Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 19

Clavain did not know whether to laugh or cry when he saw the weapons and realised how antiquated and ineffective they were compared with the oldest, lowest-lethality weapons of a Conjoiner corvette or Demarchist raider. They had obviously been cobbled together from several centuries’ worth of black market jumble sales, more on the basis of how sleek and nasty they looked than on how much damage they could really do. Apart from the handful of firearms stored inside the ship to be used to repel boarders, the bulk of the weapons were stowed in concealed hull hatches or packed into dorsal or ventral pods that Clavain had earlier assumed held communications equipment or sensor arrays. Not all of the weapons were even functional. About a third of them had either never worked or had broken down, or had run out of whatever ammunition or fuel-source they needed to work.

To access the weapons, Antoinette had pulled back a hidden panel in the floor. A thick metal column had risen slowly from the well, unfolding control arms and display devices as it ascended. A schematic of Storm Bird rotated in one sphere, with the active weapons pulsing red. They were linked back into the main avionics web by snaking red data pathways. Other spheres and readouts on the main panel showed the immediate volume of space around the ship at various magnifications. At the lowest magnification, the banshee ships were visible as indistinct radar-echo smudges creeping closer to the freighter.

‘Fifteen thousand klicks,’ Antoinette said.

‘I still say we should pull the evasive pattern,’ Xavier murmured.

‘Burn that fuel when you need it,’ Clavain said. ‘Not until then. Antoinette, are all those weapons deployed?’

‘Everything we’ve got.’

‘Good. Do you mind if I ask why you were unwilling to deploy them earlier?’

She tapped controls, finessing the weapons’ deployment, reallocating data flows through less congested parts of the web.

‘Two reasons, Clavain. One: it’s a hanging offence to even think of installing weps on a civilian ship. Two: all those juicy guns might just be the final incentive the banshees need to come in and rob us.’

‘It won’t come to that. Not if you trust me.’

‘Trust you, Clavain?’

‘Let me sit there and operate those weapons.’

She looked at Xavier. ‘Not a hope in hell.’

Clavain leaned back and folded his arms. ‘You know where I am if you need me, in that case.’

‘Pull the evasive…’ Xavier began.

‘No.’ Antoinette tapped something.

Clavain felt the entire ship rumble. ‘What was that?’

‘A warning shot,’ she said.

‘Good. I’d have done the same.’

The warning shot had probably been a slug, a cylinder of foam-phase hydrogen accelerated up to a few dozen klicks per second in a stubby railgun barrel. Clavain knew all about foam-phase hydrogen; it was one of the main weapons left in the Demarchist arsenal now that they could no longer manipulate antimatter in militarily useful quantities.

The Demarchists mined hydrogen from the oceanic hearts of gas giants. Under conditions of shocking pressure, hydrogen underwent a transition to a metallic state a little like mercury but thousands of times denser. Usually that metallic state was unstable: release the confining pressure and it would revert to a low-density gas. The foam phase, by contrast, was only quasi-unstable; with the right manipulation it could remain in the metallic state even when the external pressure dropped by many orders of magnitude. Packed into shells and slugs, foam-phase munitions were engineered to retain their stability until the moment of impact. Then they would explode catastrophically. Foam-phase weapons were either used as destructive devices in their own right, or as initiators for fission/fusion bombs.

Antoinette was right, Clavain thought. The foam-phase slug cannon might have been an antique in military terms, but just thinking of owning such a weapon was enough to send one to an irreversible neural death.

He saw the firefly smudge of the slug crawl across the distance to the closing pirate ships, missing them by mere tens of kilometres.

‘They’re not stopping,’ Xavier said, several minutes later.

‘How many more slugs do you have?’ Clavain asked.

‘One,’ Antoinette said.

‘Save it. You’re too far out now. They can get a radar lock on the slug and dodge it before it reaches them.’

He unstrapped himself from the folding flap, clambering down the length of the bridge until he was immediately behind Antoinette and Xavier. Now that he had the chance he took a better look at the weapons plinth, mentally assaying its functionality.

