Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 32

The transfer shuttle slid alongside the larger spacecraft, a single bubble drifting down the flank of a great scarred whale. Khouri and Thorn made their way to the rarely used flight deck, sealed the door behind them and then ordered some floodlights to be deployed. Fingers of light clawed along the hull, throwing the topology into exaggerated relief. The baroque transformations were queasily apparent — folds and whorls and acres of lizardlike scales — but there was no sign of any further damage.

‘Well?’ Thorn whispered. ‘What’s your assessment?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But one thing’s for sure. Normally we’d have heard from Ilia by now.’

Thorn nodded. ‘You think something catastrophic happened here, don’t you?’

‘We saw a battle, Thorn, or what looked like one. I can’t help jumping to conclusions.’

‘It was a long way off.’

‘You can be certain of that, can you?’

‘Fairly, yes. The flashes weren’t spread randomly around the sky. They were clustered, and they all lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. That means that whatever we saw was distant — tens of light-minutes, maybe even whole light-hours from here. If this ship was in the thick of it, we’d have seen a much larger spatial extent to the flashes.’

‘Good. You’ll excuse me if I don’t sound too relieved.’

‘The damage we’re seeing here can’t be related, Ana. If those flashes really were on the far side of the system, then the energy being unleashed was fearsome. This ship looks as if it took a hit of some kind, but it can’t have been a direct hit from the same weapons or there wouldn’t be a ship here.’

‘So it got hit by shrapnel or something.’

‘Not very likely…’

‘Thorn, something sure as fuck happened.’

There was a shiver of activity from the console displays. Neither of them had done anything. Khouri leaned over and queried the shuttle, biting her lip.

‘What is it?’ Thorn asked.

‘We’re being invited to dock,’ she told him. ‘Normal approach vector. It’s as if nothing unusual’s happened. But if that’s the case, why isn’t Ilia speaking to us?’

‘We’ve got two thousand people in our care. We’d better be sure we’re not walking into a trap.’

I do realise that.‘ She skated a finger across the console, skipping through commands and queries, occasionally tapping a response into the system.

‘So what are you doing?’ Thorn asked.

‘Landing us. If the ship wanted to do something nasty, it’s had enough chances.’

Thorn pulled a face but offered no counter-argument. There was a tug of microgravity as the transfer shuttle inserted itself into the docking approach, moving under direct control of the larger ship. The hull loomed and then opened to reveal the docking bay. Khouri closed her eyes — the transfer shuttle only just appeared to fit through the aperture — but there was no collision, and then they were inside. The shuttle wheeled and then nudged itself into a berthing cradle. There was a tiny shove of thrust at the last moment, then a faint, faint tremor of contact. And then the console altered again, signifying that the shuttle had established umbilical linkage with the bay. Everything was absolutely normal.

‘I don’t like it,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s not like Ilia.’

‘She wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood the last time we met. Maybe she’s just having a very long sulk.’

‘Not her style,’ Khouri said, snapping her response and then immediately regretting it. ‘Something’s wrong. I just don’t know what.’

‘What about the passengers?’ he asked.

‘We keep ’em here until we know what’s going on. After fifteen hours, they can stand one or two more.‘

‘They won’t like it.’

‘They’ll have to. One of your people can cook up an excuse, can’t they?’

‘I suppose one more lie at this point won’t make much difference, will it? I’ll think of something — an atmospheric pressure mismatch, maybe.’

‘That’ll do. It doesn’t have to be a show stopper. Just a plausible reason to keep them aboard for a few hours.’

Thorn went back to arrange matters with his aides. It would not be too difficult, Khouri thought: the majority of the passengers would not expect to be unloaded for several hours anyway, and so would not instantly realise anything was amiss. Provided word did not spread around the ship that no one was being let out, a riot could be held off for a while.

She waited for Thorn to return.

‘What now?’ he asked. ‘We can’t leave by the main airlock or people will get suspicious if we don’t come back.’

‘There’s a secondary lock here,’ Khouri said, nodding at an armoured door set in one wall of the flight deck. ‘I’ve requested a connecting tube to be fed across from the bay. We can get on and off the ship without anyone knowing we’re away.’

