Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 25

Armoured in black, Skade strode through the ship that was now fully hers. For the time being they were safe, having slipped undetected through the last shell of Demarchist perimeter defences. Now there was nothing between Nightshade and its destination except empty light-years.

Skade brushed her steel fingers against the corridor plating, loving the sleek conjunction of artificial things. For a time the ship had carried Clavain’s stench of ownership, and even after he had defected there had been Remontoire to contend with, Clavain’s sympathiser and ally, but now they were both gone, and she could rightfully consider Nightshade her own. She could, if she were minded, change the name to one of her own choosing, or perhaps discard the very idea of naming the ship at all, so resolutely against the grain of Conjoiner thinking. But Skade decided that there was a perverse pleasure to be had in keeping the old name. There would be enjoyment in turning Clavain’s prized weapon against himself, and that enjoyment would be all the sweeter if the weapon still carried the name he had bestowed upon it. It would be a final humiliation, rich reward for all that he had done to her.

Yet, for all that she despised what he had done, she could not deny that she was adjusting to her new state of body in a way that might have alarmed her weeks earlier. Her armour was becoming her. She admired her form in the gleam of bulkheads and portals. The initial clumsiness was gone now, and in the privacy of her quarters she spent long hours amusing herself with astonishing tricks of strength, dexterity and prestidigitation. The armour was learning to anticipate her movements, freeing itself from any need to wait for signals to crawl up and down her spine. Skade played lightning-fast one-handed fugues on a holoclavier, her gauntleted fingers becoming a blur of metal as quick and lethal as threshing machinery. Toccata in D, by someone called Bach, collapsed under her mastery. It became a rapid blast of sound like Gatling-gun fire, requiring neural post-processing to separate it into anything resembling ‘music’.

It was all a distraction, of course. Skade might have slipped through the Demarchists’ final line of defences, but in the last three days she had become aware that her difficulties were not entirely at an end. There was something following her, coming out of the Yellowstone system on a very similar trajectory.

It was time, Skade decided, to share this news with Felka.

Nightshade was silent. Skade’s footsteps were all she heard as she made her way down to the sleep bay. They rang hard and regular as hammers in a foundry. The ship was accelerating at two gees, the inertia-suppressing machinery running smooth and quiet, but walking for Skade was effortless.

Skade had frozen Felka shortly after news reached Skade of her most recent failure. At that point it had become clear, following scrutiny of news items around Yellowstone, that Clavain had eluded her again; that Remontoire and the pig had not succeeded in capturing him but had themselves fallen victim to local bandits. It would have been attractive at that point to assume that Clavain himself was dead, but she had made that mistake before and was not about to fall into the same error again. That was precisely why she had kept Felka back, as leverage to be used in any future negotiations with Clavain. She knew what he thought about Felka.

It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter.

Skade had intended to return to the Mother Nest on completion of the mission, but the failure to kill Clavain forced her to reconsider. Nightshade was capable of continuing into interstellar space, and any minor technical issues could be dealt with on the way to Delta Pavonis. The Master of Works did not need her direct supervision to finish building the evacuation fleet either. Once the fleet was flight-ready and equipped with inertia-suppressing machinery, part of it would follow Skade towards the Resurgam system, while the rest would set off in a different direction, loaded with sleeping evacuees. A single crustbuster warhead would finish off the Mother Nest.

Skade would attempt to recover the weapons. If she failed on her first attempt, she would have only to wait for her backup fleet to arrive. Those were much larger starships and they could carry larger armaments than Nightshade, up to heavy relativistic railguns. Once she had obtained possession of the lost weapons, she would rendezvous with the rest of the evac fleet in a different system, in the opposite half of the sky from Delta Pavonis, as far away from the Inhibitor encroachment as they could get.

Then they would set off into even deeper space, many dozens, perhaps even hundreds of light-years into the galactic plane. It was time to say goodbye to local solar space. None of them were very likely to see it again.

The constellations will shift, Skade thought; not just by a few small degrees, but enough to wrench them out of shape. For the first time in history they would live under truly alien skies, uncomforted by the mythic shapes of their childhood, those chance alignments of stars which human consciousness had imprinted with meaning. And at the same time they would know those skies to be cruel, as infested with monsters as any enchanted forest.

