She wondered if she was wrong, whether perhaps it was not John Brannigan who was haunting her, but some markedly lower-level intelligence. Perhaps the reason that the ship was keen to serve her was that its mind was only as complex as a servitor’s, infected with the same obedient routines. Perhaps when she addressed her thoughts directly to Brannigan, talking to him as if he listened, she was imagining more intelligence present than was really the case.
Then the cigarettes had turned up.
She had not asked for them, nor even suspected that there was another hoard of them to be found anywhere on the ship now that she had exhausted the last of her personal supply. She had examined them with curiosity and suspicion. They looked as if they had been manufactured by one of the trading colonies that the ship had dealt with decades ago. They did not appear to have been made by the ship itself, from local raw materials. They smelt too good for that. When she lit one of them up and smoked it to a stub, it tasted too good as well. She had smoked another one, and that had also tasted fine.
‘Where did you find these?’ she asked. ‘Where in the name of…’ She inhaled again, filling her lungs for the first time in weeks with something other than the taste of shipboard air. ‘Never mind. I don’t need to know. I’m grateful.’
From then on there had been no doubt in her mind: Brannigan was with her. Only another member of the crew could have known about her cigarette habit. No machine would have thought to bring her an offering like that, no matter how deeply ingrained its instinct for servility. So the ship must have wanted to make peace.
Progress had been slow since then. Now and then something had happened which had forced the ship back into its shell, the servitors shutting down and refusing to help her for days on end. It sometimes happened after she had been talking to the Captain too freely, trying to coax him out of his silence with cod-psychology. She was not good at psychology, she reflected ruefully. This whole horrible mess had begun when her experiments with Gunnery Officer Nagorny had driven him insane. If that hadn’t happened, there would have been no need to recruit Khouri, and everything might have been different…
Afterwards, when shipboard life returned to a kind of normality and the servitors again did her bidding, she would be very careful what she did and said. Weeks would go by without her making any overt attempts at communication. But she would always try again, building up slowly to another catatonic episode. She persisted because she had the impression that she was making small but measurable progress between each crash.
The last crash had not happened until six weeks after Khouri’s visit. The catatonic state had persisted for an unprecedented eight weeks after that. Another ten weeks had passed since then, and only now was she ready to risk another crash.
‘Captain… listen to me,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to reach you many times, and I think once or twice I’ve succeeded and that you’ve been fully cognisant of what I’m saying. But you haven’t been ready to answer. I understand; I truly do. But now there’s something I have to explain to you. Something about the outside universe, something about what’s happening elsewhere in this system.’ She was standing in the great sphere of the bridge, talking aloud with her voice raised slightly louder than would have been strictly necessary for conversation. In all likelihood, she could have said her piece anywhere in the ship and he would have heard her. But here, in what had once been the ship’s focus of command, the soliloquy felt slightly less absurd. The acoustics of the place lent her voice a resonance that she found pleasing. She was also gesticulating theatrically with the stub of a cigarette.
‘Perhaps,’ she continued, ‘you already know of it. I know you have synaptic pathways to the hull sensors and cameras. What I don’t know is how well you can interpret those data streams. After all, you weren’t born to do it. It must be strange, even for you, to see the universe through the eyes and ears of a four-kilometre-long machine. But you always were an adaptable bastard. My guess is you’ll figure it out eventually.’
The Captain did not respond. But the ship had not immediately plunged into the catatonic state. According to the monitor bracelet on her wrist, ship-wide servitor activity continued normally.
‘But I’ll assume you don’t know about the machines yet, aside from what you may have picked up during Khouri’s last visit. What kind of machines, you ask? Alien ones, that’s what. We don’t know where they’ve come from. All that we know is that they’re here, now, in the Delta Pavonis system. We think Sylveste — you remember him? — must have inadvertently summoned them here when he went into the Hades artefact.’ Of course he remembered Sylveste, if he was capable of remembering anything at all from his previous existence. It was Sylveste they had brought aboard to heal the Captain. But Sylveste had only been playing with their wishes, his eye on Hades all along.
‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘that’s guesswork, but it seems to fit the facts. Khouri knows a lot about these machines, more than me. But the way she learned about them means she can’t easily articulate everything she knows. We’re still in the dark in a lot of areas.’
She told the Captain about what had happened so far, replaying observations on the bridge’s display sphere. She explained how the swarms of Inhibitor machines had begun dismantling three smaller worlds, sucking out their cores and processing the eviscerated material into highly refined belts of orbital matter.
‘It’s impressive,’ she said. ‘But it’s not so far beyond our own capabilities that I’m quivering in my boots. Not just yet. But what worries me is what they have in mind next.’
The mining operations had come to an abrupt and precise halt two weeks earlier. The artificial volcanoes studding the equators of the three worlds had stopped belching matter, leaving a final curtailed arc of processed material climbing into orbit.
