‘I’m all ears.’
‘This office, the department of Inquisition House called External Threats, is not at all that it appears to be. The whole business of tracking down the war criminal Volyova has always been a front for a much more sensitive operation. Matter of fact, Volyova died years ago.’
He had the impression she was lying, but still telling him something that was far closer to the truth than he had ever heard before. ‘So why keep up the pretence of searching for her?’
‘Because it’s not her we really want. It’s her ship, or a means of reaching it. But by focusing on Volyova we were able to follow much the same lines of inquiry without bringing the ship into the discussion.’
The other woman, the one he thought had called herself Irina, nodded. ‘Essentially this entire government department is engaged in recovering her ship, and nothing else. Everything else is a smokescreen. A hugely complex one, and one that has involved internecine warfare with half a dozen other departments, but a smokescreen all the same.’
‘Why does it have to be so secret?’
The two woman exchanged glances.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Irina, just as the other one started to say something. ‘The operation to find the ship had to be kept maximally secret for the simple reason that there would have been intense civil disorder if it ever came to light.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘It’s a matter of panic,’ she said, waving her cigarette for emphasis. ‘The government’s official policy has always been pro-terraforming, right back to the old Inundationist days under Girardieau. That policy only deepened after the Sylveste crisis. Now they’re fully wedded to it in ideological terms. Anyone who criticises the programme is guilty of incorrect thought. You of all people shouldn’t need to be told this.’
‘So where the does the ship come in?’
‘As an escape route. One branch of government has determined a singularly disturbing fact.’ She puffed on her cigarette. ‘There’s an external threat to the colony, but not quite the kind they originally imagined. Studies of the threat have been ongoing for some time. The conclusion is inescapable: Resurgam must be evacuated, perhaps within no more than one or two years. Half a decade at the optimistic side — and that’s probably being very optimistic.’
She watched him, undoubtedly waiting to observe the effects her words would have. Perhaps she assumed that she would need to repeat herself, that he would be too slow to take it all in at first go.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, but you’re going to have to try better than that.’
Irina, or whoever she was, looked pained. ‘You don’t believe my story?’
‘I wouldn’t be the only one, either.’
The Inquisitor said, ‘But you’ve always wanted to leave Resurgam. You’ve always said the colony was in danger.’
‘I wanted to leave. Who wouldn’t?’
‘Listen to me,’ Vuilleumier said sharply. ‘You’re a hero to thousands of people. Most of them wouldn’t trust the government to tie their shoelaces. A certain fraction of those people have long believed that you know the whereabouts of one or two shuttles, and that you are planning a mass exodus into space for your believers.’
He shrugged. ‘And?’
‘It’s not true, of course — the shuttles never existed — but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might have, given everything that’s gone on. Now.’ She leant forwards again. ‘Consider the following hypothesis. A special covert branch of government determines that there is an imminent global threat to Resurgam. The same branch of government, after much work, determines the whereabouts of Volyova’s ship. An inspection of the ship indicates that it is damaged but flightworthy. More importantly, it has a passenger-carrying capacity. A vast passenger-carrying capacity. Enough to evacuate the entire planet, if some sacrifices are made.’
‘Like an ark?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, clearly pleased by his answer. ‘Exactly like an ark.’
Vuilleumier’s friend cradled her cigarette elegantly between two fingers. Her exceedingly thin hands reminded Thorn of the splayed-out bones in a bird’s wing. ‘But having a ship we can use as an ark is only half of the solution,’ she said. ‘The question is, might the government’s announcement of the existence of such a ship be viewed with a trace of scepticism? Of course it would.’ She stabbed the cigarette in his direction. ‘That’s where you come in. The people’ll trust you where they won’t trust us.’
Thorn leant back in his seat until it was balancing on only two legs. He laughed and shook his head, the two women watching him impassively. ‘Was that why I was beaten up downstairs? To soften me into accepting a piece of drivel like this?’
Vuilleumier’s friend held up the packet of cigarettes again. ‘These came from her ship.’
‘Did they? That’s nice. I thought you said you had no means of reaching orbit.’
‘We didn’t. But now we do. We hacked into the ship from the ground, got it to send down a shuttle.’
He pulled a face, but could not swear that such a thing was impossible. Difficult, yes — unlikely, very probably — but certainly not impossible.
‘And you’re going to evacuate an entire planet with one shuttle?’
‘Two, actually.’ Vuilleumier coughed and retrieved another folder. ‘The most recent census put the population of Resurgam at just under two hundred thousand. The largest shuttle can move five hundred people into orbit, where they can transfer to an in-system craft with a capacity about four times that. That means we’ll need to make four hundred surface-to-orbit flights. The in-system ship will need to make about one hundred round trips to Volyova’s ship. That’s the real bottleneck, though — each of those round trips will take at least thirty hours, and that’s assuming almost zero time for loading and unloading at either end. Better assume forty hours to be on the safe side. That means we’re looking at nearly six standard months. We can shave some time off that by pressing another surface-to-orbit ship into service, but we’ll be doing very well if we get it much below five months. And that, of course, is assuming that we can have two thousand people ready and waiting to be moved off Resurgam every forty hours…’ Vuilleumier smiled. He could not help but like her smile, for all that he felt he should be associating it with pain and fear. ‘You begin to see why we need you, I think.’
