Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 11

Deep within Nostalgia for Infinity, Ilia Volyova stood at the epicentre of the thing that had once been her Captain, the thing that in another life had called itself John Armstrong Brannigan. She was not shivering, and that still struck her as wrong. Visits to the Captain had always been accompanied by extreme physical discomfort, lending the whole exercise the faintly penitential air of a pilgrimage. On the occasions when they were not visiting the Captain to measure the extent of his growth — which could be slowed, but not stopped — they had generally been seeking his wisdom on some matter or other. It seemed only right and proper that some burden of suffering should be part of the bargain, even if the Captain’s advice had not always been absolutely sound, or even sane.

They had kept him cold to arrest the progress of the Melding Plague. For a time, the reefersleep casket in which he was kept could maintain the cold. But the Captain’s relentless growth had finally encroached on the casket itself, subverting and incorporating its systems into his own burgeoning template. The casket had continued functioning, after a fashion, but it had proved necessary to plunge the entire area around it into cryogenic cold. Trips to the Captain required the donning of many layers of thermal clothing. It was not easy to breathe the chill air that infested his realm: each inhalation threatened to shatter the lungs into a million glassy shards. Volyova had chain-smoked during those visits, though they were easier for her than for the others. She had no internal implants, nothing that the plague could reach and corrupt. The others — all dead now — had considered her squeamish and weak for not having them. But she saw the envy in their eyes when they were forced to spend time in the vicinity of the Captain. Then, if only for a few minutes, they wanted to be her. Desperately.

Sajaki, Hegazi, Sudjic… she could barely remember their names, it seemed like such a long time ago.

Now the place was no cooler than any other part of the ship, and much warmer than some areas. The air was humid and still. Glistening films textured every surface. Condensation ran in rivulets down the walls, dribbling around knobbly accretions. Now and then, with a rude eructation, a mass of noxious shipboard effluent would burst from a cavity and ooze to the floor. The ship’s biochemical recycling processes had long ago escaped human control. Instead of crashing, they had evolved madly, adding weird feedback loops and flourishes. It was a constant and wearying battle to prevent the ship from drowning in its own effluent. Volyova had installed bilge pumps at thousands of locations, redirecting the slime back to major processing vats where crude chemical agents could degrade it. The drone of the bilge pumps provided a background to every thought, like a single sustained organ note. The sound was always there. She had simply stopped noticing it.

If one knew where to look, and if one had the particular visual knack for extracting patterns from chaos, one could just about tell where the reefersleep casket had been. When she had allowed him to warm — she had fired a flechette round into the casket’s control system — he had begun to consume the surrounding ship at a vastly accelerated rate, ripping it apart atom by atom and merging it with himself. The heat had been like a furnace. She had not waited to see what the effects of the transformations would be, but it had seemed clear enough that the Captain would continue until he had assimilated much of the ship. As horrific as that prospect had been, it had been preferable to letting the ship remain in the control of another monster: Sun Stealer. She had hoped that the Captain would succeed in wresting some control from the parasitic intelligence that had invaded Nostalgia for Infinity.

She had, remarkably, been right. The Captain had eventually subsumed the whole ship, warping it to his own feverish whim. There was, Volyova knew, something unique about this particular case of plague infection. As far as anyone knew there was only one strain of Melding Plague, and the contamination that had reached the ship was the same kind that had done such damage in the Yellowstone system and elsewhere. Volyova had seen images of Chasm City after the plague, the twisted and grotesque architecture that the city had assumed, like a sick dream of itself. But while those transformations possessed at times what appeared to have been purpose, or even artistry, no real intelligence could be said to lie behind them. The shapes the buildings had taken on were in some sense pre-ordained by their underlying biodesign principles. But what had happened on Infinity was different. The plague had inhabited the Captain for long years before reshaping him. Was it possible that some symbiosis had been achieved, and that when the plague finally went wild, consuming and altering the ship, the transformations were in some sense expressions of the Captain’s subconscious?

