Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 29

Remontoire’s calculation had been unerringly accurate; so much so that Clavain suspected he had already costed the energy expenditure of the shuttle flight before the rescue operation had been more than a glint in Clavain’s eye.

Three of them went out: Scorpio, Remontoire and Clavain.

There was mercifully little time to make the shuttle ready. Merciful because had Clavain been granted hours or days, he would have spent the entire time convulsed in doubt, endlessly balancing one additional weapon or piece of armour against the fuel that would be saved by leaving it behind. As it was they had to make do with one of the stripped-down shuttles that had been used to resupply the defence shuttle before they had brought the laser-powered shield sail into use. The shuttle was just a skeleton, a wispy geodesic sketch of black spars, struts and naked silvery subsystems, it looked, to Clavain’s eyes, faintly obscene. He was used to machines that kept their innards decently covered. But it would do the job well enough, he supposed. If Skade mounted any serious defence, armour wouldn’t help them anyway.

The flight deck was the only part of the ship that was shielded from space, and even then it was not pressurised. They would have to wear suits for the entire operation and take an additional suit with them for Felka to wear on the return leg. There was also room to stow a reefersleep casket if it turned out she was frozen. But in that case, Felka’s return mass would have to be offset by leaving behind weapons and fuel tanks at the halfway point.

Clavain took the middle seat, with the flight controls plugged into his suit. Scorpio sat on his left, Remontoire on his right; both could assume control of the avionics should Clavain need a rest.

‘Are you sure you trust me enough to have me along for the operation?’ Remontoire had asked with a playful smile when they were deciding who would go on the mission.

I guess I’ll find out, won’t; I?‘ Clavain had said.

‘I won’t be much use to you in an exoskeleton. You can’t put a standard suit over one, and we don’t have powered armour ready.’

Clavain had nodded at Blood, Scorpio’s deputy. ‘Get him out of the exoskeleton. If he tries anything, you know what to do.’

‘I won’t, Clavain,’ Remontoire had assured him.

‘I almost believe you. But I’m not sure I’d take the risk if there was someone else who knew Nightshade as well as you do. Or Skade, for that matter.’

‘I’m coming too,’ Scorpio had insisted.

‘We’re going to get Felka,’ Clavain had said. ‘Not to avenge Lasher.’

‘Perhaps.’ In so far as Clavain could read his expression, Scorpio had not looked fully convinced. ‘But let’s be honest. Once you’ve got Felka, you’re not going to walk out of there without doing some damage, are you?’

‘I’ll accept Skade’s surrender gratefully,’ Clavain had said.

‘We’ll take pinhead munitions,’ Scorpio had said. ‘You won’t miss a little hot dust, Clavain, and it’ll sure put a hole in Nightshade.’

‘I’m grateful for your help, Scorpio. And I understand your feelings towards Skade after what she did. But we need you here, to supervise the weapons programme.’

‘And we don’t need you?’

‘This is about me and Felka,’ Clavain had said.

Scorpio had put a hand on his arm. ‘So take help when it’s offered. I’m not in the habit of co-operating with people, Clavain, so make the most of this rare display of magnanimity and shut the fuck up.’

Clavain had shrugged. He had not felt optimistic about the mission, but Scorpio’s enthusiasm for a fight was oddly infectious.

He had turned to Remontoire. ‘Looks as if he’s along for the ride, Rem. Certain you want to be on the team now?’

Remontoire had looked at the pig, then back at Clavain. ‘We’ll manage,’ he had said.

Now that the mission had begun the two of them were silent, letting Clavain concentrate on the business of flying. He gunned the shuttle away from Zodiacal Light, homing in on the drifting Nightshade, trying not to think of how fast they were actually moving. The two major ships were falling through space at only two per cent below the speed of light, but there was still no strong visual cue that they were moving so rapidly. The stars had been shifted in both position and colour by relativistic effects, but they still appeared perfectly fixed and stationary, even at this high tau factor. Had their trajectory taken them close to a luminous body like a star, they might have seen it swing by in the night, squashed away from sphericity by Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. But even then it would not have slammed past unless they were nearly skimming its atmosphere. The exhaust flare of another ship, heading back to Yellowstone, would have been visible, but they had the corridor to themselves. And though the hulls of both ships glowed in the near infra-red, heated by the slow, constant abrasion of interstellar hydrogen and microscopic dust grains, this was nothing Clavain’s mind could process into any visceral sense of speed. He was aware that the same collisions were a problem for the shuttle, too, though its much smaller cross section made them less likely. But cosmic rays, relativistically boosted by their motion, were eating into him every second. That was why there was armour around the flight deck.

The trip to Nightshade passed quickly, perhaps because Clavain was fearful of what he would find upon his arrival. The trio spent most of the journey unconscious, conserving suit power, knowing that there was realistically nothing they could do should Skade launch an attack.

Clavain and his companions came around when they were in visual range of the crippled lighthugger.

She was dark, of course — they were in true interstellar space here — but Clavain could see her because Zodiacal Light was shining one of its optical lasers on to her hull. He could not make out all the details he wanted to, but he could see enough to feel decidedly ill at ease. The effect was that of moonlight on a foreboding gothic edifice. The shuttle threw a tracery of moving shadows across the larger ship, making it appear to squirm and move.

