Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 28

Skade stalked around her ship. Nothing felt right aboard Nightshade now. The pressure on her spine had eased and her eyeballs had returned to more or less the right shape, but those were the only real compensations. Every living thing inside the ship was now within the field’s detectable sphere of influence, embedded in a bubble of artificially modified quantum vacuum. Nine-tenths of the inertial mass of every particle in the field no longer existed.

The ship was hurling itself towards Resurgam at ten gees.

Even though Skade had her armour, and was therefore insulated from the more physiologically upsetting effects of the field, she still moved around as little as possible. Walking was not in itself difficult since the acceleration that the armour felt was only a gee, a tenth of the actual value. The armour no longer laboured under the extra load, and Skade had lost the feeling that a fall would automatically dash her brains out. But everything else was worse. When she willed the armour to move a limb, it accommodated her wishes too quickly. When she moved what should have been a heavy piece of equipment, it shifted too easily. It was as if the apparently substantial furniture of the ship had been replaced by a series of superficially convincing paper-thin facades. Even changing the direction of her gaze took care. Her eyeballs, no longer distorted by gravity, were now too responsive and tended to overshoot and then over-compensate for the overshooting. She knew this was because the muscles that steered them, which were anchored to her skull, had evolved to move a sphere of tissue with a certain inertial mass; now they were confused. But knowing all this did not make dealing with it any easier. She had turned off her Area Postrema permanently, since her inner ear was profoundly disturbed by the modified inertial field.

Skade reached Felka’s quarters. She entered and found Felka where she had left her last time, sitting cross-legged on a part of the floor that she had instructed to become soft. Her clothes had a stale, crumpled look. Her flesh was pasty and her hair was a nestlike tangle of greasy knots. Here and there Skade saw patches of raw pink scalp, where Felka had tugged out locks of her own hair. She sat perfectly still, one hand on either knee. Her chin was raised slightly and her eyes were closed. There was a faint glistening trail of mucus leading from one nostril to the top of her lip.

Skade audited the neural connections between Felka and the rest of the ship. To her surprise, she detected no significant traffic. Skade had assumed that Felka must have been roaming through a cybernetic environment, as had been the case on her last two visits. Skade had explored them for herself and found vast puzzlelike edifices of Felka’s own making. They were clearly surrogates for the Wall. But this was not the case on this occasion. After abandoning the real, Felka had taken the next logical step, back to the place where it had all begun.

She had gone back into her skull.

Skade lowered herself to Felka’s level, then reached out and touched her brow. She expected Felka to flinch against the cold metal contact, but she might as well have been touching a wax dummy.

Felka… can you hear me? I know you’re in there somewhere. This is Skade. There is something you need to know.

She waited for a response; none came. Felka. It concerns Clavain. I’ve done what I can to make him turn away, but he hasn’t responded to any of my attempts at persuasion. My last effort was the one I thought most likely to persuade him. Shall I tell you what it was?

Felka breathed in and out, slowly and regularly.

I used you. I promised Clavain that if he turned back, I’d give you back to him. Alive, of course. I thought that was fair. But he wasn’t interested. He made no response to my overture. Do you see, Felka? You can’t mean as much to him as his beloved mission.

She stood up and then strolled around the seated meditative figure. I hoped you would, you know. It would have been the best solution for both of us. But it was Clavain’s call, and he showed where his priorities lay. They weren’t with you, Felka. After all those years, all those centuries, you didn’t mean as much to him as forty mindless machines. I’ll admit, I was surprised.

Still Felka said nothing. Skade felt an urge to dive into her skull and find the warm and comforting place into which she had retreated. Had Felka been a normal Conjoiner, it would have been within Skade’s capabilities to invade her most private mental spaces. But Felka’s mind was put together differently. Skade could skim its surface, occasionally glimpse its depths, but no more than that.

Skade sighed. She had not really wanted to torment Felka, but she had hoped to prise her out of her withdrawal by turning her against Clavain.

It had not worked.

Skade stood behind Felka. She closed her eyes and issued a stream of commands to the spinal medical device she had attached to Felka. The effect was immediate and gratifying. Felka collapsed, sagging in on herself. Her mouth lolled open, oozing saliva. Delicately, Skade picked her up and carried her out of the room.

The silver sun burned overhead, a blank coin shining through a caul of grey sea fog. Skade settled into a flesh-and-blood body, as she had before. She was standing on a flat-topped rock; the air was cold to the bone and prickled with ozone and the briny stench of rotting seaweed. In the distance, a billion pebbles sighed orgasmically under the assault of another sea wave.

It was the same place again. She wondered if the Wolf was becoming just the tiniest bit predictable.

Skade peered into the fog around her. There, no more than a dozen paces from her, was another human figure. But it was neither Galiana nor the Wolf this time. It was a small child, crouched on a rock about the same size as the one Skade stood on. Cautiously, Skade hopped and skipped her way from rock to rock, dancing across the pools and the razor-edged ridges that linked them. Being fully human again was both disturbing and exhilarating. She felt more fragile than she had ever done before Clavain had hurt her, conscious that beneath her skin was only soft muscle and brittle bone. It was good to be invincible. But at the same time it was good to feel the universe chemically invading her through every pore of her skin, to feel the wind stroking every hair on the back of her hand, to feel every ridge and crack of the seaworn rock beneath her feet.

She reached the child. It was Felka — no surprise there — but as she must have been on Mars, when Clavain rescued her.

Felka sat cross-legged, much as she had been in the cabin. She wore a damp, filthy, seaweed-stained torn dress that left her legs and arms bare. Her hair, like Skade’s, was long and dark, falling in lank strands across her face. The sea fog lent the scene a bleached, monochrome aspect.

Felka glanced up at her, made eye contact for a second and then returned to the activity she had been engaged in before. Around her, forming a ragged ring, were many tiny parts of hard-shelled sea-creatures: legs and pincers, claws and tail pieces, whiplike antennae, broken scabs of carapacial shell, aligned and orientated with maniacal precision. The conjunctions of the many pale parts resembled a kind of anatomical algebra. Felka stared at the arrangement silently, occasionally pivoting around on her haunches to examine a different part of it. Only now and then would she pick up one of the pieces — a hinged, barbed limb, perhaps — and reposition it elsewhere. Her expression was blank, not at all like a child at play. It was more as if she was engaged in some task that demanded her solemn and total attention, an activity too intense to be pleasurable.

Felka…

She looked up again, questioningly, only to return to her game.

The distant waves crashed again. Beyond Felka the grey wall of mist lost some of its opacity for a moment. Skade could still not make out the sea, but she could see much further than had been possible before. The pattern of rockpools stretched into the distance, a mind-wrenching tessellation. But there was something else out there, at the limit of vision. It was only slightly darker than the grey itself, and it shifted in and out of existence, but she was certain that there was something there. It was a grey spire, a vast towerlike thing ramming into the greyness of the sky. It appeared to lie a great distance away, perhaps beyond the sea itself, or thrusting out of the sea some distance from land.

Felka noticed it too. She looked at the object, her expression unchanging, and only when she had seen enough of it did she return to her animal parts. Skade was just wondering what it could be when the fog closed in again and she became aware of a third presence.

The Wolf had arrived. It — or she — stood only a few paces beyond Felka. The form remained indistinct, but whenever the fog abated or the form became more solid, Skade thought she saw a woman rather than an animal.

The roar of the waves, which had always been there, shifted into language again. ‘You brought Felka, Skade. I’m pleased.’

‘This representation of her,’ Skade asked, remembering to speak aloud as the Wolf had demanded of her before. She nodded towards the girl. ‘Is that how she sees herself now — as a child again — or how you wish me to see her?’

‘A little of both, perhaps,’ said the Wolf.

‘I asked for your help,’ Skade said. ‘You said that you would be more cooperative if I brought Felka with me. Well, I have. And Clavain is still behind me. He hasn’t shown any sign of giving up.’