She felt her weight shift, as if she had been on a sea vessel in a sudden squall. Skade steadied herself against the wall and established a link to Jastrusiak and Molenka, her two inertia-suppression systems experts.

Something up?

Molenka, the female of the two, responded to Skade’s query. [Nothing, Skade. Just a small bubble instability. Nothing unexpected.]

I want to know if anything untoward happens, Molenka. We may need much more out of this equipment, and I want to have absolute confidence in it.

Now it was Jastrusiak’s turn. [We have everything under control, Skade. The machinery is in a perfectly stable state-two condition. Small instabilities are damped back to the mean.]

Good. But try to keep those instabilities in check, will you?

Skade was about to add that they terrified her, but thought better of it. She must not reveal her fears to the others, not when so much depended on them accepting her leadership. It was difficult enough to make members of a hive mind submit to her will, and the one thing that would have undermined her control would have been the faintest hint of doubt in her own abilities.

There were no more irregularities in the field. Satisfied, Skade continued her journey to the sleeper bay.

Only two of the reefersleep caskets were occupied. Skade had instigated Felka’s wake-up cycle six hours earlier. Now the nearer of the two caskets was easing open, exposing Felka’s unconscious form. Skade softened her approach to the casket, crouching down on her metal haunches until she was level with Felka. The casket’s diagnostic aura told her that Felka was merely sleeping now, in a mild REM state. Skade observed the tremble of her eyelids and placed a steel hand on to Felka’s forearm. She squeezed gently, and Felka moaned and shifted.

Felka. Felka. Wake up now.

Felka came around slowly. Skade waited patiently, doting on Felka with something close to affection.

Felka. Understand me. You are coming out of reefersleep. You have been frozen for six weeks. You will feel discomfort and disorientation, but it will fade. You have nothing to fear.

Felka opened her eyes to a pained squint, affronted even by the dim blue lighting of the sleep bay. She moaned again and tried to get out of the casket, but the effort was too much for her, especially under two gees.

Easy.

Felka mumbled and slurred a series of sounds, over and over, until they formed recognisable words. ‘Where am I?’

Aboard Nightshade. You remember, don’t you? We went after Clavain, into the inner system.

‘Clavain…’ She said nothing more for ten or fifteen seconds, before adding, ‘Dead?’

I don’t think so, no.

Felka succeeded in opening her eyes a little wider. Tell me… what happened.‘

Clavain fooled us with the corvette. He made it to the Rust Belt. You remember that much, I think. Remontoire and Scorpio went in after him. No one else could go — they were the only ones who stood a chance of moving covertly through Yellowstone space. I wouldn’t let you go, for obvious reasons. Clavain cares about you, Felka, and that makes you valuable to me.

‘Hostage?’

No, of course not. Merely one of us. Clavain is the lamb that has left the fold, not you. Clavain is the one we want back, Felka. Clavain is the prodigal son.

They went to Nightshade’s flight deck. Felka sipped a chocolate-flavoured broth laced with restorative medichines.

‘Where are we?’ she asked.

Skade showed Felka a display of the rear starfield, with one dim yellow-red star outlined in green. That was Epsilon Eridani, two hundred times fainter than it had been even from the remote vantage point of the Mother Nest. It was now ten million times fainter than the sun that burned in Yellowstone’s sky. They were truly in interstellar space now, for the first time in Skade’s life.

Six weeks out from Yellowstone, over thirteen hundred AU. We’ve been maintaining two gees for most of that time, which means that we’ve already reached one-quarter light-speed. A conventional ship would be struggling to reach an eighth of the speed of light by now, Felka. But we can do better than this if we have to.

Which was true, Skade knew, but there would be little practical advantage in accelerating harder. Relativity ensured that. Arbitrarily high acceleration would compress the subjective duration of their journey to Resurgam, but it would make almost no difference to the objective time that the journey consumed. And it was that objective time which was the only relevant factor in the wider picture: it would still take the same amount of time to reach Resurgam as measured by external observers, and more decades still to rendezvous with the other elements of the exodus fleet.

