[I know. But I still think I should tell you.]
It was not simply about the war against intelligence, she told Clavain. That was only part of it; only one detail in their vast, faltering program of cosmic stewardship. Despite all evidence to the contrary the wolves were not trying to rid the galaxy of intelligence altogether. What they were striving to do was akin to pruning a forest back to a few saplings rather than incinerating or defoliating completely; or reducing a fire to a few carefully managed flickering flames rather than extinguishing it utterly.
Think about it, Felka told him. The existence of the wolves solved one cosmic riddle: the killing machines explained why it was that humanity found itself largely alone in the universe; why the Galaxy appeared barren of other intelligent cultures. It might have been that humanity was just a statistical quirk in an otherwise lifeless cosmos; that the emergence of intelligent, tool-using life was astonishingly rare and that the universe had to be a certain number of billion years old before there was a chance of such a culture arising. This possibility had lingered on until the dawn of the starfaring era, when human explorers began to pick through the ruins of other cultures around nearby stars. Far from being rare, it looked as if tool-using technological life was actually rather common. But for some reason, these cultures had all become extinct.
The evidence suggested that the extinction events happened on a short timescale compared with the evolutionary development cycles of species: perhaps no more than a few centuries. The extinctions also seemed to happen at around the time each culture attempted to make a serious expansion into interstellar space.
In other words, at around the development point that humanity — fractured, squabbling, but still essentially one species — now found itself.
Given that premise, she said, it was not too surprising to find that something like the wolves — or the Inhibitors, as some of their victims called them — existed; they were almost inevitable given the pattern of extinctions: remorseless droves of killer machines lurking between the stars, waiting patiently across the aeons for the signs of emergent intelligence…
Except that didn’t make any real sense, Felka continued. If intelligence was worth wiping out, for whatever reason, why not do it at source? Intelligence sprang from life; life — except in very rare and exotic niches — sprang from a common brew of chemicals and preconditions. So if intelligence were the enemy, why not intervene earlier in the development cycle?
There were a thousand ways it might have been done, especially if you were working on a timescale of billions of years. You could interfere in the formation processes of planets themselves, delicately perturbing the swirling clouds of accreting matter that gathered around young stars. You could make it happen that no planets formed in the right orbits for water to occur, or that only very heavy or very light worlds were formed. You could fling worlds into interstellar cold or dash them into the roiling faces of their mother stars.
Or you could poison planets, subtly disturbing the stew of elements in their crusts, oceans and atmospheres so that certain kinds of organic carbon chemistry became unfavourable. Or you could ensure that the planets never settled down into the kind of stable middle age that allowed complex multicellular life to arise. You could keep ramming comets into their crusts so that they shuddered and convulsed under an eternity of bombardment, locked in permanent winters.
Or you could tamper with their stars so that the worlds were periodically doused in flame from massive coronal flares, or thrown into terrible deep ice ages.
Even if you were late, even if you had to accept that complex life had arisen and had perhaps even achieved intelligence and technology, there were ways…
Of course there were ways.
A single determined culture could wipe out all life in the Galaxy by the deft manipulation of superdense stellar corpses. Neutron stars could be nudged together until they annihilated each other in sterilising storms of gamma rays. The jets from binary stars could be engineered into directed-energy weapons: flame-throwers reaching a thousand light-years…
And even if that were not feasible, or desirable, life could be wiped out by sheer force. A single machine culture could dominate the entire Galaxy in less than a million years, crushing organic life out of existence.
But that’s not what they are here for, Felka told him.
Why, then? he asked.
There’s a crisis, she told him. A crisis in the deep galactic future, three billion years from now. Except it wasn’t really ‘deep’ at all.
Thirteen turns of the Galactic spiral, that was all. Before the glaciers had rolled in, you could have walked on to a beach on Earth and picked up a sedimentary rock that was older than three billion years.
Thirteen turns of the wheel? It was nothing in cosmic terms. It was almost upon them.
What crisis? Clavain asked.
A collision, Felka told him.
Chapter 38
WHEN SHE WAS five hundred kilometres closer to the battle, Antoinette left the bridge unattended, trusting the ship to take care of itself for three or four minutes while she said goodbye to Scorpio and his squad. By the time she reached the huge depressurised bay where the pigs were waiting, the exterior door had eased open and the first of the three shuttles had already launched. She saw the blue spark of its exhaust flame veering towards the glittering nest of light that was the core of the battle. Two trikes followed immediately behind it, and then the second shuttle was jacked forward, pushed by the squat hydraulic rams that were normally used for moving bulky cargo pallets.
Scorpio was already buckling himself into his trike alongside the third shuttle. Since the trikes aboard Storm Bird had not needed to make the journey all the way from Zodiacal Light, they carried far more armour and weaponry than the other units. Scorpio’s own armour was an eye-wrenching combination of luminous colour and reflective patches. The frame of his trike was almost impossible to make out behind the layers of armour and the flanged and muzzled shapes of projectile and beam weapons. Xavier was helping him with his final systems checks, disconnecting a compad from a diagnostics port under the saddle of the trike. He gave a thumbs-up sign and patted Scorpio’s armour.