‘What have you tried?’

‘Using her as a bargaining chip. But Clavain didn’t bite.’

‘Did you imagine he ever would?’

‘I thought he cared about Felka enough to have second thoughts.’

‘You misunderstand Clavain,’ the Wolf said. ‘He won’t have given up on her.’

‘Only Galiana would know that, wouldn’t she?’

The Wolf did not answer Skade directly. ‘What was your response, when Clavain failed to retreat?’

‘I did what I said I would. Launched a shuttle, which he will now have great difficulty in intercepting.’

‘But an interception is still possible?’

Skade nodded. ‘That was the idea. He won’t be able to reach it with one of his own shuttles, but his main ship will still be able to achieve a rendezvous.’

There was amusement in the Wolf’s voice. ‘Are you certain that one of his shuttles can’t reach yours?’

‘It isn’t energetically feasible. He would have had to launch long before I made my move, and guess the direction I was going to send my shuttle in.’

‘Or cover every possibility,’ the Wolf said.

‘He couldn’t do that,’ Skade said, with a great deal less certainty than she thought she should feel. ‘He’d need to launch a flotilla of shuttles, wasting all that fuel on the off-chance that one…’ She trailed off.

‘If Clavain deemed the effort worth it, he would do exactly that, even if it cost him precious fuel. What did he expect to find in the shuttle, incidentally?’

‘I told him I’d return Felka.’

The Wolf shifted. Now its form lingered near Felka, though it was no more distinct that it had been an instant earlier. ‘She’s still here.’

‘I put a weapon in the shuttle. A crustbuster warhead, set for a teratonne detonation.’

She saw the Wolf nod appreciatively. ‘You hoped he would have to steer his ship to the rendezvous point. Doubtless you arranged some form of proximity fuse. Very clever, Skade. I’m actually quite impressed by your ruthlessness.’

‘But you don’t think he’ll fall for it.’

‘You’ll know soon enough, won’t you?’

Skade nodded, certain now that she had failed. Distantly, the sea mist parted again, and she was afforded another glimpse of the pale tower. In all likelihood it was actually very dark when seen up close. It rose high and sheer, like a sea-stack. But it looked less like a natural formation than a giant taper-sided building.

‘What is that?’ Skade asked.

‘What is what?’

‘That…’ But when Skade looked back towards the tower, it was no longer visible. Either the mist had closed in to conceal it, or it had ceased to exist.

‘There’s nothing there,’ the Wolf said.

Skade chose her words carefully. ‘Wolf, listen to me. If Clavain survives this, I am prepared to do what we discussed before.’

‘The unthinkable, Skade? A state-four transition?’

Even Felka halted her game, looking up at the two adults. The moment was pregnant, stretching eternally.

‘I understand the dangers. But we need to do it to finally slip ahead of him. We need to make a jump through the zero-mass boundary into state four. Into the tachyonic-mass phase.’

Again that horrible lupine glint of a smile. ‘Very few organisms have ever travelled faster than light, Skade.’

‘I’m prepared to become one of them. What do I need to do?’

‘You know full well. The machinery you have made is almost capable of it, but it will require a few modifications. Nothing that your manufactories can’t handle. But to make the changes you will need to take advice from Exordium.’

Skade nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I brought Felka.’

‘Then let us begin.’

Felka went back to her game, ignoring the two of them. Skade issued the coded sequence of neural commands that would make the Exordium machinery initiate coherence coupling.

‘It’s starting, Wolf.’

‘I know. I can feel it, too.’

Felka looked up from her game.

Skade sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of Skade’s neck prickled. She knew that there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The pre-monitionary sense of evil was quite tangible. But she had to stand her ground and do what had to be done.

Like the Wolf said, fears had to be faced.

Skade listened intently. She thought she heard voices whispering down the corridor.

‘Beast?’

‘Yes, Little Miss?’

‘Have you been completely honest with me?’

‘Why would one have been anything other than honest, Little Miss?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering, Beast.’

Antoinette was alone on the lower flight deck of Storm Bird. Her freighter was locked in a loom of heavy repair scaffolding in one of Zodiacal Light’s shuttle bays, braced to withstand even the increased acceleration rate of the light-hugger. The freighter had been here ever since they had taken the lighthugger, the damage it had sustained painstakingly being put right under Xavier’s expert direction. Xavier had relied on hyperpigs and shipboard servitors to help him do the work, and at first the repairs had gone more slowly than they would have with a fully trained monkey workforce. But although they had some dexterity problems, the pigs were ultimately cleverer than hyperprimates, and once the initial difficulties had been overcome and the servitors programmed properly, the work had gone very well. Xavier hadn’t just repaired the hull; he had completely re-armoured it. The engines, from docking thrusters right up to the main tokamak fusion powerplant, had been overhauled and tweaked for improved performance. The deterrents, the many weapons buried in camouflaged hideaways around the ship, had been upgraded and linked into an integrated weapons command net. There was no point pussyfooting now, Xavier had said. They had no reason to pretend that Storm Bird was just a freighter any more. Where they were headed, there would be no nosey authorities to hide anything from.

But once the acceleration rate had increased and they all had to either stay still or submit to the use of awkward, bulky exoskeletons, Antoinette had made fewer visits to her ship. It was not just that the work was nearly done, and there was nothing for her to supervise; there was something else that kept her away.

She supposed that on some level she had always had her suspicions. There had been times when she felt that she was not alone on Storm Bird; that Beast’s vigilance extended to more than just the mindless watchful scrutiny of a gamma-level persona. That there had been something more to him.

But that would have meant that Xavier — and her father — had lied to her. And that was something she was not prepared to deal with.

Until now.

During a brief lull when the acceleration was throttled back for technical checks, Antoinette had boarded Storm Bird. Out of sheer curiosity, expecting the information to have been erased from the ship’s archives, she had looked for herself to see whether they had anything to say on the matter of the Mandelstam Ruling.

They had, too.

But even if they hadn’t, she thought she would have guessed.

The doubts had begun to surface properly after the whole business with Clavain had started. There had been the time when Beast jumped the gun during the banshee attack, exactly as if her ship had ‘panicked’, except that for a gamma-level intelligence that was simply not possible.

Then there had been time when the police proxy, the one that was now counting out the rest of its life in a dank cellar in the Chateau, had quizzed her on her father’s relationship with Lyle Merrick. The proxy had mentioned the Mandelstam Ruling.

It had meant nothing to her at the time.

But now she knew.

Then there had been the time when Beast had inadvertently referred to itself as T, as if a scrupulously maintained facade had just, for the tiniest of moments, slipped aside. As if she had glimpsed the true face of something.

‘Little Miss…?’

‘I know.’

‘Know what, Little Miss?’

‘What you are. Who you are.’

‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but…’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Little Miss… if one might…’

‘I said shut the fuck up.’ Antoinette hit the panel of the flight deck console with the heel of her hand. It was the closest thing she could find to hitting Beast, and for a moment she felt a warm glow of retribution. ‘I know all about what happened. I found out about the Mandelstam Ruling.’

‘The Mandelstam Ruling, Little Miss?’

‘Don’t sound so fucking innocent. I know you know all about it. It’s the law they passed just before you died. The one about irreversible neural death sentences.’

‘Irreversible neural death, Little…’

The one that says that the authorities — the Ferrisville Convention — have the right to impound and erase any beta– or alpha-level copies of someone sentenced to permanent death. It says that no matter how many backups of yourself you make, no matter whether they’re simulacra or genuine neural scans, the authorities get to round them up and wipe them out.‘

‘That sounds rather extreme, Little Miss.’

