Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

WEATHER

WE WERE at one-quarter of the speed of light, outbound from Shiva-Parvati with a hold full of refugees, when the Cockatrice caught up with us. She commenced her engagement at a distance of one light-second, seeking to disable us with long-range weapons before effecting a boarding operation. Captain Van Ness did his best to protect the Petronel, but we were a lightly armoured ship and Van Ness did not wish to endanger his passengers by provoking a damaging retaliation from the pirates. As coldly calculated as it might appear, Van Ness knew that it would be better for the sleepers to be taken by another ship than suffer a purposeless death in interstellar space.

As shipmaster, it was my duty to give Captain Van Ness the widest choice of options. When it became clear that the Cockatrice was on our tail, following us out from Shiva-Parvati, I recommended that we discard fifty thousand tonnes of nonessential hull material, in order to increase the rate of acceleration available from our Conjoiner drives. When the Cockatrice ramped up her own engines to compensate, I identified a further twenty thousand tonnes of material we could discard until the next orbitfall, even though the loss of the armour would marginally increase the radiation dosage we would experience during the flight. We gained a little, but the pirates still had power in reserve: they’d stripped back their ship to little more than a husk, and they didn’t have the mass handicap of our sleepers. Since we could not afford to lose any more hull material, I advised Van Ness to eject two of our three heavy shuttles, each of which massed six thousand tonnes when fully fuelled. That bought us yet more time, but to my dismay the pirates still found a way to squeeze a little more out of their engines.

Whoever they had as shipmaster, I thought, they were good at their work.

So I went to the engines themselves, to see if I could better my nameless opponent. I crawled out along the pressurised access tunnel that pierced the starboard spar, out to the coupling point where the foreign technology of the starboard Conjoiner drive was mated to the structural fabric of the Petronel. There I opened the hatch that gave access to the controls of the drive itself: six stiff dials, fashioned in blue metal, arranged in hexagon formation, each of which was tied to some fundamental aspect of the engine’s function. The dials were set into quadrant-shaped recesses, all now glowing a calm blue-green.

I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations to three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.

The Petronel surged faster, still maintaining her former heading. It was only possible to make adjustments to the starboard engine, since the port engine had no external controls. That didn’t matter, because the Conjoiners had arranged the two engines to work in perfect synchronisation, despite them being a kilometre apart. No one had ever succeeded in detecting the signals that passed between two matched C-drives, let alone in understanding the messages those signals carried. But everyone who worked with them knew what would happen if, by accident or design, the engines were allowed to get more than sixteen hundred metres apart.

I completed my adjustments, satisfied that I’d done all I could without risking engine malfunction. Three of the five dials were now showing orange, indicating that those settings were now outside what the Conjoiners deemed the recommended envelope of safe operation. If any of the dials were to show red, or if more than three showed orange, than we’d be in real danger of losing the Petronel.

When Ultras meet on friendly terms, to exchange data or goods, the shipmasters will often trade stories of engine settings. On a busy trade route, a marginal increase in drive efficiency can make all the difference between one ship and its competitors. Occasionally you hear about ships that have been running on three orange, even four orange, for decades at a time. By the same token, you sometimes hear about ships that went nova when only two dials had been adjusted away from the safety envelope. The one thing every shipmaster agrees upon is that no lighthugger has ever operated for more than a few days of shiptime with one dial in the red. You might risk that to escape aggressors, but even then some will insist that the danger is too great; that those ships that lasted days were the lucky ones.

I left the starboard engine and retreated back into the main hull of the Petronel. Van Ness was waiting to greet me. I could tell by the look on his face—the part of it that I could read—that the news wasn’t good.

“Good lad, Inigo,” he said, placing his heavy gauntleted hand on my shoulder. “You’ve bought us maybe half a day, and I’m grateful for that, no question of it. But it’s not enough to make a difference. Are you sure you can’t sweet-talk any more out of them?”

“We could risk going to two gees for a few hours. That still wouldn’t put us out of reach of the Cockatrice, though.”

“And beyond that?”

I showed Van Ness my handwritten log book, with its meticulous notes of engine settings, compiled over twenty years of shiptime. Black ink for my own entries, the style changing abruptly when I lost my old hand and slowly learned how to use the new one; red annotations in the same script for comments and know-how gleaned from other shipmasters, dated and named. “According to this, we’re already running a fifteen per cent chance of losing the ship within the next hundred days. I’d feel a lot happier if we were already throttling back.”

“You don’t think we can lose any more mass?”

“We’re stripped to the bone as it is. I can probably find you another few thousand tonnes, but we’ll still only be looking at prolonging the inevitable.”

“We’ll have the short-range weapons,” Van Ness said resignedly. “Maybe they’ll make enough of a difference. At least now we have an extra half-day to get them run out and tested.”

“Let’s hope so,” I agreed, fully aware that it was hopeless. The weapons were antiquated and underpowered, good enough for fending off orbital insurgents but practically useless against another ship, especially one that had been built for piracy. The Petronel hadn’t fired a shot in anger in more than fifty years. When Van Ness had the chance to upgrade the guns, he’d chosen instead to spend the money on newer reefersleep caskets for the passenger hold.

People have several wrong ideas about Ultras. One of the most common misconceptions is that we must all be brigands, every ship bristling with armaments, primed to a state of nervous readiness the moment another vessel comes within weapons range.

It isn’t true. For every ship like that, there are a thousand like the Petronel: just trying to ply an honest trade, with a decent, hardworking crew under the hand of a fair man like Van Ness. Some of us might look like freaks, by the standards of planetary civilisation. But spending an entire life aboard a ship, hopping from star to star at relativistic speed, soaking up exotic radiation from the engines and from space itself, is hardly the environment for which the human form was evolved. I’d lost my old hand in an accident, and much of what had happened to Van Ness was down to time and misfortune in equal measure.

He was one of the best captains I’d ever known, maybe the best ever. He’d scared the hell out of me the first time we met, when he was recruiting for a new shipmaster in a carousel around Greenhouse. But Van Ness treated his crew well, kept his word in a deal and always reminded us that our passengers were not frozen “cargo” but human beings who had entrusted themselves into our care.

“If it comes to it,” Van Ness said, “we’ll let them take the passengers. At least that way some of them might survive, even if they won’t necessarily end up where they were expecting. We put up too much of a fight, even after we’ve been boarded, the Cockatrice’s crew may just decide to burn everything, sleepers included.”

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t want to hear it.

“But here’s my advice to you, lad.” Van Ness’s iron grip tightened on my shoulder. “Get yourself to an airlock as soon as you can. Blow yourself into space rather than let the bastards get their hands on you. They might be in mind for a bit of cruelty, but they won’t be in need of new crew.”

I winced, before he crushed my collarbone. He meant well, but he really didn’t know his own strength.

“Especially not a shipmaster, judging by the way things are going.”

“Aye. He’s good, whoever he is. Not as good as you, though. You’ve got a fully laden ship to push; all they have is a stripped-down skeleton.”

It was meant well, but I knew better than to underestimate my adversary. “Thank you, Captain.”

“We’d best start waking those guns, lad. If you’re done with the engines, the weaponsmaster may appreciate a helping hand.”

I BARELY SLEPT for the next day. Coaxing the weapons back to operational readiness was a fraught business, and it all had to be done without alerting the Cockatrice that we had any last-minute defensive capability. The magnetic coils on the induction guns had to be warmed and brought up to operational field strength, and then tested with slugs of recycled hull material. One of the coils fractured during warm-up and took out its entire turret, injuring one of Weps’ men in the process. The optics on the lasers had to be aligned and calibrated, and then the lasers had to be test-fired against specks of incoming interstellar dust, hoping that the Cockatrice didn’t spot those pinpoint flashes of gamma radiation as the lasers found their targets.

All the while this was going on, the enemy continued their long-range softening-up bombardment. The Cockatrice was using everything in her arsenal, from slugs and missiles to beam-weapons. The Petronel was running an evasion routine, swerving to exploit the sadly narrowing timelag between the two ships, but the routine was old and with the engines already notched up to close-on maximum output, there was precious little reserve power. No single impact was damaging, but as the assault continued, the cumulative effect began to take its toll. Acres of hull shielding were now compromised, and there were warnings of structural weakness in the port drive spar. If this continued, we would soon be forced to dampen our engines, rather than be torn apart by our own thrust loading. That was exactly what the Cockatrice wanted. Once they’d turned us into a lame duck, they could make a forced hard docking and storm our ship.

By the time they were eighty thousand kilometres out, things were looking very bad for us. Even the Cockatrice must have been nervous of what would happen if the port spar gave way, since they’d begun to concentrate their efforts on our midsection instead. Reluctantly I crawled back along the starboard spar and confronted the engine settings again. I was faced with two equally numbing possibilities. I could turn the dials even further into the orange, making the engines run harder still. Even if the engines held, the ship wouldn’t, but at least we’d go out in a flash when the spar collapsed and the two engines drifted apart. Or I could return the dials to blue-green and let the Cockatrice catch us up without risk of further failure. One option might ensure the future survival of the passengers. Neither looked very attractive from the crew’s standpoint.

Van Ness knew it, too. He’d begun to go around the rest of the crew, all two dozen of us, ordering those who weren’t actively involved in the current crisis to choose an empty casket in the passenger hold and try to pass themselves off as cargo. Van Ness was wise enough not to push the point when no one took him up on his offer.

At fifty thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice was in range of our own weapons. We let her slip a little closer and then rotated our hull through forty-five degrees to give her a full broadside, all eleven working slug-cannons discharging at once, followed by a burst from the lasers. The recoil from the slugs was enough to generate further warnings of structural failure in a dozen critical nodes. But we held, somehow, and thirty per cent of that initial salvo hit the Cockatrice square-on. By then the lasers had already struck her, vaporising thousands of tonnes of ablative ice from her prow in a scalding white flash. When the steam had fallen astern of the still-accelerating ship, we got our first good look at the damage.

It wasn’t enough. We’d hurt her, but barely, and I knew we couldn’t sustain more than three further bursts of fire before the Cockatrice’s own short-range weapons found their lock and returned the assault. As it was, we only got off another two salvos before the slug-cannons suffered a targeting failure. The lasers continued to fire for another minute, but once they’d burned off the Cockatrice’s ice (which she could easily replenish from our own shield, once we’d been taken) they could inflict little further damage.

By twenty thousand kilometres, all our weapons were inoperable. Fear of breakup had forced me to throttle our engines back down to zero thrust, leaving only our in-system fusion motors running. At ten thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice released a squadron of pirates, each of whom would be carrying hull-penetrating gear and shipboard weapons, in addition to their thruster packs and armour. They must have been confident that we had nothing else to throw at them.

We knew then it was over.

It was, too: but for the Cockatrice, not us. What took place happened too quickly for the human eye to see. It was only later, when we had the benefit of footage from the hull cameras, that we were able to piece together what had occurred.

One instant, the Cockatrice was creeping closer to us, her engines doused to a whisper now to match our own feeble rate of acceleration. The next instant, she was still there, but everything about her had changed. The engines were shut down completely and the hull had begun to come apart, flaking away in a long lateral line that ran the entire four kilometres from bow to stern. The Cockatrice began to crab, losing axial stabilisation. Pieces of her were drifting away. Vapour was jetting from a dozen apertures along her length. Where the hull had scabbed away, the brassy orange glow of internal fire was visible. One engine spar was seriously buckled.

