Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 17

The two women brought Thorn to a room within Nostalgia for Infinity. The centrepiece of the room was an enormous spherical display apparatus, poised in the middle of the chamber like a single grotesque eyeball. Thorn had an unshakeable feeling of intense scrutiny, as if not just the eye but also the entire fabric of the ship was studying him with great owl-like interest and not a little malice. Then he began to take in the particulars of what confronted him. There was evidence of damage everywhere. Even the display apparatus itself appeared to have been subjected to recent and crude repairs.

‘What happened here?’ Thorn asked. ‘It looks as if there was a gunfight or something.’

‘We’ll never know for sure,’ Inquisitor Vuilleumier said. ‘Clearly the crew wasn’t as united as we thought during the Sylveste crisis. It looks from the internal evidence as if there was some sort of factional dispute aboard the ship.’

‘We always suspected this was the case,’ the other woman, Irina, added. ‘Evidently there was trouble brewing just below the surface. Seems that whatever happened around Cerberus/Hades was enough to spark off a mutiny. The crew must have killed each other, leaving the ship to take care of itself.’

‘Handy for us,’ Thorn said.

The women exchanged glances. ‘Perhaps we should move on to the item of interest,’ Vuilleumier said.

They played a movie for him. It was holographic, running in the big eye. Thorn assumed that it was a computer synthesis assembled from data that the ship had gathered from a multitude of sensor bands and viewpoints. What it presented was a God’s-eye view, the view of a being able to apprehend entire planets and their orbits.

‘I must ask you to accept something,’ Irina said. ‘It is difficult to accept, but it must be done.’

Tell me,‘ Thorn said.

‘The entire human species is poised on the brink of sudden and catastrophic extinction.’

‘That’s quite a claim. I hope you can justify it.’

‘I can, and I will. The important thing to grasp is that the extinction, if it is to happen, will begin here, now, around Delta Pavonis. But this is merely the start of something that will become greater and bloodier.’

Thorn could not help but smile. ‘Then Sylveste was right, is that it?’

‘Sylveste knew nothing about the details, or the risks he was taking. But he was correct in one assumption: he believed that the Amarantin had been wiped out by external intervention, and that it had something to do with their sudden emergence as a spacefaring culture.’

‘And the same thing’s going to happen to us?’

Irina nodded. ‘The mechanism will be different this time, it seems. But the agents are the same.’

‘And they are?’

‘Machines,’ Irina told him. ‘Starfaring machines of immense age. For millions of years they’ve hidden between the stars, waiting for another culture to disturb the great galactic silence. All they exist to do is detect the emergence of intelligence and then suppress it. We call them the Inhibitors.’

‘And now they’re here?’

‘The evidence would suggest so.’

They showed him what had happened so far, how a squadron of Inhibitor machines had arrived in the system and set about the dismantling of three worlds. Irina shared with Thorn her suspicion that Sylveste’s activities had probably drawn them, and that there might even be further waves converging on the Resurgam system from further out, alerted by the expanding wavefront of whatever signal had activated the first machines.

He watched the three worlds die. One was a metallic planet; the other two were rocky moons. The machines swarmed and multiplied on the surfaces of the moons, covering them in a plaque of specialised industrial forms. From the equators, plumes of mined matter belched into space. The moons were being cored out like apples. The matter plumes were directed into the maws of three colossal processing engines orbiting the dying bodies. Streams of refined matter, segregated into distinct ores and isotopes and granularities, were then flung into interplanetary space, arcing out along lazy parabolas.

‘That was just the start,’ Vuilleumier said.

They showed him how the mass streams from the three dismantled moons converged on a single point in space. It was a point in the orbit of the system’s largest gas giant, and the giant planet would arrive at that point at exactly the same time as the three mass streams.

‘That was when our attention switched to the giant,’ Irena said.

The Inhibitor machines were fearfully difficult to detect. It was only with the greatest of effort that she had managed to discern the presence of another smaller swarm of machines around the giant. For a long time they had done nothing but wait, poised for the arrival of the matter streams, the hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.

‘I don’t understand,’ Thorn said. ‘There are plenty of moons around the gas giant itself. Why did they go to the trouble of dismantling moons elsewhere if they were going to be needed here?’

Those aren’t the right sort of moon,‘ Irina said. ’Most of the moons around the giant aren’t much more than ice balls, small rocky cores surrounded by frozen or liquid-state volatiles. They needed to rip apart metallic worlds, and that meant looking further afield.‘

‘And now what are they going to do?’

‘Make something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Something bigger still. Something that needs one hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.’

