Nothing else had happened.
Antoinette had told him that she would maintain radio silence when she was in the war zone, so he was not surprised at first when he did not hear from her. Then the general news-nets had carried vague reports of some kind of military activity near Tangerine Dream, the gas giant where Antoinette was planning to bury her father. That was not supposed to have happened. Antoinette had planned her trip to coincide with a lull in military manoeuvres in that part of the system. The reports had not mentioned a civilian vessel being caught up in the struggle, but that meant nothing. Perhaps she had been hit by crossfire, her death unknown to anyone but Xavier. Or perhaps they knew she had died but did not want to advertise the fact that a civilian ship had strayed so far into a Contested Volume.
As the days turned into weeks and still there had been no report from her, he had forced himself to accept that she was dead. She had died nobly, doing something courageous, if pointless, in the middle of a war. She had not allowed herself to be sucked into cynical abnegation. He was proud to have known her, and quietly tormented that he would not see her again.
‘I must ask again. Have you found the fault ...’
Xavier tapped commands into his sleeve, disconnecting his comms from the subpersona. Let the bastard thing stew a bit, he thought.
He glanced at the clock. Four hours, fifty-five minutes, and he was still no closer to identifying the problem. In fact, one or two lines of enquiry that had looked quite promising a few minutes earlier had turned out to be resolute dead ends.
‘Fuck this bastard piece of ...’
Something pulsed green on his sleeve. Xavier studied it through a fog of irritation and mild panic. How ironic it would be, he thought, if the shop went out of business anyway, even though he had stayed behind . . .
His sleeve was telling him that he was receiving an urgent signal from outside Carousel New Copenhagen. It was coming in right at that moment, routed through to the shop via the carousel’s general comms net. The message was talk-only, and there was no option to respond in real time, since whoever was transmitting was too far downstream. Which meant that whoever was sending was well outside the Rust Belt. Xavier told his sleeve to route the message through to his helmet, spooling back to the start of the transmission.
‘Xavier ... I hope you get this. I hope that the shop is still in business, and that you haven’t called in too many favours recently. Because I’m going to have to ask you to call in a hell of a lot more.’
‘Antoinette,’ he said aloud despite himself, grinning like an idiot.
‘All you need to know is what I’m about to tell you. The rest we can go over later, in person. I’m on my way back now, but I’ve got way too much delta-vee to make the Rust Belt. You need to get a salvage tug up to my speed, and pretty damn quickly. Haven’t they got a couple of Taurus IVs over at the Lazlo dock? One of those can handle Storm Bird easily. I’m sure they owe us for that job down to Dax-Autrichiem last year.’
She gave him coordinates and a vector and told him to be alert for banshee activity in the sector she had specified. Antoinette was right: she was moving very quickly indeed. Xavier wondered what had happened, but figured that he would find out soon enough. The timing was tight, too. She had left it to the last minute to transmit the message, which only gave him a narrow window to sort out the deal with the Taurus IVs. No more than half a day, or the tugs would not be able to reach her. Then the problem would be ten times harder to solve, and would require the calling-in of favours far outside Xavier’s range.
Antoinette liked to live dangerously, he reflected.
He turned his attention back to the hauler. He was no closer to solving the problem with the nav system, but somehow it no longer weighed on his mind with quite the same sense of extreme urgency.
Xavier prodded his sleeve again, reconnecting with the subpersona. It buzzed immediately in his ear. It was as if it had been talking to him all along, even when he was no longer listening. ‘... fault yet? It is most strenuously urged that you remedy this error within the promised time period. Failure to comply with the terms of the repair bid will render you liable to penalty charges of not more than sixty thousand Ferris units, or not more than one hundred and twenty thousand if the failure to comply is ...’
He unplugged his sleeve again. Blissful silence descended.
Nimbly, Xavier climbed off the chassis of the hauler. He hopped the short distance back on to one of the bay’s repair ledges, landing amid tools and spooled cable. He turned off the grip in his palm and steadied himself, taking one last look at the hauler to make sure he had left no valuable tools lying around on it. He had not.
Xavier flipped open a panel in the oil-smeared wall of the bay. There were many controls behind the wall, huge toylike, grease-smeared buttons and levers. Some controlled electrical power and lighting; others governed pressurisation and temperature. He ignored all these, his palm coming to rest above a very prominent lever marked in scarlet: the control that undid the docking clamps.
Xavier looked back towards the hauler. It was silly, really, what he was going to do. A little more work, an hour or so, perhaps, and he might stand a very good chance of tracking down the fault. Then the hauler could go on its way, there would be no penalty fees and the repair shop’s slide into insolvency would have been arrested, if only for the next couple of weeks.
Set against that, however, was the possibility that he would continue working for the next five hours and still not find the problem. Then there would be penalty charges, not more than one hundred and twenty thousand Ferris, as the hauler had helpfully informed him, as if knowing the upper limit in some way lessened the sting, and the fact that he would be five hours late in arranging Antoinette’s rescue.
It was no contest, really.
