And yet there was a terrible flaw in Clavain’s thinking, and in the thinking of all his advisors.
The obstacle, when Zodiacal Light’s forward sensors detected it, was moving much faster towards him than Clavain had expected. Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.
The Doppler echo from the approaching obstacle indicated a closing speed of just above 0.8 c, which meant that Skade’s obstacle was itself moving back towards Yellowstone at half the speed of light. And it was also astonishingly large: a circular structure one thousand kilometres from side to side. The mass sensor could not see it at all.
Had the object been on a direct collision course, nothing could have been done to avoid it. But the projected impact point was only a dozen kilometres from one edge of the oncoming obstacle. Zodiacal Light’s systems instigated an emergency collision-avoidance procedure.
That was what killed them, not the obstacle itself.
Zodiacal Light was forced to execute a five-gee swerve, with only seconds of warning. Those who were near seats were able to get into them and allow cushioning webs to engulf their bodies. Those who were near servitors were offered some protection by them. In certain parts of the ship, its structural fabric was able to deform to minimise injuries as bodies slammed into walls. But not all were that lucky. Those who were training in the larger bays were killed by the impact. Machinery that had not been adequately secured killed others, including Shadow and two of his senior platoon leaders. Most of the pigs who had been working outside on the hull, preparing attachment points for future armaments, were swept into interstellar space; none were recovered.
The damage to the ship was equally grave. It had never been designed for such a violent course correction, and the hull suffered many fractures and fatigue points, particularly along the attachment spars that held the Conjoiner motors. By Clavain’s estimate there was at least a year’s worth of repairs to be done merely to get back to where they had been before the attack. Interior damage had been just as bad. Even Storm Bird had been harmed as it strained against its scaffolding, all of Xavier’s work undone in a moment.
But, Clavain reminded himself, it could have been so much worse. They had not actually hit Skade’s obstacle. If they had, the dissipation of relativistically boosted kinetic energy would almost certainly have ripped his ship apart in an eyeblink.
They had almost hit a light-sail, possibly one of many hundreds that Skade had dropped behind her. The sails were probably close to being monolayers: films of matter stretched to a thickness of one atom, but with artificially boosted inter-atomic rigidity. The sails must have been unfurled when they were some distance behind Nightshade, so that its exhaust would not incinerate them. Probably they had been spun up for additional rigidity.
Then she had trained her lasers on them. That was why they had seen coherent light emanating from Nightshade. The photon pressure from the lasers had rammed against the sails, pushing them back, decelerating them at hundreds of gees until they were moving only slowly in the local stellar rest frame. But the tightly focused lasers had kept pushing, accelerating and kicking the sails back towards Clavain. Skade’s positional fix was sufficiently good that the sails could be aimed directly at Zodiacal Light.
It was, as ever, a numbers game. God only knew how many sails they had nearly collided with, until one appeared directly in front of them. Perhaps Skade’s gambit had never had a high probability of success, but knowing her the odds would not have been too bad.
There were, Clavain was certain, many other sails out there.
Even when the worst of the damage was being repaired, Clavain and his cohort of experts were devising a counter-strategy. Simulations showed that it should be possible to blast their way through an incoming sail, opening an aperture large enough to fly through, but only if the sails were detected further out than was currently possible. They would also need something to blast with, but the program to install hull weapons had been one of those hampered by Skade’s attack. The short-term solution was for a shuttle to fly one hundred thousand kilometres ahead of Zodiacal Light, serving as a buffer against any further sail strikes. The shuttle was uncrewed, stripped down to little more than an unpressurised shell. Periodically it had to be refuelled with antimatter from the other craft parked in the lighthugger’s spacecraft hold, which necessitated an energy-costly round-trip with another ship, including a hazardous fuel transfer operation. Zodiacal Light needed no antimatter herself, but it was essential to conserve some for operations around Delta Pavonis. Clavain was only prepared to use half of his reserve supplying the buffer shuttle, which gave them one hundred days to find a longer-term solution.
In the end the answer was obvious: a single sail could kill a starship, but it would only take another sail to kill a sail. Zodiacal Light’s own manufactories could be programed to make light-sails - the process did not require complex nanotechnology - and they did not need to be anywhere near as large as Skade’s, nor manufactured in any great number. The ship’s anti-collision lasers, never sufficiently effective as weapons, could be easily tuned to provide the necessary photon pressure. Skade’s sails had to be pushed at hundreds of gees; Clavain’s only had to be pushed at two.
They called it the shield sail. It was ready in ninety-five days, with a reserve of sails ready to be pushed out and deployed should the first be destroyed. In any case, the sails had a fixed lifetime due to the steady ablation caused by interstellar dust grains. This only became worse as Zodiacal Light climbed closer and closer to light-speed. But they could keep replacing the sails all the way to Resurgam and they would only have expended one per cent of the ship’s total mass.
