The Captain was trying to kill himself.
She should have seen it coming. His emergence from the catatonic state had only ever been a ploy. He must have had it in mind all along to end himself, to finally terminate whatever extreme state of misery he found himself in. And she had given him the ideal means. She had begged him to let her use the cache weapons, and he had - too easily, she now saw - obliged.
‘Captain . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I have to do this.’
‘No. You don’t. Nothing has to be done.’
‘You don’t understand. I know you want to, and I know you think you do, but you can’t know what it is like.’
‘Captain ... listen to me. We can talk about it. Whatever it is that you feel you can’t deal with, we can discuss it.’
The weapon was slowing its rotation, its flowerlike muzzle nearly pointed at the lighthugger’s shadowed hull.
‘It’s long past the time for discussion, Ilia.’
‘We’ll find a way,’ she said desperately, not even believing herself. ‘We’ll find a way to make you as you were: human again.’
‘Don’t be silly, Ilia. You can’t unmake what I’ve become.’
‘Then we’ll find a way to make it tolerable ... to end whatever pain or discomfort you’re in. We’ll find a way to make it better than that. We can do it, Captain. There isn’t anything you and I couldn’t achieve, if we set our minds to it.’
‘I said you didn’t understand. I was right. Don’t you realise, Ilia? This isn’t about what I’ve become, or what I was. This is about what I did. It’s about the thing I can’t live with any more.’
The weapon halted. It was now pointed directly at the hull.
‘You killed a man,’ Volyova said. ‘You murdered a man and took over his body. I know. It was a crime, Captain, a terrible crime. Sajaki didn’t deserve what you did to him. But don’t you understand? The crime has already been paid for. Sajaki died twice: once with his mind in his body and once with yours. That was the punishment, and God knows he suffered for it. There isn’t any need for further atonement, Captain. It’s been done. You’ve suffered enough, as well. What happened to you would be considered justice enough by anyone. You’ve paid for that deed a thousand times over.’
‘I still remember what I did to him.’
‘Of course you do. But that doesn’t mean you have to inflict this on yourself now.’ She glanced at the bracelet. The weapon was powering up, she observed. In a moment it would be ready for use.
‘I do, Ilia. I do. This isn’t some whim, you realise. I have planned this moment for much longer than you can conceive. Through all our conversations, it was always my intention to end myself.’
‘You could have done it while I was down on Resurgam. Why now?’
‘Why now?’ She heard what could almost have been a laugh. It was a horrid, gallows laugh, if that was the case. ‘Isn’t it obvious, Ilia? What good is an act of justice if there isn’t a witness to see it executed?’
Her bracelet informed her that the weapon had reached attack readiness. ‘You wanted me to see this happen?’
‘Of course. You were always special, Ilia. My best friend; the only one who talked to me when I was ill. The only one who understood.’
‘I also made you what you are.’
‘It was necessary. I don’t blame you for that, I really don’t.’
‘Please don’t do this. You’ll be hurting more than just yourself.’ She knew that she had to make this good; that what she said now could be crucial. ‘Captain, we need you. We need the weapons you carry, and we need you to help evacuate Resurgam. If you kill yourself now, you’ll be killing two hundred thousand people. You’ll be committing a far greater crime than the one you feel the need to atone for.’
‘But that would only be a sin of omission, Ilia.’
‘Captain, I’m begging you . . . don’t do this.’
‘Steer your shuttle away, please, Ilia. I don’t want you to be harmed by what is about to happen. That was never my intention. I only wanted you as a witness, someone who would understand.’
‘I already understand! Isn’t that enough?’
‘No, Ilia.’
The weapon activated. The beam that emerged from its muzzle was invisible until it touched the hull. Then, in a gale of escaping air and ionised armour, it revealed itself flickeringly: a metre-thick shaft of scything destructive quintessence force, chewing inexorably through the ship. This, weapon thirty-one, was not one of the most devastating tools in her arsenal, but it had immense range. That was why she had selected it for use in the attack against the Inhibitors. The quintessence beam ghosted right through the ship, emerging in a similar gale on the far side. The weapon began to track, gnawing down the length of the hull.
‘Captain ...’
His voice came back. ‘I’m sorry, Ilia . . . I can’t stop now.’
He sounded in pain. It was hardly surprising, she thought. His nerve endings reached into every part of Nostalgia for Infinity. He was feeling the beam slice through him just as agonisingly as if she had begun to saw off her own arm. Again, Volyova understood. It had to be much more than just a quick, clean suicide. That would not be sufficient recompense for his crime. It had to be slow, protracted, excruciating. A martial execution, with a diligent witness who would appreciate and remember what he had inflicted upon himself.
The beam had chewed a hundred-metre-long furrow in the hull. The Captain was haemorrhaging air and fluids in the wake of the cutting beam.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, for God’s sake, stop!’
‘Let me finish this, Ilia. Please forgive me.’
‘No. I won’t allow it.’
