Redemption Ark

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Ilia.’

  She was, mercifully, awake, engrossed in the swollen bauble of her battle display. Clavain’s beta-level was by her side, the servitor’s fingers forming a contemplative steeple beneath its nose as it viewed the same abstract realisation.

  ‘What is it, Khouri?’ came Volyova’s scratch of a voice.

  ‘Something’s happening to the ship.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I felt it as well. So did Clavain.’

  Khouri slipped her goggles on and viewed the two of them properly: the ailing woman and the elderly white-haired man who stood patiently at her bedside. They looked as if they had known each other all their lives.

  ‘I think we’re moving,’ Khouri said.

  ‘More than just moving, I’d say,’ Clavain replied. ‘Accelerating, aren’t we? The local vertical is shifting.’

  He was right. When the ship was parked in orbit somewhere it generated gravity for itself by spinning sections of its interior. The occupants felt themselves being flung outwards, away from the ship’s long axis. But when Nostalgia for Infinity was under thrust, the acceleration created another source of false gravity exactly at right angles to the spin-generated pseudo-force. The two vectors combined to give a force that acted at an angle between them.

  ‘About a tenth of a gee,’ Clavain added, ‘or thereabouts. Enough to distort local vertical by five or six degrees.’

  ‘No one asked the ship to move,’ Khouri said.

  ‘I think it decided to move itself,’ Volyova said. ‘I imagine that was why we experienced some jolts earlier on. Our host’s fine control is a little rusty. Isn’t it, Captain?’

  But the Captain did not answer her.

  ‘Why are we moving?’ Khouri asked.

  I think that might have something to do with it,‘ Volyova said.

  The squashed bauble of the battle realisation swelled larger. At first glance it looked much as it had before. The remaining cache weapons were still displayed, together with the Inhibitor device. But there was something new: an icon that she did not remember being displayed before. It was arrowing into the arena of battle from an oblique angle to the ecliptic, exactly as if it had come in from interstellar space. Next to it was a flickering cluster of numbers and symbols.

  ‘Clavain’s ship?’ Khouri asked. ‘But that isn’t possible. We weren’t expecting to see it for weeks…’

  ‘Seems we were wrong,’ Volyova said. ‘Weren’t we, Clavain?’

  I can’t possibly speculate.‘

  ‘His blue shift was falling too swiftly,’ Volyova said. ‘But I didn’t believe the evidence of my sensors. Nothing capable of interstellar flight could decelerate as hard as Clavain’s ship appeared to be slowing. And yet…’

  Khouri finished the sentence for her. ‘It has.’

  ‘Yes. And instead of being a month out, he was two or three days out, maybe fewer. Clever, Clavain, I’ll give you that. How do you manage that little trick, might I ask?’

  The beta-level shook its head. ‘I don’t know. That particular piece of intelligence was edited from my personality before I was transmitted here. But I can speculate as well as you can, Ilia. Either my counterpart has a more powerful drive than anything known to the Conjoiners, or he has something worryingly close to inertia-suppression technology. Take your pick. Either way, I’d say it wasn’t exactly good news, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Are you saying the Captain saw the other ship coming in?’ Khouri asked.

  ‘You can be certain of it,’ Volyova said. ‘Everything I see, he sees.’

  ‘So why are we moving? Doesn’t he want to die?’

  ‘Not here, it would seem,’ Clavain said. ‘And not now. This trajectory will bring us back into local Resurgam space, won’t it?’

  ‘In about twelve days,’ Volyova confirmed. ‘Which strikes me as too long to be of any use. Of course, that’s assuming he sticks to one-tenth of a gee… he has no need to, ultimately. At a gee he could reach Resurgam in two days, ahead of Clavain.’

  ‘What good will it do?’ Khouri asked. ‘We’re just as vulnerable there as here. Clavain can reach us wherever we move to.’

  ‘We’re not remotely vulnerable,’ Volyova said. ‘We still have thirteen damned cache weapons and the will to use them. I can’t guess at the Captain’s deeper motive for moving us, but I know one thing: it makes the evacuation operation a good deal easier, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You think he’s trying to help, finally?’

