“I’d be lost without you, you know. Especially now.”
“Nonsense, ma’am. Your expertise threatens any day to eclipse my own.”
It was more than automatic flattery: though Grelier had made the study of pain his life’s work, Jasmina was catching up quickly. She knew volumes about the physiology of pain. She knew about nociception; she knew the difference between epicritic and protopathic pain; she knew about presynaptic blocking and the neospinal pathway. She knew her prostaglandin promoters from her GABA agonists.
But the queen also knew pain from an angle Grelier never would. His tastes lay entirely in its infliction. He did not know it from the inside, from the privileged point of view of the recipient. No matter how acute his theoretical understanding of the subject, she would always have that edge over him.
Like most people of his era, Grelier could only imagine agony, extrapolating it a thousandfold from the minor discomfort of a torn hangnail.
He had no idea.
“I may have learned a great deal,” she said, “but you will always be a master of the clonal arts. I was serious about what I said before, Grelier: I anticipate increased demand on the factory. Can you satisfy me?”
“You said production mustn’t slacken. That isn’t quite the same thing.”
“But surely you aren’t working at full capacity at this moment.”
Grelier adjusted the screws. “I’ll be frank with you: we’re not far off it. At the moment I’m prepared to discard units that don’t meet our usual exacting standards. But if the factory is expected to increase production, the standards will have to be relaxed.”
“You discarded one today, didn’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“I suspected you’d make a point of your commitment to excellence.” She raised a finger. “And that’s all right. It’s why you work for me. I’m disappointed, of course—I know exactly which body you terminated—but standards are standards.”
“That’s always been my watchword.”
“It’s a pity that can’t be said for everyone on this ship.”
He hummed and whistled to himself for a little while, then asked, with studied casualness, “I always got the impression that you have a superlative crew, ma’am.”
“My regular crew is not the problem.”
“Ah. Then you would be referring to one of the irregulars? Not myself, I trust?”
“You are well aware of whom I speak, so don’t pretend otherwise.”
“Quaiche? Surely not.”
“Oh, don’t play games, Grelier. I know exactly how you feel about your rival. Do you want to know the truly ironic thing? The two of you are more similar than you realise. Both baseline humans, both ostracised from your own cultures. I had great hopes for the two of you, but now I may have to let Quaiche go.”
“Surely you’d give him one last chance, ma’am. We are approaching a new system, after all.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see him fail one final time, just so that my punishment would be all the more severe?”
“I was thinking only of the welfare of the ship.”
“Of course you were, Grelier.” She smiled, amused by his lies. “Well, the fact of the matter is I haven’t made up my mind what to do with Quaiche. But I do think he and I need a little chat. Some interesting new information concerning him has fallen into my possession, courtesy of our trading partners.”
“Fancy that,” Grelier said.
“It seems he wasn’t completely honest about his prior experience when I hired him. It’s my fault: I should have checked his background more thoroughly. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he exaggerated his earlier successes. I thought we were hiring an expert negotiator, as well as a man with an instinctive understanding of planetary environments. A man comfortable among both baseline humans and Ultras, someone who could talk up a deal to our advantage and find treasure where we’d miss it completely.”
“That sounds like Quaiche.”
“No, Grelier, what it sounds like is the character Quaiche wished to present to us. The fiction he wove. In truth, his record is a lot less impressive. The occasional score here and there, but just as many failures. He’s a chancer: a braggart, an opportunist and a liar. And an infected one, as well.”
Grelier raised an eyebrow. “Infected?”
“He has an indoctrinal virus. We scanned for the usuals but missed this one because it wasn’t in our database. Fortunately, it isn’t strongly infectious—not that it would stand much of a chance infecting one of
us
in the first place.”
“What type of indoctrinal virus are we talking about here?”
“It’s a crude mishmash: a half-baked concoction of three thousand years’ worth of religious imagery jumbled together without any overarching theistic consistency. It doesn’t make him believe anything coherent; it just makes him
feel
religious. Obviously he can keep it under control for much of the time. But it worries me, Grelier. What if it gets worse? I don’t like a man whose impulses I can’t predict.”