Thorn returned his attention to the eye. ‘When did this start? When did the matter streams reach Roc?’

‘Three weeks ago. The thing — whatever it is — is beginning to take shape.’ Irena tapped at a bracelet around her wrist, causing the eye to zoom in on the giant’s immediate neighbourhood.

Most of the planet remained in shadow. Above the one limb that was illuminated — an off-white crescent shot through with pale bars of ochre and fawn — something was suspended: a filamentary arc that must have been many thousands of kilometres from end to end. Irina zoomed in further, towards the middle of the arc.

‘It’s a solid object, so far as we can tell,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘An arc of a circle one hundred thousand kilometres in radius. It’s in an equatorial orbit around the planet, and the ends are growing.’

Irina zoomed in again, focusing on the precise midpoint of the growing arc. There was a swelling, little more than a lozenge-shaped smudge at the current resolution. She tapped more controls on the bracelet and the smudge bloomed into clarity, expanding to fill the entire display volume.

‘It was a moon in its own right,’ Irina said, ‘a ball of ice a few hundred kilometres from side to side. They circularised its orbit above the equator in a few days, without the moon breaking apart under the dynamic stresses. Then the machines built structures inside it, what we must assume to be additional processing equipment. One of the matter streams falls into the moon here, via this maw-shaped structure. We can’t speculate about what goes on inside, I’m afraid. All we know is that two tubular structures are emerging from either end of the moon, fore and aft of its orbital motion. On this scale they appear to be whiskers, but the tubes are actually fully fifteen kilometres in thickness. They currently extend seventy thousand kilometres either side of the moon, and are growing in length by a rate of around two hundred and eighty kilometres every hour.’

Irina nodded, noting Thorn’s evident incredulity. ‘Yes, that’s quite correct. What you see here has been achieved in the last ten standard days. We are dealing with an industrial capacity beyond anything in our experience, Thorn. Our machines can turn a small metal-rich asteroid into a starship in a few days, but even that would seem astonishingly slow by comparison with the Inhibitor processes.’

‘Ten days to form that arc’ The hairs on the back of Thorn’s neck were standing up, to his embarrassment. ‘Do you think they’ll keep growing it until the ends meet?’

‘It seems likely. If the ends are to form a ring, they’ll meet in a little under ninety days.’

‘Three months! You’re right. We couldn’t do that. We never could; not even during the Belle Époque. Why, though? Why throw a ring around the gas giant?’

‘We don’t know. Yet. There’s more, though.’ Irina nodded at the eye. ‘Shall we continue?’

‘Show me,’ Thorn said. ‘I want to see it all.’

‘You won’t like it.’

She showed him the rest, explaining how the three individual mass streams had followed near-ballistic trajectories from their points of origin, like chains of pebbles tossed in precise formation. But near the gas giant they were tightly orchestrated, steered and braked by machines too small to see. They were forced to curve sharply, aimed towards whichever constructional focus was their destination. One stream rained down into the maw of the moon that was extruding out the whiskers. The other two streams plunged into similar mawlike structures on two other moons, both of which had been lowered into orbits just above the cloud layer, well within the radius at which they should have been shattered by tidal forces.

‘What are the other two moons doing?’ Thorn asked.

‘Something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Here, take a look. See if you can make more sense of it than we’ve been able to.’

It was difficult to surmise exactly what was going on. There was a whisker of material emerging from each of the two lower moons, ejected aft, against the direction of orbital motion. The whiskers appeared to be about the same size as the arc that was being built by the higher moon, but they each followed a sinuous snakelike curve that took them from a tangent to the orbital motion into the atmosphere itself, like great telegraph cables being reeled into the sea by a ship. Immediately behind the impact point of each tube was an eyelike wake of roiling and disturbed atmosphere many thousands of kilometres long.

‘They don’t come out again, as far as we can see,’ Vuilleumier said.

‘How fast are they being laid?’

‘We can’t tell. There aren’t any reference points on the tubes themselves, so we can’t calculate how fast they’re emerging from the moons. There’s no way we can get a Doppler measurement, not without revealing our interest. But we know that the flux of matter falling into each of the three moons is about the same, and the tubes are all about the same width.’

‘Then they’re probably being spooled into the atmosphere at the same speed as the arc is being formed, is that it? Two hundred and eighty kilometres per hour, or thereabouts.’ Thorn looked at the two women, searching their faces for clues. ‘Any ideas, then?’

‘We can’t begin to guess,’ Irina said.

‘But you don’t think this is good news, do you?’

‘No, Thorn, I don’t. My guess, frankly, is that whatever is taking place down there is part of something even larger.’

