Antoinette scowled. Sometimes she wondered whose side Beast was really on. “All right,” she said. “Xave’s off the hook. For now. But that doesn’t help me much, does it?”
“A failure is predicted, Little Miss, but not guaranteed.”
Antoinette checked the read-outs. “We’ll need another ten klicks per second just to make orbit. Can you manage that, Beast?”
“One is doing one’s utmost, Little Miss.”
She nodded, accepting that this was all that could be asked of her ship. Above, the clouds were beginning to thin out, the sky darkening to a deep midnight blue. Space looked close enough to touch.
But she still had a long way to go.
Finding the survivor had been much easier than Clavain had expected. It had only taken thirty minutes to pinpoint the location, narrowing down the search with acoustic and biosensor scanners. Thereafter, it had simply been a question of stripping away panels and equipment until they found the concealed niche, a volume about the size of two cupboards placed back to back. It was in a part of the ship that the human crew would have avoided visiting too often, bathed as it was in elevated radiation from the fusion engines.
The hideaway, Clavain quickly decided, looked like a hastily arranged brig; a place of confinement in a ship never designed to carry prisoners. The captive must have been placed in the hole and the panelling and equipment bolted and glued back into place around him, leaving only a conduit along which to pass air, water and food. The hole was filthy. Clavain had his suit sample the air and pass a little through to his nose: it reeked of human waste. He wondered if the prisoner had been neglected all the while, or only since the crew’s attention had been diverted by Nightshade’s arrival.
In other respects, the prisoner seemed to have been well looked after. The walls of the hole were padded, with a couple of restraining hoops that could have been used to avoid injury during combat manoeuvres. There was a microphone rigged through for communication, though as far as Clavain could tell it only worked one way, allowing the prisoner to be talked to. There were blankets and the remains of a meal. Clavain had seen worse places of confinement. He had even been a guest in some of them.
He pushed a thought into the head of the soldier with the torch. Get that blanket off him, will you? I want to see who we’ve found.
The soldier reached into the hole. Clavain wondered who the prisoner would turn out to be, his mind flashing through the possibilities. He was not aware of any Conjoiners having been taken prisoner lately, and doubted that the enemy would have gone to this much trouble to keep one alive. A prisoner from the enemy’s own ranks was the next most likely thing: a traitor or deserter, perhaps.
The soldier whipped the blanket away from the huddled figure.
The prisoner, crouched into a small foetal shape, squealed against the sudden intrusion of light, hiding its dark-adapted eyes.
Clavain stared. The prisoner was nothing that he had been expecting. At first glance it might have been taken for an adolescent human, for the proportions and size were roughly analogous. A naked human at that—unclothed pink human-looking flesh folded away into the hole. There was a horrid expanse of burned skin around its upper arm, all ridges and whorls of pink and deathly white.
Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.
“Hello,” Clavain said aloud, his amplified voice booming out of his suit speaker.
The pig moved. The motion was sudden and springlike and none of them were expecting it. The pig lashed out with something long and metallic clutched in one fist. The object gleamed, its edge reverberating like a tuning fork. The pig daggered it hard into Clavain’s chest. The tip of the blade shivered across the armour, leaving only a narrow shining furrow, but found the point near Clavain’s shoulder where two plaques slid across each other. The blade slipped into the gap, Clavain’s suit registering the intrusion with a shrill pulsing alarm in his helmet. He jerked back before the blade was able to penetrate his inner suit layer and reach his skin, and then collided with a sharp crack against the wall behind him. The weapon tumbled from the pig’s grip, spinning away like a ship that had lost gyroscopic control. Clavain recognised it as a piezoknife; he carried something similar on his own suit’s utility belt. The pig must have stolen it from one of the Demarchists.
Clavain got his breath back. “Let’s start again, shall we?”
The other Conjoiners had the pig pinned down. Clavain inspected his suit, calling up damage schematics. There was a mild loss of pressure integrity near the shoulder. He was in no danger of suffocating to death, but he was still mindful of the possibility of undiscovered contaminants aboard the enemy ship. Almost as a reflex action he unhitched a sealant spray from his belt, selected nozzle diameter and pasted the rapidly hardening epoxy around the general area of the knife wound, where it solidified in the form of a sinuous grey cyst.
Somewhere before the dawn of the Demarchist era, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, not far from the time of Clavain’s own birth, a spectrum of human genes had been spliced into those of the domestic pig. The intention had been to optimise the ease with which organs could be transplanted between the two species, enabling pigs to grow body parts that could be harvested later for human utilisation. There were better ways to repair or replace damaged tissue now, had been for centuries, but the legacy of the pig experiments remained. The genetic intervention had gone too far, achieving not just cross-species compatibility but something entirely unexpected: intelligence.
