Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 3

From his vantage point in an airlock, Nevil Clavain watched a circular part of Nightshade’s hull iris open. The armoured proxies that bustled out resembled albino lice, carapaced and segmented and sprouting many specialised limbs, sensors and weapons. They quickly crossed the open space to the enemy ship, sticking to her claw-shaped hull with adhesive-tipped legs. Then they scuttled across the damaged surface, hunting for entry locks and the known weak spots of that type of ship.

The proxies moved with the random questing motion of bugs. The scarabs could have swept through the ship very quickly, but only at the risk of killing any survivors who might have been sheltering in pressurised zones. So Clavain insisted that the machines use the airlocks, even if that meant a delay while each robot passed through.

He need hardly have worried. As soon as the first scarab made its way through, it became clear that he was going to encounter neither resistance nor armed survivors. The ship was dark, cold and silent. He could almost smell death aboard her. The proxy edged its way through the enemy craft, the faces of the dead coming into view as it passed their duty stations. Similar reports came back from the other machines as they scuttled through the rest of the ship.

He withdrew most of the scarabs and then sent a small detachment of Conjoiners into the ship via the same route the machines had used. Through the eyes of a scarab, he watched his squad emerge from the lock one at a time: bulbous white shapes like hard-edged ghosts.

The squad swept the ship, moving through the same cramped spaces that the proxies had explored, but with the additional watchfulness of humans. Gun muzzles were poked into hideaways, equipment hatches opened and checked for cowering survivors. None were found. The dead were discreetly prodded, but none of them showed the slightest signs of faking it. Their bodies were beginning to cool, and the thermal patterns around their faces showed that death had already occurred, albeit recently. There was no sign of violent death or injury.

He composed a thought and passed it back to Skade and Remontoire, who were still on the bridge. I’m going inside. No ifs, no buts. I’ll be quick and I won’t take any unnecessary risks.

[No, Clavain.]

Sorry, Skade, but you can’t have it both ways. I’m not a member of your cosy little club, which means I can go where the hell I like. Like it or lump it, but that’s part of the deal.

[You’re still a valued asset, Clavain.]

I’ll be careful. I promise.

He felt Skade’s irritation bleeding into his own emotional state. Remontoire was not exactly thrilled either.

As Closed Council members, it would have been unthinkable for either of them to do anything as dangerous as board a captured enemy ship. They were taking enough of a risk by leaving the Mother Nest. Many of the other Conjoiners, Skade included, wanted him to join the Closed Council, where they could tap his wisdom more efficiently and keep him out of harm’s way. With her authority in the Council, Skade could make life awkward for him if he persisted in remaining outside, relegating him to token duties or even some kind of miserable forced retirement. There were other avenues of punishment and Clavain took none of them lightly. He had even begun to consider the possibility that perhaps he should join the Closed Council after all. At least he would learn some answers that way, and perhaps begin to exert influence over the aggressors.

But until he took a bite of that apple he was still a soldier. No restrictions applied to him, and he was damned if he was going to act as if they did.

He continued with the business of readying his suit. For a time, a good two or three centuries, that process had been much easier and quicker. You donned a mask and some communications gear and then stepped through a membrane of smart matter stretched over a door that was otherwise open to vacuum. As you went through it, a layer of the membrane slithered around you, forming an instant skintight suit. Upon your return, you stepped through the same membrane and your suit returned to it, oozing off like enchanted slime. It made the act of stepping outside a ship about as complex as slipping on a pair of sunglasses. Of course, such technologies had never made much sense in wartime — too vulnerable to attack — and they made even less sense in the post-plague era, when only the hardiest forms of nanotechnology could be deployed in sensitive applications.

Clavain supposed that he should have been irritated at the extra effort that was now needed. But in many ways he found the act of suiting-up — the martial donning of armour plating, the rigorous subsystem criticality checks, the buckling-on of weapons and sensors — to be strangely reassuring. Perhaps it was because the ritualistic nature of the exercise felt like a series of superstitious gestures against illfortune. Or perhaps it was because it reminded him of what things had been like during his youth.

