Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 30

She toured the cache chamber, riding through it like a queen inspecting her troops. Thirty-three weapons were present, no two of them alike. She had spent much of her adult life studying them, together with the seven others that were now lost or destroyed. And yet in all that time she had come to no more than a passing familiarity with most of the weapons. She had tested very few of them in any meaningful sense. Indeed, those she had known most about were the ones that were now lost. Some of the remaining weapons, she was certain, could not even be tested without wasting the one opportunity that existed to use them. But they were not all like that. The tricky part was distinguishing amongst the subclasses of cache weapon, cataloguing them according to their range, destructive capability and the number of times they could be used. Though she had always concealed her ignorance from her colleagues, Volyova had no more than the sketchiest idea about what at least half of her weapons were capable of doing. But she had worked scrupulously hard to gain even that inadequate understanding.

Based on what she had learned in her years of study, she had come to a decision as to which weapons would be deployed against the Inhibitor machinery. She would release eight of the weapons, retaining twenty-five aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. They were low-mass weapons, so they could be deployed across the system quickly and discreetly. Her studies had also suggested that the eight were weapons with sufficient range to strike the Inhibitor site, but there was a lot of guesswork involved in her calculations. Volyova hated guesswork. She was even less sure that they would be able to do enough damage to make a difference to the Inhibitors’ work. But she was certain of one thing: they would get noticed. If the human activity in the system had so far been on the buzzing-fly level — irritating without being actively dangerous — she was about to notch it up to a full-scale mosquito attack.

Swat this, you bastards, she thought.

She passed each weapon amongst the eight, slowing down her propulsion pack long enough to make sure nothing had changed since her last inspection. Nothing had. The weapons hung in their armoured cradles precisely as she had left them. They looked just as foreboding and sinister, but they had not done anything unexpected.

These are the eight I’ll need, Captain,‘ she said.

’Just the eight?‘

‘They’ll do for now. Mustn’t put all our chicks in one egg, or whatever the metaphor is.’ ‘I’m sure there’s something suitable.’

‘When I say the word, I’ll need you to deploy each weapon one at a time. You can do that, can’t you?’ ‘When you say “deploy”, Ilia…?’

‘Just move them outside the ship. Outside you, I mean,’ she corrected herself, having noticed that the Captain now tended to refer to himself and the ship as the same entity. She did not want to do anything, no matter how slight, that might interfere with his sudden spirit of co-operation. ‘Just to the outside,’ she continued. ‘Then, when all eight weapons are outside, we’ll run another systems check. We’ll keep you between them and the Inhibitors, just to be on the safe side. I don’t have the feeling that we’re being monitored, but it makes sense to play safe.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, Ilia.’

‘Right then. We’ll start with good old weapon seventeen, shall we?’ ‘Weapon seventeen it is, Ilia.’

The motion was sudden and startling. It was such a long time since any of the cache weapons had moved in any way that she had forgotten what it was like. The cradle that held the weapon began to glide along its support rail so that the whole obelisk-sized mass of the weapon slid smoothly and silently aside. Everything in the cache chamber took place in silence, of course, but nonetheless it seemed to Volyova that there was a more profound silence here, a silence that was judicial, like the silence of a place of execution.

The network of rails allowed the cache weapons to reach the much smaller chamber immediately below the main one. The smaller chamber was just large enough to accommodate the largest weapon, and had been rebuilt extensively for just this purpose.

She watched weapon seventeen vanish into the chamber, remembering her encounter with the weapon’s controlling subpersona ‘Seventeen’, the one that had shown worrying signs of free will and a marked lack of respect for her authority. She did not doubt that something like Seventeen existed in all the weapons. There was no sense worrying about it now; all she could do was hope that the Captain and the weapons continued to do what she asked of them.

No sense worrying about it, no. But she did have a dreadful sense of foreboding all the same.

The connecting door closed. Volyova switched her suit’s monitor feed to tap into the external cameras and sensors so that she could observe the weapon as it emerged beyond the hull. It would take a few minutes to get there, but she was in no immediate hurry.

And yet something very unexpected was happening. Her suit, via the monitors on the hull, was telling her that the ship was being bombarded by optical laser light.

Volyova’s first reaction was a crushing sense of failure. Finally, for whatever reason, she had alerted the Inhibitors and drawn their attention. It was as if just intending to deploy the weapons had been sufficient. The wash of laser light must be from their long-range sensor sweeps. They were noticing the ship, sniffing it out of the darkness.

But then she realised that the emissions were not coming from the right part of the sky.

They were coming from interstellar space.

‘Ilia…?’ the Captain asked. Ts something wrong? Shall I abort the deployment?‘

‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’ she said.

‘Knew about what?’

‘That someone was firing laser light at us. Communications frequency.’

‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I just…’

‘You didn’t want me to know about it. And I didn’t until I tapped into those hull sensors to watch the weapon emerging.’

‘What emissions… ah, wait.’ His great deific voice hesitated. ‘Wait. I see what you mean now. I didn’t notice them — there was too much else going on. You’re more attuned to such concerns than me, Ilia… I am very self-focused these days. If you wait, I will backtrack and determine when the emissions began… I have the sensor data, you know…’

She didn’t believe him, but knew there was no way to prove otherwise. He controlled everything, and it was only through a slip of his concentration that she had learned about the laser light at all.

‘Well. How long?’

‘No more than a day, Ilia. A day or so…’

‘What does “or so” mean, you lying bastard?’

‘I mean… a matter of days. No more than a week… at a conservative estimate.’

‘Svinoi. Lying pig bastard. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

I assumed you were already aware of the signal, Ilia. Didn’t you pick it up as your shuttle approached me?‘

Ah, she thought. So it was a signal now, not just a meaningless blast of laser light. What else did he know?

‘Of course I didn’t. I was asleep until the very last moment, and the shuttle wasn’t programmed to watch for anything other than in-system transmissions. Interstellar communications are blue-shifted out of the usual frequency bands. What was the blue shift, Captain?‘

‘Modest, Ilia… ten per cent of light. Just enough to shift it out of the expected frequency band.’

She did the sums. Ten per cent of light… a lighthugger couldn’t slow down from that kind of speed in much less than thirty days. Even if a starship was breaking into the system, she still had half a month before it would arrive. It wasn’t much of a breathing space, but it was a lot better than finding out they were mere days away.

‘Captain? The signal must be an automated transmission locked on repeat, or they wouldn’t have kept up it up for so long. Patch it through to my suit. Immediately.’

‘Yes, Ilia. And the cache weapons? Shall I abandon the deployment?’

‘Yes…’ she started saying, before correcting herself. ‘No. No! Nothing changes. Keep deploying the fucking things — it’ll still take hours to get all eight of them outside. You heard what I said before, didn’t you? I want your mass screening them from the Inhibitors.’

‘What about the source of the signal, Ilia?’

Had the option been available to her, she would have kicked part of him then. But she was floating far from anything kickable. ‘Just play the fucking thing.’

Her faceplate opaqued, blanking out the view of the cache chamber. For a moment she stared into a dimensionless sea of white. Then a scene formed, a slow dissolve into an interior. She appeared to be standing at one end of a long austerely furnished room, with a black table between her and the three people at the table’s far end. The table was a wedge of pure darkness.

‘Hello,’ said the only human male among the three. ‘My name is Nevil Clavain, and I believe you have something I want.’

At first glance he appeared to be an extension of the table. His clothes were the same unreflective black, so that only his hands and head loomed out of the shadows. His fingers were laced neatly in front of him. Ropelike veins curled across the backs of his hands. His beard and hair were white, his face notched here and there by crevasses of extreme shadow.

‘He means the devices inside your ship,’ said the person sitting next to Clavain. She was a very young-looking woman who wore a similarly black quasi-uniform. Volyova struggled with her accent, thinking it sounded like one of the local Yellowstone dialects. ‘We know you have thirty-three of them. We have a permanent fix on their diagnostic signatures, so don’t even think of bluffing.’

‘It won’t work,’ said the third speaker, who was a pig. ‘We are very determined, you see. We captured this ship, when they said it couldn’t be done. We’ve even given the Conjoiners a bloody nose. We’ve come a long way to get what we want and we won’t be going home empty-handed.’ As he spoke he reinforced his points with downward swipes of one trotterlike hand.

Clavain, the first speaker, leaned forward. ‘Scorpio’s right. We have the technical means to repossess the weapons. The question is, do you have the good sense to hand them over without a fight?’

Volyova felt as if Clavain was waiting for her to answer. The urge to say something even though she knew this was not a real-time message was almost overwhelming. She began to speak, knowing that the suit could capture whatever she was saying and uplink it back to the intruding ship. There would be a hell of a turnaround on the signal, though: three days out, at the very least, which meant she could not expect a reply for a week.

But Clavain was speaking again. ‘Let’s not be too dogmatic, however., I appreciate you have local difficulties. We’ve seen the activity in your system, and we understand how it might give cause for concern. But that doesn’t change our immediate objective. We want those weapons ready to be handed over as soon as we break into circumstellar space. No tricks, no delays. That isn’t negotiable. But we can discuss the details, and the benefits of mutual cooperation.’

‘Not when you’re half a month out, you can’t,’ Volyova whispered.