‘And that something means we have to evacuate Resurgam?’

She nodded. ‘We still have time, Thorn. The outer arc won’t be finished for eighty days, but it seems very unlikely that anything catastrophic will happen immediately after that. More likely, another process will start, something that might take as long again to complete as the building of the arcs. We may have many months beyond that.’

‘Months, though, not years.’

‘We only need six months to evacuate Resurgam.’

Thorn remembered the calculations they had explained to him, the dry arithmetic of shuttle flights and passenger capacities. It could be done in six months, yes, but only if human behaviour was factored out of the sums. People did not behave like bulk cargo. Especially not people who had been cowed and intimidated by an oppressive regime for the last five decades.

‘What you told me before — that we might have a few years to get this done?’

Vuilleumier smiled. ‘We told a few white lies, that’s all.’

Later, following what seemed to him to be an unnecessarily tortuous route through the ship, they took Thorn to view a cavernous hangar bay where many smaller spacecraft waited. They hung in their parking racks, transatmospheric and ship-to-ship shuttles like sleek-skinned sharks or bloated, spined angelfish. Most of the ships were too small to be of any use in the proposed evacuation plan, but he could not deny that the view was impressive.

They even helped him into a spacesuit with a thruster pack so that he could be taken on a tour through the chamber itself, inspecting the ships that would lift the people off Resurgam and ferry them across space to Nostalgia for Infinity itself. If he had harboured any suspicions that any of this was being faked, he discarded them now. The sheer vastness of the chamber and the overwhelming fact of the ships’ existence rammed aside any lingering misgivings, at least with respect to the reality of Infinity.

And yet… and yet. He had seen the ship with his own eyes, had walked on it and felt the subtle difference of its spin-generated artificial gravity compared with the pull of Resurgam that he had known all his adult life. The ship could not be faked, and it would have taken extreme measures to fake the fact that the bay was full of smaller craft. But the threat itself? That was where it all broke down. They had shown him much, but not nearly enough. Everything concerning the threat to Resurgam had been shown to him second-hand. He had seen none of it with his own eyes.

Thorn was a man who needed to see things for himself. He could ask either of the two women to show him more evidence, but that would solve nothing. Even if they took him outside the ship and let him look through a telescope pointed at the gas giant, there would be no way for him to be sure that the view was not being doctored in some way. Even if they let him look with his own eyes towards the giant, and told him that the dot of light he was seeing was in some way different because of the machines’ activities, he would still be taking it on trust.

He was not a man to take things on trust.

‘Well, Thorn?’ Vuilleumier said, helping him out of the suit. I take it you’ve seen enough now to know we aren’t lying? The sooner we get you back to Resurgam, the sooner we can move ahead with the exodus. Time’s precious, as we said.‘

He nodded at the small dangerous-looking woman with the smoke-coloured eyes. ‘You’re right. You’ve shown me a lot, I admit. Enough for me to be sure you aren’t lying about all of it.’

‘Well, then.’

‘But that’s not good enough.’

‘No?’

‘You’re asking me to risk too much to take any of it on trust, Inquisitor.’

There was steel in her voice when she answered. ‘You saw your dossier, Thorn. There’s enough there to send you to the Amarantin.’

I don’t doubt it. I’ll give you more, if you want. It doesn’t change a thing. I’m not going to lead the people into anything that looks like a government trap.‘

‘You still think this is a conspiracy?’ Irina asked, ending her remark with an odd clucking noise.

I can’t discount it, and that’s all that matters.‘

‘But we showed you what the Inhibitors are doing.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘What you showed me was some data in a projection device. I still have no objective evidence that the machines are real.’

Vuilleumier looked at him imploringly. ‘Dear God, Thorn. How much more have we got to show you?’

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Enough that I can believe it completely. How you do that is entirely your problem.’

‘There isn’t time for this, Thorn.’

He wondered, then. She said it with such urgency that it almost cut through his doubts. He could hear the fear in her voice.

Whatever else was going on, she was truly scared about something…

Thorn looked back towards the hangar bay. ‘Could one of those ships get us closer to the giant?’

The Dawn War had been about metal.

