But when I dimmed my own lights, and eased off on the thruster pod, I fell into total darkness.
“Struma,” I said. “I’ve lost you. Please respond.”
Silence.
“Struma. This is Rauma. Where are you? Flash your lights or thrusters if you can read me.”
Silence and darkness.
I stopped my drift. I must have been halfway into the innards of the Conjoiner ship, and that was far enough. I turned around, rationalising his silence. He must have gone all the way through, come out the other side, and the physical remains of the ship must be blocking our communications.
I fired a thruster pulse, heading out the way I had come in. The ruined forms threw back milky light. Ahead was a flower-shaped patch of stars, swelling larger. Not home, not sanctuary, but still something to aim for, something better than remaining inside the wreck.
I saw him coming just before he hit. He must have used a thruster pulse, just enough to move out of whatever concealment he had found. When he rammed my pod the closing speed could not have been more than five or six metres per second, but it was still enough to jolt the breath from me and send my own pod tumbling. I gasped for air, fighting against the thickening heaviness of my thoughts to retain some clarity of mind. I crashed into something, collision alarms sounding. A pod was sturdy enough to survive the launch boost, but it was not built to withstand an intentional, sustained attack.
I jabbed at the thruster controls, loosened myself. Struma’s pod was coming back around, lit in the strobe-flashes of our thrusters. Each flash lit up a static tableau, pods frozen in mid-space, but from one flash to the next our positions shifted.
I wondered if there was any point reasoning with him.
“Struma. You don’t have to do this. Whatever you think you’re going to achieve…” But then a vast and calm understanding settled over me. It was almost a blessing, to see things so clearly. “This was staged, somehow. This whole takeover attempt. Magadis… the others… it wasn’t them breaking the terms of the Accord, was it?”
His voice took on a pleading, reasoning tone.
“We needed this intelligence, Rauma. More than we needed them, and certainly more than we needed peace.”
Our pods clanged together. We had no weapons beyond mass and speed, no defences beyond thin armour and glass.
“Who, Struma? Who do you speak for?”
“Those who have our better interests in mind, Rauma. That’s all you need to know. All you will know, shortly. I’m sorry you’ve got to die. Sorry about the others, too. It wasn’t meant to be this bad.”
“No government would consent to this, Struma. You’ve been misled. Lied to.”
He came in again, harder than before, keeping thruster control going until the moment of impact. I blacked out for a second or ten, then came around as I drifted to a halt against a thicket of internal spars. Brittle as glass, they snapped into drifting, tumbling whiskers, making a dull music as they clanged and tinkled against my hull.
A fissure showed in my forward dome, pushing out little micro-fractures.
“They’d have found out about the wreck sooner or later, Rauma—just as we did. And they’d have found a way to get here, no matter the costs.”
“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t. Maybe once they’d have been that ruthless—as would we. But we’ve learned to work together, learned to build a better world.”
“Console yourself. When I make my report, I’ll ensure you get all the credit for the discovery. They’ll name the object after you. Bernsdottir’s Object. Bernsdottir’s Shroud. Which would you prefer?”
“I’d prefer to be alive.” I had to raise my voice over the damage alarm. “By the way, how do you expect to make a report, if we never get home?”
“It’s been taken care of,” Struma said. “They’ll accept my version of events, when I return to the Equinoctial. I’ll say you were trapped in here, and I couldn’t help you. I’ll make it sound suitably heroic.”
“Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. But the more they focus on you, the less they’ll focus on me.”
He rammed me one more time, and I was about to try and dive around him when I let my hands drift from the thruster controls. My pod sailed on, careening into deepening thickets of ruined ship. I bounced against something solid, then tumbled on.
“You’d better hope that they manage to stop the drift.”
“Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. I don’t need the ship, though. There’s a plan—a contingency—if all else were to fail. I abandon the ship. Catapult myself out of harm’s way in a reefersleep casket. I’ll put a long-range homing trace on it. Out between the stars, the casket will have no trouble keeping me cold. Eventually they’ll send another ship to find me.”
More thruster flashes, but not from me. For an instant the sharp, jagged architecture of this place was laid stark. Perhaps I saw a body somewhere in that chaos, stirred from rest by our rude intrusion, tumbling like a doll, a fleshless, sharp-crested skull turning its blank eyes to mine.
“I’m glad you trust your masters that well.”
“Oh, I do.”
“Who are they, Struma? A faction within the Demarchists? One of the non-aligned powers?”
“Just people, Rauma. Just good, wise people with our long-term interests in mind.”
Struma came in again, lining up for a final ram. He must have heard that damage alarm, I thought, and took my helpless tumble as evidence that I had suffered some final loss of thruster control.
I let him fall closer. He picked up speed, his face seeming to swell until it filled his dome. His expression was one of stony resolve, filled more with regret than anger. Our eyes must have met in those last strobe-lit instants, and perhaps he saw something in my own face, some betrayal of my intentions.