By then, by Volyova’s estimate, at least half the mass of each world had been elevated into orbital storage. Only hollowed-out husks remained below. It was fascinating to watch them subside once the mining was over, crumpling down into compact orange balls of radioactive slag. Some machines detached themselves from the surface, but many appeared to have served their purpose and were not recycled. The apparent wastefulness of that gesture chilled Volyova. It suggested to her that the machines did not care about the effort they had already expended in earlier replication cycles, that in some sense it made no difference compared with the importance of the task ahead.
Yet millions of smaller machines remained. The debris rings themselves had appreciable self-gravity and needed constant shepherding. Various breeds of processor swam through the ore lanes, ingesting and excreting. Volyova detected the occasional flare of exotic radiation from the vicinity of the works. Awesome alchemical mechanisms had been unleashed. The raw dirt of the worlds was being coaxed into specialised and rare new forms, types of matter that simply did not exist in nature.
But before the volcanoes had ceased spewing dirt, a new process had already started. A matter stream had peeled away from the space around each world, a filament of processed material that extended in a long tongue until it was light-seconds in length. The shepherding machines had obviously injected enough energy into each stream to kick them out of the gravitational wells of their progenitor worlds. The tongues of matter were now on an interplanetary trajectory, following a soft parabolic which hugged the ecliptic. They distended until they were light-hours from end to end. Volyova extrapolated the parabolas — there were three of them — and found that they would converge on the same point in space, at precisely the same time.
There was nothing there at the moment. But by the time they got there, something else would have arrived: the system’s largest gas giant. That conjunction, Volyova was inclined to think, was very unlikely to be coincidence. ‘Here’s my guess,’ she told the Captain. ‘What we’ve seen so far was just the gathering of raw material. Now it’s being assembled in the place where the real work is about to begin. They’ve got designs on Roc. What, I don’t know. But it’s undoubtedly p
art of their plan.’
What she knew of the gas giant sprung on to the projection sphere. A schematic showed Roc cored open like an apple, revealing layers of annotated strata: a plunge into perplexing depths of weird chemistry and nightmarish pressure. Gases at more or less imaginable pressures and temperatures overlaid an ocean of pure liquid hydrogen that began only a scratch beneath the apparent outer layer of the planet. Beneath that, the very thought of its existence giving Volyova a faint migraine, was an ocean of hydrogen in its metallic state. Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.
But there was nothing about Roc that marked it as out of the ordinary. It had the usual family of moons, most of them icy and tidally locked to the larger world. Ions were boiling off the surfaces of the hotter moons, forming great toroidal plasma belts which encircled the giant, held in check by the giant’s own savage magnetosphere. There were no large rocky moons, which was presumably why the initial dismantling operations had taken place elsewhere. There was a ring system with some interesting resonant patterns — bicycle spokes and odd little knots — but again, it was nothing Volyova had not seen already.
What did the Inhibitors want? What would begin when their matter streams had arrived at Roc?
‘You understand my misgivings, Captain. I’m sure you do. Whatever those machines are up to, it isn’t going to be good for us. They’re engines of extinction. Wiping out sentient life is what they do. The question is, can we do anything about it?’
Volyova paused and took stock. She had not yet triggered a catatonic withdrawal, and that was good. The Captain was at least prepared to let her discuss the outside events. On the other hand, she had yet to raise any of the subjects that usually triggered a shutdown.
Well, it was now or never.
I think we can, Captain. Perhaps not stop the machines for good, but at least throw a fairly large spanner into their works.‘ She eyed her bracelet, noting that nothing unusual was happening elsewhere in the ship. ’Of course, I’m talking about a military strike. I don’t think reasoned argument is going to work against a force that dismantles three of your planets without even saying “please” first.‘
There was something then, she thought. A tremor reaching her from somewhere else in the ship. It had happened before, and it seemed to mean something, but exactly what she was not prepared to say. It was certainly a kind of communication from whatever intelligence ruled the ship, but not necessarily of the sort she might have wished for. It was more a sign of irritation, like the low growl of a dog that did not like being disturbed.
‘Captain… I understand this is difficult. I swear I do. But we have to do something, and soon. A deployment of the cache weapons would seem to me to be our only option. We have thirty-three of them left; thirty-nine if we can salvage and re-arm the six I deployed against Hades… but I think even thirty-three will be sufficient if we can use them well and use them soon.’
The tremor intensified, subsided. She was really touching a nerve now, she thought. But the Captain was still listening. ‘The weapon we lost on the edge of the system may have been the most powerful we had,’ she went on, ‘but the six we discarded were, by my estimate at least, at the lower end of the destructive scale of the others. I think we can make do, Captain. Shall I tell you my plan? I propose that we target the three worlds where the matter streams are coming from. Ninety per cent of the extracted mass is still in orbit around each collapsed body, although more and more is being pumped towards Roc. Most of the Inhibitor machines are still around those moons. They might not survive a surprise attack, and even if they do, we can disperse and contaminate those matter reservoirs.’
