His status indicators shifted again, registering the return of air pressure. The inner door irised open and he was pushed forwards into the main body of the black ship. The spacesuited pair followed him. Once they were inside, their helmets detached themselves automatically and flew away to storage points. Two men had brought him aboard the ship. They could easily have been twins, even down to the nearly identical broken nose on each face. One of the men had a gold ring through one eyebrow, the other through the lobe of one ear. Both were bald except for an exceptionally narrow line of dyed-green hair that bisected their skulls from temple to nape. They wore wraparound tortoiseshell goggles and neither man had any trace of a mouth.
The one with the ring through his eyebrow motioned to Clavain that he should remove his own helmet. Clavain shook his head, unwilling to do that until he was certain that he was in breathable air. The man shrugged and reached for something racked on the wall. It was a bright-yellow axe.
Clavain raised a hand and began to fiddle with the connecting latch of the Demarchist suit. He could not find the release mechanism. After a moment the man with the pierced ear shook his head and brushed Clavain’s hand aside. He worked the latch and the soft voice in Clavain’s ear became shriller, more insistent. The status displays flicked mostly into red.
The helmet came off with a gasp of air. Clavain’s ears popped. The pressure on the black ship was not quite Demarchist standard. He breathed cold air, his lungs working hard.
‘Who… who are you?’ he asked, when he had the energy for words.
The man with the pierced eyebrow replaced the yellow axe on the wall. He drew a finger across his own throat.
Then another voice, one that Clavain did not recognise, said, ‘Hello.’
Clavain looked around. The third person also wore a spacesuit, though it was much less cumbersome than the suits worn by her fellows. Despite its bulk she still managed to appear thin and spare. She hovered within the frame of a bulkhead door, resting calmly with her head cocked slightly to one side. Perhaps it was the play of light on her face, but Clavain thought he saw ghostly blades of faded black against the perfect white of her skin.
I hope the Talkative Twins treated you well, Mr Clavain.‘
‘Who are you?’ Clavain said again.
‘I am Zebra. That’s not my real name, of course. You won’t ever need to know my real name.’
‘Who are you, Zebra? Why have you done this?’
‘Because I was told to. What did you expect?’
‘I didn’t expect anything. I was trying…’ He paused and waited until his breath had returned. ‘I was trying to defect.’
‘We know.’
‘We?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough. Come with me, Mr Clavain. Twins, secure and prepare for high-burn. The Convention will be swarming like flies by the time we get back to Yellowstone. It’s going to be an interesting trip home.’
‘I’m not worth killing innocent people for.’
‘No one died, Mr Clavain. The two Convention escorts we destroyed were remotes, slaved to the third. We wounded the third, but its pilot won’t have been harmed. And we conspicuously avoided harming the zombies’ shuttle. Did they make you step outside, I wonder?’
He followed her forwards, through the bulkhead into a flight deck area. There was only one other person aboard as far as Clavain could tell: a wizened-looking man strapped into the pilot’s position. He was not wearing a suit. His ancient age-spotted hands gripped the controls like prehensile twigs.
‘What do you think?’ Clavain asked.
‘It’s possible they might have, but I think it more likely that you chose to leave.’
‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ve got me.’
The ancient man glanced at Clavain with only a flicker of interest. ‘Normal insertion, Zebra, or do we take the long way home?’
‘Follow the normal corridor, Manoukhian, but be ready to deviate. I don’t want to engage the Convention again.’
Manoukhian, if that was indeed his name, nodded and applied pressure to the ivory-handled control sticks. ‘Get the guest strapped down, Zebra. You too.’
The striped woman nodded. ‘Twins? Help me secure Mr Clavain.’
The two men shifted Clavain’s suited form into a contoured acceleration couch. He let them do whatever they wanted; he was too weak to offer more than token resistance. His mind probed the immediate cybernetic environment of the spacecraft, and while his implants sensed something of the data traffic through the control networks, there was nothing he could influence. The people were also beyond his reach. He did not even think any of them had implants.
‘Are you the banshees?’ Clavain asked.
‘Sort of, but not exactly. The banshees are a bunch of thuggish pirates. We do things with a little more finesse. But their existence gives us the cover we need for our own activities. And you?’ The stripes on her face bunched as she smiled. ‘Are you really Nevil Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis?’
‘You didn’t hear that from me.’
