Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 8

Clavain looked at the stars.

He was outside the Mother Nest, alone, perched head-up or head-down — he could not decide which — on the practically weightless surface of the hollowed-out comet. There was no other human being visible in any direction, no evidence, in fact, of any kind of human presence at all. A passing observer, spying Clavain, would have assumed that he had been cruelly marooned on the surface of the comet without ship, supplies or shelter. There was no evidence whatsoever of the vast clockwork which spun at the comet’s heart.

The comet spun slowly, periodically lifting the pale jewel of Epsilon Eridani above Clavain’s horizon. The star was brighter than all the others in the sky, but it still looked like a star rather than a sun. He felt the immense chill of the empty space between himself and the star. It was a mere 100 AU distant — not even a scratch compared with interstellar distances, but it still caused him to shiver. He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when, confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

Light caught his eye. It was an impossibly faint flicker somewhere in the plane of the ecliptic, a hand’s width from Eridani. There it was again: a sharp, sudden spark at the limit of detectability. He was not imagining it. Another flash followed, a tiny distance away from the first two. Clavain ordered his helmet visor to screen out the light of the sun, so that his eyes did not have to deal with such a large dynamic range in brightness. The visor obliged, occluding the star with a precise black mask, exactly as if he had stared at the sun for too long.

He knew what he was looking at. It was a space battle dozens of light-hours away. The ships involved were probably spread through a volume of space several light-minutes from side to side, firing at each other with heavy rela-tivistic weapons. Had he been in the Mother Nest he could have tapped into the general tactics database and retrieved information on the assets known to be patrolling that sector of the solar system. But it would have told him nothing he could not deduce for himself.

The flashes were mostly dying ships. Now and then one would be the triggering pulse of a Demarchist railgun — cumbersome, thousand-kilometre-long linear accelerator barrels. They had to be energised by detonating a string of cobalt-fusion bombs. The blast would rip the railgun to atoms, but not before it had accelerated a tank-sized slug of stabilised metallic hydrogen up to seventy per cent of light-speed, surfing just ahead of the annihilation wave.

The Conjoiners had weapons of similar effectiveness, but which drew their energising pulse from space-time itself. They could be fired more than once, and steered more quickly. They did not flash when they were fired.

Clavain knew that a spectroscopic analysis of the light in each of those flashes would have confirmed their origin. But he would not have been surprised to learn that most of them were caused by direct hits to Demarchist cruisers.

The enemy were dying out there. They were dying instantly, in explosions so bright and fast that there could be no pain, no realisation that death had come. But a painless death was only a small consolation. There would be many ships in that squadron; the survivors would be witnessing the destruction of their compatriots’ vessels and wondering who would be next. They would never know when a slug was on its way towards them, and they would never know when it arrived.

From where Clavain stood, it was like watching fireworks above a remote town. From the colours of Agincourt to the flames of Guernica, to the pure shining light of Nagasaki like a cleansing sword blade catching the sun, to the contrails etched above the skies of the Tharsis Bulge, to the distant flash of heavy relativistic weapons against a starscape of sable-black in the early years of the twenty-seventh century: Clavain did not need to be reminded that war was horrific, but from a distance it could also have a terrible searing beauty.

The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.

He thought of what he had learned about the Closed Council. Remontoire, with, Clavain assumed, Skade’s tacit approval, had told him a little about the role Clavain would be expected to play. It was not merely that they wanted him within the Closed Council so that he could be kept out of harm’s way. No. Clavain was needed to assist in a delicate operation. It would be a military action and it would take place beyond the Epsilon Eridani system. It would concern the recovery of a number of items that had fallen into the wrong hands.

Remontoire would not say what those items were; only that their recovery — which implied that they had at some point been lost — would be vital to the future security of the Mother Nest. If he wanted to learn more, and he would have to learn more if he was to be of any use to the Mother Nest, he would have to join the Closed Council. It sounded breathtakingly simple. Now that he considered it, alone on the surface of the comet, he had to admit that it probably was. His qualms were out of all proportion to the facts.

