‘What’s wrong?’ I said, slurred as a drunkard. ‘I was going to whisk over to you, not the other way round...’
But before he had a chance to answer, Silver Wings told me herself, whispering information into my head: our two ships had run into the Gentian emergency signal, an event sufficiently ominous that both vehicles had taken the decision to awaken their occupants. We were still travelling at maximum speed, still more than a dozen years from our destination.
‘I came out first,’ Campion said. ‘The advantage of just being in stasis.’
‘I don’t like stasis,’ I said testily, although of course he knew this.
He helped me out of the upright box of my cryophagus casket and gathered me in his strong, warm arms. I felt cold and fragile, like a flower that had been dipped in liquid nitrogen: something that might shatter into colourful brittle pieces at the least provocation.
‘How are you feeling?’ Campion whispered into my ear, nuzzling his face against mine.
‘As if I want to go back to sleep again. As if I’d really prefer it if this was just a bad dream.’
‘Silver Wings pulled you out fast because of the emergency. You’re going to be a bit groggy.’
I pulled myself tighter against him. He felt fixed and solid, an anchor I could tie myself to.
Hesperus, who was standing behind Campion, said, ‘You have been apart for some time. If you wish to copulate, I can retire to another part of the ship or simply disable my attentive faculties for an agreed interval.’
I did not want to copulate; I just wanted to hold Campion tightly and let life seep back into my bones and muscles and nerve fibres.
But Silver Wings was still speaking into my skull. ‘The embedded content,’ I asked. ‘What did it say?’
Campion pulled back a twitch. ‘What embedded content?’
‘You didn’t look?’
‘It’s a distress code, that’s all. There isn’t meant to be any embedded content.’
‘Silver Wings says there is. Maybe Dalliance didn’t pick up on that, but it’s there.’
‘That’s not protocol. We’re supposed to connect to the private network, find out what the storm’s all about.’
‘Something’s obviously changed.’ More exasperated than cross, I said, ‘I can’t believe you missed the content, Campion: what would have happened if I hadn’t been around?’ Then I grimaced. ‘Ignore me - it’s just brain chemistry.’
‘Shall I retire while you examine the message?’ Hesperus asked tactfully.
I shook my head. ‘Whatever this is, we’re all in it now - including our guests. You’d better brace yourself for some bad news. Whatever this is about, it could mean a delay in reuniting you with your friends.’
‘Thank you for thinking of my welfare when you must have so much else on your minds. With your permission, I would consider it a privilege to be privy to the embedded content. May we examine it here?’
‘I think I need a drink first,’ Campion said, eyeing me guardedly. I felt the same, torn between wanting to know the news, however bad it might be, and at the same time wanting to do anything to delay the moment of revelation.
‘We’ll take it on the bridge,’ I said, closing the door of my casket.
‘There’s something else you need to know,’ Campion said to me quietly, while we were on our way to the nearest whisking point.
I squeezed his hand and asked, ‘What?’
‘We’re down a passenger.’
My brain was still mush. ‘One of the sleepers we picked up from Ateshga?’
‘No—it’s Doctor Meninx. We won’t be having the pleasure of his company again.’
‘What?’ I asked again, aware of Hesperus only a few paces behind.
‘He died. His casket broke down. Hesperus says he tried to fix it when he saw something was going wrong, but Doctor Meninx had put in too many safeguards.’ Campion had put emphasis on that ‘says’, letting me know he only had our guest’s word concerning what had really happened.
‘My God.’
‘Any other time, it would be the only thing on my mind. But now that this has happened as well...’ Campion trailed off.
‘I can’t say I’m going to miss the old bigot, but—’
‘You’d still rather he hadn’t died. Yes, that’s sort of how I feel. They’re going to lap this up, aren’t they?’
‘Give them half a chance. But if it wasn’t really your fault...’ Some impulse caused me to glance back at Hesperus, though I was doing all in my power not to act awkwardly.
