Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 16

Thorn took his first tentative steps aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. He looked around with frantic, wide-eyed intent, desperate not to miss a single detail or nuance of detail that might betray deception or even the tiniest hint that things were not completely as claimed. He was afraid to blink. What if some vital slip that would have exposed the whole thing as a facade happened when he had his eyes closed? What if the two of them were waiting for him to blink, like conjurors playing with an audience’s attention?

Yet there appeared to be no deception here. Even if the trip in the shuttle had not convinced him of that fact — and it was difficult to imagine how that could have been faked — the supreme evidence was here.

He had travelled through space. He was no longer on Resurgam, but inside a colossal spacecraft: the Triumvir’s long-lost lighthugger. Even the gravity felt different.

‘You couldn’t have made this…’ he said, as he walked alongside his two companions. ‘Not in a hundred years. Not unless you were Ultras to begin with. And then why would you need to fake it anyway?’

‘So you’re prepared to believe our story?’ the Inquisitor asked him.

‘You’ve got your hands on a starship. I can hardly deny that. But even a ship this size, and from what I’ve seen it’s at least as big as Lorean ever was, even a ship this size can’t accommodate two hundred thousand sleepers. Can it?’

‘It won’t need to,’ the other woman told him. ‘Remember, this is an evacuation operation, not a pleasure cruise. Our objective is only to get people away from Resurgam. We’ll put the most vulnerable into reefersleep. But the majority will have to stay awake and suffer rather cramped conditions. They won’t enjoy it, but it’s a hell of an improvement on being dead.’

There was no arguing with that. None of his own plans had ever guaranteed a luxurious ride off the planet.

‘How long do you think people will have to spend here, before they can return to Resurgam?’ he asked.

The women exchanged glances. ‘Returning to Resurgam may never be an option,’ the older one said.

Thorn shrugged. ‘It was a sterile rock when we arrived. We can start from scratch if we have to.’

‘Not if the planet doesn’t exist. It could be that bad, Thorn.’ She knuckled the wall of the ship as they walked on. ‘But we can keep people here as long as we need to — years, decades even.’

‘We could reach another star system, then,’ he countered. ‘This is a starship, after all.’

Neither of them said anything.

‘I still want to see what it is we’re so frightened of,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is that’s posing such a threat.’

The older one, Irina, said, ‘Do you sleep well at night, Thorn?’

‘As well as anyone.’

‘I’m afraid all that’s about to end. Follow me, will you?’

Antoinette was aboard Storm Bird, running systems checks, when the message came in. The freighter was still berthed in the rim repair bay in Carousel New Copenhagen, but most of the serious damage had been rectified or patched over. Xavier’s monkeys had worked around the clock, since neither he nor Antoinette could afford to occupy this bay for an hour longer than necessary. The monkeys had agreed to work even though most of the other hyperprimate workers in the carousel were on strike or sick with an extremely rare prosimian virus that had mysteriously crossed a dozen species barriers overnight. Xavier detected, so he claimed, a degree of sympathy from the workers. None of them were great fans of the Ferrisville Convention, and the fact that Antoinette and Xavier were being persecuted by the police only made the primates more willing to break the usual labour rules. Nothing came without costs, of course, and Xavier would end up owing the workers rather more than he might have wished, but there were certain trade-offs that one simply had to accept. That was a rule Antoinette’s father had quoted often enough, and she had grown up with the same resolutely pragmatic approach.

Antoinette was tapping through tokamak field configuration settings, a compad tucked under one arm and a pen between her teeth, when the console chimed. Her first thought was that something she had done had triggered an error somewhere else in the ship’s control web.

She spoke with the pen still in place, knowing that Beast would be able to make sense of her gruntings. ‘Beast… fix that, will you?’

‘Little Miss, the signal in question is a notification of the arrival of a message.’

‘Xavier?’

‘Not Mr Liu, Little Miss. The message, in so far as one can deduce from the header information, originated well outside the carousel.’

