‘I don’t feel well either,’ Felka said, squatting down next to him. ‘I feel sick and light-headed.’
The servitor turned around stiffly, animated like a haunted suit of armour. [You’re experiencing the physiological effects of the field. Our inertial mass has dropped to about half its normal value. Your inner ear will be confused by the drop in inertia of the fluid in your semi-circular canal. Your heart will beat faster: it evolved to pump a volume of blood with an inertial mass of five per cent of your body; now it has only half that amount to overcome, and its own cardiac muscle reacts more swiftly to the electrical impulses from your nerves. If we were to go much deeper, your heart would start fibrillating. You would die without mechanical intervention.]
Remontoire grinned at the armoured servitor. Fine for you, then.
[It wouldn’t be comfortable for me, either, I assure you.]
So what does the machine do? Does all the matter within the bubble have zero inertia?
[No, not in the present operating mode. The radial effectiveness of the damping depends on the mode in which we’re running the device. At the moment we’re in an inverse square field, which means that the inertial damping becomes four times more efficient every time we halve our distance to the machine; it becomes near infinite in the immediate proximity of the machine, but the inertial mass never drops to absolute zero. Not in this mode.]
But there are other modes?
[Yes: other states, we call them, but they’re all very much less stable than the present one.] She paused, eyeing Remontoire. [You look ill. Shall we return upship?]
I’ll be fine for now. Tell me more about your magic box.
Skade smiled, as stiffly as usual, but with what looked to Remontoire like pride. [Our first breakthrough was in the opposite direction — creating a region of enhanced quantum vacuum fluctuation, thereby increasing the energy-momentum flux. We call that state one. The effect was a zone of hyper-inertia: a bubble in which all motion ceased. It was unstable, and we never managed to magnify the field to macroscopic scales, but there were fruitful avenues for future research. If we could freeze motion by ramping inertia up by many orders of magnitude we’d have a stasis field, or perhaps an impenetrable defensive barrier. But cooling — state two — turned out to be technically simpler. The pieces almost fell into place.]
I’ll bet they did.
Is there a third state?‘ Felka asked.
[State three is a singularity in our calculations that we don’t expect to be physically realisable. All inertial mass vanishes. All matter in a state-three bubble would become photonic: pure light. We don’t expect that to happen; at the very least it would imply a massive local violation of the law of conservation of quantum spin.]
‘And beyond that — on the other side of the singularity? Is there a state four?’
[Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I think. We’ve explored the properties of the device in a well-understood parameter space, but there’s no point in indulging in wild speculation.]
How much testing, exactly?
[Nightshade was chosen to be the prototype: the first ship to be equipped with inertia-suppression machinery. I ran some tests during the earlier flight, dropping the inertia by a measurable amount — enough to alter our fuel consumption and verify the effectiveness of the field, but not enough to draw attention.]
And now?
[The field is much stronger. The ship’s effective mass is now only twenty per cent of what it was when we left the Mother Nest — there’s a relatively small part of the ship projecting ahead of the field, but we can do better than that simply by increasing the field strength.] Skade clapped her hands together with a creak of armour. [Think of it, Remontoire — we could squeeze our mass down to one per cent, or less — accelerate at a hundred gees. If our bodies were inside the bubble of suppressed inertia we’d be able to withstand it, too. We’d reach near-light cruise speed in a couple of days. Subjective travel between the closest stars in under a week of shiptime. There’d be no need for us to be frozen. Can you imagine the possibilities? The galaxy would suddenly be a much smaller place.]
But that’s not why you developed it. Remontoire climbed to his feet. Still lightheaded, he steadied himself against the wall. It was the closest he had come to intoxication in a great while. This excursion had been interesting enough, but he was now more than ready to return upship, where the blood in his body would behave as nature had intended.
[I’m not sure I understand, Remontoire.]
It was for when the wolves arrive — the same reason you’ve built that evacuation fleet.
[Sorry?]
Even if we can’t fight them, you’ve at least given us a means of running away very, very quickly.
Clavain opened his eyes from another bout of forced sleep. Cool dreams of walking through Scottish forests in the rain seduced him for a few dangerous moments. It was so tempting to return to unconsciousness, but then old soldierly instincts forced him to snap into grudging alertness. There had to be a problem. He had instructed the corvette not to wake him until it had something useful or ominous to report, and a quick appraisal of the situation revealed that this was most emphatically the latter.
Something was following him. Details were available on request.
Clavain yawned and scratched at the now generous growth of beard that he sported. He caught a glimpse of himself in the cabin window and registered mild alarm at what he saw. He looked wild-eyed and maniacal, as if he had just stumbled from the depths of a cave. He ordered the corvette to stop accelerating for a few minutes, then gathered some water into his hands from the faucet, cupping the amoeba-like droplets between his palms, and then endeavoured to splash them over his face and hair, slicking and taming hair and beard. He glanced at his reflection again. The result was not a great improvement, but at least he no longer looked feral.
