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.’
&
nbsp; ‘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.
TWENTY-SIX
There was almost no warning of Skade’s strike. For weeks Clavain had expected something, but there had been no guessing the exact nature of the attack. His own knowledge of Nightshade was useless: with the manufactories aboard a military lighthugger, Skade could weave new weapons almost as quickly as she could imagine them, tailoring each to the flexing demands of battle. Like a crazed toy-maker, she could spin the darkest of fabulations into existence in mere hours, and then unleash them against her enemy.
Zodiacal Light had reached half the speed of light. Relativistic effects were now impossible to ignore. For every hundred minutes that passed on Yellowstone, eighty-six passed aboard Clavain’s ship. That time-dilation effect would become steadily more acute as they nosed closer and closer to light-speed. It would compress the fifteen actual years of the journey into only four years of shiptime; still fewer if a higher rate of acceleration was used.
Yet half the speed of light was still not radically relativistic, especially when they were dealing with an enemy moving in almost the same accelerated frame. At their fastest, the mines that Skade had dropped behind her had slammed past Zodiacal Light with relative velocities of only a few thousand kilometres per second. It was fast only by the standards of solar war. Although the mines were difficult to detect until Zodiacal Light was within their ‘volume of denial’, there was no danger of actually colliding with them. A direct collision would be a very effective way of taking out a starship, but Clavain’s simulations argued that it was beyond Skade’s capability to mount such an attack. His analyses showed that for any conceivable spread of obstacles that Skade dropped in her wake - even if she dismantled most of Nightshade to convert into mines - he could always detect the obstacles sufficiently far ahead to steer a path through them.
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