A minute later, I began my own slowdown. Dalliance forwent all her usual safeguards. The engine screamed in my ears, the dampeners warning that they could not guarantee to neutralise the thousands of gee-forces trying to keep me moving in a straight line.
I grimaced and sank deeper into my seat, hands clasping at the armrests, as if that would make the slightest difference if the dampeners failed.
As the distance between Dalliance and Mezereon’s ship dwindled to thousands of kilometres, and then hundreds, I got my first clear look at the vessel I had come to rescue. Mezereon had done everything she could to camouflage herself, but she had not been able to work miracles. Her ship was a wreck, damaged beyond obvious repair. It was a lozenge-shaped hull just less than a kilometre from end to end, and about a fifth of kilometre across the beam. Where her engine had been was a perfectly spherical hole, as if a giant had taken a crunching bite out of the ship. At the forward end of the ship, the nose was split open like a ruptured seed pod. Evidence of smaller weapon or collision impacts peppered the hull with silvery craters, stark chrome flowers against the midnight black of the intact parts.
But Mezereon had been inventive. She still had a working impassor, and she had gathered several million tonnes of rubble inside the bubble with her ship, dressing it around the wreck to form a gauzy screen that would offer some concealment if the bubble failed. Beyond the bubble, several larger chunks of rock had been arranged to provide secondary camouflage. Seen in close-up, it looked unnatural - big boulders apparently coalescing into a baby asteroid, with a glassy marble at the heart of that swarm of rubble - but she must have been counting on never coming under direct scrutiny.
‘I’m very near you now,’ I said. ‘Cargo bay’s already open - there’s enough room for you inside. But you’ll have to drop the bubble and lose your camouflaging screen.’
‘I’m scared. They’re close enough now that if I do drop my bubble, they’ll have no trouble finding me again.’
‘You told me your bubble was about to give up the ghost anyway. You’ve nothing to lose.’
As I completed the final phase of my approach, my deceleration dropping down to mere gees of slowdown, my attention flicked back to Hesperus. He had begun to steer, while still maintaining a steady assault against the Homunculus weapon. He must have had some effect, for two of the escort vehicles had begun to peel off to close in on him. But the weapon itself was showing no inclination to follow his bait. The two escort craft were accelerating hard as they made their turn, nearly as hard as Hesperus himself.
Dalliance came to a halt just beyond Mezereon’s last layer of camouflaging boulders. Her bubble flicked off and her ship began to inch forward on impellors, nosing clear of the rubble that had been trapped within the bubble. The boulders carved silvery gouges in her hull as they knocked against her, splintering and pulverising in the process. The impellors began to glow a vivid pink, signifying some worrying ailment deep inside their mechanisms. Never mind: all they had to do was get her another few hundred metres, and then they could be scrapped.
I assigned two of the lampreys to rearrange the rubble into a makeshift screen between us and the Homunculus weapon. With enough intelligence not to need direct supervision, they set to work in a blur of furious motion, zipping back and forth too quickly for the eye to track.
While the lampreys were busy, I spun Dalliance around to bring the bay into alignment and dropped my own field. The lampreys buzzed around me like busy fireflies, doing their best to shepherd away the larger rocks that had been disturbed by Mezereon’s emergence. All of a sudden, even the wreck of her ship looked too big to fit, as if I had misjudged the capacity of my cargo bay.
‘Disengage your impellors,’ I told Mezereon. ‘You have enough momentum now. I’ll take care of the rest.’
At that moment it was as if half the sky had been clawed back to reveal a blinding whiteness beyond it, as if the black of night was just an eggshell-thin layer masking an unimaginably cruel brightness. On the console hovering above me, Dalliance recorded a litany of complaint: moderate damage sustained across a large acreage of the hull, one of the fireflies out of action.
Mezereon’s imago flickered and reformed.
‘They just used it.’
I nodded: I had guessed as much for myself. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I think the rubble took the brunt of it. We’re still outside its effective kill-range. Did you take a hit?’
