Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 20

Thorn had been ready to argue with Vuilleumier, but she had agreed to his wishes with surprising ease. It was not that she viewed the prospect of diving into the heart of the Inhibitor activity around Roc with anything less than deep concern, she told him, but that she wanted him to believe that she was totally sincere about the threat. If the only way to convince him of that was to let him see things in close-up, then she would have to go along with his wishes.

‘But make no mistake, Thorn. This is dangerous. We’re in uncharted territory now.’

‘I’d say we were never exactly safe, Inquisitor. We could have been attacked at any moment. We’ve certainly been within range of human weapons for the last few hours, haven’t we?’

The snake-headed ship plunged towards the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere. The trajectory would take them close to the impact point of one of the extruded tubes, only a thousand kilometres from the roiling chaos of tortured air around the eyelike collision zone. Their sensors could not glimpse anything beneath that confusion, only the vaguest suggestion that the tube continued to plunge deeper into Roc, unharmed by the impact.

‘We’re dealing with alien machinery, Thorn. Alien machine psychology, if you want. It’s true that they haven’t attacked us yet, or shown the slightest interest in any of our activities. They haven’t even bothered wiping life off the surface of Resurgam. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a threshold we might inadvertently cross if we’re not very careful.’

‘And you think this might constitute being not very careful?’

‘It worries me, but if this is what it takes…’

‘It’s about more than just convincing me, Inquisitor.’

‘Do you have to keep calling me that?’

‘I’m sorry?’

She made an adjustment to the controls. Thorn heard an orchestrated creaking as the ship’s hull reshaped itself for optimum transatmospheric insertion. The gas giant Roc was about all they could see outside now. ‘You don’t have to call me that all the time.’

‘Vuilleumier, then?’

‘My first name is Ana. I’m a lot more comfortable with that, Thorn. Perhaps I shouldn’t call you Thorn, either.’

‘Thorn will do. It’s a name I’ve grown into. It seems to fit me rather well. And I wouldn’t want to help Inquisition House in its investigations too much, would I?’

‘We know exactly who you are. You’ve seen the dossier.’

‘Yes. But I have the distinct impression you’d be less than eager to use it against me, wouldn’t you?’

‘You’re useful to us.’

That’s not quite what I meant.‘

They continued their descent into Roc without speaking for several minutes. Only the occasional chirp or spoken warning from the console interrupted the silence. The ship was not at all enthusiastic about what was being asked of it, and kept offering suggestions as to what it would rather be doing.

‘I think we’re like insects to them,’ Vuilleumier said eventually. ‘They’ve come here to wipe us out, like pest-control specialists. They’re not going to bother killing one or two of us — they know it won’t make enough of a difference to matter. Even if we sting them, I’m not sure we’d provoke the response we were expecting. They’ll just keep on doing their work, slowly and methodically, knowing that it will be more than sufficient in the long run.’

‘Then we’re safe now, is that it?’

‘It’s just a theory, Thorn — it isn’t something I particularly want to bet my life on. But it’s clear that we don’t understand all that they’re doing. There has to be a higher purpose to their activity. There has to be a reason for it; it can’t simply be the annihilation of life for its own sake. Even if it was, even if they were nothing more than mindless killing machines, there’d be more efficient ways of doing it.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Only that we shouldn’t count on our understanding of events to be correct, any more than an insect understands about pest-control programmes.’ With that, she clenched her jaw and palmed a control. ‘All right. Hold on. This is where it gets a little bumpy.’

A pair of armoured eyelids snicked down over the windows, blocking the view. Almost immediately Thorn felt the ship rumble, the way a car did when it left a smooth road and hit dirt. He had weight, too — it was the tiniest pressure squeezing him back into his seat, but it would keep growing and growing.

‘Who are you exactly, Ana?’

‘You know who I am. We’ve been over that.’

‘Not to my entire satisfaction, we haven’t. There’s something funny about that ship, isn’t there? I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but the whole time I was aboard it, I had the feeling you and the other woman, Irina, were holding your breath. It was as if you couldn’t wait to get me off it.’

‘You have urgent work to do on Resurgam. Irina didn’t agree with you coming aboard in the first place. She’d much rather you stayed on the planet, putting in the groundwork for the evacuation operation.’

‘A few days won’t make much difference. No, that definitely wasn’t it. There was something else. You two were hiding something, or hoping I wouldn’t notice something. I just can’t work out exactly what it was.’

‘You have to trust us, Thorn.’

‘You make it difficult, Ana.’

‘What else could we do? We showed you the ship, didn’t we? You saw that it was real. It has enough capacity to evacuate the planet. We even showed you the shuttle hangar.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it’s everything that you didn’t show me that makes me wonder.’

The rumbling had increased. The ship felt as if it was tobogganning down an ice-slope, hitting the occasional buried rock. The hull creaked and reshaped itself again and again, struggling to smooth out the transition. Thorn found himself excited and terrified at the same time. He had entered a planet’s atmosphere only once before in his life, when his parents had brought him as a child to Resurgam. He had been frozen and unconscious at the time, and had no more recollection of it than he did of his birth in Chasm City.

‘We didn’t show you everything because we don’t know that the whole of the ship is safe,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘We don’t know what sorts of traps Volyova’s crew left behind.’

‘You didn’t even let me see it from outside, Ana.’

‘It wasn’t convenient. Our approach—’

‘Had nothing to do with it. There’s something about that ship that you can’t let me see, isn’t there?’

‘Why are you asking me this now, Thorn?’

He smiled. ‘I thought the gravity of the situation would focus your attention.’

She said nothing.

Presently, the ride became smoother. The airframe creaked and reshaped one last time. Vuilleumier waited another few minutes and then raised the armoured eyelids. Thorn blinked against the sudden intrusion of daylight. They were inside the atmosphere of Roc.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked. ‘Your weight has doubled since we were aboard the ship.’

‘I’ll manage.’ He was fine provided he did not have to move around. ‘How deep did you take us?’

‘Not far. Pressure’s about half an atmosphere. Wait…’ At that moment she frowned at something on one of her displays, tapping controls below it so that the image shifted through pastel-coloured bands. Thorn saw a simplified silhouette of the ship they were in, surrounded by pulsing, concentric circles. He suspected it was some form of radar, and saw a small smudge of light wink in and out of existence on the limit of the display. She tapped another control and the concentric circles tightened, bringing the smudge closer. Now it was there, now it was gone, now it was there again.

‘What’s that?’ Thorn asked.

‘I don’t know. Passive radar says there’s something following us, about thirty thousand klicks astern. I didn’t see anything on our approach. It’s small and it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, but I don’t like it.’

‘Could it be a mistake, an error that the ship’s making?’