She suspected so, and at the same time hoped not. For no matter which way one looked at it, the ship had become something monstrous. When Khouri had come up from Resurgam, Volyova had done her best to be blase about the transformations, but that act had been as much for her benefit as Khouri’s. The ship unnerved her on many levels. Shortly before she had allowed him to warm, she had come to an understanding of the Captain’s crimes, gaining a fleeting glimpse into the cloister of guilt and hate that was his mind. Now it was as if that mind had been vastly expanded, to the point where she could walk around inside it. The Captain had become the ship. The ship had inherited his crimes and become a monument to its own villainy.

She studied the contours that marked where the casket had been. During the latter stages of the Captain’s illness, the reefersleep unit, pressed up against one wall, had begun to extend silvery fronds in all directions. They could be traced back through the casket’s fractured casing into the Captain himself, fused deeply with his central nervous system. Now those sensory feelers encompassed the entire ship, worming, bifurcating and reconnecting like immense squid axons. There were several dozen locations where the silver feelers converged into what Volyova had come to think of as major ganglial processing centres, fantastically intricate tangles. There was no physical trace of the Captain’s old body now, but his intelligence, distended, confused, spectral, undoubtedly still inhabited the ship. Volyova had not decided whether those nodes were distributed brains or simply small components of a much larger shipwide intellect. All that she was sure of was that John Brannigan was still present.

Once, when she had been shipwrecked around Hades and had assumed Khouri to be dead, she had been waiting for Infinity to execute her. She was expecting it. She had warmed the Captain by then, told him of the crimes she had uncovered, given him every reason to punish her.

But he had spared her and then rescued her. He had allowed her back aboard the ship, which was still in the process of being consumed and transformed. He had ignored all her attempts at communication, but had made it possible for her to survive. There had been pockets where his transformations were less severe, and she had found that she could live in them. She had discovered that they even moved around, if she decided to inhabit a different portion of the ship. So Brannigan, or whatever was running the ship, knew she was aboard, and knew what she needed to stay alive. Later, when she had found Khouri, the ship had allowed her to come aboard as well.

It had been like inhabiting a haunted house occupied by a lonely but protective spirit. Whatever they needed, within reason, the ship provided. But it would not relinquish absolute control. It would not move, except to make short in-system flights. It would not give them access to any of its weapons, let alone the cache.

Volyova had continued her attempts at communication, but they had all been fruitless. When she spoke to the ship, nothing happened. When she scrawled visual messages, there was no response. And yet she remained convinced that the ship was paying attention. It had become catatonic, withdrawn into its own private abyss of remorse and recrimination.

The ship despised itself.

But then Khouri had left, returning to Resurgam to infiltrate Inquisition House and lead the whole damned planet on a wild goose chase, just so she and Volyova could get into any place they needed without question.

Those first few months of solitude had been trying, even for Ilia Volyova. They had forced her to the conclusion that she quite liked human companionship after all. Having nothing for company except a sullen, silent, hateful mind had almost pushed her to the edge.

But then the ship, in its own small way, had begun to talk back. At first, she had almost not noticed its efforts. There had been a hundred things that needed doing each day, and no time to stop and be quiet and wait for the ship to make its fumbling gestures of conciliation. Rat infestations… bilge pump failures… the continual process of redirecting the plague away from critical areas, fighting it with nano-agents, fire, refrigerants and chemical sprays.

Then one day the servitors had started behaving oddly. Like the rats that had turned rogue, they had once been part of the ship’s repair and redesign infrastructure. The smartest of them had been consumed by the plague, but the oldest, stupidest machines had endured. They continued to toil away at their allotted tasks, only dimly aware that the ship had changed around them. For the most part they neither helped nor hindered Volyova, so she had let them be. Very occasionally they were useful, but it was such a rare occurrence that she had long since stopped counting on it.

But then the servitors began to help her. It started with a routine bilge pump failure. She had detected the pump breakdown and travelled downship to inspect the problem. When she arrived, to her astonishment she had found a servitor waiting there, carrying more or less exactly the right tools she needed to fix the unit.

