Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 27

On the rare occasions when he made any kind of ship-board journey at all, Clavain moved around Zodiacal Light in an exoskeletal support, constantly bruised and chafed by the pressure points of the framework. They were at five gees now, accelerating in close lock-step with Nightshade, which was now only three light-days ahead. Each time Skade had ramped up her acceleration, Clavain had persuaded Sukhoi to increase theirs to an even higher rate, and this, with no little reluctance, she had done. Little more than a week of shiptime later, Skade would be seen to respond with an increase of her own. The pattern was obvious: even Skade was unwilling to push the machinery any harder than was absolutely necessary.

Pauline Sukhoi did not use an exoskeletal rig herself. When she met with Clavain she did so in a form-fitting travelling couch in which she lay almost horizontally, on her back, labouring for breath between each utterance. Like much else on the ship the couch had a crudely welded makeshift look. The manufactories were running around the clock to make weapons, combat equipment, reefersleep caskets and spare parts; anything else had to be knocked together in less sophisticated workshops.

‘Well?’ Sukhoi asked, the force of the acceleration heightening her haunted appearance by pulling her skin deep into her eye sockets.

‘I need seven gees,’ Clavain said. ‘Six and a half at the very least. Can you give it to me?’

‘I’ve given you everything I can, Clavain.’

‘That’s not quite the answer I wanted.’

She threw a schematic against one wall, hard red lines against corroded brown metalwork. It was a cross section of the ship with a circle superimposed over the thickened midship and stern where the hull was widest and where the motors were attached.

‘See this, Clavain?’ Sukhoi made the circle flare brighter. ‘The bubble of suppressed inertia swallows most of our length now, which is enough to drop our effective mass to a fifth of what it should be. But we still feel the full force of that five gees here, in the front of the ship.’ She indicated the small cone of the hull, jutting forwards of the bubble’s edge.

Clavain nodded. ‘The field’s so weak here that you need fancy detectors to measure it at all.’

‘Correct. Our bodies, and the fabric of the ship around us, still have nearly their full quota of inertial mass. The floor of the ship pushes against us at five gees, so we feel five gees of force. But that’s only because we’re outside the bubble.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘This.’ Sukhoi altered the picture, making the circle expand until it enclosed the entire volume of the starship. ‘The field geometry is complex, Clavain, and it depends complicatedly on the degree of inertial suppression. At five gees, we can exclude the entire inhabited portion of the ship from the major effects of the machinery. But at six… it doesn’t work. We fall within the bubble.’

‘But we’re already effectively inside it,’ Clavain said.

‘Yes, but not so much that we feel anything. At six gees, however, the field effects would rise above the threshold of physiological detectability. Sharply, too: it isn’t a linear effect. We’d go from experiencing five gees to experiencing only one.’

Clavain adjusted his position, trying to find a posture that would relieve one or more pressure points. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

‘But we’d also feel our inertial mass to be a fifth of what it should be. Every part of your body, every muscle, every organ, every bone, every fluid, has evolved under normal conditions of inertia. Everything changes, Clavain, even the viscosity of blood.’ Sukhoi steered her couch around him, collecting her breath. ‘I have seen what happens to people who fall into fields of extreme inertial suppression. Very often they die. Their hearts stop beating properly. There are other things that can happen to them, too, especially if the field isn’t stable…’ With effort, she looked him in the eye. ‘Which it won’t be, I assure you.’

Clavain said, ‘I still want it. Will routine machinery still work normally? Reefersleep caskets, that kind of thing?’

‘I won’t make any promises, but…’

He smiled. ‘Then this is what we do. We freeze Scorpio’s army, or as many of them as we can manage, in the new caskets. Anybody who we can’t freeze, or who we might need to consult, we can rig-up to a life-support system, enough to keep them breathing and pumping blood at the right rate. That will work, won’t it?’

‘Again, no promises.’

‘Six gees, Sukhoi. That’s all I’m asking of you. You can do it, can’t you?’

‘I can. And I will, if you insist upon it. But understand this: the quantum vacuum is a nest of snakes…’

‘And we’re poking it with a very sharp stick, yes.’

Sukhoi waited until he was done. ‘No. That was before. At six gees we are down in the pit with the snakes, Clavain.’

He let her have her moment, then patted the iron husk of the travel couch. ‘Just do it, Pauline. I’ll worry about the analogies.’

She spun the couch around and wheeled off towards the elevator that would ferry her down ship. Clavain watched her go, then winced as another pressure sore announced itself.

The transmission came in a little while later. Clavain scrubbed it for buried informational attack, but it was clean.

It was from Skade, in person. He took it in his quarters, enjoying a brief respite from the high acceleration. Sukhoi’s experts had to crawl over their inertial machinery and they did not like doing that while the systems were functional. Clavain sipped on tea while the recording played itself out.