When the shield sail was in place, Clavain allowed himself to breathe again. He had the feeling that Skade and he were making up the rules of interstellar combat as they went on. Skade had won one round by killing a fifth of his crew, but he had responded with a counter-strategy that rendered her current strategy obsolete. She was undoubtedly watching him, puzzling over a smudge of photons far to her stern. Very probably Skade would figure out what he had done from that sparse data alone, even if she had not sewn high-resolution imaging drones along her flight path, designed to capture images of his ship. And then, Clavain knew, Skade would try something else, something different and currently unguessable.
He would just have to be ready for her, and hope that he still had some luck on his side.
Skade, Molenka and Jastrusiak, the two inertia-suppression systems experts, were deep in Nightshade’s bowels, well into the bubble of suppressed inertia. Skade’s armour coped well with the physiological changes, but even she had to admit that she did not feel entirely normal. Her thoughts shifted and coalesced with frightening speed, like clouds in a speeded-up film. She flickered between moods she had never known before, terror and elation revealed as opposed facets of the same hidden emotion. It was not just the effect of the armour’s blood chemistry, although that was considerable, but the field itself, playing subtle games with the normal ebb and flow of neurochemicals and synaptic signals.
Molenka’s concern was obvious. [Three gees? Are you certain?]
I wouldn’t have ordered it otherwise.
The curved black walls of the machinery folded around them, as if they were crouched inside a cavern carved into smooth and surreal shapes by patient aeons o
f subterranean water. She sensed the tech’s disquiet. The machinery was in a stable regime now, and she saw no reason to tamper with it.
[Why?] Molenka persisted. [Clavain can’t reach you. He might have squeezed two gees out of his own ship, but that must have been at enormous expense, shedding every gram of non-essential mass. He’s far behind, Skade. He can’t catch you up.]
Then increase to three gees. I want to observe his reaction to see if he attempts to match our new rate of acceleration.
[He won’t be able to.]
Skade reached up with one steel hand and caressed Molenka under the chin with her forefinger. She could crush her now, shattering bone into fine grey dust, if she dared.
Just do it. Then I’ll know for certain, won’t I?
Molenka and Jastrusiak were not happy, of course, but she had expected nothing less. Their protestations were a form of ritual that had to be endured. Later, Skade felt the acceleration load increase to three gees and knew that they had acquiesced. Her eyeballs sagged in their sockets, her jaw feeling like solid iron. It was no more of an effort to walk since the armour took care of that, but she was aware now of how unnatural it was.
She walked to Felka’s quarters, heels pounding the floor with jackhammer precision. Skade did not hate Felka, nor even blame her for hating her back. Felka could hardly be expected to endure Skade’s attempts to kill Clavain. Equally, however, Felka had to see the necessity of Skade’s actions. No other faction could be allowed to obtain the lost weapons. It was a matter of Conjoiner survival, a matter of loyalty to the Mother Nest. Skade could not tell Felka about the governing voices that told her what to do, but even without that information she must see that the mission was vital.
The door to Felka’s quarters was shut, but Skade had the authority to enter any part of the ship. She knocked politely nonetheless, and waited five or six seconds before entering.
Felka. What are you doing?
Felka was on the floor, sitting down cross-legged. She appeared calm, nothing in her composure betraying the increased effort of performing virtually any activity under three gees. She wore thin black pyjamas that made her look very pale and childlike to Skade.
She had surrounded herself with small white rectangles, many dozens of them, each of which was marked with a particular set of symbols. Skade saw reds and blacks and yellows. The rectangles were something she had encountered before, but she could not remember where. They were arrayed in excessively neat arcs and spokes, radiating out from Felka. Felka was moving them from place to place, as if exploring the permutations of some immense abstract structure.
Skade bent down, picking up one of the rectangles. It was a piece of glossy white card or plastic, printed on one side only. The other side was perfectly blank.
I recognise these. It’s a game they play in Chasm City. There are fifty-two cards in a set, thirteen cards for each symbol, just as there are thirteen hours on a Yellowstone clock face.
Skade put the card back where she had found it. Felka continued rearranging the cards for some minutes. Skade waited, listening to the slick sound that the cards made as they passed across each other.
‘Its origins are a bit older than that,’ Felka said.
But I’m right, aren’t I? They do play this there.
‘There are many games, Skade. This is just one of them.’
Where did you find the cards?
‘I had the ship make them. I remembered the numbers.’
And the patterns? Skade selected another card, this one marked with a bearded figure. This man looks like Clavain.
‘It’s just a King,’ Felka said dismissively. ‘I remembered the patterns as well.’
Skade examined another: a long-necked, regal-looking woman dressed in something that resembled ceremonial armour. She could almost be me.
‘She’s the Queen.’
Why, Felka? What precisely is the point of this? Skade stood again and gestured at the configuration of cards. The number of permutations must be finite. Your only opponent is blind chance. I don’t see the attraction.
‘You probably wouldn’t.’
Again Skade heard the slick rasp of card on card. What is the objective, Felka?
‘To maintain order.’
Skade barked out a short laugh. Then there is no end-state?