‘Then it’s the cops. Funny. They don’t usually call; they just show up, like a turd on the doorstep.’

Tt doesn’t appear to be the authorities either, Little Miss. Might one suggest that the most prudent course of action would be to view the message in question?‘

‘Clever clogs.’ She pulled the pen from her mouth and tucked it behind her ear. ‘Pipe it through to my ’pad, Beast.‘

‘Very well, Little Miss.’

The screen of tokamak data shuffled aside. In its place a face resolved, speckled with coarse-resolution pixels. Whoever was sending was trying to get away with taking up as little bandwidth as possible. Nonetheless, she recognised the face very well.

‘Antoinette… it’s me again. I hope you made it back safely.’ Nevil Clavain paused, scratching at his beard. ‘I’m bouncing this transmission through about fifteen relays. Some of them are pre-plague, some of them may even go back to the Amerikano era, so the quality may not be of the best. I’m afraid there’s no possibility of you being able to reply, and no possibility of my being able to send another message; this is emphatically my one and only shot. I need your help, Antoinette. I need your help very badly.’ He smiled awkwardly. I know what you’re thinking: that I said I’d kill you if our paths ever crossed again. I meant it, too, but I said it because I hoped you’d take me seriously and stay out of trouble. I really hope you believe that, Antoinette, or else there isn’t much chance that you’re likely to agree to my next request.‘

‘Your next request?’ she mouthed, staring in disbelief at the compad.

‘What I need, Antoinette, is for you to come and rescue me. I’m in rather a lot of trouble, you see.’

She listened to what he had to say, but there was not a great deal more to the message. Clavain’s request was simple enough, and it was, she admitted, within her capabilities to do what he wanted. Even the co-ordinates he had given her were precise enough that she would not have to do any real searching. There was a tight time window, very tight, actually, and there was a not inconsiderable degree of physical risk, quite aside from any associated with Clavain himself. But it was all very feasible. She could tell that Clavain had worked through the details himself before calling her, anticipating almost all the likely problems and objections she might have. In that respect, she could not help but admire his dedication.

But it still didn’t make a shred of difference. The message was from Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis; the same Clavain who had lately started inhabiting her dreams, personifying what had previously been the merely faceless terror of the spider induction wards. It was Clavain who presided over the glistening machines as they lowered themselves into her brainpan.

It didn’t matter that he had once saved her life.

‘You have got to be fucking kidding,’ Antoinette said.

Clavain floated alone in space. Through his spacesuit visor he watched the corvette curve away on automatic pilot, dwindling slowly but surely until its sleek flintlike shape was difficult to distinguish from a faint star. Then the corvette’s main drive flicked on, a hard and bright violet-blue spike, carefully angled away from his best guess for the position of Nightshade. The acceleration would certainly have crushed him had he remained aboard. He watched until even that spike of light had become the slightest pale scratch against the stars, until the point where he blinked and lost it altogether.

He was alone, about as truly alone as it was possible to be.

As rapid as the corvette’s acceleration now was, it was nothing that the ship could not sustain. In a few hours the burn would take it to a point in space and give it a velocity consistent with its last recorded position as determined by Nightshade. The drive would ramp down then, back to a thrust level consistent with carrying a human passenger. Skade would redetect the corvette’s flame, but she would also see that the flame was flickering with some irregularity, indicating an unstable fusion burn. That, at least, was what Clavain hoped she would think.

For the last fifteen hours of his flight he had pushed the corvette’s motors as hard as he could, deliberately circumventing the safety overrides. With all the excess mass aboard the corvette — weapons, fuel, life-support mechanisms — the corvette’s effective acceleration ceiling had not been far above his own physiological tolerance limit. It had been prudent to accelerate as hard as he could stand, of course, but Clavain had also wanted Skade to think that he was pushing things just slightly too hard.