‘Nothing that can’t be fixed, and nothing that’ll stop us getting away.’
I did not care to think about what would happen when that weapon came closer. Technically, it had not even touched us. My hands trembling, I watched as Mezereon’s ruined ship began to drift into my cargo bay, with what appeared to be no more than angstroms of clearance in any direction. Dalliance clanged as something knocked against her. But the slow drift continued. Switching to an internal view, I saw the wreck force its way into the bay as if some obscene creature was striving to raid the snug burrow of another animal. Bits of Mezereon’s ship, especially around the existing damage spots, were ripping away.
The sky beyond the sky whitened again, brighter this time, turning the bay and the ship into pink-edged silhouettes, and Dalliance let me know that she had sustained more damage. One of the boulders tumbled away from the screen that the lampreys had erected, and it was glowing red on the side that had been facing the weapon.
Then Mezereon was clear of the doors.
Grapples moved in to lock her ship into position. I reinstated my bubble and gave the command to move. With fewer lampreys to push her along, Dalliance could not sustain her former rate of acceleration. I decided I would risk stuttering the bubble, allowing the engine to contribute to the effort. At a thousand gees, the wall of boulders dropped away behind me with disarming swiftness. It was tempting to think that I had already put sufficient safe distance between myself and the Homunculus weapon, but that was not the case.
When I relocated Vespertine, I saw Hesperus was taking her towards the weapon, having executed a hairpin turn that would have crushed most ships, let alone their human occupants.
‘Hesperus,’ I whispered, ‘don’t do this. We’re getting away all right.’
As if he could have heard me, or would have listened even if he could.
The weapon fired again. This time there was a jagged and asymmetric quality to the wash of light as it branched across the sky. When it abated, something brachiform and luminous remained. The weapon had made a lesion: they must have been pushing it to its limit in their determination to kill me.
There was nothing more I could do to improve my chances. Dalliance was giving her all to get away as quickly as possible, and my fretting would make no difference whatsoever.
Yet I could not turn away until I had seen what would become of Hesperus.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Did you see him die?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Campion said.
‘I’m sorry. For you and for him.’
We were aboard Dalliance, lying together. We had cleared the cloud and were now in interstellar space, returning to cruise speed. I had whisked over as soon as Campion’s ship was in range of mine. We had embraced, holding each other so tightly that it was as if our coming back together was only provisional, a state of affairs that might be rescinded at any moment if the universe changed its mind.
We had kissed, and then our kissing had become an exercise in frenzied exploration, as if the hours that we had been apart had been long enough to dull our memories of each other. We lost our clothes and made love, dozing into half-sleep before starting anew, until we both fell into blissful unconsciousness, weary but glad to have survived. Now we were awake again, holding on to each other like two exhausted swimmers, each using the other for support.
‘I should introduce you to the new guests,’ Campion said, after a long silence during which I had almost fallen back into dream.
‘Are they all right?’
‘I checked on t
hem, obviously. Only Aconite and Mezereon are awake at the moment. But I thought I’d save the big welcome until you could share in it. I suggested they wait in the gardens until you were ready.’
‘What about the prisoner - or prisoners? Did you find out anything more?’
‘Nothing beyond what Mezereon already told me - that this was all somehow caused by me.’
‘For all we know Mezereon got the wrong end of the stick, or the prisoner was feeding her a lie.’
‘A lie that just happened to include me as a detail?’
I had no answer for that.
We washed, clothed ourselves, then whisked through-ship to Dalliance’s gardens. I did my best to hide my concerns from him, but all the while my mind was spinning through the possibilities. How could the ambush have had anything to do with Campion, if he had been so conspicuously late for the reunion?
It made no sense unless the ‘cause’ of it was something that had happened during the last reunion. Something in Campion’s thread, in other words. But if that was the case then we were dealing with an agency that thought nothing of plotting our demise across a timescale of an entire circuit, longer than the lifespan of some planetary civilisations.
Someone, in other words, prepared to be as patient as a snake.