He left the airlock, kicking off towards the enemy ship. The claw-shaped craft was bright against one dark limb of the gas giant. It was damaged, certainly, but there had been no outgassing to suggest a loss of hull integrity. There had even been a chance of a survivor. Although the infra-red scans had been inconclusive, laser-ranging devices had detected slight back-and-forth movement of the entire ship. There could be any number of explanations for that movement, but the most obvious was the presence of at least one person still moving around inside, kicking off from the hull now and then. But the scarabs hadn’t found any survivors, and neither had his sweep team.

Something caught his eye: a writhing pale green filament of lightning in the dark crescent of the gas giant. He had barely given the freighter a second thought since the Demarchist vessel had emerged, but Antoinette Bax’s ship had never emerged from the atmosphere. In all likelihood she was dead, killed in one of the several thousand ways it was possible to die in an atmosphere. He had no idea what she had been doing, and doubted that it would have been anything he would have approved of. But she had been alone — hadn’t she? — and that was no way to die in space. Clavain remembered the way she had ignored the shipmaster’s warning and realised that he rather admired her for it. Whatever else she had been, he could not deny that she had been brave.

He thudded into contact with the enemy ship, absorbing the impact by bending his knees. Clavain stood up, his soles adhering to the hull. Holding a hand against his visor to cut down sun glare, he turned back to look at Nightshade, relishing the rare opportunity to see his ship from the outside. Nightshade was so dark that at first he had trouble making it out. Then his implants boxed it in with a pulsing green overlay, scale and distance annotated by red gradations and numerals. The ship was a lighthugger, with interstellar capability. Nightshade’s slender hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow, streamlined for maximum near-light cruise efficiency. Braced near the thickest point of the hull, just before it retapered to a blunt tail, was a pair of engines, thrown out from the hull on slender spars. They were what the other human factions called Conjoiner drives, for the simple reason that the Conjoiners had a monopoly on their construction and distribution. For centuries the Conjoiners had allowed the Demarchists, Ultras and other starfaring factions to use the technology, while never once hinting at the mysterious physical processes that allowed the tamperproof engines to function in the first place.

But all that had changed a century ago. Practically overnight, the Conjoiners had ceased production of their engines. No explanation had been given, nor any promise that production would ever be resumed.

From that moment on, the existing Conjoiner drives became astonishingly valuable. Terrible acts of piracy were waged over issues of ownership. The event had certainly been one of the contributing causes of the current war.

Clavain knew there were rumours that the Conjoiners had continued building the engines for their own uses. He also knew, as far as he could be certain of anything, that these rumours were false. The edict to cease production had been immediate and universal. More than that, there had been a sharp decline in the use of existing ships, even by his own faction. But what Clavain did not know was why the edict had been issued in the first place. He guessed that it had originated in the Closed Council, but beyond that he had no idea why it had been deemed necessary.

And yet now the Closed Council had made Nightshade. Clavain had been entrusted with the prototype on this proving mission, but the Closed Council had revealed few of its secrets. Remontoire and Skade evidently knew more than he did, and he was willing to bet that Skade knew even more than Remontoire. Skade had spent most of the trip hidden away somewhere, presumably tending some ultra-secret military hardware. Clavain’s efforts to find out what she was up to had all drawn a blank.

And he still had no idea why the Closed Council had sanctioned the building of a new starship. This late in the war, against an enemy that was already in retreat, what sense did it make? If he joined the Council he might not get all the answers he wanted — he would still not have penetrated the Inner Sanctum — but he would be a lot closer than he was now.

It almost sounded tempting.

Disgusted at the ease with which he had been manipulated by Skade and the others, Clavain turned from the view, the overlay vanishing as he made his cautious way to the entry point.

Soon he was inside the bowels of the Demarchist vessel, passing along ducts and tubes that would not normally have held air. Clavain requested an intelligence upload on the design of the ship and imagined a faint tickle as the knowledge appeared in his head. There was an instant eerie sense of familiarity, like a sustained episode of déjà vu. He arrived at an airlock, finding it a tight fit in his cumbersome armoured suit. Clavain sealed the hatch behind him, air roared in, and then the inner door allowed him to pass through into the pressurised part of the ship. His overwhelming impression was of darkness, but then his helmet clicked into high-sensitivity mode, dropping infra-red and sonar overlays across his normal visual field.

[Clavain.]

One of the sweep-team members was waiting for him. Clavain angled himself so that his face was aligned with the woman’s and then hitched himself against the interior wall.