‘Looks like you’re ready,’ Antoinette said through her suit’s general comm channel.
‘You didn’t have to risk your ship,’ Scorpio said. ‘But since you did, I’ll make the extra fuel count.’
I don’t envy you this, Scorpio. I know you’ve already lost quite a few of your soldiers.‘
‘They’re our soldiers, Antoinette, not just mine.’ He made the control fascia of his trike light up with displays, luminous dials and targeting grids, while beyond him the second shuttle departed from the bay, shoved into empty space by the loading rams. The ignition of its drive painted a hard blue radiance against Scorpio’s armour. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’s something you ought to appreciate. If you knew what the life expectancy of a pig in the Mulch was, nothing that’s happened today would seem quite so tragic. Most of my army would have died years ago if they hadn’t signed up for Clavain’s crusade. I figure they owe Clavain, not the other way round.’
‘It doesn’t mean they should die today.’
‘And most of them won’t. Clavain always knew we’d have to accept some losses, and my pigs knew it as well. We never took a block of Chasm City without spilling some pig blood. But most of us will make it back, and we’ll make it with the weapons. We’re already winning, Antoinette. Once Clavain used the pacification code, Volyova’s war was over.’ Scorpio tugged down his flash visor with one stubby gauntlet. ‘We’re not even fighting the war now. This is just a mopping-up operation.’
‘Can I still wish you good luck?’
‘You can wish me what the hell you like. It won’t make any difference. If it did, it would mean I hadn’t prepared well enough.’
‘Good luck, Scorpio. Good luck to you and all your army.’
The third shuttle was being pushed forwards to the departure point.
She watched it depart along with the remaining trikes — along with Scorpio — and then told her ship to seal up and head away from the battle.
Volyova reached weapon seventeen unscathed. Though the battle for her ship continued to rage around her, Clavain was evidently taking great pains to ensure that the prizes remained unharmed, Before departing she had studied the attack pattern of his trikes, shuttles and corvettes and concluded that her own ship could reach weapon seventeen with only a fifteen per cent chance of being fired upon. Ordinarily the odds would have struck her as unacceptably poor, but now, somewhat to her horror, she considered them rather favourable.
Weapon seventeen was the only one of the five that she had not withdrawn back into the safety and seclusion of Nostalgia for Infinity. She parked her shuttle next to it, moored close enough that there would be no chance of attacking the shuttle without harming the weapon. Then she depressurised the entire cabin, not wishing to go through the time-consuming rigmarole of cycling through the airlock. The powered suit assisted her movements, giving her a false sense of strength and vitality. But perhaps not all of that was down to the suit.
Volyova hauled herself from the shuttle’s open lock, and for a moment she was poised midway between the ship and the looming side of weapon seventeen. She felt terribly vulnerable, but the spectacle of the battle was hypnotic. In every direction she looked, all she saw was rushing ships, the dancing sparks of exhaust flames and the brief blue-edged flowers of nuclear and matter-antimatter explosions. Her radio crackled with constant interference. Her suit’s radiation sensor was chirping off the scale. She killed them both, preferring peace and quiet.
Volyova had parked the shuttle directly over the hatch in the side of weapon seventeen. Her fingers felt clumsy as they tapped the commands into the thick studs of her suit bracelet, but she worked slowly and made no mistakes. Given the shutdown order Clavain had transmitted to the weapon, she did not necessarily expect that any of her commands would be acted upon.
But the hatch slid open, sickly green light spewing out.
Thank you,‘ Ilia Volyova said, to no one in particular.
Headfirst, she sunk into the green well. All evidence of the war vanished like a bad dream. Above her, Volyova could see only the armoured belly lock of her shuttle, and all around her she could make out only the interior machinery of the weapon, bathed in the same insipid green glow.
She worked through the procedure she had gone through before, at every step expecting failure, but knowing that she had absolutely nothing to lose. The weapon’s fear generators were still firing at full tilt, but this time she found the anxiety reassuring rather than disturbing. It meant that critical weapon functions were still active, and that Clavain had only stunned rather than killed weapon seventeen. She had never seriously thought otherwise, but there had always been a trace of doubt in her mind. What if Clavain himself had not properly understood the code?
But the weapon was not dead, just sleeping.
And then it happened, just as it had happened that first time. The hatch snapped closed, the interior of the weapon began to shift alarmingly and she sensed something approaching, an unspeakable malevolence rushing towards her. She steeled herself. The knowledge that all she was dealing with was a sophisticated subpersona did not make the experience any less unsettling.
There it was. The presence oozed behind her, a shadow that always hovered just on the very edge of her peripheral vision. Once again, she was paralysed, and as before the fear was ten times worse than what she had just been experiencing.
[There’s no rest for the wicked, is there, Ilia?]
She remembered that the weapon could read her thoughts. I thought I’d just drop by to see how you were doing, Seventeen. You don’t mind, do you?
[Then that’s all this is? A social call?]
Well, actually it’s a bit more than that.