‘Assuming I refuse to offer my assistance… just how would the government go about this?’
‘Mass coercion would seem to be the only other option available to us,’ Irina said, as if this was a perfectly reasonable statement. ‘Martial law… internment camps… you get the idea. It wouldn’t be pretty. There’d be civil disobedience, riots. There’s a good chance a lot of people would end up dead.’
‘A lot of people will end up dead anyway,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘There’s no way anyone could organise a mass evacuation of a planet without some loss of life. But we’d like to keep a lid on it.’
‘With my help?’ he asked her.
‘Let me outline the plan.’ She stabbed her finger against the tabletop between sentences. ‘We release you forthwith. You’ll be free to go as you please, and you have my guarantee that we will continue to do our utmost to keep Internal Threats off your back. I’ll also make sure that those bastards who hurt you are punished… you have my word on that. In return, you disseminate information to the effect that you have indeed located the shuttles. More than that, you have discovered a threat to Resurgam and the means to get everyone out of harm’s way. Your organisation begins spreading the word that the evacuation will start shortly, with hints as to where interested parties should congregate. The government, meanwhile, will issue counterstatements discrediting your movement’s position, but they won’t be completely convincing. The people will begin to suspect that you are on to something, something that the government would rather they didn’t know about. With me so far?’
He returned her smile. ‘So far.’
‘This is
where it gets interesting. Once the idea has sunk into the public consciousness, and after some people have begun to take you seriously, you will be arrested. Or at least you’ll be seen to be arrested. After some procrastination the government will concede that there is a genuine threat, and that your movement has indeed obtained access to Volyova’s ship. At that point the evacuation operation falls under government control — but you’ll be seen to give it your reluctant blessing, and you’ll remain in charge as a figurehead, by public demand. The government will have egg on its face, but the public won’t be so certain they’re walking into a trap. You’ll be a hero.’ She made eye contact with him for a moment longer than she had before, and then glanced away. ‘Everyone’s a winner. The planet gets evacuated without too much panic. In the aftermath, you’ll be released and honoured — all charges dismissed. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?’
‘It would,’ he admitted, ‘but there are just two small flaws in your argument.’
‘Which are?’
‘The threat, and the ship. You haven’t told me why we have to evacuate Resurgam. I’d need to know that, wouldn’t I? I’d also need to believe it, too. Can’t convince anyone else if I don’t believe it myself, can I?’
‘Fair point, I suppose. And concerning the ship?’
‘You told me you have the means to visit it. Fine.’ He looked at the two women in turn, the younger one and the older one, sensing without really knowing why that the two of them could be very dangerous individually and quite exquisitely lethal when working as a team.
‘Fine, what?’ said Vuilleumier.
‘Take me to see it.’
They were one light-second out from the Mother Nest when the peculiar thing happened.
Felka had watched the comet fall behind Nightshade. It dwindled so slowly at first that the whole departure had a curious dreamlike quality, like casting off from a lonely moonlit island. She thought of her atelier in the green heart of the comet, of her filigreed wooden puzzles, each as intricately worked as scrimshaw. Then she thought of her wall of faces and the glowing mice in her maze, and could not quite assure herself that she would ever see any of them again. Even if she returned, she thought, it would be to profoundly changed circumstances, with Clavain either dead or a prisoner. Denied his help, she knew that she would curl inwards, back into the comforting hollow of her past, when the only thing that had mattered in the world had been her beloved Wall. And the horrible thing was that the idea did not revolt her in the slightest, but rather left her with a nagging glow of anticipation. It would have been different when Galiana was alive; different even when she was gone but when Felka still had Clavain’s companionship to anchor her to the real world, with all its crushing simplicities.
The last thing she had done, after sealing her atelier and assigning a servitor to look after her mice, had been to go down to the vault and visit Galiana, to say goodbye to her frozen body one final time. But the door into the vault had refused to open for her. There had been no time to make enquiries; it was either go now or miss Nightshade’s departure. So she had left, never having made that final farewell, and she wondered now why it made her feel so guilty.
All they shared was some genetic material, after all.
Felka had retired to her quarters once the Mother Nest was too small and dim to see with the naked eye. An hour after departure the ship ramped the gravity to one gee, instantly defining ‘up’ as being towards the sharp prow of the long conic hull. After another two hours, during which the Mother Nest fell a light-second behind Nightshade, a message came across the ship’s intercom. It was politely aimed at Felka; she was the only Conjoiner on the ship who was not routinely tuned into the general grid of neural communications.
The message instructed her to move up the ship, ascending in the direction of flight towards the prow, which was now above her head. When she dallied, a Conjoiner, one of Skade’s technicians, politely ushered her through corridors and shafts until she was many levels above her starting point. She refused to allow a map of the ship to be burned into her short-term memory — such instant familiarity would have denied her the boredom-alleviating pleasure of working out Nightshade’s layout for herself — but it was easy enough to tell that she was closer to the prow. The curvature of the outer walls was sharper, and the individual rooms were smaller. It did not take her long to conclude that there could be no more than a dozen people on Nightshade, including Remontoire and herself. Her companions were all Closed Council, though she did not even attempt to unwrap their minds.