Her first priority had been to get the pump chugging again. When the local flood had subsided she had sat down and taken stock. The ship still looked the way it had when she had woken up. The corridors still stretched away like mucus-coated windpipes. Vile substances continued to ooze and drip from every orifice in the ship’s fabric. The air remained cloying, and at the back of every thought was the constant Gregorian chant of the other bilge pumps.

But something had definitely changed.

She had put the tools back on the rack that the servitor carried. When she was done the machine had whipped smartly around on its tracks and whirred off into the distance, vanishing around the ribbed curve of the corridor.

‘You can hear me, I think,’ she had said aloud. ‘Hear me and see me. You also know that I’m not here to hurt you. You could have killed me already, John, especially if you control the servitors — and you do, don’t you?’

She had not been the least bit surprised when no answer was forthcoming. But she had persisted.

‘You remember who I am, of course. I’m the one who warmed you. The one who guessed what you’d done. Perhaps you think I was punishing you for your actions. You’d be wrong. It’s not my style; sadism bores me. If I wanted to punish you, I’d have killed you — and there were a thousand ways I could have done it. But it wasn’t what I had in mind. I just want you to know that my personal opinion on the matter is that you’ve suffered enough. You have suffered, haven’t you?’ She had paused, listening to the musical tone of the pump, satisfying herself that it was not going to immediately fail again.

‘Well, you deserved it,’ she said. ‘You deserved to spend time in hell for what you did. Perhaps you have. Only you will ever know what it was like to live like that, for so long. Only you will ever know if the state you’re in now is any kind of improvement.’

There had been a distant tremor at that point; she had felt it through the flooring. She wondered if it was just a scheduled pumping operation going on somewhere else in the ship or whether the Captain had been commenting on her remark.

‘It’s better now, isn’t it? It has to be better. You’ve escaped now, and become the spirit of the ship you once commanded. What more could any Captain desire?’

There had been no answer. She had waited several minutes, hoping for another seismic rumble or some equally cryptic signal. Nothing had come.

‘About the servitor,’ she had said. ‘I’m grateful, thank you. It was a help.’

But the ship had said nothing.

What she found from then on, however, was that the servitors were always there to help her when they could. If her intentions could be guessed, the machines would race ahead to bring the tools or equipment she needed. If it was a long job, a servitor would even bring her food and water, transported from one of the functioning dispensaries. If she asked the ship directly to bring her something, it never happened. But if she stated her needs aloud, as if talking to herself, then the ship seemed willing to oblige. It could not always help her, but she had the distinct impression that it was doing its best.

She wondered if she was wrong, whether perhaps it was not John Brannigan who was haunting her, but some markedly lower-level intelligence. Perhaps the reason that the ship was keen to serve her was that its mind was only as complex as a servitor’s, infected with the same obedient routines. Perhaps when she addressed her thoughts directly to Brannigan, talking to him as if he listened, she was imagining more intelligence present than was really the case.

Then the cigarettes had turned up.

She had not asked for them, nor even suspected that there was another hoard of them to be found anywhere on the ship now that she had exhausted the last of her personal supply. She had examined them with curiosity and suspicion. They looked as if they had been manufactured by one of the trading colonies that the ship had dealt with decades ago. They did not appear to have been made by the ship itself, from local raw materials. They smelt too good for that. When she lit one of them up and smoked it to a stub, it tasted too good as well. She had smoked another one, and that had also tasted fine.

‘Where did you find these?’ she asked. ‘Where in the name of…’ She inhaled again, filling her lungs for the first time in weeks with something other than the taste of shipboard air. ‘Never mind. I don’t need to know. I’m grateful.’

From then on there had been no doubt in her mind: Brannigan was with her. Only another member of the crew could have known about her cigarette habit. No machine would have thought to bring her an offering like that, no matter how deeply ingrained its instinct for servility. So the ship must have wanted to make peace.

