Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 2

Skade was wedged between two curving black masses of machinery when the alert came in. One of her feelers had detected a change in the ship’s attack posture, an escalation in the state of battle readiness. It was not necessarily a crisis, but it certainly demanded her immediate attention.

Skade unplugged her compad from the machinery, the fibreoptic umbilical whisking back into the compad’s housing. She pressed the blank slate of the compad against her stomach, where it flexed and bonded with the padded black fabric of her vest. Almost immediately the compad began backing up its cache of data, feeding it into a secure partition in Skade’s long-term memory.

Skade crawled through the narrow space between the machine components, arching and corkscrewing through the tightest spaces. After twenty metres she reached the exit point and eased herself partway through a narrow circular aperture that had just opened in one wall. Then Skade froze, falling perfectly silent and still; even the colour waves in her crest subsided. The loom of implants in her head detected no other Conjoiners within fifty metres, and confirmed that all monitoring systems in this corridor were turning a blind eye to her emergence. But still she was cautious, and when she moved — looking up and down the corridor — she did so with exquisite calm and caution, like a cat venturing into unfamiliar territory.

There was no one in sight.

Skade pulled herself entirely free of the aperture, then issued a mental command that made it sphincter tight, forming an invisibly fine seal. Only Skade knew where these entry apertures were, and the apertures would only show themselves to her. Even if Clavain detected the presence of the hidden machinery, he would never find a way to reach it without using the brute force that would trigger the machinery to self-destruct.

The ship was in free fall, still, so Skade presumed, sidling closer to the enemy ship they had been chasing. Weightlessness suited Skade. She scampered along the corridor, springing from contact point to contact point on all fours. Her movements were so precise and economical that she sometimes seemed to travel within her own personal bubble of gravity.

[Report, Skade?]

She never knew precisely when the Night Council was going to pop into her head, but she had long since stopped being fazed by its sudden apparitions.

Nothing untoward. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what the machinery’s capable of doing, but so far everything’s working just the way we thought it would. [Good. Of course, a more extensive test would be desirable…] Skade felt a flush of irritation. I already told you. At the moment it takes careful measurement to detect the influence of the machinery. That means we can perform clandestine tests under the cover of routine military operations.

Skade pounced into a junction, kicking off towards the bridge. Forcing calm, tuning her blood chemistry, she continued, I agree that we need to do more before we can equip the fleet, but the instant we increase testing we risk widespread knowledge of our breakthrough. And I don’t just mean within the Mother Nest.

[Your point is well made, Skade. There is no need to remind us. We were merely stating the facts. Inconvenient or otherwise, more extensive tests must take place, and they must take place soon.]

She passed another Conjoiner on his way to a different part of the ship. Skade peered into his mind, glimpsing a surface slurry of recent experiences and emotions. None of it interested her or was of tactical relevance. Beneath the slurry were deeper layers of memory, mnemonic structures plunging down into opaque darkness like great drowned monuments. All of it was hers to sift and scrutinise, but again none of it interested her. Down at the very deepest level Skade detected a few partitioned private memories that he did not think she could read. For a thrilling instant she was tempted to reach in and edit the man’s own blockades, screening one or two tiny cherished memories from their owner. Skade resisted; it was enough to know that she could.

By way of return she felt the man’s mind send enquiring probes into her own, and then flinch away at the stinging denial of access. She felt the man’s curiosity, doubtless wondering why someone from the Closed Council had come aboard the ship.

This amused her. The man knew of the Closed Council, and might even have some inkling of the Council’s super-secret core, the Inner Sanctum. But Skade was certain that he had never even imagined the existence of the Night Council.

He passed her by; she continued on her way.

[Reservations, Skade?]

Of course I have reservations. We’re playing with God’s own fire. It’s not something you rush into.

[The wolves won’t wait for us, Skade.]

Skade bristled, hardly needing to be reminded of the wolves. Fear was a useful spur, she admitted that, but it could only make so much difference. As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn’t built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.

I haven’t forgotten about the wolves.

[Good, Skade. We haven’t, either. And we very much doubt that the wolves have forgotten about us.]

She felt the Night Council withdraw, retreating to some tiny unlocatable pocket in her head where it would wait until next time.

Skade arrived at the bridge of Nightshade, conscious that her crest was pulsing livid shades of rose and scarlet. The bridge was a windowless spherical room deep inside the ship, large enough to contain five or six Conjoiners without seeming cramped. But for now only Clavain and Remontoire were present, just as they had been when she left. They were both lying in acceleration hammocks, suspended in the middle of the sphere, their eyes closed as they tapped into the wider sensory environment of Nightshade. They looked absurdly restful, with their arms neatly folded across their chests.

