Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 10

Xavier saw one ship detach itself from the bright flow of other vessels on the main approach corridor to Carousel New Copenhagen, tugged down his helmet’s binoculars and swept space until he locked on to the ship itself. The image enlarged and stabilised, the spined pufferfish profile of Storm Bird rotating as the ship executed a slow turn. The Taurus IV salvage tug was still nosing against its hull, like a parasite looking for one last nibble.

Xavier blinked hard, requesting a higher magnification zoom. The image swelled, wobbled and then sharpened.

‘Dear God,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell have you done to my ship?’

Something awful had happened to his beloved Storm Bird since the last time he had seen it. Whole parts were gone, ripped clean away. The hull looked as if it had seen its last service some time during the Belle Époque, not a couple of months ago. He wondered where Antoinette had taken it — straight into the heart of Lascaille’s Shroud, perhaps? Either that or she had had a serious run-in with well-armed banshees.

‘It’s not your ship, Xavier. I just pay you to look after it now and then. If I want to trash it, that’s entirely my business.’

‘Shit.’ He had forgotten that the suit-to-ship comm channel was still open. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘It’s a lot worse than it looks, Xave. Trust me on that.’

The salvage tug detached at the last minute, executed a needlessly complex pirouette and then was gone, curving away to its home on the other side of Carousel New Copenhagen. Xavier had already calculated how much the salvage tug was going to cost in the end. It didn’t matter who ultimately picked up that tab. It was going to be one hell of a sting, whether it was him or Antoinette, since their businesses were so intertwined. They were well into the red at the favour bank, and it was going to take about a year of retroactive favours before they groped their way back into the black…

But things could have been worse. Three days ago he had more or less given up hope of ever seeing Antoinette again. It was depressing how quickly the elation at finding her alive had degenerated into his usual nagging worries about insolvency. Dumping that hauler certainly hadn’t helped…

Xavier grinned. But hell, it had been worth it.

When she had announced her approach Xavier had suited up, gone out on to the carousel’s skin and hired a skeletal thruster trike. He gunned the trike across the fifteen kilometres to Storm Bird, then orbited it around the ship, satisfying himself that the damage looked every bit as bad up close as he had first thought it was. None of it would cripple the ship for good; it was all technically fixable — but it would cost money to put right.

He swung around, bringing the trike forwards so that he was ahead of Storm Bird. Against the dark hull he saw the two bright parallel slits of the cabin windows. Antoinette was a tiny silhouetted figure in the uppermost cabin, the small bridge that she only used during delicate docking/undocking procedures. She was reaching up to work controls above her head, a clipboard tucked under one arm. She looked so small and vulnerable that all his anger drained out of him in an instant. Instead of worrying about the damage, he should have been rejoicing that the ship had kept her alive all this time.

‘You’re right; it’s superficial,’ he said. ‘We’ll get it fixed easily enough. Do you have enough thruster control to do a hard docking?’

‘Just point me to the bay, Xave.’

He nodded and flipped the trike over, arcing away from Storm Bird. ‘Follow me in, then.’

Carousel New Copenhagen loomed larger again. Xavier led Storm Bird around the rim, tapping the trike’s thrusters until he had matched rotation with the carousel, sustaining the pseudo-orbit with a steady rumble of power from the trike’s belly. They passed over a complex of smaller bays, repair wells lit up with golden or blue lights and the periodic flashes of welding tools. A rim train snaked past, overtaking them, and then he saw Storm Bird’s shadow blot out his own. He looked back and behind. The freighter was coming in nice and steadily, although it looked as large as an iceberg.

The huge shadow slid and dipped, flowing over the hemispherical gouge in the rim known locally as Lyle’s Crater, the impact point where the rogue trader’s chemical-drive scow had collided with the carousel while trying to evade the authorities. It was the only serious damage that the carousel had sustained during wartime, and while it could have been repaired easily enough, it now made far more money as a tourist attraction than it would ever have had it been reclaimed and returned to normal use. People came in shuttles from all around the Rust Belt to gape at the damage and hear stories of the deaths and heroics that had followed the incident. Even now, Xavier saw a party of ghouls being led out on to the skin by a tourist guide, all of them hanging by harnesses from a network of lines spidering across the underside of the rim. Since he knew several people who had died during the accident, Xavier felt only contempt for the ghouls.

His repair well was a little further around the rim. It was the second largest on the carousel and it still looked as if it would be an impossibly tight fit, even allowing for all the bits of Storm Bird that Antoinette had helpfully removed…

The iceberg-sized ship came to a halt relative to the carousel and then tipped up, nose down to the rim. Through the gouts of vapour coming from the carousel’s industrial vents and the ship’s own popping micro-gee verniers, Xavier saw a loom of red lasers embrace Storm Bird, marking her position and velocity with angstrom precision. Still applying a half-gee of thrust from its main motors, Storm Bird began to push itself into its allocated slot in the rim. Xavier held station, wanting to close his eyes, for this was the part that he dreaded.

The ship nosed in at a speed of no more than four or five centimetres per‘ second. Xavier waited until the nose had vanished into the carousel, still leaving three-quarters of the ship out in space, and then guided his trike alongside, slipping ahead of Storm Bird. He parked the trike on a ledge, disembarked and authorised the trike to return to the place where he had hired it. He watched the skeletal thing buzz away, streaking back out into open space.

He did close his eyes now, hating the final docking procedure, and only opened them again after he had felt the rapid thunder of the docking latches, transmitted through the fabric of the repair bay to his feet. Below Storm Bird, pressure doors began to close. If she was going to be stuck here for a while, and it looked as if she would, they might even consider pumping the chamber so that Xavier’s repair monkeys could work without suits. But that was something to worry about later.

Xavier made sure that the pressurised connecting walkways were aligned with and clamped to Storm Bird’s main locks, guiding them manually. Then he made his way to an airlock, passing out of the repair bay. He was in a hurry, so did not bother removing more than his gloves and helmet. He could feel his heart in his chest, knocking like an air pump that needed a new armature.

Xavier walked down the connecting tube to the airlock closest to the flight deck. Lights were pulsing at the end of the tube, indicating that the lock was already being cycled.

Antoinette was coming through.

Xavier stooped and placed his helmet and gloves on the floor. He started running down the tube, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. The airlock door was irising open with glorious slowness, condensation heaving out of it in thick white clouds. The corridor dilated ahead of him, time crawling the way it did when two lovers were running towards each other in a bad holo-romance.

The door opened. Antoinette was standing there, suited-up but for her helmet, which she cradled beneath one arm. Her blunt-cut blonde hair was dishevelled and plastered across her forehead with grease and filth, her skin was sallow and there were dark bags under her eyes. Her eyes were tired, bloodshot slits. Even from where Xavier was standing, she smelt as if she hadn’t been near a shower in weeks.

He didn’t care. He thought she still looked pretty great. He pulled her towards him, the tabards of their suits clanging together. Somehow he managed to kiss her.

‘I’m glad you’re home,’ Xavier said.

‘Glad to be home,’ Antoinette replied.

‘Did you…?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I managed it.’

He said nothing for several moments, desperately wishing not to trivialise what she had done, fully aware of how important it had been to her and that nothing must spoil that triumph. She had been through enough pain already; the last thing he wanted to do was add to it.

‘I’m proud of you.’

‘Hey. I’m proud of me. You bloody well should be.’

‘Count on it. I take it there were a few difficulties, though?’

‘Let’s just say I had to get into Tangerine’s atmosphere a bit faster than I’d planned.’

‘Zombies?’

‘Zombies and spiders.’

‘Hey, two for the price of one. But I don’t imagine that’s quite how you saw it. And how the hell did you get back if there were spiders out there?’

She sighed. ‘It’s a long story, Xave. Some strange shit happened around that gas giant and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.’

‘So tell me.’

I will. After we’ve eaten.‘

‘Eaten?’

‘Yeah.’ Antoinette Bax grinned, revealing filthy teeth. ‘I’m hungry, Xave. And thirsty. Really thirsty. Have you ever had anyone drink you under a table?’

Xavier Liu considered her question. ‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘Well, now’s your big chance.’