Progress had been slow since then. Now and then something had happened which had forced the ship back into its shell, the servitors shutting down and refusing to help her for days on end. It sometimes happened after she had been talking to the Captain too freely, trying to coax him out of his silence with cod-psychology. She was not good at psychology, she reflected ruefully. This whole horrible mess had begun when her experiments with Gunnery Officer Nagorny had driven him insane. If that hadn’t happened, there would have been no need to recruit Khouri, and everything might have been different…

Afterwards, when shipboard life returned to a kind of normality and the servitors again did her bidding, she would be very careful what she did and said. Weeks would go by without her making any overt attempts at communication. But she would always try again, building up slowly to another catatonic episode. She persisted because she had the impression that she was making small but measurable progress between each crash.

The last crash had not happened until six weeks after Khouri’s visit. The catatonic state had persisted for an unprecedented eight weeks after that. Another ten weeks had passed since then, and only now was she ready to risk another crash.

‘Captain… listen to me,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to reach you many times, and I think once or twice I’ve succeeded and that you’ve been fully cognisant of what I’m saying. But you haven’t been ready to answer. I understand; I truly do. But now there’s something I have to explain to you. Something about the outside universe, something about what’s happening elsewhere in this system.’ She was standing in the great sphere of the bridge, talking aloud with her voice raised slightly louder than would have been strictly necessary for conversation. In all likelihood, she could have said her piece anywhere in the ship and he would have heard her. But here, in what had once been the ship’s focus of command, the soliloquy felt slightly less absurd. The acoustics of the place lent her voice a resonance that she found pleasing. She was also gesticulating theatrically with the stub of a cigarette.

‘Perhaps,’ she continued, ‘you already know of it. I know you have synaptic pathways to the hull sensors and cameras. What I don’t know is how well you can interpret those data streams. After all, you weren’t born to do it. It must be strange, even for you, to see the universe through the eyes and ears of a four-kilometre-long machine. But you always were an adaptable bastard. My guess is you’ll figure it out eventually.’

The Captain did not respond. But the ship had not immediately plunged into the catatonic state. According to the monitor bracelet on her wrist, ship-wide servitor activity continued normally.

‘But I’ll assume you don’t know about the machines yet, aside from what you may have picked up during Khouri’s last visit. What kind of machines, you ask? Alien ones, that’s what. We don’t know where they’ve come from. All that we know is that they’re here, now, in the Delta Pavonis system. We think Sylveste — you remember him? — must have inadvertently summoned them here when he went into the Hades artefact.’ Of course he remembered Sylveste, if he was capable of remembering anything at all from his previous existence. It was Sylveste they had brought aboard to heal the Captain. But Sylveste had only been playing with their wishes, his eye on Hades all along.

‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘that’s guesswork, but it seems to fit the facts. Khouri knows a lot about these machines, more than me. But the way she learned about them means she can’t easily articulate everything she knows. We’re still in the dark in a lot of areas.’

She told the Captain about what had happened so far, replaying observations on the bridge’s display sphere. She explained how the swarms of Inhibitor machines had begun dismantling three smaller worlds, sucking out their cores and processing the eviscerated material into highly refined belts of orbital matter.

‘It’s impressive,’ she said. ‘But it’s not so far beyond our own capabilities that I’m quivering in my boots. Not just yet. But what worries me is what they have in mind next.’

The mining operations had come to an abrupt and precise halt two weeks earlier. The artificial volcanoes studding the equators of the three worlds had stopped belching matter, leaving a final curtailed arc of processed material climbing into orbit.

By then, by Volyova’s estimate, at least half the mass of each world had been elevated into orbital storage. Only hollowed-out husks remained below. It was fascinating to watch them subside once the mining was over, crumpling down into compact orange balls of radioactive slag. Some machines detached themselves from the surface, but many appeared to have served their purpose and were not recycled. The apparent wastefulness of that gesture chilled Volyova. It suggested to her that the machines did not care about the effort they had already expended in earlier replication cycles, that in some sense it made no difference compared with the importance of the task ahead.

Yet millions of smaller machines remained. The debris rings themselves had appreciable self-gravity and needed constant shepherding. Various breeds of processor swam through the ore lanes, ingesting and excreting. Volyova detected the occasional flare of exotic radiation from the vicinity of the works. Awesome alchemical mechanisms had been unleashed. The raw dirt of the worlds was being coaxed into specialised and rare new forms, types of matter that simply did not exist in nature.

