‘And if I say no?’
‘We’ll do just what we promised: take them by force.’
‘Look up, Clavain, will you? I want to show you something. You alluded to some knowledge of it before, but I want you to be completely certain of the facts.’
She had programmed the display sphere to come alive at that moment, rilled with an enlargement of the dismantled world. The cloud of matter was curdled and torn, flecked by dense nodes of aggregating matter. But the trumpetlike object growing at its heart was ten times larger than any other structure, and now appeared almost fully formed. Although it was difficult for her sensors to see with any clarity through the megatonnes of matter that still lay along the line of sight, there was a suggestion of immense complexity, a bewildering accretion of lacy detail, from a scale of many hundreds of kilometres across to the limit of her scanning resolution. The machinery had a muscular, organic look, knotted and swollen with gristle, sinews and glandular nodes. It did not look like anything a human imagination would have produced by design. And even now layers of matter were being added to the titanic machine: she could see the density streams where mass flows were still taking place. But the thing looked worrying close to being finished.
‘Have you seen much of that before now, Clavain?’ she asked.
‘A little. Not as clearly as this.’
‘What did you make of it?’
‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve made of it first, Ilia?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘I came to the obvious conclusion, Clavain. I watched three small worlds get ripped apart by machines, before they moved on to this one. They’re alien. They were drawn here by something Dan Sylveste did.’
‘Yes. We assumed he had something to do with it. We know about these machines, too — at least, we’ve had our suspicions that they exist.’
‘Who is “we”, exactly?’ she asked.
The Conjoiners, I mean. I only defected recently.‘ He paused before continuing. ’A few centuries ago, we launched expeditions into deep interstellar space, much further out than anything achieved by any other human faction. Those expeditions encountered the machines. We codenamed them wolves, but I think we can assume we’re seeing essentially the same entities here.‘
‘They have no name for themselves,’ Volyova said. ‘But we call them the Inhibitors. It’s the name they gained during their heyday.’
‘You learned all that from observation?’
‘No,’ Volyova said. ‘Not as such.’
She was telling him too much, she thought. But Clavain was so persuasive that she could almost not help herself. Before very long, if she were not careful, she would have told him everything about what had happened around Hades: how Khouri had been given a glimpse into the galaxy’s dark prehuman history, endless chapters of extinction and war stretching back to the dawn of sentient life itself…
There were things she was prepared to discuss with Clavain, and there were things she would rather keep to herself, for now.
‘You’re a woman of mystery, Ilia Volyova.’
‘I’m also a woman with a lot of work to do, Clavain.’ She made the sphere zoom in on the burgeoning machine. ‘The Inhibitors are building a weapon. I have strong suspicions that it will be used to trigger some kind of cataclysmic stellar event. They triggered a flare to wipe out the Amarantin, but I think this will be different — much larger and probably more terminal. And I simply cannot allow it to happen. There are two hundred thousand people on Resurgam, and they will all die if that weapon is used.’
‘I sympathise, believe me.’
‘Then you’ll understand that I won’t be handing over any weapons, now or at any point in the future.’
For the first time Clavain appeared exasperated. He rubbed a hand through his shock of hair, bristling it into a mess of jagged white spikes. ‘Give me the weapons and I’ll see that they’re used against the wolves. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Except that I don’t believe you. And if these weapons are as potent as you say, I’m not sure I’m willing to hand them over to any other party. We’ve looked after them for centuries, after all. No harm was done. I’d say that puts us in rather a good light, wouldn’t you? We’ve been responsible custodians. It would be quite cavalier of us to let any old bunch of rogues get their hands on them now, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘Especially as you admit that you’re not the rightful owners, Clavain.’
‘You’ll regret dealing with the Conjoiners, Ilia.’
‘Mm. But at least I’ll be dealing with a legitimate faction.’
Clavain pushed the fingers of his right hand against his brow, like someone fighting a migraine. ‘No, you won’t be. Not in the sense you think. They only want the weapons so they can scuttle off into deep space with them.’
‘And I suppose you have some vastly more magnanimous use in mind?’
Clavain nodded. ‘I do, as a matter of fact. I want to put them back into the hands of the human race. Demarchists… Ultras… Scorpio’s army… I don’t care who takes them over, so long as they convince me that they’ll do the right thing with them.’
‘Which is?’
‘Fight the wolves. They’re coming closer. The Conjoiners knew it, and what’s happening here proves it. The next few centuries are going to be very interesting, Ilia.’
‘Interesting?’ she repeated.
‘Yes. But not in quite the way we’d wish.’
She switched the beta-level off for the time being. The image of Clavain shattered into speckles and then faded away, leaving only the skeletal shape of the servitor where he had been standing. The transition was quite jarring: she had felt a palpable sense of being in his presence.
‘Ilia?’ It was the Captain. ‘We’re ready now. The last cache weapon is outside the hull.’
She tugged the earpiece out and spoke normally. ‘Good. Anything to report?’
‘Nothing major. Five weapons deployed without incident. Of the remaining three, I noted a transient anomaly with the propulsion harness of weapon six, and an intermittent fault with the guidance subsystems of weapons fourteen and twenty-three. Neither has recurred since deployment.’
She lit a cigarette and smoked a quarter of it before answering. ‘That doesn’t sound like nothing major to me.’
