Clavain looked at her, hoping against hope that she was lying to him as she had lied before, but knowing that this was now the truth. And although he knew the answer she would give, he had to ask the question all the same.
‘Will you give her to me?’
‘No.’ Skade raised a black metal finger. ‘You leave with Felka only, or you leave with nothing. It’s your choice. But Galiana stays here.’ Almost as an afterthought she added, ‘Oh, and in case you were wondering, I do know about the pinhead munitions you and the pig left behind you.’
‘You won’t find them all in time,’ Scorpio said.
‘I won’t have to find them,’ Skade said. ‘Will I, Clavain? Because having Galiana protects me as fully as when I had Felka. No. I won’t show her to you. It isn’t necessary. Felka will tell you that she is here. She met the Wolf, too - didn’t you?’
But Felka did not stir.
‘C’mon,’ Scorpio said. ‘Let’s leave before she changes her mind.’
Clavain was with Felka when she came around. He was sitting in a seat next to her bed, scratching at his beard, a grasshopperlike scritch, scritch, scritch that burrowed remorselessly into her subconscious and tugged her towards wakefulness. She had been dreaming of Mars, dreaming of her Wall, dreaming of being lost in the endless, consuming task of maintaining the Wall’s inviolability.
‘Felka.’ His voice was sharp, almost stern. ‘Felka. Wake up. This is Clavain. You’re amongst friends now.’
‘Where is Skade?’ she asked.
‘I left Skade behind. She isn’t your concern now.’ Clavain’s hand rested on hers. ‘I’m just relieved that you’re all right. It’s good to see you again, Felka. There were times when I never thought this would happen.’
She had come around in a room that did not look like any of those she had seen on Nightshade. It had a slightly rustic feel. She was clearly aboard a ship, but it was not a sleekly engineered thing like the last vessel.
‘You never said goodbye to me before you defected,’ she said.
‘I know.’ Clavain poked a finger into the folds of one eye. He looked weary, older than she remembered him from their last meeting. ‘I know, and I apologise. But it was deliberate. You’d have talked me out of it.’ His tone became accusatory. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I only wanted you to take care of yourself. That was why I convinced you to join the Closed Council.’
‘On balance, that was probably a mistake, wasn’t it?’ His tone had softened. He was, she was reasonably certain, smiling.
‘If you call this taking care of yourself, then yes, I’d have to admit it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’
‘Did Skade take care of you?’
‘She wanted me to help her. I didn’t. I became . . . withdrawn. I didn’t want to hear that she had killed you. She tried very hard, Clavain.’
‘I know.’
‘She has Galiana.’
‘I know that as well,’ he said. ‘Remontoire, Scorpio and I placed demolition charges across her ship. Even now we could destroy it, if I was prepared to delay our arrival at Resurgam.’
Felka forced herself into a sitting position. ‘Listen to me carefully, Clavain.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘You must kill Skade. It doesn’t matter that she has Galiana. It’s what Galiana would want you to do.’
‘I know,’ Clavain said. ‘But that doesn’t make it any easier to do.’
‘No.’ Felka raised her voice, not afraid to sound angry with the man who had just saved her. ‘No. You don’t understand. I mean it is exactly what Galiana would want you to do. I know, Clavain. I touched her mind again, when we met the Wolf.’
‘There’s no part of Galiana still there, Felka.’
‘There is. The Wolf did its best to hide her, but ... I could sense her.’ She looked into his face, studying its ancient, latent mysteries. Of all the faces she knew, this was the one she had the least trouble recognising, but what exactly did that mean? Were they united by anything more than contingency, circumstance and shared history? She remembered how she had lied to Clavain about being his daughter. Nothing in his mood suggested that he had learned of that lie.
‘Felka ...’
‘Listen to me, Clavain.’ She clasped his hand, squeezing it to demand his attention. ‘Listen to me. I never told you this before because it disturbed me too much. But in the Exordium experiments, I became aware of a mind reaching towards mine, from the future. I sensed unspeakable evil. But I also sensed something that I recognised. It was Galiana.’
‘No . . .’ Clavain said.
She squeezed his hand harder. ‘It’s the truth. But it wasn’t her fault. I see it now. It was her mind, after the Wolf had taken her over. Skade allowed the Wolf to participate in the experiments. She needed its advice about the machinery.’
Clavain shook his head. ‘The Wolf would never have collaborated with Skade.’
‘But it did. She convinced it that it needed to help her. That way she would recover the weapons, not you.’
‘How would that benefit the Wolf?’
‘It wouldn’t. But it was better that the weapons be seized by an agency that the Wolf had some influence over, rather than a third party like yourself. So it agreed to help her, knowing that it could always find a way to destroy the weapons once they were close at hand. I was there, Clavain, in its domain.’
‘The Wolf allowed that?’
‘It demanded it. Or rather, the part of it that was still Galiana did.’ Felka paused. She knew how difficult this must be for Clavain. It was agonising for her, and yet Galiana had meant even more to Clavain.
‘Then there would have to be a part of Galiana that still remembers us, is that what you mean? A part that still remembers what it was like before?’