‘We will arrive shortly,’ Clavain said. ‘Perhaps sooner than you expect. But for now we’re outside efficient communications range. We will continue transmitting this message until we arrive. In the meantime, to facilitate negotiations I have prepared a beta-level copy of myself. I am sure you are familiar with the necessary simulation protocols. If not, we can also supply technical documentation. Otherwise, you can proceed to a full and immediate installation. By the time this message has cycled one thousand times, you will have all the data you need to implement my beta-level.’ Clavain smiled reasonably, spreading his hands in a gesture of openness. ‘Please, will you consider it? We will of course make any reciprocal arrangements for your own beta-level, should you wish to uplink a negotiating proxy. We await your reaction with interest. This is Nevil Clavain, for Zodiacal Light, signing off.’

Ilia Volyova swore to herself. ‘Of course we’re familiar with the fucking protocols, you patronising git.’

The message had cycled more than a thousand times, which meant that the necessary data to implement the beta-level had already been recorded.

‘Did you get that, Captain?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Ilia.’

‘Scrub the beta-level, will you? Check it for any nasties. Then find a way to implement it.’

‘Even if it contained some kind of military virus, Ilia, I doubt very much that it would harm me in my present state. It would be a little like a man with advanced leprosy worrying about a mild skin complaint, or the captain of a sinking ship concerning himself with a minor incident of woodworm, or…’

‘Yes, I get the point, thank you. But do it anyway. I want to talk to Clavain. Face to face.’

She reached up and de-opaqued her faceplate just in time to see the next cache weapon commence its crawl towards space. She was furious beyond words. It was not simply the fact that the newcomers had arrived so unexpectedly, or made such awkward and specific demands. It was the way the Captain appeared to have gone out of his way to conceal the whole business from her.

She did not know what he was playing at, but she did not like it at all.

Volyova took a step back from the servitor.

‘Start,’ she said, not without a little wariness.

The beta-level had conformed to the usual protocols, backwardly compatible with all major simulation systems since the mid Belle Époque. It also revealed itself to be free of any contaminating viruses, either deliberate or accidental. Volyova still did not trust it, so she spent another half-day verifying the fact that the simulation had not, in some exceedingly devious way, managed to infiltrate and modify her virus filters. It appeared that it had not, but she still did her best to make sure it was isolated from as much of the ship’s control network as possible.

The Captain, of course, was entirely correct: he was, in all major respects, now the ship. What attacked the ship attacked him. And since he had become the ship thanks to his own takeover by a super-adapted alien plague, it appeared highly unlikely that anything of merely human origin would be able to piggyback its way into him. He had already been stormed and corrupted by an expert invader.

Abruptly, the servitor moved. It took a step back from her, almost toppling before it righted itself. Dual camera-eyes looked in different directions and then snapped into binocular mode, locking on to her. Mechanical irises snicked open and shut. The machine took another step, towards her this time.

She raised a hand. ‘Halt.’

She had installed the beta-level into one of the ship’s few fully androform machines. The servitor was a skeletal assemblage of parts, all spindly openwork. She felt no sense of threat in its vicinity, or at least no rational sense of threat, since she was physically stronger and more robust than the machine.

‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Are you properly installed?’

The machine’s voice box buzzed like a trapped fly. I am a beta-level simulation of Nevil Clavain.‘

‘Good. Who am I?’

I don’t know. You haven’t introduced yourself.‘

I am Triumvir Ilia Volyova,‘ she said. ’This is my ship, Nostalgia for Infinity. I’ve installed you in one of our general-mech servitors. It’s a frail machine, deliberately so, so don’t think of trying any monkey business. You’re wired for self-destruct, but even if that wasn’t the case I could rip you apart with my fingers.‘

‘Monkey business is the last thing on my mind, Triumvir. Or Ilia. What shall I call you?’

‘Sir. This is my turf now.’

It appeared not have heard her. ‘Did you arrange for your own beta-level to be transmitted to Zodiacal Light, Ilia?’

‘What’s it to you if I did?’

‘I’m curious, that’s all. There’d be a pleasing symmetry if we were both represented by our respective beta-levels, wouldn’t there?’

I don’t trust beta-levels. And I don’t see the point, either.‘

Clavain’s servitor looked around, its dual eyes clicking and whirring. She had activated it in a relatively normal part of the ship — the Captain’s transformations were very mild here — but she supposed she had become accustomed to surroundings that were still quite odd by the usual criteria. Arcs of hardened, glistening plague-matter spanned the chamber like whale ribs. They were slick with chemical secretions. Her booted feet sloshed through inches of foul black effluent.

‘You were saying?’ she prompted.

The machine snapped its attention back on to her. ‘Using beta-levels makes perfect sense, Ilia. Our two ships are out of effective communication range now, but they’re getting closer. The beta-levels can speed up the whole negotiation process, establishing the ground rules, if you like. When the ships are closer the betas can download their experiences. Our flesh progenitors can review what has been discussed and take appropriate decisions much more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.’