Xavier tugged down the scarlet lever. He felt it lock into its new position with a satisfyingly old-fashioned mechanical clunk. Immediately, orange warning lights started flashing all around the bay. An alarm sounded in his helmet, telling him to keep well away from moving metal.
The clamps retracted in a rapid flurry, like telegraphic relays. For a moment the hauler hung suspended, magically. Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier. Xavier was denied a view of the hauler dwindling into the distance - the carousel’s rotation snatched it out of his line of sight. He could wait until the next pass, but he had work to do.
The hauler was unharmed, he knew. Once it was clear of Copenhagen another repair specialist would undoubtedly pick it up. In a few hours it would probably be back on its way to the House of Correction with its load of unfashionably mutated passengers.
Of course, there would still be hell to pay from a number of quarters: the passengers themselves, if they ever got wind; Swift-Augustine, the habitat that had sent them; the cartel that owned the hauler; maybe even the House of Correction itself, for endangering its clients.
They could all go fuck themselves. He had heard from Antoinette, and that was all that mattered.
EIGHT
Clavain looked at the stars.
He was outside the Mother Nest, alone, perched head-up or head-down - he could not decide which - on the practically weightless surface of the hollowed-out comet. There was no other human being visible in any direction, no evidence, in fact, of any kind of human presence at all. A passing observer, spying Clavain, would have assumed that he had been cruelly marooned on the surface of the comet without ship, supplies or shelter. There was no evidence whatsoever of the vast clockwork which spun at the comet’s heart.
The comet spun slowly, periodically lifting the pale jewel of Epsilon Eridani above Clavain’s horizon. The star was brighter than all the others in the sky, but it still looked like a star rather than a sun. He felt the immense chill of the empty space between himself and the star. It was a mere 100 AU distant - not even a scratch compared with interstellar
distances, but it still caused him to shiver. He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.
Light caught his eye. It was an impossibly faint flicker somewhere in the plane of the ecliptic, a hand’s width from Eridani. There it was again: a sharp, sudden spark at the limit of detectability. He was not imagining it. Another flash followed, a tiny distance away from the first two. Clavain ordered his helmet visor to screen out the light of the sun, so that his eyes did not have to deal with such a large dynamic range in brightness. The visor obliged, occluding the star with a precise black mask, exactly as if he had stared at the sun for too long.
He knew what he was looking at. It was a space battle dozens of light-hours away. The ships involved were probably spread through a volume of space several light-minutes from side to side, firing at each other with heavy relativistic weapons. Had he been in the Mother Nest he could have tapped into the general tactics database and retrieved information on the assets known to be patrolling that sector of the solar system. But it would have told him nothing he could not deduce for himself.
The flashes were mostly dying ships. Now and then one would be the triggering pulse of a Demarchist railgun - cumbersome, thousand-kilometre-long linear accelerator barrels. They had to be energised by detonating a string of cobalt-fusion bombs. The blast would rip the railgun to atoms, but not before it had accelerated a tank-sized slug of stabilised metallic hydrogen up to seventy per cent of light-speed, surfing just ahead of the annihilation wave.
The Conjoiners had weapons of similar effectiveness, but which drew their energising pulse from space-time itself. They could be fired more than once, and steered more quickly. They did not flash when they were fired.
Clavain knew that a spectroscopic analysis of the light in each of those flashes would have confirmed their origin. But he would not have been surprised to learn that most of them were caused by direct hits to Demarchist cruisers.
The enemy were dying out there. They were dying instantly, in explosions so bright and fast that there could be no pain, no realisation that death had come. But a painless death was only a small consolation. There would be many ships in that squadron; the survivors would be witnessing the destruction of their compatriots’ vessels and wondering who would be next. They would never know when a slug was on its way towards them, and they would never know when it arrived.
From where Clavain stood, it was like watching fireworks above a remote town. From the colours of Agincourt to the flames of Guernica, to the pure shining light of Nagasaki like a cleansing sword blade catching the sun, to the contrails etched above the skies of the Tharsis Bulge, to the distant flash of heavy relativistic weapons against a starscape of sable-black in the early years of the twenty-seventh century: Clavain did not need to be reminded that war was horrific, but from a distance it could also have a terrible searing beauty.
The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.
He thought of what he had learned about the Closed Council. Remontoire, with, Clavain assumed, Skade’s tacit approval, had told him a little about the role Clavain would be expected to play. It was not merely that they wanted him within the Closed Council so that he could be kept out of harm’s way. No. Clavain was needed to assist in a delicate operation. It would be a military action and it would take place beyond the Epsilon Eridani system. It would concern the recovery of a number of items that had fallen into the wrong hands.
Remontoire would not say what those items were; only that their recovery - which implied that they had at some point been lost - would be vital to the future security of the Mother Nest. If he wanted to learn more, and he would have to learn more if he was to be of any use to the Mother Nest, he would have to join the Closed Council. It sounded breathtakingly simple. Now that he considered it, alone on the surface of the comet, he had to admit that it probably was. His qualms were out of all proportion to the facts.
