‘Do we call Hugh then?’ Kris asked. Solace’s heart plunged, seeing that she had just flipped the whole situation to the exact and precise worst-case scenario. But in this, Olli became an unlikely ally.
‘Fuck Hugh,’ the specialist decided. ‘What would they do for us? Nothing. We plot a course out of here, regular-like – take some Throughway to somewhere we can hide out. I can do it. We can’t go deep void, but we can just find a current and flow with it. We hide, we find a buyer, we set up a deal.’
‘Idris needs help. Now,’ Kris said. ‘We can get help on Berlenhof.’
‘We can also get arrested, disappeared, snatched by Partheni,’ Olli countered. ‘Look—’
The scream of proximity alerts swallowed up whatever she might have said next, and Olli’s eyes snapped to Solace. Her expression was abruptly pure murder. ‘Bitch told them where we were!’ howled from her speakers. Then the Scorpion was in motion, three arms snapping out for her.
Solace leapt straight up, using one lunging claw as a stepping stone to get to the frame’s shoulder. She was shouting that it wasn’t her, the Parthenon couldn’t possibly have got to them this quickly. Except it was standard practice to have a few picket craft running silent in-system, so maybe . . .
The alarms shut off abruptly and a mechanical voice snapped out, ‘Stop fighting, being boarded. Stop it. Stop it. Stop!’ It was Kittering, patching himself into the drone bay comms for volume. Solace had frozen, staring at the savage-looking stinger spike Olli had installed on the Scorpion’s tail. It had halted a metre from her face. All around them the Vulture shuddered and rocked as a vessel grappled it. Something big. Far larger than any little Partheni picket vessel.
The readouts on the drone bay hatch began cycling. Someone was coming in. Olli swore and backed off, spreading her metal limbs, Solace still riding her shoulder.
The hatch grated open, overridden from the other side. The man who strode through wore an armoured suit. Solace would bet it had been modified at the back to fit the carapace of his wasp-coloured symbiote.
Mesmon gave them all a bright, glass-sharp smile. There were others at his back: humans with guns and a headless Hiver frame built around some kind of cannon.
‘I have a fucking grievance,’ he said to Olli in particular. ‘I can resolve it right now, and leave you with even fewer fucking limbs than you currently have. Alternatively, you can slip into something more comfortable, and then the lot of you doomed sods can come for an audience with my boss.’
24.
Kris
They’d forced Olli out of the Scorpion. Mesmon in particular would remember exactly how she could use it. Solace went to help her, and the specialist gave her a look as though she’d actually bite if the Partheni came close. It was left to Kris and Kit to get her into the walker frame, under the increasingly impatient gaze of the Tothiat.
That done, Mesmon looked at the inert Scorpion. ‘I am having that,’ he said, meeting Olli’s murderous, impotent glower. ‘I have a fondness for trophies. Something to remember you by.’ He leant in close to her. ‘After I’ve returned certain favours.’
‘All the way back to Tarekuma, is it?’ Kris asked bleakly.
Mesmon’s expression was mocking. ‘Oh, stupid bitch,’ he told her, ‘who doesn’t understand just how personally the Unspeakable Razor takes all of this. Believe me, it is a matter that has pierced within the shell.’ Translated from the Essiel no doubt, but the meaning was quite clear enough. ‘You are all cordially invited to your own fucking executions, and my lord and master will watch.’
They were prodded out of the drone bay, down an umbilical and onto the Hegemonic ship. The gravitic mismatch set them stumbling, as the Harvest pulled off at around forty-five degrees to the Vulture. Mesmon was watching, and Kris guessed he’d been hoping for someone to face-plant. Experienced spacers wouldn’t be caught by simple gravity tricks; she felt obscurely proud at how well they were all handling their impending demise. Then Trine’s bad leg folded underneath them and they ended up measuring their full length down the nacreous substance of the docking bay floor. Kris helped them up, looking daggers at Mesmon’s people.
Delegate Trine sighed and their nest of arms made a disdainful little gesture, as though brushing dust off imaginary robes. ‘Thank you, fellow condemned. Good to see that politeness is not dead.’
One of Mesmon’s people brought up the rear, and Kris saw he held the unassuming grey case which had been hidden in the wreck of the Oumaru. Aklu was reclaiming his precious regalia.