The tube clanged against the side of the hull. So far, the larger ship was being very obliging. Khouri and Thorn donned spacesuits from the emergency locker even though the indications were that the air in the connecting tube was normal in mix and pressure. They propelled themselves to the door, opened it and crammed into the chamber on the other side. The outer door opened almost immediately since there was no pressure imbalance to be adjusted.

Something waited in the tunnel.

Khouri flinched and sensed Thorn do likewise. Her soldiering years had given her a deep-seated dislike for robots. On Sky’s Edge a robot was often the last thing you saw. She had learned to suppress that phobia since moving in other cultures, but she still retained the capacity to be startled when she encountered one unexpectedly.

Yet the servitor was not one she recognised. It was human-shaped, but at the same time utterly non-human in form. It was largely hollow, a lacy scaffold of wire-thin joints and struts containing almost no solid parts. Alloyed mechanisms, whirring sensors and arterial feedlines hovered within the skeletal form. The servitor spanned the corridor with limbs outstretched, waiting for them.

‘This doesn’t look good,’ Khouri said.

‘Hello,’ the servitor said, barking at them with a crudely synthesised voice.

‘Where’s Ilia?’ Khouri asked.

‘Indisposed. Would you mind authorising your suits to interpret the ambient data field, full visual and audio realisation? It will make matters a great deal easier.’

‘What’s it talking about?’ Thorn asked.

‘It wants us to let it manipulate what we see through our suits.’

‘Can it do that?’

‘Anything on the ship can, if we let it. Most of the Ultras have implants to achieve the same effect.’

‘And you?’

‘I had mine removed before I came down to Resurgam. Didn’t want anyone to be able to trace me back here in a hurry.’

‘Sensible,’ Thorn said.

The servitor spoke again. I assure you that there won’t be any trickery. As you can see, I’m actually rather harmless. Ilia chose this body for me intentionally, so that I wouldn’t be able to do any damage.‘

‘Ilia chose it?’

The servitor nodded its wire-frame approximation of a skull. Something bobbed within the openwork cage: a stub of white wedged between two wires. It almost looked like a cigarette.

‘Yes. She invited me aboard. I am a beta-level simulation of Nevil Clavain. Now, I’m no oil painting, but I’m reasonably certain that I don’t look like this. If you want to see me as I really am, however…’ The servitor gestured invitingly with one hand.

‘Be careful,’ Thorn whispered.

Khouri issued the subvocal commands that told her suit to accept and interpret ambient data fields. The change was subtle. The servitor faded away, processed out of her visual field. Her suit was filling in the gaps where it would have been, using educated guesswork and its own thorough knowledge of the three-dimensional environment. All the safeguards remained in place. If the servitor moved quickly or did anything that the suit decided was suspicious, it would be edited back into Khouri’s visual field.

Now the solid figure of a man appeared where the servitor had been. There was a slight mismatch between the man and his surroundings — he was too sharply in focus, too bright, and the shadows did not fall upon him quite as they should have done — but those errors were deliberate. The suit could have made the man appear absolutely realistic, but it was considered wise to degrade the image slightly. That way the viewer could never lapse into forgetting that they were dealing with a machine.

That’s better,‘ the figure said.

Khouri saw an old man, frail, white-bearded and white-haired. ‘Are you Nevil… what did you say your name was?’

‘Nevil Clavain. You’d be Ana Khouri, I think.’ His voice was nearly human now. Only a tiny edge of artificiality remained, again quite deliberately.

‘I’ve never heard of you.’ She looked at Thorn.

‘Me neither,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t have,’ Clavain said. ‘I’ve just arrived, you see. Or rather I’m in the process of arriving.’

Khouri could hear the details later. ‘What’s happened to Ilia?’

His face tightened. ‘It isn’t good news, I’m afraid. You’d best come with me.’ Clavain turned around with only a modicum of stiffness. He began to make his way back down the tunnel, clearly expecting to be followed.

Khouri looked at Thorn. Her companion nodded, without saying a word.

They set off after Clavain.

He led them through the catacombs of Nostalgia for Infinity. Khouri kept telling herself that the servitor could do nothing to harm her, nothing at least that Ilia had not already sanctioned. If Ilia had installed a beta-level, she would only have given it a limited set of permissions, its possible actions tightly constrained. The beta-level was only driving the servitor, anyway; the software itself — and that was all it was, she reminded herself, very clever software — was executing on one of the ship’s remaining networks.