What have you found?

[Not much. All dead.]

Every last one of them?

The woman’s thoughts arrived in his head like bullets, clipped and precise. [Recently. No sign of injury. Appears deliberate.]

No sign of a single survivor? We thought there might be one, at least.

[No survivors, Clavain.] She offered him a feed into her memories. He accepted it, steeling himself for what he was about to see.

It was every bit bad as he had feared. It was like uncovering the scene of an atrocious mass suicide. There were no signs of struggle or coercion; no signs even of hesitation. The crew had died at their respective duty.stations, as if someone had been delegated to tour the ship with suicide pills. An even more horrific possibility was that the crew had convened at some central location, been handed the means of euthanasia and had then returned to their assigned niches. Perhaps they had continued to perform their tasks until the shipmaster ordered the mass suicide.

In zero gravity, heads did not loll lifelessly. Even mouths did not drop open. Dead bodies continued to assume more or less lifelike postures, whether restrained by webbing or allowed to drift untethered from wall to wall. It was one of the earliest and most chilling lessons of space warfare: in space, the dead were often difficult to tell from the living.

The crew were all thin and starved-looking, as if they had been living on emergency rations for many months. Some of them had skin sores or the bruised evidence of earlier wounds that had not healed properly. Perhaps some had even died before now, and had been dumped from the ship so that the mass of their bodies could be traded against fuel savings. Beneath their caps and headsets none of them had more than a greyish fuzz of scalp stubble. They were clothed uniformly, carrying only insignia of technical specialisation rather than rank. Under the bleak emergency lights their skin hues merged into some grey-green average.

Through his own eyes now Clavain saw a corpse drift into view. The man appeared to paw himself through the air, his mouth barely open, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate spot several metres ahead of him. The man thudded into one wall, and Clavain felt the faint reverberation where he was hitched.

Clavain projected a request into the woman’s head. Secure that corpse, will you?

The woman did as she was asked. Then Clavain ordered all the sweep-team members to tether themselves and hold still. There were no other corpses drifting around, so there should not have been any other objects to impart any motion to the ship itself. Clavain waited a moment for an update from Nightshade, which was still spotting the enemy with range-finding lasers.

At first he doubted what he was being shown.

It made no sense, but something was still moving around inside the enemy ship.

‘Little Miss?’

Antoinette knew that tone of voice very well, and the omens were not auspicious. Pressed back into her acceleration couch, she grunted a reply that would have been incomprehensible to anyone or anything other than Beast.

‘Something’s up, isn’t it?’

‘Regrettably so, Little Miss. One cannot be certain, but there appears to be a problem with the main fusion core.’

Beast threw a head-up-display schematic of the fusion system on to the bridge window, superimposed against the cloud layers Storm Bird was punching through as it climbed back to space. Elements of the fusion motor were blocked in ominous pulsing red.

‘Holy shit. Tokamak, is it?’

‘That would appear to be the case, Little Miss.’

‘Fuck. I knew we should have swapped it during the last heavy-general.’

‘Language, Little Miss. And a polite reminder that what’s done is done.’

Antoinette cycled through some of the other diagnostic feeds, but the news did not get any better. ‘It’s Xavier’s fault,’ she said.

‘Xavier, Little Miss? In what way is Mr Liu culpable?’

‘Xave swore the tok was at least three trips away from life-expiry.’

‘Perhaps, Little Miss. But before you ascribe too much blame to Mr Liu, perhaps you should keep in mind the enforced main-engine cut-off that the police demanded of us as we were departing the Rust Belt. The hard shutdown did the tokamak no favours at all. Then there was the additional matter of the vibrational damage sustained during the atmospheric insertion.’

Antoinette scowled. Sometimes she wondered whose side Beast was really on. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Xave’s off the hook. For now. But that doesn’t help me much, does it?’

‘A failure is predicted, Little Miss, but not guaranteed.’

Antoinette checked the read-outs. ‘We’ll need another ten klicks per second just to make orbit. Can you manage that, Beast?’

‘One is doing one’s utmost, Little Miss.’

She nodded, accepting that this was all that could be asked of her ship. Above, the clouds were beginning to thin out, the sky darkening to a deep midnight blue. Space looked close enough to touch.

But she still had a long way to go.