Skade’s head and shoulders appeared in an oval projection volume, blurred at the edges. Clavain remembered the last time he had seen her like this, when she had transmitted a message to him when he was still on his way to Yellowstone. He had assumed at the time that Skade’s stiff posture was a function of the message format, but now that he saw it again he began to have doubts. Her head was immobile while she spoke, as if clamped in the kind of frame surgeons used when making precise operations on the brain. Her neck vanished into absurd gloss-black armour, like something from the Middle Ages. And there was something else strange about Skade, although he could not quite put his finger on it…

‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Please do me the courtesy of viewing this transmission in its entirety and giving careful consideration to what I am about to propose. I do not make this offer lightly, and I will not make it twice.’

He waited for her to continue.

‘You have proven difficult to kill,’ Skade said. ‘All my attempts have failed so far, and there is no assurance that anything I try in the future will work either. That doesn’t mean I expect you to live, however. Have you looked behind you recently? Rhetorical question: I’m sure that you have. You must be aware, even with your limited detection capabilities, that there are more ships out there. Remember the task force you were supposed to lead, Clavain? The Master of Works has finished those ships. Three of them are approaching you from behind. They are better armed than Nightshade : heavy relativistic railguns, ship-to-ship boser and graser batteries, not to mention long-range stingers. And they have a bright target to aim at.’

Clavain knew about the other ships, even though they only showed up at the extreme limit of his detectors. He had started turning Skade’s light-sails to his own side, training his own optical lasers on to them as they passed in the night and steering them into the paths of the chasing ships. The chances of a collision remained small, and the pursuers could always deploy similar anti-sail defences of the sort Clavain had invented, but it had been enough to force Skade to abandon sail production.

‘I know,’ he whispered.

Skade continued, ‘But I’m willing to make a deal, Clavain. You don’t want to die, and I don’t really want to kill you. Frankly, there are other problems I would sooner expend energy on.’

‘Charming.’ He sipped at his tea.

‘So I will let you live, Clavain. And, more importantly, I will let you have Felka back.’

Clavain put his cup aside.

‘She is very ill, Clavain, retreating back into dreams of the Wall. All she does now is make circular structures around herself, intricate games that demand her total attention every hour of the day. They are surrogates for the Wall. She has abandoned sleep, like a true Conjoiner. I’m worried for her, I really am. You and Galiana worked so hard to make her more fully human… and yet I can see that work crumbling away by the day, just as the Great Wall crumbled away on Mars.’ Skade’s face formed a stiff sad smile. ‘She doesn’t recognise people at all, now. She shows no interest in anything outside her increasingly narrow set of obsessions. She doesn’t even ask about you, Clavain.’

‘If you hurt her…’ he found himself saying.

But Skade was still talking. ‘But there may still be time to make a difference, to repair some of the harm, if not all of it. It’s up to you, Clavain. Our velocity differential is small enough now that a transfer operation is possible. If you turn away from my course and show no sign of returning to it, I will send Felka to you aboard a corvette — fired into deep space, of course.’

‘Skade

‘I will expect your response immediately. A personal transmission would be nice, but, failing that, I will expect to see a change in your thrust vector.’ She sighed, and it was in that moment that Clavain realised what had been troubling him about Skade since the start of the transmission. It was the way she never drew breath, never once stopped to take in air.

‘One final thing. I’ll give you a generous margin of error before I decide that you have rejected my offer. But when that margin has ended, I will still put Felka aboard a corvette. The difference is, I won’t make it easy for you to find her. Think of that, Clavain, will you? Felka, all alone between the stars, so far from companionship. She might not understand. Then again, she very well might.’ Skade hesitated, then added, ‘You’d know, I suppose, better than anyone. She’s your daughter, after all. The question is, how much does she really mean to you?’

Skade’s transmission ended.

Remontoire was conscious. He smiled with quiet amusement as Clavain entered the room that served as both his quarters and his prison. He could not be said to look sparklingly well — that would never be the case — but neither did he look like a man who had only recently been frozen, and before that, technically, deceased.

‘I wondered when you’d pay me a visit,’ he said, with what struck Clavain as disarming cheerfulness. He lay on his back, his head on a pillow, his hands steepled across his chest, but in every sense appearing relaxed and calm.

Clavain’s exoskeleton eased him into a sitting position, shifting pressure from one set of sores to another.

‘I’m afraid things have been a tiny bit difficult,’ Clavain said. ‘But I’m glad to see that you’re in one piece. It wasn’t propitious to have you thawed until now.’

‘I understand,’ Remontoire said, with a dismissive wave of one hand. ‘It can’t…’

‘Wait.’ Clavain looked at his old friend, taking in the slight changes in his facial appearance that had been necessary for Remontoire to function as an agent in Yellowstone society. Clavain had become used to him being totally hairless, like an unfinished mannequin.

‘Wait what, Clavain?’

‘There are some ground rules you need to be aware of, Rem. You can’t leave this room, so please don’t embarrass me by making an attempt to do so.’

Remontoire shrugged, as if this was no great matter. I wouldn’t dream of it. What else?‘

‘You can’t communicate with any system beyond this room, not while you’re in here. So, again, please don’t try.’

‘How would you know if I did try?’

‘1 would.’

‘Fair enough. Anything else?’

‘I don’t know if I can trust you yet. Hence the precautions, and my general reluctance to wake you before now.’

‘Perfectly understandable.’