Skade waited while the room threw a separate hammock around her, wrapping her in a protective mesh of lianalike vines. Idly, she skimmed their minds. Remontoire’s was fully open to her, even his Closed Council partitions appearing as mere demarcations rather than absolute barriers. His mind was like a city made of glass, smoked here and there, but never entirely opaque. Seeing through Closed Council screens had been one of the first tricks that the Night Council had taught her, and it had proven useful even after she had joined the Closed Council. Not all Closed Council members were privy to exactly the same secrets — there was the Inner Sanctum, for a start — but nothing was hidden from Skade.

Clavain was frustratingly harder to read, which was why he both fascinated and disturbed her. His neural implants were of a much older configuration than anyone else’s, and Clavain had never allowed them to be upgraded. Large parts of his brain were not subsumed by the loom at all, and the neural bondings between these regions and the Conjoiner parts were sparse and inefficiently distributed. Skade’s search-and-retrieve algorithms could extract neural patterns from any part of Clavain’s brain that had been subsumed by the loom, but even that was a lot easier said than done. Searching Clavain’s mind was like being given the keys to a fabulous library that had just been swept through by a whirlwind. By the time she located what she was looking for, it was usually no longer relevant.

Nonetheless, Skade had learned a great deal about Clavain. It was ten years since Galiana’s return, but if her reading of his mind was accurate — and she had no reason to doubt that it was otherwise — Clavain still had no real idea about what had happened.

In common with the whole of the Mother Nest, Clavain knew that Galiana’s ship had encountered hostile alien entities in deep space, machines that had come to be called the wolves. The wolves had infiltrated the ship, ripping open the minds of her crew. Clavain knew that Galiana had been spared and that her body was still preserved; he knew also that there was a structure of evident wolf origin lodged in her skull. What he did not know, and to the best of Skade’s knowledge had never suspected, was that Galiana had returned to consciousness; that there had been a brief window of lucidity before the Wolf had spoken through her. More than one, in fact.

Skade recalled lying to Galiana, telling her that Clavain and Felka were already dead. It had not been easy at first. Like any Conjoiner, Skade viewed Galiana with awe. She was the mother of them all, the queen of the Conjoined faction. Equally, the Night Council had reminded Skade that she had a duty to the Mother Nest that superseded her reverence towards Galiana. It was her duty to make maximum use of the windows of lucidity to learn what could be learned of the wolves, and that meant unburdening Galiana of any superfluous concerns. Hurtful as it had felt at the time, the Night Council had assured her it was better in the long run.

And gradually Skade had come to see the sense of it. It was not really Galiana she was lying to, after all, but a shadow of what Galiana had been. And one lie naturally demanded another, which was why Clavain and Felka had never learned of the conversations.

Skade withdrew her mental probes, settling for a routine level of intimacy. She allowed Clavain access to her surface memories, sensory modalities and emotions, or rather to a subtly doctored version of them. At the same time Remontoire saw precisely as much as he expected to see — but again, doctored and modified to suit Skade’s purposes.

The acceleration hammock tugged Skade into the centre of the sphere, next to the other two. Skade folded her arms under her breasts, settling them over the curved plate of the compad, which was still whispering its findings into her long-term memory.

Clavain’s presence asserted itself. [Skade. Nice of you to join us.]

I sensed a change in our attack readiness, Clavain. I imagine it has something to do with the Demarchist ship?

[Actually, it’s a little more interesting than that. Take a look.]

Clavain offered her one end of a data feed from the ship’s sensor net. Skade accepted the feed, instructing her implants to map it into her sensorium with her usual filters and preferences.

She experienced a pleasing instant of dislocation. Her body, the bodies of her companions, the room in which they floated, the great sleek carbon-black needle of Nightshade — all these things shifted to insubstantiality.

The Jovian was a massive presence ahead, wrapped in an ever-moving geometrically complex cloud of interdicted zones and safe passages. An angry swarm of platforms and sentries whipped around the world in tight precessional orbits. Closer, but not much closer, was the Demarchist ship that Nightshade had been chasing. It was already touching the top of Tangerine Dream’s atmosphere, beginning to glow hotter. The shipmaster was taking a risk with the atmospheric dive, hoping to gain concealment beneath a few hundred kilometres of overlying cloud.

It was, Skade reflected, a move born of desperation.

