Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 6

The Inquisitor’s private aircraft could have made extremely short shrift of the journey to Solnhofen, but she decided to make the final leg of the trip by surface transport, having the plane drop her off at the nearest reasonably sized community to her destination.

The place was called Audubon, a sprawl of depots, shacks and domes pierced by slev rails, cargo pipelines and highways. From the perimeter, the fine-filigreed fingers of dirigible docking masts poked into the slate-grey northern sky. But there were no airships moored today and no sign that any had come in lately.

The plane had dropped her off on a patch of concreted ground between two depots. The concrete was scabbed and rutted. She walked across it swiftly, her booted feet scuffing the bristlelike tufts of Resurgam-tolerant grass that ripped through the concrete here and there. With some trepidation she watched the plane arc back towards Cuvier, ready to serve some other government official until she requested that it take her back home.

‘Get in, get out fast,’ she muttered under her breath.

She had been observed by workers going about their business, but this far from Cuvier the activities of the Inquisition were not the subject of intense speculation. Most people would correctly assume she was from the government, even though she wore plain clothes, but they would not immediately guess that she was on the trail of a war criminal. She could equally well be a police officer, or she might be an inspector from one of the government’s many bureaucratic arms, come to check that funds were not being misappropriated. Had she arrived with armed assistance — a servitor or a squad of guards — her appearance would definitely have attracted more comment. As it was most people did their best not to meet her eye, and she was able to make her way to the roadhouse without incident.

She wore dark, unostentatious clothes covered by a long coat of the kind people used to wear when the razorstorms were more common, with a fold-down pouch beneath the chin for a breather mask. Black gloves completed the outfit, and she carried a few personal items in a small knapsack. Her hair was a glossy black bowl-cut which she occasionally had to flick out of her eyes. It effectively concealed a radio transmitter with throat-mike and earpiece, which she would only use to retrieve the aircraft. She carried a small Ultra-manufactured boser-pistol, aided by a targeting contact lens covering one eye. But the gun was there for her sanity only. She did not anticipate using it.

The roadhouse was a two-storey structure slung across the main route to Solnhofen. Big balloon-wheeled freight transports rumbled up and down the road at irregular intervals, with ribbed cargo containers tucked beneath their elevated spines like overripe fruit. The drivers sat inside pressurised pods mounted near the fronts of the machines, each pod articulated on a double-hinged arm so that it could be lowered to ground level or raised higher for boarding from one of the roadhouse’s overhead access gates. Typically, three or four transports trundled in robot-mode behind a crewed rig. No one trusted the machines to make the journey totally unsupervised.

The roadhouse’s faded decor had a permanent greasy ambience that made the Inquisitor anxious to keep her gloves on. She approached a huddle of drivers sitting around a table, bitching about their working conditions. Snacks and coffee lay on the table in various states of consumption. A poorly printed newspaper contained the latest artist’s impression of the terrorist Thorn, alongside a catalogue of his most recent crimes against the people. A ring-shaped coffee stain surrounded Thorn’s head, like a halo.

She stood by the drivers for what felt like several minutes until one of them deigned to look at her and nod.

‘My name is Vuilleumier,’ she said. I need a lift to Solnhofen.‘

‘Vuilleumier?’ said one of the drivers. ‘As in…?’

‘Draw your own conclusions. It’s not that unusual a name on Resurgam.’

The driver coughed. ‘Solnhofen,’ he said dubiously, as if it was a place he had barely heard of.

‘Yes, Solnhofen. It’s a small settlement up that road. In fact it’s the first one you’re going to hit if you head in that direction for more than about five minutes. Who knows, you may even have passed through it once or twice.’

‘Solnhofen’s a bit off my route, love.’

‘Is it? That’s funny. I was under the impression that the route, as you put it, pretty much consisted of a straight line right through Solnhofen. Difficult to imagine how anything could be “off” it, unless we’ve abandoned the idea of being on a road at all.’ She fished out some money and was about to lay it on the food-strewn table when she thought better of it. Instead she just waved it in front of the drivers, the notes crisp in her leather-gloved hand. ‘Here’s the deal: half of this now to any driver who can promise me a trip to Solnhofen; a quarter more if we leave within the next thirty minutes; the remainder if we arrive in Solnhofen before sun-up.’