And yet he could not bring himself to trust Skade fully. She knew more than he did, and that would continue to be the case even if he agreed to join the Closed Council. He would be one layer closer to the Inner Sanctum then, but he would still not be within it - and what was to say that there were not additional layers behind that?
The battle rose again, over the opposite horizon. Clavain watched it dutifully, noting that the flashes were far less frequent now. The engagement was drawing to a close. It was practically certain that the Demarchists would have sustained the heaviest losses. There might even have been zero casualties on his own side. The enemy’s survivors would soon be limping back to their respective bases, struggling to avoid further engagements on the way. Before very long the battle would figure in a propaganda transmission, the facts wrung to squeeze some tiny drop of optimism out of the overwhelming Demarchist defeat. He had seen it happen a thousand times; there would be more such battles, but not many. The enemy were losing. They had been on the losing side for years. So why was anyone worried about the future security of the Mother Nest?
There was, he knew, only one way to find out.
The tender found its slot on the rim, edging home with unerring machine precision. Clavain disembarked into standard gravity, puffing for the first few minutes until he adjusted to the effort.
He made his way through a circuitous route of corridors and ramps. There were other Conjoiners about, but they spared him no particular attention. When he felt the wash of their thoughts, sensing their impressions of him, he detected only quiet respect and admiration, with perhaps the tiniest tempering of pity. The general populace knew nothing of Skade’s efforts to bring him into the Closed Council.
The corridors grew darker and smaller. Spartan grey walls became festooned with conduits, panels and the occasional grilled duct through which warm air blasted. Machines thrummed beneath his feet and behind the walls. The lighting was intermittent and meagre. At no point had Clavain stepped through any kind of prohibited door, but the general impression now to anyone unfamiliar with this part of the wheel would have been that they had strayed into some slightly forbidding maintenance section. A few made it this far, but most would have turned back and kept walking until they found themselves in more welcoming territory.
Clavain continued. He had reached a part of the wheel that was unrecorded on any blueprints or maps. Most of the citizens of the Mother Nest knew nothing of its existence. He approached a bronze-green bulkhead. It was unguarded and unmarked. Next to it was a thick-rimmed metal wheel with three spokes. Clavain grasped the wheel by two of the spokes and tugged it. For a moment it was stiff - no one had been down here in some time - but then it oozed into mobility. Clavain yanked it round until it spun freely. The bulkhead door eased out like a stopper, dripping condensation and lubricant. As he turned the wheel further the stopper hinged aside, allowing entry. The stopper was like a huge squat piston, its sides polished to a brilliant hermetic gleam.
Beyond was an even darker space. Clavain stepped over the half-metre lip of the bulkhead, ducking to avoid grazing his scalp against the transom. The metal was cold against his fingers. He blew on them until they felt less numb.
Once he was inside, Clavain spun a second wheel until the bulkhead was again tightly sealed, tugging his sleeves down over his fingers as he worked. Then he took a few steps further into the gloom. Pale green lights came on in steps, stammering back into the darkness.
The chamber was immense, low and long like a gunpowder store. The curve of the wheel’s rim was just visible, the walls arcing upwards and the floor bending with them. Into the distance stretched row after row of reefersleep caskets.
Clavain knew precisely how many there were: one hundred and seventeen. One hundred and seventeen people had returned from deep space aboard Galiana’s ship, but all had been beyond any reasonable hope of revival. In many cases, the violence inflicted on her crew had been so extreme that the remains could only be segregat
ed by genetic profiling. Nonetheless, however sparse the remains had been, each identified individual had been allocated a single reefersleep casket.
Clavain made his way down the aisles between the rows of caskets, the grilled flooring clattering beneath his feet. The caskets hummed quietly. They were all still operational, but that was only because it was considered wise to keep the remains frozen, not because there was any realistic hope of reviving most of them. There was no sign of any active wolf machinery embedded in any of the remains - except, of course, for one - but that did not mean that there were no dormant microscopic wolf parasites lurking just below the detection threshold. The bodies could have been cremated, but that would have removed the possibility of ever learning anything about the wolves. The Mother Nest was nothing if not prudent.
Clavain reached Galiana’s reefersleep casket. It stood apart from the others, raised fractionally on a sloping plinth. Exposed intricacies of corroded machinery suggested ornate stonework carving. It called to mind the coffin of a fairy queen, a much-loved and courageous monarch who had defended her people until the end and who now slept in death, surrounded by her most trusted knights, advisers and ladies-in-waiting. The upper portion of the casket was transparent, so that something of Galiana’s form was visible in silhouette long before one stood by the casket itself. She looked serenely accepting of her fate, with her arms folded across her chest, her head raised to the ceiling, accentuating the strong, noble line of her jaw. Her eyes were closed and her brow smooth. Long grey-streaked hair lay in dark pools on either side of her face. A billion ice particles glittered across her skin, twinkling in pastel flickers of blue and pink and pale green as Clavain’s angle of view changed. She looked exquisitely beautiful and delicate in death, as if she had been carved from sugar.
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