‘I’m not sure. I suppose the radar might be confused, picking up a false return from our wake vortex. I could switch to a focused active sweep, but I really don’t want to provoke anything I don’t have to. I suggest we get away from here while we still can. I’m a firm believer in listening to warnings.’

Thorn tapped the console. ‘And how do I know that you didn’t arrange for that bogey to appear?’

She laughed the sudden, nervous laugh of a person caught completely unawares. ‘I didn’t, believe me.’

Thorn nodded, sensing that she was telling the truth — or at least lying very well indeed. ‘Perhaps not. But I still want you to steer us towards the impact site, Ana. I’m not leaving until I see what’s happening here.’

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ She waited for him to answer, but Thorn said nothing, looking at her unflinchingly. ‘All right,’ Vuilleumier said finally. ‘We’ll get close enough that you can see things for yourself. But no closer than that. And if that other thing shows any signs of coming nearer, we’re out of here. Got that?’

‘Of course,’ he said mildly. ‘What do you think I am, suicidal?’

Vuilleumier plotted an approach. The impact point was moving at thirty kilometres per second relative to Roc’s atmosphere, its pace determined by the orbital motion of the moon that was extruding the tube. They came in from the rear, shadowing the impact point, increasing their speed. The hull contorted itself again, dealing with the increasing Mach numbers; all the while the smudge on the passive radar lingered behind them, shifting in and out of clarity, sometimes vanishing entirely, but never moving relative to their own position.

‘I feel lighter,’ Thorn said.

‘You will. We’re nearly orbiting again. If we went much faster I’d have to apply thrust to hold us down.’

In the wake of the impact the atmosphere was curdled and turbulent, rare chemistries staining cloud layers with sooty reds and vermilions. Lightning flickered from horizon to horizon, arcing across the sky in stuttering silver bridges as transient charge differentials were smoothed out. Furious eddies whirled like dervishes. The ship’s manifold passive sensors probed ahead, groping for a trajectory between the worst of the storms.

‘I don’t see the tube yet,’ Thorn said.

‘You won’t, not until we’re much closer. It’s only thirteen kilometres across, and I doubt that we could see more than a hundred kilometres in any direction even without the storm.’

‘Do you have any idea what they’re doing?’

‘I wish I did.’

‘Planetary engineering, obviously. They ripped apart three worlds for this, Ana. They must mean business.’

They continued their approach, the ride becoming rougher. Vuilleumier dipped them up and down by tens of kilometres, until she decided not to risk any further use of the Doppler radar. Thereafter she held a steady altitude, the ship bucking and shaking as it slammed through vortices and shear walls. Alarms went off every other minute, and now and again Vuilleumier would swear and tap a rapid sequence of commands into the control panel. The air around them was growing pitch-dark. Mighty black clouds billowed and surged, contorted into looming visceral shapes. Thunderheads larger than cities whipped past in an instant. Ahead, the air pulsed and blazed with constant electrical discharges: blinding forked white branches and twisting sheets of baby blue. They were flying into a small pocket of hell.

‘Doesn’t seem like quite such a good idea now, does it?’ Vuilleumier commented.

‘Never mind,’ Thorn said. ‘Just keep us on this heading. The bogey hasn’t come any closer, has it? Maybe it was just a reflection from our wake.’ As he spoke, something else snared Vuilleumier’s attention on the console. An alarm started whooping, a chorus of multilingual voices shouting incomprehensible warning messages.

‘Mass sensor says there’s something up ahead, seventy-odd kilometres distant,’ she said. ‘Elongated, I think — the field geometry’s cylindrical, with an inverse “r” attenuation. That’s got to be our baby.’

‘How long until we see it?’

‘We’ll be there in five minutes. I’m slowing our rate of approach. Hold on.’

Thorn pitched forwards in his seat restraints as Vuilleumier killed the speed. He counted out five minutes, then another five. The smudge on the passive radar display held its relative position, slowing as they did. Strangely, the ride became even smoother. The clouds began to thin out; the savage electrical activity became little more than a constant distant strobing on either side of them. There was a horrible sense of unreality about it.

‘Air pressure’s dropping,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘I think there must be a low-pressure wake behind the tube. It’s slicing through the atmosphere super-sonically, so that the air can’t immediately rush around and close the gap. We’re inside the Mach cone of the tube, as if we were flying right behind a supersonic aircraft.’

‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about — for an Inquisitor, anyway.’

‘I’ve had to learn, Thorn. And I’ve had a good teacher.’

Trina?‘ he asked, amusedly.

‘We make a pretty good team. But it wasn’t always the case.’ Then she looked ahead and pointed. ‘Look. I can see something, I think. Let’s try some magnification and then get the hell back out into space.’ On the main console display appeared an image of the tube. It plunged down into the atmosphere from above them, angled to the horizontal by forty or forty-five degrees. Against the slate background of the atmosphere it was a line of shining silver, like the funnel of a twister. They could see perhaps eighty kilometres of its length; above and below it vanished into haze or roiling clouds. There was no sense of motion along the tube, even though it was flowing into the depths at a rate of a kilometre every four seconds. It appeared to be suspended, even unmoving.

‘No sign of anything else,’ Thorn said. ‘I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but I thought there’d be something else. Deeper, maybe. Can you take us forwards?’

‘We’ll have to pass through the transonic boundary. It’ll be a lot rougher than anything we’ve gone through so far.’

‘Can we handle it?’

‘We can try.’ Vuilleumier grimaced and worked the controls again. The air in front of the tube was perfectly steady and calm, utterly unaware of the shock wave that was racing towards it. Even the last passage of the tube on the previous swing-round of the moon had been thousands of kilometres to one side of its present trajectory. Air immediately in front of the tube was compressed into a fluid layer only centimetres thick, forming a v-shaped shock wave at each point along the tube’s length. There was no way to get ahead of the tube without passing through that wing of savagely compressed and heated air; not unless Vuilleumier accepted a detour of many thousands of kilometres.

They passed to one side of the tube. It shone cherry-red along the leading edge, evidence of the frictional energies dissipated in its passage. But there was no sign of any harm being done to the alien machinery.

‘It’s being fed downwards,’ Thorn said. ‘But there isn’t anything down there. Just a lot of gas.’

‘Not all the way down,’ said Vuilleumier. ‘The gas turns into liquid hydrogen a few hundred kilometres down. Below that, there’s pure metallic hydrogen. And somewhere below that there’s a rocky core.’

‘Ana, if they wanted to take apart a planet like this to get at that rocky matter, have you any idea how they might go about it?’