‘Tell me what happened, Clavain,’ she said. ‘You said you were arriving. What did you mean by that?’

‘My ship’s on its final deceleration phase,’ he said. ‘She’s called Zodiacal Light. She’ll be in this system shortly, braking to a stop near this vessel. My physical counterpart is aboard it. I invited Ilia to install this beta-level, since light-lag prohibited us from having anything resembling meaningful negotiations. Ilia obliged… and so here I am.’

‘So where is Ilia?’

I can tell you where she is,‘ Clavain said. ’But I’m not totally sure what happened. She turned me off, you see.‘

’She must have turned you on again,‘ Thorn said.

They were walking — or rather wading — through knee-deep ship slime the colour of bile. Ever since leaving the ship bay they had moved through portions of the vessel that were spun for gravity, although the effect varied depending on the exact route they followed.

‘Actually, she didn’t switch me on,’ Clavain said.‘ That’s the unusual thing. I came around, I suppose you’d say, and found… well, I’m getting ahead of myself.’

‘Is she dead, Clavain?’

‘No,’ he said, answering Khouri with a degree of emphasis. ‘No, she isn’t dead. But she isn’t well, either. It’s good that you came now. I take it you have passengers on that shuttle?’

There seemed little point in lying. ‘Two thousand of them,’ Khouri said.

‘Ilia said that you’d need to make around a hundred trips in total. This is just the first round-trip, isn’t it?’

‘Give us time and we’ll manage all hundred,’ Thorn said.

‘Time may well be the one thing you no longer have,’ Clavain replied. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.’

‘You mentioned negotiations,’ Khouri said. ‘What the fuck is there to negotiate?’

A sympathetic smile creased Clavain’s aged face. ‘Quite a lot, I fear. You have something that my counterpart wants very badly, you see.’

The servitor knew its way around the ship. Clavain led them through a labyrinth of corridors and shafts, ramps and ducts, chambers and antechambers, traversing many districts of which Khouri had only sketchy knowledge. There were regions of the ship that had not been visited for decades of worldtime, places into which even Ilia had shown a marked reluctance to stray. The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.

And yet now it was subtly different. It was entirely possible that the ship still retained all its old hauntings, all its places of menace. Now, however, there was a single encompassing spirit, a sentient presence that permeated every cubic inch of the vessel and could not be meaningfully localised to any specific point within the ship. Wherever they walked, they were surrounded by the Captain. He sensed them and they sensed him, even if it was only a tingling of the neck hairs, a keen sense of being scrutinised. It made the entire ship seem both more and less threatening than it had before. It all depended on whose side the Captain was on.

Khouri didn’t know. She didn’t even think Ilia had ever been entirely sure.

Gradually, Khouri began to recognise a district. It was one of the regions of the ship that had changed only slightly since the Captain’s transformation. The walls were the sepia of old manuscripts, the corridors pervaded by a cloisterlike gloom relieved only by ochre lights flickering within sconces, like candles. Clavain was leading them to the medical bay.

The room that he led them into was low ceilinged and windowless. Medical servitors were crouched hunks of machinery backed well into the corners, as if they were unlikely to be needed. A single bed was positioned near the room’s centre, attended by a small huddle of squat monitoring devices. A woman was lying on her back in the bed, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes shut. Biomedical traces rippled above her like aurorae.

Khouri stepped closer to the bed. It was Volyova; there was no doubt about that. But she looked like a version of her friend who had been subjected to some appalling experiment in accelerated ageing, something involving drugs to suck the flesh back to the bone and more drugs to reduce the skin to the merest glaze. She looked astonishingly delicate, as if liable to splinter into dust at any moment. It was not the first time Khouri had seen Volyova here, in the medical bay. There had been the time after the gunfight on the surface of Resurgam, when they were capturing Sylveste. Volyova had been injured then, but there had never been any question of her dying. Now it took close examination to tell that she was not already dead. Volyova looked desiccated.

Khouri turned to the beta-level, horrified. ‘What happened?’

‘I still don’t really know. Before she put me to sleep there was nothing the matter with her. Then I came back around and found myself here, in this room. She was in the bed. The machines had stabilised her, but that was about the best they could do. In the long term, she was still dying.’ Clavain nodded at the displays looming above Volyova. ‘I’ve seen these kinds of injuries before, during wartime. She breathed vacuum without any kind of protection against internal moisture loss. Decompression must have been rapid, but not quite quick enough to kill her instantly. Most of the damage is in her lungs — scarring of the alveoli, where ice crystals formed. She’s blind in both eyes, and there is some damage to brain function. I don’t think it’s cognitive. There’s tracheal damage as well, which makes it difficult for her to speak.’