“You’ll be letting him go, then.”
“Not just yet. Not until we’ve passed beyond 107 Piscium. Not until he’s had one last chance to redeem himself.”
“What makes you think he’ll find anything now?”
“I have no expectation that he will, but I do believe he’s more likely to find something if I provide him with the right incentive.”
“He might do a runner.”
“I’ve thought of that as well. In fact, I think I’ve got all bases covered where Quaiche is concerned. All I need now is the man himself, in some state of animation. Can you arrange that for me?”
“Now, ma’am?”
“Why not? Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say.”
“The trouble is,” Grelier said, “he’s frozen. It’ll take six hours to wake him, assuming that we follow the recommended procedures.”
“And if we don’t?” She wondered how much mileage was left in her new body. “Realistically, how many hours could we shave off?”
“Two at the most, if you don’t want to run the risk of killing him. Even then it’ll be a wee bit unpleasant.”
Jasmina smiled at the surgeon-general. “I’m sure he’ll get over it. Oh, and Grelier? One other thing.”
“Ma’am?”
“Bring me the scrimshaw suit.”
THREE
Lighthugger
Gnostic Ascension
, Interstellar Space, 2615
His lover helped him out of the casket. Quaiche lay shivering on the revival couch, racked with nausea, while Morwenna attended to the many jacks and lines that plunged into his bruised baseline flesh.
“Lie still,” she said.
“I don’t feel very well.”
“Of course you don’t. What do you expect when the bastards thaw you so quickly?”
It was like being kicked in the groin, except that his groin encompassed his entire body. He wanted to curl up inside a space smaller than himself, to fold himself into a tiny knot like some bravura trick of origami. He considered throwing up, but the effort involved was much too daunting.
“They shouldn’t have taken the risk,” he said. “She knows I’m too valuable for that.” He retched: a horrible sound like a dog that had been barking too long.
“I think her patience might be a bit strained,” Morwenna said, as she dabbed at him with stinging medicinal salves.
“She knows she needs me.”
“She managed without you before. Maybe it’s dawning on her that she can manage without you again.”
Quaiche brightened. “Maybe there’s an emergency.”
“For you, perhaps.”
“Christ, that’s all I need—sympathy.” He winced as a bolt of pain hit his skull, something far more precise and targeted than the dull unpleasantness of the revival trauma.
“You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” Morwenna said, her tone scolding. “You know it only hurts you.”
He looked into her face, forcing his eyes open against the cruel glare of the revival area. “Are you on my side or not?”
“I’m trying to help you. Hold still, I’ve nearly got the last of these lines out.” There was a final little stab of pain in his thigh as the shunt popped out, leaving a neat eyelike wound. “There, all done.”
“Until next time,” Quaiche said. “Assuming there
is
a next time.”
Morwenna fell still, as if something had struck her for the first time. “You’re really frightened, aren’t you?”
“In my shoes, wouldn’t you be?”
“The queen’s insane. Everyone knows that. But she’s also pragmatic enough to know a valuable resource when she sees one.” Morwenna spoke openly because she knew that the queen had no working listening devices in the revival chamber. “Look at Grelier, for pity’s sake. Do you think she’d tolerate that freak for one minute if he wasn’t useful to her?”
“That’s precisely my point,” Quaiche said, sinking into an even deeper pit of dejection and hopelessness. “The moment either of us stops being useful . . . ” Had he felt like moving, he would have mimed drawing a knife across his throat. Instead he just made a choking sound.
“You’ve an advantage over Grelier,” Morwenna said. “You have me, an ally amongst the crew. Who does he have?”
“You’re right,” Quaiche said, “as ever.” With a tremendous effort he reached out and closed one hand around Morwenna’s steel gauntlet.