Still, there were other reasons to consider an increase in acceleration. And at the back of Skade’s mind was a dangerous and alluring possibility that would change the rules entirely.

‘And the other ship?’ Felka asked. ‘Where is that?’

Skade had already told her about the vessel behind them. Now a second circle bisected by two cross hairs appeared on the display almost exactly centred above the one that demarked Epsilon Eridani.

That’s it. It’s very faint, but there’s a clear tau-neutrino source there, and it’s moving on the same course as us.

‘But a long way behind,’ Felka said.

Yes. Three or four weeks behind us, easily.

‘It could be a commercial ship, Ultras or something, on a similar heading.’

Skade nodded. I’ve considered that possibility, but I don’t find it likely. Resurgam isn’t a very popular destination for Ultras, and if that ship were headed for another colony in the same part of the sky, we’d have seen lateral motion by now. We haven’t — she’s dead on our tail, Felka.

‘A stern chase.’

Yes, deliberately following us. They have a modest tactical advantage, you see. Our flame points towards them; theirs points away from us. I can track them because we have military-grade neutrino detectors, but it is still difficult. But they need no finesse to spot us. I have separated our thrust beams into four components and given them a small angular offset, but they need only detect a tiny amount of leaked radiation to fix our position. We are neutrino-quiet, however, and that will give us a definitive advantage after turnover, when we have to point our flame towards Resurgam. But it won’t come to that. That ship can’t ever catch us, no matter how hard it tries.

The ship should be falling behind already,‘ Felka said. ’Is it?‘

No. So far she has maintained two gees all the way out from the Rust Belt.

I didn’t think normal ships could accelerate that hard.‘

They can’t, not usually. But there are methods, Felka. Do you know the story of Irravel Veda?

‘Of course,’ Felka said.

When she was pursuing Run Seven she modified her own ship to manage two gees. But she did it the crude way — not by improving the efficacy of her Conjoiner drives, but by stripping her ship down to a skeleton. She left all her passengers behind on a comet to save mass.

‘And you think that other ship must be doing something similar?’

There’s no other explanation. But it won’t help them. Even at two gees they cannot close the gap between us, and the gap will widen if we increase our inertia-suppression effect. They cannot match three gees, Felka; there is only so much mass you can strip out of a ship before you haven’t got a ship at all. They must be very near the limit already.

‘It must be Clavain,’ she said.

You seem very certain.

‘I never thought he’d give up, Skade. It just isn’t his style. He wants those weapons very badly, and he isn’t going to let you get your cold steel hands on them without a fight.’

Skade wanted to shrug, but her armour would not allow it. Then it confirms what I have always suspected, Felka. Clavain is not a rationalist. He is a man fond of gestures, no matter how futile or stupid they might be. This is merely his grandest and most hopeless gesture to date.

Clavain ran into the first of Skade’s traps eight hundred AU from Yellowstone, one hundred light-hours into the crossing. Clavain had been expecting her to try something; he would, in fact, have been disappointed and a little alarmed had she not. But Skade had not let him down.

Nightshade had sown mines behind it. Over a period of weeks, Skade had dropped them from her ship’s stern: small, automated, highly autonomous drones stealthed for maximum invisibility against Clavain’s forward-looking sensors. The drones were small enough that Skade could afford to manufacture and deploy them by the hundreds, littering Clavain’s forward path with hidden obstacles.

The drones did not have to be very clever or have great range. Skade could be quite certain of the trajectory that Clavain would be obliged to follow, just as he could be quite certain of hers. Even a small deviation away from the direct line between Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis would cost Clavain precious weeks, further delaying his arrival. He was already lagging behind, and would not wish to incur any further hold-ups if he could help it. So Skade would have known that Clavain would remain on the same heading except for short-term deviations.

That still meant she had a lot of space to cover. Explosions were not an efficient means of inflicting harm on space vessels at anything other than extreme close range, since vacuum did not propagate shock waves. Skade would know that the odds of one of her mines coming within a thousand kilometres of Clavain’s ship were so small as to be negligible, so there would be no point putting crustbuster-class warheads in them. Clavain expected, instead, that the mines would be designed to identify and fire at his ship across a typical range of light-seconds. They would be single-use launchers, particle beams, very probably. It was exactly what he would have done if he were being chased by a similar ship.