The weird augmentations looked even stranger up close. Their complexity had not really been apparent before, nor the extent to which they had been twisted and sheared by the accident. But Skade had been remarkably fortunate, since the damage was largely confined to the tapering rear part of her ship. The two Conjoiner drives, thrust out from either side of the thoraxlike hull, had suffered only superficial harm. Clavain steered the shuttle closer, convincing himself that any attack would already have happened. Delicately, he nosed the skeletal craft between the stingerlike curves and arcs of the ruined faster-than-light drive.

‘She was desperate,’ he said to his companions. ‘She must have known there was no way we were going to get to Resurgam ahead of her, but that wasn’t good enough for Skade. She wanted to get there years ahead of us.’

Scorpio said, ‘She had the means, Clavain. Why are you surprised that she used them?’

‘He’s right to be surprised,’ Remontoire cut in before Clavain could answer. ‘Skade was perfectly aware of the risks of toying with the state-four transition. She denied any interest in it when I asked her about it, but I had the impression she was lying. Her own experiments must already have revealed the risks.’

‘Once thing’s for sure,’ Scorpio said. ‘She wanted those guns badly, Clavain. They must mean a fuck of a lot to her.’

Clavain nodded. ‘But we’re not really dealing with Skade, I think. We’re dealing with whatever it was that got to her in the Chateau. The Mademoiselle wanted the weapons, and she just planted the idea in Skade’s mind.’

‘This Mademoiselle interests me greatly,’ Remontoire said. He had been told some of what had happened in Chasm City. ‘I’d have liked to have met her.’

‘Too late,’ Scorpio said. ‘H had her corpse in a box — didn’t Clavain tell you?’

‘He had something in a box,’ Remontoire said testily. ‘But evidently not the part of her that mattered. That part reached Skade. Is Skade now, for all we know.’

Clavain slid the shuttle through the last pair of scissorlike blades and back into open space. This side of Nightshade was pitch black, save where the shuttle’s own floods picked out details. Clavain crept along the hull, observing that the antiship weapons were all stowed behind their invisibly seamed hatches. It meant very little: it would only require an eyeblink to deploy them, but it was undeniably reassuring that they were not already pointed at the shuttle.

‘You two know your way around this thing?’ Scorpio said.

‘Of course,’ Remontoire said. ‘It used to be our ship. You should recognise it as well. It’s the same one that pulled you out of Maruska Chung’s cruiser.’

‘The only thing I remember about that is you trying to put the fear of the devil into me, Remontoire.’

With some relief, Clavain realised that they had reached the airlock he had been looking for. There was still no sign of a reaction from the crippled ship: no lights or indications of proximity sensors coming alive. Clavain guyed them to the hull with epoxy-tipped grapples, holding his breath as the suckerlike grapple feet adhered to the ablative hull armour. But nothing happened.

‘This is the difficult part,’ Clavain said. ‘Rem, I want you to remain here on the shuttle. Scorpio’s coming inside with me.’

‘Might I ask why?’

‘Yes, although I was hoping you wouldn’t. Scorp has more experience of hand-to-hand combat than you do, almost more than me. But the main reason is I don’t trust you enough to have you inside.’

‘You trusted me to come this far.’

‘And I’m prepared to trust you to sit tight on the shuttle until we get out.’ Clavain checked the time. ‘In thirty-five minutes we’re out of return range. Wait half an hour and then leave. Not a minute more, even if Scorp and I are already coming back out of the airlock.’

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘We’ve budgeted enough fuel to return the three of us plus Felka. If you return alone you’ll have fuel to spare — fuel that we’ll badly need later. That’s what I trust you with, Rem: that responsibility.’

‘But not to come aboard,’ Remontoire said.

‘No. Not with Skade on that ship. I can’t run the risk of you defecting back to her side.’

‘You’re wrong, Clavain.’

‘Am I?’

‘I didn’t defect. Neither did you. It was Skade and the rest of them that changed sides, not us.’

‘C’mon,’ Scorpio said, tugging at Clavain’s arm. ‘We’ve got twenty-nine minutes now.’

The two of them crossed over to Nightshade. Clavain fumbled around the rim of the airlock until he found the nearly invisible recess that concealed the external controls. It was just wide enough to take his gloved hand. He felt the familiar trinity of manual switches — standard Conjoiner design — and tugged them to the open position. Even if there had been a general shipwide power failure, cells within the lock would have retained power to open the door for about a century. Even if that failed, there was a manual mechanism on the other side of the rim.

The door slid aside. Blood-red lighting glared back from the interior chamber. His eyes had become highly dark-adapted. He waited for them to adjust to the brightness and then ushered Scorpio into the generously proportioned space. He followed the pig, their bulky suits knocking together, and then sealed and pressurised the chamber. It took an eternity.

The inner door opened. The interior of the ship was bathed in the same blood-red emergency lighting. But at least there was power. That meant there might be survivors, too.