They undressed, made love, lay together for an hour, showered, dressed — Antoinette wearing her best plum-coloured jacket — went out, ate well and then got royally drunk. Antoinette enjoyed nearly every minute of it. She enjoyed every instant of the lovemaking; that wasn’t the problem. It was good to be clean, too — really clean, rather than the kind of grudging clean that was the best she could manage on the ship — and it was good to be back in some kind of gravity, even if it was only half a gee and even if it was centrifugal. No, the problem was that wherever she looked, whatever was happening around her, she couldn’t help thinking that none of it was going to last.

The spiders were going to win the war. They would take over the entire system, the Rust Belt included. They might not turn everyone into hive-mind conscripts — they had more or less promised that that was the last thing they intended — but you could guarantee things were going to be different. Yellowstone had not exactly been a barrel of laughs under the last brief spider occupation. It was difficult to see where the daughter of a space pilot, with a single damaged, creaking ship to her name, was going to be able to fit in.

But hell, she thought, cajoling herself into a state of forced bonhomie, it wasn’t going to happen tonight, was it?

They travelled by rim train. She wanted to eat at the bar under Lyle’s Crater where the beer was great, but Xavier told her it would be heaving at this time of day and they were much better off going somewhere else. She shrugged, accepting his judgement, and was mildly puzzled when they arrived at Xavier’s choice — a bar halfway around the rim called Robotnik’s — and found the place nearly empty. When Antoinette synchronised her watch with Yellowstone Local Time she understood why: it was two hours past thirteen, in the middle of the afternoon. It was the graveyard shift on Carousel New Copenhagen, which saw most of its serious partying during the hours of Chasm City ‘night’.

‘We wouldn’t have had any trouble getting into Lyle’s,’ she told him.

‘I don’t really like that place.’

‘Ah.’

‘Too many damned animals. When you work with monkeys all day… or not, as the case may be… being served by machines begins to seem like a bloody good idea.’

She nodded at him over the top of her menu. ‘Fair enough.’

The gimmick at Robotnik’s was that the staff were all servitors. It was one of the few places in the carousel, barring the heavy-industrial repair shops, where you saw any kind of machines doing manual labour. Even then the machines were ancient and clapped-out, the kind of cheap, rugged servitors that had always been immune to the plague, and which could still be manufactured despite the system’s much reduced industrial capability in the wake of the plague and the war. There was a certain antique charm to them, Antoinette supposed, but by the time she had watched one limping machine drop their beers four times between the bar and their table, the charm had begun to wear a little thin.

‘You don’t actually like this place, do you?’ she asked later. ‘It’s just that you like Lyle’s even less.’

‘You ask me, there’s something a tiny bit sick about that place, turning a major civic catastrophe into a bloody tourist attraction.’

‘Dad would probably have agreed with you.’

Xavier grunted something unintelligible. ‘So what happened with the spiders, anyway?’

Antoinette began picking the label off her beer bottle, just the way she had all those years ago when her father had first mentioned his preferred mode of burial. ‘I don’t really know.’

Xavier wiped foam from his lip. ‘Have a wild stab in the dark.’

‘I got into trouble. It was all going nicely — I was making a slow, controlled approach to Tangerine Dream — and then wham.’ She picked up a beer mat and stabbed a finger at it by way of explanation. ‘I’ve got a zombie ship dead ahead of me, about to hit the atmosphere itself. I painted it with my radar by mistake and got a bunch of attitude from the zombie pilot.’

‘But she didn’t chuck a missile at you by way of thanks?’

‘No. She must have been all out, or she didn’t want to make things worse by revealing her position with a tube launch. See, the reason she was doing the big dive — the same as me — was that she had a spider ship chasing her.’

‘That wasn’t good,’ Xavier said.

‘No, not good at all. That’s why I had to get into the atmosphere so quickly. Fuck the safeguards, let’s get down there. Beast obliged, but there was a lot of damage on the way in.’

‘If it was that or get captured by the spiders, I’d say you did the right thing. I take it you waited down there until the spiders had passed on?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Antoinette…’ Xavier chided.

‘Hey, listen. Once I’d buried my father, that was the last place I wanted to hang around. And Beast wasn’t enjoying it one bit. The ship wanted out as much as I did. Problem is, we got tokamak failure on the up and out.’

‘You were dead meat.’

‘We should have been,’ Antoinette said, nodding. ‘Especially as the spiders were still nearby.’

Xavier leant back in his chair and swigged an inch of beer. Now that he had her safe, now that he knew how things had turned out, he was obviously enjoying hearing the story. ‘So what happened — did you get the tokamak to reboot?’

‘Later, yes, when we were back in empty space. It lasted long enough to get me back to Yellowstone, but I needed the tugs for the slow-down.’

‘So you managed to reach escape velocity, or were you still able to insert into orbit?’

‘Neither, Xave. We were falling back to the planet. So I did the only thing I could, which was ask for help.’ She finished her own beer, watching his reaction.

‘Help?’

‘From the spiders.’

‘No shit? You had the nerve — the balls — to do that?’

‘I’m not sure about the balls, Xave. But yes, I guess I had the nerve.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, what else was I going to do? Sit there and die? From my point of view, with a fuck of a lot of cloud coming up real fast, being conscripted into a hive mind suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.’

‘I still can’t believe… even after that dream you’ve been replaying?’

‘I figured that had to be propaganda. The truth couldn’t be quite that bad.’

‘But maybe nearly as bad.’

‘When you’re about to die, Xave, you take what you can get.’

He pointed the open neck of the beer bottle at her. ‘But…’

She read his mind. ‘I’m still here, yeah. I’m glad you noticed.’

‘What happened?’

‘They saved me.’ She said it again, almost having to reassure herself that it had really happened. ‘The spiders saved me. Sent down some kind of drone missile, or tug, or whatever it was. The thing clamped on to the hull and gave me a shove — a big shove — all the way out of Tangerine Dream’s gravity well. Next thing I knew I was falling back to Yellowstone. Had to get the tokamak up and running, but at least now I had more than a few minutes to do it in.’

‘And the spiders… they left?’

She nodded vigorously. ‘Their main guy, this old geezer, he spoke to me just before they sent the drone. Gave me one hell of a warning, I admit. Said if we ever crossed paths again — like, ever — he’d kill me. I think he meant it, too.’

‘I suppose you have to count yourself lucky. I mean, not everyone gets let off with a warning where the spiders are concerned.’

‘I guess so, Xave.’

‘This old man — the spider — anyone we’d have heard of?’

She shook her head. ‘Said his name was Clavain, that’s all. Didn’t mean shit to me.’

‘Not the Clavain, obviously?’

She stopped fiddling with the beer mat and looked at him. ‘And who would the Clavain be, Xave?’

He looked at her as if she was faintly stupid, or at the very least worryingly forgetful. ‘History, Antoinette, that boring stuff about the past. You know — before the Melding Plague, all that jazz?’

‘I wasn’t born then, Xave. It’s not even of academic interest to me.’ She held her bottle up to the light. ‘I need another one. What are the chances of getting it in the next hour, do you think?’

Xavier clicked a finger at the nearest servitor. The machine spun around, stiffened itself, took a step in their direction and fell over.

But when she was back at their place, Antoinette began to wonder. In the evening, when she had blasted away the worst effects of the beer, leaving her head clear but ringingly delicate, she squirrelled herself into Xavier’s office, powered up the museum-piece terminal and set about querying the carousel’s data hub for information on Clavain. She had to admit that she was curious now, but even if she had been curious during the journey home from the gas giant she would have had to wait until now to access any extensive systemwide archives. It would have been too risky to send a query from Storm Bird, and the ship’s own memories were not the most compendious.

Antoinette had never known anything except a post-plague environment, so she had no expectations of actually finding any useful information, even if the data she was looking for might once have existed. The system’s data networks had been rebuilt almost from scratch during the post-plague years, and much that had been archived before then had been corrupted or erased during the crisis.

But to her surprise there was rather a lot out there about Clavain, or at least about a Clavain. The famous Clavain, the one that Xavier had known about, had been born on Earth way back in the twenty-second century, in one of the last perfect summers before the glaciers rolled in and the place became a pristine snowball. He had gone to Mars and fought against the Conjoiners in their earliest incarnation. Antoinette read that again and frowned: against the Conjoiners? But she read on.