‘I could take you,’ one the drivers said. ‘But it’s difficult at this time of year. I think I’d…’

‘The offer’s non-negotiable.’ She had made a decision not to try to ingratiate herself with them. She had known before she took a step into the roadhouse that none of them would like her. They could smell government a mile off and none of them, financial incentives aside, really wanted to share a cabin with her all the way to Solnhofen. Frankly, she could not blame them for that. Government officials of any stripe made the average person’s skin crawl.

If she had not been the Inquisitor she would have been terrified of herself.

The money worked wonders, however, and within twenty minutes she was sitting in the elevated cab of a cargo hauler, watching the lights of Audubon fall back into the dusk. The rig was only carrying one container, and the combination of light lading and the cushioning effect of the house-sized road wheels leant the motion a soporific yawing. The cabin was well heated and silent, and the driver preferred to play music rather than engage her in pointless conversation. For the first few minutes she had watched as he drove, observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very rarely another rig or string of rigs whipped past in the night, but for the most part the journey felt like a trek into endless uninhabited darkness.

On her lap was the newspaper containing the story about Thorn, and she read the article several times as she grew more fatigued, her eyes stumbling over the same leaden paragraphs. The article portrayed Thorn’s movement as a gang of violent terrorists obsessed with bringing down the government for no other reason than to plunge the colony into anarchy. It made only passing mention of the fact that Thorn’s avowed aim was to find a way to evacuate Resurgam, using the Triumvir’s ship. But the Inquisitor had read enough of Thorn’s statements to know his position on the matter. Ever since the days of Sylveste, successive governments had downplayed any suggestions that the colony might be unsafe, liable to suffer the same extinction event that had wiped out the Amarantin nearly a million years earlier. Over time, and especially in the dark, desperate years that had followed the collapse of the Girardieau regime, the idea of the colony being destroyed in some sudden cataclysmic episode had been quietly erased from public debate. Even mentioning the Amarantin, let alone what had happened to them, was the sort of thing that got one branded a troublemaker. Yet Thorn was right. The threat might not be imminent, but it had certainly not gone away.

It was true that he struck against government targets, but usually the strikes were surgical and considered, with the minimum of civilian casualties. Sometimes they were intended to publicise his movement, but more often than not their function was the theft of government property or funds. Bringing the administration down was a necessary part of Thorn’s plan, but not the primary goal.

Thorn believed that the Triumvir’s ship was still in the system; he also believed that the government knew where it was and how to reach it. His movement claimed that the government had two functioning shuttles with the capability to make repeated flights between Resurgam and Nostalgia for Infinity.

Thorn’s plan, therefore, was simple enough. He would first locate the shuttles, something he claimed he was close to doing. Then he would bring down the government, or at least enough of it to enable the shuttles to be seized. Then it would be up to the people to make their way to the agreed exodus point, where the shuttles would make round trips between surface and orbit. The last part would presumably involve the complete overthrow of the existing regime, but Thorn repeatedly stated that he wished his goal to be achieved as bloodlessly as possible.

Very little of that desire came through in the government-sanctioned article. Thorn’s goal was glossed over, the idea of a threat to Resurgam made to seem faintly ludicrous. Thorn was portrayed as deranged and egotistical, while the numbers of civilian deaths associated with his activities were greatly exaggerated.

The Inquisitor studied the portrait. She had never met Thorn, though she knew a great deal about him. The picture bore only a very vague likeness to the real man, but Internal Threats had accepted its plausibility all the same. She was pleased with that.

‘I wouldn’t waste your time with that rubbish,’ the driver said, when she had just nodded off properly. The sod’s dead.‘

She blinked awake. ‘What?’

‘Thorn.’ He poked a thick finger into the paper spread across her lap. ‘The one in the picture.’

She wondered if the driver had deliberately kept silent until she was asleep, whether this was a little game he played with his passengers to amuse himself through the journey. ‘I don’t know that Thorn’s dead,’ she answered. ‘I mean, I haven’t read anything in the papers or heard anything on the news that says so…’

‘The government shot him. He didn’t call himself Thorn for nothing, you know.’

‘How could they have shot him if they don’t even know where he is?’

‘They do, though. That’s the point. They just don’t want us to know that he’s dead yet.’

“They”?‘

The government, love. Keep up.‘

He was toying with her, she suspected. He might have guessed that she was from the government, but he might also have guessed that she had no time to report minor instances of wayward thought.