‘It does, doesn’t it? And they take it seriously, too. Anyone caught harbouring a copy of a sentenced felon is in just as much trouble themselves. Of course, there are loopholes — a simulation can be hidden almost anywhere, or beamed to somewhere beyond Ferrisville jurisdiction. But there are still risks. I checked, Beast. The authorities have caught people who sheltered copies, against the Mandelstam Ruling. They all got the death sentence, too.’

‘It would seem a rather cavalier thing to do.’

She smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it just? But what if you didn’t even know you were sheltering one? How would that change the equation?’

‘One hesitates to speculate.’

‘I doubt it would change the equation one fucking inch. Not where the cops are concerned. Which would make it all the more irresponsible, don’t you think, for someone to trick someone else into harbouring an illegal simulation?’

‘Trick, Little Miss?’

She nodded. She was there now. No more pussyfooting here either. ‘The police proxy knew, didn’t it? Just couldn’t get the evidence together, I guess — or maybe it was just letting me stew, waiting to see how much I knew.’

The mask slipped again. ‘I’m not entire…’

‘I guess Xavier had to be in on it. He knows this ship like the back of his hand, every subsystem, every Goddamned wire. He certainly would have known how to hide Lyle Merrick aboard it.’

‘Lyle Merrick, Little Miss?’

‘You know. You remember. Not the Lyle Merrick, of course, just a copy of him. Beta– or alpha-level, I don’t know. Don’t very much care either. Wouldn’t have made a fuck of a lot of difference in a court of law, would it?’

‘Now…’

‘It’s you, Beast. You’re him. Lyle Merrick died when the authorities executed him for the collision. But that wasn’t the end, was it? You kept on going. Xavier hid a copy of Lyle aboard my father’s fucking ship. You’re it.’

Beast said nothing for several seconds. Antoinette watched the slow, hypnotic play of colours and numerics on the console. She felt as if a part of her had been violated, as if everything in the universe she had ever felt she could trust had just been wadded up and thrown away.

When Beast answered, the tone of his voice was mockingly unchanged. ‘Little Miss… I mean Antoinette… You’re wrong.’

‘Of course I’m not wrong. You’ve as good as admitted it.’

‘No. You don’t understand.’

‘What part don’t I understand?’

‘It wasn’t Xavier who did this to me. Xavier helped — Xavier knew all about it — but it wasn’t his idea.’

‘No?’

Tt was your father, Antoinette. He helped me.‘

She hit the console again, harder this time. And then walked out of her ship, intending never to set foot in it again.

Lasher the pig slept for most of the trip out from Zodiacal Light. There was nothing for him to do, Scorpio had said, except at the very end of the operation, and even then there was only a one-in-four chance that he would be required to do anything other than turn his ship around. But at the back of his mind he had always known it would be him who had to do the dirty work. He registered no surprise at all when the tight-beam message from Zodiacal Light told him that his shuttle was the one in the right quadrant of the sky to intercept the vessel Skade had dropped behind her larger ship.

‘Lucky old Lasher,’ he said to himself. ‘You always wanted the glory. Now’s your big chance.’

He did not take the duty lightly, nor underestimate the risks to himself. The recovery operation was fraught with danger. The amount of fuel his shuttle carried was precisely rationed, just enough so that he could get back home again with a human-mass payload. But there was no room for error. Clavain had made it clear that there were to be no pointless heroics. If the trajectory of Skade’s shuttle took it even a kilometre outside the safe volume in which a rendezvous was possible, Lasher — or whoever the lucky one was — was to turn back, ignoring it. The only concession to be made was that each of Clavain’s shuttles carried a single modified missile, the warhead stripped out and replaced with a transponder. If they got within range of Skade’s shuttle they could attach the beacon to its hull. The beacon would keep emitting its signal for a century of subjective time, five hundred years of worldtime. It would not be easy, but there would remain a faint chance of homing in on it again, before it fell beyond the well-mapped sphere of human space. It was enough to know that they would not have abandoned Felka entirely.

Lasher saw it now. His shuttle had homed in on Skade’s, following updated coordinates from Zodiacal Light. Skade’s shuttle was now in free-fall, having burned its last microgram of antimatter. It was visible in his forward window: a gunmetal barb illuminated by his forward floods.

He opened the channel back to the lighthugger. ‘This is Lasher. I see it now. It’s definitely a shuttle. Can’t tell you what type, but it doesn’t look like one of ours.‘

He slowed his approach. It would have been nice to wait for Scorpio’s response, but that was a luxury he did not have. There was already a twenty-minute timelag back to Zodiacal Light, and the distance was stretching continually as the larger ship maintained its ten-gee acceleration. He was permitted exactly thirty minutes here, and then he had to begin his return journey. If he stayed a minute longer he would never catch up with the lighthugger.

It would be just enough time to establish airlock connections between two unfamiliar ships, just enough time for him to get aboard and find Clavain’s daughter, or whoever she was.

He didn’t care who he was rescuing, only that Scorpio had told him to do it. So what if Scorpio was only doing what Clavain had told him to do? It didn’t matter, did not reduce in any way the burning soldierly admiration Lasher felt for his leader. He had followed Scorpio’s career almost from the moment Scorpio had arrived in Chasm City.

It was impossible to underestimate the effect of Scorpio’s coming. Before, the pigs had been a squabbling rabble, content to snuffle around in the shiftiest layers of the fallen city. Scorpio had galvanised them. He had become a criminal messiah, a figure so mythic that many pigs doubted that he even existed. Lasher had collected Scorpio’s crimes, committing them to memory with the avidity of a religious acolyte. He had studied them, marvelling at their brutal ingenuity, their haiku-like simplicity. How must it feel, he had wondered, to have been the author of such jewel-like atrocities? Later, he had moved into Scorpio’s realm of influence, and then ascended through the shadowy hierarchies of the criminal underworld. He remembered his first meeting with Scorpio, the sense of mild disappointment when he turned out to be just another pig like himself. Gradually, however, that realisation had only sharpened his admiration. Scorpio was flesh and blood, and that made his achievements all the more remarkable. Lasher, nervously at first, became one of Scorpio’s main operatives, and then one of his deputies.

And then Scorpio had vanished. It was said that he had gone into space, off to engage in sensitive negotiations with some other criminal group elsewhere in the system — the Skyjacks, perhaps.

It was unsafe for Scorpio to move at any time, but most especially during war. Lasher had forced himself to deal with the likely but unpalatable truth: Scorpio was probably dead.

Months had passed. Then Lasher had heard the news: Scorpio was in custody, or a kind of custody. The spiders had captured him, it turned out, maybe after the zombies had already picked him up. And now the spiders were being pressured into turning Scorpio over to the Ferrisville Convention.

That was it, then. Scorpio’s bright, inglorious reign had come to an end. The Convention could make any charge stick, and in wartime there was almost no crime that didn’t carry the death penalty. They had Scorpio, the prize they had sought for so long. There would be a show trial and then an execution, and Scorpio’s passage into legend would be complete.

But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the usual contradictory rumours, but some of them had spoken of the same thing — that Scorpio was alive and well, and no longer in anyone’s custody; that Scorpio had made it back to Chasm City and was now holed up in the darkly threatening structure some of the pigs knew as the Chateau des Corbeaux, the one they said had the haunted cellar. And that he was the guest of the Chateau’s mysterious tenant, and was now putting together the fabled thing that had often been spoken of but which had never quite come into existence before.

The army of pigs.

Lasher had rejoined his old master and learned that the rumours were true. Scorpio was working for, or in some strange collaboration with, the old man they called Clavain. And the two of them were plotting the theft of a ship belonging to the Ultras, something that the orthodox criminal rulebook said could not even be contemplated, let alone attempted. Lasher had been intrigued and terrified, even more so when he learned that the theft was just the prelude to something even more audacious.

How could he resist?

And so here, light-years from Chasm City, light-years from anything he could call familiar, he was. He had served Scorpio and served him well, not just treading in his footsteps but anticipating them; even, sometimes, dancing ahead of his master, earning Scorpio’s quiet praise.