‘What else have you got?’

‘Two gigawatt excimers,’ Antoinette said. ‘One Breitenbach three-millimetre boser with a proton-electron precursor. Couple of solid-state close-action slug guns, megahertz firing rate. A cascade-pulse single-use graser, not sure of the yield.’

‘Probably mid-gigawatt. What’s that?’ Clavain pointed at the only active weapon she had not described.

‘That? That’s a bad joke. Gatling gun.’

Clavain nodded. ‘No, that’s good. Don’t knock Gatling guns; they have their uses.’

Xavier spoke. ‘Picking up reverse thrust plumes. Doppler says they’re slowing.’

‘Did we scare them off?’ Clavain asked.

‘Sorry, no; this looks exactly like a standard banshee approach,’ Xavier replied.

‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said.

‘Don’t do anything until they’re closer,’ Clavain said. ‘Much closer. They won’t attack you; they won’t want to risk damaging your cargo.’

‘I’ll remind you of that when we’re having our throats slit,’ Antoinette said.

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what they do?’

‘Actually, that’s at the nice humane end of the spectrum.’

The next twelve minutes were amongst the most tense Clavain could remember. He understood how his hosts felt, sympathising with their instinct to shoot at the enemy. But it would have been suicidal. The beam weapons were too low-powered to guarantee a kill, and the projectile weapons were too slow to have any effectiveness except at very short range. At the very best they might succeed in taking out one banshee, but not two at once. At the same time Clavain wondered why the banshees had not taken the earlier warning. Antoinette had given them plenty of hints that stealing her imagined cargo would not be easy. Clavain would have thought that they would have decided to cut their losses and move on to a less nimble, less well-armed target. But according to Antoinette it was already unusual for banshees to foray this far into the zone.

When they were just under a hundred klicks out, the two ships slowed and split up, one of them arrowing around to the other hemisphere before resuming its approach. Clavain studied the magnified visual grab of the closest ship. The image was fuzzy — Storm Bird’s optics were not military quality — but it was enough to disperse any doubts they might have had about the ship’s identity. The view showed a wasp-waisted civilian vessel a little smaller than Storm Bird. But it was night-black and studded with grapples and welded-on weapons. Jagged neon markings on the hull suggested skulls and sharks’ teeth.

‘Where do they come from?’ Clavain asked.

‘No one knows,’ Xavier said. ‘Somewhere in the Rust Belt/Yellowstone environment, but beyond that… no one has a fucking clue.’

‘And the authorities just tolerate them?’

‘The authorities can’t do dick. Not the Demarchists, not the Ferrisville Convention. That’s why everyone’s so shit-scared of the banshees.’ Xavier winked at Clavain. ‘I tell you, even if you guys do take over it isn’t going to be a picnic, not while the banshees are still around.’

‘Luckily it isn’t likely to be my problem,’ Clavain said.

The two ships crept closer, pinning Storm Bird from either side. The optical views sharpened, allowing Clavain to pick out points of weakness and strength, and to make a guess at the capability of the enemy ships’ weapons. Scenarios tumbled through his head by the dozen. At sixty kilometres he nodded and spoke quietly and calmly. ‘All right, listen carefully. At this range you have a chance of doing some damage, but only if you listen to me and do precisely what I say.’

‘I think we should ignore him,’ Xavier said.

Clavain licked his lips. ‘You can, but you’ll die. Antoinette: I want you to set up the following firing pattern in pre-programmed mode, without actually moving any of your weapons until I say. You can bet the banshees have us in their sights, and they’ll be watching to see what happens.’

She looked at him and nodded, her fingers poised over the controls of the weapons plinth. ‘Say it, Clavain.’

‘Hit the starboard ship with a two-second excimer pulse as close to amidships as you can get it. There’s a sensor cluster there; we want to take it out. At the same time use the rapid-fire slug gun to put a spread over the port ship, say a megahertz salvo with a hundred millisecond sustain. That won’t kill them, but it’ll sure as hell damage that rack launcher and probably buckle those grapple arms. In any case it’ll provoke a response, and that’s good.’