We didn’t know it at the time—didn’t know it until much later, when we’d actually boarded her—but the Cockatrice had fallen victim to the oldest hazard in space: collision with debris. There isn’t a lot of it out there, but when it hits…at a quarter of the speed of light, it doesn’t take much to inflict crippling damage. The impactor might only have been the size of a fist, or a fat thumb, but it had rammed its way right through the ship like a bullet, and the momentum transfer had almost ripped the engines off.

It was bad luck for the crew of the Cockatrice. For us, it was the most appalling piece of good luck imaginable. Except it wasn’t even luck, really. Every now and then, ships will encounter something like that. Deep-look radar will identify an incoming shard and send an emergency steer command to the engines. Or the radar will direct anti-collision lasers to vaporise the object before it hits. Even if it does hit, most of its kinetic energy will be soaked up by the ablation ice. Ships don’t carry all that deadweight for nothing.

But the Cockatrice had lost her ice under our lasers. She’d have replaced it sooner or later, but without it she was horribly vulnerable. And her own anti-collision system was preoccupied dealing with our short-range weapons. One little impactor was all it took to remove her from the battle.

It gave us enough of a handhold to start fighting back. With the Cockatrice out of the fight, our own crew were able to leave the protection of the ship without fear of being fried or pulverised. Van Ness was the first out of the airlock, with me not far behind him. Within five minutes there were twenty-three of us outside, our suits bulked out with armour and antiquated weapons. There were at least thirty incoming pirates from the Cockatrice, and they had better gear. But they’d lost the support of their mother ship, and all of them must have been aware that the situation had undergone a drastic adjustment. Perhaps it made them fight even more fiercely, given that ours was now the only halfway-intact ship. They’d been planning to steal our cargo before, and strip the Petronel for useful parts; now they needed to take the Petronel and claim her as her own. But they didn’t have back-up from the Cockatrice and—judging by the way the battle proceeded—they seemed handicapped by more than just the lack of covering fire. They fought as well as they could, which was with a terrible individual determination, but no overall coordination. Afterwards, we concluded that their suit-to-suit communications, even their spatial-orientation systems, must have been reliant on signals routed through their ship. Without her they were deaf and blind.

We still lost good crew. It took six hours to mop up the last resistance from the pirates, by which point we’d taken eleven fatalities, with another three seriously wounded. But by then the pirates were all dead, and we were in no mood to take prisoners.

But we were in a mood to take what we needed from the Cockatrice.

IF WE’D EXPECTED to encounter serious resistance aboard the damaged ship, we were wrong. As Van Ness led our boarding party through the drifting wreck, the scope of the damage became chillingly clear. The ship had been gutted from the inside out, with almost no intact pressure-bearing structures left anywhere inside her main hull. For most of the crew left aboard when the impactor hit, the end would have come with merciful swiftness. Only a few had survived the initial collision, and most of them must have died shortly afterwards, as the ship bled through its wounds. We found no sign that the Cockatrice had been carrying frozen passengers, although—since entire internal bays had been blasted out of existence, leaving only an interlinked chain of charred, blackened caverns—we probably wouldn’t ever know for sure. Of the few survivors we did encounter, none attempted surrender or requested parley. That made it easier for us. If they stood still, we shot them. If they fled, we still shot them.

Except for one.

We knew there was something different about her as soon as we saw her. She didn’t look or move like an Ultra. There was something of the cat or snake about the way she slinked out of the illumination of our lamps, something fluid and feral, something sleek and honed that did not belong aboard a ship crewed by pirates. We held our fire from the moment her eyes first flashed at us, for we knew she could not be one of them. Wide, white-edged eyes in a girl’s face, her strong-jawed expression one of ruthless self-control and effortless superiority. Her skull was hairless, her forehead rising to a bony crest rilled on either side by shimmering coloured tissue.

The girl was a Conjoiner.

It was three days before we found her again. She knew that ship with animal cunning, as if the entire twisted and blackened warren was a lair she had made for herself. But her options were diminishing with every hour that passed, as more and more air drained out of the wreck. Even Conjoiners needed to breathe, and that meant there was less and less of the ship in which she could hide.

Van Ness wanted to move on. Van Ness—a good man, but never the most imaginative of souls—wasn’t interested in what a stray Conjoiner could do for us. I’d warned him that the Cockatrice’s engines were in an unstable condition, and that we wouldn’t have time to back off to a safe distance if the buckled drive spar finally gave way. Now that we’d harvested enough of the other ship’s intact hull to repair our own damage, Van Ness saw no reason to hang around. But I managed to talk him into letting us hunt down the girl.

“She’s a Conjoiner, Captain. She wouldn’t have been aboard that ship of her own free will. That means she’s a prisoner that we can free and return to her people. They’ll be grateful. That means they’ll want to reward us.”

Van Ness fixed me with an indulgent smile. “Lad, have you ever had close dealings with Spiders?”

He still called me “lad” even though I’d been part of his crew for twenty years, and had been born another twenty before that, by shiptime reckoning. “No,” I admitted. “But the Spiders—the Conjoiners—aren’t the bogey men some people like to make out.”

“I’ve dealt with ’em,” Van Ness said. “I’m a lot older than you, lad. I go right back to when things weren’t so pretty between the Spiders and the rest of humanity, back when my wife was alive.”

It took a lot to stir up the past for Rafe Van Ness. In all our years together, he’d only mentioned his wife a handful of times. She’d been a botanist, working on the Martian terraforming programme. She’d been caught by a flash flood when she was working in one of the big craters, testing plant stocks for the Demarchists. All I knew was that after her death, Van Ness had left the system, on one of the first passenger-carrying starships. It had been his first step on the long road to becoming an Ultra.

“They’ve changed since the old days,” I said. “We trust them enough to use their engines, don’t we?”

“We trust the engines. Isn’t quite the same thing. And if they didn’t have such a monopoly on making the things, maybe we wouldn’t have to deal with them at all. Anyway, who is this girl? What was she doing aboard the Cockatrice? What makes you think she wasn’t helping them?”

“Conjoiners don’t condone piracy. And if we want answers, we have no option but to catch her and find out what she has to say.”

Van Ness sounded suddenly interested. “Interrogate her, you mean?”

“I didn’t say that, Captain. But we might want to ask her a few questions.”

“We’d be playing with fire. You know they can make things happen just by thinking about them.”

“She’ll have no reason to hurt us. We’ll have saved her life just by taking her off the Cockatrice.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want it saved. Have you thought of that?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we find her, Captain.”

He pulled a face, that part of his visage still capable of making expressions, at least. “I’ll give you another twelve hours, lad. That’s my limit. Then we put as much distance between us and that wreck as God and physics will allow.”

I nodded, knowing that it was pointless to expect more of Van Ness. He’d already shown great forbearance in allowing us to delay the departure for so long. Given his feelings regarding Conjoiners, I wasn’t going to push for any more time.

WE CAUGHT HER eleven hours later. We’d driven her as far as she could go, blocking her escape routes by blowing the few surrounding volumes that were still pressurised. I was the first to speak to her, when we finally had her cornered.

I pushed up the visor of my helmet, breathing stale air so that we could speak. She was huddled in a comer, compressed like some animal ready to bolt or strike.

“Stop running from us,” I said, as my lamp pinned her down and forced her to squint. “There’s nowhere left to go, and even if there was, we don’t want to hurt you. Whatever these people did to you, whatever they made you do, we’re not like them.”

She hissed back, “You’re Ultras. That’s all I need to know.”

“We’re Ultras, yes, but we still want to help you. Our captain just wants to get away from this time bomb as quickly as possible. I talked him into giving us a few extra hours to find you. You can come with us whenever you like. But if you’d rather stay aboard this ship…”

She stared back at me and said nothing. I couldn’t guess her age. She had the face of a girl, but there was a steely resolution in her olive-green eyes that told me she was older than she looked.

“I’m Inigo, the shipmaster from the Petronel,” I said, hoping that my smile looked reassuring rather than threatening. I reached out my hand, my right one, and she flinched back. Even suited, even hidden under a glove, my hand was obviously mechanical. “Please,” I continued, “come with us. We’ll treat you well and get you back to your people.”

“Why?” she snarled. “Why do you care?”

“Because we’re not all the same,” I said. “And you need to believe it, or you’re going to die here when we leave. Captain wants us to secure for thrust in less than an hour. So come on.”

“What happened?” she asked, looking around at the damaged compartment in which she had been cornered. “I know the Cockatrice was attacking another ship…how did you do this?”

“We didn’t. We just got very, very lucky. Now it’s your turn.”

“I can’t leave here. I need to be with this ship.”

‘This ship is going to blow up if one of us sneezes. Do you really want to be aboard when that happens?”

“I still need to be here. Leave me alone, I’ll survive by myself. Conjoiners will find me again.”

I shook my head firmly. ‘That isn’t going to happen. Even if this ship doesn’t blow up, you’re still drifting at twenty-five per cent of the speed of light. That’s too fast to get you back to Shiva-Parvati, even if there’s a shuttle aboard this thing. Too fast for anyone around Shiva-Parvati to come out and rescue you, too.”

“I know this.”

“Then you also know that you’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to actually get anywhere before your resources run out. Unless you think you can survive fifty years aboard this thing, until you swing by the next colonised system with no way of slowing down.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

A voice buzzed in my helmet. It was Van Ness, insisting that we return to the Petronel as quickly as possible. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but if you don’t come willingly, I’m going to have to bring you in unconscious.” I raised the blunt muzzle of my slug-gun.

“If there’s a tranquiliser dart in there, it won’t work on me. My nervous system isn’t like yours. I only sleep when I choose to.”

“That’s what I figured. It’s why I dialled the dose to five times its normal strength. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to give it a try and see what happens.”

Panic crossed her face. “Give me a suit,” she said. “Give me a suit and then leave me alone, if you really want to help.”

“What’s your name?”

“We don’t have names, Inigo. At least nothing you could get your tongue around.”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Give me a suit. Then leave me alone.”

Van Ness started screaming in my ears again. I’d had enough. I pointed the muzzle at her, aiming for the flesh of her thigh, where she had her legs tucked under her. I squeezed the trigger and delivered the stun flechette.

“You fool,” she said. “You don’t understand. You have to leave me here, with this…”

That was all she managed before slumping into unconsciousness. She’d gone down much faster than I’d expected, as if she’d already been on her last reserves of strength. I just hoped I hadn’t set the stun dose too high. It was already strong enough to kill any normal human being.

VAN NESS HAD been right to be concerned about our proximity to the Cockatrice. We’d barely doubled the distance between the two ships when her drive spar failed, allowing the port engine to drift away from its starboard counterpart. Several agonising minutes later, the distance between the two engine units exceeded sixteen hundred metres and the drives went up in a double burst that tested our shielding to its limits. The flash must have been visible all the way back to Shiva-Parvati.

The girl had been unconscious right up until that moment, but when the engines went up she twitched on the bunk where we’d placed her, just as if she’d been experiencing a vivid and disturbing dream. The rilled structures on the side of her crest throbbed with vivid colours, each chasing the last. Then she was restful again, for many hours, and the play of colours calmer.

I watched her sleeping. I’d never been near a Conjoiner before, let alone one like this. Aboard the ship, when we had been hunting her, she had seemed strong and potentially dangerous. Now she looked like some half-starved animal, driven to the brink of madness by hunger and something infinitely worse. There were awful bruises all over her body, some more recent than others. There were fine scars on her skull. One of her incisors was missing a point.