Clavain had gained notoriety during his Martian days. They called him the Butcher of Tharsis, the man who had turned the course of the Battle of the Bulge. He had authorised the use of red-mercury, nuclear and foam-phase weapons against spider forces, gouging glassy kilometre-wide craters across the face of Mars. In some accounts his deeds made him an automatic war criminal. Yet according to some of the less partisan reports, Clavain’s actions could be interpreted as having saved many millions of lives, both spider and allied, that would otherwise have been lost in a protracted ground campaign. Equally, there were reports of his heroism: of Clavain saving the lives of trapped soldiers and civilians; of him sustaining many injuries, recovering and going straight back to the front line. He had been there when the spiders brought down the aerial docking tower at Chryse, and had been pinned in the rubble for eighteen days with no food or water except the supplies in his skinsuit. When they pulled him out they found him clutching a cat that had also been trapped in the ruins, its spine snapped by masonry and yet still alive, nourished by portions from Clavain’s own rations. The cat died a week later. It took Clavain three months to recover.

But that hadn’t been the end of his career. He had been captured by the spider queen, the woman called Galiana who had created the whole spider mess in the first place. For months Galiana had held him prisoner, finally releasing him when the cease-fire was negotiated. Thereafter, there had always been a weird bond between the two former adversaries. When the uneasy peace had begun to crumble, it had been Clavain who went down to try to iron things out with the spider queen. And it was on that mission that he was presumed to have ‘defected’, throwing in his lot with the Conjoiners, accepting their remodelling machines into his skull and becoming one of the hive-mind spiders.

And that was when Clavain more or less dropped out of history. Antoinette skimmed the remaining records and found numerous anecdotal reports of him popping up here and there over the next four-hundred-odd years. It was possible; she could not deny that. Clavain had been getting on a bit before he defected, but with freezing and the time dilation that naturally accompanied any amount of star travel, he might not have lived through more than a few decades of those four centuries. And that was not even allowing for the kind of rejuvenation therapies that had been possible before the plague. No, it could have been Clavain — but it could equally well have been someone else with the same name. What were the chances of Antoinette Bax’s life intersecting with that of a major historical figure? Things like that just didn’t happen to her.

Something disturbed her. There was a commotion outside the office, the sound of things toppling and scraping, Xavier’s voice raised in protest. Antoinette killed the terminal and went outside.

What she found made her gasp. Xavier was up against one wall, his feet an inch from the floor. He was pinned there — painfully, she judged — by one manipulator of a multi-armed gloss-black police proxy. The machine — again it made her think of a nightmarish collision of pairs of huge black scissors — had barged into the office, knocking over cabinets and potted plants.

She looked at the proxy. Although they all appeared to be more or less identical, she just knew this was the same one, being slaved by the same pilot, that had come to pay her visit aboard Storm Bird.

‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said.

‘Miss Bax.’ The machine lowered Xavier to the ground, none too gently. Xavier coughed, winded, rubbing a raw spot beneath his throat. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a series of hoarse hacking vowels.

‘Mr Liu was impeding me in the course of my inquiries,’ the proxy said.

Xavier coughed again. ‘I… just… didn’t get out of the way fast enough.’

‘Are you all right, Xave?’ Antoinette asked

I’m all right,‘ he said, regaining some of the colour he had lost a moment earlier. He turned to the machine, which was occupying most of the office, flicking things over and examining other things with its multitude of limbs. ’What the fuck do you want?‘

‘Answers, Mr Liu. Answers to exactly the questions that were troubling me upon my last visit.’

Antoinette glared at the machine. ‘This fucker paid you a visit while I was away?’

The machine answered her. ‘I most certainly did, Miss Bax — seeing as you were so unforthcoming, I felt it necessary.’

Xavier looked at Antoinette.

‘He boarded Storm Bird,’ she confirmed

‘And?’

The proxy overturned a filing cabinet, rummaging with bored intent through the spilled paperwork. ‘Miss Bax showed me that she was carrying a passenger in a reefersleep casket. Her story, which was verified by Hospice Idlewild, was that there had been some kind of administrative confusion, and that the body was in the process of being returned to the Hospice.’

Antoinette shrugged, knowing she was going to have to bluff this one out. ‘So?’

‘The body was already dead. And you never arrived at the Hospice. You steered for interplanetary space shortly after I departed.’

‘Why would I have done that?’

‘That, Miss Bax, is precisely what I would like to know.’ The proxy abandoned the paperwork, kicking the cabinet aside with a whining flick of one sharp-edged piston-driven limb. ‘I asked Mr Liu, and he was no help at all. Were you, Mr Liu?’

‘I told you what I knew.’

‘Perhaps I should take a special interest in you too, Mr Liu — what do you think? You have a very interesting past, judging by police records. You knew James Bax very well, didn’t you?’

Xavier shrugged. ‘Who didn’t?’

‘You worked for him. That implies a more than passing knowledge of the man, wouldn’t you say?’

‘We had a business arrangement. I fixed his ship. I fix a lot of ships. It didn’t mean we were married.’

‘But you were undoubtedly aware that James Bax was a figure of concern to us, Mr Liu. A man not overly bothered about matters of right and wrong. A man not greatly troubled by anything so inconsequential as the law.’

‘How was he to know?’ Xavier argued. ‘You fuckers make the law up as you go along.’

The proxy moved with blinding speed, becoming a whirling black blur. Antoinette felt the breeze as it moved. The next thing she knew it had Xavier pinned to the wall again, higher this time, and with what looked like a good deal more force. He was choking, clawing at the machine’s manipulators in a desperate effort to free himself.

‘Did you know, Mr Liu, that the Merrick case has never been satisfactorily closed?’

Xavier couldn’t answer.

‘The Merrick case?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Lyle Merrick,’ the proxy replied. ‘You know the fellow. A trader, like your father. On the wrong side of the law.’

‘Lyle Merrick died…’

Xavier was beginning to turn blue.

‘But the case has never been closed, Miss Bax. There have always been a number of loose ends. What do you know of the Mandelstam Ruling?’

‘Another one of your fucking new laws, by any chance?’

The machine let Xavier fall to the floor. He was unconscious. She hoped he was unconscious.

‘Your father knew Lyle Merrick, Miss Bax. Xavier Liu knew your father. Mr Liu almost certainly knew Lyle Merrick. What with that and your propensity for ferrying dead bodies into the war zone for no logical reason that we can think of, it’s hardly any wonder that you two are of such interest to us, is it?’

‘If you touch Xavier one more time…’

‘What, Miss Bax?’

‘I’ll…’

‘You’ll do nothing. You’re powerless here. There aren’t even any security cameras or mites in this room. I know. I checked first.’

‘Fucker.’

The machine edged closer to her. ‘Of course, you could be carrying some form of concealed device, I suppose.’

Antoinette pressed herself back against one wall of the office. ‘What?’

The proxy extended a manipulator. She squeezed back even further, sucking in her breath, but it was no good. The proxy stroked its manipulator down the side of her face gently enough, but she was horribly aware of the damage it could do should the machine wish it. Then the manipulator caressed he; neck and moved down, lingering over her breasts.

‘You… fucker.’

‘I think you might be carrying a weapon, or drugs.’ There was a blur of metal, the same vile breeze. She flinched, but it was over in an instant. The proxy had torn her jacket off; her favourite plum jacket was ripped to shreds. Underneath she wore a tight black sleeveless vest with equipment pockets. She wriggled and swore, but the machine still held her tightly. It drew shapes on the vest, tugging it away from her skin.

‘I have to be sure, Miss Bax.’

She thought of the pilot, surgically inserted into a steel canister somewhere in the belly of the police cutter that had to be parked nearby, little more than a central nervous system and a few tedious add-ons.

‘You sick fuck.’

‘I am only being… thorough, Miss Bax.’

There was a crash and a clatter behind the machine. The proxy froze. Antoinette held her breath, just as puzzled. She wondered if the pilot had notified more proxies of the fun that was to be had.

The machine edged back from her and spun around very slowly. It faced a wall of shocking orange-brown and rippling black. By Antoinette’s estimate there were at least a dozen of them, six or seven orang-utans and about the same number of enhanced silverback gorillas. They had all been augmented for full bipedality and they were all carrying makeshift — in some cases not so makeshift — weapons.