Transatmospheric insertions were risky, even for ships built to make skimming passes into the upper layers of Jovians. The shipmaster would have had to slow down before attempting the plunge, and would be moving slowly again upon return to space. Aside from the camouflaging effect of the overlying air — the benefits of which depended on the armoury of sensors that the pursuing ship carried, and on what could be detected by low-orbit satellites or floating drones — the only advantage in making a skim was to replenish fuel reserves.

In the early years of the war, both sides had used antimatter as their main energy source. The Conjoiners, with their camouflaged manufactories on the edge of the system, were still able to produce and store antimatter in militarily useful quantities. Even if they could not, it was common knowledge that they had access to even more prodigious energy sources. But handling antimatter was something that the Demarchists had not been able to do for more than a decade. They had fallen back on fusion power, for which they needed hydrogen, ideally dredged from the oceans within gas giants where it was already compressed into its metallic state. The shipmaster would open the ship’s fuel scoops, sucking in and compressing atmospheric hydrogen, or might even attempt a plunge into the ‘merely’ liquid hydrogen sea overlaying the metallic-state hydrogen wrapped around the Jovian’s rocky nugget of a core. But that would be a hazardous thing to attempt in a ship that had already sustained battle damage. Very probably the shipmaster would be hoping that the scoops would not be necessary; that it might instead manage to rendezvous with one of the whale-brained tankers circling endlessly through the atmosphere, singing sad, mournful songs of turbulence and hydrocarbon chemistry. The tanker would inject slugs of pre-processed metallic hydrogen into the ship, some to use as fuel and some to use as warheads.

Atmospheric insertion was a gamble, and a desperate one, but one that had paid off enough times to be slightly preferable to a suicidal scuttling operation.

Skade composed a thought and popped it into her companions’ heads. I admire the shipmaster’s determination. But it won’t help him.

Clavain’s response was immediate. [It’s a she, Skade. We picked up her signal when she tight-beamed the other ship; they were passing through the edge of a debris ring, so there was enough ambient dust to scatter a small fraction of the laser light in our direction.]

And the interloper?

Remontoire answered her. [We always suspected it was a freighter from the moment we had a clean lock on its exhaust signature. That turns out to be the case, and we know a little more now.]

Remontoire offered her a feed, which she accepted.

A fuzzy image of the freighter sharpened in her mind’s eye, accreting detail like a sketch being worked to completion. The freighter was half the size of Nightshade, a typical in-system hauler built one or two centuries ago; definitely pre-plague. The hull was vaguely rounded; the ship might once have been designed to land on Yellowstone or one of the other atmosphere-bound bodies in the system, but it had gained so many bulges and spines since then that it made Skade think of a fish afflicted with some rare recessive mutation. Cryptic machine-readable symbols flickered on its skin, some of which were interrupted by blank acres of repaired hull cladding.

Remontoire anticipated her question. [The ship’s Storm Bird, a freighter registered out of Carousel New Copenhagen in the Rust Belt. The ship’s commander and owner is Antoinette Bax, although she hasn’t been either for more than a month. The previous owner was a James Bax, presumably a relative. We don’t know what happened to him. Records show, however, that the Bax family has been running Storm Bird since long before the war, possibly even before the plague. Their activities seem to be the usual mixture of the legal and the marginally legal; a few infringements here and there, and one or two run-ins with the Ferrisville Convention, but nothing serious enough to warrant arrest, even under the emergency legislation.]

Skade felt her distant body acknowledge this with a nod. The girdle of habitats orbiting Yellowstone had long supported a spectrum of transportation ventures, ranging from prestigious high-burn operations to much slower — and commensurately cheaper, fewer-questions-asked — fusion and ion-drive haulers. Even after the plague, which had turned the once-glorious Glitter Band into the far less than glorious Rust Belt, there had still been commercial niches for those prepared to fill them. There were quarantines to be dodged, and a host of new clients rising from the smouldering rubble of Demarchist rule, not all of who were the kinds of clients one would wish to do business with twice.

Skade knew nothing about the Bax family, but she could imagine them thriving under these conditions, and perhaps thriving even more vigorously during wartime. Now there were blockades to be run and opportunities to aid and abet the deep-penetration agents of either faction in their espionage missions. No matter that the Ferrisville Convention, the caretaker administration that was running circum-Yellowstone affairs, was just about the most intolerant regime in history. Where there were harsh penalties, there would always be those who would pay handsomely for others to take risks on their behalf.

Skade’s mental picture of Antoinette Bax was almost complete. There was just one thing she did not understand: what was Antoinette Bax doing this far inside a war zone? And, now that she thought about it, why was she still alive?