He was near the shuttle now. It had the smooth worn-pebble look of Con-joiner machinery. It was completely dark. He tracked the floods across it, searching for the point where Clavain had told him he would find an airlock: an almost invisibly fine seam in the hull that would only reveal itself when he was close by. Distance to the hull was now fifteen metres, with a closing speed of one metre per second. The shuttle was small enough that he would have no difficulty finding the hostage aboard it, provided Skade had kept her word.

It happened when he was ten metres from the hull. It grew from the heart of the Conjoiner spacecraft: a mote of light, like the first spark of the rising sun.

Lasher did not have time to blink.

Skade saw the fairy-light glint of the crustbuster proximity device. It was not difficult to recognise. There were no stars aft of Nightshade now, only an inky spreading pool of total blackness. Relativity was squeezing the visible universe into a belt that encircled the ship. But Clavain’s ship was in nearly the same velocity frame as Nightshade, so it still appeared to lie directly behind her. The pinprick flare of the weapon studded that darkness like a single misplaced star.

Skade examined the light, corrected it for modest differential red shift and determined that the multiple-teratonne blast yield was consistent only with the device itself detonating, plus a small residual mass of antimatter. A shuttle-sized spacecraft had been destroyed by her weapon, but not a starship. The explosion of a lighthugger, a machine which had already sunk claws deep into the infinite energy well of the quantum vacuum, would have outshone the crustbuster by three orders of magnitude.

So Clavain had been cleverer than her again. No, she corrected herself: not cleverer, but precisely as clever. Skade had made no mistakes yet, and though Clavain had parried all her attacks, he had yet to strike at her. The advantage was still hers, and she was certain that she had inconvenienced him with at least one of her attacks. At the very least she had forced him to burn fuel he would sooner have conserved. More probably she had made him divert his efforts into countering her attacks rather than preparing for the battle that lay ahead around Resurgam. In every military sense she had lost nothing except the ability ever to bluff convincingly again.

But she had never been counting on that anyway.

It was time to do what had to be done.

‘You lying fuck.’

Xavier looked up as Antoinette stormed into their quarters. He was lying on his back on the bunk, a compad balanced between his knees. Antoinette had a momentary glimpse of lines of source code scrolling down the ‘pad, the symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalised stanzas of some alien poetry. Xavier had a stylus gripped between his teeth. It dropped from his mouth as he opened it in shock. The compad tumbled to the floor.

‘Antoinette?’

‘I know.’

‘You know what?’

‘About the Mandelstam Ruling. About Lyle Merrick. About Storm Bird. About Beast. About you.’

Xavier slid around on the bunk, his feet touching the floor. He pushed a few fingers through the black mop of his hair, bashfully.

‘About what?’

‘Don’t lie to me, you fuck!’

Then she was on him in a blind, pummelling rage. There was no real violence behind her punches; under any other circumstances they would have been playful. But Xavier hid his face, absorbing her anger against his forearms. He was trying to say something to her. She was blanking him out in her fury, refusing to listen to his snivelling little justifications.

Finally the rage turned to tears. Xavier stopped her from hitting him, taking her wrists gently.

‘Antoinette,’ he said.

She hit him one last time, then started weeping in earnest. She hated him and loved him at the same time.

‘It’s not my fault,’ Xavier said. ‘I swear it’s not my fault.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He looked at her, she returning his gaze through the blur of her tears. ‘Why didn’t I tell you?’

‘That’s what I asked.’

‘Because your father made me promise not to.’

When Antoinette had calmed down, when she was ready to listen, Xavier told her something of what had happened.

Jim Bax had been a friend of Lyle Merrick’s for many years. The two of them had been freighter pilots, both working within and around the Rust Belt. Normally two pilots operating in the same trading sphere would have found it difficult to sustain a genuine friendship through the ups and downs of a systemwide economy; there would have been too many occasions where their interests overlapped. But because Jim and Lyle operated in radically different niches with very different client lists, rivalry had never threatened their relationship. Jim Bax hauled heavy loads on rapid high-burn trajectories, usually at short notice and usually, though not always, more or less within the bounds of legality. Certainly Jim did not court criminal clients, although it was not exactly true to say that he turned them away, either. Lyle, by contrast, worked almost exclusively with criminals. They recognised that his slow, frail, unreliable chemical-drive scow was about the least likely ship to attract the attention of the Convention’s customs and excise cutters. Lyle could not guarantee that his loads would arrive at their destinations quickly, or sometimes at all, but he could almost always guarantee that they would arrive uninspected, and that there would be no inconvenient lines of questioning extending back to his clients. So, in a more than modest fashion, Lyle Merrick prospered. He went to a great deal of trouble to hide his earnings from the authorities, maintaining a fastidious illusion of being constantly on the edge of insolvency. But behind the scenes, and by the standards of the day, he was a moderately wealthy man, far wealthier, in fact, than Jim Bax would ever be. Wealthy enough, indeed, to afford to have himself backed-up once a year at one of the alpha-level scanning facilities in Chasm City’s high canopy.

And for many years his act worked. Until the day a bored police cutter decided to pick on Lyle for no other reason than that he had never troubled them before, and so therefore had to be up to something. The cutter had no difficulty matching trajectories with Lyle’s scow. It requested that he initiate main-engine cut-off and prepare for boarding. But Lyle knew he could not possibly comply with the enforced main-engine cutoff. His entire reputation hinged on the fact that his hauls were never inspected. Had he allowed the proxy aboard, he would have been signing his own bankruptcy notice.

He had no choice but to run.

Fortunately — or not, as the case proved — he was already on final approach for Carousel New Copenhagen. He knew that there was a repair well on the rim just large enough to hold his ship. It would be tight, but if he could get inside the bay, he would at least be able to destroy the cargo before the proxies forced their way aboard. He would still be in a lot of trouble, but at least he would not have broken client confidentiality, and that, for Lyle, mattered a lot more than his own wellbeing.

Lyle, of course, never made it. He screwed up his last approach burn, harried by the cutters — there were now four of them swooping in to escort him, and they had already fired retarder grapples on to his hull — and collided with the outer face of the rim itself. Surprisingly, and no one was more surprised than Lyle, he survived the impact. The blunt life-support and habitat module of his freighter had pushed itself through the skin of the carousel like a baby bird’s beak ripping through eggshell. His velocity at impact had only been a few tens of metres per second, and although he had been bruised and battered, he suffered no serious injuries. His luck continued even when the main propulsion section — the swollen lungs of the chemical fuel tanks — went up. The blast rammed the nose module further into the carousel, but again Lyle survived.

But even as he realised his good fortune, he knew that he was in grave trouble. The impact had not occurred in the most densely inhabited portion of the carousel’s ring, but there were still many casualties. A vault of the rim interior had decompressed as his ship plunged through the rim, the air gushing through the wound in the carousel’s fabric. The chamber had been a recreational zone, a miniature glade and forest lit by suspended lamps.

On any other night, there might have been no more than a few dozen people and animals enjoying the synthetic scenery by moonlight. But on the night Lyle crashed there had been a midnight recital of one of Quirrenbach’s more populist efforts, and several hundred people had been there. Thankfully most had survived, though many had been seriously injured. But there had still been fatalities: forty-three dead at the final count, excluding Lyle himself. It was certainly possible that more had been killed.

Lyle made no attempt to escape. He knew that his fate was sealed. He would have been lucky to avoid the death penalty just for refusing to comply with the boarding order, but even if he had wriggled out of that — and there were ways and means — there was nothing that could be done for him now. Since the Melding Plague, when the once glorious Glitter Band had been reduced to the Rust Belt, acts of vandalism against habitats were considered the most heinous of crimes. The forty-three dead were almost a detail.

Lyle Merrick was arrested, tried and sentenced. He was found guilty on all counts relating to the collision. His sentence was irreversible neural death. Since he was known to have been scanned, the Mandelstam Ruling was to apply.

