Federations

“No. It has to be the halo, of course. It’s where the splinter’s headed anyway; just means we’ll get there ahead of schedule. There are other Splinterqueens out there, and at the very least they’ll want to keep us alive. Possibly other humans as well—others who made the same discovery as us, and knew there was no going home.”

“Not to mention Royalists.”

“That troubles you, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll deal with it,” I said, pushing forward.

The tunnel was nearly horizontal, and with the splinter’s weak gravity it was easy to make the distance to the surface. Emerging, Fomalhaut glared down at us, a white-cored, bloodshot eye surrounded by the wrinkle-like dust lanes of the inner Swirl. Limned in red, wasp corpses marred the landscape.

“I don’t see the ship.”

Wendigo pointed to a piece of blank caramel-colored horizon. “Curvature’s too great. We won’t see it until we’re almost on top of it.”

“Hope you’re right.”

“Trust me. I know this place like, well . . . ” Wendigo regarded one of her limbs. “Like the back of my hand.”

“Encourage me, why don’t you.”

Three or four hundred meters later we crested a scallop-shaped rise of ice, and halted. We could see the ship now. It didn’t look in much better shape than when Yarrow and I had scoped it from Mouser.

“I don’t see any wasps.”

“Too dangerous for them to stay on the surface,” Wendigo said.

“That’s cheering. I hope the remaining damage is cosmetic,” I said. “Because if it isn’t—”

Suddenly I wasn’t talking to anyone.

Wendigo was gone. After a moment I saw her, lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the hillock. Her guts stretched away like a rusty comet-tail, halfway to the next promontory.

Quillin was fifty meters ahead, having risen from the concealment of a chondrite boulder.

When Wendigo had mentioned her, I’d put her out of my mind as any kind of threat. How could she pose any danger beyond the inside of a thickship, when she’d traded her legs for a tail and fluke, just like Yarrow? On dry land, she’d be no more mobile than a seal pup. Well, that was how I’d figured things.

But I’d reckoned without Quillin’s suit.

Unlike Yarrow’s—unlike any siren suit I’d ever seen—it sprouted legs. Mechanized, they emerged from the hip, making no concessions to human anatomy. The legs were long enough to lift Quillin’s tail completely free of the ice. My gaze tracked up her body, registering the crossbow which she held in a double-handed grip.

“I’m sorry,” Quillin’s deep voice boomed in my skull. “Check-in’s closed.”

“Wendigo said you might be a problem.”

“Wise up. It was staged from the moment we reached the Royalist stronghold.” Still keeping the bow on me, she began to lurch across the ice. “The ferals were actors, playing dumb. The wasps were programmed to feed us bullshit.”

“It isn’t a Royalist trick, Quillin.”

“Shit. See I’m gonna have to kill you as well.”

The ground jarred, more violently than before. A nimbus of white light puffed above the horizon, evidence of an impact on the splinter’s far side. Quillin stumbled, but her legs corrected the misstep before it tripped her forward.

“I don’t know if you’re keeping up with current events,” I said. “But that’s our own side.”

“Maybe you didn’t think hard enough. Why did wasps in the Swirl get smart before the trillions of wasps back in Sol system? Should have been the other way round.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course, Spirey. GE’s wasps had a massive head start.” She shrugged, but the bow stayed rigidly pointed. “Okay, war sped up wasp evolution here. But that shouldn’t have made so much difference. That’s where the story breaks down.”

“Not quite.”

“What?”

“Something Wendigo told me. About what she called the second imperative. I guess it wasn’t something she found out until she went underground.”

“Yeah? Astonish me.”

Well, something astonished Quillin at that point—but I was only marginally less surprised by it myself. An explosion of ice, and a mass of swiftly moving metal erupting from the ground around her. The wasp corpses were partially dismembered, blasted, and half-melted—but they still managed to drag Quillin to the ground. For a moment she thrashed, kicking up plumes of frost. Then the whole mass lay deathly still, and it was just me, the ice, and a lot of metal and blood.

The Queen must have coaxed activity out of a few of the wasp corpses, ordering them to use their last reserves of power to take out Quillin.

Thanks, Queen.

But no cigar. Quillin hadn’t necessarily meant to shoot me at that point, but—bless her—she had anyway. The bolt had transected me with the precision of one of the Queen’s theorems, somewhere below my sternum. Gut-shot. The blood on the ice was my own.

• • •

I tried moving.

A couple of light-years away I saw my body undergo a frail little shiver. It didn’t hurt, but there was nothing in the way of proprioceptive feedback to indicate I’d actually managed to twitch any part of my body.