‘So if they’ve shot him,’ she said, ‘why don’t they announce the fact? Thousands of people think Thorn’s going to lead them into the Promised Land.’

‘Yes, but the only thing worse than a martyr is a dead martyr. There’d be a lot more trouble if word got around that he was really dead.’

She shrugged and folded the paper. ‘Well, I’m not really sure that he ever existed. Maybe it suited the government to create a fictitious hope figure, just so that they could clamp down on the population even more effectively. You don’t really believe all the stories, do you?’

‘About him finding a way to lead us off Resurgam? No. Nice if it happened, I suppose. Get rid of all the whiners, for a start.’

‘Is that really your attitude? That the only people who want to leave Resurgam are whiners?’

‘Sorry, love. I can tell which side of the fence you’d come down on. But some of us actually like it on this planet. No offence.’

‘None taken.’ Then she leant back in the seat and placed the folded paper across her eyes, so that it served as a mask. If that message failed to get through to the driver, she decided, there was really no hope for him.

Fortunately it did.

This time when she nodded off it was into deep sleep. She dreamed about the past, memories flashing back now that the voice of Operative Four had unlocked them. It was not that she had been able to stop thinking about Four completely, but in all that time she had managed to avoid thinking of Four as a person. It was too painful. To remember Four was to think about how she had arrived on Resurgam, and that in turn meant thinking about her other life, the one that, compared with the bleak reality of the present, seemed like a distant and improbable fiction.

But Four’s voice had been like a trapdoor into the past. There were now certain things that could not be ignored.

Why the hell had Four called her now?

She woke when the motion of the vehicle changed. The driver was backing them into an unloading bay.

‘Are we there yet?’

‘Solnhofen it is. Not exactly bright lights, big city, but this is where you wanted to go.’

Through a gap in the slats of the depot wall she could see a sky the colour of anaemic blood. Dawn, or near enough.

‘We’re a bit on the late side,’ she commented.

‘We arrived in Solnhofen a quarter of an hour ago, love. You were sleeping like a log. I didn’t want to wake you.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’ Grudgingly, she handed over the rest of the driver’s fee.

Remontoire watched the last few members of the Closed Council take their seats around the tiered inner surface of the privy chamber. A number of the very old were still able to make their own way to their seats, but the majority were aided by servitors, exoskeletons or black clouds of thumb-sized drones. A few were so near the end of physical life that they had nearly abandoned the flesh entirely. They came in as heads, hooked up to spiderlike mobility prostheses. One or two were massively swollen brains so full of machinery that they could no longer be housed in skulls. The brains rode inside transparent fluid-filled domes dense with throbbing support machinery. They were the most extreme Conjoined, and by this stage most of their conscious activity would have devolved into the distributed web of greater Conjoiner thought. Each retained their brain like a family unwilling to demolish a crumbling mansion even though they hardly ever lived in it.

Remontoire tasted the thoughts of each newcomer. There were people in this room he had long assumed dead, individuals who had never attended any of the Closed Council sessions in which he had participated.

It was the matter of Clavain. He brought everyone out of retirement.

Remontoire felt the sudden presence of Skade as she entered the privy chamber. She had emerged on a ring-shaped balcony halfway up the side of the spherical room. The chamber was opaque to all neural transmissions; those within it could communicate freely, but they were totally isolated from the other minds in the Mother Nest. It enabled the Closed Council to meet in session and communicate more freely than through the usual restricted neural channels.

Remontoire shaped a thought and assigned it high priority, so that it immediately cut across the general wash of gossip and gained everyone’s attention. Does Clavain know about this meeting?

Skade snapped around to address him. [Why should he know about it, Remontoire?]

Remontoire shrugged. Isn’t it him we’ve come to talk about, behind his back?

Skade smiled sweetly. [If Clavain consented to join us, there’d be no need to talk about him behind his back, would there? The problem’s his, not mine.]

Remontoire stood up, now that everyone was looking at him or directing some sort of sensory apparatus in his direction. Who said anything about a problem, Skade? What I’m objecting to is the hidden agenda behind this meeting.

[Hidden agenda? We only want what’s best for Clavain, Remontoire. As his friend I would have imagined that you’d have grasped that.]

Remontoire looked around. There was no sign of Felka, which did not surprise him in the slightest. She had every right to be present, but he doubted that she would have been on Skade’s list of invitees.