‘I’m not finished. I dearly want to trust you, Rem, but I’m not certain that I can. And I can’t afford to risk the success of this mission.’ Remontoire started to speak, but Clavain raised a finger and continued talking. ‘That’s why I won’t be taking any chances. None at all. If you do anything, no matter how apparently trivial, that I think might be in any way to the detriment of the mission, I’ll kill you. No ifs, no buts. Absolutely no trial. We’re a long way from the Ferrisville Convention now, a long way from the Mother Nest.’

‘I gathered we were on a ship,’ Remontoire said. ‘And we’re accelerating very, very hard. I wanted to find something I could drop to the floor, so that I might have an idea of exactly how hard. But you’ve done a very good job of leaving me with nothing. Still, I can guess. What is it now — four and a half gees?’

‘Five,’ Clavain said. ‘And we’ll soon be pushing to six and higher.’

‘This room doesn’t remind me of any part of Nightshade. Have you captured another lighthugger, Clavain? That can’t have been easy.’

‘I had some help.’

‘And the high rate of acceleration? How did you manage that without Skade’s magic box of tricks?’

‘Skade didn’t create that technology from scratch. She stole it, or enough pieces to figure out the rest. She wasn’t the only one with access to it, however. I met a man who had tapped the same motherlode.’

‘And this man is aboard the ship?’

‘No, he left us to our own devices. It’s my ship, Rem.’ Clavain whipped out an arm encased in the support rig and patted the rough metal wall of Remon-toire’s cell. ‘She’s called Zodiacal Light. She’s carrying a small army. Skade’s ahead of us, but I’m not going to let her get her hands on those weapons without a struggle.’

‘Ah. Skade.’ Remontoire nodded, smiling.

‘Something amusing you?’

‘Has she been in touch?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes. That’s why I woke you. What are you getting at?’

‘Did she make it clear what had…’ Remontoire trailed off, leaving Clavain aware that he was being observed closely. ‘Evidently not.’

‘What?’

‘She nearly died, Clavain. When you escaped from the comet, the one where we met the Master of Works.’

‘Clearly she got better.’

‘Well, that very much depends…’ Again, Remontoire trailed off. ‘This isn’t about Skade, is it? I can see that concerned paternal look in your eye.’ In one easy movement he swung himself off the bed, sitting quite normally on the edge, as if the five gees of acceleration did not apply to him at all. Only a tiny twitching vein in the side of his head betrayed the tension he was under. ‘Let me guess. She still has Felka, doesn’t she.’

Clavain said nothing, waiting for Remontoire to continue.

‘I tried to have Felka come with me and the pig,’ he said, ‘but Skade wasn’t having it. Said Felka was more useful to her as a bargaining chip. I couldn’t talk her out of it. If I’d have argued too strenuously, she wouldn’t have let me come after you at all.’

‘You came to kill me.’

‘I came to stop you. My intention was to persuade you to come back with me to the Mother Nest. Of course, I’d have killed you if it came to it, but then you’d have done precisely the same to me if it was something you believed in sufficiently.’ Remontoire paused. ‘I believed I could talk you out of it. No one else would have given you a chance.’

‘We’ll talk about that later. It’s Felka who matters now.’

There was a long silence between the two men. Clavain adjusted his position, determined that Remontoire should not see how uncomfortable he was.

‘What’s happened?’ Remontoire asked.

‘Skade’s offered to turn Felka over provided I abandon the chase. She’ll drop her behind Nightshade, in a shuttle. At maximum burn it can shift to a rest frame we can reach with one of our shuttles.’

Remontoire nodded. Clavain sensed his friend thinking deeply, chewing over permutations and possibilities.

‘And if you refuse?’

‘She’ll still ditch Felka, but she won’t make it easy for us to catch her. At best, I’ll have to forfeit the chase to ensure a safe recovery. At worst, I’ll never find her. We’re in interstellar space, Rem. There’s a hell of a lot of nothing out there. With Skade’s flame ahead of us and ours behind, there are huge deadspots in our sensor coverage.’

There was another long silence while Remontoire thought again. He eased back on to the bed, assisting the flow of blood to his brain.

‘You can’t trust Skade, Clavain. She has absolutely no need to convince you of her sincerity, since she doesn’t think you’ll ever have anything she needs or anything that can hurt her. This is not a two-prisoner game, like they taught you back on Deimos.’

‘I must have scared her,’ Clavain said. ‘She wasn’t expecting us to catch up so easily.’

‘Even so…’ Remontoire hovered on the edge of saying something for several minutes.

‘You realise why I woke you now.’

‘Yes, I think I do. Run Seven was in a similar position to Skade when he had Irravel Veda on his tail, trying to get back her passengers.’

‘Seven made you serve him. You were forced to give him advice, tactics he could use against Irravel.’

‘It’s an entirely different situation, Clavain.’

‘There are enough similarities for me.’ Clavain made his frame elevate him to a standing position. ‘Here’s the picture, Rem. Skade will expect a response from me in a matter of days. You’re going to help me choose that response. Ideally, I want Felka back without losing sight of the objective.’