The main silverback had a comically huge wrench in its hands. When it spoke its voice was almost pure subsonics, something Antoinette felt more in her stomach than heard. ‘Let her go.’

The proxy weighed its chances. Very probably it could have taken out all of the hyperprimates. It had tasers and glue-guns and other nasties. But there would have been a great deal of mess and a great deal of explaining to be done, and no guarantee that the proxy would not sustain a certain amount of damage before it had all the primates either pacified or dead.

It was not worth the bother, especially not when there were such powerful unions and political lobbies behind most of the hyperprimate species. The Ferrisville Convention would find it a lot harder to explain the death of a gorilla or orang-utan than a human, especially in Carousel New Copenhagen.

The proxy retreated, tucking most of its limbs away. For a moment the wall of hyperprimates refused to allow it to leave and Antoinette feared that there was going to bloodshed. But her rescuers only wanted to make their point.

The wall parted; the proxy scuttled out.

Antoinette let out a sigh. She wanted to thank the hyperprimates, but her first and most immediate concern was for Xavier. She knelt down by him and touched the side of his neck. She felt hot animal breath on hers.

‘He all right?’

She looked into the magnificent face of the silverback; it was like something carved from coal. ‘I think so. How did you know?’

The superbly low voice rumbled, ‘Xavier push panic button. We come.’

‘Thank you.’

The silverback stood up, towering over her. ‘We like Xavier. Xavier treat us good.’

Later, she inspected the remains of her jacket. Her father had given it to her on her seventeenth birthday. It had always been a little small for her — when she wore it, it looked more like a matador’s jacket — but despite that it had always been her favourite, and she always felt she had made it look right. Now it was ruined beyond any hope of repair.

When the primates had gone, and when Xavier was back on his feet, shaken but basically unharmed, they did what they could to tidy up the mess. It took several hours, most of which were spent putting the paperwork back into order. Xavier had always been meticulous about his book-keeping; even as the company slid towards bankruptcy, he said, he was damned if he was going to give the money-grabbing creditor bastards any more ammunition than they already had.

By midnight the place looked respectable again. But Antoinette knew it was not over. The proxy was going to come back, and next time it would make sure there would be no primate rescue party. Even if the proxy never did get to the bottom of what she had been doing in the war zone, there would be a thousand ways that the authorities could put her out of business. The proxy could have impounded Storm Bird already. All the proxy was doing, and she had to keep reminding herself that there was a human pilot behind it, was playing with her, making her life a misery of worry while giving itself, or himself, something amusing to do when it wasn’t harassing someone else.

She thought of asking Xavier why it was taking such an interest in her father’s associates, most specifically the Lyle Merrick case, but then she decided to put the whole thing out of her mind, at least until the morning.

Xavier went out and bought a couple more beers, and they finished them off while they were putting the last few items of furniture back into place.

‘Things will work out, Antoinette,’ he said.

‘You’re certain of that?’

‘You deserve it,’ he said. ‘You’re a good person. All you ever wanted to do was honour your father’s wishes.’

‘So why do I feel like such an idiot?’

‘You shouldn’t,’ he said, and kissed her.

They made love again — it felt like days since the last time — and then Antoinette fell asleep, sinking through layers of increasingly vague anxiety until she reached unconsciousness. And then the Demarchist propaganda dream began to take over: the one where she was on a liner that was raided by spiders; the one where she was taken to their cometary base and surgically prepared for induction into their hive mind.

But there was a difference this time. When the Conjoiners came to open her skull and sink their machines into it, the one who leant over her pulled down a white surgical mask to reveal the face she now recognised from the history texts, from the most recent anecdotal sightings. It was the face of a white-haired, bearded old patriarch, lined and characterful, sad and jolly at the same time, a face that might, under any other circumstances, have seemed kind and wise and grandfatherly.

It was the face of Nevil Clavain.

‘I told you not to cross my path again,’ he said.

The Mother Nest was a light-minute behind him when Clavain instructed the corvette to flip over and commence its deceleration burn, following the navigational data that Skade had given him. The starscape wheeled like something geared by well-oiled clockwork, shadows and pale highlights oozing over Clavain and the recumbent forms of his two passengers. A corvette was the nimblest vessel in the Conjoiner in-system fleet, but cramming three occupants into the hull resembled a mathematical exercise in optimal packing. Clavain was webbed into the pilot’s position, with tactile controls and visual read-outs within easy reach. The ship could be flown without blinking an eyelid, but it was also designed to withstand the kind of cybernetic assault that might impair routine neural commands. Clavain flew it via tactile control in any case, though he had barely moved a finger in hours. Tactical summaries jostled his visual field, competing for attention, but there had been no hint of enemy activity within six light-hours.

Immediately to his rear, with their knees parallel to his shoulders, lay Remontoire and Skade. They were slotted into human-shaped spaces between the inner surfaces of weapons pods or fuel blisters and, like Clavain, they wore lightweight spacesuits. The black armoured surfaces of the suits reduced them to abstract extensions of the corvette’s interior. There was barely room for the suits, but there was even less room to put them on.

Skade?

[Yes, Clavain?]

I think it’s safe to tell me where we’re headed now, isn’t it?

Qust follow the flight plan and we’ll arrive there in good time. The Master of Works will be expecting us.]

Master of Works? Anyone I’ve met? He caught the sly curve of Skade’s smile, reflected in the corvette’s window.

[You’ll soon have the pleasure, Clavain.]

He didn’t need to be told that wherever they were going was still in the same part of the cometary halo that contained the Mother Nest. There was nothing out here but vacuum and comets, and even the comets were scarce. The Conjoiners had turned some comets into decoys to lure in the enemy, and had placed sensors, booby-traps and jamming systems on others, but he was not aware of any such activities taking place so close to home.

He tapped into systemwide newsfeeds as they flew. Only the most partisan enemy agencies pretended that there was any chance of a Demarchist victory now. Most of them were talking openly of defeat, though it was always worded in more ambiguous terms: cessation of hostilities; concession to some enemy demands; reopening of negotiations with the Conjoiners… the litany went on and on, but it was not difficult to read between the lines.

Attacks against Conjoiner assets had grown less and less frequent, with a commensurately dwindling success rate. Now the enemy was concentrating on protecting its own bases and strongholds, and even there they were failing. Most of the bases needed to be resupplied with provisions and armaments from the main production centres, which meant convoys of robot craft strung out on long, lonely trajectories across the system. The Conjoiners picked them off with ease; it was not even worth capturing their cargoes. The Demarchists had launched crash programmes to recover some of the expertise in nano-fabrication they had enjoyed before the Melding Plague, but the rumours coming out of their war labs hinted at grisly failures; of whole research teams turned into grey slurry by runaway replicators. It was like the twenty-first century all over again.

And the more desperate they got, the worse the failures became.

Conjoiner occupation forces had successfully seized a number of outlying settlements and quickly established puppet regimes, enabling day-to-day life to continue much as it had before. They had not so far embarked on mass neural conversion programmes, but their critics said it would only be a matter of time before the populaces were subjugated by Conjoiner implants, enslaved into their crushingly uniform hive mind. Resistance groups had made several damaging strikes against Conjoiner power in those puppet states, with loose alliances of Skyjacks, pigs, banshees and other systemwide ne’er-do-wells banding together against the new authority. All they were doing, Clavain thought, was hastening the likelihood that some form of neural conscription would have to take place, if only for the public good.

But so far Yellowstone and its immediate environs — the Rust Belt, the high-orbit habitats and carousels and the starship parking swarms — had not been contested. The Ferrisville Convention, though it had its own problems, was still maintaining a facade of control. It had long suited both sides to have a neutral zone, a place where spies could exchange information and where covert agents from both sides could mingle with third parties and sweet-talk possible collaborators, sympathisers or defectors. Some said that even this was only a temporary state of affairs; that the Conjoiners would not stop at occupying most of the system; they had held Yellowstone for a few short decades and would not throw away a chance to claim her for good. Their earlier occupation had been a pragmatic intervention at the invitation of the Demarchisfs, but the second would be an exercise in totalitarian control like nothing history had seen for centuries.

So it was said. But what if even that was a hopelessly optimistic forecast?