I am his friend, I admit that. He’s saved my life enough times, but even if he hadn’t… well, Clavain and I have been through more than enough together. If that means I don’t have an objective view on the matter, so be it. But I’ll tell you something. Remontoire glanced around the room, nodding as he made eye or sensor contact. All of you — or those of you who need reminding — no matter what Skade would like to make you think, Clavain owes us nothing. Without him, none of us would be here. He’s been as important to us as Galiana, and I don’t say that lightly. I knew her before anyone in this room.

Skade nodded. [Remontoire is right, of course, but you’ll note his use of the past tense. Clavain’s great deeds all lie in the past — the distant past. I don’t deny that since his return from deep space he has continued to serve us well. But then so have we all. Clavain has done no more and no less than any senior Conjoiner. But don’t we expect more of him than that?]

More than what, Skade?

[His tired devotion to mere soldiery, constantly putting himself at risk.]

Remontoire realised that, like it or not, he had become Clavain’s advocate. He felt a mild contempt for the other Council members. He knew that many of them owed their lives to Clavain, and would have admitted it under other circumstances. But Skade had them cowed.

It was down to him to speak up for his friend. Someone has to patrol the border.

[Yes. But we have younger, faster and, let us be frank here, more expendable individuals who can do precisely that. We need Clavain’s expertise here, in the Mother Nest, where we can tap it. I don’t believe that he clings to the fringes out of any sense of duty to the Nest. He does it out of pure self-interest. He gets to play at being one of us, being on the winning side, without accepting the full implications of what it means to be Conjoined. It hints at complacency, self-interest — everything that is inimical to our way. It even begins to hint at disloyalty.]

Disloyalty? No one’s shown more loyalty to the Conjoined faction than Nevil Clavain. Maybe some of you need to brush up on your history.

One of the detached heads spidered on to a seat-back. [I agree with Remontoire. Clavain doesn’t owe us anything. He’s proven himself a thousand times over. If he wants to stay outside the Council, that’s his right.]

Across the auditorium a brain lit up, its lights pulsing in synchronisation with its voice patterns. [Yes; no one doubts that, but it is equally the case that Clavain has a moral obligation to join us. He cannot continue to waste his talents outside the Council.]

The brain paused while fluid pumps throbbed and gurgled. The knotted mass of neural tissue swelled and contracted for several lethargic cycles, like some horrible lump of dough. [I cannot endorse Skade’s inflammatory rhetoric. But there is no escaping the essential truth of what she says. Clavain’s continued refusal to join us is tantamount to disloyalty.]

Oh, shut up, Remontoire interjected. If you’re anything to go by, I’m not surprised Clavain has second thoughts…

[The insult!] the brain spluttered.

But Remontoire detected a suppressed wave of amusement at his barb. The swollen brain was clearly not as universally respected as it liked to imagine. Sensing his moment, Remontoire leant forward, hands clasped tight around the railings of the balcony. What is this about, Skade? Why now, after all the years when the Closed Council has managed without him?

[What do you mean, why now?]

I mean, what exactly has precipitated this move? Something’s afoot, isn’t it?

Skade’s crest blushed maroon. Her jaw was clenched rigid. She stepped back and arched her spine like a cornered cat.

Remontoire pressed on. First we have a renewal of the starship-building programme, a century after we stopped building them for reasons so secret even the Closed Council isn’t allowed to know them. Then we have a prototype crammed with hidden machinery of unknown origin and function, the nature of which again can’t be revealed to the Closed Council. Then there’s a fleet of similar ships being put together in a comet not far from here — but again, that’s as much as we’re allowed to know. Of course, I’m sure the Inner Sanctum might have something to say on the matter…

[Be very careful, Remontoire.]

Why — because I might be in danger of harmless speculation?

Another Conjoiner, a man with a crest a little like Skade’s, stood up tentatively. Remontoire knew the man well, and was certain that he was not a member of the Inner Sanctum.

[Remontoire’s right. Something is happening, and Clavain’s just one part of it. The cessation of the shipbuilding programme, the strange circumstances surrounding Galiana’s return, the new fleet, the disturbing rumours I hear about the hell-class weapons — these things are all connected. The present war is just a distraction, and the Inner Sanctum knows it. Perhaps the true picture is simply too disturbing for we mere Closed Council members to grasp. In which case, like Remontoire, I will indulge in a little speculation and see where it takes me.]