She did not give herself time to think about what had to be done. If she had, she doubted that she would have had the courage to act. She had never considered herself a brave person, and most certainly not someone given to self-sacrifice.
Ilia Volyova steered her shuttle towards the beam, placing herself between the weapon and the fatal gash it was knifing into Nostalgia for Infinity.
‘No!’ she heard the Captain call.
But it was too late. He could not shut down the weapon in less than a second, nor steer it fast enough to bring her out of the line of fire. The shuttle collided glancingly with the beam - her aim had not been dead on - and the edge of the beam obliterated the entire right side of the shuttle. Armour, insulation, interior reinforcement, pressure membrane - everything wafted away in an instant of ruthless annihilation. Volyova had a moment to realise that she had missed the precise centre of the beam, and another instant to realise that it did not really matter.
She was going to die anyway.
Her vision fogged. There was a shocking, sudden cold in her windpipe, as if someone had poured liquid helium down her throat. She attempted to take a breath and the cold rammed into her lungs. There was an awful feeling of granite solidity in her chest. Her interior organs were shock freezing.
She opened her mouth, attempting to speak, to make one final utterance. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
THIRTY-ONE
‘Why, Wolf?’ Felka asked.
They were meeting alone on the same iron-grey, silver-skied expanse of rockpools where she had, at Skade’s insistence, already encountered the Wolf. Now she was dreaming lucidly; she was back on Clavain’s ship and Skade was dead, and yet the Wolf seemed no less real than it had before. The Wolf’s shape lingered just beyond clarity, like a column of smoke that occasionally fell into a mocking approximation of human form.
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you hate life so much?’
‘I don’t. We don’t. We only do what we must.’
Felka kneeled on the rock, surrounded by animal parts. She understood that the presence of the wolves explained one of the great cosmic mysteries, a paradox that had haunted human minds since the dawn of spaceflight. The galaxy teemed with stars, and around many of those stars were worlds. It was true that not
all of those worlds were the right distance from their suns to kindle life, and not all had the right fractions of metals to allow complex carbon chemistry. Sometimes the stars were not stable enough for life to gain a toehold. But none of that mattered, since there were hundreds of billions of stars. Only a tiny fraction had to be habitable for there to be a shocking abundance of life in the galaxy.
But there was no evidence that intelligent life had ever spread from star to star, despite the fact that it was relatively easy to do. Looking out into the night sky, human philosophers had concluded that intelligent life must be vanishingly rare; that perhaps the human species was the only sentient culture in the galaxy.
They were wrong, but they did not discover this until the dawn of interstellar society. Then, expeditions started finding evidence of fallen cultures, ruined worlds, extinct species. There were an uncomfortably large number of them.
It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out.
The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.
That was the answer. But it did not explain why they did it.
‘But why?’ she asked the Wolf. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to act the way you do. If you hate life so much, why not end it once and for all?’
‘For good?’ The Wolf appeared amused, curious about her speculations.
‘You could poison every world in the galaxy or smash every world apart. It’s as if you don’t have the courage to finally finish life for good.’
There was a slow, avalanche-like sigh of pebbles. ‘It isn’t about ending intelligent life,’ the Wolf said.
‘No?’
‘It is about the exact opposite, Felka. It is about life’s preservation. We are life’s keepers, steering life through its greatest crisis.’
‘But you murder. You kill entire cultures.’
The Wolf shifted in and out of vision. Its voice, when it answered, was tauntingly similar to Galiana’s. ‘Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, Felka.’
No one saw much of Clavain after Galiana’s death. There was an unspoken understanding amongst his crew, one that percolated right down through to the lowliest ranks of Scorpio’s army, that he was not to be disturbed by anything except the gravest of problems: matters of extreme shipwide urgency, nothing less. It remained unclear whether this edict had come from Clavain himself, or was simply something that had been assumed by his immediate deputies. Very probably it was a combination of the two. He became a shadowy figure, occasionally seen but seldom heard, a ghost stalking Zodiacal Light’s corridors in the hours when the rest of the ship was asleep. Occasionally, when the ship was under high gravity, they heard the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of his exoskeleton on the deck plates as he traversed a corridor above them. But Clavain himself was an elusive figure.
It was said that he spent long hours in the observation cupola, staring into the blackness behind them, transfixed by the starless wake. Those who saw him remarked that he looked much older than at the start of the voyage, as if in some way he remained anchored to the faster flow of world-time, rather than the dilated time that passed aboard the ship. It was said that he looked like a man who had given up on the living, and was now only going through the burdensome motions of completing some final duty.
It was recognised, without the details necessarily being understood, that Clavain had been forced into making a dreadful personal decision. Some of the crewmembers grasped that Galiana had already ‘died’ long before, and that what had happened now was only the drawing of a line beneath that event. But it was, as others appreciated, much worse than that. Galiana’s earlier death had only ever been provisional. The Conjoiners had kept her frozen, thinking that she could at some point be cleansed of the Wolf. The likelihood of that happening must have been small, but at the back of Clavain’s mind there must have remained the ghost of a hope that the Galiana he had loved since that ancient meeting on Mars could be brought back to him, healed and renewed. But now he had personally removed that possibility for ever. It was said that a large factor in his decision had been Felka’s persuasion, but it was still Clavain who had made the final choice; it was he who carried the blood of that merciful execution on his hands.
