‘Because if you’d had any idea what I had in mind, you’d have had all the more time to talk me out of it.’
‘One sees.’
‘Don’t sound hurt about it. I was just being pragmatic.’
‘As you wish, Little Miss.’ Beast paused just long enough to make her feel guilty and hurtful. ‘One has located the routines. One respectfully points out that they were last used sixty-three years ago, and that there have been a number of changes to the hull profile since then which may limit the efficacy of ...’
‘Fine. I’m sure you’ll improvise.’
But it was no simple thing to persuade a ship of vacuum to skim an atmosphere, even the upper atmospheric layer of a gas giant - even a ship as generously armoured and rounded as hers. At best, Storm Bird would come through this with some heavy hull damage that would still allow her to limp home to the Rust Belt. At worst, the ship would never see open space again.
And nor, in all likelihood, would Antoinette.
Well, she thought, at least there was one consolation: if she trashed the ship, she would never have to break the bad news to Xavier.
So much for small mercies.
There was a muted chime from the panel.
‘Beast ...’ Antoinette said, ‘was that what I thought it was?’
‘Very possibly, Little Miss. Radar contact, eighteen thousand klicks distant, three degrees off dead ahead; two degrees off ecliptic north.’
‘Fuck. Are you certain it isn’t a beacon or weapons platform?’
‘Too large to be either, Little Miss.’
She did not need to do any mental arithmetic to work out what that meant. There was another ship between them and the top of the gas giant; another ship close to the atmosphere.
‘What can you tell me about it?’
‘It’s moving slowly, Little Miss, on a direct course for the atmosphere. Looks rather as if it’s planning to execute a similar manoeuvre to the one you have in mind, although they’re moving several klicks per second faster and their approach angle is considerably steeper.’
‘Sounds like a zombie - you don’t think it is, do you?’ she said quickly, hoping to convince herself otherwise.
‘No need to speculate, Little Miss. The ship has just locked a tight-beam on to us. The message protocol is indeed Demarchist.’
‘Why the fuck are they bothering to tight-beam us?’
‘One respectfully suggests you find out.’
A tight-beam was a needlessly finicky means of communication when two ships were so close. A simple radio broadcast would have worked just as well, removing the need for the zombie ship to point its message laser exactly at the moving target of Storm Bird.
‘Acknowledge whoever it is,’ she ordered. ‘Can we tight-beam them back?’
‘Not without redeploying something one just went to rather a lot of trouble to retract, Little Miss.’
‘Then do it, but don’t forget to haul it back in afterwards.’
She heard the machinery push one of the spines back into vacuum. There was a rapid chirp of message protocols between the two ships and then suddenly Antoinette was looking at the face of another woman. She looked, if such a thing were possible, more tired, drawn and edgy than Antoinette felt.
‘Hello,’ Antoinette said. ‘Can you see me as well?’
The woman’s nod was barely perceptible. Her tight-lipped face suggested vast reserves of pent-up fury, like water straining behind a dam. ‘Yes. I can see you.’
‘I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone out here,’ Antoinette offered. ‘I thought it might not be a bad idea to respond by tight-beam as well.’
‘You may as well not have bothered.’
‘Not have bothered?’ Antoinette echoed.
‘Not after your radar already illuminated us.’ The woman’s shaven scalp gleamed blue as she looked down at something. She did not appear to be very much older than Antoinette, but with zombies you could never be sure.
‘Um ... and that’s a problem, is it?’
‘It is when we’re trying to hide from something. I don’t know why you’re out here, and frankly I don’t much care. I suggest that you abort whatever you’re planning. The Jovian is a Contested Volume, which means that I’d be fully within my rights to blast you out of the sky right now.’
‘I don’t have a problem with zom ... with Demarchists,’ Antoinette said.
‘I’m delighted to hear it. Now turn around.’
Antoinette glanced down again at the piece of paper she had removed from her shirt pocket. The design on it showed a man wearing an antique spacesuit, the kind with accordioned joints, holding a bottle up to his gaze. The neck ring where his helmet should have been latched was a broken ellipse of gleaming silver. He was smiling as he looked at the bottle, which shone with gold fluid. No, Antoinette thought. It was time to be resolute.
‘I’m not turning around,’ she said. ‘But I promise I don’t want to steal anything from the planet. I’m not going anywhere near any of your refineries, or anything like that. I won’t even open my intakes. I’m just going in and out, and then I won’t bother you again.’
‘Fine,’ the woman said. ‘I’m very glad to hear that. The trouble is it’s not really me that you need to be worried about.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘No.’ The woman smiled sympathetically. ‘It’s the ship behind you, the one I don’t think you’ve even noticed yet.’
‘Behind me?’
The woman nodded. ‘You have spiders on your tail.’
That was when Antoinette knew she was in real trouble.
TWO
Skade was wedged between two curving black masses of machinery when the alert came in. One of her feelers had detected a change in the ship’s attack posture, an escalation in the state of battle readiness. It was not necessarily a crisis, but it certainly demanded her immediate attention.