Designated Ferrisville officials, nicknamed eraserheads, were assigned to track down and nullify all extant alpha– or beta-level simulations of Lyle Merrick. The eraserheads had the full legal machinery of the Convention behind them, together with an arsenal of plague-tolerant hunter-seeker software tools. They could comb any known database or archive and ferret out the buried patterns of an illegal simulation. They could erase any public database even suspected of holding a forbidden copy. They were very good at their work.

But Jim Bax wasn’t going to let down his friend. Before the net closed, and with the help of Lyle’s other friends, some of who were extremely frightening individuals, the most recent alpha-level backup was spirited out of the hands of the law. Deft alteration of the records at the scanning clinic made it appear as if Lyle had missed his last appointment. The eraserheads lingered over the evidence, puzzling over the anomalies for many days. But in the end they decided that the missing alpha had never existed. They had done their work in any case, rounding up all other known simulations.

So, in a sense, Lyle Merrick escaped justice.

But there was a catch, and it was one that Jim Bax insisted upon. He would shelter Lyle’s alpha-level persona, he said, and he would shelter it in a place the authorities were very unlikely ever to think of looking. Lyle would replace the subpersona of his ship, the alpha-level scan of a real human mind supplanting the collection of algorithms and subroutines that was a gamma-level persona. A real mind, albeit a simulation of the neural patterns of a real mind, would replace a purely fictitious persona.

A real ghost would haunt the machine.

‘Why?’ Antoinette asked. ‘Why did Dad want it to happen this way?’

‘Why do you think? Because he cared about his friend and his daughter. It was his way of protecting both of you.’

‘I don’t understand, Xave.’

‘Lyle Merrick was dead meat if he didn’t agree. Your father wasn’t going to risk his neck by sheltering the simulation any other way. At least this way Jim got something out of deal, other than the satisfaction of saving part of his friend.’

‘Which was?’

‘He got Lyle to promise to look after you when Jim wasn’t around.’

‘No,’ Antoinette said flatly.

‘You were going to be told. That was always the plan. But the years slipped by, and when Jim died…’ Xavier shook his head. ‘This isn’t easy for me, you know. How do you think I’ve felt, knowing this secret all these years? Sixteen Goddamned years, Antoinette. I was about as young and green as they come when your father first took me under his employment, helping him with Storm Bird. Of course I had to know about Lyle.’

‘I don’t follow. What do you mean, look after me?’

‘Jim knew he wasn’t going to be around for ever, and he loved you more than, well…’ Xavier trailed off.

‘I know he loved me,’ Antoinette said. ‘It’s not like we had one of those dysfunctional father-daughter relationships like they always have on the holoshows, you know. All that “you never told me you loved me” crap. We actually got along pretty damned well.’

‘I know. That was the point. Jim cared about what’d happen to you afterwards, when he was gone. He knew you’d want to inherit the ship. Wasn’t anything he could do about that, or even wanted to do about it. Hell, he was proud. Really proud. He thought you’d make a better pilot than he ever did, and he was damned sure you had more business sense.’

Antoinette suppressed half a smile. She had heard that sort of thing from her father often enough, but it was still pleasing to hear it from someone else; evidence — if she needed it — that Jim Bax had really meant it.

‘And?’

Xavier shrugged. ‘Guy still wanted to look out for his daughter. Not such a crime, is it?’

I don’t know. What was the arrangement?‘

‘Lyle got to inhabit Storm Bird. Jim told him he had to play along with being the old gamma-level; that you were never to suspect that you had a, well, guardian angel looking over you. Lyle was supposed to look after you, make sure you never got into too much trouble. It made sense, you know. Lyle had a strong instinct for self-preservation.’

She remembered the times that Beast had tried to talk her out of doing something. There had been many, and she had always put them down to an over-protective quirk of the subpersona. Well, she had been right. Dead right. Just not in quite the way she had assumed.

‘And Lyle just went along with it?’ she asked.

Xavier nodded. ‘You’ve got to understand: Lyle was on a serious guilt and recrimination trip. He really felt bad for all the people he had killed. For a while he wouldn’t even run himself — kept going into hibernation, or trying to persuade his friends to destroy him. The guy wanted to die.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘Because Jim gave him a reason to live. A way to make a difference, looking after you.’

‘And all that “Little Miss” shit?’

‘Part of the act. Got to hand it to the dude, he kept it up pretty good, didn’t he? Until the shit came down. But then you can’t blame him for panicking.’

Antoinette stood up. ‘I suppose not.’

Xavier looked at her expectantly. ‘Then… you’re OK about it?’

She turned around and looked him hard in the eyes. ‘No, Xave, I’m not OK about it. I understand it. I even understand why you lied to me all those years. But that doesn’t make it OK.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking down into his lap. ‘But all I ever did was make a promise to your father, Antoinette.’ ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.

Later, they made love. It was as good as any time she could remember with him; all the more so, perhaps, given the emotional fireworks that were still going off in her belly. And it was true what she had said to Xavier. Now that she had heard his side of the story, she understood that he could never have told her the truth, or at least not until she had figured out most of it for herself. She did not even particularly blame her father for what he had done. He had always looked after his friends, and he had always thought the world of his daughter. Jim Bax had done nothing out of character.

But that did not make the truth of it any easier to take. When she thought of all the time she had spent alone on Storm Bird now knowing that Lyle Merrick had been there, haunting her — perhaps even watching her — she felt a wrenching sense of betrayal and stupidity.

She did not think it was something she was capable of getting over.

A day later, Antoinette walked out to visit her ship, thinking that by entering it again she might find some forgiveness for the lie that had been visited on her by the one person in the universe she had thought she could trust. It hardly mattered that the lie had been a kind one, intended to protect her.

But when she reached the base of the scaffolding that embraced Storm Bird, she could go no further. She gazed up at the vessel, but the ship looked threatening and unfamiliar. It no longer looked like her ship, or anything that she wanted to be part of.

Crying because something had been stolen from her that could never be returned, Antoinette turned around and walked away.

Things moved with startling swiftness once the decision had been made. Skade throttled her ship down to one gee and then had the techs make the bubble contract to sub-bacterial size, maintained by only a trickle of power. This allowed much of the machinery to be disconnected. Then she gave the command that would cause a drastic reshaping of the ship, in accordance with the information that she had gleaned from Exordium.

Buried in the rear of Nightshade were many plague-hardened nanomachine repositories, dark tubers crammed with clades of low-level replicators. Upon Skade’s command the machines were released, programmed to multiply and diversify until they had formed a scalding slime of microscopic matter-transforming engines. The slime swarmed and infiltrated every niche of the rear part of the ship, dissolving and regurgitating the very fabric of the lighthugger. Much of the machinery of the device succumbed to the same transforming blight. In their wake, the replicators left glistening obsidian structures, fila-mental arcs and helices threading back into space behind the ship like so many trailing tentacles and stingers. They were studded with the nodes of subsidiary devices, bulging like black suckers and venom sacs. In operation, the machinery would move with respect to itself, executing a hypnotic thresherlike motion, whisking and slicing the vacuum. In the midst of that scything motion, a quark-sized pocket of state-four quantum vacuum would be conjured into existence. It would be a pocket of vacuum in which inertial mass was, in the strict mathematical sense, imaginary.

The quark-sized bubble would quiver, fluctuate and then — in much less than an instant of Planck time — it would engulf the entire spacecraft, undergoing an inflationary type phase transition to macroscopic dimensions. The machinery that would continue to hold it in check was engineered to astonishingly fine tolerances, down to the very threshold of Heisenberg fuzziness. How much of this was necessary, no one could guess. Skade was not prepared to second-guess what the whispering voices of Exordium had told her. All she could do was hope that any deviations would not affect the functioning of the machine, or at least affect it so profoundly that it did not work at all. The thought of it working, but working wrongly, was entirely too terrifying to contemplate.