‘She still remembers, Clavain. She still remembers, and she still feels.’ Again Felka paused, knowing that this was going to be the hardest part of all. ‘That’s why you have to do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘What you always planned to do before Skade told you that she had Galiana. You have to destroy the Wolf.’ Again she looked into his face, marvelling at its age, feeling sorrow for what she was doing to him. ‘You have to destroy the ship.’
‘But if I do that,’ Clavain said suddenly and excitedly, as if he had spotted a fatal flaw in Felka’s argument, ‘I’ll kill Galiana.’
‘I know,’ Felka said. ‘I know. But you still have to do it.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I can, and I do. I felt her, Clavain. I felt her willing you to do this.’
He watched it alone and in silence, from the vantage point of the observation cupola near Zodiacal Light’s prow. He had given instructions that he was to remain undisturbed until he made himself available again, even though that might mean many hours of solitude.
After forty-five minutes his eyes had become highly dark-adapted. He stared into the sea of endless night behind his ship, waiting for the sign that the work was done. The occasional cosmic ray scratched a false trail across his vision, but he knew that the signature of the event would be different and impossible to mistake. Against that darkness, too, it would be unmissable.
It grew from the heart of blackness: a blue-white glint that flared to its maximum brightness over the course of three or four seconds, and then declined slowly, ramping down through spectral shades of red and rust-brown. It burned a vivid hole into his vision, a searing violet dot that remained even when he closed his eyes.
He had destroyed Nightshade.
Skade, despite her best efforts, had not located all the demolition charges that they had glued to her ship. And because they were pinheads, it had only taken one to do the necessary work. The demolition charge had merely been the initiator for the much larger cascade of detonations: first the antimatter-fuelled and -tipped warheads, and then the Conjoiner drives themselves. It would have been instantaneous, and there would have been no warning.
He thought
of Galiana, too. Skade had assumed that he would never attack the ship once he knew or even suspected that she was aboard.
And perhaps Skade had been right, too.
But Felka had convinced him that it had to be done. She alone had touched Galiana’s mind and felt the agony of the Wolf’s presence. She alone had been able to convey that single, simple message back to Clavain.
Kill me.
And so he had.
He started weeping as the full realisation of what he had done hit home. There had always been the tiniest possibility that she could be made well again. He had, he supposed, never fully come to terms with her absence because that tiny hope had always made it possible to deny the fact of her death.
But no such succour was possible now.
He had killed the thing he most loved in the universe.
Clavain began to weep, silently and alone.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry ...
He felt her approaching the monstrosity that he had become. Through senses that had no precise human analogue, the Captain became aware of the blunt metallic presence of Volyova’s shuttle sidling close to him. She did not think that his omniscience was this total, he knew. In the many conversations that they had enjoyed he had learned that she still viewed him as a prisoner of Nostalgia for Infinity, albeit a prisoner who had in some sense merged with the fabric of his prison. And yet Ilia had assiduously mapped and catalogued the nerve bundles of his new, vastly enlarged anatomy, tracing the way they interfaced with and infiltrated the ship’s old cybernetic network. She must be fully aware, on an analytical level, that there was no point in distinguishing between the prison and the prisoner any more. Yet she appeared unable to make that last mental leap, unable to cease viewing him as something inside the ship. It was, perhaps, just too violent a readjustment of their old relationship. He could not blame her for that final failure of imagination. He would have had grave difficulties with it himself had the tables been reversed.
The Captain felt the shuttle intrude into him. It was an indescribable sensation, really: as if a stone had been pushed through his skin, painlessly, into a neat hole in his abdomen. A few moments later he felt a series of visceral tremors as the shuttle latched itself home.
She was back.
He turned his attention inwards, becoming acutely and overwhelmingly aware of what was going on inside him. His awareness of the external universe - everything beyond his hull - stepped down a level of precedence. He descended through scale, focusing first on a district of himself, then on the arterial tangle of corridors and service tubes that wormed through that district. Ilia Volyova was a single corpuscular presence moving down one corridor. There were other living things inside him, as there were inside any living thing. Even cells contained organisms that had once been independent. He had the rats: scurrying little presences. But they were only dimly sentient, and ultimately they moved to his will, incapable of surprising or amusing him. The machines were even duller. Volyova, by contrast, was an invading presence, a foreign cell that he could kill but never control.
Now she was speaking to him. He heard her sounds, picking them up from the vibrations she caused in the corridor material.
‘Captain?’ Ilia Volyova asked. ‘It’s me. I’m back from Resurgam.’
He answered her through the fabric of the ship, his voice barely a whisper to himself. ‘I’m glad to see you again, Ilia. I’ve been a little lonely. How was it down on the planet?’
‘Worrying,’ she said.
‘Worrying, Ilia?’
‘Things are moving to a head. Khouri thinks she can hold it together long enough to get most of them off the surface, but I’m not convinced.’
‘And Thorn?’ the Captain asked delicately. He was very glad that Volyova appeared more concerned about what was going on down on Resurgam than the other matter. Perhaps she had not noticed the incoming laser signal at all yet.