‘She’s an Ultra,’ Thorn said with a touch of desperation. ‘Ultras don’t die just because they swallow a little vacuum.’

‘She isn’t much like the other Ultras I’ve met,’ Clavain said.‘ There were no implants in her. If there had been, she might have walked it off. At the very least, the medichines could have buffered her brain. But she had none. I understand she was repulsed by the idea of anything invading her.’

Khouri looked at the beta-level. ‘What have you done, Clavain?’

‘What it took. It was requested that I do what I could. The obvious thing was to inject a dose of medichines.’

‘Wait.’ Khouri raised a hand. ‘Who requested what?’

Clavain scratched his beard. ‘I’m not sure. I just felt an obligation to do it. You have to understand that I’m just software. I wouldn’t claim otherwise. It’s entirely possible that something booted me up and intervened in my execution, forcing me to act in a certain manner.’

Khouri and Thorn exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing, Khouri knew. The only agency that could have switched Clavain back on and made him help Volyova was the Captain.

Khouri felt cold, intensely aware that she was being observed. ‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Listen to me. I don’t know what you are, really. But you have to understand: she would sooner have died than have you do what you’ve just done.’

‘I know,’ Clavain said, extending his palms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘But I had to do it. It’s what I would have done had I been here.’

‘Ignored her deepest wish, is that what you mean?’

‘Yes, if you want to put it like that. Because someone once did the same for me. I was in the same position as her, you see. Injured — dying, in fact. I’d been wounded, but I definitely didn’t want any stinking machines in my skull. I’d have rather died than that. But someone put them in there anyway. And now I’m grateful. She gave me four hundred years of life I wouldn’t have had any other way.’

Khouri looked at the bed, at the woman lying in it, and then back to the man who had, if not saved her life, at the very least postponed her moment of death.

‘Clavain…’ she said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Clavain is a Conjoiner,’ said a voice as thin as smoke. ‘You should listen to him very carefully, because he means what he says.’

Volyova had spoken, yet there had been no movement from the figure on the bed. The only indication that she was now conscious, which had not been the case when they arrived, was a shift in the biomedical traces hovering above her.

Khouri wrenched her helmet off. Clavain’s apparition vanished, replaced by the skeletal machine. She placed the helmet on the floor and knelt by the bed. ‘Ilia?’

‘Yes, it’s me.’ The voice was like sandpaper. Khouri observed the tiniest movement of Volyova’s lips as she formed the words, but the sound came from above her.

‘What happened?’

‘There was an incident.’

‘We saw the damage to the hull when we arrived. Is…’

‘Yes. It was my fault, really. Like everything. Always my fault. Always my damned fault.’

Khouri glanced back at Thorn. ‘Your fault?’

‘I was tricked.’ The lips parted in what might almost have been a smile. ‘By the Captain. I thought he had finally come around to my way of thinking. That we should use the cache weapons against the Inhibitors.’

Khouri could almost imagine what must have happened. ‘How did he trick…’

‘I deployed eight of the weapons beyond the hull. There was a malfunction. I thought it was genuine, but it was really just a way to get me outside the ship.’

Khouri lowered her voice. It was an absurd gesture — there was nothing that could be hidden from the Captain now — but she could not help it. ‘He wanted to kill you?’

‘No,’ Volyova said, hissing her answer. ‘He wanted to kill himself, not me. But I had to be there to see it. Had to be a witness.’

‘Why?’

‘To understand his remorse. To understand that it was deliberate, and not an accident.’

Thorn joined them. He too had removed his helmet, tucking it respectfully under one arm. ‘But the ship’s still here. What happened, Ilia?’

Again that weary half-smile. ‘I drove my shuttle into the beam. I thought it might make him stop.’

‘Seems as if it did.’

‘I didn’t expect to survive. But my aim wasn’t quite right.’

The servitor strode towards the bed. Unclothed of Clavain’s image, its motions appeared automatically more machinelike and threatening.