The rooms were spartan, usually windowless chambers that the ship had defined according to the current needs of the crew. The room where she found Remontoire was on the outer edge of the hull, with a blister-shaped observation cupola set into one wall. Remontoire was sitting on an extruded ledge, his expression calm and his fingers steepled neatly above one knee. He was deep in conversation with a white mechanical crab that was perched just below the rim of the cupola.
‘What’s happening?’ Felka asked. ‘Why did I have to leave my quarters?’
‘I’m not quite sure,’ Remontoire replied.
Then she heard a volley of muted clunks as dozens of armoured irised bulkheads snicked shut up and down the ship.
‘You’ll be able to return to your quarters shortly,’ the crab said. ‘This is just a precaution.’
She recognised the voice, even if the timbre was not entirely as she remembered it. ‘Skade? I thought you were…’
‘They’ve allowed me to slave this proxy,’ the crab said, wiggling the tiny jointed manipulators between its foreclaws. It was stuck to the wall by circular pads on the ends of its legs. From under the crab’s glossy white shell protruded various barbs, muzzles and lacerating and stabbing devices. It was very clearly an old assassination device that Skade had commandeered.
‘It’s good of you to see us off,’ Felka said, relieved that Skade would not be accompanying them.
‘See you off?’
‘When the light-lag exceeds a few seconds, won’t it be impracticable to slave the proxy?’
‘What light-lag? I’m on the ship, Felka. My quarters are only a deck or two below your own.’
Felka remembered being told that Skade’s injuries were so severe that it required a roomful of Doctor Delmar’s equipment just to keep her alive. ‘I didn’t think…’
The crab waved a manipulator, dismissing her protestations. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come down later; we’ll have a little chat.’
‘I’d like that,’ Felka said. ‘There’s a great deal you and I need to talk about, Skade.’
‘Of course there is. Well, I must be going; urgent matters to attend to.’
A hole puckered open in one wall; the crab scuttled through it, vanishing into the ship’s hidden innards.
Felka looked at Remontoire. ‘Seeing as we’re all Closed Council, I suppose I can talk freely. Did she say anything more about the Exordium experiments when you were with Clavain?’
Remontoire kept his voice very low. It was no more than a gesture; they had to assume that Skade would be able to hear everything that went on in the ship, and would also be able to read their minds at source. But Felka understood precisely why he felt the need to whisper. ‘Nothing. She even lied about where the edict to cease shipbuilding came from.’
Felka glared at the wall, forcing it to provide her with somewhere to sit down. A ledge pushed out from the wall opposite Remontoire and she eased herself on to it. It was good to be off her feet; she had spent far too long of late in the weightless environment of her atelier, and the gee of shipboard thrust was wearying.
She stared out through the cupola and down, and saw the lobed shadow of one of Nightshade’s engines silhouetted against an aura of chill flame.
‘What did she tell him?’ Felka asked.
‘Some story about the Closed Council piecing together the evidence of the wolf attacks from a variety of ship losses.’
‘Implausible.’
‘I don’t
think Clavain believed her. But she couldn’t mention Exordium; she obviously wanted him to know the bare minimum for the job, and yet she couldn’t avoid talking about the edict to some extent.’
‘Exordium’s at the heart of all this,’ Felka said. ‘Skade must have known that if she gave Clavain a thread to pull on he’d have unravelled the whole thing, right back to the Inner Sanctum.’
‘That’s as far as he’d have been able to take it.’
‘Knowing Clavain, I wouldn’t be so sure. She wanted him as an ally because he isn’t the kind to stop at a minor difficulty.’
‘But why couldn’t she have just told him the truth? The idea that the Closed Council picked up messages from the future isn’t so shocking, when you think about it. And from what I’ve gathered the content of those messages was sketchy at best, little more than vague premonitionary suggestions.’
‘Unless you were part of it, it’s difficult to describe what happened. But I only participated once. I don’t know what happened in the other experiments.’
‘Was Skade involved in the programme when you participated?’
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘But that was after our return from deep space. The edict was issued much earlier, long before Skade was recruited to the Conjoined. The Closed Council must have already been running Exordium experiments before Skade joined us.’
Felka eyed the wall again. It was entirely reasonable to indulge in speculation about something like Exordium, Felka knew — Skade could hardly object to it, given the fact that it was so central to what was now happening — but she still felt as if they were on the brink of committing some unspeakably treasonous act.
But Remontoire continued speaking, his voice low yet assured. ‘So Skade joined us… and before very long she was in the Closed Council and actively involved in the Exordium experiments. At least one of the experiments coincided with the edict, so we can assume there was a direct warning about the tau-neutrino effect. But what about the other experiments? What warnings came through during those? Were there even warnings?’ He looked at Felka intently.
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