‘Everything goes back to the Vigilance,’ I said.
Campion opened the door in the stone wall that encircled the gardens.
‘What does the Vigilance have to do with anything?’
‘Think about it for a moment. If you hadn’t visited the Vigilance in your previous circuit, you wouldn’t have been saddled with delivering Doctor Meninx to them. If you hadn’t had to deliver Doctor Meninx, we’d never have been back to that sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm. No Centaurs, no Ateshga - and more than likely no being late for the reunion.’
‘And no Hesperus, either - he’d still be Ateshga’s prisoner.’
‘See what I’m getting at?’
‘I’m still not sure what all that has to do with what Mezereon said.’
‘Maybe nothing - but if all those occurrences hung on your visit to the Vigilance, how do we know something else didn’t? It formed the central part of your strand, a circuit ago. What if there was a detail in your memories, something to do with the Vigilance, that someone didn’t like?’
‘What kind of detail?’
Campion could be almost superhumanly exasperating. ‘No idea. But in the absence of anything better, shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility?’
‘That would mean going back over my thread,’ Campion said, as if that was somehow an insurmountable obstacle. ‘Maybe we should see what the prisoners have to say first.’
Of all the spaces in Campion’s ship, I liked the gardens the best. We had emerged through a gate in a tall ivy-clad stone wall. From the gate we had followed a winding pathway down a gently sloping meadow set with sculptures, sundials, water clocks, wind-chimes, elegant moving statuary and foaming iron fountains, into a bower enclosed by trees. At the centre of the bower was a small summer house, a round wooden building with a conical roof, surrounded by a moat of water which in turn connected to a larger pond, the moat spanned by a red-painted bridge of Chinese design.
The visible sky was the cloudless enamel-blue of a hundred thousand worlds. The layout of the gardens, the agreeable climate of that eternal sunny afternoon, never varied. There were stars in the sky that had not existed when the soil in these gardens was first laid down. There were stars that had shone then that were now veils of dead gas, rushing into darkness. Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.
Mezereon and Aconite were waiting in the summer house, sitting on one of the benches with food and wine on a tray between them. ‘Hello, Purslane,’ they said in near-unison as I ducked into the shadowed interior, with Campion just behind me.
‘I’m glad you both made it,’ I said.
‘We are making it, aren’t we?’ Mezereon asked, directing her question at Campion. She had short blonde hair the colour of sun-dried straw and pale, almost translucent skin, with a delicate mottling of honey-coloured freckles across her cheeks.
‘Too soon to tell, I’m afraid,’ Campion said. ‘We’re putting distance between us and the enemy, but I won’t feel truly safe until this system is just a bad memory.’
‘I meant to ask,’ Aconite said, pausing to sip from the goblet he held. He was muscular and dark-skinned, with a black beard raffishly flecked with silver and a mass of jangling rings hanging from one earlobe. ‘Did you hear from anyone else? We knew we were all right, obviously, but we couldn’t risk broadcasting our presence to the rest of the cloud.’
‘If there was anyone else there,’ Campion said, ‘I didn’t hear from them. Sorry - wish the news was better.’
‘Not your fault, old man.’
‘The only other survivor we know about is Fescue,’ I said, taking a place on the opposite bench, kicking off my shoes and hugging my legs, my arms encircling my shins. ‘We ran into his transmission. He tried to talk us out of entering the cloud, but we decided to take a shot at it.’
Mezereon looked sharply at Aconite, then me. ‘Then I guess you don’t know about Fescue.’
‘He’s dead,’ Aconite said. ‘He stayed behind when most of the survivors had already managed to get out of the system. That transmission must have been one of his last acts.’
The news hit me hard. I had taken it for granted that Fescue was one of the living - how else would he have been in a position to send his warning, if he had not made it through the ambush?
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Engine trouble?’
Mezereon shook her small, pale head wearily. ‘Fescue was trying to create a distraction, to keep the ambushers occupied so that a few of us could get away. He could have escaped if he’d chosen to, but he was thinking of the Line.’