The man looked intently at Skade before continuing. [There’s another rumour, Skade, concerning something called Exordium. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that that was the codeword Galiana gave to her final series of experiments on Mars — the ones she swore she would never repeat.]

Remontoire might have been imagining it, but he thought he saw a visible change of colour sweep through Skade’s crest at the mere mention of the word. What about Exordium? he asked.

The man turned to Remontoire. [I don’t know, but I can guess. Galiana never wanted the experiments to be repeated; the results were useful, incredibly useful, but they were also too disturbing. But once Galiana was away from the Mother Nest, off on her interstellar expedition, what was to stop the Inner Sanctum from re-running Exordium? She need never have found out about it.]

The codeword meant something to Remontoire; he had definitely heard it before. But if it referred to experiments Galiana had performed on Mars, it was something that had happened more than four hundred years earlier. It would require delicate mnemonic archaeology to dig through the strata of overlying memories, especially if the subject itself was shrouded in secrecy.

It seemed simpler to ask. What was Exordium?

‘I’ll tell you what it was, Remontoire.’

The sound of a real human voice cutting through the chamber’s silence was as shocking as a scream.

Remontoire followed the sound until he saw the speaker, sitting on her own near one of the entry points. It was Felka; she must have arrived since the session had commenced.

Skade slammed a furious thought into his head. [Who invited her?]

‘I did,’ Remontoire said mildly, speaking aloud for Felka’s benefit, ‘on the assumption that you didn’t seem very likely to, and since the matter under discussion happened to be Clavain… it seemed the right thing to do.’

‘It was,’ Felka said. Remontoire saw something move in her hand and realised that she had brought a mouse into the privy chamber. ‘Wasn’t it, Skade?’

Skade sneered. [There’s no need to talk aloud. It takes too long. She can hear our thoughts as well as any of us.]

‘But if you were to hear my thoughts, you’d probably all go mad,’ Felka said. The way she smiled was all the more chilling, Remontoire thought, because what she said was probably true. ‘So rather than risk that…’ She looked down, the mouse chasing its tail around her hand.

[You have no right to be here.]

‘But I do, Skade. If I wasn’t recognised as a Closed Council member, the privy chamber wouldn’t have admitted me. And if I wasn’t a Closed Council member, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about Exordium, would I?’

The man who had first mentioned the codeword spoke aloud, his voice high and trembling. ‘So my guess was correct, was it, Skade?’

[Ignore anything she says. She knows nothing about the programme.]

‘Then I can say what I like, can’t I, and none of it will matter. Exordium was an experiment, Remontoire, an attempt to achieve unification between consciousness and quantum superposition. It happened on Mars; you can verify that much for yourself. But Galiana got far more than she bargained for. She curtailed the experiments, frightened at what she had invoked. And that should have been the end of it.’ Felka looked directly at Skade, tauntingly. ‘But it wasn’t, was it? The experiments were begun again, about a century ago. It was an Exordium message that made us stop making ships.’

‘A message?’ Remontoire said, perplexed.

‘From the future,’ Felka said, as if this should have been obvious from the start.

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’m perfectly serious, Remontoire. I should know — I took part in one of the experiments.’

Skade’s thoughts scythed across the room. [We’re here to discuss Clavain, not this.]

Felka continued to speak calmly. She was, Remontoire thought, the only one in the room who was unfazed by Skade, including himself. Felka’s head already held worse horrors than Skade could imagine. ‘But we can’t discuss one without discussing the other, Skade. The experiments have continued, haven’t they? And they have something to do with what’s happening now. The Inner Sanctum’s learned something, and they’d rather the rest of us didn’t know anything about it.’

Skade clenched her jaw again. [The Inner Sanctum has identified a coming crisis.]

‘What kind of crisis?’ asked Felka.

[A bad one.]

Felka nodded sagely and pushed a strand of lank black hair from her eyes. ‘And Clavain’s role in all this — where does he come in?’

Skade’s pain was almost tangible. Her thoughts arrived in clipped packets, as if, between her utterances, she was waiting for a silent speaker to offer her guidance. [We need Clavain to help us. The crisis can be… lessened… with Clavain’s assistance.]

‘What kind of assistance did you have in mind, exactly?’ Felka persisted.

A tiny vein twitched in Skade’s brow. Jarring colour waves chased each other along her crest, like the patterns in a dragonfly’s wing. [A long time ago, we lost some objects of value. Now we know exactly where they are. We want Clavain to help us get them back.]