Almost all the heavy elements in the observable universe had been brewed in the cores of stars. The Big Bang itself had made little except hydrogen, helium and lithium, but each successive generation of stars had enriched the palette of elements available to the cosmos. Massive suns assembled the elements lighter than iron in delicately balanced fusion reactions, block by block, cascading through increasingly desperate reactions as lighter elements were depleted. But once stars started burning silicon, the end was in sight. The end-stage of silicon fusion was a shell of iron imprisoning the star’s core, but iron itself could not be fused. Barely a day after the onset of silicon fusion, the star would become catastrophically and suddenly unstable, collapsing under its own gravity. Rebounding Shockwaves from the collapse would lip: the star’s carcass into space, outshining all other stars in the galaxy. The supernova itself would create new elements, pumping cobalt, nickel, iron and a stew of radioactive decay products back into the tenuous clouds of gas that lay between all stars. It was this interstellar medium that would provide the raw material for the next generation of stars and worlds. Nearby, a clump of gas that had until then been stable against collapse would ripple with the Shockwave of the supernova, forming knots and whorls of enhanced density. The clump, which had already been metal-enriched by earlier supernovae, would begin to collapse under its own ghostly gravity. It would form hot, dense stellar nurseries, birthing places of eager young stars. Some were cool dwarves that would consume their star fuel so slowly that they would outlast the galaxy itself. But others were faster burners, supermassive suns that lived and died in a galactic eyeblink. In their death throes they strewed more metals into the vacuum and triggered yet more cycles of stellar birth.

The process continued, until the dawn of life itself. Hot blasts of dying stars peppered the galaxy, and with each blast the raw materials for world-building — and life itself — became more abundant. But the steady enrichment of metals did not happen uniformly across the disc of the galaxy. In the outlying regions of the galaxy, the cycles of stardeath and starbirth happened on a much slower timescale than in the frantic core zones.

So it was that the first stars to host rocky worlds formed closer to the core, where the metals reached the critical level first It was from the core zones, within a thousand kiloparsecs of the galactic centre itself, that the first starfaring cultures emerged. They looked out into the galactic wilderness, flung envoys across thousands of light-years and imagined themselves alone and unique and somehow privileged. It was a time both of sadness and chilling cosmic potential. They imagined themselves to be lords of creation.

But nothing in the galaxy was that straightforward. Not only were there other cultures emerging at more or less the same galactic epoch, in the same band of habitable stars, but there were also pockets of higher metallicity out in the cold zone: statistical fluctuations which allowed machine-building life to emerge where it ought not to have been possible. There were to be no all-encompassing galactic dominions, for none of these nascent cultures managed to spread across the galaxy before encountering the expansion wave of another rival. It had all happened with blinding speed once the initial conditions were correct.

And yet the initial conditions were themselves changing. The great stellar furnaces had not fallen quiet. Several times a century, heavy stars died as supernovae, outshining all others. Usually they did so behind sooty veils of dust, and their deaths went unrecorded save for a chirp of neutrinos or a seismic tremor of gravitational waves. But the metals that they made still found their way into the interstellar medium. New suns and worlds were still coalescing out of the clouds that had been enriched by each previous stellar cycle. This ceaseless cosmic industry rumbled on, oblivious to the intelligence that it had allowed to flourish.

But near the core the metallicity was becoming higher than optimum. The new worlds that were forming around new suns were very heavy indeed, their cores laden with heavy elements. Their gravitational fields were stronger and their chemistries more volatile than those of existing worlds. Plate tectonics no longer functioned, since their mantles could no longer support the burden of rigid floating crusts. Without tectonics, topography — and hence changes in elevation — became less pronounced. Comets were tugged into collisions with these worlds, drenching them with water. Vast world-engulfing oceans slumbered beneath oppressive skies. Complex life rarely evolved on these worlds, since there were few suitable niches and little climatic variation. And those cultures that had already achieved starflight found these new core worlds lacking in usefulness or variety. When a pocket of the right metallicity threatened to condense down into a solar system with the prospect of being desirable, the elder cultures often squabbled over property rights. The ensuing catfights were the most awesome displays of energy that the galaxy had seen beyond its own blind processes of stellar evolution. But they were nothing compared with what was to come.

So, avoiding conflict where they could, the elder cultures turned outwards. But even then they were thwarted. In half a billion years the zone of optimum habitability had crept a little further from the galactic core. The lifewave was a single ripple, spreading out from the centre to the galaxy’s edge. Sites of stellar formation that had previously been too metal-poor to form viable solar systems were now sufficiently enriched. Again, squabbles broke out. Some of them lasted ten million years, leaving scars on the galaxy that took another fifty million to heal over.

And still these were nothing compared with the coming Dawn War.

For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars. There were no stable niches in the galactic disc. On the kind of timescale that mattered to galactic supercultures, the environment was constantly changing. The wheel of galactic history forced them into eternal conflict with other cultures, new and old.

