She sat in the seat next to him, waiting for him to notice her and look up from his work. When he did he just nodded, giving her the space and time to say what she needed to. She appreciated that.
‘Beast?’ Antoinette said quietly.
The pause before Lyle Merrick replied was probably no longer than usual, but it felt like an eternity. ‘Yes, Antoinette?’
‘I’m back.’
‘Yes… I gathered.’ There was another long intermission. ‘I’m pleased that you’ve returned.’
The voice had the same tonal quality as ever, but something had changed. She supposed that Lyle was no longer obliged to mimic the old subpersona, the one that he had replaced sixteen years before.
‘Why?’ she asked sharply. ‘Did you miss me?’
‘Yes,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘I don’t think I can ever forgive you, Lyle.’
‘I wouldn’t ever want or expect your forgiveness, Antoinette. I certainly wouldn’t deserve it.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘But you understand that I made a promise to your father?’
‘That’s what Xavier said.’
‘Your father was a good man, Antoinette. He only wanted the best for you.’
‘The best for you as well, Lyle.’
‘I’m in his debt. I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘How do you live with what you did?’
There was something that might have been a laugh, or even a self-deprecating snigger. ‘The part of me that mattered the most isn’t greatly troubled by that question, you know. The flesh-and-blood me was executed. I’m just a shadow, the only shadow that the eraserheads missed.’
‘A shadow with a highly evolved sense of self-preservation.’
‘Again, that’s nothing I’d deny.’
‘I want to hate you, Lyle.’
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Millions already do.’
She sighed. ‘But I can’t afford to. This is still my ship. You are still running it whether I like it or not. True, Lyle?’
‘I was already a pilot, Little… I mean Antoinette. I already had an intimate knowledge of spacecraft operations before my small mishap. It hasn’t been difficult for me to integrate myself with Storm Bird. I doubt that a real subpersona would ever prove an adequate replacement. ’
She sneered. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to replace you.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But my reasons are pragmatic. I can’t afford to, not without seriously fucking up my ship’s performance. I don’t want to go through the learning curve of integrating a new gamma-level, especially not now.’
‘That’s reason enough for me.’
‘I’m not finished. My father made a deal with you. That means you made a deal with the Bax family. I can’t renege on that, even if I wanted to. It wouldn’t be good for business.’
‘We’re a little far from any business opportunities now, Antoinette.’
‘Well, maybe. But there’s one other thing. Are you listening?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’re going into battle. You’re going to help me. And by that I mean you’re going to fly this ship and make it do whatever the fuck I ask of it. Understood? I mean everything. No matter how much danger it puts me in.’
‘Vowing to protect you was also part of the arrangement I made with your father, Antoinette.’
She shrugged. ‘That was between you and him, not me. From now on I take my own risks, even if they’re the kind that might get me killed. Got that?’
‘Yes… Antoinette.’
She stood up from her seat. ‘Oh, and one other thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘No more “Little Miss”.’
Khouri was down in the reception bay, showing her face and generally doing her best to reassure the evacuees that they had not been forgotten, when she felt the entire ship lurch to one side. The movement was sudden and violent, enough to knock her off her feet and send her crashing bruisingly into the nearest wall. Khouri swore, a thousand possibilities flashing through her mind, but her thoughts were immediately drowned under the vast roar of panic that emanated from the two thousand passengers. She heard screams and shouts, and it was many seconds before the sound began to die down to a general rumble of disquiet. The motion had not repeated itself, but any illusions they had that the ship was a solid and unchanging thing had just been annihilated.
Khouri snapped into damage-limitation mode. She made her way through the maze of partitions that divided the chamber, offering nothing more than a reassuring wave to the families and individuals who tried to stop her to ask what was going on. At that point she was still trying to work it out for herself.
It had already been agreed that her immediate deputies would assemble together in the event of anything unexpected happening. She found a dozen of them waiting for her, all looking only slightly less panicked than the people in their care.
‘Vuilleumier…’ they said, in near unison, on her arrival.
‘What the hell just happened?’ one asked. ‘We’ve got broken bones, fractures, people scared shitless. Shouldn’t someone have warned us?’
