‘What happened here?’ Clavain asked.
‘A fucking idiot called Lyle Merrick,’ Antoinette said.
Xavier took over the story. ‘That’s Merrick’s ship, or what’s left of it. Thing was a chemical-rocket scow, about the most primitive ship still making a living in the Rust Belt. Merrick stayed in business because he had the right clients — people the authorities would never, ever suspect of trusting their cargo to such a shit-heap. But Merrick got into trouble one day.’
‘It was about sixteen, seventeen years ago,’ Antoinette said. ‘The authorities were chasing him, trying to force him to let them board and inspect his cargo. Merrick was trying to get under cover — there was a repair well on the far side of the carousel that could just accommodate his ship. But he didn’t make it. Fluffed his approach, or lost control, or just bottled out. Stupid twat rammed straight into the rim.’
‘You’re only looking at a small part of his ship,’ Xavier said. ‘The rest of it, trailing behind, was mostly fuel tank. Even with foam-phase catalysis you need a lot of fuel for a chemical rocket. When the front hit, she went clean through the carousel’s rim, deforming it with the force of the impact. Lyle made it, but the fuel tanks blew up. There’s one hell of a crater out there, even now.’
‘Casualties?’ Clavain asked.
‘A few,’ Xavier said.
‘More than a few,’ said Antoinette. ‘A few hundred.’
They told him that suited hyperprimates had sealed the rim, with only a few deaths amongst the emergency team. The animals had done such a good job of sealing the gap between the shuttle and the rim wall that it had been decided that the safest thing to do was to leave the remains of the ship exactly where they were. Expensive designers had been called in to give the rest of the plaza a sympathetic face-lift.
‘They call it “echoing the ship’s brutalist intrusion”,’ Antoinette said.
‘Yeah,’ said Xavier. ‘Or else, “commenting on the accident in a series of ironic architectural gestures, while retaining the urgent spatial primacy of the transformative act itself”.’
‘Bunch of overpaid wankers is what I call them,’ Antoinette said.
‘It was your idea to come here in the first place,’ Xavier responded.
There was a bar built into the nose cone of the ruined ship. Clavain tactfully suggested that they situate themselves as unobtrusively as possible. They found a table in one corner, next to a cavernous tank of bubbling water. Squid floated in the water, their conic bodies flickering with commercials.
A gibbon brought beers. They attacked them with enthusiasm, even Clavain, who had no particular taste for alcohol. But the drink was cold and refreshing and he would have gladly drunk anything in the current spirit of celebration. He just hoped he would not spoil things by revealing how gloomy he really felt.
‘So, Clavain…’ Antoinette said. ‘Are you going to tell us what this is all about, or are you just going to leave us wondering?’
‘You know who I am,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She glanced at Xavier. ‘We think so. You didn’t deny it before.’
‘You know that I defected once already, in that case.’
‘A way back,’ Antoinette said.
Clavain noticed that she was peeling the label from her beer bottle with great care. ‘Sometimes it seems like only yesterday. But it was four hundred years ago, give or take the odd decade. For most of that time I have been more than willing to serve my people. Defecting certainly isn’t something I take lightly.’
‘So why the big change of heart?’ she asked.
‘Something very bad is going to happen. I can’t say what exactly — I don’t know the full story — but I know enough to say that there’s a threat, an external threat, which is going to pose a great danger to all of us. Not just Conjoiners, not just Demarchists, but all of us. Ultras. Skyjacks. Even you.’
Xavier glared into his beer. ‘And on that cheering note…’
‘I didn’t mean to spoil things. That’s just the way it is. There’s a threat, and we’re all in trouble, and I wish it were otherwise.’
‘What kind of threat?’ Antoinette asked.
‘If what I learned was correct, then it’s alien. For some time now, we — the Conjoiners, rather — have known that there are hostile entities out there. I mean actively hostile, not just occasionally dangerous and unpredictable, like the Pattern Jugglers or Shrouders. And I mean extant, in the sense that they’ve posed a real threat to some of our expeditions. We call them the wolves. We think that they’re machines, and that somehow we’ve only now begun to trigger a response from them.’ Clavain paused, certain now that he had the attention of his young hosts. He was not overly concerned about revealing what were technically Conjoiner secrets; in a very short while he hoped to be saying exactly the same things to the Demarchist authorities. The quicker the news was spread, the better.
‘And these machines…?’ Antoinette said. ‘How long have you known about them?’
‘Long enough. For decades we were aware of the wolves, but it seemed they wouldn’t cause us any local difficulties provided that we took certain precautions. That’s why we stopped building starships. They were luring the wolves to us, like beacons. Only now we’ve found a way to make our ships quieter. There’s a faction in the Mother Nest, led — or influenced, at the very least — by Skade.’
‘You’ve mentioned that name already,’ Xavier said.
‘Skade’s chasing me down. She doesn’t want me to reach the authorities because she knows how dangerous the information I hold is.’
‘And this faction, what have they been doing?’
