‘My memory says they rescued one hundred and sixty thousand people,’ Clavain said. ‘Is that shockingly wide of the mark?’
‘No, it’s about right. Which sounds pretty impressive until you realise that we didn’t manage to save forty thousand others…’
‘We were the thing that went wrong, weren’t we? If we hadn’t intervened…’
‘No, Clavain.’ Her voice was admonitionary, as if he was an old man who had committed some awful faux pas in polite company. ‘No. You mustn’t think like that. Look, it was like this, understand?’ They were close enough for Conjoined thought. She piped images into his head, pictures from the death of Resurgam. He saw the last hours as the wolf machine — that was what they were now all calling the Inhibitor weapon — bored its gravitation sinkhole into the very heart of the star, stabbing an invisible curette deep into the nuclear-burning core. The tunnel that it had opened was exceedingly narrow, no more than a few kilometres wide at its deepest point — and though the star was being drained of blood, the process was no uncontrolled haemorrhage. Instead the fusing matter in the nuclear-burning core was allowed to squirt out in a fine jetting arc, a column of expanding, cooling hellfire that speared from the star’s surface at half the speed of light. Constrained and guided by pulses of the same gravitational energy that had cored the star in the first place, the spike was bent in a lazy parabola that caused it to douse against the dayside of Resurgam. By the time it impacted, the starfire flame was a thousand kilometres across. The effect was catastrophic and practically instantaneous. The atmosphere was boiled away in a searing flash, the icecaps and the few areas of open water following instants later. Arid and airless, the crust under the beam became molten, the spike gouging a cherry-red scar across the face of the planet. Hundreds of vertical kilometres of the planet’s surface were incinerated, gouting into space in a hot cloud of boiled rock. Shockwaves from the initial impact reached around the world and destroyed all life on the nightside: every human being, every organism that humans had brought to Resurgam. And yet they would have died soon enough without that Shockwave. Within hours, the nightside had turned to face the sun. The spike continued to boil, the well of the energy at the heart of the star barely tapped. Resurgam’s crust burned away, and still the beam continued to chew into the planet’s mantle.
It took three weeks to reduce the planet to a smoking red-hot cinder, four-fifths of its previous size. Then the beam flicked to another target, another world, and began the same murderous sweep. The depletion of matter from the star’s heart would eventually bleed Delta Pavonis down to a cool husk of itself, until so much matter had been removed that fusion came to an abrupt halt. It had not happened yet, Fetka said — at least not according to the light-signals that were catching up with them from the system — but when it did, it stood every chance of being a violent event.
‘So you see,’ Felka said, ‘we were actually lucky to rescue as many as we did. It wasn’t our fault that more died. We just did what was right under the circumstances. There’s no sense feeling guilty about it. If we hadn’t shown up, a thousand other things could have gone wrong. Skade’s fleet would still have arrived, and she wouldn’t have been any more inclined to negotiate than you were.’
Clavain remembered the vile flash of a dying starship, and remembered also the ultimate death of Galiana that he had sanctioned with the decision to destroy Nightshade. Even now the thought of that was painful.
‘Skade died, didn’t she? I killed her, in interstellar space. The other elements of her fleet were acting autonomously, even when we engaged them.’
‘Everything was autonomous,’ Felka said, with curious evasion.
Clavain watched a macaw orbit from tree to tree. ‘I don’t mind being consulted on strategic matters, but I’m not seeking a position of authority on this ship. It isn’t mine, for a start, no matter what Volyova might have thought. I’m too old to take command. And besides, what would the ship need with me anyway? It already has its own Captain.’
Felka’s voice was low. ‘So you remember the Captain?’
‘I remember what Volyova told us. I don’t remember ever talking with the Captain himself. Is he still running things, the way she said he would?’
Her voice remained guarded. ‘Depends what you mean by running things. His infrastructure is still intact, but there’s been no sign of him as a conscious entity since we left Delta Pavonis.’
‘Then the Captain’s dead, is that it?’
‘No, that can’t be it either. He had fingers in too many aspects of routine shipwide functioning, so Volyova said. When he used to go into one of his catatonic states, it was like pulling the plug on the entire ship. That hasn’t happened. The ship’s still taking care of itself, keeping itself ticking over, indulging in self-repair and the occasional upgrade.’
Clavain nodded. ‘Then it’s as if the Captain’s still functioning on an involuntary level, but there’s no sentience there any more? Like a patient who still has enough brain function to breathe, but not much else?’
‘That’s our best guess. But we can’t be totally sure. Sometimes there are little glimmers of intelligence, things that the ship does to itself without asking anyone. Flashes of creativity. It’s more as if the Captain’s still there, but buried more deeply than was ever the case before.’
‘Or perhaps he just left behind a ghost of himself,’ Clavain said. ‘A mindless shell, pottering through the same behavioural patterns.’
‘Whatever it was, he redeemed himself,’ Felka said. ‘He did something terrible, but in the end he also saved one hundred and sixty thousand lives.’