Clavain studied the ambient data read-out in his faceplate field of view, then turned off his suit air and slid up the faceplate. These clumsy old suits, the best that Zodiacal Light had been able to provide, had limited air and power, and he saw no sense in wasting resources. He motioned for Scorpio to do likewise.

The pig whispered, ‘Where are we?’

‘Amidships,’ Clavain told him in a normal speaking voice. ‘But everything looks different in this light, and without gravity. The ship doesn’t feel as familiar as I had expected. I wish I knew how many crew we could expect to find.’

‘Skade never gave any indication?’ he hissed back.

‘No. You could run a ship like this with a few experts, and no more. There’s no need to whisper either, Scorp. If there’s anyone around to know we’re here, they know we’re here.’

‘Remind me why we didn’t come with guns?’

‘No point, Scorp. They’d have heavier and better armaments here. Either we take Felka painlessly or we negotiate our way out.’ Clavain tapped his utility belt. ‘Of course, we do have a negotiating aid.’

They had brought pinheads aboard Skade’s ship. The microscopic fragments of antimatter suspended in a pin-sized containment system, which was in turn shielded within a thumb-sized armoured grenade, would blow Nightshade cleanly out of the sky.

They moved down the red-lit corridor hand over hand. Every now and then, randomly, one of them would unclip a pinhead device, smear it with epoxy and push it into place in a corner or shadow. Clavain was confident that a well-organised search would be able to locate all the pinheads in a few tens of minutes. But a well-organised search looked like exactly the kind of thing the ship was not going to be capable of mounting for quite some time.

They had been working their way along for eight minutes when Scorpio broke the silence. They had reached a trifurcation in the corridor. ‘Recognise anything yet?’

‘Yes. We’re near the bridge.’ Clavain pointed one way. ‘But the reefersleep chamber is down here. If she has Felka frozen, that’s where she might be. We’ll check it first.’

‘We’ve got twenty minutes, then we have to be out.’

Clavain knew that the time limit was, in a sense, artificially imposed. Zodiacal Light could backtrack and recover the shuttle even if they delayed their departure, but only at a wasteful expenditure of time, one that would instil a lethal seed of complacency into the rest of the crew. He had considered the risks and concluded that it would be better for all three of them to die — or at least be marooned here — rather than let that happen. Their deputies and sub-deputies could continue the operation even if Remontoire did not make it back alive, and they had to believe that every second really counted. As indeed it did. It was tough. But that was war, and it was a long way from the toughest decision Clavain had ever had to make.

They worked their way down to the reefersleep chamber.

‘Something ahead,’ Scorpio said, after they had crawled and clambered wordlessly for several minutes.

Clavain slowed his progress, peering into the same red gloom, envious of Scorpio’s augmented eyesight. ‘Looks like a body,’ he said.

They approached it carefully, pulling themselves along from one padded wall-staple to another. Clavain was mindful of every minute that elapsed; every half-minute of each minute; every cruel second.

They reached the body.

‘Do you recognise it?’ Scorpio asked, fascinated.

‘I’m not sure whether anyone would be able to recognise it for certain,’ Clavain said, ‘but it isn’t Felka. I don’t think it could have been Skade, either.’

Something dreadful had happened to the body. It had been sliced down the middle, exactly and neatly, in the fastidious fashion of an anatomical model. The interior organs were packed into tightly coiled or serpentine formations, glistening like glazed sweetmeats. Scorpio reached out a gloved trotter and pushed the half-figure; it drifted slackly away from the slick walling where it had come to rest.

‘Where do you think the rest of it is?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere else,’ Clavain replied. ‘This half must have drifted here.’

‘What did that to it? I’ve seen what beam-weapons can do and it isn’t nice, but there isn’t any sign of scorching on this body.’

‘It was a causal gradient,’ said a third voice.

‘Skade…’ Clavain breathed.

She was behind them. She had approached with inhuman silence, not even breathing. Her armoured bulk filled the corridor, black as night save for the pale oval of her face.

‘Hello, Clavain. And hello, Scorpio, too, I suppose.’ She looked at him with mild interest. ‘So you didn’t die then, pig?’

‘Actually, Clavain was just pointing out how lucky 1 am to have met the Conjoiners.’

‘Sensible Clavain.’

Clavain looked at her, horrified and awestruck at the same time. Remontoire had forewarned him about Skade’s accident, but that warning had been insufficient to prepare him for this meeting. Her mechanical armour was androform, even — in an exaggerated, faintly medieval way — feminine, swelling at the hips and with the suggestion of breasts moulded into the chest plate. But Clavain knew now that it was not armour at all but a life-support prosthesis; that the only organic part of her was her head. Skade’s crested skull was plugged stiffly into the neckpiece of the armour. The brutal conjunction of flesh and machinery screamed wrongness, a wrongness that became even more acute when Skade smiled.

‘You did this to me,’ she said, obviously speaking aloud for Scorpio’s benefit. ‘Aren’t you proud?’

‘I didn’t do it to you, Skade. 1 know exactly what happened. I hurt you, and I’m sorry it happened that way. But it wasn’t intentional and you know it.’

‘So your defection was involuntary? If only it were that easy.’