And yet he could not bring himself to trust Skade fully. She knew more than he did, and that would continue to be the case even if he agreed to join the Closed Council. He would be one layer closer to the Inner Sanctum then, but he would still not be within it — and what was to say that there were not additional layers behind that?

The battle rose again, over the opposite horizon. Clavain watched it dutifully, noting that the flashes were far less frequent now. The engagement was drawing to a close. It was practically certain that the Demarchists would have sustained the heaviest losses. There might even have been zero casualties on his own side. The enemy’s survivors would soon be limping back to their respective bases, struggling to avoid further engagements on the way. Before very long the battle would figure in a propaganda transmission, the facts wrung to squeeze some tiny drop of optimism out of the overwhelming Demarchist defeat. He had seen it happen a thousand times; there would be more such battles, but not many. The enemy were losing. They had been on the losing side for years. So why was anyone worried about the future security of the Mother Nest?

There was, he knew, only one way to find out.

The tender found its slot on the rim, edging home with unerring machine precision. Clavain disembarked into standard gravity, puffing for the first few minutes until he adjusted to the effort.

He made his way through a circuitous route of corridors and ramps. There were other Conjoiners about, but they spared him no particular attention. When he felt the wash of their thoughts, sensing their impressions of him, he detected only quiet respect and admiration, with perhaps the tiniest tempering of pity. The general populace knew nothing of Skade’s efforts to bring him into the Closed Council.

The corridors grew darker and smaller. Spartan grey walls became festooned with conduits, panels and the occasional grilled duct through which warm air blasted. Machines thrummed beneath his feet and behind the walls. The lighting was intermittent and meagre. At no point had Clavain stepped through any kind of prohibited door, but the general impression now to anyone unfamiliar with this part of the wheel would have been that they had strayed into some slightly forbidding maintenance section. A few made it this far, but most would have turned back and kept walking until they found themselves in more welcoming territory.

Clavain continued. He had reached a part of the wheel that was unrecorded on any blueprints or maps. Most of the citizens of the Mother Nest knew nothing of its existence. He approached a bronze-green bulkhead. It was unguarded and unmarked. Next to it was a thick-rimmed metal wheel with three spokes. Clavain grasped the wheel by two of the spokes and tugged it. For a moment it was stiff — no one had been down here in some time — but then it oozed into mobility. Clavain yanked it round until it spun freely. The bulkhead door eased out like a stopper, dripping condensation and lubricant. As he turned the wheel further the stopper hinged aside, allowing entry. The stopper was like a huge squat piston, its sides polished to a brilliant hermetic gleam.

Beyond was an even darker space. Clavain stepped over the half-metre lip of the bulkhead, ducking to avoid grazing his scalp against the transom. The metal was cold against his fingers. He blew on them until they felt less numb.

Once he was inside, Clavain spun a second wheel until the bulkhead was again tightly sealed, tugging his sleeves down over his fingers as he worked. Then he took a few steps further into the gloom. Pale green lights came on in steps, stammering back into the darkness.

The chamber was immense, low and long like a gunpowder store. The curve of the wheel’s rim was just visible, the walls arcing upwards and the floor bending with them. Into the distance stretched row after row of reefersleep caskets.

Clavain knew precisely how many there were: one hundred and seventeen. One hundred and seventeen people had returned from deep space aboard Galiana’s ship, but all had been beyond any reasonable hope of revival. In many cases, the violence inflicted on her crew had been so extreme that the remains could only be segregated by genetic profiling. Nonetheless, however sparse the remains had been, each identified individual had been allocated a single reefersleep casket.

Clavain made his way down the aisles between the rows of caskets, the grilled flooring clattering beneath his feet. The caskets hummed quietly. They were all still operational, but that was only because it was considered wise to keep the remains frozen, not because there was any realistic hope of reviving most of them. There was no sign of any active wolf machinery embedded in any of the remains –except, of course, for one — but that did not mean that there were no dormant microscopic wolf parasites lurking just below the detection threshold. The bodies could have been cremated, but that would have removed the possibility of ever learning anything about the wolves. The Mother Nest was nothing if not prudent.