By then, though, it would have been much too late.
I jammed my hands back onto the controls, thrusting sideways, giving him no time to change his course. His pod slid into the space where mine had been only an instant earlier, and then onward, onto the impaling spike of a severed spar. It drove through armour, into Struma’s chest, and in the flicker of my own thrusters I watched his body undergo a single violent convulsion, even as the air and life raced from his lungs.
Under better circumstances, I would have found a way to remove his body from that wreck. Whatever he had done, whatever his sins, no one deserved to be left in that place.
But these were not better circumstances, and I left him there.
* * *
Of the rest, there isn’t much more I need to tell you. Few things in life are entirely black and white, and so it was with the repair schedule. It completed on time, and Equinoctial regained control. I was on my way back, using what remained of my fuel, when they began to test the auxiliary engines. Since they were shining in my direction, I had no difficulty making out the brightening star that was my ship. Not much was being asked of it, I told myself. Surely now it would be possible to undo the drift, even reverse it, and begin putting some comfortable distance between the Equinoctial and the object.
As my pod cleared the immediate influence of the surface, I regained a stable signal and ranging fix on the main ship. Hardly daring to breathe, I watched as her drift was reduced by a factor of five. At ten metres per second a human could have outpaced her. It was nearly enough—tantalising close to zero.
Then something went wrong. I watched the motors flicker and fade. I waited for them to restart, but the moment never came. Through the link I learned that some fragile power coupling had overloaded, strained beyond its limits. Like everything else, it could be repaired—but only given time that we did not have. The Equinoctial’s rate of drift had been reduced, but not neutralised. Our pods had detected changes at nine thousand kilometres from the surface. At its present speed, the ship would pass that point in four days.
We did not have time.
I had burned almost all my fuel on the way b
ack from the wreck, leaving only the barest margin to rendezvous with the ship. Unfortunately that margin proved insufficient. My course was off, and by the time I corrected it, I did not have quite enough fuel to complete my rendezvous. I was due to sail past the ship, carrying on into interstellar space. The pod’s resources would keep me alive for a few more days, but not enough for anyone to come to my rescue, and eventually I would freeze or suffocate, depending on which got me first. Neither option struck me as very appealing. But at least I would be spared the rending forces of the surface.
That was not how it happened, of course.
My remaining crew, and the passenger-representatives, had decreed that I should return to the ship. And so the Equinoctial’s alignment was trimmed very carefully, using such steering control as the ship now retained, and I slid back into the maw of the cargo launcher. It was a bumpy procedure, reversing the process that had boosted me out of the ship in the first place, and I suffered concussion as the pod was recaptured by the launch cradle and brought to a punishing halt.
But I was alive.
Doctor Grellet’s was the first face I saw when I returned to awareness, lying on a revival couch, sore around the temples, but fully cognizant of what had happened.
My first question was a natural one.
“Where are we?”
“Two days from the point where your pods began to pick up the altered spacetime.” He spoke softly, in the best bedside manner. “Our instruments haven’t picked up anything odd just yet, but I’m sure that will change as we near the boundary.”
I absorbed his news, oddly resentful that I had not been allowed to die. But I forced a captain-like composure upon myself. “It took until now to revive me?”
“There were complications. We had to put you into the auto-surgeon, to remove a bleed on the brain. There were difficulties getting the surgeon to function properly. I had to perform a manual override of some of its tasks.”
No one else was in the room with me. I wondered where the rest of my executive staff were. Perhaps they were busy preparing the ship for its last few days, closing logs and committing messages and farewells to the void, for all the hope they had of reaching anyone.
“It’s going to be bad, Doctor Grellet. Struma and I got a taste of it, and we were still a long way from the surface. If there’s nothing we can do, then no one need be conscious for it.”
“They won’t be,” Doctor Grellet said. “Only a few of us are awake now. The rest have gone back into reefersleep. They understand that it’s a death sentence, but at least it’s painless, and some sedatives can ease the transition into sleep.”
“You should join them.”
“I shall. But I wanted to tell you about Magadis first. I think you will find it interesting.”
When I was ready to move Doctor Grellet and I made our way to the interrogation cell. Magadis was sitting in her chair, still bound. Her head swivelled to track me as I entered the electrostatic cage. In the time since I had last seen her, the swelling around her bad eye had begun to reduce, and she could look at me with both eyes.
“I told the guard to stand down,” Doctor Grellet said. “He was achieving nothing anyway.”
“You told me about the prisoners on Mars.”
He gave a thin smile. “I’m glad some of that sunk in. I didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Why hadn’t Magadis turned that weapon on herself, or simply reached inside her own skull to commit suicide? It ought to have been well within her means.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked her.
Magadis levelled her gaze at Doctor Grellet. Although she was still my prisoner, her poise was one of serene control and dominance. “Tell her what you found, Doctor.”