‘I didn’t cut your head off, Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘By now Delmar could have healed the injuries I gave you. You’d be whole again. But that didn’t fit with your plans.’

‘You dictated my plans, Clavain. You and my loyalty to the Mother Nest.’

‘I don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.’

Scorpio whispered, ‘Thirteen minutes, Clavain. Then we have to be out of here.’

Skade’s attention snapped on to the pig. ‘In a hurry, are you?’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Scorpio said.

‘You’ve come for something. I don’t doubt that your weapons could already have destroyed Nightshade were that your intention.’

‘Give me Felka,’ Clavain said. ‘Give me Felka, then we’ll leave you alone.’

‘Does she mean that much to you, Clavain, that you’d have held back from destroying me when you had the chance?’

‘She means a great deal to me, yes.’

Skade’s crest rippled with turquoise and orange. ‘I’ll give you Felka, if it makes you leave. But first I want to show you something.’

She reached up with the gauntleted arms of her suit, placing one hand on either side of her neck as if about to strangle herself. But her metal hands were evidently capable of great gentleness. Clavain heard a click somewhere within Skade’s chest, and then the metal pillar of her neck began to rise from between her shoulders. She was removing her own head. Clavain watched, entranced and repelled, as the lower part of the pillar emerged. It ended in thrashing, segmented appendages. They dribbled pink baubles of coloured fluid — blood, perhaps, or something entirely artificial.

‘Skade…’ he said. ‘This isn’t necessary.’

‘Oh, it is very necessary, Clavain. I want you to apprehend fully what it is you’ve done to me. I want you to feel the horror of it.’

‘I think he’s getting the picture,’ Scorpio said.

‘Just give me Felka, then I’ll leave you.’

She hefted her own head, cradling it in one hand. It continued to speak. ‘Do you hate me, Clavain?’

‘None of this is personal, Skade. I just think you’re misguided.’

‘Misguided because I care about the survival of our people?’

‘Something got to you, Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘You were a good Conjoiner once, one of the best. You truly served the Mother Nest, just as I did. But then you were sent on the Chateau operation.’

He had pricked her interest. He saw the involuntary widening of her eyes. ‘The Chateau des Corbeaux? What does that have to do with anything?’

‘A lot more than you’d like to think,’ Clavain said. ‘You were the only survivor, Skade, but you didn’t come back alone. You probably don’t remember very much of what actually happened down there, but that doesn’t matter. Something got to you, I’m certain of that. It’s responsible for everything that’s happened lately.’ He tried to smile. ‘That’s why I don’t hate you, or even much blame you. You’re either not the Skade I knew, or you think you’re serving something higher than yourself.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘But possibly true. I should know, Skade, I went there myself. How do you think we stayed on your tail all this time? The Chateau was the source for the technology you and I both used. Alien technology, for manipulating inertia. Except you used it for much more than that, didn’t you?’

‘I used it to serve an end, that’s all.’

‘You tried to move faster than light, just the way Galiana did.’ He saw another flicker of interest at the mention of Galiana’s name. ‘Why, Skade? What was so important that you had to do this? They’re just weapons.’

‘You want them badly, too.’

Clavain nodded. ‘But only because I’ve seen how badly you want them. You showed me that fleet, too, and that made me think you were planning on getting away from this part of space. What is it, Skade? What have you seen in your crystal ball?’

‘Shall I show you, Clavain?’

‘Show me?’ he asked.

‘Allow me access to your mind and I’ll implant exactly what I was shown. Then you will know. And perhaps see things my way.’

‘Don’t…’ Scorpio said.

Clavain lowered his mental defences. Skade’s presence was sudden and intrusive, so much so that he flinched. But she did not attempt to do more than paint images in his mind, as she had promised.

Clavain saw the end of everything. He saw chains of human habitats spangling with bright pinpricks of annihilating fire. Nuclear garlands dappled the surfaces of worlds too unimportant to dismantle. He saw comets and asteroids being steered into colonies, wave upon wave of them, far too many to be neutralised by the existing defences. Flares were lifted from the surfaces of stars, focused and daubed across the faces of worlds, sterilising all in their path. He saw rocky worlds being pulverised, smashed into hot clouds of interplanetary rubble. He saw gas giants being spun apart, ruined like the toys of petulant children. He saw stars themselves dying, poisoned so that they shone too hot or too cold, or ripped apart in a dozen different ways. He saw ships detonating in interstellar space, when they imagined they were safe from harm. He heard a panicked chorus of human radio and laser transmissions that was at first a multitude, but which thinned out to a handful of desperate lone voices, which were themselves silenced one by one. Then he heard only the mindless warbling of machine transmissions, and even those began to fall silent as humanity’s last defences crumbled.

The cleansing was spread across a volume many dozens of light-years wide. It took many decades to complete, but it was over in a flash compared with the slow grind of galactic history.

And all around, orchestrating this cleansing, he sensed dim, ruthless sentience. It was an ensemble of machine minds, most of which hovered just beneath the threshold of consciousness. They were old, older than the youngest stars, and they were expert only in the art of extinction. Nothing else concerned them.

‘How far in the future is this?’ he asked Skade.