  ‘I don’t know, Khouri. I’ll admit it is a distinct theoretical possibility, that is all. You’d better tell Thorn, anyway.’

  ‘Tell him what?’

  ‘To start accelerating things. The bottleneck may be about to change.’

  Chapter 34

  A FIGURE GREW to flickering solidity within Zodiacal Light’s imaging tank. Clavain, Remontoire, Scorpio, Blood, Cruz and Felka sat in a rough semicircle around the device as the man’s form sharpened and then took on animation.

  ‘Well,’ Clavain’s beta-level said. ‘I’m back.’

  Clavain had the uneasy sense that he was looking at his own reflection flipped left-to-right, all the subtle asymmetries of his face thrown into exaggerated relief. He did not like beta-levels, especially not of himself. The whole idea of being mimicked rankled him, and the more accurate the mimicry the less he liked it. Am I supposed to be flattered, he thought, that my essence is so easily captured by an assemblage of mindless algorithms?

  Tou’ve been hacked,‘ Clavain told his image.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Remontoire leaned towards the tank and spoke. ‘Volyova stripped out large portions of you. We can see her handiwork, the damage she left, but we can’t tell exactly what she did. Very probably all she managed was to delete sensitive memory blocks, but since we can’t know for sure, we’ll have to treat you as potentially viral. That means that you’ll be quarantined once this debriefing is over. Your memories won’t be neurally merged with Clavain’s, since there’s too much risk of contamination. You’ll be frozen on to a solid-state memory substrate and archived. Effectively, you’ll be dead.’

  Clavain’s image shrugged apologetically. ‘Let’s just hope I can be of some service before then, shall we?’

  ‘Did you learn anything?’ Scorpio asked.

  ‘I learned a lot, I think. Of course, I can’t be sure which of my memories are genuine, and which are plants.’

  ‘We’ll worry about that,’ Clavain said. ‘Just tell us what you found out. Is the commander of the ship really Volyova?’

  The image nodded keenly. ‘Yes, it’s her.’

  ‘And does she know about the weapons?’ asked Blood.

  ‘Yes, she does.’

  Clavain looked at his fellows, then back to the tank. ‘Right, then. Is she going to hand them over without a fight?’

  ‘I don’t think you can count on that, no. As a matter of fact, I think you’d better assume she’s going to make matters a little on the awkward side.’

  Felka spoke now. ‘What does she know about the weapons’ origin?’

  ‘Not much, I think. She might have some vague inkling, but I don’t think it is a great interest of hers. She does know a little about the wolves, however.’

  Felka frowned. ‘How so?’

  ‘I don’t know. We never got that chatty. We’d better just assume that Volyova has already had some tangential involvement with them — and survived, as I need hardly point out. That makes her at least worthy of our respect, I think. She calls them the Inhibitors, incidentally. I never got to the bottom of why.’

  ‘I know why,’ Felka said quietly.

  ‘She may not have had any direct involvement with them,’ Remontoire said. ‘There is already wolf activity in this system, and must have been for some time. Very probably all she’s done is make some shrewd deductions.’

  I think her experience goes a little deeper than that,‘ Clavain’s beta-level answered, but made no further elaboration.

  I agree,‘ Felka sai
d.

  Now they all looked at her for a moment.

  ‘Did you impress on her our seriousness?’ Clavain asked, turning his attention back to the beta-level. ‘Did you let her know that she would be much better off dealing with us than the rest of the Conjoiners?’

  I think she got the message, yes.‘

  ‘And?’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks, was the general idea.’

  ‘She’s a very foolish woman, this Volyova,’ Remontoire said. ‘That’s a shame. It would be so much easier if we could proceed in a cordial manner, without all this unfortunate need to use aggressive force.’