‘I misjudged him,’ I said.
‘You weren’t the only one,’ Campion said, looking down shame facedly.
‘Let’s not get maudlin,’ Aconite said. ‘It’s enough that we have survived to commemorate him. Burnish his name, and all that stuff. We’ll do the old bastard proud.’ He gave Campion an encouraging punch. ‘Right, old man?’
‘Right,’ Campion said.
Mezereon poured herself some more wine while Aconite chewed the end off a loaf of bread. Outside, birds twittered and breezes stirred the reeds around the summer house’s little moat.
‘Are there just the two of you?’ I asked.
‘We’re the only ones up and awake,’ Aconite said. ‘There are three others in abeyance: Lucerne, Melilot and Valerian - and the prisoners, of course.’
Campion leaned over to take a grape from the platter. ‘Is there anything else you need in the meanwhile? Medical attention - anything like that?’
Our two new guests looked at each other momentarily before Mezereon answered for them both. ‘We’re fine. It’s been stressful, but the ship’s looked after us well. If there’d been a problem with rations, or life support, one or more of us would have gone into permanent abeyance. Thankfully, it never came to that.’
‘Have you been awake ever since the ambush?’ I asked.
‘We’d have gone mad from the tension if we hadn’t had abeyance,’ Mezereon said. ‘We took turns. The ship was instructed to bring one or two of us out if she detected something anomalous. It could have been Lucerne or one of the other two, but it was our turn.’
‘This may not be the best time to talk about it,’ Campion said, ‘but it would have been difficult to get one of those weapons close to the reunion planet unless it was hidden.’
‘Inside one of our ships?’ Aconite asked.
‘I hate to think it, but—’
‘You’re right. There were three of those weapons, and the Spitting Cobra, in the ships of Saffron, Scabious and Tare. But they weren’t involved. Their ships must have been captured, the Line pro
tocols cracked.’ Aconite kept looking at Campion as if there could be no other explanation; that to think otherwise was a kind of heresy. ‘They couldn’t have been complicit, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘At this point we shouldn’t rule anything out,’ Campion said.
Mezereon sighed through her nose. ‘It’s about time we faced up to Line involvement, Aconite. Even Fescue had his suspicions. He couldn’t understand how the private network had been broken into, unless one of us was complicit.’
‘Involvement doesn’t necessarily mean willing involvement,’ Aconite said. Then he raised his big hands defensively. ‘Let’s not fall out over this. There’ll be time to ask the unpleasant questions when we make it to the fallback. I won’t flinch from asking them if the evidence points that way.’
I took a piece of bread for myself. ‘Nor will I.’
Mezereon brushed a hand against the iron-grey casing of Melilot’s cryophagus. ‘We should wake them up. It’s what we agreed we’d do if there was a change in our situation.’
‘Be kinder not to,’ Aconite said. ‘At least until we know we’re definitely in the clear.’
‘We can move them into Dalliance, at least,’ Campion said. ‘I’ve got plenty of sleepers aboard her already, so a few more won’t hurt. It’s easier to keep an eye on them when they’re all together.’
‘Didn’t have you down as the guest-carrying sort,’ Mezereon said, with an amused smile.
‘Just the way things worked out,’ Campion said.
The prisoners were in a different room from the Gentian shatterlings. Mezereon strode to the first cabinet, worked the heavy clasp and flung wide the patterned brass doors. Inside lay a scaffold of ancient machinery, a framework supporting an array of impassors energising a containment bubble. The bubble’s near-transparency made it resemble a globe of blown glass, large enough to swallow a throne. Inside the bubble floated another kind of framework, this one supporting time-compression mechanisms. They created a secondary bubble, scarlet-tinged as if the glass had been stained. Inside the bubble hovered a chair, edges curved to fit inside the confines of the field. Inside the high-backed throne, secured against involuntary movements, was a human figure. The figure had the deathly stillness of a hologram, but it was neither dead nor holographic.