‘It is?’ She was already programming his firing pattern into the plinth.

‘Yes. See how she’s keeping her hull at that angle? At the moment she’s in a defensive posture. That’s because her main weapons are delicate; now that they’re deployed she won’t want to bring them into our field of fire until she can guarantee a kill. And she’ll think we’ve hit with our heaviest toys first.’

Antoinette brightened. ‘Which we won’t have.’

‘No. That’s when we hit them — both ships — with the Breitenbach.’

‘And the single-use graser?’

‘Hold it back. It’s our medium-range trump card, and we don’t want to play it until we’re in a lot more danger than this.’

‘And the Gatling gun?’

‘We’ll keep that back for dessert.’

‘I hope you’re not bullshitting us, Clavain,’ Antoinette warned.

He grinned. I sincerely hope I’m not bullshitting you, too.‘

The two ships continued their approach. Now they were visible through the cabin windows: black dots that occasionally pulsed out white or violet spikes of steering thrust. The dots enlarged, becoming slivers. The slivers took on hard mechanical form, until Clavain could quite clearly see the neon patterning of the pirate ships. The markings had only been turned on during their final approach; at that point, needing to trim speed with thruster bursts, there was no further prospect of remaining camouflaged against the darkness of space. The markings were there to inspire fear and panic, like the Jolly Roger of the old sailing ships.

‘Clavain…’

‘In about forty-five seconds, Antoinette. But not a moment before. Got that?’

‘I’m worried, Clavain.’

‘It’s natural. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die.’

That was when he felt the ship shudder again. It was almost the same movement he had felt earlier, when the foam-phase slug had been fired as a warning shot. But this was more sustained.

‘What just happened?’ Clavain asked.

Antoinette frowned. ‘I didn’t…’

‘Xavier?’ Clavain snapped.

‘Not me, guy. Must have been the…’

‘Beast!’ Antoinette shouted.

‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but one…’

Clavain realised that the ship had taken it upon itself to fire the megahertz slug gun. It had been directed towards the port banshee, as he had specified, but much too soon.

Storm Bird shook again. The flight deck console lit up with blocks of flashing red. A klaxon began to shriek. Clavain felt a tug of air, and then immediately heard the rapid sequential slamming of bulkheads.

‘We’ve just taken a hit,’ Antoinette said. ‘Amidships.’

‘You’re in deep trouble,’ Clavain said.

Thanks. I gathered that.‘

‘Hit the starboard banshee with the ex—’

Storm Bird shuddered again, and this time half the lights on the console blacked out. Clavain guessed that one of the pirates had just hit them with a penetrating slug equipped with an EMP warhead. So much for Antoinette’s boast that all the critical systems were routed through opto-electronic pathways…

‘Clavain…’ she looked back at him with wild, frightened eyes. ‘I can’t get the excimers to work…’

‘Try a different routing.’

Her fingers worked the plinth controls, and Clavain watched the spider’s web of data connections shift as she assigned data to scurry along different paths. The ship shook again. Clavain leaned over and looked through the port window. The banshee was looming large now, arresting its approach with a continuous blast of reverse thrust. He could see grapples and claws unfolding, articulating away from the hull like the barbed and hooked limbs of some complicated black insect just emerging from a cocoon.

‘Hurry up,’ Xavier said, looking at what Antoinette was doing.

‘Antoinette.’ Clavain spoke as calmly as he could. ‘Let me take over. Please.’

‘What fucking good…’

‘Just let me take over.’

She breathed in and out for five or six seconds, just looking at him, and then unbuckled herself and eased out of the seat. Clavain nodded and squeezed past her, settling by the weapons plinth.

He had already familiarised himself with it. By the time his hands touched the controls, his implants had begun to accelerate his subjective consciousness rate. Things around him moved glacially, whether it was the expressions on the faces of his hosts or the pulsing of the warning messages on the control panel. Even his hands moved as if through treacle, and the delay between sending a nerve signal and watching his hands respond was quite noticeable. He was used to that, though. He had done this before, too many times, and he naturally made allowances for the sluggish response of his own body.