Skade unplugged her compad from the machinery, the fibreoptic umbilical whisking back into the compad’s housing. She pressed the blank slate of the compad against her stomach, where it flexed and bonded with the padded black fabric of her vest. Almost immediately the compad began backing up its cache of data, feeding it into a secure partition in Skade’s long-term memory.
Skade crawled through the narrow space between the machine components, arching and corkscrewing through the tightest spaces. After twenty metres she reached the exit point and eased herself partway through a narrow circular aperture that had just opened in one wall. Then Skade froze, falling perfectly silent and still; even the colour waves in her crest subsided. The loom of implants in her head detected no other Conjoiners within fifty metres, and confirmed that all monitoring systems in this corridor were turning a blind eye to her emergence. But still she was cautious, and when she moved - looking up and down the corridor - she did so with exquisite calm and caution, like a cat venturing into unfamiliar territory.
There was no one in sight.
Skade pulled herself entirely free of the aperture, then issued a mental command that made it sphincter tight, forming an invisibly fine seal. Only Skade knew where these entry apertures were, and the apertures would only show themselves to her. Even if Clavain detected the presence of the hidden machinery, he would never find a way to reach it without using the brute force that would trigger the machinery to self-destruct.
The ship was in free fall, still, so Skade presumed, sidling closer to the enemy ship they had been chasing. Weightlessness suited Skade. She scampered along the corridor, springing from contact point to contact point on all fours. Her movements were so precise and economical that she sometimes seemed to travel within her own personal bubble of gravity.
[Report, Skade?]
She never knew precisely when the Night Council was going to pop into her head, but she had long since stopped being fazed by its sudden apparitions.
Nothing untoward. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what the machinery’s capable of doing, but so far everything’s working j
ust the way we thought it would.
[Good. Of course, a more extensive test would be desirable ...]
Skade felt a flush of irritation. I already told you. At the moment it takes careful measurement to detect the influence of the machinery. That means we can perform clandestine tests under the cover of routine military operations.
Skade pounced into a junction, kicking off towards the bridge. Forcing calm, tuning her blood chemistry, she continued, I agree that we need to do more before we can equip the fleet, but the instant we increase testing we risk widespread knowledge of our breakthrough. And I don’t just mean within the Mother Nest.
[Your point is well made, Skade. There is no need to remind us. We were merely stating the facts. Inconvenient or otherwise, more extensive tests must take place, and they must take place soon.]
She passed another Conjoiner on his way to a different part of the ship. Skade peered into his mind, glimpsing a surface slurry of recent experiences and emotions. None of it interested her or was of tactical relevance. Beneath the slurry were deeper layers of memory, mnemonic structures plunging down into opaque darkness like great drowned monuments. All of it was hers to sift and scrutinise, but again none of it interested her. Down at the very deepest level Skade detected a few partitioned private memories that he did not think she could read. For a thrilling instant she was tempted to reach in and edit the man’s own blockades, screening one or two tiny cherished memories from their owner. Skade resisted; it was enough to know that she could.
By way of return she felt the man’s mind send enquiring probes into her own, and then flinch away at the stinging denial of access. She felt the man’s curiosity, doubtless wondering why someone from the Closed Council had come aboard the ship.
This amused her. The man knew of the Closed Council, and might even have some inkling of the Council’s super-secret core, the Inner Sanctum. But Skade was certain that he had never even imagined the existence of the Night Council.
He passed her by; she continued on her way.
[Reservations, Skade?]
Of course I have reservations. We’re playing with God’s own fire. It’s not something you rush into.
[The wolves won’t wait for us, Skade.]
Skade bristled, hardly needing to be reminded of the wolves. Fear was a useful spur, she admitted that, but it could only make so much difference. As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn’t built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.
I haven’t forgotten about the wolves.
[Good, Skade. We haven’t, either. And we very much doubt that the wolves have forgotten about us.]
She felt the Night Council withdraw, retreating to some tiny un-locatable pocket in her head where it would wait until next time.
Skade arrived at the bridge of Nightshade, conscious that her crest was pulsing livid shades of rose and scarlet. The bridge was a windowless spherical room deep inside the ship, large enough to contain five or six Conjoiners without seeming cramped. But for now only Clavain and Remontoire were present, just as they had been when she left. They were both lying in acceleration hammocks, suspended in the middle of the sphere, their eyes closed as they tapped into the wider sensory environment of Nightshade. They looked absurdly restful, with their arms neatly folded across their chests.
Skade waited while the room threw a separate hammock around her, wrapping her in a protective mesh of lianalike vines. Idly, she skimmed their minds. Remontoire’s was fully open to her, even his Closed Council partitions appearing as mere demarcations rather than absolute barriers. His mind was like a city made of glass, smoked here and there, but never entirely opaque. Seeing through Closed Council screens had been one of the first tricks that the Night Council had taught her, and it had proven useful even after she had joined the Closed Council. Not all Closed Council members were privy to exactly the same secrets - there was the Inner Sanctum, for a start - but nothing was hidden from Skade.