‘So did Lyle Merrick,’ Clavain said, remembering for the first time since he had awakened the secret within Antoinette’s ship and the necessary sacrifice the man had made. ‘Two redemptions for the price of one? I suppose it’s a start.’ Clavain picked at a stray splinter of wood that had embedded itself in his palm, torn from the very edge of the tree stump. ‘So what did happen, Felka? Why have I been awakened when everyone knew it might kill me?’
‘I’ll show you,’ she said. She looked in the direction of the waterfall. Startled, for he had been certain that they were alone, Clavain saw a figure standing on the very edge of the lake immediately before the waterfall. The mist ebbed and swirled around the figure’s extremities.
But he recognised her.
‘Skade,’ he said.
‘Clavain,’ she answered. But she did not step closer. Her voice had been hollow, the acoustics all wrong for the environment. Clavain realised, with a jolt of irritation at how easily he had been fooled, that he was being addressed by a simulation.
‘She’s a beta-level, isn’t she,’ he said, talking only to Felka. ‘The Master of Works would have retained a good enough working memory of Skade to put a beta-level aboard any of the other ships.’
‘She’s a beta-level, yes,’ Felka said. ‘But that isn’t how it happened. Is it, Skade?’
The figure was crested and armoured. It nodded. ‘This beta-level is a recent version, Clavain. My physical counterpart transmitted it to you during the engagement.’
‘Sorry,’ Clavain said, shaking his head, ‘my memory may not be what it was, but I remember killing your counterpart. I destroyed Nightshade shortly after I rescued Felka.’
‘That’s what you remember. It’s almost what happened, too.’
‘You can’t have survived, Skade.’ He said it with numb insistence, despite the evidence of his eyes.
I saved my head, Clavain. I feared that you would destroy Nightshade once I gave you back Felka, even though I didn’t think you would have the courage to do it when you knew I had Galiana aboard…‘ She smiled, her expression strangely close to admiration. ’I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? You were a far more ruthless adversary than I had ever imagined, even after you did this to me.‘
‘You had Galiana’s body, not Galiana.’ Clavain held his voice steady. ‘All I did was give her the peace she should have had when she died
all those years ago.’
‘But you don’t really believe that, do you? You always knew she was not really dead, but merely in a state of deadlock with the Wolf.’
‘That was as good as death.’
‘But there was always the chance the Wolf could be removed, Clavain…’ Her voice became soft. ‘You believed that, too. You believed there was a chance you could have her back one day.’
‘I did what I had to do,’ he said.
‘It was ruthlessness, Clavain. I admire you for it. You’re more of a spider than any of us.’
He stood up from the stump and made his way to the water’s edge until he was only a few metres from Skade. She hovered in the mist, neither fully solid nor fully anchored to the ground. ‘I did what I had to do,’ he repeated. ‘It was all I ever did. It wasn’t ruthlessness, Skade. Ruthlessness implies that I felt no pain when I did it.’
‘And did you?’
Tt was the worst thing I have ever done. I removed her love from the universe.‘
‘I feel sorry for you, Clavain.’
‘How did you survive, Skade?’
She reached up and fingered the curious collar where armour joined flesh. ‘After you left with Felka, I detached my head and placed it inside a small warhead casing. My brain tissue was buffered by interglial medichines to withstand rapid deceleration. The warhead was ejected backwards from Nightshade, back towards the other elements of the fleet. You never noticed because you were concerned only with the prospect of an attack against yourselves. The warhead fell through space silently until it was well beyond your detection sphere. Then it activated a focused homing pulse. One element of the fleet was delegated to change velocity until an intercept was feasible. The warhead was captured and brought aboard the other ship.’ She smiled and closed her eyes. ‘The late Doctor Delmar was aboard another fleet vessel. Unfortunately it happened to be the ship you destroyed. But before his death he was able to finish the cloning of my new body. Neural reintegration was surprisingly easy, Clavain. You should try it one day.’
Clavain almost stumbled on his words. ‘Then… you are whole again?’
‘Yes.’ She said it tartly, as if the subject was a matter for mild regret. ‘Yes. I am whole again now.’
‘Then why do you choose to manifest this way?’
‘As a reminder, Clavain, of what you made of me. I am still out there, you see. My ship survived the engagement. There was damage, yes — just as there was damage to your ship. But I haven’t given up. I want what you have stolen from us.’
He turned back to Felka, who was still watching patiently from her wooden stump. ‘Is this true? Is Skade still out there?’
‘We can’t know for sure,’ she said. ‘All we know is what this beta-level tells us. It could be lying, trying to destabilise us. But in that case Skade must have shown astonishing foresight to create it in the first place.’
‘And the surviving ships?’
‘That’s sort of why we woke you. They are out there. We have fixes on their flames even now.’ And then she told him that the three Conjoiner ships had streaked past at half the speed of light relative to Nostalgia for Infinity, just as the simulations had predicted. Weapons had been deployed, their activation sequences as carefully choreographed as the individual explosions in a fireworks performance. The Conjoiners had used particle beams and heavy relativistic railguns for the most part. Infinity had fired back with lighter versions of the same armaments, while also deploying two of the salvaged cache weapons. Both sides made much use of decoys and feints, and in the most critical phase of the engagement savage accelerations were endured as the ships tried to deviate from predicted flight-paths.