Clavain watched while the last layer of concealment was removed from the survivor’s hiding place. One of his soldiers shone a torch into the gloomy enclosure. The survivor was huddled in a corner, cocooned in a stained grey thermal blanket. Clavain felt relief; now that this minor detail was attended to, the enemy ship could be safely destroyed and Nightshade could return to the Mother Nest.

Finding the survivor had been much easier than Clavain had expected. It had only taken thirty minutes to pinpoint the location, narrowing down the search with acoustic and biosensor scanners. Thereafter, it had simply been a question of stripping away panels and equipment until they found the concealed niche, a volume about the size of two cupboards placed back to back. It was in a part of the ship that the human crew would have avoided visiting too often, bathed as it was in elevated radiation from the fusion engines.

The hideaway, Clavain quickly decided, looked like a hastily arranged brig; a place of confinement in a ship never designed to carry prisoners. The captive must have been placed in the hole and the panelling and equipment bolted and glued back into place around him, leaving only a conduit along which to pass air, water and food. The hole was filthy. Clavain had his suit sample the air and pass a little through to his nose: it reeked of human waste. He wondered if the prisoner had been neglected all the while, or only since the crew’s attention had been diverted by Nightshade’s arrival.

In other respects, the prisoner seemed to have been well looked after. The walls of the hole were padded, with a couple of restraining hoops that could have been used to avoid injury during combat manoeuvres. There was a microphone rigged through for communication, though as far as Clavain could tell it only worked one way, allowing the prisoner to be talked to. There were blankets and the remains of a meal. Clavain had seen worse places of confinement. He had even been a guest in some of them.

He pushed a thought into the head of the soldier with the torch. Get that blanket off him, will you? I want to see who we’ve found.

The soldier reached into the hole. Clavain wondered who the prisoner would turn out to be, his mind flashing through the possibilities. He was not aware of any Conjoiners having been taken prisoner lately, and doubted that the enemy would have gone to this much trouble to keep one alive. A prisoner from the enemy’s own ranks was the next most likely thing: a traitor or deserter, perhaps.

The soldier whipped the blanket away from the huddled figure.

The prisoner, crouched into a small foetal shape, squealed against the sudden intrusion of light, hiding its dark-adapted eyes.

Clavain stared. The prisoner was nothing that he had been expecting. At first glance it might have been taken for an adolescent human, for the proportions and size were roughly analogous. A naked human at that — unclothed pink human-looking flesh folded away into the hole. There was a horrid expanse of burned skin around its upper arm, all ridges and whorls of pink and deathly white.

Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.

‘Hello,’ Clavain said aloud, his amplified voice booming out of his suit speaker.

The pig moved. The motion was sudden and springlike and none of them were expecting it. The pig lashed out with something long and metallic clutched in one fist. The object gleamed, its edge reverberating like a tuning fork. The pig daggered it hard into Clavain’s chest. The tip of the blade shivered across the armour, leaving only a narrow shining furrow, but found the point near Clavain’s shoulder where two plaques slid across each other. The blade slipped into the gap, Clavain’s suit registering the intrusion with a shrill pulsing alarm in his helmet. He jerked back before the blade was able to penetrate his inner suit layer and reach his skin, and then collided with a sharp crack against the wall behind him. The weapon tumbled from the pig’s grip, spinning away like a ship that had lost gyroscopic control. Clavain recognised it as a piezo-knife; he carried something similar on his own suit’s utility belt. The pig must have stolen it from one of the Demarchists.

Clavain got his breath back. ‘Let’s start again, shall we?’

The other Conjoiners had the pig pinned down. Clavain inspected his suit, calling up damage schematics. There was a mild loss of pressure integrity near the shoulder. He was in no danger of suffocating to death, but he was still mindful of the possibility of undiscovered contaminants aboard the enemy ship. Almost as a reflex action he unhitched a sealant spray from his belt, selected nozzle diameter and pasted the rapidly hardening epoxy around the general area of the knife wound, where it solidified in the form of a sinuous grey cyst.

Somewhere before the dawn of the Demarchist era, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, not far from the time of Clavain’s own birth, a spectrum of human genes had been spliced into those of the domestic pig. The intention had been to optimise the ease with which organs could be transplanted between the two species, enabling pigs to grow body parts that could be harvested later for human utilisation. There were better ways to repair or replace damaged tissue now, had been for centuries, but the legacy of the pig experiments remained. The genetic intervention had gone too far, achieving not just cross-species compatibility but something entirely unexpected: intelligence.