Clavain reached Galiana’s reefersleep casket. It stood apart from the others, raised fractionally on a sloping plinth. Exposed intricacies of corroded machinery suggested ornate stonework carving. It called to mind the coffin of a fairy queen, a much-loved and courageous monarch who had defended her people until the end and who now slept in death, surrounded by her most trusted knights, advisers and ladies-in-waiting. The upper portion of the casket was transparent, so that something of Galiana’s form was visible in silhouette long before one stood by the casket itself. She looked serenely accepting of her fate, with her arms folded across her chest, her head raised to the ceiling, accentuating the strong, noble line of her jaw. Her eyes were closed and her brow smooth. Long grey-streaked hair lay in dark pools on either side of her face. A billion ice particles glittered across her skin, twinkling in pastel flickers of blue and pink and pale green as Clavain’s angle of view changed. She looked exquisitely beautiful and delicate in death, as if she had been carved from sugar.

He wanted to weep.

Clavain touched the cold lid of the casket, skating his fingers across the surface, leaving four faint trails. He had imagined a thousand times the things he might say to her should she ever emerge from the Wolf’s clasp. She had never been thawed again after that one time shortly after her return, but that did not mean that it might not happen again, years or centuries from now. Time and again Clavain had wondered what he would say, were Galiana to shine through the mask even for the briefest of moments. He wondered if she would remember him and the things they had shared. Would she even remember Felka, who was as close to being her daughter as made no difference?

There was no point thinking about it. He knew he would never speak to her again.

‘I’ve made my mind up,’ he said, the fog of his breath visible before him. ‘I’m not sure you’d approve, since you would never have agreed to something like the Closed Council existing in the first place. They say the war made it inevitable, that the demands for operational secrecy forced us to compartmentalise our thinking. But the Council was already there before the war broke out, in a nascent form. We’ve always had secrets, even from ourselves.’

His fingers were very cold. ‘I’m doing it because I think something bad is going to happen. If it’s something that has to be stopped, I will do my best to make sure it is. If it can’t be helped, I will do my best to guide the Mother Nest through whatever crisis is awaiting it. But I can’t do either on the outside.

‘I’ve never felt so uneasy about a victory as I do about this one, Galiana. I’ve a sense you’d feel much the same way. You always used to be suspicious of anything that looked too simple, anything that looked like a ruse. I should know. I fell for one of your tricks once.’

He shivered. It was suddenly very cold and he had the prickly feeling that he was being watched. All around him the reefersleep caskets hummed, their banks of status lights and read-outs unchanging.

Clavain suddenly knew that he did not want to spend much longer in the vault. ‘Galiana,’ he said, too hastily for comfort, ‘I have to do it. I have to accede to Skade’s request, for good or ill. I just hope you understand.’

‘She will, Clavain.’

He turned around sharply, but even in the act of turning he realised that he knew the voice and it was nothing to be alarmed by. ‘Felka.’ His relief was total. ‘How did you find me?’

‘I assumed you’d be down here, Clavain. I knew Galiana would always be the one you spoke to last of all.’

She had entered the vault unheard. He could see now that the door at the end was ajar. What had made him shiver was the shift in air currents as the vault was opened.

‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ Clavain said. ‘I know she’s dead.’

‘She’s your conscience, Clavain.’

That’s why I loved her.‘

‘We all did. That’s why she still seems to be alive, to be guiding us.’ Felka was by his side now. ‘It’s all right to come down here. It doesn’t make me think less of you, or respect you less.’

‘I think I know what I have to do.’

She nodded, as if he had merely told her the time of day. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s too cold for the living. Galiana won’t mind.’

Clavain followed her to the door leading out of the vault.

Once they were on the other side he worked the wheel, sealing the great piston-like stopper back into place, sealing memories and ghosts away where they belonged.