‘You sound plausible, but all I’m talking to is a set of algorithmic responses; a predictive model for how the real Clavain would respond in a similar situation.’

The servitor made itself shrug. ‘And your point is?’

‘I’ve no guarantee that this is exactly how Clavain really would respond, were he standing here.’

‘All, that old fallacy. You sound like Galiana. The fact is, the real Clavain might respond differently in any number of instances where he was presented with the same stimuli. So you lose nothing by dealing with a beta-level.’ The machine lifted up one of its skeletal arms, peering at her through the hollow spaces between the arm’s struts and wires. ‘You realise this won’t help matters, though?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Putting me in a body like this, something so obviously mechanical. And this voice… it’s not me, not me at all. You saw the transmission. This just doesn’t do me justice, does it? I actually have a slight lisp. Even play it up sometimes. I suppose you could say it’s part of my character.’

‘I told you already…’

‘Here’s what I suggest, Ilia. Allow the machine to access your implants, will you, so that it can map a perceptual ghost into your visual/auditory field.’

She felt oddly defensive. I have no implants, Clavain.‘

The buzzing voice sounded astonished. ’But you’re an Ultra.‘

‘Yes, but I’m also brezgatnik. I’ve never had implants, not even before the plague.’

‘I thought I understood Ultras,’ Clavain’s beta-level said thoughtfully. ‘You surprise me, I admit. But you must have some way of viewing projected information, surely, when a hologram won’t work?’

‘I have goggles,’ she admitted.

‘Fetch them. It will make life a lot easier, I assure you.’

She did not like being told what to do by the beta-level, but she was prepared to admit that its suggestion made sense. She had another servitor bring her the goggles and an earpiece. She slipped the ensemble on, and then allowed the beta-level to modify the view she saw through the goggles. The spindly robot was edited out of her visual field and replaced by an image of Clavain, much as she had seen him during the transmission. The illusion was not perfect, which was a useful reminder that she was not dealing with a flesh-and-blood human. But on the whole it was a great improvement on the servitor.

‘There,’ Clavain’s real voice said in her ear. ‘Now we can do business. I’ve asked already, but will you consider uplinking a beta-level of yourself to Zodiacal Light!’

He had her in a spot. She did not want to admit that she had no provision for such a thing; that would really have made her look odd.

‘I’ll consider it. In the meantime, Clavain, let’s get this little chat over with, shall we?’ Volyova smiled. ‘You caught me in the middle of something.’

Clavain’s image smiled back. ‘Nothing too serious, I hope.’

Even while she busied herself with the servitor, she continued the operation to deploy the cache weapons. She had told the Captain that she did not want him to make his presence known while the servitor was on, so his only means of speaking to her was through the same earpiece. He, in turn, was able to read her subvocal communications.

‘I don’t want Clavain learning any more than he has to,’ she had told the Captain. ‘Especially about you, and what’s happened to this ship.’

‘Why should Clavain learn anything? If the beta-level discovers something we don’t want it to know, we’ll just kill it.’

‘Clavain will ask questions later.’

‘If there is a later,’ the Captain had said.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning… we aren’t intending to negotiate, are we?’

She escorted the servitor through the ship to the bridge, doing her best to pick a route that took her through the least strange parts of the interior. She observed the beta-level taking in its surroundings, obviously aware that something peculiar had happened to the ship. Yet it did not ask her any questions directly related to the plague transformations. It was, frankly, a lost battle in any case. The approaching ship would soon have the necessary resolution to glimpse Infinity for itself, and then it would learn of the baroque external transformations.

‘Ilia,’ Clavain’s voice said. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush. We want the thirty-three items now in your possession, and we want them very badly. Do you admit knowledge of the items in question?’

‘It would be a tiny bit implausible to deny it, I think.’

‘Good.’ Clavain’s image nodded emphatically. ‘That’s progress. At least we’re clear that the items exist.’

Volyova shrugged. ‘So if we’re not going to beat about the bush, why don’t we call them what they are? They’re weapons, Clavain. You know it. I know it. They know it, in all likelihood.’

She slipped her goggles off for a moment. Clavain’s servitor strode around the room, its movements almost but not quite fluidly human. She replaced the goggles, and the overlaid image moved with the same puppetlike strides.

‘I like you better already, Ilia. Yes, they’re weapons. Very old weapons, of rather obscure origin.’

‘Don’t bullshit me, Clavain. If you know about the weapons, you probably have just as much idea as me about who made them, maybe more. Well, here’s my guess: I think the Conjoiners made them. What do you say to that?’

