Two per cent of the speed of light was almost not moving at all by the standards of Gentian Line - a speed so imperceptibly slow that it was best measured in kilometres per second, a unit more usually associated with travel in a planetary atmosphere. But it was still much faster than the orbital motion of any of the bodies making up the system, whether they were the remaining planets and moons or the dust, grit and tumbling boulders of the shattered planet. Campion had already pulled away to a distance of two minutes—thirty-six million kilometres - beginning his separation many hours ago. Now our two ships were moving along parallel trajectories, like bullets shot from a double-barrelled rifle, and would remain so as we slipped through the cloud, piercing it more or less at its widest point, and passing either side of the sun. Both ships would be peering into the surrounding volume, looking for indications of technological activity. Allowing for the effectiveness of our sensors, we should be able to sweep twenty per cent of the cloud with a sensitivity high enough to detect typical ship signatures. There were places to hide: warm knots and eddies in the cloud caused by the to-and-fro influence of the remaining worlds. A ship could hide itself, masked to eyes that worked on gravity and heat.
All the while we would be doing our best not to be seen. That meant no communications unless absolutely necessary: by the time we were deep inside the cloud there would be too great a chance of a tight-beam being scattered in all directions by intervening debris, rendering our private communications at least detectable by foreign parties, if not decipherable. It also meant using our engines as infrequently as possible, and not raising our impassors to full effectiveness until a collision was imminent. Running dark, in other words: coasting without screens, and relying solely on passive sensor methods.
I watched Hesperus leave. Before he entered Vespertine we touched hands. His was very cold, very metallic, but somehow pliant in the way it yielded to my touch. He slipped out of my grasp and retreated through the blue-lit doorway of the golden ship. The doorway formed over and vanished back into the blurred surface of the hull. A humming note rose and stabilised. A few seconds later, the hull blurring intensified, as if I was seeing the golden craft through a veil of tears. Vespertine moved away from the catwalk, slipping free of its force cradle. The railing reformed. I clutched it, watching Hesperus navigate between the much larger and darker vessels filling my hold. Gradually it dwindled to a tiny, fuzzy mote of self-illuminated gold. The bay door had opened wide. Hesperus penetrated the atmosphere curtain and entered open space. He hovered outside for a few seconds before engaging the engine, appearing to blink out of existence as the massive acceleration snatched him away.
I watched the door close and then whisked back to the bridge.
‘Vespertine is loose,’ I told Campion.
His reply came back four minutes later. ‘I didn’t see a thing, and I was watching very closely. I hope that bodes well, if and when we run into trouble.’
His image was based on Silver Wings’ own memories of Campion, not any visual information arriving over the talk-beam. It would have been pointless and dangerous to send more data than was strictly necessary, so our exchange consisted only of the words we spoke, accompanied by a few cues for gesture, emphasis and inflection, rendered back into a convincing simulacrum of speech.
An hour passed, and then my ship had something to tell me.
‘My trove’s turned something up,’ I reported to Campion. ‘The bright structures in the cloud - I think they may confirm another part of Fescue’s story. The trove thinks they may be lesions - a kind of residue left over from the use of Homunculus weapons. That’s not good news, obviously. Not only would it mean we are dealing with H-guns - after all this time - but it also means someone’s used them more recently than thirty-four years ago. Lesions have a decay half-life, even in hard vacuum. They wouldn’t last long in this kind of environment.’
Campion came back, ‘Agreed—it’s not good news. But at least it means someone had a reason to fire those weapons relatively recently. Unless they were just firing them for the hell of it, it could mean they were trying to eliminate survivors still hiding out in the cloud.’
‘Or shoot down latecomers who had the chrome-plated balls to come through anyway, despite Fescue’s warning.’
Campion smiled grimly. ‘There’s that as well.’ Then he glanced aside at a read-out. ‘Dust is starting to thicken, for me at least. I’m going to have to notch up my impassor effectiveness before it gets any worse. Suggest you do likewise.’
I sent the necessary command to Silver Wings. ‘Raised. Can you still hear me?’
The image flickered, criss-crossed with pink and white static lines. ‘Yes,’ Campion said, his voice throaty. ‘You’re coming through. I can see your bubble, though - you’re beginning to scintillate. It helps that I know exactly where to look, but you’re more visible than you were a minute ago.’
He meant a minute by his reckoning - it was still taking two minutes for light to creep between us.
I could see Dalliance’s impasse flickering on and off as it interdicted incoming matter, though the effort taxed my sensors to the limit. I had sometimes chastised him for using such a small ship, but now his size gave him a clear edge over me. The surface area of his bubble was a hundred and twenty times less than that enveloping Silver Wings, making it much less likely that he would run into any given piece of debris.
Two hours in, and I could feel the effect of those collisions as well. As the ambient dust thickened - as we pushed deeper and deeper into the cloud of planetary ashes - so Silver Wings registered each impact with a tangible jolt as the impassor soaked up the momentum of the incoming particle and then transferred that impulse to the ship via the generators. The dampeners were doing their best to cancel out any shifts in the local gravity, but because they had little warning they had to cut in sharply, with a perceptible lag between effect and response.
