The slower, older approaches were often better than newfangled gimmicks, the wolves had learned.
The great work encompassed more than just the movement of stars, of course. Even if the two galaxies only grazed past each other rather than ramming head-on, there would be still be incandescent fireworks as walls of gas and dust hit each other. As Shockwaves rebounded through the galaxies, furious new cycles of stellar birth would be kickstarted. A generation of supermassive hot stars would live and die in a cosmic eyeblink, dying in equally convulsive cycles of supernovae. Although individual stars and their solar systems might pass through the event unscathed, vast tracts of the galaxy would still be sterilised by these catastrophic explosions. It would be a million times worse if the collision was head-on, of course, but it was still something that had to be contained and minimised. For another billion years, the machines would toil to suppress not the emergence of life but the creation of hot stars. Those that slipped through the net would be ushered to the edge of space by the star-moving machinery so that their dying explosions did not threaten the newly flourishing cultures.
The great work would not soon be over.
But that was only one future. There was another, Felka said. It was the future in which intelligence slipped through the net here and now, the future in which the Inhibitors lost their grip on the galaxy.
In that future, she said, the time of great flourishing was imminent in cosmic terms; it would happen within the next few million years. In a heartbeat, the galaxy would run amok with life, becoming a teeming, packed oasis of sentience. It would be a time of wonder and miracles.
And yet it was doomed.
Organic intelligence, Felka said, could not achieve the necessary organisation to steer itself through the collision. Species co-operation was just not possible on that scale. Short of xenocide, one species wiping out all the others, the galactic cultures would never become sufficiently united to engage in such a massive and protracted programme as the collision-avoidance operation. It was not that they would fail to see that something had to be done, but that every species would have its own strategy, its own preferred solution to the problem. There would be disputes over policy as violent as the Dawn War.
Too many hands on the cosmic wheel, Felka said.
The collision would happen, and the results — from the collison and the wars that would accompany it-would be utterly catastrophic. Life in the Milky Way would not end immediately; a few flickering flames of sentience would struggle on for another couple of billion years, but because of the measures they had taken to survive in the first place, they would be little more than machines themselves. Nothing resembling the pre-collision societies would ever arise again.
Almost as soon as she had registered the fact that the weapon was firing, the beam shut down, leaving weapon seventeen exactly as she found it. By Volyova’s estimation, the weapon had broken free of Clavain’s control for perhaps half a second. It might even have been less than that.
She fumbled her suit-radio on. Khouri’s voice was there immediately. ‘Ilia… ? Ilia… ? Can you—’
‘I can hear you, Khouri. Is something the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, Ilia. It’s just that you seem to have done whatever it was you set out to do. The cache weapon landed a direct hit on Zodiacal Light’
She closed her eyes, tasting the moment, wondering why it felt far less like victory than she had imagined it would. ‘A direct hit?’
‘Yes.’
‘It can’t have been. I didn’t see the flash as the Conjoiner drives went up.’
‘I said it was a direct hit. I didn’t say it was a fatal hit.’
By then Volyova had managed to call up a long-range grab of Zodiacal Light on the shuttle’s console. She piped it through to her helmet faceplate, studying the damage with awed fascination. The beam had sliced through the hull of Clavain’s ship like a knife through bread, snipping off perhaps a third of its length. The needle-nosed prow, glittering with carved facets of diamond-threaded ice, was buckling away from the rest of the hull in ghastly slow motion, like some toppling spire. The wound that the beam had excavated was still shining a livid shade of red, and there were explosions on either side of the severed hull. It was the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful thing she had seen in some time. It was just a shame she was not seeing it with her own eyes.
That was when the shuttle jarred to one side. Volyova thumped against one wall, for she had not had time to buckle herself back into the control seat. What had happened? Had the weapon adjusted its direction of aim, shoving her shuttle in the process? She steadied herself and directed her goggles to the window, but the weapon was in the same orientation as it had been when it had stopped firing. Again the shuttle jarred to one side, and this time she felt, through the tactile-transmitting fabric of her gloves, the shrill scrape of metal against metal. It was exactly as if another ship were brushing against her own.
She arrived at this conclusion only a moment before the first figure came through the still open airlock door. She cursed herself for not closing the lock behind her, but she had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that she was wearing a suit. She should have been thinking about intruders rather than her own life-support needs. It was exactly the kind of mistake she would never have made had she been well, but she supposed she could allow herself one or two errors this late in the game. She had, after all, delivered something of a winning move against Clavain’s ship. The broken hull was drifting away now, trailing intricate strands of mechanical gore.
‘Triumvir?’ The figure was speaking, his voice buzzing in her helmet. She studied the intruder’s armour, noting baroque ornamentation and dazzling juxtapositions of luminous paint and mirrored surface.
‘You have that pleasure,’ she said.
The figure had a wide-muzzled weapon pointed at her. Behind, two more similarly armoured specimens had squeezed into the cabin. The first tugged up a black flash visor; through the thick dark glass of his helmet she caught the not-quite-human facial anatomy of a hyperpig.