‘They know that I injected medichines into your head,’ it said, its voice no longer humanoid. ‘And now they know that you know.’

‘Clavain… the beta-level… had no choice,’ Volyova said before either of her two human visitors could speak. ‘Without the medichines I’d be dead now. Do they horrify me? Yes. Utterly, to the absolute core of my being. I am racked with revulsion at the thought of them crawling inside my skull like so many spiders and snakes. At the same time, I accept the necessity of them. They are the tools I have always worked with, after all. And I am fully aware that they cannot work miracles. Too much damage has been done. I am not amenable to repair.’

‘We’ll find a way, Ilia,’ Khouri said. ‘Your injuries can’t be…’

Volyova’s whisper of a voice cut her off. ‘Forget me. I don’t matter. Only the weapons matter now. They are my children, spiteful and wicked as they may be, and I won’t have them falling into the wrong hands.’

‘Now we seem to be getting to the crux of things,’ Thorn said.

‘Clavain — the real Clavain — wants the weapons,’ Volyova said. ‘By his own estimation he has the means to take them from us.’ Her voice grew louder. ‘Isn’t that so, Clavain?’

The servitor bowed. ‘I’d much rather negotiate their handover, Ilia, as you know, especially now that I’ve invested time in your welfare. But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.’

‘Why are you telling us that?’ Khouri said.

‘It’s in his — our — best interests,’ the servitor said amiably. ‘I’d far rather convince you to give up the weapons without a fight. At the very least we’d avoid any risk of damaging the damned things.’

‘You don’t seem like a monster to me,’ Khouri said.

‘I’m not,’ the servitor replied. ‘And nor is my counterpart. He’ll always choose the path of least bloodshed. But if some bloodshed is required… well, my counterpart won’t flinch from a little surgical butchery. Especially not now.’

The servitor said the last with such emphasis that Thorn asked, ‘Why not now?’

‘Because of what he has had to do to get this far.’ The servitor paused, its openwork head scanning each of them. ‘He betrayed everything that he had believed in for four hundred years. That wasn’t done lightly, I assure you. He lied to his friends and left behind his loved ones, knowing that it was the only way to get this done. And lately he took a terrible decision. He destroyed something that he loved very much. It cost him a great deal of pain. In that sense, I am not an accurate copy of the real Clavain. My personality was shaped before that dreadful act.’

Volyova’s voice rasped out again, instantly commanding their attention. ‘The real Clavain isn’t like you?’

‘I’m a sketch taken before a terrible darkness fell across his life, Ilia. I can only speculate on the extent to which we differ. But I would not like to trifle with my counterpart in his current state of mind.’

‘Psychological warfare,’ she hissed.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘That is why you’ve come, isn’t it? Not to help us negotiate a sensible settlement, but to put the fear of God into us.’

The servitor bowed again, with something of the same mechanical modesty. ‘If I were to achieve that,’ Clavain said, ‘I would consider my work well done. The path of least bloodshed, remember?’

‘You want bloodshed,’ Ilia Volyova said, ‘you’ve come to the right woman.’

Shortly afterwards she fell into a different state of consciousness, something perhaps not too far from sleep. The displays relaxed, sine waves and Fourier harmonic histograms reflecting a seismic shift in major neural activity. Her visitors observed her in that state for several minutes, wondering to themselves whether she was dreaming or scheming, or if the distinction even mattered.

The next six hours went by quickly. Thorn and Khouri returned to the transfer shuttle and conferred with their immediate underlings. They were gratified to hear that no crises had occurred while they were visiting Volyova. There had been some minor flare-ups, but for the most part the two thousand passengers had accepted the cover story about a problem with the atmospheric compatibility of the two ships. Now the passengers were assured that the technical difficulty had been resolved — it had been a sensor malfunction all along — and that disembarkation could commence in the orderly fashion that had already been agreed. A large holding area had been prepared a few hundred metres from the parking bay, just into the spun part of the ship. It was a region that was relatively unafflicted by the Captain’s plague transformations, and Khouri and Volyova had worked hard to disguise the most overtly disturbing parts of the area that the plague had affected.