  ‘There’s another matter,’ the simulated Clavain said. ‘There’s some kind of evacuation operation in progress. You’ve already seen what the wolf machine is doing to the star, gnawing into it with some kind of focused gravity-wave probe. Soon it will reach the nuclear-burning core, releasing the energy at the heart of the star. It will be like drilling a hole into the base of a dam, unleashing water under tremendous pressure. Except it won’t be water. It will be fusing hydrogen, at stellar-core pressure and temperature. My guess is that it will convert the star into a form of flame-thrower. The core’s energy will be bled away very rapidly once the drill has reached it, and the star will die — or at least become a much dimmer and cooler star in the process. But at the same time I imagine the star itself will become a weapon capable of incinerating any planet within a few light-hours of Delta Pavonis, simply by dousing that arterial spray of fusion fire across the face of a world. I imagine it would strip the atmosphere from a gas giant and smelt a rocky world to metallic lava. They don’t necessarily know what will happen on Resurgam, but you can be certain that they wish to get away from there as soon as possible. There are already people aboard the ship, airlifted from the surface. A few thousand, at the very least.’

  ‘And you have evidence of this, do you?’ asked Scorpio.

  ‘Nothing I can prove, no.’

  Then we’ll assume that they don’t exist. It’s obviously a crude attempt at convincing us not to attack.‘

  Thorn stood on the surface of Resurgam, his coat buttoned high against the harsh polar wind that scraped and scoured every exposed inch of his skin. It was not quite what they would once have called a razorstorm, but it was unpleasant enough when there was no nearby shelter. He adjusted flimsy dust goggles, squinting into starlight, looking for the tiny moving star of the transfer ship.

  It was dusk. The sky overhead was a deep velvet purple which shaded to black at the southern horizon. Only the brightest stars were visible through his goggles, and now and then even these would appear to dim as his eyes readjusted to the sudden flash of one of the warring weapons. To the north, and reaching some way to east and west, soft pink auroral curtains trembled in invisible wind. The lightshow was only beautiful if one had no idea what was causing it, and therefore no grasp of how portentous it was. The aurorae were fuelled by ionised particles that were being clawed and gouged off the surface of the star by the Inhibitor weapon. The inwards bulge, the tunnel that the weapon was boring into the star, now reached halfway to the nuclear-burning core. Around the walls of the tunnel, propped apart by standing waves of pumped gravitational energy, the interior structure of the star had undergone a series of drastic changes as the normal convective processes struggled to adjust to the weapon’s assault. Already the core was beginning to change its shape as the overlying mass density shifted. The song of neutrinos streaming out from the star’s heart had changed tune, signifying the imminence of the core breakthrough. There was still no clear idea about exactly what would happen when the weapon finished its work, but in Thorn’s view the best they could do was not hang around to find out.

  He was waiting for the last of the day’s shuttle flights to finish boarding. The elegant craft was parked below him, surrounded by a throbbing insectile mass of potential evacuees. Fights broke out constantly as people struggled to jump the queue for the next departure. The mob revolted him, even though he felt nothing but admiration and sympathy for its individual elements. In all his years of agitation he had only ever had to deal with small numbers of trusted people, but he had always known it would come to this. The mob was an emergent property of crowds, and as such he had to take credit for bringing this particular mob into being. But he did not have to like what he had done.

  Enough, Thorn thought. Now was not the time to start despising the people he had saved simply because they allowed their fears to surface. Had he been amongst them, he doubted that he would have behaved with any great saintliness. He would have wanted to get his family off the planet, and if that meant stamping on someone else’s escape plans, so be it.

  But he wasn’t in the mob, was he? He was the one who had actually found a way off the planet. He was the one who had actually made it possible.

  He supposed that had to count for something.

  There — sliding overhead. The transfer ship crossed his zenith and then dove into shadow. He felt a flicker of relief that it was still there. Its orbit was tightly proscribed, for any deviation was likely to trigger an attack from the surface-to-orbit defence system. Although Khouri and Volyova had dug their claws into many branches of government, there were still certain departments that they had only been able to influence indirectly. The Office of Civil Defence was one, and it was also one of the most worrying, entrusted as it was with the defences to prevent a recurrence of the Volyova incident. The Office had rapid-response surface-to-orbit missiles equipped with hot-dust warheads, designed to take out an orbiting starship before it became a threat to the colony as a whole. The Ultras’ smaller ships had been able to duck and dive under the radar nets, but the transfer shuttle was too large for such subterfuge. So there had been brokering and behind-the-scenes leverage and the result was that the Office’s missiles would be held in their bunkers provided that the transfer ship or any of the transatmospheric shuttles did not deviate from rigidly defined flight corridors. Thorn knew this, and was confident that the various ships’ avionics systems knew it too, but he still felt an irrational moment of relief every time the transfer ship came into view again.