But no one, not even the pigs, really knew what had happened. There might not have been deliberate tinkering to bring their cognitive faculties up to human level, but the pigs had certainly not gained language by accident. Not all of them had it — there were distinct subgroups of pigs with various mental and vocal capacities — but those that could speak had been engineered that way by someone who had known exactly what they were doing. It was not simply that their brains had the right grammatical machinery wired in. They had also had their throats, lungs and jaws adapted so that they could form human speech sounds.

Clavain eased forwards to speak to the prisoner. ‘Can you understand me?’ he asked, first in Norte and then in Canasian, the Demarchists’ main language. ‘My name is Nevil Clavain. You’re in the custody of Conjoiners.’

The pig answered, his remodelled jaw and throat anatomy enabling him to form perfect human sounds. ‘I don’t care who I’m in the custody of. You can fuck off and die.’

‘Neither happens to be on my agenda for the day.’

The pig warily uncovered one pink-red eye. ‘Who the fuck are you anyway? Where are the rest of them?’

‘The shipmaster’s crew? I’m afraid they’re all dead.’

The pig showed no detectable gratitude at this news. ‘You killed them?’

‘No. They were already dead when we got aboard.’

‘And you are?’

‘As I said, Conjoiners.’

‘Spiders…’ The pig contorted its almost human mouth into a semblance of disgust. ‘You know what I do to spiders? I piss them off toilet seats.’

‘Very nice.’

Clavain could see this was going nowhere fast; subvocally he asked one of the nearby troops to get the prisoner sedated and ferried back to Nightshade. He had no idea who or what the pig represented, how it slotted into the spiralling endgame of the war, but he would know a great deal more once the pig had been trawled. And a dose of Conjoiner medichines would do wonders for the pig’s reticence.

Clavain remained on the enemy ship while the sweep teams completed the last of their checks, ensuring that the enemy had left behind no tactically useful information. But there was nothing; the ship’s data stores had been wiped clean. A parallel search revealed no technologies that were not already well understood by the Conjoiners, and no weapons systems that were worth appropriating. The standard procedure at this point was to destroy the searched vessel, to prevent it falling back into enemy possession.

Clavain was thinking about the best way to scuttle the ship — a missile or a demolition charge? — when he felt Remontoire’s presence invade his head.

[Clavain?]

What is it?

[We’re picking up a general distress message from the freighter.]

Antoinette Bax? I thought she was dead.

[She isn’t, but she might soon be. Her ship has engine problems — a tokamak failure, it seems. She hasn’t made escape velocity, and she hasn’t managed an orbital injection either.]

Clavain nodded, more for his benefit than Remontoire’s. He imagined the kind of parabolic trajectory Storm Bird had to be on. She might not have reached the apex of that parabola yet, but sooner or later Antoinette Bax was going to start sliding back towards the cloud deck. He imagined, too, the kind of desperation that would have led her to issue a general distress signal when the only ship within answering distance was a Conjoiner vessel. In Clavain’s experience, the majority of pilots would have chosen death rather than capture by the spiders.

[Clavain… you realise we can’t possibly acknowledge her call.]

I realise.

[That would set a precedent. We’d be endorsing illegal activity. At the very least, we’d have no choice but to recruit her.]

Clavain nodded again, thinking of the times he had seen prisoners scream and thrash as they were led to the recruitment theatres, where their heads would be pumped full of Conjoiner neural machinery. They were wrong to fear it; he knew that better than anyone, since he had once resisted it himself. But he understood how they felt.

And he wondered if he wanted to inflict that terror upon Antoinette Bax.

A little while later Clavain saw the bright blue spark as the enemy ship hit the gas giant’s atmosphere. The timing had been accidental, but she had hit on the dark side, illuminating stacked cloud layers in purple strobe flashes as she plummeted deeper. It was impressive, beautiful, even, and Clavain momentarily wanted to show it to Galiana, for it was exactly the kind of visual spectacle that would have delighted her. She would have approved of his scuttling method, too: nothing as wasteful as a missile or a demolition charge. Instead, he had attached three tractor rockets from Nightshade, tiny drones which had glued themselves to the enemy’s hull like remora. The tractors had whisked the enemy ship towards the gas giant, only detaching when she was minutes from re-entry. The angle of attack had been steep, and the enemy craft had incinerated impressively.