‘You thawed me out in desperation, then? Better the devil you know, as they say?’

‘You’re my oldest and closest friend, Rem. I just don’t know if I can trust you any more.’

‘And should the advice I give you be good…?’

‘That might put me in a more trusting frame of mind, I suppose.’ Clavain forced a smile. ‘Of course, I’d also have Felka’s advice on that as well.’

‘And if we fail?’

Clavain said nothing. He just turned and left.

Four small shuttles arced away from Zodiacal Light, each falling into its own half-hemisphere of the relativistically distorted starscape. The exhaust streams of the ships glittered in the backwash from Zodiacal Light’s main flames. The trajectories were achingly beautiful, flung out from the mother ship like the curved arms of a chandelier.

If only this wasn’t an action in a war, Clavain thought, then it might almost be something to be proud of…

He watched their departure from an observation cupola near the prow of his ship, feeling an obligation to wait until he could no longer make them out. Each shuttle carried a valued crewmember, plus a quota of fuel that he would rather not have had to spend before reaching Resurgam. If all went well, Clavain would get back the four shuttles and their crew. But he would never see most of the fuel again. There was only a tiny margin of error, enough that one ship could bring back a human-mass payload in addition to its pilot.

He hoped he was playing this one correctly.

It was said that the taking of hard decisions was something that became easier with repetition, like any difficult activity. There was, perhaps, some truth in that assertion. But if so, Clavain found that it most certainly did not apply in his own case. He had taken several extraordinarily difficult decisions lately, and each had been, in its own unique way, harder than the last. So it was with the matter of Felka.

It was not that he did not want Felka back, if there was a way that could be achieved. But Skade knew how much he wanted the weapons as well. She also knew that it was not a selfish issue with Clavain. He could not be bargained with in the usual sense, since he did not want the weapons for his own personal gain. But with Felka she had the perfect instrument of negotiation. She knew that the two of them had a special bond, one that went back to Mars. Was Felka really his daughter? He didn’t know, even now. He had convinced himself that she might be, and she had told him she was… but that had been under possible duress, when she had been trying to persuade him not to defect. If anything, that admission had only served to slowly undermine his own certainties. He would not know for sure until he was again in her presence, and he could ask her properly.

And should it really matter? Her value as a human being had nothing to do with any hypothetical genetic connection with himself. Even if she was his daughter, he hadn’t known that, or even suspected it, until long after he had rescued her from Mars. And yet something had made him go back into Galiana’s nest, at great risk to himself, because he had felt a need to save her. Galiana had told him it was pointless, that she wasn’t a thinking human being in any sense that he recognised it, just a mindless information-processing vegetable.

And he had proven her wrong. It was probably the only time in his life when he had ever done that to Galiana.

And yet still it didn’t matter. This was all about humanity, Clavain thought, not about blood ties or loyalty. If he forgot that, then he might as well let Skade take the weapons with her. And he might as well defect back to the spiders and leave the rest of the human race to its fate. And yet if he failed to recover the weapons, what use was a single human gesture, no matter how well intentioned?

The four ships were gone. Clavain hoped and prayed that he had made the right decision.

A beetle-backed government car hissed through the streets of Cuvier. It had been raining again, but recently the clouds had cleared. The dismantled planet was now clearly visible during many hours of each evening. The cloud of liberated matter was a lacy many-armed thing. It gleamed red and ochre and pale green and occasionally flickered with slow electrical storms, pulsing like the courtship display of some uncatalogued deep-sea animal. Hard shadows and bright symmetric foci marked the sites within the cloud where Inhibitor machinery was coming into existence, aggregating and solidifying. There had been a time when it was possible to think that what had happened to the planet was some rare but natural event. Now no such comfort existed.

Thorn had seen the way people in Cuvier dealt with the phenomenon. For the most part they ignored it. When the thing was in the sky they walked down the streets without looking up. Even when the fact of its existence could not be ignored, they seldom looked at the thing directly, or even referred to it in anything but the most oblique terms. It was as if a massive act of collective denial might make it go away, an omen that the people had decided to reject.

Thorn sat in one of the car’s two rear seats, behind the driver’s partition. There was a small flickering television screen sunk into the back of the driver’s seat. Blue light played across Thorn’s face as he watched footage taken from far outside the city. The clip was fuzzy and hand-held shaky, but it showed all that it needed to. The first of the two shuttles was still on the ground — the camera panned over it, lingering on the surreal juxtaposition of sleek machine and jumbled rockscape — but the second was in the air, coming back down from orbit. The shuttle had already made several trips to just above Resurgam’s atmosphere where the much larger in-system craft was in orbit. Now the camera view jogged upwards, catching the descending ship as it lowered itself towards the landing site, settling down on a tripod of flames.

‘It could be faked,’ Thorn said quietly. ‘I know it isn’t, but that’s what people will think.’

Khouri was sitting next to him, dressed as Vuilleumier. She said, ‘You can fake anything if you try hard enough. But it isn’t as easy as it used to be, not now that everything’s stored using analogue media. I’m not sure even a whole government department could produce something convincing enough.’

‘The people will still be suspicious.’

