an instant his ill-made hands were seeking the pressure points that would drop anyone, even a Conjoiner, into unconsciousness and then death. Scorpio came around. He was in another part of the ship, strapped into a seat. Remontoire was sitting opposite him, hands folded neatly in his lap. Behind him was the impressive curve of a control panel, its surface covered with numerous read-outs, command systems and hemispherical navigation displays. It was lit up like a casino. Scorpio knew a thing or two about ship design. A Conjoiner control interface would have been minimalist to the point of invisibility, like something designed by New Quakers. ‘I wouldn’t try that again,’ Remontoire said. Scorpio glared at him. ‘Try what?’ ‘You had a go at strangling me. It didn’t work, and I’m afraid it never will. We put an implant in your skull, Scorpio — a very small one, around your carotid artery. Its only function is to constrict the artery in response to a signal from another implant in my head. I can send that signal voluntarily if you threaten me, but I don’t have to. The implant will emit a distress code if I suffer sudden unconsciousness or death. You will die shortly afterwards.’ ‘I’m not dead now.’ ‘That’s because I was nice enough to let you off with a warning.’ Scorpio was clothed and dry. He felt better than when he had come around in the egg. ‘Why should I care, Remontoire? Haven’t you just given me the perfect means to kill myself, instead of letting the Convention do it for me?’ ‘I’m not taking you to the Convention.’ ‘A little private justice, is that it?’ ‘Not that either.’ Remontoire swung his seat around so that he faced the lavish control panel. He played it like a pianist, hands outstretched, not needing to watch where his fingers were going. Above the panel and on either side of the cabin, windows puckered into what had been blue steel. The cabin illumination dropped softly. Scorpio heard the roar of the thrust change pitch and felt his stomach register a change in the axis of gravity. A vast ochre crescent hoved into view beyond. It was Yellowstone: most of the planet was in night. Remontoire’s ship was nearly in the same plane as the Rust Belt. The string of habitats was hardly visible against dayside ~ just a dark sprinkling, like a fine line of cinnamon — but beyond the terminator they formed a jewelled thread, spangling and twinkling as habitats precessed or trimmed their immense mirrors and floodlights. It was impressive, but Scorpio knew that it was only a shadow of what it had been. There had been ten thousand habitats before the plague; now only a few hundred were fully utilised. But against night the derelicts vanished, leaving only the fairy-dust trail of illuminated cities, and it was almost as if the wheel of history had never turned. Beyond the Belt, Yellowstone looked hurtingly close. He could almost hear the urban hum of Chasm City droning up through the clouds like a seductive siren song. He thought of the warrens and strongholds that the pigs and their allies maintained in the deepest parts of the city’s Mulch, a festering outlaw empire composed of many interlocked criminal fiefdoms. After his escape from Quail, Scorpio had entered that empire at the very lowest level, a scarred immigrant with barely a single intact memory in his head, other than how to stay alive from hour to hour in a dangerous foreign environment, and — equally importantly — how to turn the apparatus of that environment to his advantage. That at least was something he owed Quail, if nothing else. But it did not mean that he was grateful. Scorpio remembered very little of his life before meeting Quail. He was aware that much of what he did recall was second-hand memory, for although he had pieced together only the major details of his former existence — his life aboard the yacht — his subconscious had wasted no time in filling in the aching gaps that remained with all the enthusiasm of gas rushing into a vacuum. And as he remembered those memories, not quite real in themselves, he could not help but impress even more sensory details upon them. The memories might accord precisely with what had really happened, but Scorpio had no way of knowing for sure. And yet it made no difference as far as he was concerned. No one else was going to contradict him now. Those who might have been able to do so were dead, butchered at the hands of Quail and his friends. Scorpio’s first clear memory of Quail was amongst the most frightening. He had come to consciousness after a long period of sleep, or something deeper than sleep, standing in a cold armoured room with eleven other pigs, disorientated and shivering, much as he had been upon waking aboard Remontoire’s ship. They wore crudely fashioned clothes, sewn together from stiff squares of dark, stained fabric. Quail had been there with them: a tall asymmetrically augmented human whom Scorpio identified as being either an Ultra or from one of the other occasionally chimeric factions, such as the Skyjacks or the Atmosphere Dredgers. There were other augmented humans, too, half a dozen of them crowding behind Quail. They all carried weapons, ranging from knives to wide-muzzled low-velocity slug-guns, and they all viewed the assembled pigs with undisguised anticipation. Quail, whose language Scorpio understood without effort, explained that the twelve pigs had been brought aboard his ship — for the room was inside a much larger vessel — to provide amusement for his crew after a run of unprofitable deals. And in a sense, though perhaps not in quite the sense that Quail had intended, that was precisely what they had done. The crew had anticipated a hunt, and for a little while that was what they got. The rules were simple enough: the pigs were allowed free run of Quail’s ship, to hide anywhere they desired and to improvise tools and weapons from whatever was at hand. After five days an amnesty would be declared on any surviving pigs, or at least that was what Quail promised. It was up to the pigs to choose whether they hid en masse or split into smaller teams. They had six hours’ lead on the humans. That turned out to make precious little difference. Half the pigs were dead by the end of the first day’s hunt. They had accepted the terms unquestioningly; even Scorpio had felt a strangely eager obligation to do whatever was asked of him, a sense that it was his duty to do whatever Quail — or any other human — required. Though he was afraid, and had an immediate desire to safeguard his own survival, it was to be nearly three days before he would think about striking back, and even then the thought only pushed its way into his head against great resistance, as if violating some sacrosanct personal paradigm. At first Scorpio had sought shelter with two other pigs, one of them mute, the other only able to form broken sentences, but they had functioned well enough as a team, anticipating each other’s actions with uncanny ease. Scorpio knew, even then, that the twelve pigs had worked together before, though he could not yet assemble a single clear memory of his life before waking in Quail’s chamber. But even though the team had functioned well, Scorpio had chosen to go off on his own after the first eighteen hours. The other two wanted to remain hiding in the cubbyhole they had found, but Scorpio was sure that the only hope of survival lay in continuous ascent, moving ever upwards along the ship’s axis of thrust. It was then that he had made the first of three discoveries. Crawling through a duct, he had ripped away part of his clothing, revealing the edge of a shining green shape that covered much of his right shoulder. He ripped away more of the clothing, but it was only when