‘It’s already begun. We just don’t know it yet. But within half a century the wolves reach the core colonies, those closest to the First System. Within a century, the human race consists of a few huddling groups too afraid to travel or attempt any communication with each other.’

‘And the Conjoiners?’

‘We’re amongst them but just as vulnerable, just as predated. No Mother Nest remains. Conjoiner nests in some systems have been wiped out completely. That’s when they send the message back in time.’

He absorbed what she had said and nodded guardedly, prepared to accept it for the time being. ‘How did they do it?’

‘Galiana’s Exordium experiments,’ Skade’s decorporated head answered. ‘She explored the linkage of human minds with coherent quantum states. But matter in a state of quantum superposition is entangled, in a ghostly sense, with every particle that has ever existed, or ever will exist. Her experiments were only intended to explore new modes of parallel consciousness, but she opened a window to the future, too. The conduit was imperfect, so that only faint echoes reached back to Mars. And every message sent through the channel increased the background noise. The conduit had a finite information capacity, you see. Exordium was a precious resource that could only be used at times of extreme crisis.’

Clavain felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. ‘Our history’s already been changed, hasn’t it?’

‘Galiana learned enough to make the first star ship drive. It was a question of energy, Clavain, and the manipulation of quantum wormholes. At the heart of a Conjoiner drive is one end of a microscopic wormhole. The other end is anchored fifteen billion years in the past, sucking energy out of the quark-gluon plasma of the primordial fireball. Of course, the same technology can be applied to the manufacturing of doomsday weapons.’

‘The hell-class weapons,’ he said.

Tn our original history we had neither of these advantages. We did not achieve starflight until a century later than the Sandra Voi’s first flight. Our ships were slow, heavy, fragile, incapable of reaching more than a fifth of light-speed. The human expansion was necessarily retarded. In four hundred years only a handful of systems were successfully settled. Yet still we attracted the wolves, even in that timeline. The cleansing was brutally efficient. This version of history — the one you have known — was an attempt at an improvement. The pace of human expansion was quickened and we were given better weapons to deal with the threat once it arose.‘

‘I see now,’ Clavain said, ‘why the hell-class weapons couldn’t be made again. Once Galiana had been shown how to make them, she destroyed the knowledge.’

‘They were a gift from the future,’ she said pridefully. ‘A gift from our future selves.’

‘And now?’

‘Even in this timeline decimation happened. Again the wolves were alerted to our emergence. And it turned out that the drives were easy for them to track, across light-years of space.’

‘So our future selves tried another tweak.’

‘Yes. This time they reached back only into the recent past, intervening much later in Conjoiner history. The first message was an edict warning us to stop using Conjoiner drives. That was why we stopped shipbuilding a century ago. Later, we were given clues that enabled us to build stealthed drives of the kind Nightshade carries. The Demarchists thought we had built her to gain a tactical advantage over them in the war. In fact, she was designed to be our first weapon against the wolves. Later, we were given information regarding the construction of inertia-suppressing machinery. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sent to the Chateau to obtain the fragments of alien technology which would enable us to assemble the prototype inertia-suppressing machine.’

‘And now?’

She answered him with a smile. ‘We’ve been given another chance. This time, flight is the only viable solution. The Conjoiners must leave this volume of space before the wolves arrive en masse.’

‘Run away, you mean?’

‘Not really your style, is it, Clavain? But sometimes it’s the only response that makes any sense. Later, we can consider a return — even a confrontation with the wolves. Other species have failed, but we are different, I think. We have already had the nerve to alter our past.’

‘What makes you think the other poor suckers didn’t try it as well?’

‘Clavain…’ It was Scorpio. ‘We really need to be out of here, now.’

‘Skade… you’ve shown me enough,’ Clavain said. ‘I accept that you believe you are acting justly.’

‘And yet you still think I am the puppet of some mysterious agency?’

‘I don’t know, Skade. I certainly haven’t ruled it out.’

I serve only the Mother Nest.‘

‘Fine.’ He nodded, sensing that no matter what the truth was Skade believed that she was acting correctly. ‘Now give me Felka and I’ll leave.’

‘Will you destroy me once you have left?’

He doubted that she knew of the pinhead charges he and Scorpio had deployed. He said, ‘What will happen to you, Skade, if I leave you here, drifting? Can you repair your ship?’

‘I don’t need to. The other craft are not far behind me. They are your real enemy, Clavain. Vastly better armed than Nightshade, and yet just as nimble and difficult to detect.’

‘That still doesn’t mean I’d be better off not killing you.’

Skade turned around and raised her voice. ‘Bring Felka here.’

Half a minute later, two other Conjoiners appeared behind Skade, burdened with a spacesuited figure. Skade allowed them to pass it forwards. The visor was open so that Clavain could tell that the figure was Felka. She appeared unconscious, but he was certain that she was still alive.

‘Here. Take her.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Nothing fundamental,’ Skade said. ‘I told you she was becoming withdrawn, didn’t I? She misses her Wall very much. Perhaps she will improve in your care. But there is something you need to know, Clavain.’

He looked at her. ‘What?’

‘She isn’t your daughter. She never was. Everything she told you was a lie, to make you more likely to return. A plausible lie, and perhaps one she almost wanted to believe was true, but a lie nonetheless. Do you still want her now?’