The camera panned across the sparse, nervous-looking crowd that was still on the ground. There was a small encampment three hundred metres from the parked shuttle, the dusty tents difficult to distinguish from fallen boulders. The people looked like refugees from any world, any century. They had come thousands of kilometres, converging on this point from a variety of settlements. It had cost them greatly: roughly a tenth of their number had not completed the journey. They had brought enough possessions to make the overland crossing, while knowing — if the underground intelligence network was efficient in its dissemination of information — that they would be allowed to bring nothing aboard the ship but the clothes they stood in. Near the encampment was a small hole in the ground where belongings were tossed before each party boarded the shuttle. These were possessions that had been treasured until the last possible moment, even though the logical thing would have been to leave them behind at home, before making the difficult journey across Resurgam. There were photographs and children’s toys, and all of them would be buried, human relics to add to the million-year-old store of Amarantin artefacts that the planet still held.

‘We’ve taken care of that,’ Khouri said. ‘Some of the witnesses who made it this far have returned to the major population centres. They needed persuading, of course, to turn around when they’d got that far, but…’

‘How did you manage it?’

The car negotiated a bend with a swish of tyres. The cubiform buildings of the Inquisition House district loomed into view, grey and slab-sided as granite cliffs. Thorn eyed them apprehensively.

‘They were told they’d be allowed to take a small quota of personal effects on to the ship with them when they came back.’

‘Bribery, in other words.’ Thorn shook his head, wondering if any great good deed could be entirely untainted by corruption, no matter how useful a purpose that corruption served. ‘But I suppose you had to get the word back somehow. How many, now?’

Khouri had the numbers ready. ‘Fifteen hundred in orbit, at the last count. A few hundred still on the ground. When we’ve got five hundred we’ll make the next trip up from the surface, and then the transfer ship will be full, ready to shuttle them to Nostalgia.’

‘They’re brave,’ Thorn said. ‘Or very, very foolish. I’m not sure which.’

‘Brave, Thorn, there’s no doubt about that. And scared, too. But you can’t blame them for that.’

They were brave, it was true. They had made the journey to the shuttles based only on the scantiest of evidence that the machines even existed. After Thorn’s arrest, rumours had run rife amongst the exodus movement. The government had continued to issue carefully engineered denials, each of which was designed to nurture in the populace’s mind the idea that Thorn’s shuttles might in fact be real. Those people who had made it to the shuttles so far had done so expressly against government advice, risking imprisonment and death as they trespassed into prohibited territory.

Thorn admired them. He doubted that he would have had the courage to follow those rumours to their logical conclusion had he not been the man who had initiated the whole movement. But he could take no pride in their achievement. They were still being deceived about their ultimate fate, a deception in which he was entirely complicit.

The car arrived at the rear of Inquisition House. Thorn and Khouri walked into the building, past the usual security checks. Thorn’s identity was still a closely guarded secret, and he had been issued with a full set of papers allowing free movement in and around Cuvier. The guards assumed he was merely another official from the House, on government business.

‘Do you still think this will work?’ he asked, hurrying to keep up with Khouri as she strode up the stairs ahead of him.

‘If it doesn’t, we’re fucked,’ she replied, in the same hushed voice.

The Triumvir was waiting in the Inquisitor’s larger room, sitting in the seat usually reserved for Thorn. She was smoking, flicking ash on to the highly polished floor. Thorn felt a spasm of irritation at this act of studied carelessness. But doubtless the Triumvir’s argument would have been that the whole planet was going to be ash before very long, so what difference did a little more make?

Trina,‘ he said, remembering to use the name she had adopted for her Cuvier persona.

‘Thorn.’ She stood up, grinding out her cigarette on the chair’s arm. ‘You look well. Government custody obviously isn’t as bad as they say.’

‘If that’s a joke, it isn’t in very good taste.’

‘Of course.’ She shrugged, as if an apology would be superfluous. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done lately?’

‘They?’

Triumvir Ilia Volyova was looking through the window, towards the sky. ‘Have a guess.’

‘Of course. You can’t miss it now. Do you know what’s taking shape in that cloud?’

‘A mechanism, Thorn. Something to destroy our sun, I’d say.’

‘Let’s talk in the office,’ Khouri said.

‘Oh, let’s not,’ said Volyova. ‘There are no windows, Ana, and the view does so focus the mind, don’t you think? In a matter of minutes the fact of Thorn’s collusion will be public knowledge.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Won’t it?’

‘If you want to call it collusion.’

Thorn had already taped his ‘statement’ — the one where he spoke for the government, revealing that the shuttles were real, that the planet was indeed in imminent danger and that the government had, reluctantly, asked him to become the figurehead of the official exodus operation. It would be transmitted on all Resurgam television channels within the hour, to be repeated at intervals throughout the next day.

‘It won’t be viewed as collusion,’ Khouri said, eyeing the other woman coldly. ‘Thorn will be seen to be acting out of concern for the people, not his own self-interest. It will be convincing because it happens to be the truth.’ Her attention flicked to him. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘I’m only voicing what will be common doubts,’ said Volyova. ‘Never mind, anyway. We’ll know soon enough what the reaction is. Is it true there have already been acts of civil disturbance in some of the outlying settlements, Ana?’