But before the volcanoes had ceased spewing dirt, a new process had already started. A matter stream had peeled away from the space around each world, a filament of processed material that extended in a long tongue until it was light-seconds in length. The shepherding machines had obviously injected enough energy into each stream to kick them out of the gravitational wells of their progenitor worlds. The tongues of matter were now on an interplanetary trajectory, following a soft parabolic which hugged the ecliptic. They distended until they were light-hours from end to end. Volyova extrapolated the parabolas — there were three of them — and found that they would converge on the same point in space, at precisely the same time.

There was nothing there at the moment. But by the time they got there, something else would have arrived: the system’s largest gas giant. That conjunction, Volyova was inclined to think, was very unlikely to be coincidence. ‘Here’s my guess,’ she told the Captain. ‘What we’ve seen so far was just the gathering of raw material. Now it’s being assembled in the place where the real work is about to begin. They’ve got designs on Roc. What, I don’t know. But it’s undoubtedly part of their plan.’

What she knew of the gas giant sprung on to the projection sphere. A schematic showed Roc cored open like an apple, revealing layers of annotated strata: a plunge into perplexing depths of weird chemistry and nightmarish pressure. Gases at more or less imaginable pressures and temperatures overlaid an ocean of pure liquid hydrogen that began only a scratch beneath the apparent outer layer of the planet. Beneath that, the very thought of its existence giving Volyova a faint migraine, was an ocean of hydrogen in its metallic state. Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.

But there was nothing about Roc that marked it as out of the ordinary. It had the usual family of moons, most of them icy and tidally locked to the larger world. Ions were boiling off the surfaces of the hotter moons, forming great toroidal plasma belts which encircled the giant, held in check by the giant’s own savage magnetosphere. There were no large rocky moons, which was presumably why the initial dismantling operations had taken place elsewhere. There was a ring system with some interesting resonant patterns — bicycle spokes and odd little knots — but again, it was nothing Volyova had not seen already.

What did the Inhibitors want? What would begin when their matter streams had arrived at Roc?

‘You understand my misgivings, Captain. I’m sure you do. Whatever those machines are up to, it isn’t going to be good for us. They’re engines of extinction. Wiping out sentient life is what they do. The question is, can we do anything about it?’

Volyova paused and took stock. She had not yet triggered a catatonic withdrawal, and that was good. The Captain was at least prepared to let her discuss the outside events. On the other hand, she had yet to raise any of the subjects that usually triggered a shutdown.

Well, it was now or never.

I think we can, Captain. Perhaps not stop the machines for good, but at least throw a fairly large spanner into their works.‘ She eyed her bracelet, noting that nothing unusual was happening elsewhere in the ship. ’Of course, I’m talking about a military strike. I don’t think reasoned argument is going to work against a force that dismantles three of your planets without even saying “please” first.‘

There was something then, she thought. A tremor reaching her from somewhere else in the ship. It had happened before, and it seemed to mean something, but exactly what she was not prepared to say. It was certainly a kind of communication from whatever intelligence ruled the ship, but not necessarily of the sort she might have wished for. It was more a sign of irritation, like the low growl of a dog that did not like being disturbed.

‘Captain… I understand this is difficult. I swear I do. But we have to do something, and soon. A deployment of the cache weapons would seem to me to be our only option. We have thirty-three of them left; thirty-nine if we can salvage and re-arm the six I deployed against Hades… but I think even thirty-three will be sufficient if we can use them well and use them soon.’

The tremor intensified, subsided. She was really touching a nerve now, she thought. But the Captain was still listening. ‘The weapon we lost on the edge of the system may have been the most powerful we had,’ she went on, ‘but the six we discarded were, by my estimate at least, at the lower end of the destructive scale of the others. I think we can make do, Captain. Shall I tell you my plan? I propose that we target the three worlds where the matter streams are coming from. Ninety per cent of the extracted mass is still in orbit around each collapsed body, although more and more is being pumped towards Roc. Most of the Inhibitor machines are still around those moons. They might not survive a surprise attack, and even if they do, we can disperse and contaminate those matter reservoirs.’