Van Ness still wasn’t convinced of the wisdom of bringing her aboard, but even his dislike of Conjoiners didn’t extend to the notion of throwing her back into space. All the same, he insisted that she be bound to the bunk by heavy restraints, in an armoured room under the guard of a servitor, at least until we had some idea of who she was and how she had ended up aboard the pirate ship. He didn’t want heavily augmented crew anywhere near her, either: not when (as he evidently believed) she had the means to control any machine in her vicinity, and might therefore overpower or even commandeer any crewperson who had a skull full of implants. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell him: Conjoiners could talk to machines, yes, but not all machines, and the idea that they could work witchcraft on anything with a circuit inside it was just so much irrational fearmongering.

Van Ness heard my reasoned objections, and then ignored them. I’m glad that he did, though. Had he listened to me, he might have put some other member of the crew in charge of questioning her, and then I wouldn’t have got to know her as well as I did. Because I only had the metal hand, the rest of me still flesh and blood, he deemed me safe from her influence.

I was with her when she woke.

I placed my left hand on her shoulder as she squirmed under the restraints, suddenly aware of her predicament. “It’s all right,” I said softly. “You’re safe now. Captain made us put these on you for the time being, but we’ll get them off you as soon as we can. That’s a promise. I’m Inigo, by the way, shipmaster. We met before, but I’m not sure how much of that you remember.”

“Every detail,” she said. Her voice was low, dark-tinged, untrusting.

“Maybe you don’t know where you are. You’re aboard the Petronel. The Cockatrice is gone, along with everyone aboard her. Whatever they did to you, whatever happened to you aboard that ship, it’s over now.”

“You didn’t listen to me.”

“If we’d listened to you,” I said patiently, “you’d be dead by now.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

I’d been ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but my reservoir of sympathy was beginning to dry up. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to show a little gratitude. We put ourselves at considerable risk to get you to safety. We’d taken everything we needed from the pirates. We only went back in to help you.”

“I didn’t need you to help me. I could have survived.”

“Not unless you think you could have held that spar on by sheer force of will.”

She hissed back her reply. “I’m a Conjoiner. That means the rules were different. I could have changed things. I could have kept the ship in one piece.”

“To make a point?”

“No,” she said, with acid slowness, as if that was the only speed I was capable of following. “Not to make a point. We don’t make points.”

“The ship’s gone,” I said. “It’s over, so you may as well deal with it. You’re with us now. And no, you’re not our prisoner. We’ll do everything I said we would: take care of you, get you to safety, back to your people.”

“You really think it’s that simple?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? I don’t see what the problem is.”

“The problem is I can’t ever go back. Is that simple enough for you?”

“Why?” I asked. “Were you exiled from the Conjoiners, or something like that?”

She shook her elaborately crested head, as if my question was the most naive thing she had ever heard. “No one gets exiled.”

“Then tell me what the hell happened!”

Anger burst to the surface. “I was taken, all right? I was stolen, snatched away from my people. Captain Voulage took me prisoner around Yellowstone, when the Cockatrice was docked near one of our ships. I was part of a small diplomatic party visiting Carousel New Venice. Voulage’s men ambushed us, split us up, then took me so far from the other Conjoiners that I dropped out of neural range. Have you any idea what that means to one of us?”

I shook my head, not because I didn’t understand what she meant, but because I knew I could have no proper grasp of the emotional pain that severance must have caused. I doubted that pain was a strong enough word for the psychic shock associated with being ripped away from her fellows. Nothing in ordinary human experience could approximate the trauma of that separation, any more than a frog could grasp the loss of a loved one. Conjoiners spent their whole lives in a state of gestalt consciousness, sharing thoughts and experiences via a web of implant-mediated neural connections. They had individual personalities, but those personalities were more like the blurred identities of atoms in a metallic solid. Beyond the level of individual self was the state of higher mental union that they called Transenlightenment, analogous to the fizzing sea of dissociated electrons in that same metallic lattice.

And the girl had been ripped away from that, forced to come to terms with existence as a solitary mind, an island once more.

“I understand how bad it must have been,” I said. “But now you can go back. Isn’t that something worth looking forward to?”

“You only think you understand. To a Conjoiner, what happened to me is the worst thing in the world. And now I can’t go back: not now, not ever. I’ve become damaged, broken, useless. My mind is permanently disfigured. It can’t be allowed to return to Transenlightenment.”

“Why ever not? Wouldn’t they be glad to get you back?”

She took a long time answering. In the quiet, I studied her face, watchful for anything that would betray the danger Van Ness clearly believed she posed. Now his fears seemed groundless. She looked smaller and more delicately boned than when we’d first glimpsed her on the Cockatrice. The strangeness of her, the odd shape of her hairless crested skull, should have been off-putting. In truth I found her fascinating. It was not her alienness that drew my furtive attention, but her very human face: her small and pointed chin, the pale freckles under her eyes, the way her mouth never quite closed, even when she was silent. The olive green of her eyes was a shade so dark that from certain angles it became a lustrous black, like the surface of coal.

“No,” she said, answering me finally. “It wouldn’t work. I’d upset the purity of the others, spoil the harmony of the neural connections, like a single out-of-tune instrument in an orchestra. I’d make everyone else start playing out of key.”

“I think you’re being too fatalistic. Shouldn’t we at least try to find some other Conjoiners and see what they say?”

“That isn’t how it works,” she said. “They’d have to take me back, yes, if I presented myself to them. They’d do it out of kindness and compassion. But I’d still end up harming them. It’s my duty not to allow that to happen.”

“Then you’re saying you have to spend the rest of your life away from other Conjoiners, wandering the universe like some miserable excommunicated pilgrim?”

“There are more of us than you realise.”

“You do a good job keeping out of the limelight. Most people only see Conjoiners in groups, all dressed in black like a flock of crows.”

“Maybe you aren’t looking in the right places.”

I sighed, aware that nothing I said was going to convince her that she would be better off returning to her people. “It’s your life, your destiny. At least you’re alive. Our word still holds: we’ll drop you at the nearest safe planet, when we next make orbitfall. If that isn’t satisfactory to you, you’d be welcome to remain aboard ship until we arrive somewhere else.”

“Your captain would allow that? I thought he was the one who wanted to leave the wreck before you’d found me.”

“I’ll square things with the captain. He isn’t the biggest fan of Conjoiners, but he’ll see sense when he realises you aren’t a monster.”

“Does he have a reason not to like me?”

“He’s an old man,” I said simply.

“Riven with prejudice, you mean?”

“In his way,” I said, shrugging. “But don’t blame him for that. He lived through the bad years, when your people were first coming into existence. I think he had some firsthand experience of the trouble that followed.”

“Then I envy him those first-hand memories. Not many of us are still alive from those times. To have lived through those years, to have breathed the same air as Remontoire and the others…” She looked away sadly. “Remontoire’s gone now. So are Galiana and Nevil. We don’t know what happened to any of them.”

I knew she must have been talking about pivotal figures from earlier Conjoiner history, but the people of whom she spoke meant nothing to me. To her, cast so far downstream from those early events on Mars, the names must have held something of the resonance of saints or apostles. I thought I knew something of Conjoiners, but they had a long and complicated internal history of which I was totally ignorant.

“I wish things hadn’t happened the way they did,” I said. “But that was then and this is now. We don’t hate or fear you. If we did, we wouldn’t have risked our necks getting you out of the Cockatrice.”

“No, you don’t hate or fear me,” she replied. “But you still think I might be useful to you, don’t you?”

“Only if you wish to help us.”

“Captain Voulage thought that I might have the expertise to improve the performance of his ship.”

“Did you?” I asked innocently.

“By increments, yes. He showed me the engines and…encouraged me to make certain changes. You told me you are a shipmaster, so you doubtless have some familiarity with the principles involved.”

I thought back to the adjustments I had made to our own engines, when we still had ambitions of fleeing the pirates. The memory of my trembling hand on those three critical dials felt as if it had been dredged from deepest antiquity, rather than something that had happened only days earlier.

“When you say ‘encouraged’…” I began.

“He found ways to coerce me. It is true that Conjoiners can control their perception of pain by applying neural blockades. But only to a degree, and then only when the pain has a real physical origin. If the pain is generated in the head, using a reverse-field trawl, our defences are useless.” She looked at me with a sudden hard intensity, as if daring me to imagine one-tenth of what she had experienced. “It is like locking a door when the wolf is already in the house.”

“I’m sorry. You must have been through hell.”

“I only had the pain to endure,” she said. “I’m not the one anyone needs to feel sorry about.”

The remark puzzled me, but I let it lie. “I have to get back to our own engines now,” I said, “but I’ll come to see you later. In the meantime, I think you should rest.” I snapped a duplicate communications bracelet from my wrist and placed it near her hand, where she could reach it. “If you need me, you can call into this. It’ll take me a little while to get back here, but I’ll come as quickly as possible.”

She lifted her forearm as far as it would go, until the restraints stiffened. “And these?”

“I’ll talk to Van Ness. Now that you’re lucid, now that you’re talking to us, I don’t see any further need for them.”

“Thank you,” she said again. “Inigo. Is that all there is to your name? It’s rather a short one, even by the standards of the retarded.”

“Inigo Standish, shipmaster. And you still haven’t told me your name.”

“I told you: it’s nothing you could understand. We have our own names now, terms of address that can only be communicated in the Transenlightenment. My name is a flow of experiential symbols, a string of interiorised qualia, an expression of a particular dynamic state that has only ever happened under a conjunction of rare physical conditions in the atmosphere of a particular kind of gas giant planet. I chose it myself. It’s considered very beautiful and a little melancholy, like a haiku in five dimensions.”

“Inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, right?”

She looked at me alertly. “Yes.”

“Fine, then. I’ll call you Weather. Unless you’d like to suggest something better.”

SHE NEVER DID suggest something better, even though I think she once came close to it. From that moment on, whether she liked it or not, she was always Weather. Soon, it was what the other crew were calling her, and the name that—grudgingly at first, then resignedly—she deigned to respond to.

I went to see Captain Van Ness and did my best to persuade him that Weather was not going to cause us any difficulties.

“What are you suggesting we should give her—a free pass to the rest of the ship?”

“Only that we could let her out of her prison cell.”

“She’s recuperating.”

“She’s restrained. And you’ve put an armed servitor on the door, in case she gets out of the restraints.”

“Pays to be prudent.”

“I think we can trust her now, Captain.” I hesitated, choosing my words with great care. “I know you have good reasons not to like her people, but she isn’t the same as the Conjoiners from those days.”

“That’s what she’d like us to think, certainly.”

“I’ve spoken to her, heard her story. She’s an outcast from her people, unable to return to them because of what’s happened to her.”

“Well, then,” Van Ness said, nodding as if he’d proved a point, “outcasts do funny things. You can’t ever be too careful with outcasts.”

“It’s not like that with Weather.”

“Weather,” he repeated, with a certain dry distaste. “So she’s got a name now, has she?”

“I felt it might help. The name was my suggestion, not hers.”

“Don’t start humanising them. That’s the mistake humans always make. Next thing you know, they’ve got their claws in your skull.”

I closed my eyes, forcing self-control as the conversation veered off course. I’d always had an excellent relationship with Van Ness, one that came very close to bordering on genuine friendship. But from the moment he heard about Weather, I knew she was going to come between us.