Skade had told him that the signals from the lost weapons had been detected more than thirty years earlier. The memories he had been given and the data he now had access to confirmed her story. But there was no explanation for why the recovery of the weapons had suddenly become a matter of vital urgency to the Mother Nest. Skade had said that the war had made it difficult to stage an attempt any sooner than now, but that was surely only part of the truth. There had to be something else: a crisis, or the threat of a crisis, which made the recovery of the weapons vastly more important than it had been before. Something had scared the Inner Sanctum.

Clavain wondered if Skade — and by implication the Inner Sanctum — knew something about the wolves that he had yet to be told. Since Galiana’s return, the wolves had been classified as a disturbing but distant threat, something to worry about only when humankind began to push deeper into interstellar space. But what if some new intelligence had been received? What if the wolves were closer?

He wanted to dismiss the idea, but found himself unable to do so. For the remainder of the trip his thoughts circled like vultures, examining the idea from every angle, mentally stripping it to the bone. It was only when Skade again pushed her thoughts into his head that he forced himself to bury his internal enquiries beneath conscious thought.

[We’re nearly there, Clavain. You appreciate that none of what you see here can be shared with the rest of the Mother Nest?]

Of course. I hope you were discreet about whatever you were doing out here. If you’d drawn the enemy’s attention you could have compromised everything.

[But we didn’t, Clavain.]

That’s not the point. There weren’t supposed to be any operations within ten light-hours of—

[Listen, Clavain.] She leaned forwards from the tight confines of her seat, the restraint webbing taut against the black curves of her spacesuit. [There’s something you need to grasp: the war isn’t our main concern any more. We’re going to win it.]

Don’t underestimate the Demarchists.

[Oh, I won’t. But we must keep them in perspective. The only serious issue now is the recovery of the hell-class weapons.]

Does it have to be recovery? Or would you settle for destruction? Clavain watched her reaction carefully. Even after his admittance to the Closed Council Skade’s mind was closed to him.

[Destruction, Clavain? Why on Earth would we want to destroy them?]

You told me that your main objective was to stop them from falling into the wrong hands.

[That remains the case, yes.]

So you’d allow them to be destroyed? That would achieve the same end, wouldn’t it? And I imagine it’d be very much easier from a logistical point of view.

[Recovery is our preferred outcome.]

Preferred?

[Very much preferred, Clavain.]

Presently, the corvette’s motors burned harder. Barely visible, a dark cometary husk hoved out of the darkness. The ship’s forward floods glanced across its surface, hunting and questing. The comet spun slowly, more rapidly than the Mother Nest but still within reasonable limits. Clavain judged the size of the filthy snowball to be perhaps seven or eight kilometers across — an order of magnitude smaller than home. It could easily have been hidden within the Mother Nest’s hollowed-out core.

The corvette hovered close to the frothy black surface of the comet, arresting its drift with stuttering spikes of violet-flamed thrust before firing anchoring grapples. They slammed into the ground, piercing the nearly invisible epoxy skein that had been thrown around the comet for structural reinforcement.

You’ve been busy little beavers. How many people have you got here, Skade, doing whatever it is they do?

[No one. Only a handful of us have ever visited here, and no one ever stays permanently. All activities have been totally automated. Periodically a Closed Council operative arrives to check on things, but for the most part the servitors have worked unsupervised.]

Servitors aren’t that clever.

[Ours are.]

Clavain, Remontoire and Skade donned helmets and left the corvette via its surface lock, jumping across several metres of space until they collided with the reinforcement membrane. It caught them like flies on glue paper, springing back and forth until their impact energy was damped away. When the membrane had ceased its oscillations Clavain gently ripped his arm away from the adhesive surface and then levered himself into a standing position. The adhesive was sophisticated enough to yield to normal motions, but it would remain sticky against any action sufficiently violent to send someone away from the comet at escape velocity. Similarly, the membrane was rigid under normal forces, but would deform elastically if something impacted it at more than a few metres per second. Walking was possible provided it was done reasonably slowly, but anything more vigorous would result in the subject becoming embroiled and immobilised until they relaxed.

Skade, whose crested helmet made her difficult to mistake, led the way, following what must have been a suit homing trace. After five minutes of progress they arrived at a modest depression in the comet’s surface. Clavain discerned a black entrance hole at the depression’s lowest point, almost lost against the sooty blackness of the comet’s surface. There was a circular gap in the membrane, protected by a ring-shaped collar.

Skade knelt by the blackness, the adhesive gripping her knees via oozing capillary flow. She knocked the rim of the collar twice and then waited. After perhaps a minute a servitor bustled from the darkness, unfolding a plethora of jointed legs and appendages as it cleared the tight restriction of the collar. The machine resembled a belligerent iron grasshopper. Clavain recognised it as a general construction model — there were thousands like it back at the Mother Nest — but there was something unnervingly confident and cocky about the way it moved.

[Clavain, Remontoire… let me introduce you to the Master of Works.]

The servitor?

[The Master’s more than just a servitor, I assure you.]

Skade shifted to spoken language. ‘Master… we wish to see the interior. Please let us through.’

In reply Clavain heard the buzzing, wasplike voice of the Master. ‘I am not familiar with these two individuals.’

‘Clavain and Remontoire both have Closed Council clearance. Here, read my mind. You’ll see I am not being coerced.’

There was a pause while the machine stepped closer to Skade, easing the full mass of its body from the collar. It had many legs and limbs, some tipped with picklike feet, others ending in specialised grippers, tools or sensors. On either side of its wedge-shaped head were major sensor clusters, packed together like faceted compound eyes. Skade stood her ground while the servitor advanced, until it was towering over her. The machine lowered its head and swept it from side to side, and then jerked backwards.

I will want to read their minds as well.‘

‘Be my guest.’

The servitor moved to Remontoire, angled its head and swept him. It took a little longer with him than it had spent on Skade. Then, seemingly satisified, it proceeded to Clavain. He felt it rummaging through his mind, its scrutiny fierce and systematic. As the machine trawled him, a torrent of remembered smells, sounds and visual images burst into his consciousness, and then each image vanished to be replaced by another. Now and then the machine would pause, back up and retrieve an earlier image, lingering over it suspiciously. Others it skipped over with desultory disinterest. The process was mercifully quick, but it still felt like he was being ransacked.

Then the scanning stopped, the torrent ceased and Clavain’s mind was his own again.

‘This one is conflicted. He appears to have had doubts. I have doubts about him. I cannot retrieve deep neural structures. Perhaps I should scan him at higher resolution. A modest surgical procedure would permit…’

Skade interrupted the servitor. ‘That’s not necessary, Master. He’s entitled to his doubts. Let us through, will you?’

‘This is not in order. This is most irregular. A limited surgical intervention…’ The machine still had its clusters of sensors locked on to Clavain.

‘Master, this is a direct command. Let us pass.’

The servitor pulled away. ‘Very well. I comply under duress. I will insist that the visit be brief.’

‘We won’t detain you,’ Skade said.

‘No, you will not. You will also remove your weapons. I will not permit high-energy-density devices within my comet.’

Clavain glanced down at his suit’s utility belt, unclipping the low-yield boser pistol he had barely been aware he was carrying. He moved to place the pistol on the ice, but even as he did so there was a whiplike blur of motion from the Master of Works, flicking the pistol from his hand. He saw it spin off into the darkness above him, flung away at greater than escape velocity. Skade and Remontoire did likewise, and the Master disposed of their weapons with the same casual flick. Then the servitor spun round, its legs a dancing blur of metal, and then thrust itself back into the hole.

[Come on. It doesn’t really like visitors, and it’ll start getting irritated if we stay too long.]

Remontoire pushed a thought into their heads. [You mean it’s not irritated yet?]

What the hell is it, Skade?

[A servitor, of course, only somewhat brighter than the norm… does that disturb you?]

Clavain followed her through the collar and into the tunnel, drifting more than walking, guiding himself between the throatlike walls of compactified ice. He had barely been aware of the pistol he carried until it had been confiscated, but now he felt quite vulnerable without it. He fingered his utility belt, but there was nothing else on it that would serve as a weapon against the servitor, should it chose to turn against them. There were a few clamps and miniature grapples, a couple of thumb-sized signalling beacons and a standard-issue sealant spray. The only thing approaching an actual weapon — while the spray looked like a gun, it had a range of only two or three centimetres — was a short-bladed piezo-knife, sufficient to pierce spacesuit fabric but not much use against an armoured machine or even a well-trained adversary.