‘He says he didn’t do it,’ Campion said under his breath. ‘For now I’ve decided to take him at his word.’
As we whisked through-ship to Silver Wings’ bridge, my thoughts veered between anxious anticipation of the embedded content and dark speculation as to Hesperus’s innocence. I was still prickly and tense when the bridge lit up in welcome as we entered. Anticipating our arrival, the ship had arranged three seats around the plinthed glass hemisphere that was the main displayer. Although Silver Wings could have swallowed Campion’s little ship fifty times over, what passed for a bridge on my own ship was about a twentieth the size of his, with configurable walls that were always set to a dull pewter, a low, dimpled ceiling gridded with lights and only the very minimum in terms of visible instrumentation and control interfaces.
‘I presume you were serious about that drink,’ I said, pausing at the bridge’s maker while it fashioned and filled two glasses. Campion’s was alcoholic; mine a cocktail of neural restoratives, to assist my recovery from the cryophagus.
Campion took the glass. ‘Thank you.’
I indicated to Hesperus that he should take the sturdiest seat, while Campion and I lowered ourselves into the other two. ‘No point in delaying this any longer, is there?’ I asked, with a nervous catch in my voice. ‘State the nature of the embedded content, Silver— for everyone’s benefit.’
The ship spoke aloud. ‘The embedded content is a non-interactive audio-visual recording with a playback time of one hundred and thirty-five seconds. If there are deeper content layers, I cannot detect them.’
‘Can we assume it’s safe?’
‘I have scrutinised the message to the limit of my abilities and found no dangerous patterns.’
I ran my tongue along the dry edge of my lip. ‘You’d better run it then. Ready, everyone?’
‘As I’ll ever be,’ Campion said. He chose that moment to reach around for my hand, our fingertips only just touching.
The upper half of a man appeared in the hemisphere, rendered life-size. It only took me a moment to recognise him as a fellow shatterling of Gentian Line and to put a name to the face.
‘Fescue,’ I said softly.
‘What would he want—?’ Campion began, before Fescue spoke over his words.
‘If you are in receipt of this message, then I’m assuming that you are latecomers for the reunion. Ordinarily you would deserve the sternest censure... but these are not ordinary times. Now you deserve our blessing, our thanks, and above all our heartfelt wishes for your own continued survival. You may be all that is left of Gentian Line.’ The imaged figure nodded gravely, leaving us in no doubt that we had understood his words.
It was definitely Fescue, but not as we usually knew him. The haughty, supercilious demeanour was only visible as a ghost of itself. His face was drawn, his hair dishevelled, clinging to his forehead in damp curls, his eyes weary, frightened slits. There was even something on his cheek that looked like a burn or bruise or a smudge of oily dirt.
‘We were ambushed,’ he continued, prolonging the syllables of the word with lingering distaste. ‘The Thousand Nights were yet to begin - a dozen or so ships were still to arrive, even though we had already been waiting more than fifteen years. Hundreds had already come, of course - more than eight hundred in orbit. Most of us were already on the world, awake in the carnival cities or waiting in abeyance for the celebrations to commence. When the weapons opened fire, we had no practical
defence: the world’s impassors were too feeble to counter the assault, and our ships were annihilated before they could aggregate into an effective counter-force. They used Homunculus weapons against us: horrors we hardly dare speak of, exhumed from the deepest, most pathological vaults of history. After they had reduced our ships to clouds of ionised gas, even the largest and strongest of them, they turned on the reunion world and pumped energy into it for a hundred hours. It was a business of minutes, a mere preamble, to boil away the atmosphere and oceans and render that world as sterile as it had been before our arrival. But the attackers didn’t stop there. They continued to pour energy into the planet, melting first the crust and then the mantle... turning the entire world into a molten ball that glowed first orange and then furious gold, until it began to break up, its own gravity insufficient to hold it together. Over four and a half days, the energy output of those weapons exceeded even that of the sun the world orbited. And when they were done, nothing remained. That was eight years ago, by my reckoning - still more time will have passed when you intercept this signal. Concentrate your sensors on the target system and you will soon see not a sun and its family of worlds, but a new nebula, a roiling dark cloud of rubble and dust and tortured gas, now bound only by the gravity well of the star itself. It will endure for centuries, thousands of years, significant fractions of a circuit. Planets and moons plough through that cloud, but not the world we hoped to make our temporary home. It’s gone, and so has most of the Line.’