She began to talk faster, intoxicated with the way the plan was unfolding in her mind. ‘The machines might be able to regroup, but they’ll need to find new worlds to dismantle. But we can beat them at that as well. We can use the other cache weapons to rip apart as many probable candidates as we can find. We can poison their wells; stop them from doing any more mining. That’ll make it harder — perhaps even impossible — for them to finish what they have in mind for the gas giant. We have a chance, but there’s a catch, Captain. You’ll have to help us do it.’

She looked at the bracelet again. Still nothing had happened, and she allowed herself to breathe a mental sigh of relief. She would not push him much more now. Merely discussing the need for his co-operation had gone further than she had imagined would be possible.

But it came, then: a distant, growing howl of angry air. She heard it shrieking towards her through kilometres of corridor.

‘Captain…’

But it was too late. The gale stormed the command sphere, knocking her to the floor with its ferocity. The cigarette butt flew from her hand and executed several orbits of the chamber, caught in a whirlwind of ship air. Rats and sundry other items of loose ship debris precessed with it.

She found it hard to talk. ‘Captain… I didn’t mean… ’ But then even breathing became difficult. The wind sent her skidding across the floor, arms windmilling. The noise was excruciating, like an amplification of all the years, all the decades of pain that John Brannigan had known.

Then the gale died down, and the chamber was still again. Somewhere else in the ship all he had needed to do was open a pressure lock into one of the chambers that was normally under hard vacuum. Very likely no air had actually reached space during his show of strength, but the effect had been as unnerving as any hull rupture.

Ilia Volyova got to her feet. Nothing seemed to be broken. She dusted herself down and, shaking, lit herself another cigarette. She smoked it for at least two minutes, until her nerves were as steady as they were going to get.

Then she spoke again, calmly and quietly, like a parent talking to a baby that had just thrown a tantrum. ‘Very well, Captain. You’ve made your point very effectively. You don’t want to talk about the cache weapons. Fine. That’s your prerogative, and I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. But understand this: we’re not just talking about a small local matter here. Those Inhibitor machines haven’t just arrived around Delta Pavonis. They’ve arrived in human space. This is just the beginning. They won’t stop here, not even after they’ve wiped out all life on Resurgam for the second time in a million years. That’ll just be the warm-up exercise. It’ll be somewhere else after that. Maybe Sky’s Edge. Maybe Shiva-Parvati. Maybe Grand Teton, Spindrift, Zastruga — maybe even Yellowstone. Maybe even the First System. It probably doesn’t matter, because once one goes, the others won’t be far behind. It’ll be the end, Captain. It might take decades or it might take centuries. Doesn’t matter. It’ll still be the end of everything, the final repudiation of every human gesture — every human thought — since the dawn of time. We’ll have been erased from existence. I guarantee you something: it’ll be one hell of a shooting match, even if the outcome isn’t really in doubt. But you know what? We won’t be around to see one damned moment of it. And that pisses me off more than you can imagine.’

She took another drag on the cigarette. The rats had scampered back into the darkness and slime and the ship felt almost normal again. He appeared to have forgiven her that one indiscretion.

She continued, ‘The machines haven’t paid us much attention yet. But my guess is they’ll get around to it eventually. And do you want my theory as to why we haven’t been attacked so far? It might be that they just don’t see us yet; that their senses are attuned to signs of life on a much larger scale than just a single ship. It could also be that there’s no need to worry about us; that it would be a waste of effort to go to the trouble of wiping us out individually when what they’re working on will do the job just as effectively. I suspect that’s how they think, Captain. On a much larger, slower scale than we’re used to. Why go to the trouble of squashing a single fly when you’re about to exterminate the entire species? And if we’re going to do something about them, we have to start thinking a little bit like them. We need the cache, Captain.’