But Skade had used crustbusters. She had inserted them, so far as Clavain could judge, into every twentieth mine, with a statistical bias towards the edge of her swarm. The warheads were primed to detonate as soon as he came within one light-hour of them, as near as he could tell. There would be a distant prick of hard blue light, shading into violet, red-shifted from Clavain’s rest frame by a few hundred kilometres per second. And then, hours or tens of hours later, another would detonate, sometimes two or three in close succession, stammering out of the night like a cascade of fireworks. Some were closer than others, but they were all much too distant to do any harm to Clavain’s ship. Clavain ran a regression analysis on the spread pattern and concluded that Skade’s bombs had only a one in one thousand chance of damaging his ship. The chances of a destructive strike were a factor of one hundred less favourable. Clearly, they were not meant for that purpose.

Skade, he realised, was using the crustbusters purely to increase the targeting accuracy of her other weapons, flooding Clavain’s ship with strobelike flashes which nailed its instantaneous position and velocity. Her other mines would be sniffing space for the backscatter of reflected photons from his own hull. It was a way of compensating for the fact that Skade’s mines were too small to carry neutrino detectors, and were therefore reliant on outdated positional estimates transmitted back from Nightshade, many light-hours further into interstellar space. The crustbusters smoked Clavain’s ship out of darkness, allowing Skade’s directed-energy weapons to latch on to it. Clavain did not see the beams of those weapons, only the flash of their triggering explosions. The yields were about one hundredth of a crustbuster burst, which was sufficient to power a particle beam or graser with a five-light-second extreme kill range. If the beam missed him, he never saw it at all. In interstellar space there were so few ambient dust grains that even a beam passing within kilometres of Clavain’s ship would suffer insufficient scattering to reveal itself. Clavain was a blind and deaf man stumbling across no man’s land, oblivious to the bullets zipping past him, not even feeling the wind of their passage.

The irony was, he probably wouldn’t even know it if a beam hit.

Clavain evolved a strategy that he hoped might work. If Skade’s weapons were firing across typical distances of five light-seconds, they were dependent on positional estimates that were at least ten seconds out of date, and probably more like thirty seconds. The targeting algorithms would be extrapolating his course, bracketing his likely future position with a spread of less likely estimates. But thirty seconds gave Clavain enough of an edge to make that strategy enormously inefficient for Skade. In thirty seconds, under a steady two gees of thrust, a ship changed its relative position by nine kilometres, more than twice its hull length. Yet if Clavain stuttered the thrust randomly, Skade would not know for sure where in that nine-kilometre box to direct her weapons. She would have to assign more resources to obtain the same probability of a kill. It was a numbers game, not a guaranteed method of avoiding being killed, but Clavain had been a soldier long enough to know that this was, ultimately, what most combat situations boiled down to.

It appeared to work. A week passed, and then another, and then the smaller bursts of the particle beams ceased. There remained only the occasional, much more distant flash of a crustbuster. She was keeping her eye on him, but for now she had abandoned the idea of taking him out with anything as simple as a particle beam.

Clavain remained watchful and nervous. He knew Skade.

She wouldn’t give up that easily.

He was right. Two months later a fifth of the army were dead, with many more injured and likely to die in the weeks ahead. The first hint of trouble had been innocuous indeed: a tiny change in the pattern of light that they were detecting from Nightshade. It seemed impossible that such a trifling change could have any impact on their own ship, but Clavain knew that Skade would do nothing without excellent reason. So once the change had been verified and shown to be deliberate, he assembled his senior crew on the bridge of the stolen lighthugger.