“I’m not suggesting we let her run amok,” I said. “Even if we let her out of those restraints, even if we take away the servitor, we can still keep her out of any parts of the ship where we don’t want her. In the meantime, I think she can be helpful to us. She’s already told me that Captain Voulage forced her to make improvements to the Cockatrice’s drive system. I don’t see why she can’t do the same for us, if we ask nicely.”

“Why did he have to force her, if you’re so convinced she’d do it willingly now?”

“I’m not convinced. But I can’t see why she wouldn’t help us, if we treat her like a human being.”

“That’d be our big mistake,” Van Ness said. “She never was a human being. She’s been a Spider from the moment they made her, and she’ll go to the grave like that.”

“Then you won’t consider it?”

“I consented to let you bring her aboard. That was already against every God-given instinct.” Then Van Ness rumbled, “And I’d thank you not to mention the Spider again, Inigo. You’ve my permission to visit her if you see fit, but she isn’t taking a step out of that room until we make orbitfall.”

“Very well,” I said, with a curtness that I’d never had cause to use on Captain Van Ness.

As I was leaving his cabin, he said, “You’re still a fine shipmaster, lad. That’s never been in doubt. But don’t let this thing cloud your usual good judgement. I’d hate to have to look elsewhere for someone of your abilities.”

I turned back and, despite everything that told me to hold my tongue, I still spoke. “I was wrong about you, Captain. I’ve always believed that you didn’t allow yourself to be ruled by the irrational hatreds of other Ultras. I always thought you were better than that.”

“And I’d have gladly told you I have just as many prejudices as the next man. They’re what’ve kept me alive so long.”

“I’m sure Captain Voulage felt the same way,” I said.

It was a wrong and hateful thing to say—Van Ness had nothing in common with a monster like Voulage—but I couldn’t stop myself. And I knew even as I said it that some irreversible bridge had just been crossed, and that it was more my fault than Van Ness’s.

“You have work to do, I think,” Van Ness said, his voice so low that I barely heard it. “Until you have the engines back to full thrust, I suggest you keep out of my way.”

WEPS CAME TO see me eight or nine hours later. I knew it wasn’t good news as soon as I saw her face.

“We have a problem, Inigo. The captain felt you needed to know.”

“And he couldn’t tell me himself?”

Weps cleared part of the wall and called up a display, filling it with a boxy green three-dimensional grid. “That’s us,” she said, jabbing a finger at the red dot in the middle of the display. She moved her finger halfway to the edge, scratching her long black nail against the plating. “Something else is out there. It’s stealthed to the gills, but I’m still seeing it. Whatever it is is making a slow, silent approach.”

My thoughts flicked to Weather. “Could it be Conjoiner?”

“That was my first guess. But if it was Conjoiner, I don’t think I’d be seeing anything at all.”

“So what are we dealing with?”

She tapped the nail against the blue icon representing the new ship. “Another raider. Could be an ally of Voulage—we know he had friends—or could be some other ship that was hoping to pick over our carcass once Voulage was done with us, or maybe even steal us from him before he had his chance.”

“Hyena tactics.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Range?”

“Less than two light-hours. Even if they don’t increase their rate of closure, they’ll be on us within eight days.”

“Unless we move.”

Weps nodded sagely. “That would help. You’re on schedule to complete repairs within six days, aren’t you?”

“On schedule, yes, but that doesn’t mean things can be moved any faster. We start cutting corners now, we’ll break like a twig when we put a real load on the ship.”

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

“The captain just thought you should be aware of the situation, Inigo. It’s not to put you under pressure, or anything.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s just that…we really don’t want to be hanging around here a second longer than necessary.”

I REMOVED WEATHER’S restraints and showed her how to help herself to food and water from the room’s dispenser. She stretched and purred, articulating and extending her limbs in the manner of a dancer rehearsing some difficult routine in extreme slow motion. She’d been “reading” when I arrived, which for Weather seemed to involve staring into the middle distance while her eyes flicked to and fro at manic speed, as if following the movements of an invisible wasp.

“I can’t let you out of the room just yet,” I said, sitting on the fold-down stool next to the bed, upon which Weather now sat cross-legged. “I just hope this makes things a little more tolerable.”

“So your captain’s finally realised I’m not about to suck out his brains?”

“Not exactly. He’d still rather you weren’t aboard.”

“Then you’re going against his orders.”

“I suppose so.”

“I presume you could get into trouble for that.”

“He’ll never find out.” I thought of the unknown ship that was creeping towards us. “He’s got other things on his mind now. It’s not as if he’s going to be paying you a courtesy call just to pass the time of day.”

“But if he did find out…” She looked at me intently, lifting her chin. “Do you fear what he’d do to you?”

“I probably should. But I don’t think he’d be very likely to throw me into an airlock. Not until we’re under way at full power, in any case.”

“And then?”

“He’d be angry. But I don’t think he’d kill me. He’s not a bad man, really.”

“Perhaps I misheard, but didn’t you say his name was Van Ness?”

“Captain Rafe Van Ness, yes.” I must have looked surprised. “Don’t tell me it means something to you.”

“I heard Voulage mention him, that’s all. Now I know we’re talking about the same man.”

“What did Voulage have to say?”

“Nothing good. But I don’t think that necessarily reflects poorly on your captain. He must be a reasonable man. He’s at least allowed me aboard his ship, even if I haven’t been invited to dine in his quarters.”

“Dining for Van Ness is a pretty messy business,” I said confidingly. “You’re better off eating alone.”

“Do you like him, Inigo?”

“He has his flaws, but next to someone like Voulage, he’s pretty close to being an angel.”

“Doesn’t like Conjoiners, though.”

“Most Ultras would have left you drifting. I think this is a point where you have to take what you’re given.”

“Perhaps. I don’t understand his attitude, though. If your captain is like most Ultras, there’s at least as much of the machine about him as there is about me. More so, in all likelihood.”

“It’s what you do with the machines that counts,” I said. “Ultras tend to leave their minds alone, if at all possible. Even if they do have implants, it’s usually to replace areas of brain function lost due to injury or old age. They’re not really interested in improving matters, if you get my drift. Maybe that’s why Conjoiners make them twitchy.”

She unhooked her legs, dangling them over the edge of the bed. Her feet were bare and oddly elongated. She wore the same tight black outfit we’d found her in when we boarded the ship. It was cut low from her neck, in a rectangular shape. Her breasts were small. Though she was bony, with barely any spare muscle on her, she had the broad shoulders of a swimmer. Though Weather had sustained her share of injuries, the outfit showed no sign of damage at all. It appeared to be self-repairing, even self-cleaning.

“You talk of Ultras as if you weren’t one,” she said.

“Just an old habit breaking through. Though sometimes I don’t feel like quite the same breed as a man like Van Ness.”

“Your implants must be very well shielded. I can’t sense them at all.”

“That’s because there aren’t any.”

“Squeamish? Or just too young and fortunate not to have needed them yet?”

“It’s nothing to do with being squeamish. I’m not as young as I look, either.” I held up my mechanical hand. “Nor would I exactly call myself fortunate.”

She looked at the hand with narrowed, critical eyes. I remembered how she’d flinched back when I reached for her aboard the Cockatrice, and wondered what maltreatment she had suffered at the iron hands of her former masters.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“I liked the old one better.”

Weather reached out and gingerly held my hand in hers. They looked small and doll-like as they stroked and examined my mechanical counterpart.

“This is the only part of you that isn’t organic?”

“As far as I know.”

“Doesn’t that limit you? Don’t you feel handicapped around the rest of the crew?”

“Sometimes. But not always. My job means I have to squeeze into places where a man like Van Ness could never fit. It also means I have to be able to tolerate magnetic fields that would rip half the crew to shreds, if they didn’t boil alive first.” I opened and closed my metal fist. “I have to unscrew this, sometimes. I have a plastic replacement if I just need to hook hold of things.”

“You don’t like it very much.”

“It does what I ask of it.”

Weather made to let go of my hand, but her fingers remained in contact with mine for an instant longer than necessary. “I’m sorry that you don’t like it.”

“I could have got it fixed at one of the orbital clinics, I suppose,” I said, “but there’s always something else that needs fixing first. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the hand, some people might not believe I’m an Ultra at all.”

“Do you plan on being an Ultra all your life?”

“I don’t know. I can’t say I ever had my mind set on being a shipmaster. It just sort of happened, and now here I am.”

“I had my mind set on something once,” Weather said. “I thought it was within my grasp, too. Then it slipped out of reach.” She looked at me and then did something wonderful and unexpected, which was to smile. It was not the most genuine-looking smile I’d ever seen, but I sensed the genuine intent behind it. Suddenly I knew there was a human being in the room with me, damaged and dangerous though she might have been. “Now here I am, too. It’s not quite what I expected…but thank you for rescuing me.”

“I was beginning to wonder if we’d made a mistake. You seemed so reluctant to leave that ship.”

“I was,” she said, distantly. “But that’s over now. You did what you thought was the right thing.”

“Was it?”

“For me, yes. For the ship…maybe not.” Then she stopped and cocked her head to one side, frowning. Her eyes flashed olive. “What are you looking at, Inigo?”

“Nothing,” I said, looking sharply away.

KEEPING OUT OF Van Ness’s way, as he’d advised, was not the hard part of what followed. The Petronel was a big ship and our paths didn’t need to cross in the course of day-to-day duties. The difficulty was finding as much time to visit Weather as I would have liked. My original repair plan had been tight, but the unknown ship forced me to accelerate the schedule even further, despite what I’d told Weps. The burden of work began to take its toll on me, draining my concentration. I was still confident that once that work was done, we’d be able to continue our journey as if nothing had happened, save for the loss of those crew who had died in the engagement and our gaining one new passenger. The other ship would probably abandon us once we pushed the engines up to cruise thrust, looking for easier pickings elsewhere. If it had the swiftness of the Cockatrice, it wouldn’t have been skulking in the shadows letting the other ship take first prize.

But my optimism was misplaced. When the repair work was done, I once more made my way along the access shaft to the starboard engine and confronted the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. As expected, all six dials were now showing deep blue, which meant they were operating well inside the safety envelope. But when I consulted my log book and made the tiny adjustments that should have taken all the dials into the blue-green—still nicely within the safety envelope—I got a nasty surprise. I only had to nudge two of the dials by a fraction of a millimetre before they shone a hard and threatening orange.

Something was wrong.

I checked my settings, of course, making sure none of the other dials were out of position. But there’d been no mistake. I thumbed through the log with increasing haste, a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, looking for an entry where something similar had happened; something that would point me to the obvious mistake I must have made. But none of the previous entries were the slightest help. I’d made no error with the settings, and that left only one possibility: something had happened to the engine. It was not working properly.

“This isn’t right,” I said to myself. “They don’t fail. They don’t break down. Not like this.”

But what did I know? My entire experience of working with C-drives was confined to routine operations, under normal conditions. Yet we’d just been through a battle against another ship, one in which we were already known to have sustained structural damage. As shipmaster, I’d been diligent in attending to the hull and the drive spar, but it had never crossed my mind that something might have happened to one or other of the engines.

Why not?

There’s a good reason. It’s because even if something had happened, there would never have been anything I could have done about it. Worrying about the breakdown of a Conjoiner drive was like worrying about the one piece of debris you won’t have time to steer around or shoot out of the sky. You can’t do anything about it, ergo you forget about it until it happens. No shipmaster ever loses sleep over the failure of a C-drive.

It looked as if I was going to lose a lot more than sleep.