‘Building an exodus fleet,’ Clavain told Antoinette. ‘I’ve seen it. It’s easily large enough to carry all the Conjoiners in this system. They’re planning on evacuating, basically. They’ve determined that a full-scale wolf attack is imminent — that’s my guess, anyway — and they’ve decided that the best thing they can do is run away.’
‘What’s so abhorrent about that?’ Xavier asked. ‘We’d do the same thing if it meant saving our skins.’
‘Perhaps,’ Clavain said, feeling a weird admiration for the young man’s cynicism. ‘But there’s an added complication. Some time ago the Conjoiners manufactured a stockpile of doomsday weapons. And I mean doomsday weapons — nothing like them has ever been made again. They were lost, but now they’ve been found again. The Conjoiners are trying to get their hands on them, hoping that they’ll be an additional safeguard against the wolves.’
‘Where are they?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Near Resurgam, in the Delta Pavonis system. About twenty years’ flight time from here. Someone — whoever now owns the weapons — has re-armed them, causing them to emit diagnostic signals that we picked up. That’s worrying in itself. The Mother Nest was putting together a recovery squad which they, not unnaturally, wanted me to lead.’
‘Wait a sec,’ Xavier said. ‘You’d go all the way there just to pick up a bunch of lost weapons? Why not make new ones?’
‘The Conjoiners can’t,’ Clavain said. ‘It’s as simple as that. These weapons were made a long time ago according to principles which were deliberately forgotten after their construction.’
‘Sounds a bit fishy to me.’
I never said I had all the answers,‘ Clavain replied.
‘All right. Assuming these weapons exist… what next?’
Clavain leaned closer, cradling his beer. ‘My old side will still do their best to recover them, even without me. My purpose in defecting is to persuade the Demarchists or whoever will listen that they need to get there first.’
Xavier glanced at Antoinette. ‘So you need someone with a ship, and maybe some weapons. Why didn’t you just go straight to the Ultras?’
Clavain smiled wearily. ‘It’s Ultras we’ll be trying to take the weapons from, Xavier. I don’t want to make things more difficult than they already are.’
‘Good luck,’ Xavier said.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re going to need it.’
Clavain nodded and held his bottle aloft. ‘To me, in that case.’
Antoinette and Xavier raised their own bottles in toast. ‘To you, Clavain.’
Clavain said goodbye to them outside the bar, asking only that they give him directions as to which rim train to take. There had been no customs checks coming into Carousel New Copenhagen, but according to Antoinette he would have to pass through a security check if he wanted to travel elsewhere in the Rust Belt. That suited him very well; he could think of no better way to introduce himself to the authorities. He would be examined, trawled, his Conjoiner identity established. A few more tests would prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was indeed who he claimed to be, since his largely unmodified DNA would mark him as a man born on Earth in the twenty-second century. From that point he had no real idea what would happen. He hoped that the response would not be his immediate execution, but it was not something he could rule out. He just hoped he would be able to convey the gist of his message before it was too late.
Antoinette and Xavier showed him which rim train to take and made sure he had enough money to cover the fare. He waved goodbye as the train slid out of the station, the battered ruin of Lyle Merrick’s ship vanishing around the gentle curve of the carousel.
Clavain closed his eyes, willing his consciousness rate into a three-to-one ratio, snatching a few moments of calm before he arrived at his destination.
CHAPTER 20
Thorn had been ready to argue with Vuilleumier, but she had agreed to his wishes with surprising ease. It was not that she viewed the prospect of diving into the heart of the Inhibitor activity around Roc with anything less than deep concern, she told him, but that she wanted him to believe that she was totally sincere about the threat. If the only way to convince him of that was to let him see things in close-up, then she would have to go along with his wishes.
‘But make no mistake, Thorn. This is dangerous. We’re in uncharted territory now.’
‘I’d say we were never exactly safe, Inquisitor. We could have been attacked at any moment. We’ve certainly been within range of human weapons for the last few hours, haven’t we?’
The snake-headed ship plunged towards the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere. The trajectory would take them close to the impact point of one of the extruded tubes, only a thousand kilometres from the roiling chaos of tortured air around the eyelike collision zone. Their sensors could not glimpse anything beneath that confusion, only the vaguest suggestion that the tube continued to plunge deeper into Roc, unharmed by the impact.
‘We’re dealing with alien machinery, Thorn. Alien machine psychology, if you want. It’s true that they haven’t attacked us yet, or shown the slightest interest in any of our activities. They haven’t even bothered wiping life off the surface of Resurgam. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a threshold we might inadvertently cross if we’re not very careful.’
‘And you think this might constitute being not very careful?’
‘It worries me, but if this is what it takes…’
‘It’s about more than just convincing me, Inquisitor.’
‘Do you have to keep calling me that?’
‘I’m sorry?’
She made an adjustment to the controls. Thorn heard an orchestrated creaking as the ship’s hull reshaped itself for optimum transatmospheric insertion. The gas giant Roc was about all they could see outside now. ‘You don’t have to call me that all the time.’
‘Vuilleumier, then?’
‘My first name is Ana. I’m a lot more comfortable with that, Thorn. Perhaps I shouldn’t call you Thorn, either.’
