“Touching it would not be your wisest course of action, given the circumstances.”
He almost laughed. Jasmina and Grelier had excelled themselves. First the audience with the queen to make him think that she had at last run out of patience with him. Then the charade of being shown the suit and made to think that punishment was finally upon him. Made to believe that he was about to be buried in ice, forced into consciousness for what might be the better part of a decade. And then this: the final, mocking reprieve. His last chance to redeem himself. And make no bones about it: this
would
be his last chance. That was clear to him now. Jasmina had shown him exactly what would happen if he failed her one more time. Idle threats were not in Jasmina’s repertoire.
But her cleverness ran deeper than that, for with Morwenna imprisoned in the suit he had no hope of doing what had sometimes occurred to him, which was to hide in a particular system until the
Gnostic Ascension
had passed out of range. No—he had no practical choice but to return to the queen. And then hope for two things: firstly, that he would not have disappointed her; and secondly, that she would free Morwenna from the suit.
A thought occurred to him. “Is she awake?”
“She is now approaching consciousness,” the ship replied.
With her Ultra physiology, Morwenna would have been much better equipped to tolerate slowdown than Quaiche, but it still seemed likely that the scrimshaw suit had been modified to protect her in some fashion.
“Can we communicate?”
“You can speak to her when you wish. I will handle ship-to-suit protocols.”
“All right, put me through now.” He waited a second, then said, “Morwenna?”
“Horris.” Her voice was stupidly weak and distant. He had trouble believing she was only separated from him by mere centimetres of metal: it might as well have been fifty light-years of lead. “Horris, where am I? What’s happened?”
Nothing in his experience gave him any clue about how you broke news like this to someone. How did you gently wend the topic of a conversation around to being imprisoned alive in welded metal suit?
Well, funny you should mention incarceration
. . .
“Morwenna, something’s up, but I don’t want you to panic. Everything will be all right in the end, but you mustn’t,
mustn’t
panic. Will you promise me that?”
“What’s wrong?” There was now a distinctly anxious edge to Morwenna’s voice.
Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
“Morwenna, tell me what you remember. Calmly and slowly.”
He heard the catch in her voice, the approaching onset of hysteria. “Where do you want me to begin?”
“Do you remember me being taken to see the queen?”
“Yes.”
“And do you remember me being taken away from her chamber?”
“Yes . . . yes, I do.”
“Do you remember trying to stop them?”
“No, I . . . ” She stopped and said nothing. He thought he had lost her—when she wasn’t speaking, the connection was silent. “Wait. Yes, I do remember.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing.”
“They took me to Grelier’s operating theatre, Morwenna. The one where he did all those other things to me.”
“No . . . ” she began, misunderstanding, thinking that the dreadful thing had happened to Quaiche rather than herself.
“They showed me the scrimshaw suit,” he said. “But they put you in it instead. You’re in it now, and that’s why you mustn’t panic.”
She took it well, better than he had been expecting. Poor, brave Morwenna. She had always been the more courageous half of their partnership. If she’d been given the chance to take the punishment upon herself, he knew she would have done so. Equally, he knew that he lacked that strength. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Not a bad man, but not exactly one to be admired either. It was the flaw that had shaped his life. Knowing this did not make it any easier.
“You mean I’m under the ice?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “No, it’s not that bad.” He realised as he spoke how absurdly little difference it made whether she was buried under ice or not. “You’re in the suit now, but you’re not under the ice. And it isn’t because of anything you did. It’s because of me. It’s to force me to act in a certain way.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re with me, aboard the
Dominatrix
. I think we just completed slowdown into the new system.”
“I can’t see or move.”
He had been looking at the suit while he spoke, holding an image of her in his mind. Although she was clearly doing her best to hide it, he knew Morwenna well enough to understand that she was terribly frightened. Ashamed, he looked sharply away. “Ship, can you let her see something?”
“That channel is not enabled.”
“Then fucking well enable it.”
“No actions are possible. I am to inform you that the occupant can only communicate with the outside world via the current audio channel. Any attempt to instate further channels will be viewed as . . .”
He waved a hand. “All right. Look, I’m sorry, Morwenna. The bastards won’t let you see anything. I’m guessing that was Grelier’s little idea.”
“He’s not my only enemy, you know.”
“Maybe not, but I’m willing to bet he had more than a little say in the matter.” Quaiche’s brow was dripping with condensed beads of zero-gravity sweat. He mopped himself with the back of his hand. “All of this is my fault.”
“Where are you?”
The question surprised him. “I’m floating next to you. I thought you might be able to hear my voice through the armour.”
“All I can hear is your voice in my head. You sound a long way away. I’m scared, Horris. I don’t know if I can handle this.”
“You’re not alone,” he said. “I’m right by you. You’re probably safer in the suit than out of it. All you have to do is sit tight. We’ll be home and dry in a few weeks.”
Her voice had a desperate edge to it now. “A few weeks? You make it sound as if it’s nothing at all.”
“I meant it’s better than years and years. Oh, Christ, Morwenna, I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll get you out of this.” Quaiche screwed up his eyes in pain.