As his consciousness rate reached fifteen times faster than normal, so that every actual second felt like fifteen seconds to him, Clavain willed himself on to a plateau of detached calm. A second was a long time in war. Fifteen seconds was even longer. There was a lot you could do, a lot you could think, in fifteen seconds.

Now then. He began to set the optimum control pathways for the remaining weapons. The spider’s web shifted and reconfigured. Clavain explored a number of possible solutions, forcing himself not to accept second best. It might take two actual seconds to find the perfect arrangement of data flows, but that would be time well spent. He glanced at the short-range radar sphere, amused to see that its update cycle now looked like the slow beating of some immense heart.

There. He had regained control of the excimer cannons. All he needed now was a revised strategy to deal with the changed situation. That would take a few seconds — a few actual seconds — for his mind to process.

It would be tight.

But he thought he would make it.

Clavain’s efforts destroyed one banshee and left the other crippled. The damaged ship scuttled back into darkness, its neon patterning flickering spas-tically like a short-circuiting firefly. After fifty seconds they saw the glint of its fusion torch and watched it fall ahead of them, back towards the Rust Belt.

‘How to win friends and influence people,’ Antoinette said as she watched the ruined one tumble away. Half its hull was gone, revealing a skeletal confusion of innards belching grey spirals of vapour. ‘Good work, Clavain.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s two reasons for you to trust me. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have to faint.’

He fainted.

The rest of the journey passed without incident. Clavain was unconscious for eight or nine hours after the battle against the banshees, while his mind recovered from the ordeal of such a protracted spell of rapid consciousness. Unlike Skade, his brain was not built to support that kind of thing for more than one or two actual seconds, and he had suffered the equivalent of a massive and sudden heatstroke.

But there had been no lasting ill effects and he had earned their trust. It was a price he was more than willing to pay. For the remainder of the trip he was free to move around the ship as he pleased, while the other two gradually divested themselves of their outer spacesuit layers. The banshees never came back, and Storm Bird never ran into any military activity. Clavain still felt the need to make himself useful, however, and with Antoinette’s consent he helped Xavier with a number of minor in-flight repairs or upgrades. The two of them spent hours tucked away in tight cable-infested crawlspaces, or rummaging through layers of archaic source code.

I can’t really blame you for not trusting me before,‘ Clavain said, when he and Xavier were alone.

‘I care about her.’

‘It’s obvious. And she took a hell of a risk coming out here to rescue me. If I’d been in your shoes I’d have tried to talk her out of it as well.’

‘Don’t take it personally.’

Clavain dragged a stylus across the compad he had balanced on his knees, rerouting a number of logic pathways between the control web and the dorsal communications cluster. ‘I won’t.’

‘What about you, Clavain? What’s going to happen when we get to the Rust Belt?’

Clavain shrugged. ‘Up to you. You can drop me wherever it suits you. Carousel New Copenhagen’s as good as anywhere else.’

‘And then what?’

‘I’ll hand myself over to the authorities.’

‘The Demarchists?’

He nodded. ‘Although it’d be much too dangerous for me to approach them directly, out here in open space. I’ll need to go through a neutral party, such as the Convention.’

Xavier nodded. ‘I hope you get what you’re hoping for. You took a risk as well’

‘Not the first, I assure you.’ Clavain paused and lowered his voice. It was unnecessary — they were many dozens of metres away from Antoinette — but he felt the need all the same. ‘Xavier… while we’re alone… there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

Xavier peered at him through scuffed grey data-visualisation goggles. ‘Go ahead.’

‘I gather you knew her father, and that you handled the repair of this ship when he was running it.’

‘True enough.’

‘Then I suppose you know all about it. Perhaps more than Antoinette?’

‘She’s a damned good pilot, Clavain.’

Clavain smiled. ‘Which is a polite way of saying she’s not very interested in the technical aspects of this ship?’