‘You’re warm, I’ll give you that.’

‘Warm?’

‘Hot. Very hot, as it happens.’

‘Start telling me what the hell this is all about, Clavain. If they’re Conjoiner weapons, how have you only just found out about them?’

‘They emit tracer signals, Ilia. We homed in on them.’

‘But you’re not Conjoiners.’

‘No…’ Clavain conceded this point with a sweep of one arm, neatly synchronised with the servitor. ‘But I’ll be honest with you, if only because it might help swing the negotiations in my favour. The Conjoiners do want those weapons back. And they’re on their way here as well. As a matter of fact, there’s a whole fleet of heavily armed Conjoiner vessels immediately behind Zodiacal Light’

She remembered what the pig, Scorpio, had said about Clavain’s crew bloodying the noses of the spiders. ‘Why tell me this?’ Volyova said.

‘It alarms you, I see. I don’t blame you for that. I’d be alarmed, too.’ The image scratched its beard. ‘That’s why you should consider negotiating with me first. Let me take the weapons off your hands. I’ll deal with the Conjoiners.’

‘Why do you think you’d have any more luck than me, Clavain?’

‘Couple of reasons, Ilia. One, I’ve already outsmarted them on a few occasions. Two, and perhaps more pertinent, until very recently I was one.’

The Captain whispered in her ear. ‘I’ve done a check, Ilia. There was a Nevil Clavain with Conjoiner connections.’

Volyova addressed Clavain. ‘And you think that would make a difference, Clavain?’

He nodded. ‘The Conjoiners aren’t vindictive. They’ll leave you alone if you have nothing to offer them. If you still have the weapons, however, they’ll take you apart.’

‘There’s a small flaw in your thinking,’ Volyova said. ‘If I had the weapons, wouldn’t I be the one doing the taking apart?’

Clavain winked at her. ‘Know how to use them that well, do you?’

‘I have some experience.’

‘No, you don’t. You’ve barely switched the bloody things on, Ilia. If you had, we’d have detected them centuries ago. Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, won’t I?’

Clavain — she had to stop thinking of it as Clavain — scratched his beard again. ‘I didn’t mean to offend. But the weapons are dangerous. I’m quite sincere in my suggestion that you hand them over now and let me worry about them.’

‘And if I say no?’

‘We’ll do just what we promised: take them by force.’

‘Look up, Clavain, will you? I want to show you something. You alluded to some knowledge of it before, but I want you to be completely certain of the facts.’

She had programmed the display sphere to come alive at that moment, rilled with an enlargement of the dismantled world. The cloud of matter was curdled and torn, flecked by dense nodes of aggregating matter. But the trumpetlike object growing at its heart was ten times larger than any other structure, and now appeared almost fully formed. Although it was difficult for her sensors to see with any clarity through the megatonnes of matter that still lay along the line of sight, there was a suggestion of immense complexity, a bewildering accretion of lacy detail, from a scale of many hundreds of kilometres across to the limit of her scanning resolution. The machinery had a muscular, organic look, knotted and swollen with gristle, sinews and glandular nodes. It did not look like anything a human imagination would have produced by design. And even now layers of matter were being added to the titanic machine: she could see the density streams where mass flows were still taking place. But the thing looked worrying close to being finished.

‘Have you seen much of that before now, Clavain?’ she asked.

‘A little. Not as clearly as this.’

‘What did you make of it?’

‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve made of it first, Ilia?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘I came to the obvious conclusion, Clavain. I watched three small worlds get ripped apart by machines, before they moved on to this one. They’re alien. They were drawn here by something Dan Sylveste did.’

‘Yes. We assumed he had something to do with it. We know about these machines, too — at least, we’ve had our suspicions that they exist.’

‘Who is “we”, exactly?’ she asked.

The Conjoiners, I mean. I only defected recently.‘ He paused before continuing. ’A few centuries ago, we launched expeditions into deep interstellar space, much further out than anything achieved by any other human faction. Those expeditions encountered the machines. We codenamed them wolves, but I think we can assume we’re seeing essentially the same entities here.‘

‘They have no name for themselves,’ Volyova said. ‘But we call them the Inhibitors. It’s the name they gained during their heyday.’

‘You learned all that from observation?’

‘No,’ Volyova said. ‘Not as such.’

She was telling him too much, she thought. But Clavain was so persuasive that she could almost not help herself. Before very long, if she were not careful, she would have told him everything about what had happened around Hades: how Khouri had been given a glimpse into the galaxy’s dark prehuman history, endless chapters of extinction and war stretching back to the dawn of sentient life itself…

There were things she was prepared to discuss with Clavain, and there were things she would rather keep to herself, for now.

‘You’re a woman of mystery, Ilia Volyova.’