And so the war to end wars had come, the war that ended the first phase of galactic history, and the one that would yet come to be known as the Dawn War, because it had happened so far in the past.

The Inhibitors remembered little of the war itself. Their own history had been chaotic, muddled and almost certainly subject to crude retroactive tampering. They could not be sure what was documented fact and what was a fiction some earlier incarnation of themselves had manufactured for the purposes of cross-species propaganda. It was probable that they had once been organic, spined, warm-blooded land-dwellers with bicameral minds. The faint shadow of that possible past could be discerned in their cybernetic architectures.

For a long time they had clung to the organic. But at some point their machine selves had become dominant, sloughing their old forms. As machine intelligences, they roamed the galaxy. The memory of planetary dwelling became dim, and then was erased entirely, no more relevant than the memory of tree dwelling.

All that mattered was the great work.

In her quarters, after she had made certain that Remontoire and Felka were aware that the mission’s objective had been achieved, Skade had the armour return her head to the pedestal. She found that her thoughts took on a different texture when she was sessile. It was something to do with the slight differences between the blood recirculation systems, the subtle flavouring of neurochemicals. On the pedestal she felt calm and inwardly focused, open to the presence that she always carried with her.

[Skade?] The Night Council’s voice was tiny, almost childlike, but utterly unignorable. She had come to know it well.

Yes.

[You feel that you have been successful, Skade?]

Yes.

[Tell us, Skade.]

Clavain is dead. Our missiles reached him. The kill still has to be confirmed… but I’m certain of it.

[Did he die well, in the Roman sense?]

He didn’t surrender. He kept running all the while, even though he must have known he’d never get far enough away with his engines damaged.

[We didn’t think he would ever surrender, Skade. Still, it was quick for him. You’ve done well, Skade. We are satisfied. More than satisfied.]

Skade wanted to nod, but the pedestal prevented it. Thank you.

The Night Council allowed her time to gather her thoughts. It was always mindful of her, always patient with her. On more than one occasion the voice had told Skade that it valued her as highly as it valued any of the elite few, perhaps more so. The relationship, in so far as Skade appreciated it, was like that between a teacher and a gifted, keenly inquisitive pupil.

Skade did not often ask herself where the voice came from or what precisely it represented. The Night Council had warned her not to dwell on such matters, for fear that her thoughts might be intercepted by others.

Skade found herself recalling the occasion on which the Night Council had first made itself known to her and revealed something of its nature.

[We are a select core of Conjoiners,] it had told her, [a Closed Council so secret, so hyper-secure, that our existence is not known, or even suspected, by the most senior orthodox Council members. We are deeper than the Inner Sanctum, though the Sanctum is at times our unwitting client, our puppet in wider Conjoiner affairs. But we do not lie within it. Our relationship to these other bodies can only be expressed in the mathematical language of intersecting sets. The details need not concern you, Skade.]

The voice had gone on to tell her that she had been singled out. She had performed excellently in the most dangerous of recent Conjoiner operations, a covert mission deep into Chasm City to recover key elements vital to the inertia-suppression technology programme. No one else had made it out alive except Skade.

[You did well. Our collective eye had been on you for some time, Skade, but that was your chance to shine. It did not escape our attention. That is why we have made ourselves known to you now: because you are the kind of Conjoiner capable of the difficult work that lies ahead. This is not flattery, Skade, but a cold statement of the facts.]

It was true that she had been the only survivor of the Chasm City operation. The precise details of that job had necessarily been scrubbed from her memory, but she knew that it had been an exquisitely dangerous high-risk venture that had not played out according to Closed Council plans.

There was a paradox in Conjoiner operations. Those troops who could be deployed along battle lines, within Contested Volumes, could never be allowed to hold sensitive information in their heads. But deep insertions, covert forays into enemy space, were a different matter. They were highly delicate operations that drew on expert Conjoiners. More than that, they required the use of agents who had been psychologically primed to tolerate isolation from their fellows. Those individuals who could work alone, far behind enemy lines, were rare indeed, and regarded with ambivalence by the others. Clavain was one.

Skade was another.

When she had returned to the Mother Nest, the voice had entered her skull for the first time. It had told her that she must speak of the matter to no one.

[We value our secrecy, Skade. We will protect it at all costs. Serve us, and you will be serving the greater good of the Mother Nest. But betray us, even involuntarily, and we will be forced to silence you. It will not amuse us, but it will be done.]

Am I the first?

[No, Skade. There are others like you. But you will never know who they are. That is our will.]

What do you want of me?

[Nothing, Skade. For now. But you will hear from us when we have need of you.]