‘Nor was her father,’ Xavier said, with a touch of defensiveness. ‘Running a commercial operation like this is enough trouble without worrying about every subroutine.’

‘I understand. I’m no expert myself. But I couldn’t help noticing back there, when the subpersona intervened…’ He left the remark hanging.

‘You thought that was odd.’

‘It nearly got us killed,’ Clavain said. ‘It fired too soon, against my direct orders.’

‘They weren’t orders, Clavain, they were recommendations.’

‘My mistake. But the point is, it shouldn’t have happened. Even if the subpersona had some control over the weapons — and in a civilian ship I’d regard that as unusual, to say the least — it still shouldn’t have acted without a direct command. And it definitely shouldn’t have panicked.’

Xavier’s laugh was hard and nervous. ‘Panicked?’

‘That’s what it felt like to me.’ Clavain couldn’t see Xavier’s eyes behind the data goggles.

‘Machines don’t panic, Clavain.’

‘I know. Especially not gamma-level subpersonae, which is what Beast would have to be.’

Xavier nodded. ‘Then it can’t have been panic, can it?’

‘I suppose not.’ Clavain frowned and returned to his compad, dragging the stylus through the bright ganglia of logic pathways like someone stirring a plate of spaghetti.

They docked in Carousel New Copenhagen. Clavain was prepared to go on his way there and then, but Antoinette and Xavier were having none of it. They insisted that he join them for a farewell meal elsewhere in the carousel. After giving the matter a few moments’ thought, Clavain happily assented; it would only take a couple of hours and it would give him a valuable chance to acclimatise before he commenced what he imagined would be a perilous solo journey. And he still felt he owed them thanks, especially after Xavier allowed him to take whatever he wanted from his wardrobe.

Clavain was taller and thinner than Xavier, so it took some creativity to both dress himself and not feel that he was taking anything particularly valuable. He retained the skintight spacesuit inner layer, slipping on a bulging high-collared vest that looked faintly like the kind of inflatable jacket pilots wore when they ditched in water. He found a pair of loose black trousers that came down to his shins, which looked terrible, even with the skintight, until he found a pair of rugged black boots that reached nearly to his knees. When he inspected himself in a mirror he concluded that he looked odd rather than bizarre, which he supposed was a step in the right direction. Finally he trimmed his beard and moustache and neatened his hair by combing it back from his brow in snowy waves.

Antoinette and Xavier were waiting for him, already freshened up. They took an intra-rim train from one part of Carousel New Copenhagen to another. Antoinette told him that the line had been put in after the spokes were destroyed; until then the quickest way to get about had been to go up to the hub and down again, and by the time the intra-rim line was installed it could not take the most direct route. It zigzagged its way along the rim, swerving and veering and occasionally taking detours out on to the skin of the habitat, just to avoid a piece of precious interior real estate. As the train’s direction of travel shifted relative to the carousel’s spin vector, Clavain felt his stomach knot and unknot in a variety of queasy ways. It reminded him of dropship insertions into the atmosphere of Mars.

He snapped back to the present as the train arrived in a vast interior plaza. They disembarked on to a glass-floored and glass-walled platform that was suspended many tens of metres above an astonishing sight.

Beneath their feet, thrusting through the inner wall of the carousel’s rim, was the front of an enormous spacecraft. It was a blunt-nosed, rounded design, scratched, gouged and scorched, with all its appendages — pods, spines and antennae — ripped clean away. The spacecraft’s cabin windows, which ran around the pole of the nose in a semicircle, were shattered black apertures, like eye-sockets. Around the collar of the ship where it met the fabric of the carousel was a congealed grey foam of solidified emergency sealant that had the porous texture of pumice.

‘What happened here?’ Clavain asked.

‘A fucking idiot called Lyle Merrick,’ Antoinette said.

Xavier took over the story. ‘That’s Merrick’s ship, or what’s left of it. Thing was a chemical-rocket scow, about the most primitive ship still making a living in the Rust Belt. Merrick stayed in business because he had the right clients — people the authorities would never, ever suspect of trusting their cargo to such a shit-heap. But Merrick got into trouble one day.’