You know damned well it does. I’ve never had my mind invaded by a machine… not the way that one just did.

[It just needs to know it can trust us.]

While it trawled him he had tasted the sharp metallic tang of its intelligence. How clever is it, exactly? Turing-compliant?

[Higher. As smart as an alpha-level, at the very least. Oh, don’t give me that aura of self-righteous disgust, Clavain. You once accepted machines that were almost as intelligent as yourself.]

I’ve had time to revise my opinion on the subject.

[Is it that you feel threatened by it, I wonder?]

By a machine? No. What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave. I didn’t think that was quite what we believed in.

He felt Remontoire’s quiet presence. [I agree with Clavain. We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.]

Somewhere ahead of them was a pale lilac glow that picked out the natural patterning of the tunnel walls. Clavain could see the servitor’s dark spindly bulk against the light source. It must have been listening in to this conversation, he thought, hearing them debate what it represented.

[I regret that we had to do it. But we didn’t have any choice. We needed clever servitors.]

[It’s slavery,] Remontoire insisted.

[Desperate times call for desperate measures, Remontoire.]

Clavain peered into the pale purple gloom. What’s so desperate? I thought all we were doing was recovering some lost property.

The Master of Works brought them to the interior of Skade’s comet, calling them to a halt inside a small, airless blister set into the interior wall of the hollowed-out body. They stationed themselves by hooking limbs into restraint straps attached to the blister’s stiff alloy frame. The blister was hermetically sealed from the comet’s main chamber. The vacuum that had been achieved within was so high-grade that even the vapour leakage from Clavain’s suit would have caused an unacceptable degradation.

Clavain stared into the chamber. Beyond the glass was a cavern of dizzying scale. It was bathed in rapturous blue light, filled with vast machines and an almost subliminal sense of scurrying activity. For a moment the scene was far too much to take in. Clavain felt as if he was staring into the depths of perspective in a fabulous detailed medieval painting, beguiled by the interlocking arches and towers of some radiant celestial city, glimpsing hosts of silver-leaf angels in the architecture, squadron upon squadron of them as far as the eye could see, receding into the cerulean blue of infinity. Then he grasped the scale of things and realised with a perceptual jolt that the angels were merely distant machines: droves of sterile construction servitors traversing the vacuum by the thousand as they went about their tasks. They communicated with each other using lasers, and it was the scatter and reflection of those beams that drenched the chamber in such shivering blue radiance. And it was indeed cold, Clavain knew. Dotted around the walls of the chamber he recognised the nubbed black cones of cryo-arithmetic engines, calculating overtime to suck away the heat of intense industrial activity that would otherwise have boiled the comet away.

Clavain’s attention flicked to the reason for all that activity. He was not surprised to see the ships — not even surprised to see that they were starships — but the degree to which they had been completed astonished him. He had been expecting half-finished hulks, but he could not believe that these ships were far from flight-readiness. There were twelve of them packed side by side in clouds of geodesic support scaffolding. They were identical shapes, smooth and black as torpedos or beached whales, barbed near the rear with the outflung spars and nacelles of Conjoiner drives. Though there were no obvious visual comparisons, he was certain that each of the ships was at least three or four kilometres long, much larger than Nightshade.

Skade smiled, obviously noting his reaction. [Impressed?]

Who wouldn’t be?

[Now you understand why the Master was so concerned about the risk of an unintentional weapons discharge, or even a powerplant overload. Of course, you’re wondering why we’ve started building them again.]

It’s a fair question. Would the wolves have anything to do with it, by any chance?

[Perhaps you should tell me why you think we ever stopped making them.]

I’m afraid no one ever had the decency to tell me.

[You’re an intelligent man. You must have formed a few theories of your own.]

For a moment Clavain thought of telling her that the matter had never really concerned him; that the decision to stop making starships had happened when he was in deep space, a fait accompli by the time he returned, and — given the immediate need to help his side win the war — not the most pressing issue at hand.

But that would have been a lie. It had always troubled him.

Generally it’s assumed that we stopped making them for selfish economic reasons, or because we were worried that the drives were falling into the wrong hands — Ultras and other undesirables. Or that we discovered a fatal flaw in the design that meant that the drives had a habit of exploding now and again.

[Yes, and there are at least half a dozen other theories in common currency, ranging from the faintly plausible to the ludicrously paranoid. What was your understanding of the reason?]

We’d only ever had a stable customer relationship with the Demarchists. The Ultras bought their drives off second– or third-hand sources, or stole them. But once our relationship with the Demarchists began to deteriorate, which happened when the Melding Plague crashed their economy, we lost our main client. They couldn’t afford our technology, and we weren’t willing to sell it to a faction that showed increasing signs of hostility.

[A very pragmatic answer, Clavain.]

I never saw any reason to look for any deeper explanation.

[There is, of course, quite a grain of truth in that. Economic and political factors did play a role. But there was something else. It can’t have escaped your attention that our own internal shipbuilding programme has been much reduced.]

We’ve had a war to fight. We have enough ships for our needs as it is.

[True, but even those ships have not been active. Routine interstellar traffic has been greatly reduced. Travel between Conjoiner settlements in other systems has been cut back to a minimum.]

Again, effects of a war—

[Had remarkably little to do with it, other than providing a convenient cover story.]

Despite himself, Clavain almost laughed. Cover story?

[Had the real reason ever come out, there would have been widespread panic across the whole of human-settled space. The socio-economic turmoil would have been incomparably greater than anything caused by the present war.]

And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why?

[You were right, in a sense. It was to do with the wolves, Clavain.]

He shook his head. It can’t have been.

[Why not?]

Because we didn’t learn about the wolves until Galiana returned. And Galiana didn’t encounter them until after we separated. There was no need to remind Skade that both of these events had happened long after the edict to stop shipbuilding.

Skade’s helmet nodded a fraction. [That’s true, in a sense. Certainly, it wasn’t until Galiana’s return that the Mother Nest obtained any detailed intelligence concerning the nature of the machines. But the fact that the wolves existed — the fact that they were out there — that was already known, many years before.]

It can’t have been. Galiana was the first to encounter them.

[No. She was merely the first to make it back alive — or at least the first to make it back in any sense at all. Before that, there had only been distant reports, mysterious instances of ships vanishing, the odd distress signal. Over the years the Closed Council collated these reports and came to the conclusion that the wolves, or something like the wolves, was stalking interstellar space. That was bad enough, yet there was an even more disturbing conclusion, one that led to the edict. The pattern of losses pointed to the fact that the machines, whatever they were, homed in on a specific signature from our engines. We concluded that the wolves were drawn to us by the tau-neutrino emissions that are a characteristic of our drives.]

And Galiana?

[When she returned we knew we’d been right. And she gave a name to our enemy, Clavain. We owe her that much, if nothing else.]

Then Skade reached into his head and planted an image. What she showed him was pitiless blackness studded by a smattering of faint, feeble stars. The stars did nothing to nullify the darkness, serving only to make it more absolute and cold. This was how Skade now perceived the cosmos, as ultimately inimical to life as an acid bath. But between the stars was something other than emptiness. The machines lurked in those spaces, preferring the darkness and the cold. Skade made him experience the cruel flavour of their intelligence. It made the thought processes of the Master of Works seem comforting and friendly. There was something bestial in the way the machines thought, a furious slavering hunger that would eclipse all other considerations.

A feral, ravenous bloodlust.

[They’ve always been out there, hiding in the darkness, watching and waiting. For four centuries we’ve been extremely lucky, stumbling through the night, making noise and light, broadcasting our presence into the galaxy. I think in some ways they must be blind, or that there are certain kinds of signal they filter from their perceptions. They never homed in on our radio or television transmissions, for instance, or else they would have scented us en masse centuries ago. That hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps they are designed only to respond to the unmistakable signs of a starfaring culture, rather than a merely technological one. Speculation, of course, but what else can we do but speculate?]

Clavain looked at the twelve brand-new starships. And now? Why start shipbuilding again?