The holding area was cold and dank, and though they had done their best to make it comfortable, it still had the atmosphere of a crypt. Interior partitions had been put up to divide the space into smaller chambers which were each capable of containing a hundred passengers, and those chambers were in turn equipped with partitions to allow some privacy for family units. The holding area could accommodate ten thousand passengers — four further arrivals of the transfer shuttle — but by the time the sixth flight arrived, they would have to begin dispersing passengers into the main body of the ship. And then, inevitably, the truth would dawn: that they had been brought not only aboard a ship which was carrying the feared Melding Plague, but aboard a ship which had been subsumed and reshaped by its own Captain; that they were, in every sense that mattered, now inside that selfsame Captain.

Khouri expected panic and terror to accompany that realisation. Very likely it would be necessary to enforce a state of martial emergency even more stringent than that now operating on Resurgam. There would be deaths, and there would probably have to be more executions, to make a point.

And yet none of that would matter a damn when the real truth got out, which was that Ilia Volyova, the hated Triumvir, was still alive, and that she had orchestrated this very evacuation.

Only then would the real trouble start.

Khouri watched the transfer shuttle undock and begin its return trip to

Resurgam. Thirty hours of flight time, she calculated, plus — if they were lucky — no more than half that in turnaround at the other end. In two days Thorn would be back. If she could hold things together until then, she would already feel as if she had climbed a mountain.

But there would still be ninety-eight further flights to bring aboard after that…

One step at a time, she thought. That was what they had taught her in her soldiering days: break a problem down into doable units. Then, no matter how stupendous the problem seemed, you could tackle it piece by piece. Focus on the details and worry about the bigger picture later.

Outside, the distant space battle continued to rage. The flashes resembled the random firing of synapses in a splayed-out brain. She was certain that Volyova knew something about what was going on, and perhaps Clavain’s beta-level did, too. But Volyova was sleeping and Khouri did not trust the servitor to tell her anything except subtle lies. That left the Captain, who probably knew something as well.

Khouri made her way through the ship alone. She took the dilapidated elevator system down to the cache chamber, just as she had done hundreds of times before in Volyova’s company. She felt an odd sense of mischief to be making the journey unaccompanied.

The chamber was as weightless and dark as it had been on their recent visits. Khouri halted the elevator on the lock level, and then shrugged on a spacesuit and propulsion pack. In a few breathless moments she was inside the chamber, floating into darkness. She jetted from the wall, doing her best to ignore the sense of unease she always felt in the presence of the cache weapons. She keyed on the suit’s navigation system and waited for it to align itself with the chamber’s transponder beacons. Annotated grey-green forms hoved on to her faceplate, at distances ranging from tens to hundreds of metres. The spidery lattice of the monorail system was a series of harder lines transecting the chamber at various angles. There were still weapons in the chamber. But not as many as she had expected.

There had been thirty-three before she had left for Resurgam. Volyova had deployed eight of them before the Captain tried to destroy himself. But just from the paucity of hovering shapes, Khouri could see that there were a lot fewer than twenty-five weapons left here. She counted the hovering shapes and then counted again, steering her suit deeper into the chamber just in case there was a problem with the transponder. But her first suspicion had been correct. There were only thirteen weapons left aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. Twenty of the damned things were unaccounted for.

Except she knew exactly where they were, didn’t she? Eight were outside somewhere, and so — presumably — were the other twelve that had gone missing. And, very probably, they were halfway across the system, responsible for at least some of the glints and flashes she had seen from the shuttle.

Volyova — or someone, anyway — had thrown twenty cache weapons into battle against the Inhibitors.

And it was anyone’s guess who was winning.

Know thine enemy, Clavain thought.

Except he didn’t know his enemy at all.

He was alone on the bridge of Zodiacal Light, sitting in rapt concentration. With his eyes nearly closed and his forehead creased by habitual worry lines, he resembled a chess master about to make the most vital move of his career. Beyond the steeple of his fingers hung a projected form: a deeply nested composite view of the lighthugger that held the long-lost weapons.

He recalled what Skade had told him, back in the Mother Nest. The evidence trail pointed to this ship being Nostalgia for Infinity; her commander most likely a woman named Ilia Volyova. He could even remember the picture of the woman that Skade had shown him. But even if that evidence trail was correct, and he really would be dealing with Volyova, it told him almost nothing. The only thing he could trust was what he learned with his own extended senses, in the present.