But nothing happened the first time. The machinery had powered up and the quantum-vacuum sensors had picked up strange, subtle fluctuations… but equally precise measurements established that Nightshade had not moved an angstrom further than it would have under ordinary inertia-suppressing propulsion. Angry as much with herself as anyone else, Skade made her way through the interstices of the curved black machinery. Soon, she found the person she was looking for: Molenka, the Exordium systems technician. Molenka looked drained of blood.

What went wrong?

Molenka fumbled out an explanation, dumping reams of technical data into the public part of Skade’s mind. Skade absorbed the data critically, skimming it for the essentials. The configuration of the field-containment systems had not been perfect; the bubble of state-two vacuum had evaporated back into state zero before it could be pushed over the potential barrier into the magical tachyonic state four. Skade appraised the machinery. It appeared undamaged.

Then you’ve learned what went wrong, I take it? You can make the appropriate corrective changes and attempt the transition again?

[Skade…]

What?

[Something did happen. I can’t find Jastrusiak anywhere. He was much closer to the equipment than I was when we attempted the experiment. But he isn’t there now. I can’t find him anywhere, or even any evidence of him.]

Skade listened to this without registering any expression beyond tolerant interest. Only when the woman had finished speaking and there had been several seconds of silence did she reply. Jastrusiak?

[Yes… Jastrusiak.]

The woman seemed relieved. [My partner in this. The other Exordium expert.]

There was never anyone called Jastrusiak on this ship, Molenka.

Molenka turned — so it appeared to Skade — a shade paler. Her reply was little more than an exhalation. [No…]

I assure you, there was no one called Jastrusiak. This is a small crew, and I know everyone on it.

[That isn’t possible. I was with him not twenty minutes ago. We were in the machinery, readying it for the transition. Jastrusiak stayed there to make last-minute adjustments. I swear this!]

Perhaps you do. Skade was tempted, very tempted, to reach into Molenka’s head and install a mnemonic blockade, wiping out Molenka’s memory of what had just happened. But that would not bury the evident conflict between what she thought to be true and what was objective reality.

Molenka, I know this will be difficult for you, but you have to continue working with the equipment. I’m sorry about Jastrusiak — I forgot his name for a moment. Well find him, I promise you. There are many places where he could have ended up.

[I don’t…]

Skade cut her off, one of her fingers suddenly appearing beneath Molenka’s chin. No. No words, Molenka. No words, no thoughts. Just go back into the machinery and make the necessary adjustments. Do that for me, will you? Do it for me, and for the Mother Nest?

Molenka trembled. She was, Skade judged, quite exquisitely terrified. It was the resigned, hopeless terror of a small mammal caught in something’s claws. [Yes, Skade.]

The name Jastrusiak stuck in Skade’s mind, tantalisingly familiar. She could not dislodge it. When the opportunity presented itself, she tapped into the Con-joiner collective memory and retrieved all references connected to the name, or anything close to it. She was determined to understand what had made Molenka’s subconscious malfunction in such a singularly creative fashion, weaving a non-existent individual out of nothing in a moment of terror.

To her moderate surprise, Skade learned that Jastrusiak was a name known to the Mother Nest. There had been a Jastrusiak amongst the Conjoined. He had been recruited during the Chasm City occupation. He had quickly gained Inner Sanctum clearance, where he worked on advanced concepts such as breakthrough propulsion theory. He had been one of a team of Conjoiner theorists who had established their own research base on an asteroid. They had been working on methods to convert existing Conjoiner drives to the stealthed design.

It was tricky work, it turned out. Jastrusiak’s team had been amongst the first to learn exactly how tricky. Their entire base, along with a sizeable chunk of that hemisphere of the asteroid, had been wiped out in an accident.

So Jastrusiak was dead — had, in fact, been dead for many years.

But had he lived, Skade thought, he would have been exactly the kind of expert she would have recruited for her own team aboard Nightshade. Very probably he would have been of similar calibre to Molenka, and would have ended up working alongside her.

What did it mean? It was, she supposed, no more than uncomfortable coincidence.

Molenka called her back. [We’re ready, Skade. We can try the experiment again.]

Skade hesitated, almost about to tell her that she had discovered the truth about Jastrusiak. But then she thought better of it. Make it so, Skade told her.

She watched the machinery move, the curved black arms whisking back and forth and, it appeared, through each other, knitting and threshing time and space like some infernal weaving machine, coaxing and cradling the bacterium-sized speck of altered metric into the tachyonic phase. Within seconds the machinery had become a knitting blur behind Nightshade. The gravity wave and exotic particle sensors registered squalls of deep spatial stress as the quantum vacuum on the boundary of the bubble was curdled and sheared on microscopic scales. The pattern of those squalls, filtered and processed by computers, told Molenka how the bubble’s geometry was behaving. She transmitted this data to Skade, permitting her to visualise the bubble as a glowing globule of light, pulsing and quivering like a drop of mercury suspended in a magnetic cradle. Colours, not all of them within the normal human spectrum, shifted in prismatic waves across the skin of the bubble, signifying arcane nuances of quantum-vacuum interaction. None of that concerned Skade; all that mattered to her were the accompanying indices that told her that the bubble was behaving normally, or as normally as could be expected of something that had no real right to exist in this universe. There was a soft blue glow from the bubble as particles of Hawking radiation were snatched into the tachyonic state and whisked away from Nightshade at superluminal speed.

Molenka signalled that they were ready to expand the bubble, so that Nightshade itself would be trapped inside its own sphere of tachyonic-phase space-time. The process would happen in a flash, and the field, according to Molenka, would collapse back to its microscopic scale in subjective picoseconds, but that instant of stability would be sufficient to translate Skade’s ship across a light-nanosecond of space, about one-third of a metre. Disposable probes had already been deployed beyond the expected radius of the bubble, ready to capture the instant when the ship made its tachyonic shift. One-third of a metre was not enough to make a difference against Clavain, of course, but in principle the jump procedure could be extended in duration and repeated almost immediately. By far the hardest thing would be to do it once; thereafter it was only a question of refinements.

Skade gave Molenka permission to expand the bubble. At the same time Skade willed her implants into their maximum state of accelerated consciousness. The normal activity of the ship became a barely changing background; even the whisking black arms slowed so that she was able to appreciate their hypnotic dance more clearly. Skade examined her state of mind and found nervous anticipation, mingled with the visceral fear that she was about to commit a grave mistake. She recalled that the Wolf had told her that very few organic entities had ever moved faster than light. Under other circumstances, she might have chosen to heed the Wolf’s unspoken warning, but at the same time the Wolf had been goading her on, urging her to this point. Its technical assistance had been vital in decoding the Exordium instructions, and she assumed that it had some interest in preserving its own existence. But perhaps it simply enjoyed seeing her conflicted, caring nothing for its own survival.

Never mind. It was done now. The whisking arms were already altering the field conditions around the bubble, stroking the boundary with delicate quantum caresses, encouraging it to expand. The wobbling bubble enlarged, swelling in a series of lopsided expansions. The scale changed in a series of logarithmic jumps, but not nearly fast enough. Skade knew immediately that something was wrong. The expansion should have happened too rapidly to be sensed, even in accelerated consciousness. The bubble should have engulfed the ship by now, but instead it had only inflated to the size of a swollen grapefruit. It hovered within the grasp of the whisking arms, horribly, tauntingly wrong. Skade prayed for the bubble to shrink back down to bacterium size, but she knew from what Molenka had said that it was much more likely to expand in an uncontrolled fashion. Horrified and enraptured, she watched as the grapefruit-sized bubble flexed and undulated, becoming peanut-shaped one instant and then squirming into a torus, a topological transformation that Molenka had sworn was impossible. Then it was a bubble again, and then, as random bulges and dents pulsed in an out of the membrane’s surface, Skade swore she saw a gargoyle face leer at her. She knew that it was the fault of her subconscious, imprinting a pattern where none existed, but the impression of inchoate evil was inescapable.