The room shuddered; the display illumination and the surrounding lights failed. Volyova looked at her bracelet, unsurprised to see that the ship was in the process of going catatonic again. Servitors were shutting down on all levels, abandoning whatever tasks they had been assigned. Even some of her bilge pumps were dying; she could hear the subtle change in the background note as units dropped out of the chorus. Warrens of shipboard corridor would be plunged into darkness. Elevators would not be guaranteed to arrive. Life was about to get harder again, and for a few days — perhaps a few weeks — merely surviving aboard the ship would require most of her energies.

‘Captain… ’ she said softly, doubtful that anything was now listening. ‘Captain, you have to understand: I’m not going to go away. And nor are they.’

Alone, standing in darkness, Volyova smoked what remained of her cigarette then, when she was done, she pulled out her torch, flicked it on and left the bridge.

The Triumvir was busy. She had much work to do.

Remontoire stood on the adhesive skin of Skade’s comet, waving at an approaching spacecraft.

It came in hesitantly, nosing towards the dark surface with evident suspicion. It was a small ship, only slightly larger than the corvette that had brought them here in the first place. Globular turrets bulged from its hull, swivelling this way and that. Remontoire blinked against the red glare of a targeting laser, then the beam passed, doodling patterns on the ground, surveying it for booby-traps.

‘You said there were two of you,’ said the commander of the ship, his voice buzzing in Remontoire’s helmet. ‘I see only one.’

‘Skade was injured. She’s inside the comet, being looked after by the Master of Works. Why are you speaking to me vocally?’

‘You could be a trap.’

‘I’m Remontoire. Don’t you recognise me?’

‘Wait. Turn a little to the left so I can see your face through your visor.’

A moment passed while the ship loitered, scrutinising him. Then it eased closer and fired its own set of grapples, ramming them hard into the ground where the three severed lines were still anchored. Remontoire felt the impacts drum through the membrane, the epoxy tightening its grip on his soles.

He tried to establish neural communication with the pilot. Do you accept that I’m Remontoire, now?

He watched an airlock open near the front of the ship. A Conjoiner emerged, clad in full battle armour. The figure glided to the comet’s surface and landed feet first only two metres from where he stood. The figure carried a gun that he pointed unwaveringly at Remontoire. Other guns on the ship were also trained on him. He could feel their wide-muzzled scrutiny, and had the sense that it would only take a slight wrong move for the weapons to open fire.

The Conjoiner connected neurally with Remontoire. [What are you doing here? Who is the Master of Works?]

Closed Council business, I’m afraid. All I can tell you is that Skade and I were here on a matter ofConjoiner security. This comet is one of ours, as you’ll have gathered.

[Your distress message said that three of you came here. Where is the ship that brought you?]

That’s where it gets a tiny bit complicated. Remontoire tried to push into the man’s head — it would make it so much easier if he could just dump his memories directly — but the other Conjoiner’s neural blockades were secure.

[Just tell me.]

Clavain came with us. He stole the corvette.

[Why would he do something like that?]

I can’t really tell you, not without revealing the nature of this comet.

[Let me guess. Closed Council business again.]

You know what it’s like.

[Where was he headed with the corvette?]

Remontoire smiled; there was no point in playing further cat-and-mouse games. Probably towards the inner system. Where else? He won’t be going back to the Mother Nest.

[How long ago was this, exactly?]

More than thirty hours.

[He’ll need fewer than three hundred to reach Yellowstone. You didn’t think to alert us sooner?]

I did my best. We had something of a medical crisis to deal with. And the Master of Works needed a lot of persuasion before it would allow me to send a signal back to the Mother Nest.

[Medical crisis?]

Remontoire gestured back across the scabbed and gashed surface of the comet, towards the dimpled entry hole where the Master of Works had first appeared. As I said, Skade was hurt. I think we should get her back to the Mother Nest as quickly as possible.

Remontoire began walking, picking his way gingerly step by step. The ship-mounted guns continued to track him, ready to turn him into a miniature crater if he so much as flinched.

[Is she alive?]

Remontoire shook his head. Nor at the moment, no.