‘Cadence and Cascade - the two guests I introduced to you before.’
‘Yes, Purslane?’
‘Are they on the bridge now?’
‘Yes, Purslane.’
‘Show them to me.’
A picture appeared before me, hanging in the darkness. The robots were on the bridge. They were standing quite still, side by side with their hands at their sides.
‘They don’t look as if they’re doing anything,’ I said.
‘They wouldn’t,’ said Hesperus.
The words came to me with difficulty. ‘Silver, I want you to immobilise them.’
‘Do they pose a threat, Purslane?’
‘Yes,’ Hesperus said.
‘Just immobilise them for now. Use impassors to hold them where they are.’
‘It is done, Purslane.’
The robots looked just the same. Nothing about them gave the slightest clue that they were now pinned in place, bracketed by a sheath of constraining forces.
‘They can’t do anything now,’ I said to Hesperus.
‘They can do everything they could do before. They are reaching out with their minds, trying to find a crack in your ship’s defences. She won’t even know they’re doing it. They’re that clever. When they succeed, Purslane, their very first act will be to disarm those immobilisers. Nothing you can say or do will bring them back up again. Cadence and Cascade will have free run of your ship - or more precisely their ship, since they will own her - and there will be nothing you can do to stop them. Within seconds they will have entered the whisking system, and seconds after that they will be in this room.’ Hesperus turned his head towards the door through which we had entered. ‘There is one of me, and two of them. I will do what I can to protect you, but the odds are not in my favour. Even now.’
‘Even now?’ I asked, sensing an oddness in his tone.
‘Never mind. Please take me at my word, Purslane. We have been through a lot together. It would be a shame to end it all now, wouldn’t it? Especially when we have so much to talk about.’
I felt as if there was a boulder lodged in my throat. ‘I should consult ... I can be in touch with Campion, or Betony, in a few seconds—’
‘They will tell you to ignore me. From their perspective, it’s a perfectly rational standpoint. But you do not have that luxury. You are in this situation and I am telling you that those robots are seconds away from gaining control of your ship. They must be destroyed now, or ejected.’
‘This is a hard one, Hesperus.’
He was speaking faster now, as if he sensed that he had only moments to make his case. ‘How did they come to Neume, Purslane? Did you ever investigate that?’
‘Of course. Sainfoin brought them. They were her guests.’
Hesperus must have read that crack of doubt opening in my face. ‘Sainfoin didn’t bring them,’ he said. ‘She may have thought she did, but that’s not how it would have happened. They would have sought her out. They wanted to come here - I sensed that very clearly. They have business with Gentian Line, but their arrival had to look serendipitous. She was their puppet, not the other way around.’
‘She said she met them at a reunion of Dorcus Line.’
‘They would have been counting on a Gentian dropping by. If no one had, they would have found a more circuitous route to reach you. But their ultimate goal was to attend your reunion.’
‘What are they?’
‘Purslane! No more questions!’
I nodded once. He had not persuaded me completely - far from it. But my natural inclination was to trust Hesperus and he was right about Sainfoin. There was something else as well - a kind of commanding gravitas about him that had not been there before, for all that his mannerisms of speech were less formal than before he had fallen ill.
‘Silver,’ I said, my voice shaky, ‘take the immobilised guests and eject them into space.’
‘Are you certain, Purslane? This is a very unusual order.’ By which the ship meant it was not something she ever recalled me asking of her, in all the circuits I had been master.
‘Yes. Certain. Give them enough of a shove to keep them from falling into the atmosphere for at least a hundred orbits. They’ll come to no immediate harm.’
‘Executing the order, Purslane.’
I waited for Silver Wings to tell me that the robots had been ejected.
And waited.
‘This is not a good sign,’ Hesperus said. He picked me up again and started running. Beneath me his legs became a blur of pistoning gold. ‘Silver,’ I said, raising my voice above the roar of the wind as Hesperus raced through the bay. ‘Confirm execution of last order.’
No answer came.
‘You’ve lost the ship,’ Hesperus said.
‘No,’ I said, refusing to accept it. All around, Silver Wings looked exactly the way she always had.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself. You gave the order eventually. It’s quite probable that the machines had already taken over your ship when you asked for them to be immobilised. They may just have been curious as to your intentions.’
‘And now?’
‘I think they will try to kill you, and to destroy me. It is my hope that we can reach the shuttle first.’
‘And then what?’
‘Leave, and hope that we are not fired upon by Silver Wings’ defences before we have a chance to get away.’
It was not far to the shuttle from that point, but it might as well have been kilometres as far as I was concerned. We passed many other ships that might have been equally useful, had they been powered-up and tested for flight. The temptation was to get inside one of them and bring it to life. Silver‘s jurisdiction reached into the cargo bay, but not into the ships inside it. With armour between us and the robots, we might last long enough to escape. But the shuttle was working, and I had left it idling, ready to be flown at a moment’s notice. When we reached it, Hesperus lowered me to the decking and I told the shuttle to open and admit us. As the hull sealed behind us, I allowed my anxiety to drop down a notch.