I don’t know. Maybe we’re about to find out.‘

They hit the transonic boundary. For a moment Thorn thought the ship would break up; that they had finally asked too much of it. The hull had creaked before; now — for an instant — he heard it actively scream. The console flared red and flickered out. For a horrible moment all was silent. Then they were through, ghosting in still air. The console stuttered back into life and a chorus of warning voices began to shriek out of the walls.

‘We’re through,’ Vuilleumier said. Tn one piece, I think. But let’s not push our luck, Thorn…‘

I agree. But now that we’ve come all this way… well, it would be silly not to look a little deeper, wouldn’t it?‘

‘No.’

‘If you want me to help you, I want to know what I’m getting myself into.’

‘The ship can’t take it.’

Thorn smiled. ‘It just took more crap than you said it would ever be able to take. Stop being such a pessimist.’

The Demarchist representative entered the white holding room and looked at him. Behind her stood three Ferrisville police, the ones he had surrendered to in the departure terminal, and four Demarchist soldiers. The latter had surrendered their firearms but still managed to look foreboding in their fiery red power-armour. Clavain felt old and fragile, knowing that he was completely at the mercy of his new hosts.

I am Sandra Voi,‘ the woman said. ’You must be Nevil Clavain. Why did you have me come here, Clavain?‘

‘I’m in the process of defecting.’

That’s not what I mean. I mean why me in particular? According to the Convention officials you specifically asked for me.‘

I thought you’d give me a fair hearing, Sandra. I used to know one of your relatives, you see. Who would she have been, your great-grandmother? I can never get the hang of generations these days.‘

The woman pulled up the other white chair and stationed herself in it, opposite Clavain. Demarchists pretended that their political system made rank an outmoded concept. Instead of captains they had shipmasters; instead of generals they had strategic planning specialists. Naturally, such specialisations required visual signifiers, but Voi would have frowned at any suggestion that the many bars and bands of colour across the breast of her tunic indicated anything as outmoded as military status.

‘There hasn’t been another Sandra Voi for four hundred years,’ she said.

I know. The last one died on Mars, during an attempt to negotiate peace with the Conjoiners.‘

‘You’re talking ancient history now.’

‘Which doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Voi and I were part of the same peacekeeping mission. I defected to the Conjoiners shortly after she died, and I’ve been on their side ever since.’

The eyes of the younger Sandra Voi momentarily glazed over. Clavain’s implants sensed the scurry of data traffic in and out of her skull. He was impressed. Since the plague few Demarchists carried very much in the way of neural augmentation.

‘Our records don’t agree.’

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘They don’t?’

‘No. Our intelligence indicates that Clavain did not live for more than a century and a half after his defection. You can’t possibly be him.’

I left human space on an interstellar expedition and only returned recently. That’s why there hasn’t been much record of me lately. Does it matter, though? The Convention’s already verified that I’m a Conjoiner.‘

‘You could be a trap. Why would you wish to defect?’

Again, she had surprised him. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Maybe you’ve been reading too many of our newspapers. If you have, I’ve got some real news for you: your side is about to win this war. A single spider defection won’t make any difference now.’

I never thought it would,‘ Clavain said.

‘And?’

‘That’s not why I’d like to defect.’

Down, down they went, always remaining ahead of the transonic shock wave of the Inhibitor machinery. The smudge on the passive radar display — the thing that shadowed them at a distance of thirty thousand kilometres — remained present, fading in and out of clarity but never leaving them completely. The daylight grew steadily darker, until the sky overhead was only fractionally lighter than the unmoving black depths below. Ana Khouri turned off the spacecraft’s cabin illumination, hoping that it would make the exterior brighter, but the improvement was marginal. The only real source of light was the cherry-red slash of the tube’s leading edge, and even that was duller than it had been before. The tube moved at only twenty-five kilometres per second now, relative to the atmosphere: it had steepened its descent, too, plunging nearly vertically towards the transition zones where the atmosphere thickened to liquid hydrogen.

She winced as another pressure warning sounded. ‘We can’t go much deeper. I’m serious now. We’ll crush. It’s already fifty atmospheres outside, and that thing is still sitting on our tail.’

‘Just a little closer, Ana. Can we reach the transition zone?’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not in this ship. She’s an airbreather. She’ll stall in liquid hydrogen, and then we’ll fall and be crushed by hull implosion. It’s not a nice way to go, Thorn.’

‘The tube doesn’t seem bothered by the pressure, does it? I think it probably goes a lot deeper. How much do you think they’ve laid already? One kilometre every four seconds, isn’t it? That’s not far off a thousand kilometres in an hour. By now there must be enough to loop around the planet quite a few times.’

‘We don’t know that that’s what’s happening.’

‘No, but we can make an educated guess. Do you know what I keep thinking of, Ana?’

‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

‘Windings. Like in an electric motor. I could be wrong, of course.’ Thorn smiled at her.

He moved suddenly. She was not expecting it and for a moment — for all her soldier training — she was frozen in surprise. He was out of his seat, pushing himself towards her across the cabin. He had some weight, since they were moving at much less than orbital speed, but he still swung across with ease, his movements fluid and pre-planned. Gently, he pulled her out of the pilot’s position. She fought back, but Thorn was much stronger and knew enough to parry her defensive moves. It was not that she had forgotten her soldiering, but there was only so much advantage that technique could give, especially against an equally skilled opponent.

‘Easy, Ana, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.’

Before she knew what was happening, Thorn had her in the passenger seat. He forced her to sit on her hands, then tugged the crash webbing tight across her chest. He asked her if she could breathe, then tugged it tighter. She wriggled, but the webbing contracted snugly, holding her in place.

‘Thorn…’ she said.

Thorn eased himself into the pilot’s seat. ‘Now. How shall we play this? Are you going to tell me everything I want to know, or do I have to supply some additional persuasion?’

He worked the controls. The ship lurched; alarms sounded.

‘Thorn…’

‘Sorry. It looked easy enough when I watched you do it. Maybe there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, eh?’

‘You can’t fly this thing.’

‘I’m having a damned good go, aren’t I? Now… what does this do? Let’s see…’ There was another violent reaction from the ship. More alarms sounded. But, sluggishly, the ship had begun to answer his commands. Khouri saw the artificial horizon indicator tilt. They were banking. Thorn was executing a hard turn to starboard.

‘Eighty degrees…’ he read off. ‘Ninety… one hundred…’

‘Thorn, no. You’re taking us straight back towards the shock wave.’

‘That’s pretty much the idea. Do you think the hull will cope? You seemed to think it was already a little on the stressed side. Well, I suppose we’re about to find out, aren’t we?’

‘Thorn, whatever you’re planning—’

‘I’m not planning anything, Ana. I’m just trying to put us in a position of real and imminent danger. Isn’t that abundantly clear?’