The ship — Scorpio had named her Zodiacal Light, for obscure reasons of his own — was a typical trade lighthugger, manufactured more than two hundred years earlier. The ship had been through several cycles of repair and redesign in the intervening time, but the core of the vessel remained mostly unchanged. At four kilometres long the lighthugger was much larger than Nightshade, her hull voided by cavernous cargo bays large enough to swallow a flotilla of medium-sized spacecraft. The hull itself was approximately conic, tapering to a needle-sharp prow in the direction of flight, with a blunter tail to stern. Two interstellar drives were attached to the hull via flanged spars flung out from the cone’s widest point. The drives were barnacled with two centuries’ worth of later accretions, but the basic shape of Conjoiner technology was evident beneath the growth layers. The rest of the hull had the dark smoothness of wet marble, except for the prow, which was cased in a matrix of ablative ice sewn through with hyperdiamond filaments. As H had said, the ship itself was essentially sound; it was the former crew’s business methods that had made them insolvent. The army of pigs, trained not to harm anything irreplaceable, had succeeded in minimising damage during the capture itself.

The bridge was a third of the way back from the prow, one point three five kilometres of vertical distance when the ship was accelerating. Most of the technology in it — indeed, most of the technology aboard the ship — was ancient, both in feel and function. Nothing about that surprised Clavain: Ultras were notoriously conservative, and it was precisely because they hadn’t adopted nano-technologies to any great degree that they continued to play a role in these post-plague days. There were general-purpose manufactories in the belly of the ship, now running full-time on weapons production, with no capacity to be spared to upgrade the fabric and infrastructure of Zodiacal Light. It had not taken Clavain very long to settle into the museumlike ambience of the huge old ship; he knew such robustness would serve them well in any battle against Triumvir Volyova.

The bridge itself was a spherical chamber within a gimballed arrangement that permitted it to swivel according to whether the ship was under thrust or rotating. The walls were quilted with projection systems, showing exterior views of the ship captured by drones, tactical representations of the immediate volume of space and simulations of various approach strategies for the arrival in the Resurgam system. Other parts of the walls were filled with scrolling text in old-fashioned Norte script, a steady litany of shipboard faults and the automatic systems that were triggered to fix them.

A railinged, circular dais made of grilled red metal held seats, display and control systems. The dais could accommodate about twenty people before it became uncomfortable; Clavain judged that it was somewhere near its maximum capacity right now. Scorpio was there, of course, with Lasher, Shadow, Blood and Cruz: three of his pig deputies and a one-eyed human woman from the same criminal underworld. Antoinette Bax and Xavier Liu, filthy from hastily abandoned repairwork, sat near the back, and the rest of the dais was taken up by a broad mixture of pigs and baseline humans, many of who had come directly from the Chateau’s employment. They were experts in the technology H had pieced together and, like Scorpio and his associates, had been convinced that they were better off joining Clavain’s expedition than staying behind in Chasm City or the Rust Belt. Even Pauline Sukhoi was there, ready to return to the work that had wrenched askew her personal reality. To Clavain she looked like a woman who had just stumbled out of a haunted house.

There’s been a development,‘ Clavain said when he had their attention. ’I don’t quite know what to make of it.‘

A cylindrical display tank, an antique imaging system, sat in the middle of the dais. The interior of the tank contained a single transparent blade of helical profile that could be rotated at great speed. Coloured lasers buried in the base of the tank pulsed beams of light upwards, where they were intercepted by the moving surface of the blade.

A perfectly flat square of light appeared in the tank, rotating slowly to bring itself into view of all those on the bridge. This is a two-dimensional image of the sky ahead of us,‘ Clavain said. ’Already there are strong relativistic effects: the stars shifted out of their usual positions, and their spectra shifted into the blue. Hot stars appear dimmer, since they were already emitting most of their flux in the UV. Dwarf stars pop out of nowhere, since we’re suddenly seeing IR flux that used to be invisible. But it isn’t the stars I’m interested in today.‘ He pointed to the middle of the square, to one dim, starlike object. This thing here, which looks like a star as well, is the exhaust signature from Skade’s lighthugger. She’s done her best to make her drive invisible, but we’re still seeing enough stray photons from Nightshade to maintain a fix.’

‘Can you estimate her thrust output?’ Sukhoi asked.

Clavain nodded. ‘Yes. The temperature of her flame says she’s running her drive at nominal thrust — that would give her a gee of acceleration, for a typical million-tonne ship. Nightshade’s engines are smaller, but she’s also a small ship by lighthugger standards. It shouldn’t make that much difference, yet she’s managing two gees, and she’s occasionally pushed it to three. Like us, she has inertia-suppressing machinery. But I know she can push it much harder than this.’