‘Thorn will do. It’s a name I’ve grown into. It seems to fit me rather well. And I wouldn’t want to help Inquisition House in its investigations too much, would I?’
‘We know exactly who you are. You’ve seen the dossier.’
‘Yes. But I have the distinct impression you’d be less than eager to use it against me, wouldn’t you?’
‘You’re useful to us.’
That’s not quite what I meant.‘
They continued their descent into Roc without speaking for several minutes. Only the occasional chirp or spoken warning from the console interrupted the silence. The ship was not at all enthusiastic about what was being asked of it, and kept offering suggestions as to what it would rather be doing.
‘I think we’re like insects to them,’ Vuilleumier said eventually. ‘They’ve come here to wipe us out, like pest-control specialists. They’re not going to bother killing one or two of us — they know it won’t make enough of a difference to matter. Even if we sting them, I’m not sure we’d provoke the response we were expecting. They’ll just keep on doing their work, slowly and methodically, knowing that it will be more than sufficient in the long run.’
‘Then we’re safe now, is that it?’
‘It’s just a theory, Thorn — it isn’t something I particularly want to bet my life on. But it’s clear that we don’t understand all that they’re doing. There has to be a higher purpose to their activity. There has to be a reason for it; it can’t simply be the annihilation of life for its own sake. Even if it was, even if they were nothing more than mindless killing machines, there’d be more efficient ways of doing it.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘Only that we shouldn’t count on our understanding of events to be correct, any more than an insect understands about pest-control programmes.’ With that, she clenched her jaw and palmed a control. ‘All right. Hold on. This is where it gets a little bumpy.’
A pair of armoured eyelids snicked down over the windows, blocking the view. Almost immediately Thorn felt the ship rumble, the way a car did when it left a smooth road and hit dirt. He had weight, too — it was the tiniest pressure squeezing him back into his seat, but it would keep growing and growing.
‘Who are you exactly, Ana?’
‘You know who I am. We’ve been over that.’
‘Not to my entire satisfaction, we haven’t. There’s something funny about that ship, isn’t there? I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but the whole time I was aboard it, I had the feeling you and the other woman, Irina, were holding your breath. It was as if you couldn’t wait to get me off it.’
‘You have urgent work to do on Resurgam. Irina didn’t agree with you coming aboard in the first place. She’d much rather you stayed on the planet, putting in the groundwork for the evacuation operation.’
‘A few days won’t make much difference. No, that definitely wasn’t it. There was something else. You two were hiding something, or hoping I wouldn’t notice something. I just can’t work out exactly what it was.’
‘You have to trust us, Thorn.’
‘You make it difficult, Ana.’
‘What else could we do? We showed you the ship, didn’t we? You saw that it was real. It has enough capacity to evacuate the planet. We even showed you the shuttle hangar.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it’s everything that you didn’t show me that makes me wonder.’
The rumbling had increased. The ship felt as if it was tobogganning down an ice-slope, hitting the occasional buried rock. The hull creaked and reshaped itself again and again, struggling to smooth out the transition. Thorn found himself excited and terrified at the same time. He had entered a planet’s atmosphere only once before in his life, when his parents had brought him as a child to Resurgam. He had been frozen and unconscious at the time, and had no more recollection of it than he did of his birth in Chasm City.
‘We didn’t show you everything because we don’t know that the whole of the ship is safe,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘We don’t know what sorts of traps Volyova’s crew left behind.’
‘You didn’t even let me see it from outside, Ana.’
‘It wasn’t convenient. Our approach—’
‘Had nothing to do with it. There’s something about that ship that you can’t let me
see, isn’t there?’
‘Why are you asking me this now, Thorn?’
He smiled. ‘I thought the gravity of the situation would focus your attention.’
She said nothing.
Presently, the ride became smoother. The airframe creaked and reshaped one last time. Vuilleumier waited another few minutes and then raised the armoured eyelids. Thorn blinked against the sudden intrusion of daylight. They were inside the atmosphere of Roc.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked. ‘Your weight has doubled since we were aboard the ship.’
‘I’ll manage.’ He was fine provided he did not have to move around. ‘How deep did you take us?’
‘Not far. Pressure’s about half an atmosphere. Wait…’ At that moment she frowned at something on one of her displays, tapping controls below it so that the image shifted through pastel-coloured bands. Thorn saw a simplified silhouette of the ship they were in, surrounded by pulsing, concentric circles. He suspected it was some form of radar, and saw a small smudge of light wink in and out of existence on the limit of the display. She tapped another control and the concentric circles tightened, bringing the smudge closer. Now it was there, now it was gone, now it was there again.
‘What’s that?’ Thorn asked.
‘I don’t know. Passive radar says there’s something following us, about thirty thousand klicks astern. I didn’t see anything on our approach. It’s small and it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, but I don’t like it.’
‘Could it be a mistake, an error that the ship’s making?’
‘I’m not sure. I suppose the radar might be confused, picking up a false return from our wake vortex. I could switch to a focused active sweep, but I really don’t want to provoke anything I don’t have to. I suggest we get away from here while we still can. I’m a firm believer in listening to warnings.’
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