‘I’m sure the faults won’t happen again,’ boomed the Captain’s voice. ‘The electromagnetic environment of the cache chamber is quite different from that beyond the hull. The transition probably caused some confusion, that’s all. The weapons will settle down now that they’re outside.’
‘Make a shuttle ready, please.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You heard me. I’m going outside to check on the weapons.’ She stamped her feet, waiting for his answer.
‘There’s no need for that, Ilia. I can monitor the wellbeing of the weapons perfectly well.’
‘You may be able to control them, Captain, but you don’t know them as well as I do.’
‘Ilia…’
‘I won’t need a large shuttle. I’d even consider taking a suit, but I can’t smoke in one of those things.’
The Captain’s sigh was like the collapse of a distant building. ‘Very well, Ilia. I’ll have a shuttle ready for you. You’ll take care, won’t you? You can keep to the side of the ship that the Inhibitors can’t see, if you’re careful.’
‘They’re a long way from taking any notice of us. That isn’t about to change in the next five minutes.’
‘But you appreciate my concern.’
Did the Captain really care for her? She was not certain that she really believed it. Granted, he might be a little lonely out here, and she was his only chance of human companionship. But she was also the woman who had exposed his crime and punished him with this transformation. His feelings towards her were bound to be a little on the complex side.
She had finished enough of the cigarette. On a whim she inserted the butt-end into the wirework head as
sembly of the servitor, jamming it between two thin metal spars. The tip burned dull orange.
‘Filthy habit,’ Ilia Volyova said.
She took the two-seater snake-headed shuttle that Khouri and Thorn had used to explore the Inhibitor workings around the former gas giant. The Captain had already warmed the craft and presented it to an air lock. The craft had sustained some minor damage during the encounter with the Inhibitor machinery inside Roc’s atmosphere, but most of it had been easy to repair from existing component stocks. The defects that remained certainly did not prevent the shuttle being used for short-range work like this.
She settled into the command seat and assayed the avionics display. The Captain had done a very good job: even the fuel tanks were brimming, although she would not be taking the ship more than a few hundred metres out.
Something nagged at the back of her mind, a feeling she could not quite put her finger on.
She took the shuttle outside, transiting through the armoured doors until she reached naked space. She exited near the much larger aperture where the cache weapons had emerged. The weapons themselves had vanished around the mountainous curve of the great ship’s hull, out of the Inhibitors’ line of sight. Volyova followed the same path, watching the nebulous mass of the shredded planet fall beneath the sharp horizon of the hull.
The eight cache weapons came into view, lurking like monsters. They were all different, but had clearly been shaped by the same governing intellects. She had always suspected that the builders were the Conjoiners, but it was unsettling to have this confirmed by Clavain. She saw no reason for him to have lied. Why, though, had the Conjoiners brought into existence such atrocious tools? It could only have been because they had some intention, at some point, of using them. Volyova wondered whether the intended target had been humanity.
Around each weapon was a harness of girders to which were attached steering rockets and aiming subsystems, as well as a small number of defensive armaments, purely to protect the weapons themselves. The harnesses were able to move the weapons around, and in principle they could have positioned them anywhere within the system, but they were too slow for her requirements. Instead, she had lately fastened sixty-four tug rockets on to the harnesses, eight apiece, positioned at opposing corners of each weapon’s frame. It would take fewer than thirty days to move the eight weapons to the other side of the system.
She nosed the shuttle towards the group of weapons. The weapons, sensing I her approach, shifted their positions. She slid through them, then banked, circled and slowed, examining the specific weapons that the Captain had reported difficulties with. Diagnostic summaries, terse but efficient, scrolled on to her wrist bracelet. She called up each weapon, paying meticulous attention to what she saw.
Something was wrong.
Or rather, something was not wrong. There appeared to be nothing the matter with any of the eight weapons.
She felt again that prickly sense of wrongness, the sense that she had been steered into doing something which only felt as if it had been her choice. The weapons were perfectly healthy; indeed, there was no evidence that there had been any faults at all, transient or otherwise. But that could only mean that the Captain had lied to her: that he had reported problems where none existed.
She composed herself. If only she had not taken him at his word, but had checked for herself before leaving the ship…
‘Captain…’ she said hesitantly.
‘Yes, Ilia?’
‘Captain, I’m getting some funny readings here. The weapons all appear to be healthy, no problems at all.’
‘I’m quite sure there were transient errors, Ilia.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes.’ But he did not sound so convinced of himself. ‘Yes, Ilia, quite sure. Why would I have reported them otherwise?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps because you wanted to get me outside the ship for some reason?’
‘Why would I have wanted to do that, Ilia?’ He sounded affronted, but not quite as affronted as she would have liked.
‘I don’t know. But I have a horrible feeling I’m about to find out.’
She watched one of the cache weapons — it was weapon thirty-one, the quintessence-force weapon — detach from the group. It slid sideways spouting bright sparks from its steering jets, the smooth movement belying the enormous mass of machinery that was being shunted so effortlessly. She examined her bracelet. Gyroscopes spun up, shifting the harness about its centre of gravity. Ponderously, like a great iron finger moving to point at the accused, the enormous weapon was selecting its target.
It was swinging back towards Nostalgia for Infinity.
Belatedly, stupidly, cursing herself, Ilia Volyova understood precisely what was happening.
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.‘
Tt 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.
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