Fescue paused and stroked a finger against a puffiness under one of his slitted eyes. It occurred to me then, as it had not before, that he might very well be blind: at no point had I sensed his attention focused in any particular direction.
‘Some got out,’ he said. ‘Those with the fastest ships, the best camouflage or countermeasures ... but few were so fortunate. It will come as no surprise to hear that I have initiated the Belladonna protocol. You must deviate immediately from your present heading. Under no circumstances attempt to enter or approach the reunion system, for even now - eight years after the ambush - the aggressive elements are still loitering, waiting to pick off latecomers. Even once you have obeyed the Belladonna protocol, you must be watchful for pursuers: complete your turn stealthily, and use misdirection as appropriate. If you sense you are being followed, you must sacrifice yourselves rather than lead the attackers to the Belladonna fallback.’
Again Fescue fell silent, looking to one side as if he had seen - or perhaps heard - something that merited his attention. When he resumed speaking, it was with a renewed haste.
‘I chose to embed this message because it was too risky to convey this information via the private network: the nature of the ambush implies that our security is not as tight as we had imagined, and any attempt to tap into the network may be detected and acted upon by those who would seek to exterminate our Line. Concerning the nature of our attackers, and their reasons for doing this ... I regret to tell you that I have no information.’ Fescue shook his head forcefully. ‘Nothing: not even the tiniest flicker of intelligence. But I know this. Unless one has arisen in the last circuit, no galactic civilisation—not even the Rebirthers or the Machine People - is known to possess the sophistry in vacuum manipulation necessary to duplicate Homunculus-level technology. Those weapons must therefore be the original instruments, despite the fact that Marcellin Line was charged with their disposal four and a half million years ago. The question therefore begs itself: did Marcellin Line betray their promise to the Commonality and conceal those weapons when they should have decommissioned them? I cannot believe they would have done so ... but then neither can I believe that Gentian Line has enemies who would wish this upon us. Therefore tread carefully, for if the Marcellins cannot necessarily be trusted, then neither can any other Line in the Commonality. After thirty-two circuits and six million years, we may finally have run out of friends.’
Fescue halted, and for a moment it appeared that he was done. Then he raised his chin, striking a defiant pose, and said, ‘I wish I knew how many of you were out there. I would like to think that there are still latecomers on their way home, but for all I know attrition may already have taken every last one of you. I will say this, though, in the vain hope that it reaches some remnants of the Line. Now you and a handful of survivors carry the candle that Abigail set aflame. That is a singular responsibility: a greater burden than you have ever been required to shoulder. You must not let the rest of us down.’
Fescue bowed his head. The image froze and then flicked back to its starting position, ready for the speech to be replayed.
We watched it again, in case there was some nuance that had escaped us the first time.
When our messenger was done, Campion said, ‘This can’t be real. Someone’s faked it. Someone’s figured out how to send an emergency signal, impersonating Fescue.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’ I asked. There was a coldness growing inside me, a realisation that our future had just become stranger and more frightening than it had appeared only a few minutes ago, but for now I was still capable of reasoned thought.
‘To get at us, of course! To give us a reason to skip the reunion completely. God knows we’ve got enough enemies, enough people who’d love to see us miss the boat.’
‘They wouldn’t dare use Fescue’s name unless they had his authority. He sent this message, or delegated it to someone he trusted.’
‘Fescue hates us! He’s got every reason in the world to trick us with something like this.’