“Horris?”
“Yes?” he asked, through tears.
“Don’t leave me to die in this thing. Please.”
“Morwenna,” he said, a little while later, “listen carefully. I have to leave you now. I’m going up to the command deck. I have to check on our status.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“You’ll still be able to hear my voice. I must do this, Morwenna. I absolutely must. If I don’t, neither of us will have any kind of a future to look forward to.”
“Horris.”
But he was already moving. He drifted away from the slowdown coffin and the scrimshaw suit, crossing the compartment space to reach a set of padded wall grips. He began to make his way down the narrow companionway towards the command deck, pulling himself along hand over hand. Quaiche had never developed a taste for weightlessness, but the needle-hulled survey craft was far too small for centrifugal gravity. It would be better once they were underway again, for then he would have the illusion of gravity provided by the
Dominatrix
’s engines.
Under pleasanter circumstances, he would have been enjoying the sudden isolation of being away from the rest of the crew. Morwenna had not accompanied him on most of his previous excursions, but, while he missed her, he had generally revelled in the enforced solitude of his periods away from the
Gnostic Ascension
. It was not strictly the case that he was antisocial; admittedly, during his time in mainstream human culture, Quaiche had never been the most gregarious of souls, but he had always ornamented himself with a handful of strong friendships. There had always been lovers, some tending towards the rare, exotic, or—in Morwenna’s case—the downright hazardous. But the environment of Jasmina’s ship was so overwhelmingly claustrophobic, so cloyingly saturated with the pheromonal haze of paranoia and intrigue, that he found himself longing for the hard simplicity of a ship and a mission.
Consequently the
Dominatrix
and the tiny survey craft it contained had become his private empire within the greater dominion of the
Ascension
. The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan. The more time he spent in it, the more it learned his whimsies and foibles. It played music that not only suited his moods, but was precisely calibrated to steer him from the dangerous extremes of morbid self-reflection or careless euphoria. It fed him the kinds of meals that he could never persuade the food synthesisers on the
Ascension
to produce, and seemed able to delight and surprise him whenever he suspected he had exhausted its libraries. It knew when he needed sleep and when he needed bouts of feverish activity. It amused him with fancies when he was bored, and simulated minor crises when he showed indications of complacency. Now and then it occurred to Quaiche that because the ship knew him so well he had in a sense extended himself into it, permeating its machine systems. The merging had even taken place on a biological level. The Ultras did their best to sterilise it every time it returned to its storage bay in the belly of the
Ascension
, but Quaiche knew that the ship now smelt different from the first time he had boarded it. It smelt of places he had lived in.
But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fiefdom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead.
“Bitch,” he said again.
Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot’s seat. The deck was necessarily tiny, for the
Dominatrix
was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space.
“Avionics,” he said.
Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved.
“Orders, Quaiche?”
“Just give me a moment,” he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was well: the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the
Dominatrix
’s belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born.
“Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?”
“None that were revealed to me.”
“Well, that’s splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?”
“I am receiving continuous telemetry from
Gnostic Ascension
. You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six- to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre.”
“Affirmative.” It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly.
“Horris?” said Morwenna. “Talk to me, please. Where are you?”
“I’m up front,” he said, “checking things out. Everything looks more or less OK at this point, but I want to make certain.”
“Do you know where we are yet?”
“I’m about to find out.” He touched one of the control fields, enabling voice control of major ship systems. “Rotate plus one-eighty, thirty-second slew,” he said.
The console display indicated compliance. Through the oval view port, a sprinkling of faintly visible stars began to ooze from one edge to the other.
“Talk to me,” Morwenna said again.
“I’m slewing us around. We were pointed tailfirst after slowdown. Should be getting a look at the system any moment now.”
“Did Jasmina say anything about it?”
“Not that I remember. What about you?”
“Nothing,” she said. For the first time since waking she sounded almost like her old self. He imagined it was a coping mechanism. If she acted normally, she would keep panic at bay. Panicking was the last thing she needed in the scrimshaw suit. Morwenna continued, “Just that it was another system that didn’t look particularly noteworthy. A star and some planets. No record of human presence. Dullsville, really.”
“Well, no record doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t passed through here at some point, just like we’re doing. And they may have left something behind.”
“Better bloody hope they did,” Morwenna remarked caustically.
“I’m trying to look on the optimistic side.”
“I’m sorry. I know you mean well, but let’s not expect the impossible, shall we?”
“We may have to,” he said under his breath, hoping that the ship would not pick it up and relay it to Morwenna.
By then the ship had just about completed its rotation, flipping nose-to-tail. A prominent star slid into view and centred itself in the oval. At this distance it was really more a sun than a star: without the command deck’s selective glare shields it would have been uncomfortably bright to look at.
“I’ve got something,” Quaiche said. His fingers skated across the console. “Let’s see. Spectral type’s a cool G. Main sequence, about three-fifths solar luminosity. A few spots, but no worrying coronal activity. About twenty AU out.”
“Still pretty far away,” Morwenna said.
“Not if you want to be certain of including all the major planets in the same volume.”