‘And these “objects”,’ Felka said. ‘They wouldn’t by any chance be weapons, would they?’

The Inquisitor said farewell to the driver who had brought her to Solnhofen. She had slept for five or six hours clean through on the drive, offering the driver ample opportunity to rifle her belongings or strand her in the middle of nowhere. But everything was intact, including her gun. The driver had even left her with the newspaper clipping, the one about Thorn.

Solnhofen itself was every bit as miserable and squalid as she had suspected it would be. She only had to wander around the centre for a few minutes before she found what passed for the settlement’s heart: an apron of ground surrounded by two slovenly-looking hostels, a couple of drab administrative structures and a motley assortment of drinking establishments. Looming beyond the centre were the hulking repair sheds that were Solnhofen’s reason for existence. Far to the north, vast terraforming machines worked to speed the conversion of Resurgam’s atmosphere into a fully human-breathable form. These atmospheric refineries had functioned perfectly for a few decades, but now they were becoming old and unreliable. Keeping them working was a major drain on the planet’s centrally managed economy. Communities like Solnhofen made a precarious living from servicing and crewing the terraforming rigs, but the work was hard and unforgiving, and required — demanded — a certain breed of worker.

The Inquisitor remembered that as she stepped into the hostel. She had expected it to be quiet at this time of day, but when she shoved open the door it was like stepping into a party that had only just passed its peak. There was music and shouting and laughter, hard, boisterous laughter that reminded her of barracks rooms on Sky’s Edge. A few drinkers had already passed out, huddled over their mugs like pupils guarding homework. The air was clotted with chemicals that made her eyes sting. She clenched her teeth against the noise and swore softly. Trust Four to pick a dump like this. She remembered the first time they had met. It had been in a bar in a carousel orbiting Yellowstone, probably the worst dive she had ever been in. Four had many talents, but selecting salubrious meeting places was not one of them.

Fortunately no one had noticed the Inquisitor’s arrival. She pushed past some semi-comatose bodies to what passed for the bar: a hole punched through one wall, ragged brickwork at the edges. A surly woman pushed drinks through like prison rations, snatching back money and spent glasses with almost indecent haste.

‘Give me a coffee,’ the Inquisitor said.

‘There isn’t any coffee.’

‘Then give me the nearest fucking equivalent.’

‘You shouldn’t speak like that.’

‘I’ll speak any fucking way I want to. Especially until I get a coffee.’ She leant on the plastic lip of the serving hatch. ‘You can get me one, can’t you? I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for the world.’

‘You government?’

‘No, just thirsty. And a tiny bit irritable. It’s morning, you see, and I really don’t do mornings.’

A hand landed on her shoulder. She twisted around sharply, her own hand instinctively reaching for the haft of the boser-pistol.

‘Causing trouble again, Ana?’ said the woman behind her.

The Inquisitor blinked. She had rehearsed this moment many times since she had left Cuvier, but still it felt unreal and melodramatic. Then Triumvir Ilia Volyova nodded at the woman behind the hatch.

‘This is my friend. She wants a coffee. I suggest you give her one.’

The serving woman squinted at her, then grunted something and vanished from view. She reappeared a few moments later with a cup of something that looked as if it had just been drained from the main axle bearing of an overland cargo hauler.

‘Take it, Ana,’ Volyova said. ‘It’s about as good as it gets.’

The Inquisitor took the coffee, her hand trembling faintly. ‘You shouldn’t call me that,’ she whispered.

Volyova steered her towards a table. ‘Call you what?’

‘Ana.’

‘But it’s your name.’

‘Not any more, it isn’t. Not here. Not now.’

The table that Volyova had found was tucked into a corner, half-hidden by several stacked beer crates. Volyova swept her sleeve across the surface, brushing detritus on to the floor. Then she sat, placing both elbows on the table’s edge and locking her fingers under her chin. ‘I don’t think we need worry about anyone recognising you, Ana. No one’s given me more than a second glance and, with the possible exception of Thorn, I’m the most wanted person on the planet.’

The Inquisitor, who had once called herself Ana Khouri, sipped experimentally at the treaclelike concoction that passed for coffee. ‘You’ve had the benefit of some expert misdirection, Ilia…’ She paused and looked around, realising as she did so how suspicious and theatrical she must look. ‘Can I call you Ilia?’