The tractors were haring home now, accelerating at high burn to catch up with Nightshade, which had already turned back towards the Mother Nest. Once the tractors had returned the operation could be considered closed; there would only be the matter of the prisoner to attend to, but the pig’s fate was of no great urgency. Of Antoinette Bax… well, irrespective of her motives, Clavain admired her bravery; not just because she had come so far into a war zone, but also because of the way she had so brazenly ignored the shipmaster’s warning and, when it became necessary, the way she had summoned the courage to ask the Conjoiners for help. She must have known that it was an unreasonable request; that by the illegality of her trespass into the war zone she had forfeited any right to assistance, and that a military ship was hardly likely to waste time or fuel helping her out. She must also have known that even if the Conjoiners did save her life, the penalty she would pay for that would be conscription into their ranks, a fate that the Demarchist propaganda machine had made to seem hellish in the extreme.

No. She could not have reasonably expected rescue. But it had been brave of her to ask.

Clavain sighed, teetering on the edge of self-disgust. He issued a neural command instructing Nightshade to tight-beam the stricken freighter. When the link was established, he spoke aloud. ‘Antoinette Bax… this is Nevil Clavain. I am aboard the Conjoiner vessel. Can you hear me?’

There was some timelag now, and the return signal was poorly focused. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from somewhere beyond the furthest quasar.

‘Why are you answering me now, you bastard? I can see you’ve left me to die.’

‘I’m curious, that’s all.’ He held his breath, half-expecting that she would not reply.

‘About what?’

‘About what made you ask for our help. Aren’t you terrified of what we’ll do to you?’

‘Why should I be terrified?’

She sounded nonchalant but Clavain wasn’t fooled. ‘It’s generally our policy to assimilate captured prisoners, Bax. We’d bring you aboard and feed our machines into your brain. Doesn’t that concern you?’

‘Yes, but I’ll tell you what concerns me a fuck of a lot more right now, and that’s hitting this fucking planet.’

Clavain smiled. ‘That’s a very pragmatic attitude, Bax. I admire it.’

‘Good. Now will you fuck off and let me die in peace?’

‘Antoinette, listen to me carefully. There’s something I need you to do for me, with some urgency.’

She must have detected the change of tone in his voice, although she still sounded suspicious. ‘What?’

‘Have your ship transmit a blueprint of itself to me. I want a complete map of your hull’s structural integrity profile. Hardpoints, that kind of thing. If you can persuade your hull to colour itself to reveal maximum stress contours, all the better. I want to know where I can safely put a load without having your ship fold under the strain.’

‘There’s no way you can save me. You’re too far away. Even if you turned around now, it’d be too late.’

‘There’s a way, trust me. Now, that data, please, or I’ll have to trust my instincts, and that may not be for the best.’

She did not answer for a moment. He waited, scratching his beard, and only breathed again when he felt Nightshade’s acknowledgement that the data had been uploaded. He filtered the transmission for neuropathic viruses and then allowed it into his skull. Everything he needed to know about the freighter bloomed in his head, crammed into short-term memory.

‘Thank you very much, Antoinette. That will do nicely.’

Clavain sent an order to one of the returning tractor rockets. The tractor peeled away from its brethren at whiplash acceleration, executing a hairpin reversal that would have reduced an organic passenger to paste. Clavain authorised the tractor to ignore all its internal safety limits, removing the need for it to conserve enough fuel for a safe return to Nightshade.

‘What are you going to do?’ Bax asked.

‘I’m sending a drone back. It will latch on to your hull and drag you to clear space, out of the Jovian’s gravity well. I’ll have the tractor give you a modest nudge in the direction of Yellowstone, but I’m afraid you’ll be on your own from then. I hope you can fix your tokamak, or else you’ll be in for a verv long fall home.’

It seemed to take an eternity for his words to sink in. ‘You’re not going to take me prisoner?’

‘Not today, Antoinette. But if you ever cross my path again, I promise one thing: I’ll kill you.’

He had not enjoyed delivering the threat, but hoped it might knock some sense into her. Clavain closed the link before she could answer.