She had another go at wriggling free, but it was futile. Thorn had been very clever. No wonder the bastard had eluded the government for so long. She had to admire him for that, even if her admiration was grudging. ‘We won’t make it,’ she said.

‘No, perhaps we won’t. And my flying won’t help matters, I think. Which makes it all the easier, then. Answers, that’s what I want.’

‘I’ve told you everything…’

‘You’ve told me precisely nothing. I want to know who you are. Do you know when I started having suspicions?’

‘No,’ she said, realising that he would do nothing until she answered.

‘It was Irina’s voice. I was certain I’d heard it before, you know. Well, finally I remembered. It was Ilia Volyova’s address to Resurgam, shortly before she started blasting colonies off the surface. It was a long time ago, but old wounds take a long time to heal. More than a family resemblance there, I’d say.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Thorn.’

‘Have I? Then are you going to enlighten me?’

More alarms sounded. Thorn had pulled their speed down, but they were still moving at several kilometres per second towards the shock wave. She hoped it was her imagination, but she thought she could see that slash of cherry-red coming at them through the blackness.

‘Ana…?’ he asked again, his voice all sweetness and light.

‘Damn you, Thorn.’

‘Ah. Sounds like progress to me.’

‘Pull up. Turn us around.’

‘In a moment. Just as soon as I hear the magic words from you. A confession, that’s all I’m looking for.’

She breathed in deeply. Here it was, then. The ruination of all their slow and measured plans. They had bet on Thorn and Thorn had been cleverer than them. They should have seen it coming, really they should. And Volyova, damn her too, had been right. It had been a mistake ever allowing him anywhere near Nostalgia for Infinity. They should have found another way to convince him. Volyova should have ignored Khouri’s protests…

‘Say the words, Ana.’

‘All right. All right, God damn it. She is the Triumvir. We told you a pack of fucking lies from word one. Happy now?’

Thorn did not answer immediately. To her gratitude, he took the time to swing the ship around. Acceleration pressed her even further into the couch as he applied thrust to outrun the shock wave. And from the blackness it came hurtling towards them, a livid line of red, like the bloody edge of an executioner’s sword. She watched it swell until the rear view was a wall of scarlet as bright as molten metal. The collision alarms whooped and the multilingual warning voices merged into a single agitated chorus. Then a background of sky started to close in on either side of the red line, like two iron-grey curtains. The thread began to diminish in width, falling behind them.

‘I think we made it,’ Thorn said.

‘Actually, I think we didn’t.’

‘What?’

She nodded at the radar display. There was now no sign of the smudge that had been behind them ever since they had entered Roc’s atmosphere, but a host of radar signatures were crowding in on all sides. There were at least a dozen new objects, and they lacked the transient quality of the earlier echo. They were closing at kilometres per second, clearly converging on Khouri’s ship.

‘I think we just provoked a response,’ she said, her own voice sounding much calmer than she had expected. ‘Looks like there is a threshold after all, and we just crossed it.’

‘I’ll get us up and out as quickly as possible.’

‘You think it’ll make any damned difference? They’re going to be here in about ten seconds. Guess you got the proof you wanted, Thorn. Either that or you’re about to get it. Enjoy the moment, because it might not last very long.’

He looked at her with what she thought was quiet admiration. ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’

‘Here, Thorn?’

‘On the point of death. It doesn’t mean much to you.’

‘I’d rather be somewhere else, don’t get me wrong.’

The converging forms had transgressed the final concentric circle on the display. They were now within a few kilometres of the ship, slowing as they neared it. Khouri knew there was no longer any harm in directing the active sensors at the approaching things. Their position was already betrayed, and they would lose nothing by taking a closer look at the converging objects. They were approaching from all sides, and although there were still large gaps between them, it would have been utterly futile to attempt to run away. A minute ago the things had not been there at all; clearly, they were able to slip through the atmosphere as if it hardly existed. Thorn had put them into a steep climb, and while she would have done exactly the same thing, she knew it was not going to make any difference. They had come too close to the heart of things, and now they were going to pay for their curiosity, just as Sylveste had all those years ago.

The active radar returns were confused by the shifting forms of the approaching machines. Mass sensors registered phantom signals at the edge of their sensitivity, barely separable from the background of Roc’s own field. But the visual evidence was unequivocal. Discrete dark shapes were swimming towards the ship through the atmosphere. Swimming was the right word, Khouri realised, because that was exactly how it appeared: a squirming, flowing, undulating complexity of motion, the way an octopus moved through water. The machines were as large as her ship and formed of many millions of smaller elements, a slithering, restless dance of black cubes on many scales. Almost no detail was visible beyond the absolute shifting black of the silhouettes, but every now and then blue or mauve light flickered within the blocky masses, throwing this or that appendage into relief. Clouds of smaller black shapes attended each major assemblage, and as the assemblages neared each other they threw out extensions between each other, umbilical lines of flowing black daughter machines. Waves of mass pulsed between the main cores, and now and then one of the primaries fissioned or merged with its neighbour. The purple lightning continued to flicker between the inky shapes, occasionally forming a geometric shell around Khouri’s ship, before collapsing back to something which appeared much more random. Despite herself, despite the certain feeling that she was going to die, the approach was fascinating. It was also sickening: simply looking at the Inhibitor machines inspired a feeling of dreadful nausea, for she was apprehending something that had clearly never been shaped by human intelligence. It was breathtakingly strange, the way the machines moved, and in her heart she knew that Volyova and she had — if such a thing were possible — terribly underestimated their enemy. They had seen nothing yet.

The machines were now only a hundred metres from her ship. They formed a closing black shell, oozing tighter around their prey. The sky was being locked out, visible only between the tentacular filaments of the exchanging machines. Limned in violet arcs and sprays of lightning — quivering sheets and dancing baubles of contained plasma energy — Khouri saw thick trunks of shifting machinery probing inwards, obscenely and hungrily. The ship’s exhaust was still thrusting behind them, but the machines were quite oblivious to it, and it seemed to pass right through the shell.

‘Thorn?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘It’s just that I had to know. I’ve always been one to push things.’

I don’t really blame you. I might have done the same thing, if the tables were turned.‘

‘That means we’d have both been stupid, Ana. It isn’t any excuse.’

The hull clanged, then clanged again. The whooping alarm changed its tone: no longer reporting imminent pressure collapse or a stall warning, but indicating that the hull was being damaged, prodded from outside. There was a vile metallic scraping sound, like nails dragged down tin, and the wide, grasping end of a trunk of Inhibitor machinery splayed itself across the cockpit windows. The circular end of the trunk squirmed with a moving mosaic of tiny thumb-sized black cubes, the swirling motion possessing a weird hypnotic quality. Khouri tried to reach the controls that would shutter the windows, imagining it might make one or two seconds’ difference.