‘It was about sixteen, seventeen years ago,’ Antoinette said. ‘The authorities were chasing him, trying to force him to let them board and inspect his cargo. Merrick was trying to get under cover — there was a repair well on the far side of the carousel that could just accommodate his ship. But he didn’t make it. Fluffed his approach, or lost control, or just bottled out. Stupid twat rammed straight into the rim.’

‘You’re only looking at a small part of his ship,’ Xavier said. ‘The rest of it, trailing behind, was mostly fuel tank. Even with foam-phase catalysis you need a lot of fuel for a chemical rocket. When the front hit, she went clean through the carousel’s rim, deforming it with the force of the impact. Lyle made it, but the fuel tanks blew up. There’s one hell of a crater out there, even now.’

‘Casualties?’ Clavain asked.

‘A few,’ Xavier said.

‘More than a few,’ said Antoinette. ‘A few hundred.’

They told him that suited hyperprimates had sealed the rim, with only a few deaths amongst the emergency team. The animals had done such a good job of sealing the gap between the shuttle and the rim wall that it had been decided that the safest thing to do was to leave the remains of the ship exactly where they were. Expensive designers had been called in to give the rest of the plaza a sympathetic face-lift.

‘They call it “echoing the ship’s brutalist intrusion”,’ Antoinette said.

‘Yeah,’ said Xavier. ‘Or else, “commenting on the accident in a series of ironic architectural gestures, while retaining the urgent spatial primacy of the transformative act itself”.’

‘Bunch of overpaid wankers is what I call them,’ Antoinette said.

‘It was your idea to come here in the first place,’ Xavier responded.

There was a bar built into the nose cone of the ruined ship. Clavain tactfully suggested that they situate themselves as unobtrusively as possible. They found a table in one corner, next to a cavernous tank of bubbling water. Squid floated in the water, their conic bodies flickering with commercials.

A gibbon brought beers. They attacked them with enthusiasm, even Clavain, who had no particular taste for alcohol. But the drink was cold and refreshing and he would have gladly drunk anything in the current spirit of celebration. He just hoped he would not spoil things by revealing how gloomy he really felt.

‘So, Clavain…’ Antoinette said. ‘Are you going to tell us what this is all about, or are you just going to leave us wondering?’

‘You know who I am,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She glanced at Xavier. ‘We think so. You didn’t deny it before.’

‘You know that I defected once already, in that case.’

‘A way back,’ Antoinette said.

Clavain noticed that she was peeling the label from her beer bottle with great care. ‘Sometimes it seems like only yesterday. But it was four hundred years ago, give or take the odd decade. For most of that time I have been more than willing to serve my people. Defecting certainly isn’t something I take lightly.’

‘So why the big change of heart?’ she asked.

‘Something very bad is going to happen. I can’t say what exactly — I don’t know the full story — but I know enough to say that there’s a threat, an external threat, which is going to pose a great danger to all of us. Not just Conjoiners, not just Demarchists, but all of us. Ultras. Skyjacks. Even you.’

Xavier glared into his beer. ‘And on that cheering note…’

‘I didn’t mean to spoil things. That’s just the way it is. There’s a threat, and we’re all in trouble, and I wish it were otherwise.’

‘What kind of threat?’ Antoinette asked.

‘If what I learned was correct, then it’s alien. For some time now, we — the Conjoiners, rather — have known that there are hostile entities out there. I mean actively hostile, not just occasionally dangerous and unpredictable, like the Pattern Jugglers or Shrouders. And I mean extant, in the sense that they’ve posed a real threat to some of our expeditions. We call them the wolves. We think that they’re machines, and that somehow we’ve only now begun to trigger a response from them.’ Clavain paused, certain now that he had the attention of his young hosts. He was not overly concerned about revealing what were technically Conjoiner secrets; in a very short while he hoped to be saying exactly the same things to the Demarchist authorities. The quicker the news was spread, the better.