Clavain unharnessed himself and set about preparing coffee and something to eat. It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely. This, on the basis of the evidence, looked like the kind which could be contemplated after first sating his appetite.
He filled the cabin with music: one of Quirrenbach’s unfinished symphonies. He sipped the coffee, leafing through the corvette’s status log entries while he did so. He was pleased but not surprised to see that the ship had operated flawlessly ever since his departure from Skade’s comet. There was still adequate fuel to carry him all the way to circum-Yellowstone space, including the appropriate orbital insertion procedures once he arrived. The corvette was not the problem.
Transmissions had been received from the Mother Nest as soon as his departure had become evident. They had been tight-beamed on to him, maximally encrypted. The corvette had unpacked the messages and stored them in time-sequence.
Clavain bit into a slice of toast. ‘Play ’em. Oldest first. Then erase immediately.‘
He could have guessed what the first few messages would be like: frantic requests from the Mother Nest for him to turn around and come home. The first few gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming — or pretending to assume — that he had some excellent justification for what looked like a defection attempt. But they had been half-hearted. Then the messages gave up on that tack and simply started threatening him.
Missiles had been launched from the Mother Nest. He had turned off his course and lost them. He had assumed that would be the end of it. A corvette was fast. There was nothing else that could catch him, unless he turned to interstellar space.
But the next set of messages did not emanate from the Mother Nest at all. They came from a tiny but measurable angle away from its position, a few arc-seconds, and they were steadily blue-shifted, as if originating from a moving source.
He calculated the rate of acceleration: one point five gees. He ran the numbers through his tactical simul
ator. It was as he’d expected: no ship with that rate of acceleration could catch him in local space. For a few minutes he allowed himself to feel relief while still pondering the point of the pursuer. Was it merely a psychological gesture? It seemed unlikely. Conjoiners were not greatly enamoured of gestures.
‘Open the messages,’ he said.
The format was audio-visual. Skade’s head popped into the cabin, surrounded by an oval of blurred background. The communication was verbal; she knew that he would never allow her to insert anything into his head again.
‘Hello, Clavain,’ she said. ‘Please listen and pay attention. As you may have gathered, we are pursuing you with Nightshade. You will assume that we cannot catch you, or come within missile or beam-weapon range. These assumptions are incorrect. We are accelerating and will continue to increase our acceleration at regular intervals. Study the Doppler shift of these transmissions carefully if you doubt me.’
The disembodied head froze; vanished.
He scanned the next message originating from the same source. Its header indicated that it had been transmitted ninety minutes after the first. The implied acceleration was now two point five gees.
‘Clavain. Surrender now and I guarantee you a fair hearing. You cannot win.’
The transmission quality was poor: the acoustics of her voice were strange and mechanical, and whatever compression algorithm she had used had made her head seem fixed and immobile, only her mouth and eyes moving.
Next message: three gees.
‘We have redetected your exhaust signature, Clavain. The temperature and blue shift of your flame indicates that you are accelerating at your operational limit. I want you to appreciate that we are nowhere near ours. This is not the ship you knew, Clavain, but something faster and more deadly. It is fully capable of intercepting you.’
The masklike face contorted into a stiff ghoulish smile. ‘But there is still time for negotiation. I’ll let you pick a place of rendezvous, Clavain. Just say the word and we’ll meet on your terms. A minor planet, a comet, open space — it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’
He killed the message. He was certain that Skade was bluffing about having detected his flame. The last part of the message, the invitation to reply, was just her attempt to get him to betray his position by transmitting.
‘Sly, Skade,’ he said. ‘But unfortunately I’m a hell of a lot more sly.’
But it still worried him. She was accelerating too hard, and although the blue shift could have been faked, applied to the message before it was transmitted, he sensed that in that respect at least there had been no bluff.
She was coming after him with a much faster ship than he had assumed available, and she was gaining ground by the second.
Clavain bit into his toast and listened to the Quirrenbach a bit longer.
‘Play the rest,’ he said.
‘You have no more messages,’ the corvette told him.
Clavain was studying newsfeeds when the corvette announced receipt of a new batch of messages. He examined the accompanying information, noting that there was nothing from Skade this time.
‘Play them,’ he said cautiously.
The first message was from Remontoire. His head appeared, bald and cherubic. He was more animated than Skade, and there was a good deal more emotion in his voice. He leant towards the lens, his eyes beseeching.
‘Clavain. I’m hoping you’ll hear this and give it some thought. If you’ve listened to Skade then you’ll know that we can catch you up. This isn’t a trick. She’ll kill me for what I’m about to say, but if I know you at all you’ll have arranged for these messages to be wiped as soon as you play them, so there’s no real danger of this information reaching enemy hands. So here it is. There’s experimental machinery on Nightshade. You knew Skade was testing something, but not what. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a machine for suppressing inertial mass. I don’t pretend to understand how it works, but I’ve seen the evidence that it does with my own eyes. Felt it, even. We’ve ramped up to four gees now, though you’ll be able to confirm that independently. Before very long you’ll have parallactic confirmation from the origin of these signals, if you weren’t already convinced. All I’m saying is it’s real, and according to Skade it can keep suppressing more and more of our mass.’ He looked hard into the camera, paused and then continued, ‘We can read your drive flame. We’re homing in on it. You can’t escape, Clavain, so stop running. As a friend, I beg you to stop running. I want to see you again, to talk and laugh with you.’
