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 Lights 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?’
Chapter 30
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.
Swat this, you bastards, she thought.
She passed each weapon amongst the eight, slowing down her propulsion pack long enough to make sure nothing had changed since her last inspection. Nothing had. The weapons hung in their armoured cradles precisely as she had left them. They looked just as foreboding and sinister, but they had not done anything unexpected.
These are the eight I’ll need, Captain,‘ she said.
’Just the eight?‘
‘They’ll do for now. Mustn’t put all our chicks in one egg, or whatever the metaphor is.’ ‘I’m sure there’s something suitable.’
‘When I say the word, I’ll need you to deploy each weapon one at a time. You can do that, can’t you?’ ‘When you say “deploy”, Ilia… ?’
‘Just move them outside the ship. Outside you, I mean,’ she corrected herself, having noticed that the Captain now tended to refer to himself and the ship as the same entity. She did not want to do anything, no matter how slight, that might interfere with his sudden spirit of co-operation. ‘Just to the outside,’ she continued. ‘Then, when all eight weapons are outside, we’ll run another systems check. We’ll keep you between them and the Inhibitors, just to be on the safe side. I don’t have the feeling that we’re being monitored, but it makes sense to play safe.’
‘I couldn’t agree more, Ilia.’
‘Right then. We’ll start with good old weapon seventeen, shall we?’ ‘Weapon seventeen it is, Ilia.’
The motion was sudden and startling. It was such a long time since any of the cache weapons had moved in any way that she had forgotten what it was like. The cradle that held the weapon began to glide along its support rail so that the whole obelisk-sized mass of the weapon slid smoothly and silently aside. Everything in the cache chamber took place in silence, of course, but nonetheless it seemed to Volyova that there was a more profound silence here, a silence that was judicial, like the silence of a place of execution.
The network of rails allowed the cache weapons to reach the much smaller chamber immediately below the main one. The smaller chamber was just large enough to accommodate the largest weapon, and had been rebuilt extensively for just this purpose.
She watched weapon seventeen vanish into the chamber, remembering her encounter with the weapon’s controlling subpersona ‘Seventeen’, the one that had shown worrying signs of free will and a marked lack of respect for her authority. She did not doubt that something like Seventeen existed in all the weapons. There was no sense worrying about it now; all she could do was hope that the Captain and the weapons continued to do what she asked of them.
No sense worrying about it, no. But she did have a dreadful sense of foreboding all the same.
The connecting door closed. Volyova switched her suit’s monitor feed to tap into the external cameras and sen
sors so that she could observe the weapon as it emerged beyond the hull. It would take a few minutes to get there, but she was in no immediate hurry.
And yet something very unexpected was happening. Her suit, via the monitors on the hull, was telling her that the ship was being bombarded by optical laser light.
Volyova’s first reaction was a crushing sense of failure. Finally, for whatever reason, she had alerted the Inhibitors and drawn their attention. It was as if just intending to deploy the weapons had been sufficient. The wash of laser light must be from their long-range sensor sweeps. They were noticing the ship, sniffing it out of the darkness.
But then she realised that the emissions were not coming from the right part of the sky.
They were coming from interstellar space.
‘Ilia…?’ the Captain asked. Ts something wrong? Shall I abort the deployment?‘
‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’ she said.
‘Knew about what?’
‘That someone was firing laser light at us. Communications frequency.’
‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I just…’
‘You didn’t want me to know about it. And I didn’t until I tapped into those hull sensors to watch the weapon emerging.’
‘What emissions… ah, wait.’ His great deific voice hesitated. ‘Wait. I see what you mean now. I didn’t notice them — there was too much else going on. You’re more attuned to such concerns than me, Ilia… I am very self-focused these days. If you wait, I will backtrack and determine when the emissions began… I have the sensor data, you know…’
She didn’t believe him, but knew there was no way to prove otherwise. He controlled everything, and it was only through a slip of his concentration that she had learned about the laser light at all.
‘Well. How long?’
‘No more than a day, Ilia. A day or so…’
‘What does “or so” mean, you lying bastard?’
‘I mean… a matter of days. No more than a week… at a conservative estimate.’
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