Then the bubble expanded again, swelling up to the size of a small spacecraft. Some of the whisking arms did not swing out of the way in time, and their sharp extremities punched through the undulating membrane. The sensors flipped into overload, unable to process the howling torrent of gravitational and particle flux. Inexorably, matters were shifting out of control. Vital control systems in the rear of Nightshade were shutting down. The arms began to move spasmodically, lashing against each other like the limbs of ill-orchestrated dancers. Nodules and flanges sheered off. Scarves of glowing plasma ripped between the boundary and its encasing machinery. The boundary bloated again; its membrane swallowed cubic hectares of support machinery. The failing machinery could no longer hold it stable. Dim explosions pulsed within the bubble. A major control arm severed itself and swung back into the side of Nightshade’s hull. Skade sensed a chain of explosions surging along the side of her ship, pink blossoms cascading towards the bridge. Her beautiful machinery was ripping itself to pieces. The bubble squirmed larger, oozing through the failing constraints of the sheered and buckled arms. Emergency alarms sounded, internal barricades clanging down throughout the ship. Whiteness glared from the heart of the bubble as matter within it underwent a partial transition to the pure photonic state. A catastrophic reversion to the state-three quantum vacuum, in which all matter was massless…

The photo-leptonic flash surged through the membrane. The few arms that were still functioning were snapped backwards like broken fingers. There was a brief, furious sizzle of plasma discharge and then the bubble swept larger, engulfing Nightshade and dissipating at the same time. Skade felt it slam through her, like a sudden cold front on a warm day. At the same time a shock wave shook the ship, throwing Skade against a wall. Ordinarily the wall would have deformed to absorb the energy of the collision, but this time the impact was hard and metallic.

Yet the ship remained around her. She was able to think. She could still hear klaxons and emergency messages, and the barricades were still closing. But the excursion event had passed. The bubble had shattered, but while it had damaged her ship — perhaps profoundly, perhaps beyond the point of repair — it had not destroyed it.

Skade willed her consciousness rate back down to her normal processing speed. Her crest throbbed with the excess blood heat it had to dissipate — she felt light-headed — but that would soon pass. She appeared to have suffered no injuries, even in the violent crash against the wall. Her armour moved at her will, undamaged by the impact. She took hold of a wall restraint and tugged herself into the middle of the corridor. She had no weight, for Nightshade was drifting and had never been equipped for spin-generated gravity.

Molenka?

There was no response. The entire shipboard network was down, preventing neural communication unless the subjects were extremely close to each other. But she knew where Molenka had been before the bubble had swelled out of control. She called aloud, but there was still no answer, and then set off in the direction of the machinery. The critical volume was still pressurised, though she had to persuade the internal doors to let her through.

The glossy, curved surfaces of the alien machinery, like black glass, had shifted since she was last within this part of the ship. She wondered how much of the change had happened during the failed attempt to expand the bubble. The air prickled with ozone and a dozen less familiar smells, and against the continuous background of klaxons and spoken alarms she heard sparking and shearing sounds.

‘Molenka?’ she called again.

[Skade.] The neural response was incredibly weak, but it was recognisably Molenka. She was close now, certainly.

Skade pushed forwards, hand over hand, the movements of her armour stiff. The machinery surrounded her on all sides, smooth black ledges and protrusions, like the water-carved rock in some ancient underground cavern. It widened out, admitting her to an occlusion five or six metres from side to side. The scalloped walls were studded with data-input sockets. A window set into the far side of the chamber offered a view of the smashed and buckled containment machinery jutting from the rear of her ship. Even now some of the arms were still moving, ticking lazily back and forth like the last twitching limbs of a dying creature. Seen with her eyes, the damage appeared much worse than she had been led to believe. Her ship had been gutted, its viscera ripped out for inspection.

But that was not what drew Skade’s attention. In the approximate centre of the occlusion floated an undulating sac, its skin a milky translucence behind which something shifted in and out of visibility. The sac was five-pointed, throwing out blunt pseudopodia that corresponded in proportion and arrangement to the head and limbs of a human. Indeed, Skade saw, the thing within it was human, a shape she glimpsed in shattered parts rather than any unified whole. There was a ripple of dark clothing and a ripple of paler flesh.

Molenka?

Though she was only metres away, the reply felt astonishingly distant.

[Yes. It’s me. I’m trapped, Skade. Trapped inside part of the bubble.]

Skade shivered, impressed by the woman’s calm. She was clearly going to die, and yet her reporting of her predicament had an admirable detachment. It was the attitude of a true Conjoiner, convinced that her essence would live on in the wider consciousness of the Mother Nest, and that physical death amounted only to the removal of an inessential peripheral element from a much more significant whole. But, Skade reminded herself, they were a long way from the Mother Nest now. The bubble, Molenka?

[It fragmented as it passed through the ship. It glued itself to me, almost deliberately. Almost as if it was looking for someone to surround, someone to embed within itself.] The five-pointed thing wobbled revoltingly, hinting at some awful instability that was on the point of collapsing.

What state are you in, Molenka?

[It must be state one, Skade… I don’t feel any different. Just trapped… and distant. I feel very, very distant.] The bubble fragment began to contract, exactly as Molenka had said it was likely to do. The body-shaped membrane shrunk down until its surface conformed closely with Molenka’s body. For a dreadful moment she looked quite normal, except that she was covered in a shifting glaze of pearly light. Skade dared to hope that the bubble would choose that instant to collapse, freeing Molenka. But at the same time she knew it was not about to happen.

The bubble quivered again, hiccoughed and twitched. Molenka’s expression — it was quite visible — became obviously frightened. Even through the faint neural channel that connected them, Skade felt the woman’s fear and apprehension. It was as if the glaze was tightening around her.

[Help me, Skade. I can’t breathe.]

I can’t. I don’t know what to do.

Molenka’s skin was tight against the membrane. She was starting to suffocate. Normal speech would have been impossible by now, but the automatic routines in her head would have already started shutting down non-essential parts of her brain, conserving vital resources to squeeze three or four extra minutes of consciousness from her last breath. [Help me. Please…]

The membrane tightened further. Skade watched, unable to turn away, as it squeezed Molenka. Her pain gushed across the neural link. It was all that Skade recognised: there was no further room for rational thought. She reached out, desperate to do something even if the gesture was hopeless. Her fingers skimmed the surface of the membrane. It shrank further, hastened by the contact. The neural link began to break up. The collapsing membrane was crushing Molenka alive, the pressure destroying the delicate loom of Conjoiner implants that floated in her skull.

The membrane halted, quivered, and then shrank down with shocking speed. When Molenka was three-quarters of her normal size, the figure within the membrane turned abruptly scarlet. Skade felt the screaming howl of abrupt neural severance before her own implants curtailed the link. Molenka was dead. But the human-shaped form lingered even as it collapsed further. Now it was a mannequin, now a horrid marionette, now a doll, now a thumb-sized figurine, losing shape and definition as the material within liquefied. Then the contraction stopped, the milky envelope stabilising.

Skade reached out and grasped the marble-sized thing that had been Molenka, knowing that she must dispose of it into vacuum before the field contracted even further. The matter within the membrane — that matter that had once been Molenka — was already under savage compression, and she did not want to think about what would happen should it spontaneously expand.

She tugged at the marble, but the thing barely moved, as if it were locked rigid at that precise point in space and time. She increased her suit’s strength and finally the marble began to shift. It had all of Molenka’s inertial mass within it, perhaps more, and it would be just as difficult to stop or steer.

Skade began to make her laborious way to the nearest dorsal airlock.