Even if we didn’t have another ship to worry about, we were in more than enough trouble. We were too far out from Shiva-Parvati to get back again, and yet we were moving too slowly to make it to another system. Even if the engines kept working as they were now, we’d take far too long to reach relativistic speed, where time dilation became appreciable. At twenty-five per cent of the speed of light, what would have been a twenty-year hop before became an eighty-year crawl now…and that was an eighty-year crawl in which almost all that time would be experienced aboard ship. Across that stretch of time, reefersleep was a lottery. Our caskets were designed to keep people frozen for five to ten years, not four-fifths of a century.

I was scared. I’d gone from feeling calmly in control to feeling total devastation in about five minutes.

I didn’t want to let the rest of the crew know that we had a potential crisis on our hands, at least not until I’d spoken to Weather. I’d already crossed swords with Van Ness, but he was still my captain, and I wanted to spare him the difficulty of a frightened crew, at least until I knew all the facts.

Weather was awake when I arrived. In all my visits, I’d never found her sleeping. In the normal course of events Conjoiners had no need of sleep: at worst, they’d switch off certain areas of brain function for a few hours.

She read my face like a book. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

So much for the notion that Conjoiners were not able to interpret facial expressions. Just because they didn’t make many of them didn’t mean they’d forgotten the rules.

I sat down on the fold-out stool.

“I’ve tried to push the engines back up to normal cruise thrust. I’m already seeing red on two dials, and we haven’t even exceeded point-two gees.”

She thought about this for several moments: what for Weather must have been hours of subjective contemplation. “You didn’t appear to be pushing your engines dangerously during the chase.”

“I wasn’t. Everything looked normal up until now. I think we must have taken some damage to one of the drives, during Voulage’s softening-up assault. I didn’t see any external evidence, but—”

“You wouldn’t, not necessarily. The interior architecture of one of our drives is a lot more complicated, a lot more delicate, than is normally appreciated. It’s at least possible that a shock-wave did some harm to one of your engines, especially if your coupling gear—the shock-dampening assembly—was already compromised.”

“It probably was,” I said. “The spar was already stressed.”

“Then you have your explanation. Something inside your engine has broken, or is considered by the engine itself to be dangerously close to failure. Either way, it would be suicide to increase the thrust beyond the present level.”

“Weather, we need both those engines to get anywhere, and we need them at normal efficiency.”

“It hadn’t escaped me.”

“Is there anything you can do to help us?”

“Very little, I expect.”

“But you must know something about the engines, or you wouldn’t have been able to help Voulage.”

“Voulage’s engines weren’t damaged,” she explained patiently.

“I know that. But you were still able to make them work better. Isn’t there something you can do for us?”

“From here, nothing at all.”

“But if you were allowed to get closer to the engines…might that make a difference?”

“Until I’m there, I couldn’t possibly say. It’s irrelevant though, isn’t it? Your captain will never allow me out of this room.”

“Would you do it for us if he did?”

“I’d do it for me.”

“Is that the best you can offer?”

“All right, then maybe I’d for it for you.” Just saying this caused Weather visible discomfort, as if the utterance violated some deep personal code that had remained intact until now. “You’ve been kind to me. I know you risked trouble with Van Ness to make things easier in my cell. But you need to understand something very important. You may care for me. You may even think you like me. But I can’t give you back any of that. What I feel for you is…” Weather hesitated, her mouth half-open. “You know we call you the retarded. There’s a reason for that. The emotions I feel…the things that go on in my head…simply don’t map onto anything you’d recognise as love, or affection, or even friendship. Reducing them to those terms would be like…” And then she stalled, unable to finish.

“Like making a sacrifice?”

“You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me.”

“There’s more to love than fascination. And you said it yourself: you’re halfway back to being human again.”

“I said I wasn’t a Conjoiner any more. But that doesn’t mean I could ever be like you.”

“You could try.”

“You don’t understand us.”

“I want to!”

Weather jammed her olive eyes tight shut. “Let’s…not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? I only wanted to spare you any unnecessary emotional pain. But if we don’t get this ship moving properly, that’ll be the least of your worries.”

“I know.”

“So perhaps we should return to the matter of the engines. Again: none of this will matter if Van Ness refuses to trust me.”

My cheeks were smarting as if I’d been slapped hard in the face. Part of me knew she was only being kind, in the harshest of ways. That part was almost prepared to accept her rejection. The other part of me only wanted her more, as if her bluntness had succeeded only in sharpening my desire. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I was insane to think a Conjoiner could ever feel something in return. But I remembered the gentle way she’d stroked my fingers, and I wanted her even more.

“I’ll deal with Van Ness,” I said. “I think there’s a little something that will convince him to take a risk. You start thinking about what you can do for us.”

“Is that an order, Inigo?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody’s going to order you to do anything. I gave you my word on that, and I’m not about to break it. Nothing you’ve just said changes that.”

She sat tight-lipped, staring at me as if I was some kind of byzantine logic puzzle she needed to unscramble. I could almost feel the furious computation of her mind, as if I was standing next to a humming turbine. Then she lifted her little pointed chin minutely, saying nothing, but letting me know that if I convinced Van Ness, she would do what she could, however ineffectual that might prove.

THE CAPTAIN WAS tougher to crack than I’d expected. I’d assumed he would fold as soon as I explained our predicament—that we were going nowhere, and that Weather was the only factor that could improve our situation—but the captain simply narrowed his eyes and looked disappointed.

“Don’t you get it? It’s a ruse, a trick. Our engines were fine until we let her aboard. Then all of a sudden they start misbehaving, and she turns out to be the only one who can help us.”

“There’s also the matter of the other ship Weps says is closing on us.”

“That ship might not even exist. It could be a sensor ghost, a hallucination she’s making the Petronel see.”

“Captain—”

“That would work for her, wouldn’t it? It would be exactly the excuse she needs to force our hands.”

We were in his cabin, with the door locked: I’d warned him I had a matter of grave sensitivity that we needed to discuss. “I don’t think this is any of her doing,” I said calmly, vowing to hold my temper under better control than before. “She’s too far from the engines or sensor systems to be having any mental effect on them, even if we hadn’t locked her in a room that’s practically a Faraday cage to begin with. She says one or other of the engines was damaged during the engagement with the Cockatrice, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve that. I think you’re wrong about her.”

“She’s got us right where she wants us, lad. She’s done something to the engines, and now—if you get your way—we’re going to let her get up close and personal with them.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Whatever takes her fancy. Blowing us all up is one possibility. Did you consider that?”

“She’d blow herself up as well.”

“Maybe that’s exactly the plan. Could be that she prefers dying to staying alive, if being shut out from the rest of the Spiders is as bad as you say it is. She didn’t seem to be real keen on being rescued from that wreck, did she? Maybe she was hoping to die aboard it.”

“She looked like she was trying to stay alive to me, Captain. There were a hundred ways she could have killed herself aboard the Cockatrice before we boarded, and she didn’t. I think she was just scared of us, scared that we were going to be like all the other Ultras. That’s why she kept running.”

“A nice theory, lad. It’s a pity so much is hanging on it, or I might be inclined to give it a moment’s credence.”

“We have no choice but to trust her. If we don’t let her try something, most of us won’t ever see another system.”

“Easy for you to say, son.”

“I’m in this as well. I’ve got just as much to lose as anyone else on this ship.”

Van Ness studied me for what felt like an eternity. Until now his trust in my competence had always been implicit, but Weather’s arrival had changed all that.

“My wife didn’t die in a terraforming accident,” he said slowly, not quite able to meet my eyes as he spoke. “I lied to you about that, probably because I wanted to start believing the lie myself. But now it’s time you heard the truth, which is that the Spiders took her. She was a technician, an expert in Martian landscaping. She’d been working on the Schiaparelli irrigation scheme when she was caught behind Spider lines during the Sabaea Offensive. They stole her from me, and turned her into one of them. Took her to their recruitment theatres, where they opened her head and pumped it full of their machines. Rewired her mind to make her think and feel like them.”

“I’m sorry,” I began. “That must have been so hard—”

“That’s not the hard part. I was told that she’d been executed, but three years later I saw her again. She’d been taken prisoner by the Coalition for Neural Purity, and they were trying to turn her back into a person. They hadn’t ever done it before, so my wife was to be a test subject. They invited me to their compound in Tychoplex, on Earth’s Moon, hoping I might be able to bring her back. I didn’t want to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to work; that it was always going to be easier thinking that she was already dead.”

“What happened?”

“When she saw me, she remembered me. She called me by name, just as if we’d only been apart a few minutes. But there was a coldness in her eyes. Actually, it was something beyond coldness. Coldness would mean she felt some recognisably human emotion, even if it was dislike or contempt. It wasn’t like that. The way she looked at me, it was as if she was looking at a piece of broken furniture, or a dripping tap, or a pattern of mould on the wall. As if it vaguely bothered her that I existed, or was the shape I was, but that she could feel nothing stronger than that.”

“It wasn’t your wife any more,” I said. “Your wife died the moment they took her.”

“That’d be nice to believe, wouldn’t it? Trouble is, I’ve never been able to. And trust me, lad: I’ve had long enough to dwell on things. I know a part of my wife survived what they did to her in the theatres. It just wasn’t the part that gave a damn about me any more.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling as if I’d been left drifting in space while the ship raced away from me. “I had no idea.”

“I just wanted you to know: with me and the Spiders, it isn’t an irrational prejudice. From where I’m sitting, it feels pretty damn rational.” Then he drew an enormous intake of breath, as if he needed sustenance for what was to come. “Take the girl to the engine if you think it’s the only way we’ll get out of this mess. But don’t let her out of your sight for one second. And if you get the slightest idea that she might be trying something—and I mean the slightest idea—you kill her, there and then.”

I CLAMPED THE collar around Weather’s neck. It was a heavy ring fashioned from rough black metal. “I’m sorry about this,” I told her, “but it’s the only way Van Ness will let me take you out of this room. Tell me if it hurts, and I’ll try to do something about it.”

“You won’t need to,” she said.

The collar was a crude old thing that had been lying around the Petronel since her last bruising contact with pirates. It was modified from the connecting ring of a space helmet, the kind that would amputate and shock-freeze the head if it detected massive damage to the body below the neck. Inside the collar was a noose of monofilament wire, primed to tighten to the diameter of a human hair in less than a second. There were complicated moving parts in the collar, but nothing that a Conjoiner could influence. The collar trailed a thumb-thick cable from its rear, which ran all the way to an activating box on my belt. I’d only need to give the box a hard thump with the heel of my hand, and Weather would be decapitated. That wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d die instantly—with all those machines in her head, Weather would be able to remain conscious for quite some time afterwards—but I was reasonably certain it would limit her options for doing harm.

“For what it’s worth,” I told her as we made our way out to the connecting spar, “I’m not expecting to have to use this. But I want you to be clear that I will if I have to.”

She walked slightly ahead of me, the cable hanging between us. “You seem different, Inigo. What happened between you and the captain, while you were gone?”

The truth couldn’t hurt, I decided. “Van Ness told me something I didn’t know. It put things into perspective. I understand now why he might not feel positively disposed towards Conjoiners.”

“And does that alter the way you think about me?”

I said nothing for several paces. “I don’t know, Weather. Until now I never really gave much thought to those horror stories about the Spiders. I assumed they’d been exaggerated, the way things often are during wartime.”

“But now you’ve seen the light. You realise that, in fact, we are monsters after all.”