‘We can’t,’ Sukhoi said, turning paler than ever. ‘Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick.’

Clavain smiled patiently. ‘Point taken, Pauline. But whatever Skade manages, we must find a way to do as well. That isn’t what’s troubling me, though. It’s this.’ The wheeling images changed almost imperceptibly. Skade’s signature became slightly brighter.

‘She’s thrusting harder, or she’s changed her beam geometry,’ Antoinette said.

‘No, that’s what I thought, but the additional light is different. It’s coherent, peaked sharply in the optical in Skade’s rest frame.’

‘Laser light?’ Lasher asked.

Clavain looked at the pig, Scorpio’s most trusted ally. ‘So it would seem. High-power optical lasers, probably a battery of them, shining back along her line of flight. We’re probably not seeing all the flux, either, just a fraction of it.’

‘What good will that do her?’ Lasher said. He had a black scar on his face, slashed like a pencil line from brow to cheek. ‘She’s much too far ahead of us for that to make any sense as a weapon.’

‘I know,’ Clavain said. ‘And that’s what worries me. Because Skade won’t do anything unless there’s a good reason for it.’

‘This is an attempt to kill us?’ the pig asked.

‘We just have to figure out how she hopes to succeed,’ Clavain replied. ‘And then hope to hell that we can do something about it.’

Nobody said anything. They stared at the slowly wheeling square of light, with the malign little star of Nightshade burning at its heart.

The government spokesman was a small, neat man with fastidiously well-maintained fingernails. He despised dirt or contamination of any sort, and when the prepared statement was handed to him — a folded piece of synthetic grey government vellum — he took it between his thumb and forefinger only, achieving the minimum possible contact between skin and paper. Only when he was seated at his desk in Broadcasting House, one of the squat buildings adjoining Inquisition House, did he contemplate opening the statement, and then only when he had satisfied himself that there were no crumbs or grease spots on the table itself. He placed the paper on the desk, geometrically aligned with the table’s edges, and then levered it open along its fold, slowly and evenly, in the manner of someone opening a box that might possibly contain a bomb. He employed his sleeve to encourage the paper to lie flat on the surface, stroking it across the text diagonally. Only when this process was complete did he lower his eyes and begin scanning the text for meaning, and then only so that he would be certain of making no mistakes when delivering it.

On the other side of the desk, the operator aimed the camera at him. The camera was a cantilevered boom with an old float-cam attached to the end of it. The float-cam’s optical system still worked perfectly, but its levitation motors were long expired. Like many things in Cuvier, it was a taunting reminder of how much better things had been in the past. But the spokesman put such thoughts from his mind. It was not his duty to reflect on the present standard of living, and — if truth be told — he lived a comfortable enough existence by comparison with the majority. He had a surplus of food rations and he and his wife lived in a larger than average domicile in one of the better quarters of Cuvier.

‘Ready, sir?’ asked the camera operator.

He did not answer immediately, but scanned once more through the prepared text, his lips moving softly as he familiarised himself with the wording. He had no idea where the piece had originated, who had drafted and refined it or puzzled over the precise language. It was not his business to worry about such matters. He knew only that the machinery of government had functioned, as it always did, and that great, solid, well-oiled apparatus had delivered the text into his hands, for him to deliver to the people. He read the piece once more, and then looked up at the operator.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I believe we are ready now.’

‘We can run through it again if you’re not happy with the first reading. This isn’t going out live.’

‘I believe one take should suffice.’

‘Right you are, then…’

The spokesman cleared his throat, feeling a spasm of inner revulsion at the thought of the phlegm being dislodged and resettled by that particular bodily action. He began to read.