The image before him composited all salient tactical knowledge of the enemy craft. Its details were constantly shifting and re-layering as Zodiacal Lights intelligence-gathering systems improved their guesswork. Long baseline inter-ferometry teased out the electromagnetic profile of the ship across the entire spectrum from soft gamma rays to low-frequency radio. At all wavelengths the backscatter of radiation was perplexing, making the interpretive software crash or come up with nonsensical guesses. Clavain had to intervene every time the software threw up another absurd interpretation. For some reason the software kept insisting that the vessel resembled some weird fusion of ship, cathedral and sea urchin. Clavain could see the underlying form of a plausible spacecraft, and had to constantly nudge the software away from its more outlandish solution minima. He could only imagine that the lighthugger had cloaked itself in a shell of confusing material, like the obfuscatory clouds that Rust Belt habitats occasionally employed.

The alternative — that the software was correct, and that he was merely enforcing his own expectations on it — was too unnerving to consider.

There was a knock against the frame of the door.

He turned around with a stiff whirr of his exoskeleton. ‘Yes?’

Antoinette Bax stalked into the room, followed by Xavier. They both wore exoskeletons as well, though they had ornamented theirs with swirls of luminous paint and welded-on baroquework. Clavain had observed a lot of that amongst his crew, especially amongst Scorpio’s army, and had seen no reason to enforce a more disciplined regime. Privately, he welcomed anything that instilled a sense of camaraderie and purpose.

‘What is it, Antoinette?’ Clavain asked.

‘There’s something we wanted to discuss, Clavain.’

‘It’s about the attack,’ Xavier Liu added.

Clavain nodded and made the effort of a smile. ‘If we are very lucky, there won’t be one. The crew will see reason and hand over the weapons, and we can go home without firing a shot.’

Of course, that outcome was looking less likely by the hour. He had already learned from the weapon traces that twenty of them had been dispersed from the ship, leaving only thirteen aboard. Worse than that, the specific diagnostic patterns suggested that some of the weapons had actually been activated. Three of the patterns had even vanished in the last eight hours of shiptime. He didn’t know what to make of that, but he had a nasty feeling that he knew exactly what it meant.

‘And if they don’t hand them over?’ Antoinette asked, easing into a seat.

‘Then some force may be in order,’ Clavain said.

Xavier nodded. ‘That’s what we figured.’

‘I hope it will be brief and decisive,’ Clavain said. ‘And I have every expectation that it will be. Scorpio’s preparations have been thorough. Remontoire’s technical assistance has been invaluable. We have a well-trained assault force and the weapons to back them up.’

‘But you haven’t asked for our help,’ Xavier said.

Clavain turned back to the image of the ship, examining it to see if there had been any changes in the last few minutes. To his annoyance, the software had started building up scablike accretions and spirelike spines along one flank of the hull. He swore under his breath. The ship looked like nothing so much as one of the plague-stricken buildings in Chasm City. The thought hovered in his mind, worryingly.

‘You were saying?’ he said, his attention drifting back to the youngsters.

‘We want to help,’ Antoinette said.

‘You’ve already helped,’ Clavain told her. ‘Without you we probably wouldn’t have seized this ship in the first place. Not to mention the fact that you helped me to defect.’

‘That was then. Now we’re talking about helping in the attack,’ Xavier said.

‘Ah.’ Clavain scratched his beard. ‘You mean really help, in a military sense?’

‘Storm Bird’s hull can take more weapons,’ Antoinette said. ‘And she’s fast and manoeuvrable. Had to be, to make a profit back home.’

‘She’s armoured, too,’ Xavier said. ‘You saw the damage she did when we busted out of Carousel New Copenhagen. And there’s a lot of room inside her. She could probably carry half of Scorpio’s army, with space to spare.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘Then what’s your objection?’ Antoinette asked.

‘This isn’t your fight. You helped me, and I’m grateful for that. But if I know Ultras, and I think I do, they won’t give up anything without some trouble. There’s been enough bloodshed already, Antoinette. Let me handle the rest of it.’

The two youngsters — he wondered if they had really seemed so young to him before — exchanged coded looks. He had the sense that they were privy to a script he had not been shown.

‘You’d be making a mistake, Clavain,’ Xavier said.

Clavain looked into his eyes. ‘Thought this through, have you, Xavier?’

‘Of course…’

‘I really don’t think you have.’ Clavain returned his attention to the hovering image of the lighthugger. ‘Now, if you don’t mind… I’m a little on the busy side.’