“It was the auto-surgeon,” Grellet said. “I mentioned that there were problems getting it to work properly. No one had expected that it would need to be used again, I think, and so they had taken no great pains to clear its executive memory of the earlier workflow.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The auto-surgeon had been programmed to perform an unusual surgical task, something far outside its normal repertoire. Magadis was brought out of reefersleep, but held beneath consciousness. She was put into the auto-surgeon. A coercive device was installed inside her.”
“It was a military device,” Magadis said, as detached as if she were recounting something that had happened to someone else entirely, long ago and far away. “An illegal relic of the first war. A Tharsis Lash, they called it. Designed to override our voluntary functions, and permit us to be interrogated and serve as counter-propaganda mouthpieces. While the device was installed in me, I had no volition. I could only do and say what was required of me.”
“By Struma,” I said, deciding that was the only answer that made any sense.
“He was obliged to act alone,” Magadis answered, still with that same icy calm. “It was made to look like an attempted takeover of your ship, but no such thing was ever attempted. But we had to die, all of us. No knowledge of the object could be allowed to reach our mother nests.”
“I removed the coercive device,” Doctor Grellet said. “Of course, there was resistance from your loyal officers. But they were made to understand what had happened. Struma must have woken up first, then completed the work on Magadis. Struma then laid the evidence for an attempted takeover of the ship. More Conjoiners were brought out of reefersleep, and either killed on the spot or implanted with cruder versions of the coercive devices, so that they were seen to put up a convincing fight. The other officers were revived, and perceived that the ship was under imminent threat. In the heat of the emergency they had no reason to doubt Struma.”
“Nor did I,” I whispered.
“It was vital that the Conjoiners be eliminated. Their cooperation was required for the existence and operation of this ship, but they could not be party to the discovery and exploration of the object.”
“What about the rest of us?” I asked. “We were all part of it. We’d have spoken, when we got back home.”
“You would have accepted Struma’s account of the Conjoiner takeover, as you very nearly did. As I did. But it was a mistake to put her under armed guard, and another mistake to allow me a close look at that auto-surgeon. I suppose we can’t blame Struma for a few slips. He had enough to be concentrating on.”
“You were worried about war,” Magadis said evenly. “Now it may still happen. But the terms of provocation will be different. A faction inside one of your own planetary governments engineered this takeover bid.” She held her silence for a few moments. “But I do not want war. Do you believe in clemency, Rauma Bernsdottir?”
“I hope so.”
“Good.” And Magadis stood from her chair, her bindings falling away where they had clearly never been properly fastened. She took a step nearer to me, and in a single whiplash motion brought her arm up to my chin. Her hand closed around my jaw. She held me with a vicelike force, squeezing so hard that I felt my bones would shatter. “I believe in clemency as well. But it takes two to make it work. You struck me, when you thought I was your prisoner.”
I stumbled back, crashing against the useless grid of the electrostatic cage. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you, Captain?”
“Yes.” It was hard to speak, hard to think, with the pain she was inflicting. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“In your defence,” Magadis said, “you only did it the once. And although I was under the control of the device, I saw something in your eyes. Doubt. Shame.” She relinquished her hold on me. I drew quick breaths, fully aware of how easily she could still break me. “I’m minded to think you regretted your impulse.”
“I did.”
“Good. Because someone has to live, and it may as well be you.”
I reached up and nursed the skin around my jaw. “No. We’re finished—all of us. All that’s left is reefersleep. We’ll die, but at least we’ll be under when it happens.”
“The ship can’t be saved. There just isn’t time.”
Magadis turned to Doctor Grellet. “Perhaps we should show her, Doctor. Then she would understand.”
* * *
They took me to one of the forward viewports. Since the ship was still aimed at the object all that was presently visible was a wall of darkness, stretching to the limit of vision in all directions. I stared into that nothingness, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of the Conjoiner wreck, now that we were so much closer. They had asked me very little of what happened to Struma, as if my safe return was answer enough.
Then something flashed. It was a brief, bright scintillation, there and gone almost before it had time to register on my retinas. Wondering if it might have been a trick of the imagination, I stayed at the port until I saw another of the flashes. A little later came a third. They were not happening in the same spot, but clustered near enough to each other not to be accidental.
“You saved us,” Doctor Grellet said, speaking quietly, as if he might break some sacred spell. “Or at least, showed us the way. When you and Struma used the cargo launcher to accelerate your pods, there was an effect on the rest of the ship. A tiny but measurable recoil, reducing some of her speed.”
“It’s no help to us,” I said, taking a certain bleak pleasure in pointing out the error in his thinking. “If we had a full cargo manifest, tens of thousands of tonnes, then maybe we could shoot enough of it ahead of the ship to reverse the drift. But we haven’t. We’re barely carrying any cargo at all.”
Another flash twinkled against the surface.
“It’s not cargo,” Magadis said.
I suppose I understood even then. Some part of me, at least. But not the part that was willing to face the truth.
Infinite Stars Page 53