The hull creaked. More black tentacles attached themselves. One by one the sensor displays began to blank out or haze with static.

‘They could have killed us by now…’ Thorn said.

‘They could, but I think they want to know what we’re like.’

There was another sound, one she had been dreading. It was the squeal of metal being torn aside. Her ears popped as pressure fell within the ship, and she assumed that she would be dead a second or two later. To die by depressurisation was not the most desirable of deaths, but she imagined that it was preferable to being smothered by Inhibitor machinery. What would the grasping black shapes do when they reached her — dismantle her the same way they were pulling the ship apart? But just as she had formulated that consolatory thought, the sensation of pressure drop ceased and she realised that if there had been a hull rupture it had been brief.

‘Ana,’ Thorn said. ‘Look.’

The bulkhead door that led into the flight deck was a wall of rippling ink, like a suspended tidal wave of pure darkness. Khouri felt the breeze of that constant bustling motion, as if a thousand silent fans were being flicked back and forth. Only now and then did a pulse of pink or purple light strobe within the blackness, hinting at dreadful machine-filled depths. She sensed hesitation. The machines had reached this far into her ship, and they must have been aware that they had arrived at its delicate organic core.

Something began to emerge from the wall. It began as a domelike blister as wide across as Khouri’s thigh, and then it extended, taking on the form of a tree trunk as it probed further into the cabin. Its tip was a blunt nub like one extremity of a slime mould, but it waggled to and fro as if sniffing the air. A blurred haze of tiny black machines made the edge difficult to focus on. The process took place in silence, save for the occasional distant snap or crackle. The nub grew out from the wall until it was a metre long, and as many metres again from Khouri and Thorn. For a moment it ceased extending and swung to one side and then the other. Khouri saw a black thing the size of a bluebottle flit past her brow and then settle back into the main mass of the trunk. Then, with dire inevitability, the trunk bifurcated and resumed its extrusion. The split ends forked, one aiming for Khouri, the other for Thorn. It grew via oozing waves of cubes pulsing along the length of it, the cubes swelling or contracting before locking into their final positions.

‘Thorn,’ Khouri said. ‘Listen to me. We can destroy the ship.’

He nodded once. ‘What do I do?’

‘Free me and I’ll do it. It won’t accept the destruct order from you.’

He made to move, but had shifted barely an inch before the black tentacle had whipped out another appendage to pin him down. It was done with care — the machinery was clearly still unwilling to harm them inadvertently — but Thorn was now immobilised.

‘Nice try,’ Khouri said. The tips were only an inch from her. They had bifurcated and re-bifurcated on their final approach, so that now a many-fingered black hand was poised before her face, fingers — or appendages — ready to be plunged into eyes, mouth, nose, ears, even through skin and bone. The fingers were themselves split into tinier and tinier black spikes, vanishing into a grey-black bronchial haze.

The trunk pulled back an inch. Khouri closed her eyes, thinking the machinery was preparing itself to strike. Then she felt a sharp prick of coldness beneath her eyelids, a sting so quick and localised that it was hardly pain at all. A moment later she felt the same thing somewhere within her auditory canal, and an instant after that — though she had no real idea of how rapidly time was actually passing now — the Inhibitor machinery reached her brain. There was a torrent of sensation, confused feelings and images cascading by in rapid, random succession, followed by a sense that she was being unravelled and inspected like a long magnetic tape. She wanted to scream or make some recognisable human response, but she was pinned hard. Even her thoughts had become gelid, impeded by the invasive presence of the black machines. The tarlike mass had crept into every part of her, until there was almost no space left for the entity that had once thought of itself as Khouri. And yet enough remained to sense that even as the machine pushed itself into her there was a two-way flow of data. As it established communicational feeds into her skull, she became dimly cognisant of its smothering black vastness, extending beyond her head, back along the trunk, back through the ship and into the clump of machines that had surrounded the ship.

She even sensed Thorn, linked into the same information-gathering network. His own thoughts, such as they were, echoed hers precisely. He was paralysed and compressed, unable to scream or even imagine the release that would come from screaming. She tried to reach out to him, to at least let him know that she was still present and that somone else in the universe was aware of what he was going through. And at the same time she felt Thorn do likewise, so that they linked fingers through neural space, like two lovers drowning in ink. The process of being analysed continued, the blackness seeping into the oldest parts of her mind. It was the worst thing she had ever experienced, worse than any torture or simulation of torture that she had ever known on Sky’s Edge. It was worse than anything the Mademoiselle had done to her, and the only respite lay in the fact that she was only dwindlingly aware of her own identity. When that was gone she would be free.

And then something changed. At the limit of what she was feeling through the data-gathering channels, there was a disturbance on the periphery of the cloud that had englobed her ship. Thorn sensed it as well: she felt a pathetic flicker of hope reach her through the bifurcation. But there was nothing to be hopeful about. They were just feeling the machines regroup, ready for the next phase of the smothering process.

She was wrong.

She felt a third mind enter her thoughts, quite separate from Thorn’s. This mind was bell-clear and calm, and its thoughts remained unclotted by the oppressive black choke of the machinery. She sensed curiosity and not a little hesitation, and while she also sensed fear, she did not detect the outright terror that Thorn was radiating. The fear was only an extreme kind of caution. And at the same time she gained back a little of herself, as if the black crush had relented.

The third mind skirted closer to her own, and she realised, with as much shock as she was capable of registering, that it was a mind she knew. She had never encountered it on this level before, but the force of its personality was so pervasive that it was like a trumpet blast sounding a familiar refrain. It was the mind of a man and it was the mind of a man who had never had much time for doubt, or humility, or much in the way of compassion for the affairs of others. At the same time she detected the tiniest gleam of remorse and something that might even have been concern. But even as she came to that conclusion the mind snapped back, shrouding itself again, and she felt the powerful wake of its withdrawal.

She screamed, properly, for she was able to move her body again. In the same moment the trunk shattered, breaking apart with a high-pitched tinkle. When she opened her eyes she was surrounded by a cloud of jostling black cubes, tumbling in disarray. The black wall across the bulkhead was breaking up. She watched the cubes attempt to merge with each other, occasionally forming larger black aggregates that lasted only a second or so before they too broke apart. Thorn was no longer pinned to his seat. He moved, shoving aside black cubes, until he was able to release Khouri from the webbing.

‘Have you any idea what the hell just happened?’ he asked, slurring his words as he spoke.

I do,‘ she said. ’But I’m not sure if I believe it.‘

‘Talk to me, Ana.’

‘Look, Thorn. Look outside.’