Inside, despite my bruises and the fogginess that still afflicted my vision, I raced to the front and took the manual piloting position, thrusting out my hands like a knight waiting to be gauntleted. The shuttle formed its controls and pushed them obligingly into my hands. I disengaged the docking clamps and increased the drive from idle to taxiing power, sufficient to get us out of the cargo bay. I swung the shuttle’s wedge-shaped nose around until we were facing the rectangular aperture of the open space door, visible in the gaps between a thicket of ships stretching nearly seven kilometres into the distance. I had kept the door open after our arrival, knowing that I would soon be moving ships through the atmosphere curtain.
‘I think we can get out,’ I said, easing the shuttle forward. If I had had a clear line to the door I could have applied more power, but as it was I had to pick my way through the forest of ships and their docking cradles. Too fast, and I would risk colliding with something bigger and stronger than the shuttle, something fixed so firmly into place that it would be like ramming a cliff.
‘They know what we’re trying to do,’ Hesperus said.
‘How do you know?’
‘The door is closing.’
I looked, but I could not be certain that the aperture was any narrower than when we had started. It was difficult to tell, with the angle changing all the time as I steered the shuttle around obstacle after obstacle. ‘Are you sure, Hesperus?’
‘Absolutely. Would you like me to pilot?’
‘I’m doing fine, thank you.’
‘I will be faster. I am not disadvantaged by a peripheral nervous system. There is as much processing power in my thumb as in your entire skull.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s a simple statement of fact. I can get us to the door sooner, provided you assign piloting authority to me.’
Now it was clear even to me that the door was narrowing after all. The rectangle of space framed by the a
perture was still three kilometres wide, but it looked much less than two kilometres in height. One and a half, maybe less.
I snatched my hands from the instruments and said, ‘Assign temporary control authority to my passenger, to be rescinded at my command.’ Then I flounced back from the console and said, ‘There. It’s yours. Make this count, because I was getting us there.’
Hesperus stepped into place, his broad back between me and the console. ‘Thank you, Purslane. I shall do my utmost.’
We got faster. We got much faster, swerving around obstacles, diving through the gaps between docking supports, skimming past obstructions with what looked like only millimetres of clearance. Hesperus was making such rapid course adjustments that the nullifiers were struggling to catch up. I felt the push and pull of inertia: phantom fingers eager to turn me into a pulp, if only they could get a good enough grip.
‘The door is closing more quickly,’ Hesperus said, sounding outrageously calm even though his hands were a manic blur, like a conjuror speeded up. ‘They must have sensed our escape intentions and activated some emergency override.’
‘Can you go faster?’
‘By accepting an element of risk. I don’t think we have a lot of choice at this point, do we?’
‘Do what you have to do. I’m just going to stand back here and close my eyes.’
‘Next time, it might be a good idea to park closer to the door.’
‘I was thinking of you. I thought it would be a good thing if Cadence and Cascade didn’t have so far to carry you to the whisking point, in case you were still vulnerable to damage.’
‘Then I bow to your thoughtfulness, and apologise for my uncalled for criticism.’
Hesperus cut a few more corners, literally and metaphorically. The shuttle bumped and jarred as it shaved past some of the obstacles, just clipping them. I do not know if that was accidental on his part, or a trade-off he had factored into his calculations. All I knew was that we were going faster, but that the door was closing even more determinedly, squeezing down until there was now only a dark slot of space through which we were hoping to pass.
At last, Hesperus cleared the main forest of obstructions, leaving us with only a two-kilometre sprint to the aperture. The door was still narrowing, but he could accelerate harder now. The walls of the cargo bay slid by on either side at a quickening rate, and I dared to hope that we were going to make it.
I was wrong. All of a sudden, the shuttle bucked and swayed, as if it had run into a screen of invisible netting. The walls moved by less quickly. Hesperus applied more power, but the shuttle was getting slower, not faster. Scarlet warnings flashed across the console, and a chime began to sound with monotonous regularity.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Drive-field intermesh,’ Hesperus said, rotating his head to look back over his shoulder. ‘It’s what I feared the most. Silver Wings of Morning must have engaged her parametric engine. The field effects are interfering with each other, and I’m afraid the shuttle is losing the battle.’
‘Can’t you do anything?’
‘You know better than that, Purslane. If I push the engine harder, it will either deactivate because of safety overrides, or rip itself to pieces. I’m not sure I’d care to bet on which outcome would be the more likely.’ Hesperus worked the controls again, more slowly this time. ‘I’m sorry, Purslane, but I think they have us.’
‘The door’s nearly closed. Even if you got the engine working again, it wouldn’t help us.’
Silver Wings must have been changing her course. As the door narrowed further, the dayside of Neume came into view. The planet was growing visibly smaller. One minute of acceleration at a thousand gees was sufficient to put eighteen thousand kilometres between us and our point of departure. After the second minute, we would have travelled seventy-two thousand kilometres - twice the circumference of Neume. Everyone I knew, everyone I cared for, everyone who cared for me, was on that dwindling planet. I had to resist the urge to reach out for it, to try to hold on as our acceleration ripped it away.
