‘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 Remon-toire 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 denned 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.
She was about to answer, about to tell him something, when the seat beneath her forced itself upwards, the suddenness of it taking her breath away. She expected the pressure to abate, but it did not. By her own estimation her weight, which had been uncomfortable enough beforehand, had just doubled.
Remontoire looked out and downwards, as Felka had done a few minutes before.
‘What just happened? We seem to be accelerating harder,’ she observed.
‘We are,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’
Felka followed his gaze, hoping to see something different in the view. But as accurately as she could judge, nothing had changed. Even the blue glow behind the engines seemed no brighter.
Gradually, the acceleration became tolerable, if not something she would actually describe as pleasant. With forethought and economy she could manage most of what she had been doing before. The ship’s servitors did their best to assist, helping people get in and out of seats, always ready to spring into action. The other Conjoiners, all somewhat lighter and leaner than Felka, adapted with insulting ease. The interior surfaces of the ship hardened and softened themselves on cue, aiding movement and limiting injury.
But after an hour it increased again. Two and a half gees. Felka could stand it no longer. She asked to be allowed back to her quarters, but learned it was still not possible to go into that part of the ship. Nonetheless the ship partitioned a fresh room for her and extruded a couch she could lie on. Remontoire helped her on to it, making it perfectly clear that he had no better idea than she did of what was happening.
I don’t understand,‘ Felka said, wheezing between words. ’We’re just accelerating. It’s what we always knew we’d have to do if we stood a chance of reaching Clavain.‘
Remontoire nodded. ‘But there’s more to it than that. Those engines were already operating near their peak efficiency when we boosted to one gee. Nightshade may be smaller and lighter than most lighthuggers, but the engines are smaller as well. They were designed to sustain a one-gee cruise up to light-speed, no more than that. Over short distances, yes, greater speed is possible, but that isn’t what’s happening.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning we shouldn’t have been able to accelerate so much harder. And definitely not three times as hard. I didn’t see any auxiliary boosters attached to our hull, either. The only other way Skade could have done it would be by jettisoning two-thirds of the mass we had when we left the Mother Nest.’
With some effort Felka shrugged. She had a profound lack of interest in the mechanics of spaceflight — ships were a means to an end as far as she was concerned — but she could work her way through an argument easily enough. ‘So the engines must be capable of working harder than you assumed.’
‘Yes. That’s what I thought.’
‘And?’
‘They can’t be. We both looked out. You saw that blue glow? Scattered light from the exhaust beam. It would have had to get a lot brighter, Felka, bright enough that we’d have noticed. It didn’t.’ Remontoire paused. ‘If anything, it got fainter, as if the engines had been throttled back a little. As if they weren’t having to work as hard as before.’
‘That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?’
‘No,’ Remontoire said. ‘No sense at all. Unless Skade’s secret machinery had something to do with it.’
Chapter 14
TRIUMVIR ILIA VOLYOVA gazed into the abyss of the cache chamber, wondering if she was about to make the kind of dreadful mistake she had always feared would end her days.
Khouri’s voice buzzed in her helmet. ‘Ilia, I really think we should give this just a tiny bit more thought.’
‘Thank you.’ She checked the seals on her spacesuit again, and then flicked through her weapon status indicators.
‘I mean it.’
‘I know you mean it. Unfortunately I’ve already given it more than enough thought. If I gave it any more thought I might decide not to do it. Which, given the wider circumstances, would be even more suicidally dangerous and stupid than doing it.’
‘I can’t fault your logic, but I’ve a feeling the ship… I mean the Captain… really isn’t going to like this.’
‘No?’ Volyova considered that a far from remote possibility herself. Then perhaps he’ll decide to co-operate with us.‘
‘Or kill us. Have you considered that?’
‘Khouri?’
‘Yes, Ilia?’
‘Please shut up.’
They were floating inside an airlock that allowed entry into the chamber. It was a large lock, but there was still only just enough room for the two of them. It was not simply that their suits had been augmented with the bulky frames of thr
uster-packs. They also carried equipment, supplemental armour and a number of semi-autonomous weapons, clamped to the frames at strategic points.
‘All right; let’s just get it over with,’ Khouri said. ‘I’ve never liked this place, not from the first time you showed it to me. Nothing that’s happened since has made me like it any more.’
They powered out into the chamber, propelling themselves with staccato puffs of micro-gee thrust.
It was one of five similarly sized spaces in Nostalgia for Infinity’s interior: huge inclusions large enough to stow a fleet of passenger shuttles or several megatonnes of cargo, ready to be dropped down to a needy colony world. So much time had passed since the days when the ship had carried colonists that only scant traces of its former function remained, overlaid by centuries of adaptation and corruption. For years the ship had rarely carried more than a dozen inhabitants, free to wander its echoing interior like looters in an evacuated city. But beneath the accretions of time much remained more or less intact, even allowing for the changes that had come about since the Captain’s transformations.
The smooth sheer walls of the chamber reached away in all directions, vanishing into darkness and only fitfully illuminated by the roving spotlights of their suits. Volyova had not been able to restore the chamber’s main lighting system: that was one of the circuits the Captain now controlled, and he clearly did not like them entering this territory.
Gradually the wall receded. They were immersed in darkness now, and it was only the head-up display in Volyova’s helmet that gave her any indication of where to aim for or how fast she was moving.
‘It feels as if we’re in space,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s hard to believe we’re still inside the ship. Any sign of the weapons?’
‘We should be coming up on weapon seventeen in about fifteen seconds.’
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