[Because now we can. Nightshade was a prototype for these twelve much larger ships. They have quiet drives. With certain refinements in drive topology we were able to reduce the tau-neutrino flux by two orders of magnitude. Far from perfect, but it should allow us to resume interstellar travel without immediate fear of bringing down the wolves. The technology will, of course, have to remain strictly within Conjoiner control.]

Of course.

[I’m glad you see it that way.]

He looked at the ships again. The twelve black shapes were larger, fatter versions of Nightshade, their hulls swelling out to a width of perhaps two hundred and fifty metres at the widest point. They were as fat-bellied as the old ramliner colonisation ships, which had been designed to carry many tens of thousands of frozen sleepers.

But what about the rest of humanity? What about all the old ships that are still being used?

[We’ve done what we can. Closed Council agents have succeeded in regaining control of a number of outlaw vessels. These ships were destroyed, of course: we can’t use them either, and existing drives can’t be safely converted to the stealthed design.]

They can’t?

Into Clavain’s mind Skade tossed the image of a small planet, perhaps a moon, with a huge bowl-shaped chunk gouged out of one hemisphere, glowing cherry-red.

[No.]

And I don’t suppose that at any point you thought that it might help to disclose this information?

Behind the visor of her crested helmet she smiled tolerantly. [Clavain… Clavain. Always so willing to believe in the greater good of humanity. I find your attitude heartening, I really do. But what good would disclosure serve? This information is already too sensitive to share even with the majority of the Conjoined. I daren’t imagine what effect it would have on the rest of humanity.]

He wanted to argue but he knew she was correct. It was decades since any utterance from the Conjoiners had been taken at face value. Even a warning as bluntly urgent as that would be assumed to have duplicitous intent.

Even if his side capitulated, their surrender would be taken as a ruse.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe. But I still don’t understand why you’ve suddenly begun shipbuilding again.

[As a purely precautionary measure, should we need them.]

Clavain studied the ships again. Even if each ship only had the capacity to carry fifty or sixty thousand sleepers — and they looked capable of carrying far more than that — Skade’s fleet would have sufficed to carry nearly half the population of the Mother Nest.

Purely precautionary — that’s all?

[Well, there is the small matter of the hell-class weapons. Two of the ships plus the prototype will constitute a taskforce for the recovery operation. They will be armed with the most advanced weapons in our arsenal, and will contain recently developed technologies of a tactically advantageous nature.]

Like, I suppose, the systems you were testing?

[Certain further tests must still be performed, but yes…]

Skade unhitched herself. ‘Master of Works — we’re done here for now. My guests have seen enough. What is your most recent estimate for when the ships will be flight ready?’

The servitor, which had folded and entwined its appendages into a tight bundle, swivelled its head to address her. ‘Sixty-one days, eight hours and thirteen minutes.’

Thank you. Be sure to do all you can to accelerate that schedule. Clavain won’t want to be detained a moment, will you?‘

Clavain said nothing.

‘Please follow me,’ said the Master of Works, flicking a limb towards the exit. It was anxious to lead them back to the surface.

Clavain made sure he was the first behind it.

He did his best to keep his mind as blank and calm as possible, concentrating purely on the mechanics of the task in hand. The journey back towards the surface of the comet seemed to take much longer than the trip down had. The Master of Works bustled ahead of them, straddling the tunnel bore, picking its way along it with fastidious care. The servitor’s mood was impossible to read, but Clavain had the impression that it was very glad to be done with the three of them. It had been programmed to tend the operations here with zealous protectivity, and Clavain could not help but admire the grudging way it had entertained them. He had dealt with many robots and servitors in his lifetime, and they had been programmed with many superficially convincing personalities. But this was the first one that had seemed genuinely resentful of human company.

Halfway along the throat, Clavain halted suddenly. Wait a moment.

[What’s wrong?]

I don’t know. My suit’s registering a small pressure leak in my glove. Something in the wall may have ripped the fabric.

[That’s not possible, Clavain. The wall is mildly compacted cometary ice. It would be like cutting yourself on smoke.]

Clavain nodded. Then I cut myself on smoke. Or perhaps there was a sharp chip embedded in the wall.

Clavain turned around and held his hand up for inspection. A target-shaped patch on the back of his left gauntlet was flashing pink, indicating the general region of a slow pressure loss.

[He’s right, Skade,] Remontoire said.

[It’s not serious. He can fix it when we’re back on the corvette.]

My hand feels cold. I’ve lost this hand once already, Skade. I don’t intend to lose it again.

He heard her hiss, an unfiltered sound of pure human impatience. [Then fix it.]

Clavain nodded and fumbled the spray from his utility belt. He dialled the nozzle to its narrowest setting and pressed the tip against his glove. The sealant emerged like a thin grey worm, instantly hardening and bonding to the fabric. He worked the nozzle sinuously up and down and from side to side, until he had doodled the worm across the gauntlet.

His hand was cold, but it also hurt because he had pushed the blade of the piezo-knife clean through the gauntlet. He had done it without removing the knife from the belt, in one fluid gesture as he moved one hand across the belt and angled the knife with the other. Given the difficulties, he had done well not to escape a more severe injury.

Clavain returned the spray to his belt. There was a regular warning tone in his helmet and his glove continued to pulse pink — he could see the pink glow around the edges of the sealant — but the sense of cold was diminishing. There was a small residual leak, but nothing that would cause him any difficulties.

[Well?]

I think that’s taken care of it. I’ll take a better look at it when we’re in the corvette.

To Clavain’s relief the incident appeared closed. The servitor bustled on and the three of them followed it. Eventually the tunnel breached the comet’s surface. Clavain had the usual expected moment of vertigo as he stood outside again, for the comet’s weak gravity was barely detectable and it was very easy via a simple flip of the perceptions to imagine himself glued by the soles of his feet to a coal-black ceiling, head down over infinite nothingness. But then the moment passed and he was confident again. The Master of Works packed itself back into the collar and then vanished down the tunnel.

They made quick progress to the waiting corvette, a wedge of pure black tethered against the starscape.

[Clavain…?]

Yes, Skade?

[Do you mind if I ask you something? The Master of Works reported that you had doubts… was that an honest observation, or was the machine confused by the extreme antiquity of your memories?]

You tell me.

[Do you appreciate the need to recover the weapons, now? I mean on a visceral level?]

Nothing’s ever been clearer to me. I understand perfectly that we need those weapons.

[I sense your honesty, Clavain. You do understand, don’t you?]

Yes, I think so. The things you showed me made it all a lot clearer.

He was ahead of Skade and Remontoire by ten or twelve metres, moving as quickly as he dared. Suddenly — when he had reached the corvette’s nearest grappling line — he stopped and spun around, grasping the line with one hand. The gesture was enough to make Skade and Remontoire stop in their tracks.

[Clavain…]

He ripped the piezo-knife from his belt and plunged it into the plastic membrane that wrapped the comet. He had the knife set to maximum sharpness and worked it lengthways, gouging a gash in the membrane. Clavain edged along like a crab, slicing first a metre then a two-metre rift, the knife whistling through the membrane with the barest hint of resistance. He had to keep a firm hold of the grapple, so he was only able to open up a four-metre-wide gash.

Until he had made the cut, he had no way of judging whether it would be sufficiently long. But a sliding sensation in his gut told him that it was enough. The entire patch of membrane under the corvette was being tugged back by the elasticity of the rest of the fabric. The gash was ripping wider and longer without his encouragement: four metres, then six, then ten… unzipping in either direction. Skade and Remontoire, caught on the far side, were tugged away by the same elastic pull.

The whole thing had taken one or two seconds. That, however, was more than enough time for Skade.

Almost as soon as he had plunged the knife in he had felt her claw at his mind, understanding that he was attempting to escape. In that moment he sensed brutal neural power that he had never suspected before. Skade was unleashing everything that she had against him, damning caution and secrecy. He felt search-and-destroy algorithms scuttle across the vacuum on radio waves, burrowing into his skull, working their way through the layered strata of his mind, questing and grasping for the basal routines that would allow her to paralyse him, or throw him into unconsciousness, or simply kill him. Had he been a normal Conjoiner she would have succeeded in microseconds, instructing his neural implants to self-destruct in an incendiary orgy of heat and pressure, and he would have been lost. Instead he felt a pain as if someone were driving an iron piton into his skull, one cruel tap at a time.