He followed her gaze. Beyond the ship, the surrounding black mass was experiencing the same inability to cohere as the cubes within the ship. Windows were opening back into empty sky, closing and then re-opening elsewhere. And there was, she realised, something else out there as well. It was within the rough black shell that encompassed the ship but not of it, and as it moved — for it appeared to be orbiting the ship, looping around it in lazy open curves — the coagulated black masses moved nimbly out of its way. The shape of the object was difficult to focus on, but the impression Khouri retained later was of a whirling iron-grey gyroscope, a roughly spherical thing made out of many spinning layers. At its core, or buried somewhere within it, was a flickering source of dark red light, like a carnelian. The object — it also made her think of a spinning marble — was perhaps a metre across, but because its periphery swelled and retracted as it spun, it was difficult to be certain. All Khouri knew, all she could be sure of, was that the object had not been there before, and that the Inhibitor machinery appeared strangely apprehensive of it.

‘It’s opening a window for us,’ Thorn said, wonderingly. ‘Look. It’s given us a way to escape.’

Khouri eased him from the pilot’s position. ‘Then let’s use it,’ she said. They nosed out of the swarm of Inhibitor machines and arced towards space. On the radar Khouri watched the shell fall behind, fearful that it would smother the flickering red marble and come after them again. But they were allowed to leave. It was only later that something came up hard and fast from behind, with the same tentative radar signature that they had seen before. But the object only zipped past them at frightening acceleration, heading out into interplanetary space. Khouri watched it fall out of range, heading in the general direction of Hades, the neutron star on the system’s edge.

But she had expected that.

Where did the great work come from? What had instigated it? The Inhibitors did not have access to that data. All that was clear was that the work was theirs to perform and theirs alone, and that the work was the single most important activity that had ever been instigated by an intelligent agency in the history of the galaxy, perhaps even in the history of the universe itself.

The nature of the work was simplicity itself. Intelligent life could not be allowed to spread across the galaxy. It could be tolerated, even encouraged, when it confined itself to solitary worlds or even solitary solar systems.

But it must not infect the galaxy.

Yet it was not acceptable to simply extinguish life wholesale. That would have been technologically feasible for any mature galactic culture, especially one that had the galaxy largely to itself. Artificial hypernovae could be kindled in stellar nurseries, sterilising blasts a million times more effective than supernovae. Stars could be steered and tossed into the event horizon of the sleeping supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core, so that their disruption would fuel a cleansing burst of gamma rays. Binary neutron stars could be encouraged to collide by delicate manipulation of the local gravitational constant. Droves of self-replicating machines could be unleashed to rip worlds to rubble, in every single planetary system in the galaxy. In a million years, every old rocky world in the galaxy could have been pulverised. Prophylactic intervention in the protoplanetary discs out of which worlds coalesced could have prevented any more viable planets from forming. The galaxy would have choked in the dust of its own dead souls, glowing red across the megaparsecs.

All this could have been done.

But the point was not to extinguish life, rather to hold it in check. Life itself, despite its apparent profligacy, was held sacrosanct by the Inhibitors. Its ultimate preservation, most especially that of thinking life, was what they existed for.

But it could not be allowed to spread.

Their methodology, honed over millions of years, was simple. There were too many viable suns to watch all the time; too many worlds where simple life might suddenly bootstrap itself towards intelligence. So they established networks of triggers, puzzling artefacts dotted across the face of the galaxy. Their placement was such that an emergent culture was likely to stumble on one sooner rather than later. Equally, they were not intended to lure cultures into space inadvertently. They had to be tantalising, but not too tantalising.

The Inhibitors waited between the stars, listening for the signs that one of their glittering contraptions had attracted a new species. And then, quickly and mindlessly, they converged on the site of the new outbreak.

The military shuttle Voi had arrived in was docked outside, clamped to the underside of Carousel New Copenhagen via magnetic grapples. Clavain was marched aboard and told where to sit. A black helmet was lowered over his head, with only a tiny glass viewing window in the front. It was intended to block neural signals, preventing him from interfering with ambient machinery. Their caution did not surprise him in the slightest. He was potentially valuable to them — in spite of Voi’s earlier comments to the contrary, any kind of defector might make some difference, even this late in the war — but as a spider he could also cause them considerable harm.

The military ship undocked and fell away from Carousel New Copenhagen. The windows in the armoured hull were quaintly fixed. Through the scratched and scuffed fifteen-centimetre-thick glass Clavain saw a trio of slim police craft shadowing them like pilot fish.

He nodded at the ships. ‘They’re taking this seriously.’

‘They’ll escort us out of Convention airspace,’ Voi said. ‘It’s normal procedure. We have very good relations with the Convention, Clavain.’

‘Where are you taking me? Straight to Demarchist HQ?’

‘Don’t be silly. We’ll take you somewhere nice and secure and remote to begin with. There’s a small Demarchist camp on the far side of Marco’s Eye… of course, you know all about our operations.’

Clavain nodded. ‘But not your precise debriefing procedures. Have you had to do many of these?’

The other person in the room was a male Demarchist, also of high status, whom Voi had introduced as Giles Perotet. He had a habit of constantly stretching the fingers of his gloves, one after the other, from hand to hand.

‘Two or three a decade,’ he said. ‘Certainly you are the first in a while. Do not expect the red-carpet treatment, Clavain. Our expectations may have been coloured by the fact that eight of the eleven previous defectors turned out to be spider agents. We killed them all, but not before valuable secrets had been lost to them.’

‘I’m not here to do that. There wouldn’t be much point, would there? The war is ours anyway.’

‘So you came to gloat, is that it?’ Voi asked.

‘No. I came to tell you something that will put the war into an entirely different perspective.’

Amusement ghosted across her face. ‘That’d be some trick.’

‘Does the Demarchy still own a lighthugger?’

Perotet and Voi exchanged puzzled glances before the man replied, ‘What do you think, Clavain?’

Clavain didn’t answer him for several minutes. Through the window he saw Carousel New Copenhagen diminishing, the vast grey arc of the rim revealing itself to be merely one part of a spokeless wheel. The wheel itself grew smaller until it was nearly lost against the background of the other habitats and carousels that formed the Rust Belt.

‘Our intelligence says you don’t,’ Clavain said, ‘but our intelligence could be wrong, or incomplete. If the Demarchy had to get its hands on a lighthugger at very short notice, do you think it could?’ ‘What is this about, Clavain?’ Voi asked. ‘Just answer my question.’

Her face flared red at his insolence, but she held her temper well. Her voice remained calm, almost businesslike. ‘You know there are always ways and means. It just depends on the degree of desperation.’

I think you should start making plans. You will need a starship, more than one, if you can manage it. And troops and weapons.‘

‘We’re not exactly in a position to spare resources, Clavain,’ Perotet said, removing one glove completely. His hands were milky white and very fine-boned.