‘I’m also a woman with a lot of work to do, Clavain.’ She made the sphere zoom in on the burgeoning machine. ‘The Inhibitors are building a weapon. I have strong suspicions that it will be used to trigger some kind of cataclysmic stellar event. They triggered a flare to wipe out the Amarantin, but I think this will be different — much larger and probably more terminal. And I simply cannot allow it to happen. There are two hundred thousand people on Resurgam, and they will all die if that weapon is used.’

‘I sympathise, believe me.’

‘Then you’ll understand that I won’t be handing over any weapons, now or at any point in the future.’

For the first time Clavain appeared exasperated. He rubbed a hand through his shock of hair, bristling it into a mess of jagged white spikes. ‘Give me the weapons and I’ll see that they’re used against the wolves. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Except that I don’t believe you. And if these weapons are as potent as you say, I’m not sure I’m willing to hand them over to any other party. We’ve looked after them for centuries, after all. No harm was done. I’d say that puts us in rather a good light, wouldn’t you? We’ve been responsible custodians. It would be quite cavalier of us to let any old bunch of rogues get their hands on them now, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘Especially as you admit that you’re not the rightful owners, Clavain.’

‘You’ll regret dealing with the Conjoiners, Ilia.’

‘Mm. But at least I’ll be dealing with a legitimate faction.’

Clavain pushed the fingers of his right hand against his brow, like someone fighting a migraine. ‘No, you won’t be. Not in the sense you think. They only want the weapons so they can scuttle off into deep space with them.’

‘And I suppose you have some vastly more magnanimous use in mind?’

Clavain nodded. ‘I do, as a matter of fact. I want to put them back into the hands of the human race. Demarchists… Ultras… Scorpio’s army… I don’t care who takes them over, so long as they convince me that they’ll do the right thing with them.’

‘Which is?’

‘Fight the wolves. They’re coming closer. The Conjoiners knew it, and what’s happening here proves it. The next few centuries are going to be very interesting, Ilia.’

‘Interesting?’ she repeated.

‘Yes. But not in quite the way we’d wish.’

She switched the beta-level off for the time being. The image of Clavain shattered into speckles and then faded away, leaving only the skeletal shape of the servitor where he had been standing. The transition was quite jarring: she had felt a palpable sense of being in his presence.

‘Ilia?’ It was the Captain. ‘We’re ready now. The last cache weapon is outside the hull.’

She tugged the earpiece out and spoke normally. ‘Good. Anything to report?’

‘Nothing major. Five weapons deployed without incident. Of the remaining three, I noted a transient anomaly with the propulsion harness of weapon six, and an intermittent fault with the guidance subsystems of weapons fourteen and twenty-three. Neither has recurred since deployment.’

She lit a cigarette and smoked a quarter of it before answering. ‘That doesn’t sound like nothing major to me.’

‘I’m sure the faults won’t happen again,’ boomed the Captain’s voice. ‘The electromagnetic environment of the cache chamber is quite different from that beyond the hull. The transition probably caused some confusion, that’s all. The weapons will settle down now that they’re outside.’

‘Make a shuttle ready, please.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You heard me. I’m going outside to check on the weapons.’ She stamped her feet, waiting for his answer.

‘There’s no need for that, Ilia. I can monitor the wellbeing of the weapons perfectly well.’

‘You may be able to control them, Captain, but you don’t know them as well as I do.’

‘Ilia…’

‘I won’t need a large shuttle. I’d even consider taking a suit, but I can’t smoke in one of those things.’

The Captain’s sigh was like the collapse of a distant building. ‘Very well, Ilia. I’ll have a shuttle ready for you. You’ll take care, won’t you? You can keep to the side of the ship that the Inhibitors can’t see, if you’re careful.’

‘They’re a long way from taking any notice of us. That isn’t about to change in the next five minutes.’

‘But you appreciate my concern.’

Did the Captain really care for her? She was not certain that she really believed it. Granted, he might be a little lonely out here, and she was his only chance of human companionship. But she was also the woman who had exposed his crime and punished him with this transformation. His feelings towards her were bound to be a little on the complex side.

She had finished enough of the cigarette. On a whim she inserted the butt-end into the wirework head assembly of the servitor, jamming it between two thin metal spars. The tip burned dull orange.

‘Filthy habit,’ Ilia Volyova said.

She took the two-seater snake-headed shuttle that Khouri and Thorn had used to explore the Inhibitor workings around the former gas giant. The Captain had already warmed the craft and presented it to an air lock. The craft had sustained some minor damage during the encounter with the Inhibitor machinery inside Roc’s atmosphere, but most of it had been easy to repair from existing component stocks. The defects that remained certainly did not prevent the shuttle being used for short-range work like this.