The door closed. Hesperus dropped the engine to idle.
‘We’re in a lot of trouble, I’m afraid.’
The air resistance of the pressurised chamber had brought us to a halt. ‘We can’t just float here,’ I said.
‘There’s a vacant berth to our right. I’ll risk a little power to bring us in.’
The console flashed its warning and sounded the accompanying alarm, but Hesperus managed to guide us in, letting the shuttle thud into its restraints. The field clamp locked us home.
‘We must be leaving the Neume system,’ he said. ‘This is one of the fastest ships in your Line, isn’t it?’
‘Especially now that there are only fifty-one of us left. That’s why Cadence and Cascade wanted her so badly.’
‘That’s what I feared. It will be difficult for any of your fellow shatterlings to catch up with us, especially given the element of surprise.’
‘We can’t just give up, go along for the ride. We don’t even know where we’re being taken.’
‘I doubt very much that the robots have any intention of taking us along for the ride. Once they have cleared the system, and dealt with any would-be pursuers, I think it very likely that they will turn their minds to us.’
‘And?’
‘They’ll find a way to eliminate us. I’ll do my best to protect you, but there is only one of me.’
‘What do they want?’
‘To go somewhere.’
‘They didn’t have to come all the way to Neume just to find a ship. If what you’re saying is right, then they’d been planning all this long before the ambush took place.’
‘So it would appear.’
He had turned from the console. His golden mask was as neutrally handsome as ever, his expression one of kindness, but beyond that there was nothing for me to read.
‘You know more than you’re telling me, Hesperus. I got that impression from the moment you woke up. What happened back there, on Neume?’
‘We should review our situation,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘Does this shuttle have abeyance devices?’
‘No. You’d never need them.’
‘That’s what I thought. It will serve for now, but we may be better off moving to a larger, more readily defended craft. If you have something with weapons and real-thrust motors, we may be able to force our way out of the cargo bay. Is there such a ship?’
‘Let me think. Those are pretty thick doors - it’s going to take more than a laser or two to get through them.’
‘See what you come up with.’
‘All right,’ I said, flustered, my mind still having trouble catching up with recent events. I had been dreading the handing over of Silver Wings, but now I would have gone through with that gladly, rather than find myself a prisoner on my own ship. ‘This is all a bit sudden, Hesperus. You’re going to have to make allowances. I have a peripheral nervous system and it takes me a while to adjust to radical paradigm shifts.’
‘I can forgive you anything, Purslane.’ He turned to the console and made a few more adjustments. ‘I’ll keep the drive on idle, just in case an opportunity presents itself. I don’t think we should count on it, though.’
‘I’m not. Do you think the others will have noticed our departure by now?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘And?’
‘They’ll be struggling to make sense of it. It may cross their minds that you are the one stealing the ship, not the robots.’
‘They wouldn’t think that.’ But even as I said it, I knew he was right. ‘I should have called down to Campion.’
‘They’d have assumed you were fabricating details, making out that the robots were up to no good.’
‘They were.’
‘No one on Neume would have known that.’
‘Except Campion. He’d have trusted me. He’d have believed me, no matter how outlandish it sounded.’
??
?Then I am sorry you were not able to contact Campion. But in the long run it would have made very little difference.’ Hesperus put a golden hand on my shoulder, his fingers cold and hard, but also gentle. ‘It would probably have been futile. If the robots had already seized control of the ship before you attempted to eject them - as I am increasingly convinced they had - then they would have had no qualms about blocking your efforts to contact Neume.’
I closed my blurred, tired eyes, wanting the whole universe to fold itself into a bundle and go and hide in the corner. But when I opened them again, Hesperus and the universe were still waiting to say something.
‘I’m scared,’ I said. ‘There’s never been a time when I wasn’t in control. Even when we went to the Spirit, that was our choice.’
‘It happens to us all eventually.’ He moved his hand from my shoulder and as quick as lightning touched his thumb and forefinger to my eyelids. I would have flinched had he been slower, but all I felt was a touch of metal, a spike of intense cold too brief to be called pain, and then his hand was lowering.
‘I have repaired your eyes. You had a partially detached retina in the right eye. There was capillary damage in both. I trust your vision will be clearer now.’
Miraculously, it was.
‘What did you just do?’
He held up his left hand, letting me see the forefinger. Between the gold nail and the quick, a tiny, harpoon-like structure emerged. It was a many-barbed thing of fractal complexity, its details vanishing down to a purple-gold haze as if the thing was simultaneously shifting in and out of focus, or indeed reality. ‘I fixed you,’ Hesperus said simply. ‘It wasn’t difficult.’
‘Could you always do that?’
‘From the moment I met you.’
‘But there’s more, isn’t there? You’re different, since you came back.’
‘I can’t do anything I couldn’t do before, but I see things in a new light. And I know much, much more.’
‘Because the Spirit restored your memory?’
‘That too.’
‘But not only that.’
‘I learned a great many things, Purslane. I am still coming to terms with some of them.’