‘My name is Scorpio,’ the pig informed her. ‘I’m here to accept your surrender, Triumvir.’
She clucked in surprise. ‘My surrender?
‘Yes, Triumvir.’
‘Have you looked out of the window lately, Scorpio? I really think you ought to.’
There was a moment while her intruders conferred amongst themselves. She sensed to the second the moment when they became aware of what had just happened. There was the minutest lowering of the gun muzzle, a flicker of hesitation in Scorpio’s eyes.
‘You’re still our prisoner,’ he said, but with a good deal less conviction than before,
Volyova smiled indulgently. ‘Well, that’s very interesting. Where do you think we should complete the formalities? Your ship or mine?’
So that’s it? That’s the choice I’m given? That even if we win, even if we beat the wolves, it won’t mean a damn in the long term? That the best thing we could do in the interests of the preservation of life itself, taking the long view, is to curl up and die now? That what we should be doing is surrendering to the wolves, not preparing to fight them?
[I don’t know, Clavain.]
It could be a lie. It could be propaganda that the Wolf showed you, self-justifying rhetoric. Maybe there is no higher cause. Maybe all they’re really doing is wiping out intelligence for no other reason than that’s what they do. And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness. Trust me on this. You can’t excuse the murder of billions of sentient individuals because of some remote Utopian dream, no matter what the alternative.
[But you know precisely what the alternative is, Clavain. Absolute extinction.]
Yes. Or so they say. But what if it isn’t that simple? If what they told you is true, then the entire future history of the galaxy has been biased by t
he presence of the wolves. We’ll never know what would have happened if the wolves hadn’t emerged to steer life through the crisis. The experiment has changed. And there’s a new factor now: the wolves’ own weakness, the fact that they’re slowly failing. Maybe they were never meant to be this brutal, Felka — have you considered that? That they might once have been more like shepherds and less like poachers? Perhaps that was the first failure, so long ago that no one remembers it. The wolves kept following the rules they had been instructed to enforce, but with less and less wisdom; less and less mercy. What started as gentle containment became xenocide. What started as authority became tyranny, self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. Consider it, Felka. There might be a higher cause to what they’re doing, but it doesn’t have to be right.
[I only know what it showed me. It’s not my job to choose, Clavain. Not my job to show you what you should do. I just thought you ought to be told.]
I know. I’m not blaming you for it.
[What are you going to do, Clavain?]
He thought of the cruel balance of things: equating vistas of cosmic strife — millennia-long battles thrumming across the face of the galaxy — against infinitely grander vistas of cosmic silence. He thought of worlds and moons spinning, their days uncounted, their seasons unremembered. He thought of stars living and dying in the absence of sentient observers, flaring into mindless darknesss until the end of time itself, not a single conscious thought to disturb the icy calm between here and eternity. Machines might still stalk those cosmic steppes, and they might in some sense continue to process and interpret data, but there would be no recognition, no love, no hate, no loss, no pain, only analysis, until the last flicker of power faded from the last circuit, leaving a final stalled algorithm half-executed.
He was being hopelessly anthropomorphic, of course. This entire drama concerned only the local group of galaxies. Out there — not just tens, but hundreds of millions of light years away — there were other such groups, clumps of one or two dozen galaxies bound together in darkness by their mutual self-gravity. Too far to imagine reaching, but they were there all the same. They were ominously silent — but that didn’t mean they were necessarily devoid of sentience. Perhaps they had learned the value of silence. The grand story of life in the Milky Way — across the entire local group — might just be one thread in something humblingly vast. Perhaps, after all, it didn’t actually matter what happened here. Blindly executing whatever instructions they had been given in the remote galactic past, the wolves might strangle sentience out of existence now, or they might guard a thread of it through its gravest crisis. And perhaps neither outcome really mattered, any more than a local cluster of extinctions on a single island would make any significant difference when set against the rich, swarming ebb and flow of life on an entire world.
Or perhaps it mattered more than anything.
Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction — no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause — was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.
Nor was it the kind he was interested in serving. Like all the hard choices he had ever made, the heart of the problem was childishly simple: he could concede the weapons and accept his complicity in humanity’s coming extinction, while knowing that he had done his part for sentient life’s ultimate destiny. Or he could take the weapons now — or as many of them as he could get his hands on — and make some kind of stand against tyranny.
It might be pointless. It might just be postponing the inevitable. But if that was the case, what was the harm in trying?
[Clavain…]
He felt a vast, searing, calm. All was clear now. He was about to tell her that he had made his mind up to take the weapons and make a stand, future history be damned. He was Nevil Clavain and he had never surrendered in his life.
But suddenly something else merited his immediate attention. Zodiacal Light had been hit. The great ship was breaking in two.
Chapter 39
‘HELLO, CLAVAIN,’ ILIA Volyova said, her voice a fine papery rasp that he had to struggle to understand. ‘It’s good to see you, finally. Come closer, will you?’