‘Collision avoidance,’ she said. ‘The ship detected a piece of debris heading towards it. Didn’t have time to shoot it away, so it moved itself.’ It was a lie, and it did not even sound convincing to her, but it was at least a stab at a rational explanation. ‘That’s why there was no warning,’ she added, by way of an afterthought. ‘It’s good, really: it means the safety subsystems are still working.’
‘You never said they wouldn’t be,’ the man told her.
‘Well, now we know for sure, don’t we?’ And with that she told them to spread the word that the sudden movement had been nothing to worry about, and to make sure that the injured got the care they needed.
Fortunately, no one had been killed, and the broken bones and fractures turned out to be clean breaks that could be attended to with simple procedures, without the need to take anyone beyond the chamber to the medical bay. An hour passed, and then two, and a nervous calm descended. Her explanation, it appeared, had been accepted by the majority of the evacuees.
Great, she thought. Now all I have to do is convince myself.
But an hour later the ship moved again.
This time it was less violent than before, and the only effect was to make Khouri sway and reach hastily for a support. She swore, but now it was less out of surprise than annoyance. She had no idea what she was going to tell the passengers next, and her last explanation was going to start looking less than convincing. She decided, for the time being, not to offer any explanation at all, and to let her underlings figure out what had happened. Give them time and they might come up with something better than she was capable of.
She made her way back to Ilia Volyova, thinking all the while that something was wrong, experiencing a sense of dislocation that she could not quite put her finger on. It was as if every vertical surface in the ship was minutely askew. The floor was no longer perfectly level, so that the liquid effluent in the flooded zones built up more on one side of the corridor than the other. Where it dripped from the walls it no longer fell vertically, but at a pronounced angle. By the time she reached Volyova’s bed, she could not ignore the changes. It was an effort to walk upright, and she found it easier and safer to move along one wall at a time.
‘Ilia.’
She was, mercifully, awake, engrossed in the swollen bauble of her battle display. Clavain’s beta-level was by her side, the servitor’s fingers forming a contemplative steeple beneath its nose as it viewed the same abstract realisation.
‘What is it, Khouri?’ came Volyova’s scratch of a voice.
‘Something’s happening to the ship.’
‘Yes, I know. I felt it as well. So did Clavain.’
Khouri slipped her goggles on and viewed the two of them properly: the ailing woman and the elderly white-haired man who stood patien
tly at her bedside. They looked as if they had known each other all their lives.
‘I think we’re moving,’ Khouri said.
‘More than just moving, I’d say,’ Clavain replied. ‘Accelerating, aren’t we? The local vertical is shifting.’
He was right. When the ship was parked in orbit somewhere it generated gravity for itself by spinning sections of its interior. The occupants felt themselves being flung outwards, away from the ship’s long axis. But when Nostalgia for Infinity was under thrust, the acceleration created another source of false gravity exactly at right angles to the spin-generated pseudo-force. The two vectors combined to give a force that acted at an angle between them.
‘About a tenth of a gee,’ Clavain added, ‘or thereabouts. Enough to distort local vertical by five or six degrees.’
‘No one asked the ship to move,’ Khouri said.
‘I think it decided to move itself,’ Volyova said. ‘I imagine that was why we experienced some jolts earlier on. Our host’s fine control is a little rusty. Isn’t it, Captain?’
But the Captain did not answer her.
‘Why are we moving?’ Khouri asked.
‘I think that might have something to do with it,’ Volyova said.
The squashed bauble of the battle realisation swelled larger. At first glance it looked much as it had before. The remaining cache weapons were still displayed, together with the Inhibitor device. But there was something new: an icon that she did not remember being displayed before. It was arrowing into the arena of battle from an oblique angle to the ecliptic, exactly as if it had come in from interstellar space. Next to it was a flickering cluster of numbers and symbols.
‘Clavain’s ship?’ Khouri asked. ‘But that isn’t possible. We weren’t expecting to see it for weeks…’
‘Seems we were wrong,’ Volyova said. ‘Weren’t we, Clavain?’
‘I can’t possibly speculate.’