And so it had been. Over the months, and then years, that followed she had come to assume that the voice had been illusory, no matter how real it had seemed at the time. But the Night Council had returned, in a quiet moment, and its guidance had begun. The voice did not ask much of her at first: action by omission, mostly. Skade’s promotion into the Closed Council appeared to have been won through her own efforts, not the intervention of the voice. Later, the same could be said of her admission into the Inner Sanctum.

She often wondered who exactly made up the Night Council. Amongst the faces she saw in Closed Council sessions, and in the wider Mother Nest, it was certain that some belonged to the officially nonexistent Council which the voice represented. But there was never a hint, not even a glance that appeared out of place. In the wash of their thoughts there was never a suspicious note; never a sense that the voice was speaking to her through other channels. And she did her best not to think about the voice when she was not in its presence. At other times she merely did its bidding, refusing to examine the source of her compulsion. It felt good to serve something higher than herself.

By turns, Skade’s influence reached further and further. The Exordium programme had already been re-opened by the time Skade became one of the Conjoined, but she was instructed to manoeuvre herself into a position where she could dominate the programme, make maximum use of its discoveries and determine its future direction. As she ascended through layers of secrecy, Skade became aware of just how vital had been the technological items she had harvested from Chasm City. The Inner Sanctum had already made faltering attempts to construct inertia-suppressing machinery, but with the items from Chasm City — and still Skade did not remember exactly what had happened during that mission — the pieces fell into place with beguiling ease. Perhaps it was the case that there were other individuals serving the voice, as the voice itself had suggested, or perhaps it was simply that Skade was herself a skilled and ruthless organiser. The Closed Council was her shadow theatre. Its players moved to her will with contemptible eagerness.

And still the voice had urged her on. It drew her attention to the signal from the Resurgam system, to the diagnostic pulse that indicated that the remaining hell-class weapons had been re-armed.

[The Mother Nest needs those weapons, Skade. You must expedite their recovery.]

Why?

The voice had crafted images in her skull: a swarm of implacable black machines, dark and heavy and busy like a flutter of ravens’ wings. [There are enemies between the stars, Skade, worse than anything we have imagined. They are coming closer. We must protect ourselves.]

How do you know?

[We know, Skade. Trust us.]

She had felt something in that childlike voice that she had not sensed until then. It was pain, or torment, or both.

[Trust us. We know what they can do. We know what it is like to be harried by them.]

And then the voice had fallen silent again, as if it had said too much.

Now the voice pushed a new, nagging thought into her head, pulling her out of her reverie. [When can we be certain that he is dead, Skade?]

Ten, eleven hours. We’ll sweep through the kill zone and sift the interplanetary medium for an enhancement in trace elements, the kind we’d expect to find in this situation. And even if the evidence is not conclusive, we can be confident…

The response was brusque, petulant. [No, Skade. Clavain cannot be allowed to reach Chasm City.]

I’ve killed him, I swear.

[You are clever, Skade, and determined. But so is Clavain. He tricked you once. He can always trick you again.]

It doesn’t matter.

[No?]

If Clavain reaches Yellowstone, the information he has still won’t be of any ultimate benefit to the enemy or the Convention. They can attempt to recover the hell-class weapons for themselves, if they wish. But we have Exordium and the inertia-suppression machinery. They give us an edge. Clavain, and whatever bunch of allies he manages to surround himself with, won’t succeed.

The voice hovered in her head. For a moment she wondered if it had gone, leaving her alone.

She was wrong.

[So you think he might still be alive?]

She fumbled for an answer. I…

[He had better not be, Skade. Or we will be bitterly disappointed with you.]

He was cradling an injured cat, its spine severed somewhere near the lower vertebrae so that its rear legs hung limply. He was trying to persuade it to sip water from the plastic teat of his skinsuit rations pack. His own legs were pinned under tonnes of collapsed masonry. The cat was blind, burned, incontinent and in obvious pain. But he would not give it the easy way out.

He mumbled a sentence, more for his own benefit than the cat’s. ‘You are going to live, my friend. Whether you want to or not.’

The words came out sounding like one sheet of sandpaper being scraped against another. He needed water badly. But there was only a tiny amount left in the rations pack, and it was the cat’s turn.

‘Drink, you little fucker. You’ve come this far…’

‘Let me… die,’ the cat told him.

‘Sorry, puss. Not the way it’s going to happen.’