Clavain was ushered into the privy chamber. As he crossed the threshold he felt the million background thoughts of the Mother Nest drop from his mind like a single dying sigh. He imagined that the transition would have been traumatic for many of the Conjoined, but even if he had not just come from Galiana’s place of rest, where the same kind of exclusion applied, he would not have found it more than a little jarring. Clavain had spent too much time on the fringes of Conjoiner society to be troubled by the absence of other thoughts in his head.

He was not entirely alone, of course. He sensed the minds of those in the chamber, although the usual Closed Council restrictions still only allowed him to skim the surfaces of their thoughts. The chamber itself was unremarkable: a large sphere with many seats arranged in encircling balconies reaching almost to the chamber’s zenith. The floor was flat and gleaming-grey, with a single austere chair positioned in the chamber’s centre. The chair was solid, curving seamlessly into the floor as if it had been pushed through from beneath.

[Clavain.] It was Skade. She was standing on the tip of a protruding tongue jutting from one side of the chamber.

Yes?

[Sit in the seat, Clavain.]

He walked across the glittering floor, his soles clicking against the material. The atmosphere could not help but feel judicial; he might as well have been walking towards a place of execution.

Clavain eased himself into the seat, which was as comfortable as it had appeared. He crossed his legs and scratched his beard. Let’s get this over with, Skade.

[All in good time, Clavain. Do you appreciate that with the burden of knowledge comes the additional burden of holding that knowledge secure? That once you have learned Closed Council secrets, you cannot jeopardise them by risking enemy capture? That even communicating these secrets to other Conjoiners cannot be tolerated?]

I know what I’m letting myself in for, Skade.

[We just want to be certain, Clavain. You cannot begrudge us that.]

Remontoire rose from his seat. [He’s said he’s ready, Skade. That’s enough.]

She regarded Remontoire with an absence of emotion that Clavain found far more chilling than mere anger. [Thank you, Remontoire.]

He’s right. I am ready. And willing.

Skade nodded. [Then prepare yourself. Your mind is about to be allowed access to previously excluded data.]

Clavain could not help gripping the armrests of his chair, knowing as he did so how ridiculous the instinct was. This was how he had felt four hundred years earlier, when Galiana had first introduced him to Transenlightenment. It had been in her nest on Mars, and she had infected his mind with droves of machines after he had been injured. She had given him a glimpse then, no more than that, but in the moments before it arrived he had felt like a man standing before the rushing wall of a tsunami, counting down the seconds until he was engulfed. He felt like that now, even though he was anticipating no actual change in consciousness. It was enough to know that he was about to be granted access to secrets so shattering that they merited layers of hierarchy within an otherwise omniscient hive mind.

He waited… but nothing happened.

[It’s done.]

He relaxed his grip on the seat. I feel exactly the same.

[You’re not.]

Clavain looked around him at the ringed walls of the chamber. Nothing had altered; nothing felt different. He examined his memory and there seemed to be nothing lurking there that had not been present a minute earlier. I don’t…

[Before you came here, before you made this decision, we permitted you to know that the reason for our seeking your assistance was a matter of recovering lost property. Isn’t that true, Clavain?]

You wouldn’t tell me what you were looking for. I still don’t know.

[That’s because you haven’t asked yourself the right question.]

And what question would you like me to ask, Skade?

[Ask yourself what you know about the hell-class weapons, Clavain. I’m sure you’ll find the answer very interesting.]

I don’t know anything about any hell-class…

But he faltered, fell silent. He knew exactly what the hell-class weapons were.

Now that the information was available to him, Clavain realised that he had heard rumours of the weapons on many occasions during his time amongst the Conjoined. Their bitterest enemies told cautionary tales of the Conjoiners’ hidden stockpile of ultimate weapons, doomsday devices so ferocious in their destructive capability that they had hardly been tested, and had certainly never been used in any actual engagements. The weapons were supposedly very old, manufactured during the very earliest phase of Conjoiner history. The rumours varied in detail, but all the stories agreed on one thing: there had been forty weapons, and none of them were precisely alike.