He knew she was telling the truth. Skade would lie to hurt him, but only if it served her wider ambitions. She was not doing that now, although he dearly wished that she were.

His voice caught in his throat. ‘Why should I want her less?’

‘Be honest, Clavain. It might have made a difference.’

‘I came here to save someone I care for, that’s all.’ He fought to keep his voice from breaking. ‘Whether she’s my blood or not… it doesn’t matter.’

‘No?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Good. Then I believe our business here is done. Felka has served us both well, Clavain. She protected me from you, and she was able to bring out the co-operative side of the Wolf, something I could never have done on my own.’

‘The Wolf?’

‘Oh, sorry, didn’t I mention the Wolf?’

‘Let’s leave,’ Scorpio said.

‘No. Not just yet. I want to know what she meant.’

‘I meant exactly what I said, Clavain.’ With loving care, Skade replaced her own head, blinking at the moment when it clicked home. ‘I brought the Wolf with me because I imagined it might prove valuable. Well, I was right,’

‘You mean you brought Galiana’s body?’

‘I brought Galiana,’ Skade corrected. ‘She isn’t dead, Clavain. Not in the way you always thought she was. I reached her shortly after she returned from deep space. Her personality and memories were still there, perfectly intact. We had conversations, she and I. She asked about you — and of Felka — and I told her a small white lie; it was better for all of us that she think you dead. She was already losing the battle, you see. The Wolf was trying to take her over, and in the end she wasn’t strong enough to fight it. But it didn’t kill her, even then. It kept her mind intact because it found her memories useful. It also knew that Galiana was precious to us, and so we would do nothing against it that would harm her.’

Clavain looked at her, hoping against hope that she was lying to him as she had lied before, but knowing that this was now the truth. And although he knew the answer she would give, he had to ask the question all the same.

‘Will you give her to me?’

‘No.’ Skade raised a black metal finger. ‘You leave with Felka only, or you leave with nothing. It’s your choice. But Galiana stays here.’ Almost as an afterthought she added, ‘Oh, and in case you were wondering, I do know about the pinhead munitions you and the pig left behind you.’

‘You won’t find them all in time,’ Scorpio said.

I won’t have to find them,‘ Skade said. ’Will I, Clavain? Because having Galiana protects me as fully as when I had Felka. No. I won’t show her to you. It isn’t necessary. Felka will tell you that she is here. She met the Wolf, too — didn’t you?‘

But Felka did not stir.

‘C’mon,’ Scorpio said. ‘Let’s leave before she changes her mind.’

Clavain was with Felka when she came around. He was sitting in a seat next to her bed, scratching at his beard, a grasshopperlike scritch, scritch, scritch that burrowed remorselessly into her subconscious and tugged her towards wakefulness. She had been dreaming of Mars, dreaming of her Wall, dreaming of being lost in the endless, consuming task of maintaining the Wall’s inviolability.

‘Felka.’ His voice was sharp, almost stern. ‘Felka. Wake up. This is Clavain. You’re amongst friends now.’

‘Where is Skade?’ she asked.

‘I left Skade behind. She isn’t your concern now.’ Clavain’s hand rested on hers. ‘I’m just relieved that you’re all right. It’s good to see you again, Felka. There were times when I never thought this would happen.’

She had come around in a room that did not look like any of those she had seen on Nightshade. It had a slightly rustic feel. She was clearly aboard a ship, but it was not a sleekly engineered thing like the last vessel.

‘You never said goodbye to me before you defected,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Clavain poked a finger into the folds of one eye. He looked weary, older than she remembered him from their last meeting. ‘I know, and I apologise. But it was deliberate. You’d have talked me out of it.’ His tone became accusatory. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I only wanted you to take care of yourself. That was why I convinced you to join the Closed Council.’

‘On balance, that was probably a mistake, wasn’t it?’ His tone had softened. He was, she was reasonably certain, smiling.

‘If you call this taking care of yourself, then yes, I’d have to admit it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’

‘Did Skade take care of you?’

‘She wanted me to help her. I didn’t. I became… withdrawn. I didn’t want to hear that she had killed you. She tried very hard, Clavain.’

‘I know.’

‘She has Galiana.’

‘I know that as well,’ he said. ‘Remontoire, Scorpio and I placed demolition charges across her ship. Even now we could destroy it, if I was prepared to delay our arrival at Resurgam.’

Felka forced herself into a sitting position. ‘Listen to me carefully, Clavain.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘You must kill Skade. It doesn’t matter that she has Galiana. It’s what Galiana would want you to do.’

‘I know,’ Clavain said. ‘But that doesn’t make it any easier to do.’

‘No.’ Felka raised her voice, not afraid to sound angry with the man who had just saved her. ‘No. You don’t understand. I mean it is exactly what Galiana would want you to do. I know, Clavain. I touched her mind again, when we met the Wolf.’

‘There’s no part of Galiana still there, Felka.’