‘They were crushed pretty efficiently.’

‘There’ll be worse, for certain. Don’t be surprised if there’s an attempt to overthrow this regime.’

‘That won’t happen,’ Khouri said. ‘Not when the people realise what’s at stake. They’ll see that the apparatus of government has to remain in place so that the exodus can be organised smoothly.’

The Triumvir smirked in Thorn’s direction. ‘See how hopelessly optimistic she still is, Thorn?’

‘Irina’s right, unfortunately,’ Thorn said. ‘We can expect a lot worse. But you never imagined you’d get everyone off this planet in one piece.’

‘But we have the capacity…’ Khouri said.

‘People aren’t payloads. They can’t be shipped around like neat little units. Even if the majority buy into the idea that the government is somehow sincere about the evacuation — and that will be a small miracle in its own right — it’ll only take a minority of dissenters to cause major trouble.’

‘You made a career out of being one of them,’ Khouri said.

‘I did, yes.’ Thorn smiled sadly. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the only one out there. Still, Irina’s right. We’ll know soon enough what the general reaction will be. How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?’

‘Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,’ Khouri said. ‘But that should take care of our worst enemies. The rest we only have to hold off until the exodus is finished.’

Thorn turned to the Triumvir. ‘You’ve studied that thing in the sky more closely than any of us, Irina. Do you know how long we’ve got?’

‘No,’ she said curtly. ‘Of course I can’t say how long we’ve got, not without knowing what it is that they’re building up there. All I can do is make an extremely educated guess.’

‘So indulge us.’

She sniffed and then walked stiffly along the entire length of the window. Thorn eyed Khouri, wondering what she made of this performance. He had noticed a tension between the two women that he did not recall from his previous meetings with them. Perhaps it had always been there and he had simply missed it before, but he rather doubted it.

‘I’ll say this,’ the Triumvir stated, her heels squeaking as she turned to face the two of them. ‘Whatever it is, it’s big. Much bigger than any structure we could imagine building, even if we had the raw materials and the time. Even the smallest structures that we can single out in the cloud ought to have collapsed under their own self-gravity by now, becoming molten spheres of metal. But they haven’t. That tells me something.’

‘Go on,’ Thorn said.

‘Either they can persuade matter to become many orders of magnitude more rigid than ought to be possible, or they have some local control of gravity. Perhaps some combination of the two, even. Accelerated streams of matter can serve the same structural functions as rigid spars if they can be controlled with sufficient finesse…’ She was evidently thinking aloud, and for a moment she trailed off, before remembering her audience. ‘I suspect that they can manipulate inertia when it becomes necessary. We saw how they redirected those matter flows, bending them through right angles. That implies a profound knowledge of metric engineering, tampering with the basic substrate of space-time. If they have that ability, they can probably control gravity as well. We haven’t seen that before, I think, so it might be something they can only do on a large scale: a broad brush, so to speak. Everything we’ve seen so far — the disassembly of the rocky worlds, the Dyson motor around the gas giant — all that was watchmaker stuff. Now we’re seeing the first hints of Inhibitor heavy engineering.’

‘Now you’re scaring me,’ Thorn said.

‘Entirely my intention.’ She smiled quickly. It was the first time he had seen her smile that evening.

‘So what is it going to be?’ Khouri asked. ‘A machine to make the sun go supernova?’

‘No,’ the Triumvir replied. ‘We can rule that out, I think. They may have a technology that can do it, but it would only work on heavy stars, the kind that are already predestined to blow up. That would be a formidable weapon, I admit. You could sterilise a volume of space dozens of light-years wide if you could trigger a premature supernova. I don’t know how you would do it — maybe by tuning the nuclear cross sections to prohibit fusion for elements lighter than iron, thereby shifting the peak in the curve of binding energy. The star would suddenly have nothing to fuse, no means to support its outer envelope against collapse. They may have done it once, you know. Earth’s sun is in the middle of a bubble in the interstellar medium, blown open by a recent supernova. It intersects other structures right out to the Aquila Rift. They may have been natural events, or we might be seeing the scars left behind by Inhibitor sterilisation events millions of years before the Amarantin xenocide. Or the bubbles might have been blown open by the weapons of fleeing species. We’ll probably never know, no matter how hard we look. But that won’t happen here. There are no supergiant stars in this part of the galaxy now, nothing capable of undergoing a supernova. They must have evolved different weapons for dealing with lower-mass stars like Delta Pavonis. Less spectacular — no use for sterilising more than a solar system — but perfectly effective on that level.’

‘How would you kill a star like Pavonis?’ Thorn asked.