She settled into the command seat and assayed the avionics display. The Captain had done a very good job: even the fuel tanks were brimming, although she would not be taking the ship more than a few hundred metres out.

Something nagged at the back of her mind, a feeling she could not quite put her finger on.

She took the shuttle outside, transiting through the armoured doors until she reached naked space. She exited near the much larger aperture where the cache weapons had emerged. The weapons themselves had vanished around the mountainous curve of the great ship’s hull, out of the Inhibitors’ line of sight. Volyova followed the same path, watching the nebulous mass of the shredded planet fall beneath the sharp horizon of the hull.

The eight cache weapons came into view, lurking like monsters. They were all different, but had clearly been shaped by the same governing intellects. She had always suspected that the builders were the Conjoiners, but it was unsettling to have this confirmed by Clavain. She saw no reason for him to have lied. Why, though, had the Conjoiners brought into existence such atrocious tools? It could only have been because they had some intention, at some point, of using them. Volyova wondered whether the intended target had been humanity.

Around each weapon was a harness of girders to which were attached steering rockets and aiming subsystems, as well as a small number of defensive armaments, purely to protect the weapons themselves. The harnesses were able to move the weapons around, and in principle they could have positioned them anywhere within the system, but they were too slow for her requirements. Instead, she had lately fastened sixty-four tug rockets on to the harnesses, eight apiece, positioned at opposing corners of each weapon’s frame. It would take fewer than thirty days to move the eight weapons to the other side of the system.

She nosed the shuttle towards the group of weapons. The weapons, sensing I her approach, shifted their positions. She slid through them, then banked, circled and slowed, examining the specific weapons that the Captain had reported difficulties with. Diagnostic summaries, terse but efficient, scrolled on to her wrist bracelet. She called up each weapon, paying meticulous attention to what she saw.

Something was wrong.

Or rather, something was not wrong. There appeared to be nothing the matter with any of the eight weapons.

She felt again that prickly sense of wrongness, the sense that she had been steered into doing something which only felt as if it had been her choice. The weapons were perfectly healthy; indeed, there was no evidence that there had been any faults at all, transient or otherwise. But that could only mean that the Captain had lied to her: that he had reported problems where none existed.

She composed herself. If only she had not taken him at his word, but had checked for herself before leaving the ship…

‘Captain…’ she said hesitantly.

‘Yes, Ilia?’

‘Captain, I’m getting some funny readings here. The weapons all appear to be healthy, no problems at all.’

‘I’m quite sure there were transient errors, Ilia.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes.’ But he did not sound so convinced of himself. ‘Yes, Ilia, quite sure. Why would I have reported them otherwise?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps because you wanted to get me outside the ship for some reason?’

‘Why would I have wanted to do that, Ilia?’ He sounded affronted, but not quite as affronted as she would have liked.

‘I don’t know. But I have a horrible feeling I’m about to find out.’

She watched one of the cache weapons — it was weapon thirty-one, the quintessence-force weapon — detach from the group. It slid sideways spouting bright sparks from its steering jets, the smooth movement belying the enormous mass of machinery that was being shunted so effortlessly. She examined her bracelet. Gyroscopes spun up, shifting the harness about its centre of gravity. Ponderously, like a great iron finger moving to point at the accused, the enormous weapon was selecting its target.

It was swinging back towards Nostalgia for Infinity.

Belatedly, stupidly, cursing herself, Ilia Volyova understood precisely what was happening.

The Captain was trying to kill himself.

She should have seen it coming. His emergence from the catatonic state had only ever been a ploy. He must have had it in mind all along to end himself, to finally terminate whatever extreme state of misery he found himself in. And she had given him the ideal means. She had begged him to let her use the cache weapons, and he had — too easily, she now saw — obliged.

‘Captain…’

‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I have to do this.’

‘No. You don’t. Nothing has to be done.’

‘You don’t understand. I know you want to, and I know you think you do, but you can’t know what it is like.’

‘Captain… listen to me. We can talk about it. Whatever it is that you feel you can’t deal with, we can discuss it.’

The weapon was slowing its rotation, its flowerlike muzzle nearly pointed at the lighthugger’s shadowed hull.

‘It’s long past the time for discussion, Ilia.’

‘We’ll find a way,’ she said desperately, not even believing herself. ‘We’ll find a way to make you as you were: human again.’

‘Don’t be silly, Ilia. You can’t unmake what I’ve become.’

‘Then we’ll find a way to make it tolerable… to end whatever pain or discomfort you’re in. We’ll find a way to make it better than that. We can do it, Captain. There isn’t anything you and I couldn’t achieve, if we set our minds to it.’