‘There is. The Wolf did its best to hide her, but… I could sense her.’ She looked into his face, studying its ancient, latent mysteries. Of all the faces she knew, this was the one she had the least trouble recognising, but what exactly did that mean? Were they united by anything more than contingency, circumstance and shared history? She remembered how she had lied to Clavain about being his daughter. Nothing in his mood suggested that he had learned of that lie.

‘Felka

‘Listen to me, Clavain.’ She clasped his hand, squeezing it to demand his attention, ‘Listen to me. I never told you this before because it disturbed me too much. But in the Exordium experiments, I became aware of a mind reaching towards mine, from the future. I sensed unspeakable evil. But I also sensed something that I recognised. It was Galiana.’

‘No…’ Clavain said.

She squeezed his hand harder. ‘It’s the truth. But it wasn’t her fault. I see it now. It was her mind, after the Wolf had taken her over. Skade allowed the Wolf to participate in the experiments. She needed its advice about the machinery.’

Clavain shook his head. ‘The Wolf would never have collaborated with Skade.’

‘But it did. She convinced it that it needed to help her. That way she would recover the weapons, not you.’

‘How would that benefit the Wolf?’

‘It wouldn’t. But it was better that the weapons be seized by an agency that the Wolf had some influence over, rather than a third party like yourself. So it agreed to help her, knowing that it could always find a way to destroy the weapons once they were close at hand. I was there, Clavain, in its domain.’

‘The Wolf allowed that?’

‘It demanded it. Or rather, the part of it that was still Galiana did.’ Felka paused. She knew how difficult this must be for Clavain. It was agonising for her, and yet Galiana had meant even more to Clavain.

‘Then there would have to be a part of Galiana that still remembers us, is that what you mean? A part that still remembers what it was like before?’

‘She still remembers, Clavain. She still remembers, and she still feels.’ Again Felka paused, knowing that this was going to be the hardest part of all. ‘That’s why you have to do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘What you always planned to do before Skade told you that she had Galiana. You have to destroy the Wolf.’ Again she looked into his face, marvelling at its age, feeling sorrow for what she was doing to him. ‘You have to destroy the ship.’

‘But if I do that,’ Clavain said suddenly and excitedly, as if he had spotted a fatal flaw in Felka’s argument, ‘I’ll kill Galiana.’

‘I know,’ Felka said. ‘I know. But you still have to do it.’

‘You can’t know that.’

‘I can, and I do. I felt her, Clavain. I felt her willing you to do this.’

He watched it alone and in silence, from the vantage point of the observation cupola near Zodiacal Lights prow. He had given instructions that he was to remain undisturbed until he made himself available again, even though that might mean many hours of solitude.

After forty-five minutes his eyes had become highly dark-adapted. He stared into the sea of endless night behind his ship, waiting for the sign that the work was done. The occasional cosmic ray scratched a false trail across his vision, but he knew that the signature of the event would be different and impossible to mistake. Against that darkness, too, it would be unmissable.

It grew from the heart of blackness: a blue-white glint that flared to its maximum brightness over the course of three or four seconds, and then declined slowly, ramping down through spectral shades of red and rust-brown. It burned a vivid hole into his vision, a searing violet dot that remained even when he closed his eyes.

He had destroyed Nightshade.

Skade, despite her best efforts, had not located all the demolition charges that they had glued to her ship. And because they were pinheads, it had only taken one to do the necessary work. The demolition charge had merely been the initiator for the much larger cascade of detonations: first the antimatter-fuelled and –tipped warheads, and then the Conjoiner drives themselves. It would have been instantaneous, and there would have been no warning.

He thought of Galiana, too. Skade had assumed that he would never attack the ship once he knew or even suspected that she was aboard.

And perhaps Skade had been right, too.

But Felka had convinced him that it had to be done. She alone had touched Galiana’s mind and felt the agony of the Wolf’s presence. She alone had been able to convey that single, simple message back to Clavain.

Kill me.

And so he had.

He started weeping as the full realisation of what he had done hit home. There had always been the tiniest possibility that she could be made well again. He had, he supposed, never fully come to terms with her absence because that tiny hope had always made it possible to deny the fact of her death.

But no such succour was possible now.

He had killed the thing he most loved in the universe.

Clavain began to weep, silently and alone.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…

He felt her approaching the monstrosity that he had become. Through senses that had no precise human analogue, the Captain became aware of the blunt metallic presence of Volyova’s shuttle sidling close to him. She did not think that his omniscience was this total, he knew. In the many conversations that they had enjoyed he had learned that she still viewed him as a prisoner of Nostalgia for Infinity, albeit a prisoner who had in some sense merged with the fabric of his prison. And yet Ilia had assiduously mapped and catalogued the nerve bundles of his new, vastly enlarged anatomy, tracing the way they interfaced with and infiltrated the ship’s old cybernetic network. She must be fully aware, on an analytical level, that there was no point in distinguishing between the prison and the prisoner any more. Yet she appeared unable to make that last mental leap, unable to cease viewing him as something inside the ship. It was, perhaps, just too violent a readjustment of their old relationship. He could not blame her for that final failure of imagination. He would have had grave difficulties with it himself had the tables been reversed.