Clavain was frustratingly harder to read, which was why he both fascinated and disturbed her. His neural implants were of a much older configuration than anyone else’s, and Clavain had never allowed them to be upgraded. Large parts of his brain were not subsumed by the loom at all, and the neural bondings between these regions and the Conjoiner parts were sparse and inefficiently distributed. Skade’s search-and-retrieve algorithms could extract neural patterns from any part of Clavain’s brain that had been subsumed by the loom, but even that was a lot easier said than done. Searching Clavain’s mind was like being given the keys to a fabulous library that had just been swept through by a whirlwind. By the time she located what she was looking for, it was usually no longer relevant.
Nonetheless, Skade had learned a great deal about Clavain. It was ten years since Galiana’s return, but if her reading of his mind was accurate - and she had no reason to doubt that it was otherwise - Clavain still had no real idea about what had happened.
In common with the whole of the Mother Nest, Clavain knew that Galiana’s ship had encountered hostile alien entities in deep space, machines that had come to be called the wolves. The wolves had infiltrated the ship, ripping open the minds of her crew. Clavain knew that Galiana had been spared and that her body was still preserved; he knew also that there was a structure of evident wolf origin lodged in her skull. What he did not know, and to the best of Skade’s knowledge had never suspected, was that Galiana had returned to consciousness; that there had been a brief window of lucidity before the Wolf had spoken through her. More than one, in fact.
Skade recalled lying to Galiana, telling her that Clavain and Felka were already dead. It had not been easy at first. Like any Conjoiner, Skade viewed Galiana with awe. She was the mother of them all, the queen of the Conjoined faction. Equally, the Night Council had reminded Skade that she had a duty to the Mother Nest that superseded her reverence towards Galiana. It was her duty to make maximum use of the windows of lucidity to learn what could be learned of the wolves, and that meant unburdening Galiana of any superfluous concerns. Hurtful as it had felt at the time, the Night Council had assured her it was better in the long run.
And gradually Skade had come to see the sense of it. It was not really Galiana she was lying to, after all, but a shadow of what Galiana had been. And one lie naturally demanded another, which was why Clavain and Felka had never learned of the conversations.
Skade withdrew her mental probes, settling for a routine level of intimacy. She allowed Clavain access to her surface memories, sensory modalities and emotions, or rather to a subtly doctored version of them. At the same time Remontoire saw precisely as much as he expected to see - but again, doctored and modified to suit Skade’s purposes.
The acceleration hammock tugged Skade into the centre of the sphere, next to the other two. Skade folded her arms under her breasts, settling them over the curved plate of the compad, which was still whispering its findings into her long-term memory.
Clavain’s presence asserted itself. [Skade. Nice of you to join us.]
I sensed a change in our attack readiness, Clavain. I imagine it has something to do with the Demarchist ship?
[Actually, it’s a little more interesting than that. Take a look.]
Clavain offered her one end of a data feed from the ship’s sensor net. Skade accepted the feed, instructing her implants to map it into her sensorium with her usual filters and preferences.
She experienced a pleasing instant of dislocation. Her body, the bodies of her companions, the room in which they floated, the great sleek carbon-black needle of Nightshade - all these things shifted to insubstantiality.
The Jovian was a massive presence ahead, wrapped in an ever-moving geometrically complex cloud of interdicted zones and safe passages. An angry swarm of platforms and sentries whipped around the world in tight precessional orbits. Closer, but not much closer, was the Demarchist ship that Nightshade had been chasing. It was already touching the top of Tangerine Dream’s atmosphere, beginning to glow hotter. The
shipmaster was taking a risk with the atmospheric dive, hoping to gain concealment beneath a few hundred kilometres of overlying cloud.
It was, Skade reflected, a move born of desperation.
Transatmospheric insertions were risky, even for ships built to make skimming passes into the upper layers of Jovians. The shipmaster would have had to slow down before attempting the plunge, and would be moving slowly again upon return to space. Aside from the camouflaging effect of the overlying air - the benefits of which depended on the armoury of sensors that the pursuing ship carried, and on what could be detected by low-orbit satellites or floating drones - the only advantage in making a skim was to replenish fuel reserves.
In the early years of the war, both sides had used antimatter as their main energy source. The Conjoiners, with their camouflaged manufactories on the edge of the system, were still able to produce and store antimatter in militarily useful quantities. Even if they could not, it was common knowledge that they had access to even more prodigious energy sources. But handling antimatter was something that the Demarchists had not been able to do for more than a decade. They had fallen back on fusion power, for which they needed hydrogen, ideally dredged from the oceans within gas giants where it was already compressed into its metallic state. The shipmaster would open the ship’s fuel scoops, sucking in and compressing atmospheric hydrogen, or might even attempt a plunge into the ‘merely’ liquid hydrogen sea overlaying the metallic-state hydrogen wrapped around the Jovian’s rocky nugget of a core. But that would be a hazardous thing to attempt in a ship that had already sustained battle damage. Very probably the shipmaster would be hoping that the scoops would not be necessary; that it might instead manage to rendezvous with one of the whale-brained tankers circling endlessly through the atmosphere, singing sad, mournful songs of turbulence and hydrocarbon chemistry. The tanker would inject slugs of preprocessed metallic hydrogen into the ship, some to use as fuel and some to use as warheads.
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