‘Why? Because you will lose the war? You’re going to lose it anyway. It’ll just have to happen a little sooner than you were expecting.’ Perotet replaced the glove. ‘Why, Clavain?’

‘Winning this war is no longer the Mother Nest’s primary concern. Something else has taken precedent. They’re going through the motions of winning now because they don’t want you or anyone else to suspect the truth.’

Voi asked, ‘Which is?’

‘I don’t know all the details. I had to make a choice between staying to learn more and defecting while I had a chance to do so. It wasn’t an easy decision, and I didn’t have a lot of time for second thoughts.’

‘Just tell us what you do know,’ Perotet said. ‘We’ll decide if the information merits further investigation. We’ll find out what you know eventually, you realise. We have trawls, just like your own side. Maybe not as fast, maybe not as safe… but they work for us. You’ll lose nothing by telling us something now.’ ‘I’ll tell you all that I know. But it’s valueless unless you act on it.’ Clavain felt the military ship adjust its course. They were headed for Yellowstone’s only large moon, Marco’s Eye, which orbited just beyond the Ferrisville Convention’s jurisdictional limit. ‘Go ahead,’ Perotet said.

‘The Mother Nest has identified an external threat, one that concerns all of us. There are aliens out there, machinelike entities that suppress the emergence of technological intelligences. It’s why the galaxy is such an empty place.

They’ve wiped it clean. I’m afraid we’re next on the list.‘

‘Sounds like supposition to me,’ Voi said.

It isn’t. Some of our own deep-space missions have already encountered them. They are as real as you or I, and you have my word that they’re coming closer.‘

‘We’ve managed fine until now,’ Perotet said.

‘Something we’ve done has alerted them. We may never know precisely what it was. All that matters is that the threat is real and the Conjoiners are fully aware of it. They do not think they can defeat it.’ He went on to tell them much the same story that he had already told Xavier and Antoinette about the Mother Nest’s evacuation fleet and the quest to recover the lost weapons.

‘These imaginary weapons,’ Voi asked. ‘Are we supposed to think that they’d make any practical difference against hostile aliens?’

‘I suppose if they were not considered to be of value, my people would not be so eager to recover them.’ ‘And where do we come in?’

‘I’d like you to recover the weapons first. That’s why you’ll need a starship. You could leave a few weapons behind for Skade’s exodus fleet, but beyond that…’ Clavain shrugged. ‘I think they’d be better off in the control of orthodox humanity.’

‘You’re quite a turncoat,’ Voi said admiringly.

‘I’ve tried not to make a career out of it.’

The ship lurched. There had been no warning until that moment, but Clavain had flown in enough ships to know the difference between a scheduled and unscheduled manoeuvre.

Something was wrong. He could see it instantly in Voi and Perotet: all composure dropped from their faces. Voi’s expression became a mask, her throat trembling as she went into subvocal communication with the shuttle’s shipmaster. Perotet moved to one window, making sure he had at least one limb attached to a grappling point.

The vessel lurched again. A hard blue flash lit the cabin. Perotet looked away, his eyes squinting against the glare.

‘What’s happening?’ Clavain asked.

‘We’re being attacked.’ He sounded fascinated and appalled at the same time. ‘Someone just took out one of the Ferrisville escort craft.’

‘This shuttle looks lightly armoured,’ Clavain said. ‘If someone was attacking us, wouldn’t we be dead by now?’

Another flash. The shuttle lurched and yawed, the hull vibrating as the engine load intensified. The shipmaster was applying an evasive pattern.

‘That’s two down,’ Voi said from the other side of the cabin.

‘Would you mind releasing me from this chair?’ Clavain asked.

‘I see something approaching us,’ Perotet called. ‘Looks like another ship — maybe two. Unmarked. Looks civilian, but can’t be. Unless…’

‘Banshees?’ suggested Clavain.

They appeared not to hear him.

‘There’s something on this side too,’ Voi said. ‘Shipmaster doesn’t know what’s happening either.’ Her attention flicked to Clavain. ‘Could your side have got this close to Yellowstone?’

‘They want me back pretty badly,’ Clavain said. ‘I suppose anything’s possible. But this is against every rule of war.’

‘Those could still be spiders,’ Voi said. ‘If Clavain’s right, then the rules of war don’t apply any more.’

‘Can you retaliate?’ Clavain asked.

‘Not here. Our weapons are electronically pacified inside Convention airspace.’ Perotet unhooked from one restraint and scudded to another on the far wall. ‘The other escort’s damaged — she must have taken a partial hit. She’s outgassing and losing navigational control. She’s falling behind us. Voi, how long until we’re back in the war zone?’

Her eyes glazed again. It was as if she had been stunned momentarily. ‘Four minutes to the frontier, then weps will depacify.’

‘You haven’t got four minutes,’ Clavain said. ‘Is there a spacesuit aboard this thing, by any chance?’

Voi looked at him oddly. ‘Of course. Why?’

‘Because it’s pretty obvious that it’s me they want. No sense in us all dying, is there?’

They showed him to the spacesuit locker. The suits were of Demarchist design, all ribbed silvery-red metal, and while they were neither more nor less technologically advanced than Conjoiner suits, everything worked differently on them. Clavain could not have put the suit on without the assistance of Voi and Perotet. Once the helmet had latched shut, the faceplate border lit up with a dozen unfamiliar status read-outs, worming traces and shifting histograms labelled with acronyms that meant nothing to Clavain. Periodically a small, polite feminine voice would whisper something in his ear. Most of the traces were green rather than red, which he took to be a good sign.

‘I keep thinking this must be a trap,’ Voi said. ‘Something you’d always planned. That you meant to come aboard our ship and then be rescued. Perhaps you’ve done something to us, or planted something…’

‘Everything I told you was true,’ Clavain said. ‘I don’t know who those people outside are, and I don’t know what they want with me. They could be Conjoiners, but if they are, their arrival’s nothing I’ve planned.’

‘I wish I could believe you.’

‘I admired Sandra Voi. I hoped that my knowing her might help my cause with you. I was perfectly sincere about that.’

‘If they are Conjoiners… will they kill you?’

‘I don’t know. I think they might have done that already, if that was what they wanted. I don’t think Skade would have spared you, but perhaps I’m misjudging her. If indeed it is Skade…’ Clavain shuffled into the airlock. ‘I’d best be going. I hope they leave you alone once they see I’m outside.’

‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’

Clavain smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’

‘It makes me think you might not be lying. The information you gave us…’

‘You really should act on it.’