He walked to the side of her bed, unwilling to believe that this was the Triumvir. She looked dreadfully ill, and yet at the same time he could feel a profound calm about the woman. Her expression, as well as he could read it, for her eyes were hidden behind blank grey goggles, spoke of quiet accomplishment, of the weary elation that came with the concluding of a lengthy and difficult business.
‘It’s good to meet you, Ilia,’ he said. He shook her hand as gently as he could. She had already been injured, he knew, and had then gone back into space, into the battle. Unprotected, she had received the kind of radiation dose that even broad-spectrum medichines could not remedy.
She was going to die, and she was going to die sooner rather than later.
‘You are very like your proxy, Clavain,’ she said in that quiet rasp. ‘And different, too. You have a gravitas that the machine lacked. Or perhaps it is simply that I know you better now as an adversary. I am not at all sure I respected you before.’
‘And now?’
‘You have given me pause for thought, I will certainly say that much.’
There were nine of them present. Next to Volyova’s bed was Khouri, the woman Clavain took to be her deputy. Clavain, in turn, was accompanied by Felka, Scorpio, two of Scorpio’s pig soldiers, Antoinette Bax and Xavier Liu. Clavain’s shuttle had docked with Nostalgia for Infinity after the immediate declaration of cease-fire, with Storm Bird following shortly after.
‘Have you considered my proposal?’ Clavain asked, delicately.
‘Your proposal?’ she said, with a sniff of disdain.
‘My revised proposal, then. The one that didn’t involve your unilateral surrender.’
‘You’re hardly in a position to be putting proposals to anyone, Clavain. The last time I looked, you only had half a ship left.’
She was right. Remontoire and most of the remaining crew were still alive, but the damage to the ship was acute. It was a minor miracle that the Conjoiner drives had not detonated.
‘By proposal I meant… suggestion. A mutual arrangement, to the benefit of both of us.’
‘Refresh my memory, will you, Clavain?’
He turned to Bax. ‘Antoinette, introduce yourself, will you?’
She came closer to the bed with something of the same trepidation that Clavain had shown. ‘Ilia…’
‘It’s Triumvir Volyova, young lady. At least until we’re better acquainted.’
‘What I meant to say is… I’ve got this ship… this freighter…’
Volyova glared at Clavain. He knew what she meant. She was acutely conscious that she did not have a great deal of time left, and what she did not need was indirection.
‘Bax has a freighter,’ Clavain said urgently. ‘It’s docked with us now. It has limited transatmospheric capability — not the best, but it can cope.’
‘And your point, Clavain?’
‘My point is that it has large pressurised cargo holds. It can take passengers, a great many passengers. Not in anything you’d call luxury, but…’
Volyova gestured for Bax to come closer. ‘How many?’
‘Four thousand, easily. Maybe even five. The thing’s crying out to be used as an ark, Triumvir.’
Clavain nodded. ‘Think of it, Ilia. I know you’ve got an evacuation plan going here. I thought it was a ruse before, but now I’ve seen the evidence. But you haven’t made a dent in the planet’s population.’
‘We’ve done what we could,’ Khouri said, with a trace of defensiveness.
Clavain held up a hand. ‘I know. Given your constraints, you did well to get as many off the surface as you’ve managed to. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot better now. The wolf weapon — t
he Inhibitor device — has nearly bored its way through to the heart of Delta Pavonis. There simply isn’t time for any other plan. With Storm Bird we’d need only fifty return trips. Maybe fewer, as Antoinette says. Forty, perhaps. She’s right — it’s an ark. And it’s a fast one.’
Volyova let out a sigh as old as time. ‘If only it were that simple, Clavain.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We aren’t simply moving faceless units off the surface of Resurgam. We’re moving people. Frightened, desperate people.’ The grey goggles tilted a fraction. ‘Aren’t we, Khouri?’
‘She’s right. It’s a mess down there. The administration…’
‘Before, there were just two of you,’ Clavain said. ‘You had to work with the government. But now we have an army, and the means to enforce our will. Don’t we, Scorpio?’
‘We can take Cuvier,’ the pig said. ‘I’ve already looked into it. It’s no worse than taking a single block of Chasm City. Or this ship, for that matter.’
‘You never did take my ship,’ Volyova reminded him. ‘So don’t overestimate your capabilities.’ She turned her attention to Clavain and her voice became sharper, more probing than it had been upon his arrival. ‘Would you seriously consider a forced takeover?’
‘If that’s the only way to get those people off the planet, then yes, that’s exactly what I’d consider.’
Volyova looked at him craftily. ‘You’ve changed your tune, Clavain. Since when was evacuating Resurgam your highest priority?’
He looked at Felka. ‘I realised that the possession of the weapons was not quite the clear-cut issue I’d been led to believe. There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.’
Volyova said, ‘Then you don’t want the weapons, is that it?’
Clavain smiled. ‘Actually, I still do. And so do you. But I think we can come to an agreement, can’t we?’
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