Clavain had never taken the rumours seriously, assuming that they must have originated with some forgotten piece of fear-mongering by one of the Mother Nest’s counter-intelligence units. It was unthinkable that the weapons could ever have been real. In all the time he had been amongst the Conjoined, no official hint of the existence of such weapons had ever come his way. Galiana had never spoken of them, and yet if the weapons were truly old — dating back to the Mars era — she could not possibly have been unaware of their existence.

But the weapons had existed.

Clavain sifted through his bright new memories with grim fascination. He had always known there were secrets within the Mother Nest, but he had never suspected that something so momentous could have been concealed for so long. He felt as if he had just discovered a vast, hidden room in a house he had lived in nearly all his life. The feeling of dislocation — and betrayal — was acute.

There were forty weapons, just like in the old tales. Each was a prototype, exploiting some uniquely subtle and nastily inventive principle of breakthrough physics. And Galiana did indeed know about them. She had authorised the construction of the weapons in the first place, at the height of the Conjoiner persecution. At the time, her enemies had been effective only by weight of numbers rather than technical superiority. With the forty new weapons she could have wiped the slate clean, but at the eleventh hour she had chosen not to: better to be erased from existence than have genocide on her hands.

But that had not been the end. There had been blunders by the enemy, lucky breaks and contingencies. Galiana’s people had been pushed to the brink, but they had never quite been excised from history.

Afterwards, Clavain learned that the weapons had been locked away for safekeeping, stockpiled inside an armoured asteroid in another system. Murky images flickered through his mind’s eye: barricaded vaults, fierce cybernetic watchdogs, perilous traps and deadfalls. Galiana had clearly feared the weapons as much as she feared her enemies, and though she was not willing to dismantle the weapons, she had done her best to put them beyond immediate use. The data that had allowed them to be made in the first place was erased, and apparently this had been sufficient to prevent any further attempts at duplication. Should the weapons ever be needed again — should another time of mass persecution arise — the weapons were still there to be used; but distance — years of flight-time — meant there was a generous cooling-off period built into the arrangement. Her forty hell-class weapons could only ever be used in cold blood, and that was the way it should be.

But the weapons had been stolen. The impregnable asteroid had been breached and by the time a Conjoiner investigative team arrived there was no trace of the thieves. Whoever had done it had been clever enough both to break through the defences and to avoid waking the weapons themselves. In their dormant condition the forty weapons could not be tracked, remotely destroyed or pacified.

There had been many attempts to locate the lost weapons, Clavain learned, but so far all had failed. Knowledge of the cache had been a closely guarded secret to begin with; the theft was kept even more hush-hush, with only a few very senior Conjoiners knowing what had happened. As the decades passed, they held their collective breaths: in the wrong hands, the weapons could shatter worlds like glass. Their only hope was that the thieves did not realise the potency of what they had stolen.

Decades became a century, then two centuries. There had been a great many disasters and crises in human space, but never any indication that the weapons had been awakened. The few Conjoiners in the know began to dare to believe that the matter could be quietly forgotten: perhaps the weapons had been abandoned in deep space, or tossed into the searing face of a star.

But the weapons had not been lost.

Completely unexpectedly, not long before Clavain’s return from deep space, activation signatures had been detected in the vicinity of Delta Pavonis, a sunlike star slightly more than fifteen light-years from the Mother Nest. The neutrino signals were weak; it was possible that earlier flickers of awakening had been missed entirely. But the most recent signals were quite unambiguous: a number of the weapons had been awakened from dormancy.