‘Skip to next message,’ he said, interrupting.
The corvette obliged; Felka’s image replaced Remontoire’s. Clavain experienced a jolt of surprise. The matter of who would pursue him had never been entirely settled in his mind, but he could have counted on Skade: she would make sure she was there when the killing missile was launched, and she would do all in her power to be the one to give the order. Remontoire would come along out of a sense of duty to the Mother Nest, emboldened by the conviction that he was executing a solemn task and that only he was truly qualified to hunt Clavain.
But Felka? He had not expected to see Felka at all.
‘Clavain,’ she said, her voice revealing the strain of talking under four gees. ‘Clavain… please. They’re going to kill you. Skade won’t go to any great trouble to arrange a live capture, no matter what she says. She wants to confront you, to rub your nose in what you’ve done…’
‘What I’ve done?’ he said to her recording.
‘… and while she’ll capture you if she can, I don’t think she’ll keep you alive for long. But if you turn around and surrender, and let the Mother Nest know what you’re doing, I think there might be a hope. Are you listening, Clavain?’ She reached out and traced shapes across the lens between them, exactly as if she were mapping his face, relearning its shape for the thousandth time. I want you to come home safe and sound, that’s all. I don’t even disagree with what you’ve done. I have my doubts about a lot of things, Clavain, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have…‘
She lost whatever thread she was following, staring into infinity before refocusing. ‘Clavain… there’s something I have to tell you, something that I think might make a difference. I’ve never spoken of this to you before, but now I think the time is right. Am I being cynical? Yes, avowedly. I’m doing this because I think it might persuade you to turn back; no other reason than that. I hope you can forgive me.’
Clavain clicked a finger at the corvette’s wall, making it drop the volume of the music. For a heartbreaking moment there was near silence, Felka’s face hovering before him. Then she spoke again.
‘It was on Mars, Clavain, when you were Galiana’s prisoner for the first time. She kept you there for months and then released you. You must remember what it was like back then.’
He nodded. Of course he remembered. What difference did four hundred years make?
‘Galiana’s nest was hemmed in from all sides. But she wouldn’t give up. She had plans for the future, big plans, the kind that involved expanding the numbers of her disciples. But the nest lacked genetic diversity. Whenever new DNA came her way, she seized it. You and Galiana never made love on Mars, Clavain, but it was easy enough for her to obtain a cell scraping without your knowledge.’
‘And?’ he whispered.
Felka’s message continued seamlessly. ‘After you’d gone back to your side, she combined your DNA with her own, splicing the two samples together. Then she created me from the same genetic information. I was born in an artificial womb, Clavain, but I am still Galiana’s daughter. And still your daughter, too.’
‘Skip to next message,’ he said, before she could say another word. It was too much; too intense. He could not process the information in one go, even though she was only telling him what he had always suspected — prayed — was the case.
But there were no other messages.
Fearfully, Clavain asked the corvette to spool back and replay Felka’s transmission. B
ut he had been much too thorough: the ship had dutifully erased the message, and now all that remained was what he carried in his memory.
He sat in silence. He was far from home, far from his friends, embarked on something that even he was not sure he believed in. It was entirely likely that he would die soon, uncommemorated except as a traitor. Even the enemy would not do him the dignity of remembering him with any more affection than that. And now this: a message that had reached across space to claw at his feelings. When he had said goodbye to Felka he had managed a singular piece of self-deception, convincing himself that he no longer thought of her as his daughter. He had believed it, too, for the time it took to leave the Nest.
But now she was telling him that he had been right all along. And that if he did not turn around he would never see her again.
But he could not turn around.
Clavain wept. There was nothing else to do.
CHAPTER 16
Thorn took his first tentative steps aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. He looked around with frantic, wide-eyed intent, desperate not to miss a single detail or nuance of detail that might betray deception or even the tiniest hint that things were not completely as claimed. He was afraid to blink. What if some vital slip that would have exposed the whole thing as a facade happened when he had his eyes closed? What if the two of them were waiting for him to blink, like conjurors playing with an audience’s attention?
Yet there appeared to be no deception here. Even if the trip in the shuttle had not convinced him of that fact — and it was difficult to imagine how that could have been faked — the supreme evidence was here.
He had travelled through space. He was no longer on Resurgam, but inside a colossal spacecraft: the Triumvir’s long-lost lighthugger. Even the gravity felt different.
‘You couldn’t have made this…’ he said, as he walked alongside his two companions. ‘Not in a hundred years. Not unless you were Ultras to begin with. And then why would you need to fake it anyway?’
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