‘And risk excommunication? If he sent this signal via omni-directional broadcast, then it’ll have been intercepted by every shatterling who hadn’t yet made it to the reunion. Fescue might have an axe to grind against us, but he’s not vindictive, and he definitely isn’t stupid.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’ve been thinking all this through as well, you know. I’d love to believe this is a hoax, aimed solely at us. But that’s not how it looks to me. I think this is real. I think something horrible has happened and we’re being warned to get as far away from the reunion as we can.’
‘That would also be my conclusion,’ Hesperus said.
‘Did anyone ask you?’ Campion snapped.
‘My apologies. I should not have spoken.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you should have, because you’re right. This is real, and we have to take it seriously. Listen to Hesperus, Campion. He has every reason to want to make it to that reunion: it’s where we’ve promised him he’ll find other Machine People. And now that message is saying the party’s off, and Hesperus still believes it. Doesn’t that tell you something?’
Campion spread his hands before his face, as if he wished to bury it in them.
‘I can’t deal with this. It’s got to be some kind of mistake, something blown out of all proportion.’
‘Or it’s exactly what Fescue said it was: an actual ambush, with huge losses. We’ll know soon enough, in any case. Now that we’ve a reason to, we can concentrate our sensors on the system ahead. With two ships, we can establish an observational baseline wide enough to resolve the nebula - if it’s really there.’
‘It may be easier than that,’ Hesperus said. ‘If the system is now dust-cloaked, the spectral properties of the star will be modified. It will appear redder, and contain the absorption lines characteristic of the elements making up the planet.’
‘Silver,’ I said hesitantly, because I knew I was on the verge of having a harrowing possibility confirmed, ‘tell me if there’s anything unusual about the target star, compared against the trove.’
It did not take long. Silver Wings informed us that the star was indeed redder than expected, and that its atmosphere contained unusually strong spectral signatures of nickel and iron, proving that the sun was shrouded in the rubble that had once been our reunion world. Furthermore, even at our present distance of thirteen lights, there was clear evidence of the nebula: a warm, glowing ellipse like a thumbprint pressed over the hard point of the star.
That was wh
en we knew for sure that we were not being hoaxed, and that everything was going to be different from now on. The first six million years had been all fun and games.
Now we were growing up.
‘What if there are survivors still hiding out in the cloud?’ Campion asked. ‘Don’t we owe it to them to have a closer look?’
‘Fescue said it was already eight years since the attack when he made the transmission. Add another thirteen years for the signal to reach us: that’s twenty-one years. Add another thirteen before we arrive - that’s thirty-four years.’
‘Fescue survived for eight years or he wouldn’t have been able to send that signal.’
‘He didn’t say he was still there. The message’s apparent point of origin tells us nothing. It could have been relayed from a ship on its way to the fallback.’
‘Read between the lines. He was hurt. If he was anywhere else other than inside the system, he’d have been able to get himself fixed. His ship must have been damaged, and chances are it was still inside the cloud. Fescue must have been hiding there ever since the attack. That means we have to consider the possibility of other survivors.’ His voice notched higher. ‘If we were down in that system, crippled but still alive, we’d be counting on outside help as well.’
‘The survival of the Line outweighs the survival of individual shatterlings.’
‘Ask yourself what Fescue would have done,’ Campion said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Put yourself in Fescue’s shoes - as if he was the one running into this transmission, not us. As if we sent it, and he was the one who had to decide how to act. Fescue was right to warn us, but he knew damned well we wouldn’t listen. I may not care for that arrogant, hypocritical arsehole, but do you think he’d have been very likely to listen? I don’t even know if I’m proposing the right thing, or something worse than stupid, but I know we can’t just dismiss it out of hand. These are our brothers and sisters, our fellow shatterlings. They’re pieces of us, pieces of what we are, pieces of what make us human. If we abandon them, we may as well forget about the Line. We won’t have any right to call ourselves Gentian any more.’