The shipmaster spoke to her? Skade asked.

Clavain answered. [It was a warning, Skade, telling her to back off or face the consequences.]

And did she?

Remontoire fed her the freighter’s vector. It was headed straight into the atmosphere of the Jovian, just like the Demarchist ship ahead of it.

That doesn’t make any sense. The shipmaster should have destroyed her for violating a Contested Volume.

Clavain responded. [The shipmaster threatened to do just that, but Bax ignored her. She promised the shipmaster she wasn’t going to steal hydrogen, but made it pretty clear she wasn’t about to turn around either.]

Either very brave or very stupid.

[Or very lucky,] Clavain countered. [Clearly the shipmaster didn’t have the ammunition to back up her threat. She must have used up her last missile during some earlier engagement.]

Skade considered this, anticipating Clavain’s reasoning. If the shipmaster really had fired her last missile, she would be desperately keen to keep that information from Nightshade. An unarmed ship was ripe for boarding. Even this late in the war, there were still useful intelligence gains to be made from the capture of an enemy ship, quite apart from the prospect of recruiting her crew.

You think the shipmaster was hoping the freighter would do as she said. She detected Clavain’s assent before his answer formed in her head.

[Yes. Once Bax shone her radar on to the Demarchist ship, the shipmaster had no choice but to make some kind of response. Firing a missile would have been the usual course of action — she’d have been fully within her rights — but at the very least she had to warn the freighter to back off. That didn’t work — for whatever reason Bax wasn’t sufficiently intimidated. That immediately put the shipmaster in a compromised position. She’d barked, but she sure as hell couldn’t bite.]

Remontoire completed his line of thinking. [Clavain’s right. She has no missiles. And now we know.]

Skade knew what they had in mind. Even though it had already begun to dive into the atmosphere, the Demarchist ship was still within easy range of Nightshade’s missiles. A kill could not be guaranteed, but the odds were a lot better than even. Yet Remontoire and Clavain did not want to shoot the enemy down. They wanted to wait until it had emerged from the atmosphere, slow and heavy with fuel, but still no better armed than it had been before. They wanted to board it, suck data from its memory banks and turn its crew into recruits for the Mother Nest.

I can’t consent to a boarding operation. The risks to Nightshade outweigh any possible benefits.

She sensed Clavain trying to probe her mind. [Why, Skade? Is there something that makes this ship unusually precious? If so, isn’t it a little odd that no one told me?]

That’s a matter for the Closed Council, Clavain. You had your chance to join us.

[But even if he had, he wouldn’t know everything, would he?]

Her attention flicked angrily to Remontoire. You know that I’m here on Closed Council business, Remontoire. That is all that matters.

[But I’m Closed Council and even I don’t know exactly what you’re doing here. What is it, Skade — a secret operation for the Inner Sanctum?]

Skade seethed, thinking how much simpler things would be if she never had to deal with old Conjoiners. This ship is precious, yes. It’s a prototype, and prototypes are always valuable. But you knew that anyway. Of course we don’t want to lose it in a petty engagement.

[There’s clearly more to it than that, though.]

Perhaps, Clavain, but now isn’t the time to discuss it. Allocate a spread of missiles for the Demarchist ship, and spare another for the freighter.

[No. We’ll wait for both ships to come out the other side. Assuming either survives, then we’ll act.]

I can’t allow that. So be it, then. She had hoped it would not come to this, but Clavain was forcing her hand. Skade concentrated, issuing a complex series of neural commands. She felt the distant acknowledgement of the weapons systems recognising her authority and submitting to her will. Her control was imprecise, lacking the finesse and immediacy with which she addressed her own machines, but it would suffice; all she had to do was launch a few missiles.

[Skade…?]

It was Clavain; he must have sensed that she was overriding his control of the weapons. She felt his surprise at the fact that she could do it at all. Skade assigned the spread, the hunter-seeker missiles quivering in their launch racks.

Then another voice spoke quietly in her head. [No, Skade.]

It was the Night Council.

What?

[Release control of the weapons. Do as Clavain wishes. It will serve us better in the long run.]

No, I…

The Night Council’s tone became more strident. [Release the weapons, Skade.]

Furious, feeling the sting of reprimand, Skade did as she was told.

Antoinette reached her father’s coffin. It was lashed to the cargo-bay storage lattice, precisely as it had been when she had shown it to the proxy.