Clavain’s withdrawal was less serious to ship affairs than it might have appeared; he had already abrogated much of the responsibility to others, so that the battle preparations continued smoothly and efficiently without his day-to-day intervention. Mechanical production lines were now running at full capacity, spewing out weapons and armour. Zodiacal Light’s hull bristled with antiship armaments. As training regimes honed the battalions of Scorpio’s army into savagely efficient units, they began to realise how much their previous successes had been down to good fortune, but that would certainly not be the case in the future. They might fail, but it would not be because of any lack of tactical preparation or discipline.
With Skade’s ship destroyed, they had less need to worry about an attack while they were en route. Deep-look scans confirmed that there were other Conjoiner ships behind them, but they could only match Zodiacal Light’s acceleration, not exceed it. It appeared that no one was willing to attempt another state-four transition after what had happened to Nightshade.
Halfway to Resurgam, the ship had switched into deceleration mode, thrusting in the direction of flight, which immediately made it a harder target for the pursuing craft since they no longer had a relativistically boosted exhaust beam to lock on to. The risk of attack had dropped even further, leaving the crew free to concentrate on the mission’s primary objective. Data from the approaching system became steadily more comprehensive, too, focusing minds on the specifics of the recovery operation.
It was clear that something very odd was happening around Delta Pavonis. Scans of the planetary system showed the inexplicable omission of three moderately large terrestrial bodies, as if they had simply been deleted from existence. More worrying still was what had replaced the system’s major gas giant: only a remnant of the giant’s metallic core now remained, enveloped in a skein of liberated matter many dozens of times wider than the original planet. There were hints of an immense mechanism that had been used to spin the planet apart: arcs and cusps and coils that were in the process of being dismantled and retransformed into new machinery. And at the heart of the cloud was something even larger than those subsidiary components: a two-thousand-kilometre-wide engine that could not possibly be of human origin.
Remontoire had helped Clavain build sensors to pick up the neutrino signatures of the hell-class weapons. As they had neared the system they had established that thirty-three of the weapons were in essentially the same place, while six more were dormant, waiting in a wide orbit around the neutron star Hades. One weapon was unaccounted for, but Clavain had known about that before he left the Mother Nest. More detailed scans, which became possible only when they had slowed to within a quarter of a light-year of their destination, showed that the thirty-three weapons were almost certainly aboard a ship of the same basic type as Zodiacal Light, probably stuffed into a major storage bay. The ship - it had to be the Triumvir’s vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity - hovered in interplanetary space, orbiting Delta Pavonis at the Lagrange point between the star and Resurgam.
Now, finally, they had some measure of their adversary. But what of Resurgam itself? There was no radio or other EM-band traffic coming from the system’s sole inhabited planet, but the colony had clearly not failed. Analysis of the atmosphere’s constituent gases revealed ongoing terraforming activity, with sizeable expanses of water now visible on the surface. The icecaps had withered back towards the poles. The air was warmer and wetter than it had been in nearly a million years.
The infra-red signatures of surface flora matched the patterns expected from terran genestock, modified for cold, dry, low-oxygen survivability. Hot thermal blotches showed the sites of large brute-force atmospheric reprocessors. Refined metals indicated intense surface industrialisation. At extreme magnification, there were even the suggestions of roads or pipelines, and the occasional moving echo of a fat transatmospheric cargo vehicle, like a dirigible. The planet was certainly inhabited, even now. But whoever was down there was not much interested in communicating with the outside world.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Scorpio told Clavain. ‘You came here to take the weapons, that’s all. There’s no need to make this any more complicated than it has to be.’
Clavain had been alone until the pig had visited him. ‘Just deal with the starship, is that it?’
‘We can start negotiations immediately if we transmit a beta-level proxy. They can have the weapons ready for us when we arrive. Nice quick turnaround and we’re away. The other ships won’t even have reached the system.’
‘Nothing’s ever that easy, Scorp.’ Clavain spoke with morose resignation, his eyes focused on the starfield beyond the window.
‘You don’t think negotiation will work? Fine. We’ll skip it and just come in with all guns blazing.’
‘In which case we’d better hope they don’t know how to use the hell-class weapons. Because if it comes to a straight fight, we won’t have a snowball’s chance.’
‘I thought that Volyova turning the weapons against us wasn’t going to be a problem.’
Clavain turned from the window. ‘Remontoire can’t promise me that our pacification codes will work. And if we test them too soon we give Volyova time to find a workaround. If such a thing exists, I’m pretty sure she’ll find it.’
‘Then we keep trying negotiation,’ Scorpio said. ‘Send the proxy, Clavain. It will buy us time and cost us nothing.’
The man did not answer him directly. ‘Do you think they understand what’s happening to their system, Scorpio?’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 211