I felt like the captain of an ocean-going ship grinding against an iceberg, each jolt the twang of a hull plate being ripped away.
‘It’s rougher than I expected,’ Campion told me, the scratchiness of his image and the metallic timbre of his voice Silver Wings’ way of telling me that the data transfer was becoming problematic. ‘It’ll smooth out, though, once the impacts start coming in close together enough.’
That took another hour. Silver Wings was now driving hard into a sleet of debris and the momentum transfer had become first a drum roll and then a rumble, and now little more than a faint, ever-present vibration. The downside was that the collisions were sapping my speed: I had to engage the engine just to maintain two per cent of light, and I could only run the engine in the instants when the impassor was down. Occasionally there was still a large, barely dampened jolt as we ran into something an order of magnitude bigger than the usual particles, but my nerves had already been shredded about as thoroughly as they could be.
Three and half hours in, we got our first close view of the nearest lesion. It emerged from its cloak of dust like a sliver of bright landscape seen through breaking fog. It was irregular in shape, flattened and straight at one end, curving in the middle, splaying into vast curved fingers at the other. It was aglow with a soft, milky luminescence.
It scared the hell out of me.
I tightened my grip on the metal of the bridge banister, half-expecting that my ship would be forced to swerve violently at any moment.
The lesion was orbiting with the general motion of the cloud, obeying the gravitational influence of the star, but there were countless specks of dust moving on their own courses, with their own velocities. Sooner or later one of those impacts was going to liberate enough energy to send a wave of transformation slamming through the lesion. It was anyone’s guess as to what would happen then. The lesion might just vanish, all the energy embodied in it being sucked harmlessly back into the marrow of spacetime from whence it had come - or it might explode, liberating in an instant enough destructive force to rip the crust off a planet.
The safest thing was not to be anywhere near a lesion.
‘We should go dark from now on,’ Campion said. ‘Too much chance of scatter. I’ll signal you when we’ve passed the sun and the local cloud density has dropped to a safe level again.’
Another five or six hours - it felt like half my lifetime stretching ahead of me. I was a shatterling, mentally programmed to tolerate immense stretches of solitude. But that mental programming had begun to run amok a long time ago.
Now I needed another human being close to me just to feel human myself.
I could not see Hesperus, but I knew his intended trajectory. He had not been in contact since leaving Silver Wings, but that was no cause for concern. He would pass the lesion before either of us, but his small, fleet ship seemed unlikely to trigger any undesirable changes in the abnormal structure. I was more concerned about my own passage: I would give the lesion a wider berth, but my field effects would reach further than Vespertine’s. Was hundreds of thousands of kilometres of clear space enough to insulate the lesion from the influence of my impassor and engine?
The trove offered no reassurance.
I do not think I breathed until I was clear, and the last of those curling fingers was falling behind my ship. I had survived, but there were still other lesions ahead of me, lurking deeper in the cloud. I remained tense, still conscious that my survival depended entirely on the safe functioning of my bubble; were it to fail, Silver Wings would be ripped apart in a blinding moment, and I would probably know nothing of it. Every now and then a larger impact served as a reminder that I was running into pebbles and boulders, not merely grains of dust.
The second lesion was larger than the first, but further away, and none of our intended trajectories came within six hundred thousand kilometres of it. It was similar to the first, but with a bifurcation halfway along its curving, spavined length. Its grasping fingers were knobby and broken-nailed. The more familiar I became with the lesions, the more they began to remind me of antlers, broken off in some titanic contest between animals large enough to bestride a solar system.
Six hours in, I reached my closest approach to the dust-shrouded sun. On the other side, Silver Wings began to register a slow and gradual decline in the density of the cloud.
It would be some time yet before I could risk signalling Campion. I had just resigned myself to a long wait when he reappeared.
‘I’m getting something,’ he said, sounding unsure of himself. ‘It’s a very weak signal, but it’s moving independently of the rest of this junk. Could be a ship, I think.’
‘Is it Gentian?’
‘Doesn’t look like it so far. The protocols are pretty old.’
‘Then we don’t go after it. We’re looking for Line survivors, not anyone else stupid enough to blunder into this.’
‘Agreed,’ Campion said. ‘But for all we know there are Gentian survivors who don’t have the means to send the right kind of signal. If their ship’s damaged, or they had to hide out aboard another one—’
‘I wish you weren’t so good at coming up with get-out clauses, Campion.’
Silver Wings was still seeing nothing, but then Dalliance might have been close enough to sniff out a signal just below my detection threshold. As his ship exchanged data with mine, I confirmed that this was the case. The object - whatever it was - would pass just within Campion’s effective sensor envelope, but slip past mine completely.
‘All right - I agree that this is worth looking at, but please be careful. We ignored one warning from Fescue; now we’re taking a risk we would have considered unacceptable a few hours ago.’
‘We’re flexible,’ Campion said. ‘It’s the price we pay for being sentient. I’m veering; see you in a while.’
Hesperus was the next to get in touch. ‘I see Campion moving now, Purslane. He is strobing his bubble to effect a course change. Has something happened?’