She began to talk faster, intoxicated with the way the plan was unfolding in her mind. ‘The machines might be able to regroup, but they’ll need to find new worlds to dismantle. But we can beat them at that as well. We can use the other cache weapons to rip apart as many probable candidates as we can find. We can poison their wells; stop them from doing any more mining. That’ll make it harder — perhaps even impossible — for them to finish what they have in mind for the gas giant. We have a chance, but there’s a catch, Captain. You’ll have to help us do it.’
She looked at the bracelet again. Still nothing had happened, and she allowed herself to breathe a mental sigh of relief. She would not push him much more now. Merely discussing the need for his co-operation had gone further than she had imagined would be possible.
But it came, then: a distant, growing howl of angry air. She heard it shrieking towards her through kilometres of corridor.
‘Captain…’
But it was too late. The gale stormed the command sphere, knocking her to the floor with its ferocity. The cigarette butt flew from her hand and executed several orbits of the chamber, caught in a whirlwind of ship air. Rats and sundry other items of loose ship debris precessed with it.
She found it hard to talk. ‘Captain… I didn’t mean… ’ But then even breathing became difficult. The wind sent her skidding across the floor, arms windmilling. The noise was excruciating, like an amplification of all the years, all the decades of pain that John Brannigan had known.
Then the gale died down, and the chamber was still again. Somewhere else in the ship all he had needed to do was open a pressure lock into one of the chambers that was normally under hard vacuum. Very likely no air had actually reached space during his show of strength, but the effect had been as unnerving as any hull rupture.
Ilia Volyova got to her feet. Nothing seemed to be broken. She dusted herself down and, shaking, lit herself another cigarette. She smoked it for at least two minutes, until her nerves were as steady as they were going to get.
Then she spoke again, calmly and quietly, like a parent talking to a baby that had just thrown a tantrum. ‘Very well, Captain. You’ve made your point very effectively. You don’t want to talk about the cache weapons. Fine. That’s your prerogative, and I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. But understand this: we’re not just talking about a small local matter here. Those Inhibitor machines haven’t just arrived around Delta Pavonis. They’ve arrived in human space. This is just the beginning. They won’t stop here, not even after they’ve wiped out all life on Resurgam for the second time in a million years. That’ll just be the warm-up exercise. It’ll be somewhere else after that. Maybe Sky’s Edge. Maybe Shiva-Parvati. Maybe Grand Teton, Spindrift, Zastruga — maybe even Yellowstone. Maybe even the First System. It probably doesn’t matter, because once one goes, the others won’t be far behind. It’ll be the end, Captain. It might take decades or it might take centuries. Doesn’t matter. It’ll still be the end of everything, the final repudiation of every human gesture — every human thought — since the dawn of time. We’ll have been erased from existence. I guarantee you something: it’ll be one hell of a shooting match, even if the outcome isn’t really in doubt. But you know what? We won’t be around to see one damned moment of it. And that pisses me off more than you can imagine.’
She took another drag on the cigarette. The rats had scampered back into the darkness and slime and the ship felt almost normal again. He appeared to have forgiven her that one indiscretion.
She continued, ‘The machines haven’t paid us much attention yet. But my guess is they’ll get around to it eventually. And do you want my theory as to why we haven’t been attacked so far? It might be that they just don’t see us yet; that their senses are attuned to signs of life on a much larger scale than just a single ship. It could also be that there’s no need to worry about us; that it would be a waste of effort to go to the trouble of wiping us out individually when what they’re working on will do the job just as effectively. I suspect that’s how they think, Captain. On a much larger, slower scale than we’re used to. Why go to the trouble of squashing a single fly when you’re about to exterminate the entire species? And if we’re going to do something about them,
we have to start thinking a little bit like them. We need the cache, Captain.’
The room shuddered; the display illumination and the surrounding lights failed. Volyova looked at her bracelet, unsurprised to see that the ship was in the process of going catatonic again. Servitors were shutting down on all levels, abandoning whatever tasks they had been assigned. Even some of her bilge pumps were dying; she could hear the subtle change in the background note as units dropped out of the chorus. Warrens of shipboard corridor would be plunged into darkness. Elevators would not be guaranteed to arrive. Life was about to get harder again, and for a few days — perhaps a few weeks — merely surviving aboard the ship would require most of her energies.
‘Captain… ’ she said softly, doubtful that anything was now listening. ‘Captain, you have to understand: I’m not going to go away. And nor are they.’
Alone, standing in darkness, Volyova smoked what remained of her cigarette then, when she was done, she pulled out her torch, flicked it on and left the bridge.
The Triumvir was busy. She had much work to do.
Remontoire stood on the adhesive skin of Skade’s comet, waving at an approaching spacecraft.
It came in hesitantly, nosing towards the dark surface with evident suspicion. It was a small ship, only slightly larger than the corvette that had brought them here in the first place. Globular turrets bulged from its hull, swivelling this way and that. Remontoire blinked against the red glare of a targeting laser, then the beam passed, doodling patterns on the ground, surveying it for booby-traps.
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