‘That’s what I call myself. Best leave off the Volyova part for the time being, though. No sense in pushing our luck.’

‘None at all. I suppose I should say…’ Again, she looked around. She could not help herself. ‘It’s good to see you again, Ilia. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.’

‘I’ve missed your company, too. Odd to think we once started out almost killing each other. All water under the bridge now, of course.’

‘I began to worry. You hadn’t been in touch for so long…’

‘I had good reasons to keep a low profile, didn’t I?’

‘I suppose so.’

For several minutes neither of them said anything. Khouri, for that was how she was daring to think of herself again, found herself recalling the origin of the audacious game the two of them were playing. They had devised it themselves, amazing each other with their nerve and ingenuity. Together, they made a very resourceful pair indeed. But for maximum usefulness they found that they had to work alone.

Khouri broke the silence, unable to wait any longer. ‘What is it, Ilia? Good news or bad?’

‘Knowing my track record, what do you think?’

‘A wild stab in the dark? Bad news. Very bad news indeed.’

‘Got it in one.’

‘It’s the Inhibitors, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry to be so predictable, but there you are.’

‘They’re here?’

‘I think so.’ Volyova’s voice had dropped low now. ‘Something is happening, anyway. I’ve seen it myself.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Volyova’s voice, if anything, became quieter still. Khouri had to strain to hear it. ‘Machines, Ana, huge black machines. They’ve entered the system. I never saw them actually arrive. They were just… here.’

Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.

‘Dear God.’

‘We can’t say we weren’t expecting them, Ana. From the moment Sylveste started fiddling around with things he didn’t understand, it was only a matter of when and where.’

Khouri stared at her friend, wondering why the temperature in the room appeared to have dropped ten or fifteen degrees. The feared and hated Triumvir looked small and faintly grubby, like a bag lady. Volyova’s hair was a close-cropped greying thatch above a round, hard-eyed face which betrayed remote Mongol ancestry. She did not look like a very convincing herald of doom.

‘I’m scared, Ilia.’

‘I think you have excellent reason to be scared. But try not to show it, will you? We don’t want to terrify the locals just yet.’

‘What can we do?’

‘Against the Inhibitors?’ Volyova squinted through her glass, frowning slightly, as if this was the first time she had given the subject any serious consideration. ‘I don’t know. The Amarantin didn’t have a lot of success in that department.’

‘We’re not flightless birds.’

‘No, we’re humans — the scourge of the galaxy… or something like that. I don’t know, Ana. I really don’t. If it was just you and I, and if we could persuade the ship, the Captain, to come out of his shell, we could at least consider running away. We could even contemplate using the weapons, if that would help matters.’

Khouri shuddered. ‘But even if it did, and even if we could make a getaway, it wouldn’t help Resurgam much, would it?’

‘No. And I don’t know about you, Ana, but my conscience isn’t exactly whiter-than-white as it is.’

‘How long do we have?’

‘That’s the odd thing. The Inhibitors could have destroyed Resurgam already, if that was all they intended to do — it’s within even our technology to do that much, so I very much doubt that it would trouble them particularly.’

‘So maybe they haven’t come to kill us after all.’

Volyova tipped back her drink. ‘Or maybe… just maybe… they have.’

In the swarming heart of the black machines, processors that were not themselves sentient determined that an overseer mind must be quickened to consciousness.

The decision was not taken lightly; most cleansings could be performed without raising the spectre of the very thing that the machines had been made to suppress. But this system was problematic. Records showed that an earlier cleansing had been performed here, a mere four and half thousandths of a Galactic Turn ago. The fact that the machines had been called back showed that additional measures were clearly necessary.

The overseer’s task was to deal with the specifics of this particular infestation. No two cleansings were ever quite the same, and it was a regrettable fact of life that the best way to annihilate intelligence was with a dose of intelligence itself. But once the cleansing was over, the immediate outbreak traced back to source and its daughter spores sanitised-which might take another two-thousandths of a Galactic Turn, half a million years — the overseer would be dumbed down, its self-awareness packed away until it needed it again.

Which might be never.

The overseer never questioned its work. It knew only that it was acting for the ultimate good of sentient life. It was not at all concerned that the crisis it was acting to avert, the crisis that would become an unmanageable cosmic disaster if intelligent life was permitted to spread, lay a total of thirteen Turns — three billion years — in the future.

It did not matter.

Time meant nothing to the Inhibitors.