The Captain felt the shuttle intrude into him. It was an indescribable sensation, really: as if a stone had been pushed through his skin, painlessly, into a neat hole in his abdomen. A few moments later he felt a series of visceral tremors as the shuttle latched itself home.

She was back.

He turned his attention inwards, becoming acutely and overwhelmingly aware of what was going on inside him. His awareness of the external universe — everything beyond his hull — stepped down a level of precedence. He descended through scale, focusing first on a district of himself, then on the arterial tangle of corridors and service tubes that wormed through that district. Ilia Volyova was a single corpuscular presence moving down one corridor. There were other living things inside him, as there were inside any living thing. Even cells contained organisms that had once been independent. He had the rats: scurrying little presences. But they were only dimly sentient, and ultimately they moved to his will, incapable of surprising or amusing him. The machines were even duller. Volyova, by contrast, was an invading presence, a foreign cell that he could kill but never control.

Now she was speaking to him. He heard her sounds, picking them up from the vibrations she caused in the corridor material.

‘Captain?’ Ilia Volyova asked. ‘It’s me. I’m back from Resurgam.’

He answered her through the fabric of the ship, his voice barely a whisper to himself. ‘I’m glad to see you again, Ilia. I’ve been a little lonely. How was it down on the planet?’

‘Worrying,’ she said.

‘Worrying, Ilia?’

‘Things are moving to a head. Khouri thinks she can hold it together long enough to get most of them off the surface, but I’m not convinced.’

‘And Thorn?’ the Captain asked delicately. He was very glad that Volyova appeared more concerned about what was going on down on Resurgam than the other matter. Perhaps she had not noticed the incoming laser signal at all yet.

‘Thorn wants to be the saviour of the people; the man who leads them to the Promised Land.’

‘You seem to think more direct action is appropriate.’

‘Have you studied the object lately, Captain?’

Of course he had. He still had morbid curiosity, if nothing else. He had watched the Inhibitors dismantle the gas giant with ridiculous ease, spinning it apart like a child’s toy. He had seen the dense shadows of new machines coming into existence in the nebula of liberated matter, components as vast as worlds themselves. Embedded in the glowing skein of the nebula, they resembled tentative, half-formed embryos. Clearly the machines would soon assemble into something even larger. It was, perhaps, possible to guess what it would look like. The largest component was a trumpet-shaped maw, two thousand kilometres wide and six thousand kilometres deep. The other shapes, the Captain judged, would plug into the back of this gigantic blunderbuss.

It was a single machine, nothing like the extended ring-shaped structures that the Inhibitors had thrown around the gas giant. A single machine that could maim a star, or so Volyova believed. Captain John Brannigan almost thought it would be worth staying alive to see what the machine would do. ‘I’ve studied it,’ he told Volyova.

‘It’s nearly finished, I think. A matter of months, perhaps, maybe less, and it will be ready. That’s why we can’t take any chances.’

‘You mean the cache?’

He sensed her trepidation. ‘You told me you would consider letting me use it, Captain. Is that still the case?’

He let her sweat before answering. She really did not appear to know about the laser signal. He was certain it would have been the first thing on her mind had she noticed it.

He asked, ‘Isn’t there some risk in using the cache, Ilia, when we have come so far without being attacked?’

‘There’s even more risk in leaving it too late.’

‘I imagine Khouri and Thorn were less than enthusiastic about hitting back now if the exodus is proceeding according to plan.’

‘They’ve moved barely two thousand people off the surface, Captain — one per cent of the total. It’s no more than a gesture. Yes, things will move more quickly once the government is handling the operation. But there will be a great deal more civil unrest, too. That’s why we have to consider a pre-emptive strike against the Inhibitors.’

‘We would surely draw their fire,’ he pointed out. ‘Their weapons would destroy me.’

‘We have the cache.’

‘It has no defensive value, Ilia.’

‘Well, I’ve thought about that,’ she said testily. ‘We’ll deploy the weapons at a distance of several light-hours from this ship. They can move themselves into position before we activate them, just like they did against the Hades artefact.’

There was no need to remind her that the attack against the Hades artefact had gone less than swimmingly. But, in fairness to Volyova, it was not the weapons themselves that had let her down.

He groped for another token objection. He must not appear too willing, or she would begin to have suspicions. ‘What if they were traced back to us… to me?’

‘By then we’ll have inflicted a decisive blow. If there is a response, we’ll worry about it then.’

‘And the weapons that you had in mind…?’

‘Details, Captain, details. You can leave that part to me. All you have to do is assign control of them to me.’

‘All thirty-three weapons?’

‘No… that won’t be necessary. Just the ones I’ve earmarked for use. I don’t plan to throw everything against the Inhibitors. As you kindly reminded me, we may need some weapons later, to deal with any reprisal.’

‘You’ve thought all this through, haven’t you?’

‘Let’s just say there have always been contingency plans,’ she told him. Then her tone of voice changed expectantly. ‘Captain, one final thing.’

He hesitated before replying. Here, perhaps, it came. She was going to ask him about the laser signal spraying repeatedly against his hull, the signal that he had been very unwilling to bring to her attention.

‘Go on, Ilia,’ he said, heavy-hearted.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those cigarettes, have you?’