I said you didn’t understand. I was right. Don’t you realise, Ilia? This isn’t about what I’ve become, or what I was. This is about what I did. It’s about the thing I can’t live with any more.‘

The weapon halted. It was now pointed directly at the hull.

‘You killed a man,’ Volyova said. ‘You murdered a man and took over his body. I know. It was a crime, Captain, a terrible crime. Sajaki didn’t deserve what you did to him. But don’t you understand? The crime has already been paid for. Sajaki died twice: once with his mind in his body and once with yours. That was the punishment, and God knows he suffered for it. There isn’t any need for further atonement, Captain. It’s been done. You’ve suffered enough, as well. What happened to you would be considered justice enough by anyone. You’ve paid for that deed a thousand times over.’

I still remember what I did to him.‘

‘Of course you do. But that doesn’t mean you have to inflict this on yourself now.’ She glanced at the bracelet. The weapon was powering up, she observed. In a moment it would be ready for use.

I do, Ilia. I do. This isn’t some whim, you realise. I have planned this moment for much longer than you can conceive. Through all our conversations, it was always my intention to end myself.‘

‘You could have done it while I was down on Resurgam. Why now?’

‘Why now?’ She heard what could almost have been a laugh. It was a horrid, gallows laugh, if that was the case. ‘Isn’t it obvious, Ilia? What good is an act of justice if there isn’t a witness to see it executed?’

Her bracelet informed her that the weapon had reached attack readiness. ‘You wanted me to see this happen?’

‘Of course. You were always special, Ilia. My best friend; the only one who talked to me when I was ill. The only one who understood.’

I also made you what you are.‘

Tt was necessary. I don’t blame you for that, I really don’t.‘

‘Please don’t do this. You’ll be hurting more than just yourself.’ She knew that she had to make this good; that what she said now could be crucial. ‘Captain, we need you. We need the weapons you carry, and we need you to help evacuate Resurgam. If you kill yourself now, you’ll be killing two hundred thousand people. You’ll be committing a far greater crime than the one you feel the need to atone for.’

‘But that would only be a sin of omission, Ilia.’

‘Captain, I’m begging you… don’t do this.’

‘Steer your shuttle away, please, Ilia. I don’t want you to be harmed by what is about to happen. That was never my intention. I only wanted you as a witness, someone who would understand.’

I already understand! Isn’t that enough?‘

‘No, Ilia.’

The weapon activated. The beam that emerged from its muzzle was invisible until it touched the hull. Then, in a gale of escaping air and ionised armour, it revealed itself flickeringly: a metre-thick shaft of scything destructive quintessence force, chewing inexorably through the ship. This, weapon thirty-one, was not one of the most devastating tools in her arsenal, but it had immense range. That was why she had selected it for use in the attack against the Inhibitors. The quintessence beam ghosted right through the ship, emerging in a similar gale on the far side. The weapon began to track, gnawing down the length of the hull.

‘Captain…’

His voice came back. ‘I’m sorry, Ilia… I can’t stop now.’

He sounded in pain. It was hardly surprising, she thought. His nerve endings reached into every part of Nostalgia for Infinity. He was feeling the beam slice through him just as agonisingly as if she had begun to saw off her own arm. Again, Volyova understood. It had to be much more than just a quick, clean suicide. That would not be sufficient recompense for his crime. It had to be slow, protracted, excruciating. A martial execution, with a diligent witness who would appreciate and remember what he had inflicted upon himself.

The beam had chewed a hundred-metre-long furrow in the hull. The Captain was haemorrhaging air and fluids in the wake of the cutting beam.

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, for God’s sake, stop!’

‘Let me finish this, Ilia. Please forgive me.’

‘No. I won’t allow it.’

She did not give herself time to think about what had to be done. If she had, she doubted that she would have had the courage to act. She had never considered herself a brave person, and most certainly not someone given to self-sacrifice.

Ilia Volyova steered her shuttle towards the beam, placing herself between the weapon and the fatal gash it was knifing into Nostalgia for Infinity.

‘No!’ she heard the Captain call.

But it was too late. He could not shut down the weapon in less than a second, nor steer it fast enough to bring her out of the line of fire. The shuttle collided glancingly with the beam — her aim had not been dead on — and the edge of the beam obliterated the entire right side of the shuttle. Armour, insulation, interior reinforcement, pressure membrane — everything wafted away in an instant of ruthless annihilation. Volyova had a moment to realise that she had missed the precise centre of the beam, and another instant to realise that it did not really matter.

She was going to die anyway.

Her vision fogged. There was a shocking, sudden cold in her windpipe, as if someone had poured liquid helium down her throat. She attempted to take a breath and the cold rammed into her lungs. There was an awful feeling of granite solidity in her chest. Her interior organs were shock freezing.

She opened her mouth, attempting to speak, to make one final utterance. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.