The Delta Pavonis system was not on the main trade routes. It did have a single colony world, Resurgam, a settlement established by an archaeological expedition from Yellowstone that had been led by Dan Sylveste, the son of the cyberneticist Calvin Sylveste and scion of one of the wealthiest families within Demarchist society. Sylveste’s archaeologists had been picking through the remains of a birdlike race that had lived on the planet barely a million years earlier. The colony had gradually severed formal ties with Yellowstone, and a series of regimes had seen the original scientific agenda replaced by a conflicting policy of terraforming and widescale settlement. There had been coups and violence, but it was nonetheless highly unlikely that the settlers were the ones who now possessed the weapons. Scrutiny of outbound traffic records from Yellowstone showed the departure of another ship en route to Resurgam: a lighthugger, Nostalgia for Infinity, that had arrived around the system at approximately the time that the activation signatures were detected. There was scant information on the ship’s crew and history, but Clavain learned from Rust Belt immigration records that a woman named Ilia Volyova had been scouting for new crewmembers immediately before the ship’s departure. The name might or might not have been genuine — in those confused post-plague days, ships could get away with whatever identities suited them — but Volyova had reappeared. Although very few transmissions made it back to Yellowstone, one of those, panicked and fragmentary, had mentioned Volyova’s ship terrorising the colony into surrendering its former leader. For some reason, Volyova’s Ultranaut crew wanted Dan Sylveste aboard their ship.

This did not mean that Volyova was definitely in charge of the weapons, but Clavain agreed with Skade’s assessment that she was the most likely suspect. She had a ship large enough to have held the weapons, she had used violence against the colony and she had arrived on the scene at the same time as the weapons had been revived from dormancy. It was impossible to guess what Volyova wanted with the weapons, but her association with them appeared beyond question.

She was the thief they had been looking for.

Skade’s crest pulsed with ripples of jade and bronze. New memories unpacked into his head: video clips and still-frame grabs of Volyova. Clavain was not quite sure what he had been expecting, but it was not the crop-haired, round-faced, shrewlike woman that Skade revealed to him. Had he walked into a room of suspects, Volyova would have been one of the last people he would have turned to.

Skade smiled at him. She had his full attention. [Now you understand why we need your help. The location and status of the thirty-nine remaining weapons…]

Thirty-nine, Skade? I thought there were forty.

[Didn’t I mention that one of the weapons has already been destroyed?]

You missed that part out, I think.

[We can’t be certain at this range. The weapons slip in and out of hibernation, like restless monsters. Certainly one weapon hasn’t been detected since 2565, local Resurgam time. We presume it lost, or damaged at the very least. And six of the remaining thirty-nine weapons have become detached from the main grouping. We still have intermittent signals from those weapons, but they are much closer to the neutron star on the system’s edge. The other thirty-three weapons are within an AU of Delta Pavonis, at the trailing Lagrange point of the Resurgam-Delta Pavonis system. In all likelihood they are within the hull of the Triumvir’s lighthugger.]

Clavain raised a hand. Wait. You detected some of these signals as long ago 2565?

[Local Resurgam time, Clavain.]

Nonetheless, you’d still have detected the signals here around… when, 2580? Thirty-three years ago, Skade. Why the hell didn’t you act sooner?

[This is wartime, Clavain. We’ve hardly been in a position to mount an extensive, logistically complex recovery operation.]

Until now, that is.

Skade conceded his point with the slightest of nods. [Now the tide is turning in our favour. Finally we can afford to divert some resources. Make no mistake, Clavain, recovering these weapons will not be easy. We will be attempting to repossess items that were stolen from a stronghold that we would even now have grave difficulty breaking into ourselves. Volyova has her own weapons, quite apart from those she has stolen from us. And the evidence of her crimes on Resurgam suggests that she has the nerve to use them. But we simply must have the weapons back, no matter the cost in assets and time.]

Assets? You mean lives?

[You have never flinched from accepting the costs of war, Clavain. That is why we want you to co-ordinate this recovery operation. Peruse these memories if you doubt your own suitability.]