The projection helix spun up to speed. Clavain stood with his hands on the railing that surrounded it, peering at the indistinct shape that appeared within the cylinder. It resembled a squashed bug, a fan of soft ropelike entrails spilling from one end of a hard, dark carapace.

‘She isn’t going anywhere in a hurry,’ Scorpio said.

‘Dead in the water,’ Antoinette Bax concurred. She whistled. ‘She’s drifting, just falling through space. Holy shit. What do you think happened to her?’

‘Something bad, but not something catastrophic,’ Clavain said quietly, ‘or else we wouldn’t see her at all. Scorp, can you zoom in and enhance the rear section? It looks like something happened there.’

Scorpio was controlling the hull cameras, slaved to pan over the drifting starship as they slammed past it with a velocity differential of more than a thousand kilometres per second. They would be within effective weapons range for only an hour. Zodiacal Light was not even accelerating at the moment; the inertia-suppressing systems were switched off and the engines were quiet. Great flywheels had spun the lighthugger’s habitation core up to one gee of centrifugal gravity. Clavain enjoyed not having to struggle around under higher gravity or wear an exoskeletal rig. It was even more pleasant not having to suffer the disturbing physiological effects of the inertia-suppression field.

‘There,’ Scorpio said when he had finished adjusting the settings. ‘That’s as clear as it’s going to get, Clavain.’

‘Thanks.’

Remontoire, the only one amongst them still wearing an exoskeletal rig, stepped closer to the cylinder, brushing past Pauline Sukhoi with a whirr of servos.

‘I don’t recognise those structures, Clavain, but they look intentional.’

Clavain nodded. That was his opinion as well. The basic shape of the light-hugger was still as it should have been, but from her rear erupted a complicated splay of twisted filaments and arcs, like the mainsprings and ratchets of some clockwork mechanism caught in the act of exploding.

‘Would you care to speculate?’ Clavain asked Remontoire.

‘She was desperate to escape us, desperate to pull ahead. She might have considered something extreme.’

‘Extreme?’ Xavier asked. He had one hand around Antoinette’s waist. The two of them were filthy with machine oil.

‘She already had inertia suppression,’ Remontoire said. ‘But 1 think this was something else — a modification of the same equipment to push it into a different state.’

‘Such as?’ Xavier asked.

Clavain looked at Remontoire, too.

Remontoire said, ‘The technology will suppress inertial mass — that’s what Skade called a state-two field — but it doesn’t remove it entirely. In a state-three field, however, all inertial mass drops to zero. Matter becomes photonic, unable to travel at anything other than the speed of light. Time dilation becomes infinite, so the ship would remain frozen in the photonic state until the end of time.’

Clavain nodded at his friend. Remtontoire appeared perfectly willing to wear the exoskeleton even though it was functioning as a form of restraint, capable of immobilising him should Clavain decide that he could not be trusted.

‘What about state four?’ Clavain asked.

‘That might be more useful,’ Remontoire said. ‘If she could tunnel through state three, skipping it entirely, she might be able to achieve a smooth transition to a state-four field. Inside that field, the ship would flip into a tachyonic mass state, unable to do anything but travel faster than light.’

‘Skade tried that?’ Xavier asked reverently.

‘It’s as good an explanation as any I can think of,’ Remontoire said.

‘What do you think happened?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Some sort of field instability,’ Pauline Sukhoi said, the pale reflection of her haunted face hanging in the display tank. She spoke slowly and solemnly. ‘Managing a bubble of altered space-time makes fusion containment look like the kind of game children play on their birthdays. My suspicion is that Skade first created a microscopic bubble, probably sub-atomic, certainly no larger than a bacterium. At that scale, it’s deceptively easy to manipulate. See those sickles and arms?’ She nodded at the image, which had rotated slightly since it had first appeared. Those would have been her field generators and containment systems. They would have been supposed to allow the field to expand in a stable fashion until it encased the ship. A bubble expanding at light-speed would take less than half a millisecond to swallow a ship the size of Nightshade, but altered vacuum expands superluminally, like inflationary space-time. A state-four bubble has a characteristic doubling time in the order of ten to the minus forty-three seconds. That doesn’t give much time to react if things start going wrong.‘

‘And if the bubble kept growing…?’ Antoinette asked.

‘It won’t,’ Sukhoi said. ‘At least, you wouldn’t ever know about it if it does. No one would.’

‘Skade’s lucky she has a ship left,’ Xavier said.

Sukhoi nodded. ‘It must have been a small accident, probably during the transition between states. She may have hit state three, converting a small chunk of her ship to pure white light. A small photo-leptonic explosion.’

‘It looks survivable,’ Scorpio said.

‘Are there life-signs?’ Antoinette asked.

Clavain shook his head. ‘None. But there wouldn’t be, not with Nightshade. The prototype’s designed for maximum stealth. Our usual scanning methods won’t work.’

Scorpio adjusted some settings, causing the colours of the image to shift to spectral greens and blues. ‘Thermal,’ he said. ‘She still has power, Clavain. If there’d been a major systems blow-out, her hull would be five degrees cooler by now.’

‘I don’t doubt that there are survivors,’ Clavain said.

Scorpio nodded. ‘Some, maybe. They’ll lie low until we’re ahead of them, out of sensor range. Then they’ll kick into repair mode. Before you know it they’ll be on our tail, just as much a problem as they ever were.’

‘I’ve thought about that, Scorp,’ said Clavain.

The pig nodded. ‘And?’

‘I’m not going to attack them.’

Scorpio’s wild dark eyes flared. ‘Clavain…’

‘Felka is still alive.’

There was an awkward silence. Clavain felt it press around him. They were all looking at him, even Sukhoi, each of them thanking their stars that they did not have to take this decision.

‘You don’t know that,’ Scorpio said. Clavain saw the lines of tension etched into his jaw. ‘Skade lied before and killed Lasher. She hasn’t given us any evidence that she really has Felka. That’s because she doesn’t have her, or because Felka is dead now.’

Calmly, Clavain said, ‘What evidence could she give? There isn’t anything she couldn’t fake.’

‘She could have learned something from Felka, something only she would know.’

‘You never met Felka, Scorp. She’s strong — much stronger than Skade assumes. She wouldn’t give Skade anything Skade could use to control me.’

‘Then perhaps she does have her, Clavain. But that doesn’t mean she’s awake. She’s probably in reefersleep, so she doesn’t cause any trouble.’

‘What difference would that make?’ Clavain asked.

‘She wouldn’t feel anything,’ Scorpio said. ‘We have enough weapons now, Clavain. Nightshade is a sitting duck. We can take her out instantly, painlessly. Felka won’t know a thing.’

Clavain reached for his anger, forcing it to lie low. ‘Would you say that if she hadn’t murdered Lasher?’

The pig thumped the railing. ‘She did, Clavain. That’s all that matters.’

‘No…’ Antoinette said. ‘It isn’t all that matters. Clavain’s right. We can’t start acting like a single human life doesn’t matter. We become as bad as the wolves if we do that.’

Xavier, next to her, beamed proudly. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Scorpio. I know she killed Lasher, and I know how much that pissed you off.’

‘You have no idea,’ Scorpio said. He did not sound angry so much as regretful. ‘And don’t tell me a single human life suddenly matters. It’s just because you know her. Skade is human, too. What about her, and her allies aboard that ship?’

Cruz, who had been silent until then, spoke softly. ‘Listen to Clavain. He’s right. We’ll get another chance to kill Skade. This just doesn’t feel right.’

‘Might I make a suggestion?’ Remontoire said.

Clavain looked at Remontoire uneasily. ‘What, Rem?’

‘We are just — just — within shuttle range. It would cost us more antimatter, a fifth of our remaining stocks, but we may never get another chance like this.’

‘Another chance to do what?’ Clavain asked.

Remontoire blinked, surprised, as if this was entirely too obvious to state. ‘To rescue Felka, of course.’