She placed one gloved hand on the upper surface of the casket. Through the glass of the viewing window she could see his profile. The family resemblance was quite evident, though age and gravity had shaped his features into an exaggerated masculine caricature of her own. His eyes were closed and the expression on his face, what she could see of it, was almost one of bored calm. It would have been typical of her father to snooze through all the excitement, she thought. She remembered the sound of his snoring filling the flight deck. Once she had even caught him peering at her through nearly closed eyelids, just pretending to be asleep. Watching to see how she handled whatever crisis was in progress; knowing that one day she would have to do it all herself.

Antoinette checked the rigging that bound the coffin to the lattice. It was secure; nothing had come adrift during the recent manoeuvres.

‘Beast…’ she said.

‘Little Miss?’

‘I’m down in the hold.’

‘One is uncomfortably aware of that, Little Miss.’

‘I’d like you to take us subsonic. Call me when we’re there, will you?’

She had steeled herself for a protest, but none came. She felt the ship pitch, her inner ear struggling to differentiate between deceleration and descent. Storm Bird was not really flying now. Its shape generated very little aerodynamic lift, so it had to support itself by vectoring thrust downwards. The vacuum-filled hold had provided some buoyant lift until now, but she had never planned on going deep with a depressurised hold.

Antoinette was acutely aware that she really should have been dead by now. The Demarchist shipmaster should have shot her out of the sky. And the pursuing spider ship should have attacked before she had time to dive into the atmosphere. Even the dive should have killed her. It had not been the gentle, controlled insertion she had always planned, but more of a furious scramble to get beneath the clouds, riding the vortex that the Demarchist ship had already carved. She had appraised the damage as soon as level flight had been restored, and the news was not good. If she made it back to the Rust Belt, and that was a big ‘if — the spiders were still out there, after all — then Xavier was going to be very, very busy for the next few months.

Well, at least it would keep him out of trouble.

‘Subsonic now, Little Miss,’ Beast reported.

‘Good.’ For the third time, Antoinette made sure that she was bound to the lattice as securely as the coffin, and then checked her suit settings again. ‘Open the number-one bay door, will you?’

‘Just a moment, Little Miss.’

A brilliant sliver of light cracked open at her end of the lattice. She squinted against it, then reached up and tugged down the bottle-green glare visor of her suit.

The crack of light enlarged, and then the force of the in-rushing air hit her, slamming her against the lattice’s strut. Air filled the chamber in a few seconds, roaring and swirling around her. The suit’s sensor analysed it immediately and sternly advised against opening her helmet. The air pressure had exceeded one atmosphere, but it was both lung-crackingly cold and utterly toxic.

An atmosphere of choking poisons and shocking temperature gradients was, Antoinette reflected, the price you paid for such exquisite coloration when seen from space.

Take us twenty klicks deeper,‘ she said.

‘Are you certain, Little Miss?’

‘Fuck, yes.’

The floor pitched. She watched as the suit’s barometer ticked off the increments in atmospheric pressure. Two atmospheres; three. Four atmospheres and rising. Trusting that the rest of Storm Bird, which was now under negative pressure, would not fold open around her like a wet paper bag.

Whatever else happens, Antoinette thought, I’ve probably blown the warranty on the ship by now…

When her confidence had risen, or rather when her pulse had dropped to something like a normal level, Antoinette began to inch along towards the open door, dragging the coffin with her. It was a laborious process, since now she had to fasten and unfasten the coffin’s moorings every couple of metres. But the last thing she felt was impatience.

Looking ahead, now that her eyes had adapted she saw that the light had an overcast silver-grey quality. Gradually it became duller, taking on an iron or dull bronze pall. Epsilon Eridani was not a bright star to begin with, and much of its light was now being filtered out by the layers of atmosphere above them. If they went deeper it would get darker and darker, until it was like being at the bottom of an ocean.

But this was what her father had wanted.

‘All right, Beast, hold her nice and steady. I’m about to do the deed.’

‘Take care now, Little Miss.’

There were cargo-bay entrance ports all over Storm Bird, but the one that had been opened was in the ship’s belly, facing backwards along the direction of flight. Antoinette had reached the lip now, the toes of her boots hanging an inch over the edge. It felt precarious, but she was still safely anchored. Her view above was obstructed by the dark underside of the hull, curving gently up towards the tail; but to either side, and down, nothing impeded her vision.

‘You were right, Dad,’ she breathed, quietly enough that she hoped Beast would not pick up her words. ‘It is a pretty amazing place. I think you made a good choice, all things told.’

‘Little Miss?’

‘Nothing, Beast.’