He stepped into the lock. Voi did the rest. The traces on the faceplate registered the shift to vacuum. Clavain heard his suit creak and click in unfamiliar ways as it adjusted to space. The outer door heaved open on heavy pistons. He could see nothing but a rectangle of darkness. No stars; no worlds; no Rust Belt. Not even the marauding ships.

It always took courage to step out of any spacecraft, most especially in the absence of any means of returning. Clavain judged that single footstep and push-off to be amongst the two or three hardest things he had ever done in his life.

But it had to be done.

He was outside. He turned slowly, the claw-shaped Demarchist shuttle coming into view and then passing by him. It was unharmed, save for one or two scorch marks on the hull where it had been struck by scalding fragments from the escort ships. On the sixth or seventh turn the engines pulsed and the shuttle began to put increasing distance between itself and him. Good. There was no sense sacrificing himself if Voi did not take advantage of it.

He waited. Perhaps four minutes passed before he became aware of the other ships. Evidently they had moved away after the attack. There were three of them, as Perotet and Voi had thought.

Their hulls were black, stencilled with neon skulls, eyes and sharks’ teeth. Now and then a thruster aperture would bark a pulse of steering gas, and the flash would pick out more details, limning the sleek curves of transatmospheric surfaces and the cowled muzzles of retractable weapons or hinged grappling gear. The weapons could be packed away and the ships would look innocent enough: sleek rich kids’ toys, but nothing you would bet on against armed Convention escorts.

One of the three banshees broke from the pack and loomed large. A yellow-lit airlock irised open in the belly of her hull. Two figures bustled out, black as space themselves. They jetted towards Clavain and braked expertly when they were on the point of colliding with him. Their spacesuits were like their ships: civilian in origin but augmented with armour and weapons. They made no effort to speak to him on the suit channel; all he heard as he was snared and taken aboard the black ship was the repetitious soft voice of the suit subpersona.

There was just room for the three of them in the belly airlock. Clavain looked for markings on the suits of the other two, but even up close they were perfectly black. The faceplate visors were heavily tinted, so that all he caught was the occasional flash of an eye.

His status indicators shifted again, registering the return of air pressure. The inner door irised open and he was pushed forwards into the main body of the black ship. The spacesuited pair followed him. Once they were inside, their helmets detached themselves automatically and flew away to storage points. Two men had brought him aboard the ship. They could easily have been twins, even down to the nearly identical broken nose on each face. One of the men had a gold ring through one eyebrow, the other through the lobe of one ear. Both were bald except for an exceptionally narrow line of dyed-green hair that bisected their skulls from temple to nape. They wore wraparound tortoiseshell goggles and neither man had any trace of a mouth.

The one with the ring through his eyebrow motioned to Clavain that he should remove his own helmet. Clavain shook his head, unwilling to do that until he was certain that he was in breathable air. The man shrugged and reached for something racked on the wall. It was a bright-yellow axe.

Clavain raised a hand and began to fiddle with the connecting latch of the Demarchist suit. He could not find the release mechanism. After a moment the man with the pierced ear shook his head and brushed Clavain’s hand aside. He worked the latch and the soft voice in Clavain’s ear became shriller, more insistent. The status displays flicked mostly into red.

The helmet came off with a gasp of air. Clavain’s ears popped. The pressure on the black ship was not quite Demarchist standard. He breathed cold air, his lungs working hard.

‘Who… who are you?’ he asked, when he had the energy for words.

The man with the pierced eyebrow replaced the yellow axe on the wall. He drew a finger across his own throat.

Then another voice, one that Clavain did not recognise, said, ‘Hello.’

Clavain looked around. The third person also wore a spacesuit, though it was much less cumbersome than the suits worn by her fellows. Despite its bulk she still managed to appear thin and spare. She hovered within the frame of a bulkhead door, resting calmly with her head cocked slightly to one side. Perhaps it was the play of light on her face, but Clavain thought he saw ghostly blades of faded black against the perfect white of her skin.

I hope the Talkative Twins treated you well, Mr Clavain.‘

‘Who are you?’ Clavain said again.

‘I am Zebra. That’s not my real name, of course. You won’t ever need to know my real name.’

‘Who are you, Zebra? Why have you done this?’

‘Because I was told to. What did you expect?’

‘I didn’t expect anything. I was trying…’ He paused and waited until his breath had returned. ‘I was trying to defect.’

‘We know.’

‘We?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough. Come with me, Mr Clavain. Twins, secure and prepare for high-burn. The Convention will be swarming like flies by the time we get back to Yellowstone. It’s going to be an interesting trip home.’

‘I’m not worth killing innocent people for.’

‘No one died, Mr Clavain. The two Convention escorts we destroyed were remotes, slaved to the third. We wounded the third, but its pilot won’t have been harmed. And we conspicuously avoided harming the zombies’ shuttle. Did they make you step outside, I wonder?’

He followed her forwards, through the bulkhead into a flight deck area. There was only one other person aboard as far as Clavain could tell: a wizened-looking man strapped into the pilot’s position. He was not wearing a suit. His ancient age-spotted hands gripped the controls like prehensile twigs.

‘What do you think?’ Clavain asked.

‘It’s possible they might have, but I think it more likely that you chose to leave.’

‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ve got me.’

The ancient man glanced at Clavain with only a flicker of interest. ‘Normal insertion, Zebra, or do we take the long way home?’

‘Follow the normal corridor, Manoukhian, but be ready to deviate. I don’t want to engage the Convention again.’

Manoukhian, if that was indeed his name, nodded and applied pressure to the ivory-handled control sticks. ‘Get the guest strapped down, Zebra. You too.’

The striped woman nodded. ‘Twins? Help me secure Mr Clavain.’

The two men shifted Clavain’s suited form into a contoured acceleration couch. He let them do whatever they wanted; he was too weak to offer more than token resistance. His mind probed the immediate cybernetic environment of the spacecraft, and while his implants sensed something of the data traffic through the control networks, there was nothing he could influence. The people were also beyond his reach. He did not even think any of them had implants.

‘Are you the banshees?’ Clavain asked.

‘Sort of, but not exactly. The banshees are a bunch of thuggish pirates. We do things with a little more finesse. But their existence gives us the cover we need for our own activities. And you?’ The stripes on her face bunched as she smiled. ‘Are you really Nevil Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis?’

‘You didn’t hear that from me.’

‘That’s what you told the Demarchists. And those kids in Copenhagen. We have spies everywhere, you see. There’s not a lot that escapes us.’

‘I can’t prove I’m Clavain. But then why should I bother?’

‘I think you are,’ Zebra said. ‘I hope you are, anyway. It would be such a letdown if you turned out to be an impostor. My boss wouldn’t be at all happy.’

‘Your boss?’

‘The man we’re on our way to meet,’ Zebra said.