“I didn’t say that. But I’ve just learned that something I always thought untrue—that Conjoiners would take prisoners and convert them into other Conjoiners—really happened.”

“To Van Ness?”

She didn’t need to know all the facts. “To someone close to him. The worst was that he got to meet that person after her transformation.”

After a little while, Weather said, “Mistakes were made. Very, very bad mistakes.”

“How can you call taking someone prisoner and stuffing their skull full of Conjoiner machinery a ‘mistake,’ Weather? You must have known exactly what you were doing, exactly what it would do to the prisoner.”

“Yes, we did,” she said, “but we considered it a kindness. That was the mistake, Inigo. And it was a kindness, too: no one who tasted Transenlightenment ever wanted to go back to the experiential mundanity of retarded consciousness. But we did not anticipate how distressing this might be to those who had known the candidates beforehand.”

“He felt that she didn’t love him any more.”

“That wasn’t the case. It’s just that everything else in her universe had become so heightened, so intense, that the love for another individual could no longer hold her interest. It had become just one facet in a much larger mosaic.”

“And you don’t think that was cruel?”

“I said it was a mistake. But if Van Ness had joined her…if Van Ness had submitted to the Conjoined, known Transenlightenment for himself…they would have reconnected on a new level of personal intimacy.”

I wondered how she could be so certain. “That doesn’t help Van Ness now.”

“We wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If there were ever to be… difficulties again, we wouldn’t take candidates so indiscriminately.”

“But you’d still take some.”

“We’d still consider it a kindness,” Weather said.

Not much was said as we traversed the connecting spar out to the starboard engine. I watched Weather alertly, transfixed by the play of colours across her cooling crest. Eventually she whirled around and said, “I’m not going to do anything, Inigo, so stop worrying about it. This collar’s bad enough, without feeling you watching my every move.”

“Maybe the collar isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Van Ness thinks you want to blow up the ship. I guess if you had a way to do that, we wouldn’t get much warning.”

“No, you wouldn’t. But I’m not going to blow up the ship. That’s not within my power, unless you let me turn the input dials all the way into the red. Even Voulage wasn’t that stupid.”

I wiped my sweat-damp hand on the thigh of my trousers. “We don’t know much about how these engines work. Are you sensing anything from them yet?”

“A little,” she admitted. “There’s crosstalk between the two units, but I don’t have the implants to make sense of that. Most Conjoiners don’t need anything that specialised, unless they work in the drive creches, educating the engines.”

“The engines need educating?”

Not answering me directly, she said, “I can feel the engine now. Effective range for my implants is a few dozen metres under these conditions. We must be very close.”

“We are,” I said as we turned a corner. Ahead lay the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. They were all showing blue-green now, but only because I’d throttled the engine back to a whisper of thrust.

“I’ll need to get closer if I’m going to be any use to you,” Weather told me.

“Step up to the panel. But don’t touch anything until I give you permission.”

I knew there wasn’t much harm she could do here, even if she started pushing the dials. She’d need to move more than one to make things dangerous, and I could drop her long before she had a chance to do that. But I was still nervous as she stood next to the hexagon and cocked her head to one side.

I thought of what lay on the other side of that wall. Having traversed the spar, we were now immediately inboard of the engine, about halfway along its roughly cylindrical shape. The engine extended for one hundred and ten metres ahead of me, and for approximately two hundred and fifty metres in either direction to my left and right. It was sheathed in several layers of conventional hull material, anchored to the Petronel by a shock-absorbing cradle and wrapped in a mesh of sensors and steering-control systems. Like any shipmaster, my understanding of those elements was so total that it no longer counted as acquired knowledge. It had become an integral part of my personality.

But I knew nothing of the engine itself. My log book, with its reams of codified notes and annotations, implied a deep and scholarly grasp of all essential principles. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Conjoiner drive was essentially a piece of magic we’d been handed on a plate, like a coiled baby dragon. It came with instructions on how to tame its fire, and make sure it did not come to harm, but we were forbidden from probing its mysteries. The most important rule that applied to a Conjoiner engine was a simple one: there were no user-serviceable components inside. Tamper with an engine—attempt to take it apart, in the hope of reverse-engineering it—and the engine would self-destruct in a mini-nova powerful enough to crack open a small moon. Across settled space, there was no shortage of mildly radioactive craters testifying to failed attempts to break that one prohibition.

Ultras didn’t care, as a rule. Ultras, by definition, already had Conjoiner drives. It was governments and rich planet-bound individuals who kept learning the hard way. The Conjoiner argument was brutal in its simplicity: there were principles embodied in their drives that “retarded” humanity just wasn’t ready to absorb. We were meant to count ourselves lucky that they let us have the engines in the first place. We weren’t meant to go poking our thick monkey fingers into their innards.

And so long as the engines kept working, few of us had any inclination to do so.

Weather took a step back. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I thought that perhaps the dial indications might be in error, suggesting that there was a fault where none existed…but that isn’t the case.”

“You can feel that the engine is really damaged?”

“Yes,” she told me. “And it’s this one, the starboard unit.”

“What’s wrong with it? Is it anything we can fix?”

“One question at a time, Inigo.” Weather smiled tolerantly before continuing, “There’s been extensive damage to critical engine components, too much for the engine’s own self-repair systems to address. The engine hasn’t failed completely, but certain reaction pathways have now become computationally intractable, which is why you’re seeing the drastic loss in drive efficiency. The engine is being forced to explore other pathways, those that it can still manage given its existing resources. But they don’t deliver the same output energy.”

She was telling me everything and nothing. “I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “Are you saying there’s nothing that can be done to repair it?”

“Not here. At a dedicated Conjoiner manufacturing facility, certainly. We’d only make things worse.”

“We can’t run on just the port engine, either—not without rebuilding the entire ship. If we were anywhere near a moon or asteroid, that might just be an option, but not when we’re so far out.”

“I’m sorry the news isn’t better. You’ll just have to resign yourselves to a longer trip than you were expecting.”

“It’s worse than that. There’s another ship closing in on us, probably another raider like Voulage. It’s very close now. If we don’t start running soon, they’ll be on us.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me this sooner?”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“To the trust between us, possibly.”

“I’m sorry, Weather. I didn’t want to distract you. I thought things were bad enough as they were.”

“And you thought I’d be able to work a miracle if I wasn’t distracted?”

I nodded hopelessly. I realised that, as naive as it might seem, I’d been expecting Weather to wave a hand over the broken engine and restore it to full, glittering functionality. But knowing something of the interior workings of the drive was not the same as being able to fix it.

“Are we really out of options?” I asked.

“The engine is already doing all it can to provide maximum power, given the damage it has taken. There really is no scope to make things better.”

Desperate for some source of optimism, I thought back to what Weather had said a few moments before. “When you talked about the computations, you seemed to be saying that the engine needed to do some number-crunching to make itself work.”

Weather looked conflicted. “I’ve already said too much, Inigo.”

“But if we’re going to die out here, it doesn’t matter what you tell me, does it? Failing that, I’ll swear a vow of silence. How does that sound?”

“No one has ever come close to working out how our engines function,” Weather said. “We’ve played our hand in that, of course: putting out more than our share of misinformation over the years. And it’s worked, too. We’ve kept careful tabs on the collective thinking concerning our secrets. We’ve always had contingencies in place to disrupt any research that might be headed in the right direction. So far we’ve never had cause to use a single one of them. If I were to reveal key information to you, I would have more to worry about than just being an outcast. My people would come after me. They’d hunt me down, and then they’d hunt you down as well. Conjoiners will consider any necessary act, up to and including local genocide, to protect the secrets of the C-drive.” She paused for a moment, letting me think she was finished, before continuing on the same grave note, “But having said that, there are layers to our secrets. I can’t reveal the detailed physical principles upon which the drive depends, but I can tell you that the conditions in the drive, when it is at full functionality, are enormously complex and chaotic. Your ship may ride a smooth thrust beam, but the reactions going on inside the drive are anything but smooth. There is a small mouth into hell inside every engine: bubbling, frothing, subject to vicious and unpredictable state-changes.”

“Which the engine needs to smooth out.”

“Yes. And to do so, the engine needs to think through some enormously complex, parallel computational problems. When all is well, when the engine is intact and running inside its normal operational envelope, the burden is manageable. But if you ask too much of the engine, or damage it in some way, that burden becomes heavier. Eventually it exceeds the means of the engine, and the reactions become uncontrolled.”

“Nova.”

“Quite,” Weather said, favouring my response with a tiny nod.

“Then let me get this straight,” I said. “The engine’s damaged, but it could still work if the computations weren’t so complicated.”

Weather answered me guardedly. “Yes, but don’t underestimate how difficult those computations have now become. I can feel the strain this engine is under, just holding things together as they are.”

“I’m not underestimating it. I’m just wondering if we couldn’t help it do better. Couldn’t we load in some new software, or assist the engine by hooking in the Petronel’s own computers?”

“I really wish it was that simple.”

“I’m sorry. My questions must seem quite simple-minded. But I’m just trying to make sure we aren’t missing anything obvious.”

“We aren’t,” she said. “Take my word on it.”

I RETURNED WEATHER to her quarters and removed the collar. Where it had been squeezing her neck, the skin was marked with a raw pink band, spotted with blood. I threw the hateful thing into the corner of the room and returned with a medical kit.

“You should have said something,” I told her as I dabbed at the abrasions with a disinfectant swab. “I didn’t realise it was cutting into you all that time. You seemed so cool, so focused. But that must have been hurting all the while.”

“I told you I could turn off pain.”

“Are you turning it off now?”

“Why?”

“Because you keep flinching.”

Weather reached up suddenly and took my wrist, almost making me drop the swab. The movement was as swift as a snakebite, but although she held me firmly, I sensed no aggressive intentions. “Now it’s my turn not to understand,” she said. “You were hoping I might be able to do something for you. I couldn’t. That means you’re in as much trouble as you ever were. Worse, if anything, because now you’ve heard it from me. But you’re still treating me with kindness.”

“Would you rather we didn’t?”

“I assumed that as soon as my usefulness to you had come to an end—”

“You assumed wrongly. We’re not that kind of crew.”

“And your captain?”

“He’ll keep his word. Killing you would never have been Van Ness’s style.” I finished disinfecting her neck and began to rummage through the medical kit for a strip of bandage. “We’re all just going to have to make do as best we can, you included. Van Ness reckoned we should send out a distress call and wait for rescue. I wasn’t so keen on that idea before, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t so bad after all.” She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking of exactly the same objections I’d voiced to Van Ness, when he raised the idea. “We still have a ship, that’s the main thing. Just because we aren’t moving as fast as we’d like—”

“I’d like to see Van Ness,” Weather said.

“I’m not sure he’d agree.”

“Tell him it’s about his wife. Tell him he can trust me, with or without that silly collar.”

I WENT TO fetch the captain. He took some persuading before he even agreed to look at Weather, and even then he wouldn’t come within twenty metres of her. I told her to wait at the door to her room, which faced a long service corridor.

“I’m not going to touch you, Captain,” she called, her voice echoing from the corridor’s ribbed metal walls. “You can come as close as you like. I can barely smell you at this distance, let alone sense your neural emissions.”

“This’ll do nicely,” Van Ness said. “Inigo told me you had something you wanted to say to me. That right, or was it just a ruse to get me near to you, so you could reach into my head and make me see and think whatever you like?”

She appeared not to hear him. “I take it Inigo’s told you about the engine.”

“Told me you had a good old look at it and decided there was nothing you could do. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t had that collar on, though, eh?”