He still slipped into unconsciousness. The moment could only have lasted two or three seconds, but when he emerged he felt a yawing dislocation, unable to remember where he was or what he was doing. All that remained was a searing chemical imperative, written in the adrenalin that was still flooding his blood. He didn’t quite know what had caused it, but the feeling was inescapable: an ancient mammalian fear. He was running away from something and his life was in great danger. He was suspended by one hand from a taut metal line. He glanced along the line — up — and saw a ship, a corvette, hovering above him, and knew, or hoped, that this was where he needed to be.

He started to tug himself up the line towards the waiting ship, half-remembering something that he had initiated and that he needed to continue. Then the pain notched itself higher and he fell back into unconsciousness.

Clavain came around as he drifted to a halt — Tell‘ was too strong a word for it — against the plastic membrane. Again he felt a basic urgency and struggled to make sense of the predicament he vaguely knew himself to be in. There above him was the ship — he remembered it from last time. He had been inching up the line, trying to reach it. Or had he been inching down it, trying to get away from something aboard it?

He looked laterally across the surface of wherever he was and saw two figures beckoning him.

[Clavain…]

The voice — the female presence in his head — was forceful but not entirely lacking in compassion. There was regret there, but it was the kind of regret a teacher might entertain for a promising pupil that had let her down. Was the voice disappointed because he was about to fail, or disappointed because he had nearly succeeded?

He didn’t know. He sensed that if he could only think things through, if only he could have a quiet minute alone, he could put all the pieces back together. There had been something, hadn’t there? A huge room full of dark, menacing shapes.

All he needed was peace and quiet.

But there was also a ringing tone in his head: a pressure-loss alarm. He glanced at his suit exterior, searching for the telltale pulse of pink that would highlight the wound. There it was: a smudge of rose across the back of his hand, the one that now held a knife. He returned the knife to the vacant position on his belt and reached instinctively for the sealant spray. Then he realised that he had already used the spray; that the smudge of pink was leaking around the sides of an intricately curved and curled scab of hardened sealant. The solidified grey worm appeared to form a complex runic inscription.

He looked at the glove from a different angle and saw a message scrawled in the tangled track of the worm: SHIP.

It was his handwriting.

The two figures had reached the ends of the wound-shaped gash in the ice and were now converging on his position as quickly as they were able. He judged that they would arrive at the base of the grapple in under a minute. It would take him almost as long to work his way along the line. He wondered about jumping for it, hoping that he could judge it correctly and not sail past the corvette, but at the back of his mind he knew that the adhesive membrane would not allow him to kick off. He would have to shin up the line hand-overhand, despite the pain in his head and the constant feeling that he was on the verge of teetering back into unconsciousness.

He blacked out again, but more briefly this time, and when he saw his glove and the figures converging below him he guessed that he was right to head for the ship. He reached the lock at the same time as the first of the figures — the one with the ridged helmet, he saw now — arrived at the barbed grapple.

His perceptions now told him that the surface of the comet was a vertical black wall, with the tether lines emerging horizontally. The two others were flies glued to that wall, crouched and foreshortened and about to traverse the same bridge he had just crossed. Clavain fell back into the lock and palmed the emergency repressurisation control. The outer door snicked silently shut; air began to flood in. Instantly he felt the pain in his head lessen, and gasped in the sheer relief of the moment.

The override permitted the inner door to open almost before the outer door had sealed. Clavain hurled himself into the corvette’s interior, kicked off from the far wall, knocked his skull against a bulkhead and then collided with the front of the flight deck. He did not bother getting into his seat or fastening restraints. He simply fired the corvette’s thrusters — full emergency burn — and heard a dozen klaxons scream at him that this was not an auspicious thing to do.

Advise immediate engine shutdown. Advise immediate engine shutdown.

‘Shut up!’ Clavain shouted.

For a moment the corvette pulled away from the comet’s surface. The ship made perhaps two and half meters before the grapple lines extended to their maximum tension and held taut. The jolt threw him against a wall; he felt something break like a dry twig somewhere between his heart and his waist. The comet had moved too, of course, but only imperceptibly; he might as well have been tethered to an immovable rock at the centre of the universe.

‘Clavain.’ The voice came over the corvette’s radio. It was extraordinarily calm. His memories had begun to reassemble, fitfully, and with some hesitation he felt able to apply a name to his tormentor.

‘Skade. Hello.’ He spoke through pain, certain that he had broken at least one rib and probably bruised one or two others.

‘Clavain… what exactly are you doing?’

‘I seem to be attempting to steal this ship.’

He pulled himself into the seat now, wincing at multiple flares of pain. He groaned as he stretched restraint webbing across his chest. The thrusters were threatening to go into autonomous shutdown mode. He threw desperate commands at the corvette. Grapple retraction wouldn’t help his situation: it would just reel in Skade and Remontoire — he remembered both of them now — and then the two of them would be on the outside of the hull, where they would have to stay. They would probably be safe if he abandoned them in space, drifting, but this was a Closed Council mission. Almost no one else would know they were out here.

‘Full thrust…’ Clavain said aloud, to himself. He knew a burst of full thrust would get him away from the comet. Either it would sever the grapple lines or it would rip chunks of the comet’s surface away with him.

‘Clavain,’ said a man’s voice, ‘I think you need to think about this.’

Neither of them could reach him neurally. The corvette would not allow those kinds of signals through its hull.

‘Thanks, Rem… but as a matter of fact, I’ve already given it a fair bit of thought. She wants those weapons too badly. It’s the wolves, isn’t it, Skade? You need the weapons for when the wolves come.’

‘I as good as spelled it out to you, Clavain. Yes, we need the weapons to defend ourselves against the wolves. Is that so reprehensible? Is ensuring our own survival such a damning thing to do? What would you prefer — that we capitulate, offer ourselves up to them?’

‘How do you know they’re coming?’

‘We don’t. We merely consider their arrival to be likely, based on the information available to us…’

‘There’s more to it than that.’ His fingers skated over the main thrust controls. In a few seconds he would have to use full burn or stay behind.

‘We just know, Clavain. That’s all you have to know. Now let us back aboard the corvette. We’ll forget all about this, I assure you.’

‘Not good enough, I’m afraid.’

He fired the main engine, working the other thrusters to steer the blinding violet arc of the drive flame away from the comet’s surface. He did not want to hurt either of them. Clavain disliked Skade but wished her no harm. Remontoire was his friend, and he had only left him on the comet because he did not see the point of implicating him in what he was about to do.

The corvette stretched against its guys. He could feel the vibration of the engine working its way through the hull, into his bones. Overload indicators were flicking into the red.

‘Clavain, listen to me,’ Skade said. ‘You can’t take that ship. What are you going to do with it — defect to the Demarchists?’

‘It’s a thought.’

‘It’s also suicide. You’ll never make it to Yellowstone. If we don’t kill you, the Demarchists will.’

Something snapped. The shuttle yawed and then slammed against the restraints of the remaining grapple lines. Through the cockpit window Clavain saw the severed line whiplash into the surface of the comet, slicing through the caul of stabilising membrane. It gashed a meter-wide wound in the surface. Black soot erupted out like octopus ink.

‘Skade’s right. You won’t make it, Clavain — there’s nowhere for you to go. Please, as a friend — I beg you not to do this.’

‘Don’t you understand, Rem? She wants those weapons so she can take them with her. Those twelve ships? They’re not all for the taskforce. They’re part of something bigger. It’s an evacuation fleet.’

He felt the jolt as another line snapped, coiling into the comet with savage energy.

‘So what if they are, Clavain?’ Skade said.

‘What about the rest of humanity? What are those poor fools meant to do when the wolves arrive? Take their own chances?’

‘It’s a Darwinian universe.’

‘Wrong answer, Skade.’

The final line snapped at that moment. Suddenly he was accelerating away from the comet at full burn, squashed into his seat. He yelped at the pain from his damaged ribs. He watched the indicators normalise, the needles trembling back into green or white. The motor pitch died away to subsonic; the hull oscillations subsided. Skade’s comet grew smaller.

By eye, Clavain orientated himself toward the sharp point of light that was Epsilon Eridani.