‘And these machines…?’ Antoinette said. ‘How long have you known about them?’

‘Long enough. For decades we were aware of the wolves, but it seemed they wouldn’t cause us any local difficulties provided that we took certain precautions. That’s why we stopped building starships. They were luring the wolves to us, like beacons. Only now we’ve found a way to make our ships quieter. There’s a faction in the Mother Nest, led — or influenced, at the very least — by Skade.’

‘You’ve mentioned that name already,’ Xavier said.

‘Skade’s chasing me down. She doesn’t want me to reach the authorities because she knows how dangerous the information I hold is.’

‘And this faction, what have they been doing?’

‘Building an exodus fleet,’ Clavain told Antoinette. ‘I’ve seen it. It’s easily large enough to carry all the Conjoiners in this system. They’re planning on evacuating, basically. They’ve determined that a full-scale wolf attack is imminent — that’s my guess, anyway — and they’ve decided that the best thing they can do is run away.’

‘What’s so abhorrent about that?’ Xavier asked. ‘We’d do the same thing if it meant saving our skins.’

‘Perhaps,’ Clavain said, feeling a weird admiration for the young man’s cynicism. ‘But there’s an added complication. Some time ago the Conjoiners manufactured a stockpile of doomsday weapons. And I mean doomsday weapons — nothing like them has ever been made again. They were lost, but now they’ve been found again. The Conjoiners are trying to get their hands on them, hoping that they’ll be an additional safeguard against the wolves.’

‘Where are they?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Near Resurgam, in the Delta Pavonis system. About twenty years’ flight time from here. Someone — whoever now owns the weapons — has re-armed them, causing them to emit diagnostic signals that we picked up. That’s worrying in itself. The Mother Nest was putting together a recovery squad which they, not unnaturally, wanted me to lead.’

‘Wait a sec,’ Xavier said. ‘You’d go all the way there just to pick up a bunch of lost weapons? Why not make new ones?’

‘The Conjoiners can’t,’ Clavain said. ‘It’s as simple as that. These weapons were made a long time ago according to principles which were deliberately forgotten after their construction.’

‘Sounds a bit fishy to me.’

I never said I had all the answers,‘ Clavain replied.

‘All right. Assuming these weapons exist… what next?’

Clavain leaned closer, cradling his beer. ‘My old side will still do their best to recover them, even without me. My purpose in defecting is to persuade the Demarchists or whoever will listen that they need to get there first.’

Xavier glanced at Antoinette. ‘So you need someone with a ship, and maybe some weapons. Why didn’t you just go straight to the Ultras?’

Clavain smiled wearily. ‘It’s Ultras we’ll be trying to take the weapons from, Xavier. I don’t want to make things more difficult than they already are.’

‘Good luck,’ Xavier said.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re going to need it.’

Clavain nodded and held his bottle aloft. ‘To me, in that case.’

Antoinette and Xavier raised their own bottles in toast. ‘To you, Clavain.’

Clavain said goodbye to them outside the bar, asking only that they give him directions as to which rim train to take. There had been no customs checks coming into Carousel New Copenhagen, but according to Antoinette he would have to pass through a security check if he wanted to travel elsewhere in the Rust Belt. That suited him very well; he could think of no better way to introduce himself to the authorities. He would be examined, trawled, his Conjoiner identity established. A few more tests would prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was indeed who he claimed to be, since his largely unmodified DNA would mark him as a man born on Earth in the twenty-second century. From that point he had no real idea what would happen. He hoped that the response would not be his immediate execution, but it was not something he could rule out. He just hoped he would be able to convey the gist of his message before it was too late.

Antoinette and Xavier showed him which rim train to take and made sure he had enough money to cover the fare. He waved goodbye as the train slid out of the station, the battered ruin of Lyle Merrick’s ship vanishing around the gentle curve of the carousel.

Clavain closed his eyes, willing his consciousness rate into a three-to-one ratio, snatching a few moments of calm before he arrived at his destination.