‘His blue shift was falling too swiftly,’ Volyova said. ‘But I didn’t believe the evidence of my sensors. Nothing capable of interstellar flight could decelerate as hard as Clavain’s ship appeared to be slowing. And yet…’
Khouri finished the sentence for her. ‘It has.’
‘Yes. And instead of being a month out, he was two or three days out, maybe fewer. Clever, Clavain, I’ll give you that. How do you manage that little trick, might I ask?’
The beta-level shook its head. ‘I don’t know. That particular piece of intelligence was edited from my personality before I was transmitted here. But I can speculate as well as you can, Ilia. Either my counterpart has a more powerful drive than anything known to the Conjoiners, or he has something worryingly close to inertia-suppression technology. Take your pick. Either way, I’d say it wasn’t exactly good news, wouldn’t you?’
‘Are you saying the Captain saw the other ship coming in?’ Khouri asked.
‘You can be certain of it,’ Volyova said. ‘Everything I see, he sees.’
‘So why are we moving? Doesn’t he want to die?’
‘Not here, it would seem,’ Clavain said. ‘And not now. This trajectory will bring us back into local Resurgam space, won’t it?’
‘In about twelve days,’ Volyova confirmed. ‘Which strikes me as too long to be of any use. Of course, that’s assuming he sticks to one-tenth of a gee… he has no need to, ultimately. At a gee he could reach Resurgam in two days, ahead of Clavain.’
‘What good will it do?’ Khouri asked. ‘We’re just as vulnerable there as here. Clavain can reach us wherever we move to.’
‘We’re not remotely vulnerable,’ Volyova said. ‘We still have thirteen damned cache weapons and the will to use them. I can’t guess at the Captain’s deeper motive for moving us, but I know one thing: it makes the evacuation operation a good deal easier, doesn’t it?’
‘You think he’s trying to help, finally?’
‘I don’t know, Khouri. I’ll admit it is a distinct theoretical possibility, that is all. You’d better tell Thorn, anyway.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘To start accelerating things. The bottleneck may be about to change.’
THIRTY-FOUR
A figure grew to flickering solidity within Zodiacal Light’s imaging tank. Clavain, Remontoire, Scorpio, Blood, Cruz and Felka sat in a rough semicircle around the device as the man’s form sharpened and then took on animation.
‘Well,’ Clavain’s beta-level said. ‘I’m back.’
Clavain had the uneasy sense that he was looking at his own reflection flipped left-to-right, all the subtle asymmetries of his face thrown into exaggerated relief. He did not like beta-levels, especially not of himself. The whole idea of being mimicked rankled him, and the more accurate the mimicry the less he liked it. Am I supposed to be flattered, he thought, that my essence is so easily captured by an assemblage of mindless algorithms?
‘You’ve been hacked,’ Clavain told his image.
‘I’m sorry?’
Remontoire leaned towards the tank and spoke. ‘Volyova stripped out large portions of you. We can see her handiwork, the damage she left, but we can’t tell exactly what she did. Very probably all she managed was to delete sensitive memory blocks, but since we can’t know for sure, we’ll have to treat you as potentially viral. That means that you’ll be quarantined once this debriefing is over. Your memories won’t be neurally merged with Clavain’s, since there’s too much risk of contamination. You’ll be frozen on to a solid-state memory substrate and archived. Effectively, you’ll be dead.’
Clavain’s image shrugged apologetically. ‘Let’s just hope I can be of some service before then, shall we?’
‘Did you learn anything?’ Scorpio asked.
‘I learned a lot, I think. Of course, I can’t be sure which of my memories are genuine, and which are plants.’
‘We’ll worry about that,’ Clavain said. ‘Just tell us what you found out. Is the commander of the ship really Volyova?’
The image nodded keenly. ‘Yes, it’s her.’
‘And does she know about the weapons?’ asked Blood.
‘Yes, she does.’
Clavain looked at his fellows, then back to the tank. ‘Right, then. Is she going to hand them over without a fight?’
‘I don’t think you can count on that, no. As a matter of fact, I think you’d better assume she’s going to make matters a little on the awkward side.’