‘The Democratic Government of Cuvier wishes to make the following statement. One week ago the fugitive known as Thorn was successfully apprehended following a combined operation involving Inquisition House and the Bureau of Counter-Terrorism. Thorn is now in custody and no longer poses a threat to the law-abiding citizens of Cuvier or its satellite communities. Once again, the Democratic Government of Cuvier refutes in the strongest possible terms those irresponsible rumours that have been circulated by misguided sympathisers of the fugitive Thorn. There is no evidence that the colony itself is in imminent danger of destruction. There is no evidence for the existence of a pair of intact shuttles with surface-to-orbit capability. There is no evidence that covert evacuation camps have already been established, nor is there evidence that there have already been mass migrations from any of the major population centres towards these fictitious camps. There is, furthermore, absolutely no evidence that the Triumvir’s starship has been located, and no evidence that it is capable of evacuating the entire populace of Resurgam.’

The spokesman paused, re-establishing eye contact with the camera. ‘Only twenty-six hours ago, Thorn himself publicly criticised his own complicity in the spreading of these rumours. He has denounced those who have assisted in the spreading of these malicious untruths, and has sought the government’s forgiveness for any inconvenience that may have been caused by his participation in these acts.’

The spokesman’s face betrayed not a hint of inner dissonance as he read these words. It was true that on his first scan through the text he had racked his own memory at that part and failed to come up with any recollection of Thorn making any kind of public statement, let alone a public criticism of his own activities. But such things were not unknown, and it was entirely possible that he had missed the appearance in question.

He soldiered on, changing his tone. ‘On a related matter… recent studies released by the Mantell Scientific Institute have led to a reassessment of the likely nature of the object visible in the evening sky. It is now thought less likely that the object in question is cometary in nature. A more probable explanation is that the object is related to the system’s largest gas giant. The Democratic Government of Cuvier, however, strongly refutes any suggestion that the planet itself has been, or is in the process of being, destroyed. Any rumours to this effect are malicious in origin and are to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.’

He paused again and allowed the tiniest trace of a smile to ghost his lips. ‘And that concludes this statement from the Democratic Government of Cuvier.’

Aboard Nostalgia for Infinity, with no great enjoyment, Ilia Volyova smoked to a stub one of the cigarettes the ship had furnished her with. She was thinking, and thinking furiously, her mind humming like an overworked turbine room. Her booted feet squelched through secreted ship slime that had the precise consistency of mucus. She had a mild headache, which was not in any way alleviated by the constant drone of the bilge pumps. And yet she was in one sense elated, for she could finally see a clear course of action before her.

‘It’s so good that you’ve decided to talk to me, Captain,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe what it means after all this time.’

His voice emerged from all around her, simultaneously near and distant, immense and ageless as a God’s. ‘I’m sorry it took so long.’

She felt the entire fabric of the ship tremble with each syllable. ‘Do you mind if I ask why it took quite as long as it did, Captain?’

His answers, when they came, were seldom immediate. Volyova had the impression that the marshalling of his thoughts took time; that with immense size had come immense slowness, so that his dealings with her did not really represent the true rate of his thought processes.

‘There were things I had to come to terms with, Ilia.’

‘What things, Captain?’

Another almighty pause. This was not the first conversation they had enjoyed since the Captain had resumed communications. During the first few hesitant exchanges, Volyova had feared that the silences signalled the Captain’s withdrawal into another protracted state of catatonia. The withdrawals had appeared less severe than before — normal shipboard functions had continued — but she had still feared the tremendous setback that those silences could mean. Months, perhaps, before he could be coaxed back into communication. But it had never been that bad. The silences merely indicated periods of reflection, the time it took for signals to rattle back and forth through the enormous synaptic fabric of the transformed ship and then assembled into thoughts. The Captain appeared infinitely more willing to discuss those subjects that had previously been out of bounds.

‘The things I did, Ilia. The crimes I committed.’

‘We’ve all committed crimes, Captain.’

‘Mine were exceptional.’

Yes, she thought: there was no denying that. With the unwitting collusion of alien co-conspirators, the Pattern Jugglers, the Captain had committed a grievous act against another member of his crew. He had employed the Jugglers to imprint his own consciousness into another man’s head, invading his skull: a personality transfer infinitely more effective than anything that could be achieved by technological means. And so for many years of shiptime he had existed as two men, one of whom was slowly succumbing to the infection of the Melding Plague.