“You mean I might have sabotaged the engine, to destroy myself and the ship? No, Captain, I don’t think I would have. If I had any intention of killing myself, you’d already made it easy enough with that collar.” She glanced at me. “I could have reached Inigo and pressed that control box while the nervous impulse from his brain was still working its way down his forearm. All he’d have seen was a grey blur, followed by a lot of arterial blood.”

I thought back to the speed with which she’d reached up and grabbed my forearm, and knew she wasn’t lying.

“So why didn’t you?” Van Ness asked.

“Because I wanted to help you if I could. Until I saw the engine—until I got close enough to feel its emissions—I couldn’t know for sure that the problem wasn’t something quite trivial.”

“Except it wasn’t. Inigo says it isn’t fixable.”

“Inigo’s right. The technical fault can’t be repaired, not without use of Conjoiner technology. But now that I’ve had time to think about it, mull things over, it occurs to me that there may be something I can do for you.”

I looked at her. “Really?”

“Let me finish what I have to say, Inigo,” she said warningly, “then we’ll go down to the engine and I’ll make everything clear. Captain Van Ness—about your wife.”

“What would you know about my wife?” Van Ness asked her angrily.

“More than you realise. I know because I’m a—I was—a Conjoiner.”

“As if I didn’t know.”

“We started on Mars, Captain Van Ness—just a handful of us. I wasn’t alive then, but from the moment Galiana brought our new state of consciousness into being, the thread of memory has never been broken. There are many branches to our great tree now, in many systems—but we all carry the memories of those who went before us, before the family was torn asunder. I don’t just mean the simple fact that we remember their names, what they looked like and what they did. I mean we carry their living experiences with us, into the future.” Weather swallowed, something catching in her throat. “Sometimes we’re barely aware of any of this. It’s as if there’s this vast sea of collective experience lapping at the shore of consciousness, but it’s only every now and then that it floods us, leaving us awash in sorrow and joy. Sorrow because those are the memories of the dead, all that’s left of them. Joy because something has endured, and while it does they can’t truly be dead, can they? I feel Remontoire sometimes, when I look at something in a certain analytic way. There’s a jolt of déjà vu and I realise it isn’t because I’ve experienced it before, but because Remontoire did. We all feel the memories of the earliest Conjoiners the most strongly.”

“And my wife?” Van Ness asked, like a man frightened of what he might hear.

“Your wife was just one of many candidates who entered Transenlightenment during the troubles. You lost her then, and saw her once more when the Coalition took her prisoner. It was distressing for you because she did not respond to you on a human level.”

“Because you’d ripped everything human out of her,” Van Ness said.

Weather shook her head calmly, refusing to be goaded. “No. We’d taken almost nothing. The difficulty was that we’d added too much, too quickly. That was why it was so hard for her, and so upsetting for you. But it didn’t have to be that way. The last thing we wanted was to frighten possible future candidates. It would have worked much better for us if your wife had shown love and affection to you, and then begged you to follow her into the wonderful new world she’d been shown.”

Something of Weather’s manner seemed to blunt Van Ness’s indignation. “That doesn’t help me much. It doesn’t help my wife at all.”

“I haven’t finished. The last time you saw your wife was in that Coalition compound. You assumed—as you continue to assume—that she ended her days there, an emotionless zombie haunting the shell of the woman you once knew. But that isn’t what happened. She came back to us, you see.”

“I thought Conjoiners never returned to the fold,” I said.

“Things were different then. It was war. Any and all candidates were welcome, even those who might have suffered destabilising isolation away from Transenlightenment. And Van Ness’s wife wasn’t like me. She hadn’t been born into it. Her depth of immersion into Transenlightenment was inevitably less profound than that of a Conjoiner who’d been swimming in data since they were a foetus.”

“You’re lying,” Van Ness said. “My wife died in Coalition custody three years after I saw her.”

“No,” Weather said patiently. “She did not. Conjoiners took Tychoplex and returned all the prisoners to Transenlightenment. The Coalition was suffering badly at the time and could not afford the propaganda blow of losing such a valuable arm of its research programme. So it lied and covered up the loss of Tychoplex. But in fact your wife was alive and well.” Weather looked at him levelly. “She is dead now, Captain Van Ness. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I hope it will not come as too shocking a blow, given what you have always believed.”

“When did she die?”

“Thirty-one years later, in another system, during the malfunction of one of our early drives. It was very fast and utterly painless.”

“Why are you telling me this? What difference does it make to me, here and now? She’s still gone. She still became one of you.”

“I am telling you,” Weather answered, “because her memories are part of me. I won’t pretend that they’re as strong as Remontoire’s, because by the time your wife was recruited, more than five thousand had already joined our ranks. Hers was one new voice amongst many. But none of those voices were silent: they were all heard, and something of them has reached down through all these years.”

“Again: why are you telling me this?”

“Because I have a message from your wife. She committed it to the collective memory long before her death, knowing that it would always be part of Conjoiner knowledge, even as our numbers grew and we became increasingly fragmented. She knew that every future Conjoiner would carry her message—even an outcast like me. It might become diluted, but it would never be lost entirely. And she believed that you were still alive, and that one day your path might cross that of another Conjoiner.”

After a silence Van Ness said, “Tell me the message.”

“This is what your wife wished you to hear.” Almost imperceptibly, the tone of Weather’s voice shifted. “I am sorry for what happened between us, Rafe—more sorry than you can ever know. When they recaptured me, when they took me to Tychoplex, I was not the person I am now. It was still early in my time amongst the Conjoiners, and—perhaps just as importantly—it was still early for the Conjoiners as well. There was much that we all needed to learn. We were ambitious then, fiercely so, but by the same token we were arrogantly blind to our inadequacies and failings. That changed, later, after I returned to the fold. Galiana made refinements to all of us, reinstating a higher degree of personal identity. I think she had learned something wise from Nevil Clavain. After that, I began to see things in the proper perspective again. I thought of you, and the pain of what I had done to you was like a sharp stone pushing against my throat. Every waking moment of my consciousness, with every breath, you were there. But by then it was much too late to make amends. I tried to contact you, but without success. I couldn’t even be sure if you were in the system any more. By then, even the Demarchists had their own prototype starships, using the technology we’d licensed them. You could have been anywhere.” Weather’s tone hardened, taking on a kind of saintlike asperity. “But I always knew you were a survivor, Rafe. I never doubted that you were still alive, somewhere. Perhaps we’ll meet again: stranger things have happened. If so, I hope I’ll treat you with something of the kindness you always deserved, and that you always showed me. But should that never happen, I can at least hope that you will hear this message. There will always be Conjoiners, and nothing that is committed to the collective memory will ever be lost. No matter how much time passes, those of us who walk in the world will be carrying this message, alert for your name. If there was more I could do, I would. But contrary to what some might think, even Conjoiners can’t work miracles. I wish that it were otherwise. Then I would clap my hands and summon you to me, and I would spend the rest of my life letting you know what you meant to me, what you still mean to me. I loved you, Rafe Van Ness. I always did, and I always will.”

Weather fell silent, her expression respectful. It was not necessary for her to tell us that the message was over.

“How do I know this is true?” Van Ness asked quietly.

“I can’t give you any guarantees,” Weather said, “but there was one word I was also meant to say to you. Your wife believed it would have some significance to you, something nobody else could possibly know.”

“And the word?”

“The word is ‘mezereon.’ I think it is a type of plant. Does the word mean something to you?”

I looked at Van Ness. He appeared frozen, unable to respond. His eye softened and sparkled. He nodded, and said simply, “Yes, it does.”

“Good,” Weather answered. “I’m glad that’s done: it’s been weighing on all of our minds for quite some time. And now I’m going to help you get home.”

Whatever “mezereon” meant to Van Ness, whatever it revealed to him concerning the truth of Weather’s message, I never asked.

Nor did Van Ness ever speak of the matter again.

SHE STOOD BEFORE the hexagonal arrangement of input dials, as I had done a thousand times before. “You must give me authorisation to make adjustments,” she said.

My mouth was dry. “Do what you will. I’ll be watching you very carefully.”

Weather looked amused. “You’re still concerned that I might want to kill us all?”

“I can’t ignore my duty to this ship.”

“Then this will be difficult for you. I must turn the dials to a setting you would consider highly dangerous, even suicidal. You’ll just have to trust me that I know what I’m doing.”

I glanced back at Van Ness.

“Do it,” he mouthed.

“Go ahead,” I told Weather. “Whatever you need to do—”

“In the course of this, you will learn more about our engines. There is something inside here that you will find disturbing. It is not the deepest secret, but it is a secret nonetheless, and shortly you will know it. Afterwards, when we reach port, you must not speak of this matter. Should you do so, Conjoiner security would detect the leak and act swiftly. The consequences would be brutal, for you and anyone you might have spoken to.”

“Then maybe you’re better off not letting us see whatever you’re so keen to keep hidden.”

“There’s something I’m going to have to do. If you want to understand, you need to see everything.”

She reached up and planted her hands on two of the dials. With surprising strength, she twisted them until their quadrants shone ruby red. Then she moved to another pair of dials and moved them until they were showing a warning amber. She adjusted one of the remaining dials to a lower setting, into the blue, and then returned to the first two dials she had touched, quickly dragging them back to green. While all this was happening, I felt the engine surge in response, the deck plates pushing harder against my feet. But the burst was soon over. When Weather had made her last adjustment, the engine had throttled back even further than before. I judged that we were only experiencing a tenth of a gee.

“What have you just done?” I asked.

“This,” she said.

Weather took a nimble, light-footed step back from the input controls. At the same moment a chunk of wall, including the entire hexagonal array, pushed itself out from the surrounding metallic-blue material in which it had appeared to have been seamlessly incorporated. The chunk was as thick as a bank-vault door. I watched in astonishment as the chunk slid in silence to one side, exposing a bulkhead-sized hole in the side of the engine wall.

Soft red light bathed us. We were looking into the hidden heart of a Conjoiner drive.

“Follow me,” Weather said.

“Are you serious?”

“You want to get home, don’t you? You want to escape that raider? This is how it will happen.” Then she looked back to Van Ness. “With all due respect…I wouldn’t recommend it. Captain. You wouldn’t do any damage to the engine, but the engine might damage you.”

“I’m fine right here,” Van Ness said.

I followed Weather into the engine. At first my eyes had difficulty making out our surroundings. The red light inside seemed to emanate from every surface, rather than from any concentrated source, so that there were only hints of edges and corners. I had to reach out and touch things more than once to establish their shape and proximity. Weather watched me guardedly, but said nothing.

She led me along a winding, restrictive path that squeezed its way between huge intrusions of Conjoiner machinery, like the course etched by some meandering, indecisive underground river. The machinery emitted a low humming sound, and sometimes when I touched it I felt a rapid but erratic vibration. I couldn’t make out our surroundings with any clarity for more than a few metres in any direction, but as Weather pushed on I sometimes had the impression that the machinery was moving out of her way to open up the path, and sealing itself behind us. She led me up steep ramps, assisted me as we negotiated near-impassable chicanes, helped me as we climbed down vertical shafts that would be perilous even under one-tenth of a gee. My sense of direction was soon hopelessly confounded, and I had no idea whether we had travelled hundreds of metres into the engine, or merely wormed our way in and around a relatively localised region close to our entry point.

“I’m glad you know the way,” I said, with mock cheerfulness. “I wouldn’t be able to get out of here without you.”