  His portable telephone chimed. Thorn fished the bulky item from his coat pocket, fiddling with the controls through thick-fingered gloves. ‘Thorn.’ He recognised the voice of one of the Inquisition House operators.

  ‘Recorded message from Nostalgia for Infinity, sir. Shall I put it through to you, or will you take the call when you are in orbit?’

  ‘Put it through, please.’ He waited a moment, hearing the faint chatter of electromechanical relays and the hiss of analogue tape, imagining the dark telephonic machinery of Inquisition House moving to serve him.

  ‘Thorn, it’s Vuilleumier. Listen carefully. There’s been a slight change of plan. It’s a long story, but we’re moving closer to Resurgam. I’ll have updated navigation coordinates for the transfer ship, so you won’t have to worry about that. But now we may be looking at much less than thirty hours’ round trip. We might even be able to get close enough that we don’t need to use the transfer ship at all, just bring them straight aboard Infinity. That means we can accelerate the surface-to-orbit flights. We only need five hundred rounds of shuttle flights and we’ve evacuated the entire planet. Thorn, suddenly it seems as if we might have a chance. Can you arrange things at your end?’

  Thorn looked down at the brewing mob. Khouri appeared to be waiting for him to reply. ‘Operator, record and transmit this, will you?’ He waited a decent interval before responding. ‘This is Thorn. Message understood. I’ll do what I can to speed up the evacuation process when I know that it makes sense to do so. But in the meantime, might I inject a note of caution? If you can reduce the thirty hours’ round trip, great. I endorse that wholeheartedly. But you can’t bring the starship too close to Resurgam. Even if you don’t succeed in scaring half the planet out of their skins, you’ll have the Office of Civil Defence to worry about. And I mean worry. We’ll speak later, Ana. I have work to do, I
’m afraid.’ He looked down at the mob, noting a disturbance where all had been quiet a minute earlier. ‘Perhaps a little more than I feared.’

  Thorn told the operator to send the message and alert him if a reply was forthcoming. He slipped the phone back into his pocket, where it lay as heavy and inert as a truncheon. Then he began to scramble and skid his way back down towards the mob, kicking up dust as he descended.

  ‘Clear of Zodiacal Light, Antoinette.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I think I can start breathing again.’

  Through the flight deck windows the lighthugger still loomed enormously large, extending in either direction like a great dark cliff, chiselled here and there with strangely mechanistic outcrops, defiles and prominences. The docking bay Storm Bird had just cleared was a diminishing rectangle of gold light in the nearest part of the cliff, the huge toothed doors already sliding towards each other. Yet even though the doors were sealing, there was still adequate room for smaller vessels to make their departures. She saw them with her own eyes and on the various tactical displays and radar spheres that packed the flight deck. As the armoured jaws slid towards closure, small skeletal attack ships, little more than armoured trikes, were able to slip between the teeth. They zipped out, riding agile high-bum antimatter-catalysed fusion rockets. They made Antoinette think of the mouth-cleaning parasites of some enormous underwater monster. By comparison, Storm Bird was a sizeable fish in its own right.

  The departure had been the most technically difficult she had ever known. Clavain’s surprise attack demanded that Zodiacal Light sustain a deceleration of three gees until its arrival within ten light-seconds of Nostalgia for Infinity, All the attack ships in the current wave had been forced to make their departures under the same three gees of thrust. Exiting any spacecraft bay was a technically demanding operation, most especially when the departing ships were armed and fuel-heavy. But doing it under sustained thrust was an order of magnitude more difficult again. Antoinette would have considered it a white-knuckle job if Clavain had demanded that they exit at a half-gee, the way rim pilots arrived and departed from Carousel New Copenhagen. But three gees? That was just being sadistic.