Neither side had been able to claim victory. One Conjoiner ship had been destroyed and damage wrought on the other two, but Clavain considered this almost as close to failure as having inflicted no damage at all. Two enemies were almost as dangerous as three.
And yet the outcome could have been so much worse. Nostalgia for Infinity had sustained some damage, but not enough to prevent it from making it to another solar system. None of the occupants had been hurt and none of the critical systems had been taken out.
‘But we’re not home and dry,’ Felka told him.
Clavain turned from Skade’s image. ‘We’re not?’
‘The two ships that survived? They’re turning around. Slowly but surely, they’re sweeping back around to chase us.’
Clavain let out a laugh. ‘But it’ll take them light-years to make the turn.’
#8216;It wouldn’t if they had inertia-suppression technology. But the machinery must have been damaged during the engagement. That doesn’t mean they can’t repair it again, however.’ She looked at Skade, but the image made no reaction. It was as if she had become a statue poised at the water’s edge, a slightly macabre decorative feature of the glade.
‘If they can, they will,’ Clavain said.
Felka agreed. ‘The Triumvirate ran simulations. Under certain assumptions, we can always outrun the pursuing ships — at least in our reference frame — for as long as you care to specify. We just have to keep crawling closer and closer to the speed of light. But that isn’t much of a solution in my book.’
‘It isn’t in mine either.’
‘Anyway, it doesn’t happen to be practical. We do need to stop to make repairs, and sooner rather than later. That’s why we woke you, Clavain.’
Clavain walked back to the tree stumps. He lowered himself on to his with a crick of leg joints. ‘If there’s a decision to be taken, there must be some choices on the table. Is that the case?’
‘Yes.’
He waited patiently, listening to the soothing white-noise hiss of the waterfall. ‘Well?’
Felka spoke with a reverent hush. ‘We’re a long way out, Clavain. The Resurgam system is nine light-years behind us and there isn’t another settled colony for fifteen light-years in any direction. But there’s a solar system dead ahead of us. Two cool stars. It’s a wide binary, but one of the stars has formed planets in stable orbits. They’re mature, at least three billion years old. There’s one world in the habitable zone that has a couple of small moons. Indications are that it has an oxygen atmosphere and a lot of water. There are even chlorophyll bands in the atmosphere.’
Clavain asked, ‘Human terraforming?’
‘No. There’s no sign of human presence ever having established itself around these stars. Which leaves only one possibility, I think.’
‘The Pattern Jugglers.’
She was evidently pleased that it did not need to be spelled out. ‘We always knew we’d stumble on more Juggler worlds as we moved further out into the galaxy. We shouldn’t be surprised to find one now.’
‘Dead ahead, just like that?’
‘It isn’t dead ahead, but it’s close enough. We can slow down and reach it. If it’s anything like the other Juggler worlds there may even be dry land; enough to take a few settlers.’
‘How many is a few?’
Felka smiled. ‘We won’t know until we get there, will we?’
Clavain made his decision — it was, in truth, little more than a blessing on the obvious choice — and then returned to sleep. There were few medics amongst his crew, and almost none of them had received formal training beyond a few hasty memory uploads. But he trusted them when they said that he could not expect to survive more than one or two further cycles of freezing and thawing.
‘But I’m an old man,’ he told them. ‘If I stay warm, I probably won’t survive that way either.’
‘It’ll have to be your choice,’ they told him, unhelpfully.
He was getting old, that was all. His genes were very antiquated, and though he had been through several rejuvenation programmes since leaving Mars, they had only reset a clock which then proceeded to start ticking again. Back on the Mother Nest they could have given him another half-century of virtual youth, had he wished… but he had never taken that final rejuvenation. The will had never been ther
e after Galiana’s strange return and her even stranger half-death.
He did not even know if he regretted it now. If they had been able to limp to a fully equipped colony world, somewhere that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the Melding Plague, there might have been hope for him. But what difference would it have made? Galiana was still gone. He was still old inside his skull, still seeing the world through eyes that were yellow and weary with four hundred years of war. He had done what he could, and the emotional burden had cost him terribly, and he did not think he had the energy to do it one more time. It was enough that he had not totally failed this time.
And so he submitted to the reefersleep casket for the final time.
Just before he went under, he authorised a tight-beam laser transmission back to the dying Resurgam system. The message was one-time-pad coded for Zodiacal Light If the other ship hadn’t been totally destroyed, there was a chance it would intercept and decode the signal. It would never be seen by the other Conjoiner ships, and even if Skade’s forces had somehow managed to sow receivers through Resurgam space, they would not be able to crack the encryption.
The message was very simple. It told Remontoire, Khouri, Thorn and the others that had gone with them that they were to slow and stop in the Pattern Juggler system; they would wait there for twenty years. That was enough time to allow Zodiacal Light to rendezvous with them; it was also enough time to establish a self-sustaining colony of a few tens of thousands of people, a hedge against any future catastrophe that might befall the ship.
Knowing this, feeling that in some small but significant way he had put his affairs in order, Clavain slept.
He woke to find that Nostalgia for Infinity had changed itself without consulting anyone.
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