He felt a breeze. It was the first time he had felt any stirring at all of the air bubble in which the cat and he lay trapped. From somewhere distant he heard the thunderous rumble of collapsing concrete and metal. He hoped to God that the sudden airflow was only caused by a shifting of the air bubble; that perhaps an obstruction had collapsed, linking one bubble to another. He hoped it was not part of the external wall giving way, or else the cat would shortly get its wish. The air bubble would depressurise and they would be left trying to breathe Martian atmosphere. He had heard that dying that way was not at all pleasant, despite what they tried to make you think in the Coalition’s morale-boosting holo-dramas.

‘Clavain… save yourself.’

‘Why, puss?’

‘I die anyway.’

The first time the cat had spoken to him he had assumed that he had begun to hallucinate, imagining a loquacious companion where none actually existed. Then, belatedly, he had realised that the cat really was talking, that the animal was a rich tourist’s bioengineered affectation. A civilian dirigible had been parked on the top of the aerial docking tower when the spiders had hit it with their foam-phase artillery shells. The pet must have escaped from the dirigible gondola long before the attack itself, making its way down to the basement levels of the tower. Clavain thought that bioengineered talking animals were an affront against God, and he was reasonably certain that the cat was not a legally recognised sentient entity. The Coalition for Neural Purity would have had fits if it had known he had dared share his water rations with the forbidden creature. It hated genetic augmentation as much as it hated Galiana’s neural tinkering.

Clavain forced the teat into the cat’s mouth. Some reflex made it gulp down the last few drops of water.

‘We all get it one day, puss.’

‘Not so… soon.’

‘Drink up and stop moaning.’

The cat lapped up the last few drops. ‘Thank… you.’

That was when he felt the breeze again. It was stronger this time, and with it came a more insistent rumble of shifting masonry. In the dim illumination that was afforded by the biochemical thermal/light-stick he had cracked open an hour earlier, he saw dust and debris scud across the ground. The cat’s golden fur rippled like a field of barley. The injured animal tried to raise its head in the direction of the wind. Clavain touched the animal’s head with his hand, doing his best to comfort it. Its eyes were bloody sockets.

The end was coming. He knew it. This was no relocation of air within the ruin; it was a major collapse on the perimeter of the fallen structure. The cell of air was leaking out into the Martian cold.

When he laughed it was like scraping his own throat with razor wire.

‘Something… funny?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Not at all.’

Light speared through the darkness. A wave of pure cold air hit his face and rammed into his lungs.

He stroked the cat’s head again. If this was dying, then it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared.

‘Clavain.’

His name was being spoken calmly and insistently.

‘Clavain. Wake up.’

He opened his eyes, an effort that immediately sapped half the strength he felt he had left. He was somewhere so bright that he wanted to squint, resealing the eyelids that had nearly gummed shut. He wanted to retreat back into his own past, no matter how painful and claustrophobic the dream might be.

‘Clavain. I’m warning you… if you don’t wake up I’m going to…’

He forced his eyes as wide as he could, realising that just before him was a shape that had yet to shift into focus. It was leaning over him. It was the shape that was talking to him.

‘Fuck…’ he heard the woman’s voice say. I think he’s lost his mind or something.‘

Another voice, sonorous, deferential, but just the tiniest bit patronising, said, ‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but it would be unwise to assume anything. Especially if the gentleman in question is a Conjoiner.’

‘Hey, as if I needed reminding.’

‘One merely means to point out that his medical condition may be both complex and deliberate.’

‘Space him now,’ said another male voice.

‘Shut up, Xave.’

Clavain’s vision sharpened. He was bent over double in a small white-walled chamber. There were pumps and gauges set into the walls, along with decals and printed warnings that had been worn nearly away. It was an airlock. He was still wearing his suit, the one he had been wearing, he remembered now, when he had sent the corvette away, and the figure leaning over him was wearing a suit as well. She — for it was the woman — had been the one who had opened his visor and glare shield, allowing light and air to reach him.

He groped in the ruins of his memory for a name. ‘Antoinette?’

‘Got it in one, Clavain.’ She had her visor up as well. All that he could see of her face was a blunt blonde fringe, wide eyes and a freckled nose. She was attached to the wall of the lock by a metal line, and she had one hand on a heavy red lever.

‘You’re younger than I thought,’ he said.

‘Are you all right, Clavain?’

‘I’ve felt better,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be all right in a few moments. I put myself into deep sleep, almost a coma, to conserve my suit’s resources. Just in case you were a little late.’

‘What if I hadn’t arrived at all?’

‘I assumed you would, Antoinette.’

‘You were wrong. I very nearly didn’t come. Isn’t that right, Xave?’

One of the other voices — the third — he had heard earlier answered, ‘You don’t realise how lucky you are, man.’