She did not give him the dignity of a warning. Chunks of his past crashed into his immediate consciousness, jolting him back to past campaigns and past actions. War movies, Clavain thought, remembering the old two-dimensional, monochrome recordings he had watched during his earliest days in the Coalition for Neural Purity, sifting them — usually in vain — for any hint of a lesson that he might use against real enemies. But now the war movies that Skade showed him, slamming past in accelerated bursts, were ones in which he was the protagonist. And for the most part they were historically accurate, too: a parade of actions he had participated in. There was a hostage release in the warrens of Gilgamesh Isis, during which Clavain had lost a hand to a sulphur burn, an injury that took a year to heal. There was the time Clavain and a female Conjoiner had smuggled the brain of a Demarchist scientist out of the custody of a faction of renegade Mixmasters around Marco’s Eye. Clavain’s partner had been surgically modified so that she could keep the brain alive in her womb, following simple reverse Caesarean surgery that Clavain had administered. They had left the man’s body behind for his captors to discover. Afterwards, the Conjoiners had cloned the man a new body and packed the traumatised brain back into it.

Then there was Clavain’s recovery of a stolen Conjoiner drive from dissident Skyjacks camped in one of the outer nodes of the Bloater agrarian hive, and the liberation of an entire Pattern Juggler world from Ultra profiteers who wanted to charge for access to the mind-altering alien ocean. There were more, many more. Clavain always survived and nearly always triumphed. There were other universes, he knew, where he had died much earlier: he hadn’t been any less skilled in those histories, but his luck had just played out differently. He could not extrapolate from this run of successes and assume that he was bound to succeed at the next hurdle.

Even though he was not guaranteed to succeed, it was clear that Clavain stood a better chance than anyone else in the Closed Council.

He smiled ruefully. You seem to know me better than I know myself.

[I know that you will help us, Clavain, or I would not have brought you this far. I’m right, of course, aren’t I? You will help us, won’t you?]

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Con-joiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. Skade was right, of course. There was no one Clavain would have trusted to do the job other than himself, even now, at this late hour in both his career and his life. It would take decades, nearly twenty years just to reach Resurgam, and another twenty to come back with the prize. But forty years was really not a very long time when set against four or five centuries. And for most of that time he would be frozen, anyway.

Forty years; maybe five years at this end to prepare for it, and perhaps as much as a year for the operation itself… altogether, something close to half a century. He looked at Skade, observing the expectant way the ripples on her crest slowed to a halt. He knew that Skade had trouble reading his mind at the deepest level — it was his very opacity which made him both fascinating and infuriating to her — but he suspected that she could read his assent well enough.

I’ll do it. But there are conditions.

[Conditions, Clavain?]

I pick my team. And I say who travels with me. If I ask for Felka and Remontoire, and if they agree to come with me to Resurgam, then you’ll allow it.

Skade considered, then nodded with the precise delicacy of a shadow puppet. [Of course. Forty years is a long time to be away. Is that all?]

No, of course not. I won’t go against Volyova unless I have a crushing tactical superiority from the word go. That’s how I’ve always worked, Skade: full-spectrum dominance. That means more than one ship. Two at the very least, three ideally, and I’ll take more if the Mother Nest can manufacture them in time. I don’t care about the edict, either. We need lighthuggers, heavily armed with the nastiest weapons we’ve got. One prototype isn’t enough, and given the time it takes to build anything these days, we’d better start work immediately. You can’t just click your fingers at an asteroid and have a starship pop out of the end four days later.

Skade touched a finger to her lower lip. Her eyes closed for an instant longer than a blink. For that moment Clavain had the intense feeling that she was in heated dialogue with another. He thought that he saw her eyelids quiver, like a fever-racked dreamer.

[You’re right, Clavain. We will need ships; new ones, incorporating the refinements built into Nightshade. But you don’t have to worry. We’ve already started making them. As a matter of fact, they’re coming on nicely.]

Clavain narrowed his eyes. New ships? Where?

[A little way from here, Clavain.]

He nodded. Good. Then it won’t hurt to take me to see them, will it? I’d like to have a look over them before it’s too late to change anything.

[Clavain…]

That isn’t open to negotiation either, Skade. If I want to get the job done, I’ll need to see the tools of my trade.