Redemption Ark

And then the voice had fallen silent again, as if it had said too much.

Now the voice pushed a new, nagging thought into her head, pulling her out of her reverie. [When can we be certain that he is dead, Skade?]

Ten, eleven hours. We’ll sweep through the kill zone and sift the interplanetary medium for an enhancement in trace elements, the kind we’d expect to find in this situation. And even if the evidence is not conclusive, we can be confident…

The response was brusque, petulant. [No, Skade. Clavain cannot be allowed to reach Chasm City.]

I’ve killed him, I swear.

[You are clever, Skade, and determined. But so is Clavain. He tricked you once. He can always trick you again.]

It doesn’t matter.

[No?]

If Clavain reaches Yellowstone, the information he has still won’t be of any ultimate benefit to the enemy or the Convention. They can attempt to recover the hell-class weapons for themselves, if they wish. But we have Exordium and the inertia-suppression machinery. They give us an edge. Clavain, and whatever bunch of allies he manages to surround himself with, won’t succeed.

The voice hovered in her head. For a moment she wondered if it had gone, leaving her alone.

She was wrong.

[So you think he might still be alive?]

She fumbled for an answer. I …

[He had better not be, Skade. Or we will be bitterly disappointed with you.]

He was cradling an injured cat, its spine severed somewhere near the lower vertebrae so that its rear legs hung limply. He was trying to persuade it to sip water from the plastic teat of his skinsuit rations pack. His own legs were pinned under tonnes of collapsed masonry. The cat was blind, burned, incontinent and in obvious pain. But he would not give it the easy way out.

He mumbled a sentence, more for his own benefit than the cat’s. ‘You are going to live, my friend. Whether you want to or not.’

The words came out sounding like one sheet of sandpaper being scraped against another. He needed water badly. But there was only a tiny amount left in the rations pack, and it was the cat’s turn.

‘Drink, you little fucker. You’ve come this far…’

‘Let me… die,’ the cat told him.

‘Sorry, puss. Not the way it’s going to happen.’

He felt a breeze. It was the first time he had felt any stirring at all of the air bubble in which the cat and he lay trapped. From somewhere distant he heard the thunderous rumble of collapsing concrete and metal. He hoped to God that the sudden airflow was only caused by a shifting of the air bubble; that perhaps an obstruction had collapsed, linking one bubble to another. He hoped it was not part of the external wall giving way, or else the cat would shortly get its wish. The air bubble would depressurise and they would be left trying to breathe Martian atmosphere. He had heard that dying that way was not at all pleasant, despite what they tried to make you think in the Coalition’s morale-boosting holo-dramas.

‘Clavain… save yourself.’

‘Why, puss?’

‘I die anyway.’

The first time the cat had spoken to him he had assumed that he had begun to hallucinate, imagining a loquacious companion where none actually existed. Then, belatedly, he had realised that the cat really was talking, that the animal was a rich tourist’s bioengineered affectation. A civilian dirigible had been parked on the top of the aerial docking tower when the spiders had hit it with their foam-phase artillery shells. The pet must have escaped from the dirigible gondola long before the attack itself, making its way down to the basement levels of the tower. Clavain thought that bioengineered talking animals were an affront against God, and he was reasonably certain that the cat was not a legally recognised sentient entity. The Coalition for Neural Purity would have had fits if it had known he had dared share his water rations with the forbidden creature. It hated genetic augmentation as much as it hated Galiana’s neural tinkering.

Clavain forced the teat into the cat’s mouth. Some reflex made it gulp down the last few drops of water.

‘We all get it one day, puss.’

‘Not so… soon.’

‘Drink up and stop moaning.’

The cat lapped up the last few drops. ‘Thank… you.’