Felka spoke now. ‘What does she know about the weapons’ origin?’
‘Not much, I think. She might have some vague inkling, but I don’t think it is a great interest of hers. She does know a little about the wolves, however.’
Felka frowned. ‘How so?’
‘I don’t know. We never got that chatty. We’d better just assume that Volyova has already had some tangential involvement with them — and survived, as I need hardly point out. That makes her at least worthy of our respect, I think. She calls them the Inhibitors, incidentally. I never got to the bottom of why.’
‘I know why,’ Felka said quietly.
‘She may not have had any direct involvement with them,’ Remontoire said. ‘There is already wolf activity in this system, and must have been for some time. Very probably all she’s done is make some shrewd deductions.’
‘I think her experience goes a little deeper than that,’ Clavain’s beta-level answered, but made no further elaboration.
‘I agree,’ Felka said.
Now they all looked at her for a moment.
‘Did you impress on her our seriousness?’ Clavain asked, turning his attention back to the beta-level. ‘Did you let her know that she would be much better off dealing with us than the rest of the Conjoiners?’
‘I think she got the message, yes.’
‘And?’
‘Thanks, but no thanks, was the general idea.’
‘She’s a very foolish woman, this Volyova,’ Remontoire said. ‘That’s a shame. It would be so much easier if we could proceed in a cordial manner, without all
this unfortunate need to use aggressive force.’
‘There’s another matter,’ the simulated Clavain said. ‘There’s some kind of evacuation operation in progress. You’ve already seen what the wolf machine is doing to the star, gnawing into it with some kind of focused gravity-wave probe. Soon it will reach the nuclear-burning core, releasing the energy at the heart of the star. It will be like drilling a hole into the base of a dam, unleashing water under tremendous pressure. Except it won’t be water. It will be fusing hydrogen, at stellar-core pressure and temperature. My guess is that it will convert the star into a form of flame-thrower. The core’s energy will be bled away very rapidly once the drill has reached it, and the star will die — or at least become a much dimmer and cooler star in the process. But at the same time I imagine the star itself will become a weapon capable of incinerating any planet within a few light-hours of Delta Pavonis, simply by dousing that arterial spray of fusion fire across the face of a world. I imagine it would strip the atmosphere from a gas giant and smelt a rocky world to metallic lava. They don’t necessarily know what will happen on Resurgam, but you can be certain that they wish to get away from there as soon as possible. There are already people aboard the ship, airlifted from the surface. A few thousand, at the very least.’
‘And you have evidence of this, do you?’ asked Scorpio.
‘Nothing I can prove, no.’
‘Then we’ll assume that they don’t exist. It’s obviously a crude attempt at convincing us not to attack.’
Thorn stood on the surface of Resurgam, his coat buttoned high against the harsh polar wind that scraped and scoured every exposed inch of his skin. It was not quite what they would once have called a razorstorm, but it was unpleasant enough when there was no nearby shelter. He adjusted flimsy dust goggles, squinting into starlight, looking for the tiny moving star of the transfer ship.
It was dusk. The sky overhead was a deep velvet purple which shaded to black at the southern horizon. Only the brightest stars were visible through his goggles, and now and then even these would appear to dim as his eyes readjusted to the sudden flash of one of the warring weapons. To the north, and reaching some way to east and west, soft pink auroral curtains trembled in invisible wind. The lightshow was only beautiful if one had no idea what was causing it, and therefore no grasp of how portentous it was. The aurorae were fuelled by ionised particles that were being clawed and gouged off the surface of the star by the Inhibitor weapon. The inwards bulge, the tunnel that the weapon was boring into the star, now reached halfway to the nuclear-burning core. Around the walls of the tunnel, propped apart by standing waves of pumped gravitational energy, the interior structure of the star had undergone a series of drastic changes as the normal convective processes struggled to adjust to the weapon’s assault. Already the core was beginning to change its shape as the overlying mass density shifted. The song of neutrinos streaming out from the star’s heart had changed tune, signifying the imminence of the core breakthrough. There was still no clear idea about exactly what would happen when the weapon finished its work, but in Thorn’s view the best they could do was not hang around to find out.
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