‘Thorn wants to be the saviour of the people; the man who leads them to the Promised Land.’
‘You seem to think more direct action is appropriate.’
‘Have you studied the object lately, Captain?’
Of course he had. He still had morbid curiosity, if nothing else. He had watched the Inhibitors dismantle the gas giant with ridiculous ease, spinning it apart like a child’s toy. He had seen the dense shadows of new machines coming into existence in the nebula of liberated matter, components as vast as worlds themselves. Embedded in the glowing skein of the nebula, they resembled tentative, half-formed embryos. Clearly the machines would soon assemble into something even larger. It was, perhaps, possible to guess what it would look like. The largest component was a trumpet-shaped maw, two thousand kilometres wide and six thousand kilometres deep. The other shapes, the Captain judged, would plug into the back of this gigantic blunderbuss.
It was a single machine, nothing like the extended ring-shaped structures that the Inhibitors had thrown around the gas giant. A single machine that could maim a star, or so Volyova believed. Captain John Brannigan almost thought it would be worth staying alive to see what the machine would do.
‘I’ve studied it,’ he told Volyova.
‘It’s nearly finished, I think. A matter of months, perhaps, maybe less, and it will be ready. That’s why we can’t take any chances.’
‘You mean the cache?’
He sensed her trepidation. ‘You told me you would consider letting me use it, Captain. Is that still the case?’
He let her sweat before answering. She really did not appear to know about the laser signal. He was certain it would have been the first thing on her mind had she noticed it.
He asked, ‘Isn’t there some risk in using the cache, Ilia, when we have come so far without being attacked?’
‘There’s even more risk in leaving it too late.’
‘I imagine Khouri and Thorn were less than enthusiastic about hitting back now if the exodus is proceeding according to plan.’
‘They’ve moved barely two thousand people off the surface, Captain - one per cent of the total. It’s no more than a gesture. Yes, things will move more quickly once the government is handling the operation. But there will be a great deal more civil unrest, too. That’s why we have to consider a pre-emptive strike against the Inhibitors.’
‘We would surely draw their fire,’ he pointed out. ‘Their weapons would destroy me.’
‘We have the cache.’
‘It has no defensive value, Ilia.’
‘Well, I’ve thought about that,’ she said testily. ‘We’ll deploy the weapons at a distance of several light-hours from this ship. They can move themselves into position before we activate them, just like they did against the Hades artefact.’
There was no need to remind her that the attack against the Hades artefact had gone less than swimmingly. But, in fairness to Volyova, it was not the weapons themselves that had let her down.
He groped for another token objection. He must not appear too willing, or she would begin to have suspicions. ‘What if they were traced back to us . . . to me?’
‘By then we’ll have inflicted a decisive blow. If there is a response, we’ll worry about it then.’
‘And the weapons that you had in mind ... ?’
‘Details, Captain, details. You can leave that part to me. All you have to do is assign control of them to me.’
‘All thirty-three weapons?’
‘No ... that won’t be necessary. Just the ones I’ve earmarked for use. I don’t plan to throw everything against the Inhibitors. As you kindly reminded me, we may need some weapons later, to deal with any reprisal.’
‘You’ve thought all this through, haven’t you?’
‘Let’s just say there have always been contingency plans,’ she told him. Then her tone of voice changed expectantly. ‘Captain, one final thing.’
He hesitated before replying. Here, perhaps, it came. She was going to ask him about the laser signal spraying repeatedly against his hull, the signal
that he had been very unwilling to bring to her attention.
‘Go on, Ilia,’ he said, heavy-hearted.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those cigarettes, have you?’
THIRTY
She toured the cache chamber, riding through it like a queen inspecting her troops. Thirty-three weapons were present, no two of them alike. She had spent much of her adult life studying them, together with the seven others that were now lost or destroyed. And yet in all that time she had come to no more than a passing familiarity with most of the weapons. She had tested very few of them in any meaningful sense. Indeed, those she had known most about were the ones that were now lost. Some of the remaining weapons, she was certain, could not even be tested without wasting the one opportunity that existed to use them. But they were not all like that. The tricky part was distinguishing amongst the subclasses of cache weapon, cataloguing them according to their range, destructive capability and the number of times they could be used. Though she had always concealed her ignorance from her colleagues, Volyova had no more than the sketchiest idea about what at least half of her weapons were capable of doing. But she had worked scrupulously hard to gain even that inadequate understanding.
Based on what she had learned in her years of study, she had come to a decision as to which weapons would be deployed against the Inhibitor machinery. She would release eight of the weapons, retaining twenty-five aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. They were low-mass weapons, so they could be deployed across the system quickly and discreetly. Her studies had also suggested that the eight were weapons with sufficient range to strike the Inhibitor site, but there was a lot of guesswork involved in her calculations. Volyova hated guesswork. She was even less sure that they would be able to do enough damage to make a difference to the Inhibitors’ work. But she was certain of one thing: they would get noticed. If the human activity in the system had so far been on the buzzing-fly level - irritating without being actively dangerous - she was about to notch it up to a full-scale mosquito attack.
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