‘No,’ Clavain said. ‘I probably don’t.’

‘I still say we should space him,’ the third voice repeated.

Antoinette looked over her shoulder, through the window of the inner airlock door. ‘After we came all this way?’

‘It’s not too late. Teach him a lesson about taking things for granted.’

Clavain made to move. ‘I didn’t…’

‘Whoah!’ Antoinette had extended a hand, clearly indicating that it would be very unwise of him to move another muscle. She nodded towards the lever she held in her other hand. ‘Check this out, Clavain. You do one thing that I don’t like — like so much as bat an eyelid — and I pull this lever. Then it’s back into space again, just like Xave said.’

He mulled over his predicament for several seconds. ‘If you weren’t prepared to trust me, at least slightly, you wouldn’t have come out to rescue me.’

‘Maybe I was curious.’

‘Maybe you were. But maybe you also felt I might have been sincere. I saved your life, didn’t I?’

With her free hand she worked the other airlock controls. The inner door slid aside, offering Clavain a brief glimpse into the rest of her ship. He saw another spacesuited figure waiting on the far side, but no sign of anyone else.

‘I’m going now,’ Antoinette said.

In one deft movement she undipped her restraint line, slipped through the open doorway and then made the inner airlock door close again. Clavain stayed still, waiting until her face appeared in the window. She had removed her helmet and was running her fingers through the unruly mop of her hair.

‘Are you going to leave me here?’ he asked.

‘Yes. For now. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I can still space you if you do anything I don’t like.’

Clavain reached up and removed his own helmet, twisting it free. He let it drift away, tumbling across the lock like a small metal moon. ‘I’m not planning on doing anything that might annoy any of you.’

‘That’s good.’

‘But listen to me carefully. You’re in danger just being out here. We need to get out of the war zone as quickly as possible.’

‘Relax, guy,’ the man said. ‘We’ve got time to service some systems. There aren’t any zombies for light-minutes in any direction.’

‘It’s not the Demarchists you need to worry about. I was running from my own people, from the Conjoiners. They have a stealthed ship out here. Not nearby, I grant you, but it can move quickly, it has long-range missiles and I guarantee that it is looking for me.’

Antoinette said, I thought you said you’d faked your death.‘

He nodded. ‘I’m assuming Skade will have taken out my corvette with those same long-range missiles. She’ll have assumed I’m aboard it. But she won’t stop there. If she’s as thorough as I think she is, she’ll sweep the area with Nightshade just to make sure, searching for trace atoms.’

‘Trace atoms? You’re joking. By the time they get to where the blast happened…’ Antoinette shook her head.

Clavain shook his in return. ‘There’ll still be a slightly enhanced density — one or two atoms per cubic metre — of the kind of elements you don’t normally find in interplanetary space. Hull isotopes, that kind of thing. Nightshade’s hull will sample and analyse the medium. The hull is covered with epoxy-coated patches that will snare anything larger than a molecule, and then there are mass spectrometers that will sniff the atomic constituency of the vacuum itself. Algorithms will process the forensic data, comparing the curves and histograms of abundance and isotope ratios against plausible scenarios for the destruction of a vessel of the corvette’s composition. The results won’t be unambiguous, for the statistical errors will be almost as large as the effects Skade’s attempting to measure. But I’ve seen it done before. The pull of the data will be in favour of there having been very little organic matter aboard the corvette.’ Clavain reached up and touched the side of his head, slowly enough that it could not be seen as threatening. ‘And then there are the isotopes in my implants. They’ll be harder to detect, a lot harder, but Skade will expect to find them if she looks hard enough. And when she doesn’t…’

‘She’ll figure out what you did,’ Antoinette said.

Again Clavain nodded. ‘But I took all that into consideration. It will take time for Skade to make a thorough search. You can still make it back into neutral territory, but only if you start home immediately.’

‘You’re really that keen to get to the Rust Belt, Clavain?’ asked Antoinette. ‘They’ll eat you alive, whether it’s the Convention or the zombies.’

‘No one said defecting was a risk-free activity.’

‘You defected once already, right?’ Antoinette asked.

Clavain caught his drifting helmet and secured it to his belt by the helmet’s chin loop. ‘Once. It was a long time ago. Probably a bit before your time.’

‘Like four hundred years before my time?’

He scratched his beard. ‘Warm.’

‘Then it is you. You are him.’

‘Him?’

‘That Clavain. The historical one. The one everyone says has to be dead by now. The Butcher of Tharsis.’

Clavain smiled. ‘For my sins.’