He didn’t have the heart to remind her that she was very nearly as isolated aboard the ship as he was. The one thing guaranteed to get an Ultra ostracised was having any kind of interpersonal relationship with a baseline human. Morwenna put a brave face on it, but, Quaiche knew, if he had to rely on her for help when the queen and the rest of the crew turned against him, he was already crucified.
“Can you sit up now?” she asked.
“I’ll try.”
The discomfort was abating slightly, as he had known it must do, and at last he was able to move major muscle groups without crying. He sat on the couch, his knees tucked against the hairless skin of his chest, while Morwenna gently removed the urinary catheter from his penis. He looked into her face while she worked, hearing only the whisk of metal sliding over metal. He remembered how fearful he had been when she first touched him there, her hands gleaming like shears. Making love to her was like making love to a threshing machine. Yet Morwenna had never hurt him, even when she inadvertently cut her own living parts.
“All right?” she asked.
“I’ll make it. Takes more than a quick revival to put a dent in Horris Quaiche’s day.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said, sounding less than fully convinced. She leant over and kissed him. She smelt of perfume and ozone.
“I’m glad you’re around,” Quaiche said.
“Wait here. I’ll get you something to drink.”
Morwenna moved off the revival couch, telescoping to her full height. Still unable to focus properly, he watched her slink across the room towards the hatch where various recuperative broths were dispensed. Her iron-grey dreadlocks swayed with the motion of her high-hipped piston-driven legs.
Morwenna was on her way back with a snifter of recuperative broth—chocolate laced with medichines—when the door to the chamber slid open. Two more Ultras strode into the room: a man and a woman. After them, hands tucked demurely behind his back, loomed the smaller, unaugmented figure of the surgeon-general. He wore a soiled white medical smock.
“Is he fit?” the man asked.
“You’re lucky he’s not dead,” Morwenna snapped.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” the woman said. “He was never going to die just because we thawed him a bit faster than usual.”
“Are you going to tell us what Jasmina wants with him?”
“That’s between him and the queen,” she replied.
The man threw a quilted silver gown in Quaiche’s general direction. Morwenna’s arm whipped out in a blur of motion and caught it. She walked over to Quaiche and handed it to him.
“I’d like to know what’s going on,” Quaiche said.
“Get dressed,” the woman said. “You’re coming with us.”
He pivoted around on the couch and lowered his feet to the coldness of the floor. Now that the discomfort was wearing off he was starting to feel scared instead. His cock had shrivelled in on itself, retreating into his belly as if already making its own furtive escape plans. Quaiche put on the gown, cinching it around his waist. To the surgeon-general he said, “You had something to do with this, didn’t you?”
Grelier blinked. “My dear fellow, it was all I could do to stop them warming you even more rapidly.”
“Your time will come,” Quaiche said. “Mark my words.”
“I don’t know why you insist on that tone. You and I have a great deal in common, Horris. Two human men, alone aboard an Ultra ship? We shouldn’t be bickering, competing for prestige and status. We should be supporting each other, cementing a friendship.” Grelier wiped the back of his glove on his tunic, leaving a nasty ochre smear. “We should be allies, you and I. We could go a long way together.”
“When hell freezes over,” Quaiche replied.
The queen stroked the mottled cranium of the human skull resting on her lap. She had very long finger- and toenails, painted jet-black. She wore a leather jerkin, laced across her cleavage, and a short skirt of the same dark fabric. Her black hair was combed back from her brow, save for a single neatly formed cowlick. Standing before her, Quaiche initially thought she was wearing makeup, vertical streaks of rouge as thick as candlewax running from her eyes to the curve of her upper lip. Then, joltingly, he realised that she had gouged out her eyes.
Despite this, her face still possessed a certain severe beauty.
It was the first time he had seen her in the flesh, in any of her manifestations. Until this meeting, all his dealings with her had been at a certain remove, either via alpha-compliant proxies or living intermediaries like Grelier.
He had hoped to keep things that way.
Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, “Have I let you down, ma’am?”