He had known that she must be watching his flame, studying it for any hint of a mistake on his part. So, by tapping into the engine-management system he had introduced evidence of an imminent failure mode. He had forced the engine to operate erratically, cycling its temperature, allowing unfused impurities to clot the exhaust, showing every sign that it was about to blow.

After fifteen hours he had simulated an abrupt stuttering drive failure. Skade would recognise the failure mode; it was almost textbook stuff. She would doubtless think that Clavain had been unlucky not to die in an instant painless blast. Now she would be able to catch up with him, and his death would be rather more protracted. If Skade recognised the type of failure mode he had hoped to simulate, she would conclude that it would require about ten hours for the ship’s own auto-repair mechanisms to fix the fault. Even then, for that particular failure mode only a partial repair would be possible. Clavain might be able to get the antimatter-catalysed fusion torch re-lit, but the drive would never function at full capacity. At the very best, Clavain might manage to squeeze six gees out of the corvette, and he would not be able to sustain that acceleration for long.

As soon as she saw the corvette’s flame, as soon as she recognised the telltale flicker, Skade would know that success was hers. She would never know that he had used the ten hours of grace not to repair a defective engine, but to deposit himself somewhere else entirely. At least, he hoped she would never guess that.

His last act had been to send a message to Antoinette Bax, making sure that the signal could not possibly be interdicted by Skade or any other hostile forces. He had told Antoinette where he would be floating, and he had told her exactly how long he could reasonably survive in a single low-endurance spacesuit with no sophisticated recycling systems. By his own estimation she could reach him in time and then ferry him out of the war zone before Skade had a chance to realise what was happening. All Antoinette would need to do was approach the rough volume of space he had defined and then sweep it with her radar; sooner or later she would pick out his figure.

But she only had one window of opportunity. He only had one chance to convince her, and she had to act immediately. If she decided to call his bluff or to wait a couple of days, agonising about what to do, he was dead.

He was in her hands. Totally.

Clavain did what he could to extend the suit’s durability. He brought up certain rarely used neural routines that allowed him to slow his own metabolism, so that he would use as little air and power as possible. There was no real point in staying conscious; it gained him nothing except the opportunity to endlessly reflect on whether he was going to live or die.

Drifting alone in space, Clavain prepared to sink into unconsciousness. He thought of Felka, who he did not believe he would ever see again, and wondered about her message. He did not know if he wanted it to be true or not. He hoped also that she would find a way to come to terms with his defection, that she would not hate him for it and that she would not resent the fact that he had continued with it despite her plea.

He had originally defected to the side of the Conjoiners because he had believed it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. There had been almost no time to plan his defection or evaluate the correctness of it. The moment had arisen when he had to make his choice, there and then. He had known that there was no going back.

It was the same now. The moment had presented itself… and he had seized it, mindful of the consequences, knowing that he might turn out to be wrong, that his fears might turn out to be groundless or the paranoid delusions of an old, old man, but knowing that it must be done.

That, he suspected, was the way it would always be for him.

He remembered a time when he lay under fallen rubble, in a pocket of air beneath a collapsed structure on Mars. It had been about four standard months after the Tharsis Bulge campaign. He remembered the broken-spined cat that he had kept alive, how he had shared his rations with the injured animal even when the thirst had felt like acid etching away his mouth and throat; even when the hunger had been far, far worse than the pain of his own injuries. He remembered that the cat had died shortly after the two of them had been pulled from the rubble, and wondered whether the kindest thing would have been for it to have died earlier, rather than have its own painful existence prolonged for a few more days. And yet he knew that if the same thing were to happen again he would keep the cat alive, no matter how pointless the gesture. It was not just that keeping the cat alive had given him something to focus on other than his own discomfort and fear. There had been something more. What, he couldn’t easily say. But he had a feeling that it was the same impulse that was driving him towards Yellowstone, the same impulse that had made him seek Antoinette Bax’s help.

Alone and fearful, far from any world, Nevil Clavain fell into unconsciousness.