But no one, not even the pigs, really knew what had happened. There might not have been deliberate tinkering to bring their cognitive faculties up to human level, but the pigs had certainly not gained language by accident. Not all of them had it—there were distinct subgroups of pigs with various mental and vocal capacities—but those that could speak had been engineered that way by someone who had known exactly what they were doing. It was not simply that their brains had the right grammatical machinery wired in. They had also had their throats, lungs and jaws adapted so that they could form human speech sounds.
Clavain eased forwards to speak to the prisoner. “Can you understand me?” he asked, first in Norte and then in Canasian, the Demarchists’ main language. My name is Nevil Clavain. You’re in the custody of Conjoiners.’
The pig answered, his remodelled jaw and throat anatomy enabling him to form perfect human sounds. “I don’t care who I’m in the custody of. You can fuck off and die.”
“Neither happens to be on my agenda for the day.”
The pig warily uncovered one pink-red eye. “Who the fuck are you anyway? Where are the rest of them?”
“The shipmaster’s crew? I’m afraid they’re all dead.”
The pig showed no detectable gratitude at this news. “You killed them?”
“No. They were already dead when we got aboard.”
“And you are?”
“As I said, Conjoiners.”
“Spiders . . .” The pig contorted its almost human mouth into a semblance of disgust. “You know what I do to spiders? I piss them off toilet seats.”
“Very nice.”
Clavain could see this was going nowhere fast; subvocally he asked one of the nearby troops to get the prisoner sedated and ferried back to Nightshade. He had no idea who or what the pig represented, how it slotted into the spiralling endgame of the war, but he would know a great deal more once the pig had been trawled. And a dose of Conjoiner medichines would do wonders for the pig’s reticence.
Clavain remained on the enemy ship while the sweep teams completed the last of their checks, ensuring that the enemy had left behind no tactically useful information. But there was nothing; the ship’s data stores had been wiped clean. A parallel search revealed no technologies that were not already well understood by the Conjoiners, and no weapons systems that were worth appropriating. The standard procedure at this point was to destroy the searched vessel, to prevent it falling back into enemy possession.
Clavain was thinking about the best way to scuttle the ship—a missile or a demolition charge?—when he felt Remontoire’s presence invade his head.
[Clavain?]
What is it?
[We’re picking up a general distress message from the freighter.]
Antoinette Bax? I thought she was dead.
[She isn’t, but she might soon be. Her ship has engine problems—a tokamak failure, it seems. She hasn’t made escape velocity, and she hasn’t managed an orbital injection either.]
Clavain nodded, more for his benefit than Remontoire’s. He imagined the kind of parabolic trajectory Storm Bird had to be on. She might not have reached the apex of that parabola yet, but sooner or later Antoinette Bax was going to start sliding back towards the cloud deck. He imagined, too, the kind of desperation that would have led her to issue a general distress signal when the only ship within answering distance was a Conjoiner vessel. In Clavain’s experience, the majority of pilots would have chosen death rather than capture by the spiders.
[Clavain . . . you realise we can’t possibly acknowledge her call.]
I realise.
[That would set a precedent. We’d be endorsing illegal activity. At the very least, we’d have no choice but to recruit her.]
Clavain nodded again, thinking of the times he had seen prisoners scream and thrash as they were led to the recruitment theatres, where their heads would be pumped full of Conjoiner neural machinery. They were wrong to fear it; he knew that better than anyone, since he had once resisted it himself. But he understood how they felt.
And he wondered if he wanted to inflict that terror upon Antoinette Bax.
The tractors were haring home now, accelerating at high burn to catch up with Nightshade, which had already turned back towards the Mother Nest. Once the tractors had returned the operation could be considered closed; there would only be the matter of the prisoner to attend to, but the pig’s fate was of no great urgency. Of Antoinette Bax . . . well, irrespective of her motives, Clavain admired her bravery; not just because she had come so far into a war zone, but also because of the way she had so brazenly ignored the shipmaster’s warning and, when it became necessary, the way she had summoned the courage to ask the Conjoiners for help. She must have known that it was an unreasonable request; that by the illegality of her trespass into the war zone she had forfeited any right to assistance, and that a military ship was hardly likely to waste time or fuel helping her out. She must also have known that even if the Conjoiners did save her life, the penalty she would pay for that would be conscription into their ranks, a fate that the Demarchist propaganda machine had made to seem hellish in the extreme.
No. She could not have reasonably expected rescue. But it had been brave of her to ask.
Clavain sighed, teetering on the edge of self-disgust. He issued a neural command instructing Nightshade to tight-beam the stricken freighter. When the link was established, he spoke aloud. “Antoinette Bax . . . this is Nevil Clavain. I am aboard the Conjoiner vessel. Can you hear me?”