‘There are several ways one might go about it,’ the Triumvir said thoughtfully. ‘It would depend on the resources available, and the time. The Inhibitors could assemble a ring around the star, just like they did with the gas giant. Something larger this time, of course, and perhaps functioning differently. There’s no solid surface to a star, not even a solid core. But they might encircle the star with a ring of particle accelerators, perhaps. If they established a particle-beam flux through the ring, they could create a vast magnetic force by tightening and loosening the ring in waves. The field from the ring would strangle the star like a constricting snake, pumping chromospheric material away from the star’s equator towards the poles. That’s the only place it could go, and the only place it could escape. Hot plasma would ram away from the star’s north and south poles. You might even be able to use those plasma jets as weapons in their own right, turning the whole star into a flame-thrower — all you’d need is more machinery above and below the poles to direct and focus the jets where you wanted them. You could incinerate every world in a solar system with a weapon like that, stripping atmosphere and ocean. You wouldn’t even need to dismantle the entire star. Once you’d removed enough of its outer envelope, its core would adjust its fusion rate and the whole star would become cooler and much longer-lived. That might suit their longer-term plans, I suppose.’

‘That sounds as if it would take a long time,’ Khouri said. ‘And if all you’re going to do is incinerate the worlds, why waste half a star doing it?’

‘They could dismantle the whole thing, if they wished. I’m merely pointing out the possibilities. There’s another method they might consider, too. They dismantled the gas giant by spinning it until it flew apart. They could do that to a sun, too: wrap accelerators around it again, this time in pole-to-pole loops, and start rotating them. They’d couple with the star’s magnetosphere and start dragging the whole thing along with them, until it was spinning faster than its own centrifugal break-up speed. Matter would lift off the star’s surface. It would come apart like an onion.’

‘Sounds slow, too.’

Volyova nodded. ‘Perhaps. And there’s another thing we need to consider. The machinery that’s being assembled out there isn’t ringlike, and there’s no sign of any preparatory activity around the sun itself. The Inhibitors are going to use a different method again, I think.’

‘How else do you destroy a star, if pumping or spinning it won’t work?’ Khouri asked.

‘I don’t know. Let’s assume they can manipulate gravity to some extent. If that’s the case, they might be able to make a planet-mass black hole from the matter they’ve already accumulated. Say ten Earth masses, perhaps.’ She held her hands slightly apart, as if weaving an invisible cat’s cradle. ‘This big, that’s all. At most, they might have the resources to make a black hole ten or twenty times larger — a few hundred Earth masses.’

‘And if they dropped it into the star?’

‘It would begin eating its way through it, yes. They would need to take great care to place it where it would do the maximum harm, though. It would be very difficult to insert it exactly in the star’s nuclear-burning heart. The black hole would be inclined to oscillate, following an orbital trajectory through the star. It would have an effect, I am sure — the mass density near the black hole’s Schwarzschild radius would reach the nuclear-burning threshold, I think, so the star would suddenly have two sites of nucleation, one orbiting the other. But it would only eat the star slowly, since its surface area is so small. Even when it had swallowed half the star, it would still only be three kilometres wide.’ She shrugged. ‘But it might work. It would depend acutely on the way in which matter fell into the hole. If it became too hot, its own radiation pressure would blast back the next layer of infalling material, slowing the whole process. I’ll have to do some sums, I think.’

‘What else?’ Thorn asked. ‘Assuming it isn’t a black hole?’

‘We could speculate endlessly. The nuclear-burning processes in the heart of any star are a delicate balance between pressure and gravity. Anything that tipped that balance might have a catastrophic effect on the overall properties of the star. But stars are resilient. They will always try to find a new balance point, even if that means switching to the fusion of heavier elements.’ The Triumvir turned to look out of the window again, tapping her fingers against the glass. ‘The exact mechanism that the Inhibitors will use may not even be comprehensible to us. It doesn’t matter, because they will never get that far.’

Khouri said, i’m sorry?‘

I do not intend to wait this out, Ana. For the first time the Inhibitors have concentrated their activity at one focus point. I believe they are now at their most vulnerable. And for the first time, the Captain is willing to do business.‘

Khouri flashed a glance in Thorn’s direction. ‘The cache?’

‘He’s given me his assurance that he will allow its use.’ She continued tapping the glass, still not turning to face them. ‘Of course, there’s a risk. We don’t know exactly what the cache is capable of. But damage is damage. I am certain we can put back their plans.’

‘No,’ Thorn said. ‘This isn’t right. Not now.’

The Triumvir turned from the window. ‘Why ever not?’

‘Because the exodus operation is working. We’ve begun to lift people from the surface of Resurgam.’

Volyova scoffed. ‘A few thousand. Hardly a dent, is it?’

‘Things will change when the exodus operation becomes official. That’s what we always counted on.’

‘Things could get very much worse, too. Are you willing to take that chance?’

‘We had a plan,’ Khouri said. ‘The weapons were always there, to be used when we needed them. But it’s senseless to provoke a reaction from the Inhibitors now, after all that we’ve achieved.’

‘She’s right,’ Thorn said. ‘You have to wait, Irina. At least until we’ve evacuated a hundred thousand. Then use your precious weapons if you have to.’

‘By then it will be too late,’ she said, turning back to the window.

‘We don’t know that,’ Thorn said.

‘Look.’ Volyova spoke quietly. ‘Can you see it?’

‘See what?’

‘In the distance, between those two buildings. There, beyond Broadcasting House. You can’t miss it now.’

