Scoles

Scoles is the leader of the mutineers aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh, and the man who hauls Holsten Mason out of his suspension chamber when the ship’s colonists turn on its commander. He does not survive the mutiny.

Appearance

Scoles is tall, lean and long in the bone, roughly the same age as Holsten. Small scars round his eyes come from surgical correction done before he went into suspension. The skin round his eyes and mouth twitches, which Holsten takes for the mark of a drug that keeps him awake. He carries no gun at first. Later he has a pistol.

The mutiny

Scoles was, until recently, “merely a part of that cargo”. With at least two dozen other colonists he broke into the armoury before the fighting started. Their reason is the moon colony: “Nobody here signed on for this journey to end up freezing in some death trap on a moon without an atmosphere.”

He hauls Holsten out, drags him through the corridors under fire and holds him with Isa Lain in a small systems room. A man with a withered face is shot dead beside them on the way. Scoles has no patience for questions: the people shooting at them are Holsten’s friends, and Holsten is to shut up or be hurt.

He does see a use for the classicist. Holsten knows “very valuable things”, and there are “lives at stake here, hundreds of lives”. On the wall screen he tells Guyen that he knows about the trip to the next terraforming project, and that he holds both the classicist and the chief engineer, with Nessel as his second card. Guyen answers that Lain’s team can cover for her, that the science team has the codes, and that he does not negotiate with those who defy him.

The escape

His fallback is a shuttle. He controls one bay and means to take it to the green planet, with Holsten aboard to talk to Kern. Not to the ice. Scoles says that monsters can be fought.

When Karst takes the air vents, Scoles orders masks and tells his people to shoot Lain. Holsten threatens to sabotage the shuttle; Scoles nods once, grudgingly, and has them both masked. In the fight with security he pulls Lain in front of him and shouts “Back, or she goes first”, then tells his people to aim for faceplates. At the shuttle bay he orders the doors opened and the safeties overridden, and wonders whether the security suits can take vacuum.

In the shuttle he keeps a gun on the two prisoners and frees them only when Lain agrees to isolate the comms, warning that he will kill them if they try anything. When the second shuttle orders them to surrender, Scoles answers, “What makes them think we’d do that, now that we’re winning?” Lain and Holsten agree he is Guyen’s double.

The green planet

Kern seizes the security shuttle and burns the rear half of the mutineers’ shuttle away at the edge of the atmosphere. Scoles comes through the crash with bruises and no worse. He hands out emergency painkillers, then trains a gun on Lain when she asks what the plan is: “We can do it with five.” After that he sets her to salvaging the cabin.

He sends Bales out in the one sealed suit to test the air. Ants kill her, and when the airlock opens he gets everyone outside and starts shooting, calm enough to pick his targets and hitting about one shot in two. He shoots the first spider they see. When Karst lands and orders him to drop the weapon, Nessel tells him it is over and he drops the pistol. Karst’s men shoot him first, and the pilot after him. Nessel reaches the trees.

Holsten later notes that no bacteria or viruses on the planet posed an immediate danger to human health. The next leader of the colonists is, in his words, not another Scoles.

Personality

Holsten reads him as dangerous and volatile, a man pushed as far as he can go. He threatens easily and uses a prisoner as a shield, then changes course the moment it pays: he spares Lain when Holsten offers to keep them all alive. His people follow him through a running fight and out of the ship, and Nessel is the one who finally tells him to stop.

Unanswered questions

• His first name, and what he did before the voyage.
• Whether the mutineers chose him or he took the lead.
• Whether he believed Kern could be talked round.
• What he meant to do on the green planet once he had landed.