Because his crime was so vile he had been forced to hide it from the other members of the crew. It had only come to light during the climactic events around the neutron star, the very events that had led to the Captain being allowed to engulf and transform his own ship. Volyova had forced that fate upon him as a kind of punishment, though it would have been equally easy for her to kill him. She had also done it because she hoped it might increase her own chances of survival. The ship had already been under the control of one hostile agent — the plague — and having the Captain take over instead had struck her as the marginally lesser of two evils. It was not, she would readily admit, a decision she had subjected to a great deal of analysis at the time.

‘I know what you did,’ she said. ‘And you know that I abhor it. But you have suffered for it, Captain; no one would deny that. It’s time to put it behind us and move on, I think.’

I feel tremendous guilt for what I did.‘

‘And I feel tremendous guilt for what I did to the gunnery officer. I’m as much to blame for any of this as you, Captain. If I hadn’t driven him mad, I doubt that any of this would have happened.’

‘I’d still have my crime to live with.’

‘It was a long time ago. You were frightened. What you did was terrible, but it was not the work of a rational man. That doesn’t make it excusable, but it does make it a little easier to understand. Were I in your situation, Captain — barely human, and perhaps infected with something I knew was going to kill me, or worse — I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t consider something just as extreme.’

‘You would never murder, Ilia. You are better than that.’

‘They think of me as a war criminal on Resurgam, Captain. Sometimes I wonder if they are right, you know. What if we did destroy Phoenix after all?’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I hope not.’

There was another long pause. She walked on through the slime, noting how the texture and colour of the secreted matter was never quite the same from district to district of the ship. Left to its own devices, the ship would be engulfed by the slime in a few short months. She wondered if that would help or hinder the Captain, and hoped that it was an experiment she would never see performed.

‘What exactly do you want, Ilia?’

‘The weapons, Captain. Ultimately, you control them. I’ve attempted to work them myself, but it wasn’t a roaring success. They’re too thoroughly integrated into the old gunnery weapons network.’

‘I don’t like the weapons, Ilia.’

‘I don’t either, but now I think we need them. You have sensors, Captain. You’ve seen what we’ve seen. I showed you when the rocky worlds were dismantled. That was only the start.’

After another worrying silence, he said, ‘I’ve seen what they’ve done to the gas giant.’

‘Then you’ll also have seen that something new is taking shape, assembling in the cloud of liberated matter from the giant. It’s sketchy at the moment, no more fully formed than a foetus. But it is clearly deliberate. It is something vast, Captain, vaster than anything in our experience. Thousands of kilometres across, even now, and it may become larger still as it grows.’

‘I have seen it.’

‘I don’t know what it is, or what it will do. But I can guess. The Inhibitors are going to do something to the sun, to Delta Pavonis. Something terminal. We’re not just talking about triggering a major flare now. This is going to be much bigger than any mass ejection we’ve ever heard of.’

‘What kind of weapon can kill a sun?’

‘I don’t know, Captain. I don’t know.’ She drew hard on the butt of the cigarette, but it was well and truly dead. ‘That isn’t, however, my primary concern at the moment. I’m more interested in another question. What kind of weapon can kill a weapon like that?’

‘You think the cache may suffice?’

‘One of those thirty-three horrors ought to do the trick, don’t you think?’

‘You want my assistance,’ the Captain said.

Volyova nodded. She had reached the critical point in the conversation now. If she got through this bit without triggering a catatonic shutdown, she would have made significant progress in her dealings with Captain John Brannigan.

‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘You control the cache, after all. I’ve done my best, but I can’t make it do much without your co-operation.’

‘It would be very dangerous, Ilia. We’re safe now. We haven’t done anything to provoke the Inhibitors. Using the cache… even a single weapon from the cache…’ The Captain trailed off. There was absolutely no need to labour the point.

‘It’s a bit on the risky side, I know.’

‘A bit on the risky side?’ The Captain’s chuckle of amusement was like a small earthquake. ‘You were always one for understatement, Ilia.’

‘Well. Are you going to help me or not, Captain?’

After a glacial intermission he said, ‘I’ll give it quite some thought, Ilia. I’ll give it quite some thought.’

That, she supposed, had to count as progress.