Thorn walked to the window, Khouri next to him. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘Has your statement been broadcast yet?’ Volyova asked.

Thorn checked the time. ‘Yes… yes. It should just have gone out, at least in Cuvier.’

‘There’s your first reaction, then: a fire. Not much of one yet, but I don’t doubt that we’ll see more before the evening’s out. The people are terrified. They’ve been terrified for months, with that thing in the sky. And now they know the government has been systematically lying to them. Under the circumstances I’d be a little angry. Wouldn’t you?’

‘It won’t last,’ Thorn said. ‘Trust me, I know the people. When they understand that there’s an escape route, that all they have to do is act rationally and do what I say, they’ll calm down.’

Volyova smiled. ‘Either you are a man of unusual ability, Thorn, or a man with a rather inadequate grasp of human nature. I just hope it’s the former.’

‘You deal with your machines, Irina, and I’ll deal with the people.’

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Khouri said. ‘On to the balcony. We’ll be able to see things more clearly.’

There were vehicles moving around now, more than normal for a rainy night. Below, police vans were assembling outside the building. Thorn watched riot officers troop into the vans, jostling each other with their armour, shields and electrically tipped prods. One by one the vans whisked away, dispersing the police to trouble spots. Other vans were being driven into a cordon around the building, the spaces between them spanned by metal barricades that had been perforated with narrow slits.

On the balcony it was much clearer. City sounds reached them through the rain. There were bangs and crashes, sirens and shouting. It almost sounded like a carnival, except there was no music. Thorn realised that it had been a long time since he had heard music of any kind.

Presently, despite the best efforts of the police, there was a crowd massing outside Inquisition House. There were simply too many people to hold back, and all the police could do was prevent them from entering the building itself. A number of people were already lying on the ground at the front of the crowd, stunned by grenades or prods. Their friends were doing their best to get them to safety. One man was thrashing in an epileptic frenzy. Another man looked dead, or at least deeply unconscious. The police could have murdered most of the people in the crowd in a few seconds, Thorn knew, but they were holding back. He studied the faces of the police as well as he was able. They appeared just as frightened and confused as the crowd they were supposed to be pacifying. Special orders had obviously decreed that their response should be measured rather than brutal.

The balcony was surrounded by a low fretted wall. Thorn walked to the edge and looked over, peering down towards street level. Khouri followed him, Triumvir Volyova remaining out of sight.

‘It’s time,’ Thorn said. ‘I need to speak to the people in person. That way they’ll know the statement wasn’t faked up.’

He knew that all he needed to do was shout and someone would hear him, even if it were only one person in the crowd. Before very long everyone would be looking upwards, and they would know, even before he spoke, who he was.

‘Make it good,’ Volyova said, barely raising her voice above a whisper. ‘Make it very good, Thorn. A lot will depend on this little performance.’

He looked back at her. ‘Then you’ll reconsider?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Irina…’ Khouri said. ‘Please think about this. At least give us a chance here, before you use the weapons.’

‘You’ll have a chance,’ Volyova said. ‘Before I use the weapons, I’ll move them across the system. That way, even if there is a response from the Inhibitors, Infinity won’t be the obvious target.’

‘That will take some time, won’t it?’ Khouri asked.

‘You have a month, no more than that. Of course, I’m not expecting you to have the entire planet evacuated by then. But if you’ve kept to the agreed schedule — and perhaps improved on it a little — I may consider delaying the use of the weapons a while longer. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? I can be flexible, you see.’

‘You’re asking too much of us,’ Khouri said. ‘No matter how efficient our operation on the surface is, we can’t move more than two thousand people at a time between low orbit and the starship. That’s an unavoidable bottleneck, Ilia.’ She seemed unaware that she had spoken the Triumvir’s real name.

‘Bottlenecks can always be worked around, if it matters enough,’ she said. ‘And I’ve given you every incentive, haven’t I?’

‘It’s Thorn, isn’t it?’ Khouri said.

Thorn glanced back at her. ‘What about me?’

‘She doesn’t like the way you’ve come between us,’ Khouri told him. The Triumvir made the same derisive snort he had heard before.

‘No. It’s true,’ Khouri said. ‘Isn’t it, Ilia? You and I had a perfect working relationship until I brought Thorn into the arrangement. You’ll never forgive either me or him for destroying that beautiful little partnership.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ Volyova said.

‘I’m not being absurd, I’m just…’

But the Triumvir whipped past her.

‘Where are you going?’ Khouri asked.

She stopped long enough to answer her. ‘Where do you think, Ana? Back to my ship. I have work to do.’

‘Your ship, suddenly? I thought it was our ship.’

But Volyova had said all she was going to say. Thorn heard her footsteps recede back into the building.

‘Is that true?’ he asked Khouri. ‘Do you really think she’s resentful of me?’

But she said nothing either. Thorn, after a long moment, turned back to the city. He leaned out into the night, formulating the crucial speech he was about to deliver. Volyova was right: a lot depended on it.

Khouri’s hand closed around his own.

The air reeked of fear-gas. Thorn felt it worming into his brain, brewing anxiety.