[I thought it might be. You only ever come when you want something, don’t you?]
You don’t exactly go out of your way to make me feel welcome, Seventeen.
[What, the enforced paralysis and the sense of creeping terror? You mean you don’t like that?]
I don’t think I was ever meant to like it, Seventeen.
She detected the tiniest hint of a sulk in the weapon’s reply. [Perhaps.]
Seventeen… there’s a matter we need to talk about, if you don’t mind…
[I’m not going anywhere. You’re not either.]
No. I don’t suppose I am. Are you aware of the difficulty, Seventeen? The code that won’t allow you to fire?
Now the sulk — if that was what it had been — shifted to something closer to indignation. [How could I not know about it?]
I was just checking, that’s all. About this code, Seventeen…
[Yes?]
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you ignoring it, is there?
[Ignore the code?]
Something along those lines, yes. You having a certain degree of free will and all that, I thought it might just be worth raising, as — shall we say — a matter for debate, if nothing else… Of course, I know it’s unreasonable to expect you to be capable of such a thing…
[Unreasonable, Ilia?]
Well, you’re bound to have your limitations. And if, as Clavain says, this code is causing a system interrupt at root level… well, there’s not a lot I can expect you to do about it, is there?
[What would Clavain know?]
Rather a lot more than you or I, I suspect…
[Don’t be silly, Ilia.]
Then might it be possible…?
There was a pause before the weapon deigned to reply. She thought for that moment that she might have succeeded. Even the degree of fear lessened, becoming nothing much more than acute screaming hysteria.
But then the weapon etched its response into her head. [I know what you’re trying to do, Ilia.]
Yes?
[And it won’t work. You don’t seriously imagine I’m that easily manipulated, do you? That pliant? That ridiculously childlike?]
I don’t know. I thought for a moment I detected a trace of myself in you, Seventeen. That was all.
[You’re dying, aren’t you?]
That shocked her. How would you know?
[I can tell a lot more about you than you can about me, Ilia.]
I am dying, yes. What difference does that make? You’re just a machine, Seventeen. You don’t understand what it’s like at all.
[I won’t help you.]
No?
[I can’t. You’re right. The code is at root level. There’s nothing I can do about it.]
Then all that talk of free will… ?
The paralysis ended in an instant, without warning. The fear remained, but it was not as extreme as it had been before. And around her the weapon was shifting itself again, the door into space opening above her, revealing the belly of the shuttle.
[It was nothing. Just talk.]
Then I’ll be on my way. Goodbye, Seventeen. I’ve a feeling we won’t be talking again.
She reached the shuttle. She had just pushed herself through the airlock into the airless cabin when she saw movement outside. Ponderously, like a great compass needle seeking north, the cache weapon was re-aiming itself, sparks of flame erupting from the thruster nodes on the weapon’s harness. Volyova sighted down the long axis of the weapon, looking for a reference point, anything in the sphere of battle that would tell her where weapon seventeen was pointing. But the view was too confusing, and there was no time to call up a tactical display on the shuttle’s console.
The weapon came to a halt, stopping abruptly. Now she thought of the iron hand of some titanic clock striking the hour.
And then a line of searing brightness ripped from the maw of the weapon, into space.
Seventeen was firing.
It happens in three billion years, she told him.
Two galaxies collide: ours and its nearest spiral neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. At the moment the galaxies ar
e more than two million light-years apart, but are cruising towards each other with unstoppable momentum, dead set on cosmic destruction.
Clavain asked her what would happen when the galaxies met each other and she explained that there were two scenarios, two possible futures. In one, the wolves — the Inhibitors or, more accurately, their remote machine descendants — steered life through that crisis, ensuring that intelligence came out on the other side, where it could be allowed to flourish and expand unchecked. It was not possible to prevent the collision, Felka said. Even a galaxy-spanning, super-organised machine culture did not have the necessary resources to stop it from happening completely. But it could be managed; the worst effects could be avoided.
It would happen on many levels. The wolves knew of several techniques for moving entire solar systems, so that they could be steered out of harm’s way. The methods had not been employed in recent galactic history, but most had been tried and tested in the past, during local emergencies or vast cultural segregation programmes. Simple machinery, necessitating the demolition of only one or two worlds per system, could be shackled around the belly of a star. The star’s atmosphere could be squeezed and flexed by rippling magnetic fields, coaxing matter to fly off the surface. The starstuff could be manipulated and forced to flow in one direction only, acting like a huge rocket exhaust. It had to be done delicately, so that the star continued to burn in a stable manner, and also so that the remaining planets did not tumble out of their orbits when the star started moving. It took a long time, but that was usually not a problem; normally they had tens of millions years’ warning before a system had to be moved.
There were other techniques, too: a star could be partially enshrouded in a shell of mirrors, so that the pressure of its own radiation imparted momentum. Less tested or trusted methods employed large-scale manipulation of inertia. Those techniques were the easiest when they worked well, but there had been dire accidents when they went wrong, catastrophes in which whole systems had been suddenly ejected from the galaxy at near light-speed, hurled into intergalactic space with no hope of return.
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