It bothered me that Campion’s actions were so visible, but nothing could be done about that. ‘He’s picked up something - he thinks it could be a signal, maybe from survivors.’
‘It could also be something a great deal less welcome.’
‘Yes,’ I said tersely. ‘He’s aware of that. He still feels obliged to investigate.’
‘If you have no objections, I shall strive to follow Campion and locate the same signal. It will mean sacrificing a degree of stealth, but anyone monitoring this system is surely aware of our arrival by now.’
‘Take care, please.’
‘I shall. If you are able, would you be so kind as to inform Campion of my intentions? I would not wish to startle him.’
‘I’ll do that, Hesperus. And thank you. I didn’t mean to snap just now.’
‘Under the circumstances, I think you may be forgiven.’
He closed the link and left me alone. I called Campion, telling him that Hesperus was on his way but that he should not acknowledge my transmission. The last thing I wanted was to feel alone, but the less we talked the better.
I had been scared before - too many times to remember. But there had always been a mitigating factor to take the edge off my fears. I had always been able to console myself with the thought that if I survived, I would have an astonishing adventure to braid into my strand, something that would guarantee a day or two of dreamy celebrity even if I had no interest whatsoever in winning the Thousand Nights. And even if I should die in such a way that my strand never reached the Line, I would still be commemorated. When the fact of my death was certain, plans would be laid for a commemoration of my life, something to weigh against six million years of existence. They might etch my face across the surface of a planet, or blow an image of me into the gas of a nebula, or even shape a supernova remnant into my likeness. It had all been done before. And at the next reunion, and the one after that - all the way down the line until attrition wore us down to the last living shatterling, the last pale memory of Abigail Gentian, there would be an evening during the Thousand Nights when I would be honoured as if I still walked amongst the living. I would be dreamed into life again, if only until morning.
But now there would be no more Thousand Nights, never another reunion. Some of us might have survived, those of us who had arrived late, but we would never feel safe enough to stage another gathering. The best that we could do, to safeguard the memories we already carried, would be to go off in different directions and find somewhere to hide, living like hermits until time wore our enemies to dust.
The fact was, in this hour when I most had need of that consolation, it offered me nothing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When the attack came, I do not suppose I was entirely surprised. We had been aware of the possibility of ambush before we even entered this system, and even as I raced towards it, I had my doubts about the legitimacy of the distress signal. But there was still no warning when the weapons opened fire.
Fortune smiled on me, however, for I had just disengaged the engine, using friction from the debris cloud to effect my final slowdown into the rest frame of the signal. Had I still been making the course change, I would have been fatally weakened during those instants when the field was diminished. Instead of incinerating Dalliance in a few moments, the assault merely tested her defences to the limit. More energy was pumped into the bubble in a second than it had absorbed through all the collisions it had sustained since entering the veil. Emergency measures snapped into immediate effect, before I could even think of giving an order. Throughout the ship, impassors created secondary bubbles to encase vital systems and cargo, including myself. Even if the main bubble collapsed and the ship was ripped apart, some of those interior bubbles might still survive. It would be like a fish spilling eggs from its gut, even as it was torn asunder.
I had a few numb seconds during which to wonder how long the main bubble could hold before collapsing. On the console floating over me, a red line was creeping inexorably to the right. If the beam maintained its strength, Dalliance would not survive more than another thirty
seconds. My every instinct screamed for me to steer out of the beam’s reach, but that was impossible.
Then it ended, and I was still alive. I could only presume that the weapon had exhausted itself and was now either recharging or standing down while another was readied to continue the assault. An order formed in my head, but Dalliance had already anticipated it. While her bubble was still raised, hatches in her hull opened to release several dozen lampreys: small, autonomous vehicles equipped with weapons and limited-range skein-drives. The lampreys grouped into squadrons and raced to the limit of the bubble. The bubble’s hardness was tuned down sufficiently for the lampreys to slip through into open space, and then restored to full effectiveness. Debris slipped inside the bubble during that interval of permeability, drumming against the hull like the claws of a thousand witches.
The lampreys served two functions. Three squadrons of four apiece remained near the bubble, while keeping the horizon of the bubble between themselves and the computed origin of the beam. The other six squadrons sped away from Dalliance in all directions, skein-drives at maximum output. Each lamprey was carving a furrow for itself in the debris field, using gamma-rays to ionise the particles into a plasma that could be diverted electrostatically. It made the lampreys hideously visible, but that was hardly a concern now.
The lampreys grouped around the bubble applied force to the hardened field and, with their drives synchronised, pushed Dalliance onto a different heading. After a few seconds they altered course, denying the enemy any hope of predicting my movements. The combined effect of the lampreys could never be as powerful as the main engine, but the acceleration was still violent enough that I was at the mercy of the dampening field.
Then the weapon found me again. The bubble had barely had time to recover from the last onslaught, and now that red line was beginning to creep to the right again. On another part of the console I witnessed the demise of two of the nearby lampreys, caught by energy re-radiating from the surface of the bubble. The remaining ten were still capable of pushing Dalliance, but my evasive swerves and feints would be more sluggish than before.