She began to undo the coffin’s fastenings. The ship lurched and swayed once or twice, making her stomach twist and the coffin knock against the lattice’s spars, but by and large Beast was doing an excellent job of holding altitude. The speed was now highly subsonic relative to the current airstream, so that Beast was doing little more than hover, but that was good. The wind’s ferocity had died down except for the odd squall, as she had hoped it would.

The coffin was almost loose now, almost ready to be tipped over the side. Her father looked like a man catching up on forty winks. The embalmers had done a superlative job, and the coffin’s faltering refrigeration mechanism had done the rest. It was impossible to believe that her father had been dead for a month.

‘Well, Dad,’ Antoinette said, ‘this is it, I guess. We’ve made it now. Not much more needs to be said, I think.’

The ship did her the courtesy of saying nothing.

‘I still don’t know whether I’m really doing the right thing,’ Antoinette continued. I mean, I know this is what you once said you wanted, but…‘ Stop it, she told herself. Stop going over that again.

‘Little Miss?’

‘Yes?’

‘One would strongly advise against taking too much longer.’

Antoinette remembered the label of the beer bottle. She did not have it with her now, but there was no detail of it that she could not call immediately to mind. The brilliance of the silver and gold inks had faded a little since the day when she had lovingly peeled the label from the bottle, but in her mind’s eye they still shone with a fabulous rare lustre. It was a cheap, mass-produced item, but in her hands, and in her mind, the label had assumed the significance of a religious icon. She had been much younger when she had removed the label, only twelve or thirteen years old, and, flush from a lucrative haul, her father had taken her to one of the drinking dens that the traders sometimes frequented. Though her experience was limited, it had seemed to be a good night, with much laughter and telling of stories. Then, somewhere towards the end of the evening, the talk had turned to the various ways in which the remains of spacefarers were dealt with, whether by tradition or personal preference. Her father had kept quiet during most of the discussion, smiling to himself as the conversation veered from the serious to the jocular and back again, laughing at the jokes and insults. Then, much to Antoinette’s surprise, he had stated his own preference, which was to be buried inside the atmosphere of a gas-giant planet. At any other time she might have assumed him to be mocking his comrades’ proposals, but there was something about his tone that had told her that he was absolutely earnest, and that although he had never spoken of the matter before, it was not somehing he had just conjured out of thin air. And so she had made a small, private vow to herself. She had peeled the label from the bottle as a memento, swearing that if her father should ever die, and should she ever be in a position to do anything about it, she would not forget his wish.

And for all the years that had followed it had been easy to imagine that she would hold to her vow, so easy, in fact, that she had seldom thought of it at all. But now he was dead, and she had to face up to what she had promised herself, no matter that the vow now struck her as faintly ridiculous and childlike. What did matter was the utter conviction that she believed she had heard in his voice that night. Though she had been only twelve or thirteen, and might even have imagined it, or been fooled by his poker-face facade of seriousness, she had made the vow, and however embarrassing or inconvenient, she had to stick to it, even if it meant placing her own life in jeopardy.

She undid the final restraints, and then budged the coffin forwards until a third of its length projected over the edge. One good shove and her father would get the burial he had wanted.

It was madness. In all the years after that one drunken conversation in the spacer’s bar he had never again mentioned the idea of being buried in the Jovian. But did that necessarily mean it had not been a heartfelt wish? He had not known when he was going to die, after all. There had been no time to put his affairs in order before the accident; no reason for him to explain patiently to her what he wanted doing with his mortal remains.

Madness, yes… but heartfelt madness.

Antoinette pushed the coffin over the edge.

For a moment it seemed to hang in the air behind the ship, as if unwilling to begin the long fall into oblivion. Then, slowly, it did begin to fall. She watched it tumble, dropping behind the ship as the wind retarded it. Quickly it diminished: now a thing the size of her outstretched thumb; now a tiny, tumbling hyphen at the limit of vision; now a dot that only intermittently caught the weakly transmitted starlight, glinting and fading as it fell through billowing pastel cloud layers.

She saw it one more time, and then it was gone.

Antoinette leant back against the rig. She had not expected it, but now that the deed was done, now that she had buried her father, exhaustion came crushing down on her. She felt suddenly the entire leaden weight of all the air pressing down from above. There was no actual sadness, no tears; she had cried enough already. There would be more, in time. She was sure of that. But for now all she felt was utter exhaustion.

Antoinette closed her eyes. Several minutes passed.

Then she told Beast to close the bay door, and began the long journey back to the flight deck.