“Yes, you will,” Weather said, looking back over her shoulder. “The engine will guide you out, don’t you worry.”

“You’re coming with me, though.”

“No, Inigo, I’m not. I have to stay here from now on. It’s the only way that any of us will be getting home.”

“I don’t understand. Once you’ve fixed the engine—”

“It isn’t like that. The engine can’t be fixed. What I can do is help it, relieve it of some of the computational burden. But to do that I need to be close to it. Inside it.”

While we were talking, Weather had brought us to a box-like space that was more open than anywhere we’d passed through so far. The room, or chamber, was empty of machinery, save for a waist-high cylinder rising from the floor. The cylinder had a flattened top and widened base that suggested the stump of a tree. It shone the same arterial red as everything else around us.

“We’ve reached the heart of the engine-control assembly now,” Weather said, kneeling by the stump. “The reaction core is somewhere else—we couldn’t survive anywhere near that—but this is where the reaction computations are made, for both the starboard and port drives. I’m going to show you something now. I think it will make it easier for you to understand what is to happen to me. I hope you’re ready.”

“As I’ll ever be.”

Weather planted a hand on either side of the stump and closed her eyes momentarily. I heard a click and the whirr of a buried mechanism. The upper fifth of the stump opened, irising wide. A blue light rammed from its innards. I felt a chill rising from whatever was inside, a coldness that seemed to reach fingers down my throat.

Something emerged from inside the stump, rising on a pedestal. It was a glass container pierced by many silver cables, each of which was plugged into the folded cortex of a single massively swollen brain. The brain had split open along fracture lines, like a cake that had ruptured in the baking. The blue light spilled from the fissures. When I looked into one—peering down into the geological strata of brain anatomy—I had to blink against the glare. A seething mass of tiny bright things lay nestled at the base of the cleft, twinkling with the light of the sun.

“This is the computer that handles the computations,” Weather said.

“It looks human. Please tell me it isn’t.”

“It is human. Or at least that’s how it started out, before the machines were allowed to infest and reorganise its deep structure.” Weather tapped a finger against the side of her own scalp. “All the machines in my head only amount to two hundred grams of artificial matter, and even so I still need this crest to handle my thermal loading. There are nearly a thousand grams of machinery in that brain. The brain needs to be cooled like a turbopump. That’s why it’s been opened up, so that the heat can dissipate more easily.”

“It’s a monstrosity.”

“Not to us,” she said sharply. “We see a thing of wonder and beauty.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Let’s be clear about this. What you’re showing me here is a human brain, a living mind, turned into some kind of slave.”

“No slavery is involved,” Weather said. “The mind chose this vocation willingly.”

“It chose this?”

“It’s considered a great honour. Even in Conjoiner society, even given all that we have learned about the maximisation of our mental resources, only a few are ever born who have the skills necessary to tame and manage the reactions in the heart of a C-drive. No machine can ever perform that task as well as a conscious mind. We could build a conscious machine, of course, a true mechanical slave, but that would contravene one of our deepest strictures. No machine may think, unless it does so voluntarily. So we are left with volunteer organic minds, even if those selfsame minds need the help of a thousand grams of nonsentient processing machinery. As to why only a few of us have the talent… that is one of our greatest mysteries. Galiana thought that, in achieving a pathway to augmented human intelligence, she would render the brain utterly knowable. It was one of her few mistakes. Just as there are savants amongst the retarded, so we have our Conjoined equivalents. We are all tested for such gifts when we are young. Very few of us show even the slightest aptitude. Of those that do, even fewer ever develop the maturity and stability that would make them suitable candidates for enshrinement in an engine.” Weather faced me with a confiding look. “They are valued very highly indeed, to the point where they are envied by some of us who lack what they were born with.”

“But even if they were gifted enough that it was possible…no one would willingly choose this.”

“You don’t understand us, Inigo. We are creatures of the mind. This brain doesn’t consider itself to have been imprisoned here. It considers itself to have been placed in a magnificent and fitting setting, like a precious jewel.”

“Easy for you to say, since it isn’t you.”

“But it very nearly could have been. I came close, Inigo. I passed all the early tests. I was considered exceptional, by the standards of my cohort group. I knew what it was like to feel special, even amongst geniuses. But it turned out that I wasn’t quite special enough, so I was selected out of the programme.”

I looked at the swollen, fissured mind. The hard blue glow made me think of Cherenkov radiation, boiling out of some cracked fission core.

“And do you regret it now?”

“I’m older now,” Weather said. “I realise now that being unique… being adored…is not the greatest thing in the world. Part of me still admires this mind; part of me still appreciates its rare and delicate beauty. Another part of me…doesn’t feel like that.”

“You’ve been amongst people too long, Weather. You know what it’s like to walk and breathe.”

“Perhaps,” she said, doubtfully.

“This mind—”

“It’s male,” Weather said. “I can’t tell you his name, any more than I could tell you mine. But I can read his public memories well enough. He was fifteen when his enshrinement began. Barely a man at all. He’s been inside this engine for twenty-two years of shiptime; nearly sixty-eight years of worldtime.”

“And this is how he’ll spend the rest of his life?”

“Until he wearies of it, or some accident befalls this ship. Periodically, as now, Conjoiners may make contact with the enshrined mind. If they determine that the mind wishes to retire, they may effect a replacement, or decommission the entire engine.”

“And then what?”

“His choice. He could return to full embodiment, but that would mean losing hundreds of grams of neural support machinery. Some are prepared to make that adjustment; not all are willing. His other option would be to return to one of our nests and remain in essentially this form, but without the necessity of running a drive. He would not be alone in doing so.”

I realised, belatedly, where all this was heading. “You say he’s under a heavy burden now.”

“Yes. The degree of concentration is quite intense. He can barely spare any resources for what we might call normal thought. He’s in a state of permanent unconscious flow, like someone engaged in an enormously challenging game. But now the game has begun to get the better of him. It isn’t fun any more. And yet he knows the cost of failure.”

“But you can help him.”

“I won’t pretend that my abilities are more than a shadow of his. Still, I did make it part of the way. I can’t take all the strain off him, but I can give him free access to my mind. The additional processing resources—coupled with my own limited abilities—may make enough of a difference.”

“For what?”

“For you to get wherever it is you are going. I believe that with our minds meshed together, and dedicated to this one task, we may be able to return the engines to something like normal efficiency. I can’t make any promises, though. The proof of the pudding…”

I looked at the pudding-like mass of neural tissue and asked the question I was dreading. “What happens to you, while all this is happening? If he’s barely conscious—”

“The same would apply, I’m afraid. As far as the external world is concerned, I’ll be in a state of coma. If I’m to make any difference, I’ll have to hand over all available neural resources.”

“But you’ll be helpless. How long would you last, sitting in a coma?”

“That isn’t an issue. I’ve already sent a command to this engine to form the necessary life-support machinery. It should be ready any moment now, as it happens.” Weather glanced down at the floor between us. “I’d take a step back if I were you, Inigo.”

I did as she suggested. The flat red floor buckled upwards, shaping itself into the seamless form of a moulded couch. Without any ceremony, Weather climbed onto the couch and lay down as if for sleep.

“There isn’t any point delaying things,” she said. “My mind is made up, and the sooner we’re on our way, the better. We can’t be sure that there aren’t other brigands within attack range.”

“Wait,” I said. “This is all happening too quickly. I thought we were coming down here to look at the situation, to talk about the possibilities.”

“We’ve already talked about them, Inigo. They boil down to this: either I help the boy, or we drift hopelessly.”

“But you can’t just…do this.”

Even as I spoke, the couch appeared to consolidate its hold on Weather. Red material flowed around her body, hardening over her into a semitranslucent shell. Only her face and lower arms remained visible, surrounded by a thick red collar that threatened to squeeze shut at any moment.

“It won’t be so bad,” she said. “As I said, I won’t have much room left for consciousness. I won’t be bored, that’s for sure. It’ll be more like one very long dream. Someone else’s dream, certainly, but I don’t doubt that there’ll be a certain rapturous quality to it. I remember how good it felt to find an elegant solution, when the parameters looked so unpromising. Like making the most beautiful music imaginable. I don’t think anyone can really know how that feels unless they’ve also held some of that fire in their minds. It’s ecstasy, Inigo, when it goes right.”

“And when it goes wrong?”

“When it goes wrong, you don’t get much time to explore how it feels.” Weather shut her eyes again, like a person lapsing into micro-sleep. “I’m lowering blockades, allowing the boy to co-opt my own resources. He’s wary. Not because he doesn’t trust me, but because he can barely manage his own processing tasks, without adding the temporary complexity of farming some of them out to me. The transition will be difficult…ah, here it comes. He’s using me, Inigo. He’s accepting my help.” Despite being almost totally enclosed in the shell of red matter, Weather’s whole body convulsed. Her voice, when she spoke again, sounded strained. “It’s difficult. So much more difficult than I thought it would be. This poor mind…he’s had so much to do on his own. A lesser spirit would already have buckled. He’s shown heroic dedication…I wish the nest could know how well he has done.” She clamped her teeth together and convulsed again, harder this time. “He’s taking more of me. Eagerly now. Knows I’ve come to help. The sense of relief…the strain being lifted…I can’t comprehend how he lasted until now. I’m sorry, Inigo. Soon there isn’t going to be much of me left to talk to you.”

“Is it working?”

“Yes. I think so. Perhaps between the two of us—” Her jaws cracked together, teeth cutting her tongue. “Not going to be easy, but…losing more of me now. Language going. Don’t need now.”

“Weather, don’t go.”

“Can’t stay. Got to go. Only way. Inigo, make promise. Make promise fast.”

“Say it. Whatever it is.”

“When we get…when we—” Her face was contorted with the strain of trying to make herself understood.

“When we arrive,” I said.

She nodded so hard I thought her neck was going to break. “Yes. Arrive. You get help. Find others.”

“Other Conjoiners?”

“Yes. Bring them. Bring them in ship. Tell them. Tell them and make them help.”

“I will. I swear on it.”

“Going now. Inigo. One last thing.”

“Yes. Whatever it is.”

“Hold hand.”

I reached out and took her hand, in my good one.

“No,” Weather said. “Other. Other hand.”

I let go, then took her hand in my metal one, closing my fingers as tightly as I dared without risking hers. Then I leaned down, bringing my face close to hers.

“Weather, I think I love you. I’ll wait for you. I’ll find those Conjoiners. That’s a promise.”

“Love a Spider?” she asked.

“Yes. If this is what it takes.”

“Silly…human…boy.”

She pulled my hand, with more strength than I thought she had left in her. She tugged it down into the surface of the couch until it lapped around my wrist, warm as blood. I felt something happening to my hand, a crawling itch like pins and needles. I kissed Weather. Her lips were fever-warm. She nodded and then allowed me to withdraw my hand.

“Go now,” she said.

The red material of the couch flowed over Weather completely, covering her hands and face until all that remained was a vague, mummylike form.

I knew then that I would not see her again for a very long time. For a moment I stood still, paralysed by what had happened. Even then I could feel my weight increasing. Whatever Weather and the boy were doing between them, it was having some effect on the engine output. My weight climbed smoothly, until I was certain we were exceeding half a gee and still accelerating.

Perhaps we were going to make it home after all.

Some of us.

I turned from Weather’s casket and looked for the way out. Held tight against my chest to stop it itching, my hand was lost under a glove of twinkling machinery. I wondered what gift I would find when the glove completed its work.