‘This isn’t a problem in computation, Skade. The means is the end.
The game has no halting state other than failure.’ Felka bit her tongue, like a child working on some particularly tortuous piece of colouring-in. In a flurry of movement she moved six cards, dramatically altering the larger pattern in a way Skade would have sworn was not possible a moment earlier.
Skade nodded, understanding. This is the Great Wall of Mars, isn’t it?
Felka looked up, but said nothing before resuming her work.
Skade knew that she was right: that the game she saw Felka playing here, if indeed it could be called a game, was only a surrogate for the Wall itself. The Wall had been destroyed four hundred years earlier, and yet it had played such a vital part in Felka’s childhood that she regressed towards her memories of it at the slightest sign of external stress.
Skade felt anger. She knelt down again and destroyed the pattern of cards. Felka froze, her hand hovering above the space where a card had been. She looked at Skade, incomprehension on her face.
As was sometimes the case with Felka, she framed her question as a flat, uninflected statement. ‘Why.’
Listen to me, Felka. You must not do this. You are one of us now. You cannot retreat back into your childhood just because Clavain isn’t here any more.
Pathetically, Felka tried to regather the cards. But Skade reached out and grabbed her hand.
No. Stop this, Felka. You cannot regress. I won’t allow it. Skade tilted Felka’s head towards her own. This is about more than just Clavain, Felka. I know that he means something to you. But the Mother Nest means more. Clavain was always an outsider. But you are one of us, to the marrow. We need you, Felka. As you are now, not as you were.
But when she released her hold, Felka only looked down. Skade stood up and backed away from the cross-legged figure. She had committed a cruel act, she knew. But it was no less than Clavain would have done, had he caught Felka retreating back into her childhood. The Wall was a mindless God to worship, and it sucked her soul into itself, even in memory.
Felka began to lay the cards back down again.
She pushed Galiana’s casket through the empty warrens of Nightshade . Her armour moved in measured, funereal steps, one cautious pace at a time. With each clangorous footfall, Skade heard the whining of gyroscopes struggling to maintain balance under the new acceleration. The weight of her own skull was a cruel compressive force squeezing down on the upper vertebrae of her truncated spine. Her tongue was an unresponsive mass of sluggish muscle. Her face looked different, the skin tugged down from her cheekbones as if by invisible guylines. Slight distortion of the visual field revealed the effect of the gravity on her eyeballs.
Only one-quarter of the ship’s mass remained now. The rest was being suppressed by the field, the bubble of which had now swallowed up half the ship’s length from the stern towards the midpoint.
They were sustaining four gees.
Skade seldom went into the bubble itself now: the physiological effects, even though buffered by the mechanisms of her armour, were simply too uncomfortable. The bubble lacked a sharply defined edge, but the effects of the field fell off so sharply that they were almost immeasurably small beyond the nominal boundary. The field geometry was not spherically symmetrical, either: there were occlusions and hairpins within it, ventricles and fissures where the effect dropped or rose in interplay with other variables. The strange topology of the machinery itself imposed its own structure on the field, too. When the machinery moved, as it was obliged to, the field changed as well. At other times it seemed to be the field that was making the machinery move. Her technicians only pretended that they understood all th
at was happening. What they had was a set of rules that told them what would happen under certain conditions. But those rules were valid only in a narrow range of states. They had been happy suppressing half of the ship’s mass, but were much less so now. Occasionally, the delicate quantum-field instrumentation that the techs had positioned elsewhere in the ship registered excursions of the bubble as it momentarily swelled and contracted, engulfing the entire ship. Skade convinced herself that she felt those instants, even though they lasted much less than a microsecond. At two gees of suppression, the excursions had been rare. Now they happened three or four times a day.
Skade wheeled the casket into an elevator and rode downship, towards the bubble boundary. She could see the undercurve of Galiana’s jaw through the casket’s viewing window. Her expression was one of infinite calm and composure. Skade was very glad that she had had the presence of mind to bring Galiana with her, even when the mission’s sole scope had been stopping Clavain. At the back of her mind even then she must have suspected that they might have to turn into interstellar space, and that at some point it would be necessary to seek Galiana’s dangerous advice. It had cost her nothing to bring the woman’s frozen corpse aboard; now all she needed was the nerve to consult it.
She propelled the casket into a clean white room. Behind her, the door sealed invisibly. The room was full of eggshell-pale machinery that was only truly visible when it moved. The machinery was ancient, lovingly and fearfully tended since the days of Galiana’s earliest experiments on Mars. It had also cost Skade nothing to bring it with her aboard Nightshade.
Skade opened Galiana’s casket. She elevated the corpse’s core temperature by fifty millikelvin and then ushered the pale machinery into position. It swung and fluttered around Galiana, never quite touching her skin. Skade stepped back with a stiff whirr of servos. The pale machinery made her uneasy; it always had. There was something deeply unsettling about it, so much so that it had almost never been used. Even on those rare occasions when it had been used, it had done dreadful things to those who dared to open their minds to it.
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