House of Suns

  ‘No worlds, no rubble, no ice,’ Betony said. ‘There’s no reason for them to stop there.’

  Bachelor suns were stars that had had their planetary systems ripped away by encounters with other stars early in their history. They were useless to all meta-civilisations, save as wormhole-tappable fuel sources.

  ‘Increasing to ten thousand years,’ Charlock said. ‘Well outside the Scutum-Crux Arm now. Error radius approaching six months. After seven thousand years, she comes within fifteen years of the perimeter of the Harmonious Concordance, a mid-level empire of seventeen hundred settled systems.’

  ‘Could that be the target?’ asked Tansy. ‘Allowing for minor course adjustments—’

  ‘Universal Actuary predicts only a fifty per cent likelihood that the Harmonious Concordance is still in existence, dropping to eleven per cent by the time Silver Wings would actually get there,’ Sorrel said, reading from his own displayer. ‘That’s an awfully long punt for something that has only a one-in-nine chance of still being there.’

  ‘The UA isn’t always on the nail,’ Tansy said.

  ‘But it’s correct more often than it’s wrong,’ Sorrel replied, ‘and the Harmonious Concordance has all the right indicators for a textbook rise-and-fall. Unless they’re counting on dealing with the shrivelled remnants of a former empire, I can’t see this being the target.’

  ‘I don’t see it either,’ Betony said. ‘Increase the search volume, Charlock.’

  ‘We’re already out to ten thousand.’

  ‘Then we need to look further.’

  Charlock shrugged, though his expression told us he no longer expected to gain much from this game. ‘Fifty thousand,’ he said, as the box swelled again. ‘Error radius is now two and a half years - wide enough that we’re going to be picking up systems all the way through. We’re punching through a lot of galaxy here. You’re going to have to trawl through several thousand candidates.’

  ‘List the systems in order of interception,’ Betony said. ‘We’ll work through them one at a time, see if anything jumps out at us. In the meantime, keep refining our estimate of Silver Wings’ heading. We may be able to narrow that error radius a little.’

  ‘We’re wasting our time,’ Henbane said. ‘For all we know, she’s going to turn in a completely different direction half an hour from now.’

  ‘Then we’ll repeat the exercise,’ Betony said, gruffly indifferent to the other shatterling. ‘They’re headed somewhere. I’ll sleep a lot easier when I know where it is.’

  ‘Or maybe you won’t,’ I said.

  *

  I imagined Aconite standing before me. I had come to like him and would have been glad of his company now. I was alone aboard Dalliance, temporarily free of the other imagos.

  ‘There’s something on my mind,’ I said, speaking a message that he would not hear until many hours from now, back on Neume. ‘It’s going to sound insane, but I can’t stop thinking about it, and I’m hoping it may have some bearing on Mezereon’s interrogations. There was something about Cyphel’s body that wasn’t right.’

  I thought of Aconite scratching his beard and looking sceptical. What could possibly be right about a body that had fallen several kilometres onto a hard surface?

  ‘She keeps coming to me,’ I said. ‘In my dreams. Telling me to pay attention. It’s as if my subconscious has worked out what’s wrong, but it hasn’t yet managed to communicate that to my conscious mind. Now I’m hoping someone back on Neume can see what I’m missing. There are dozens of you, and you have the imagery the Ymirians would have already recorded up to the moment of her death. Maybe there’s something ...’ I paused, aware of how absurd I might sound when my transmission was received. But I could not ignore Cyphel, the urgency I heard in her voice when she admonished me for not paying attention. ‘She had a long way to fall, Ack. What if she was alive all the way down, and she knew who had killed her? Could she have got a message to us?’

  I ended my recording. It was several minutes more before I found the courage of my convictions and actually sent it.

  The turn had changed nothing as far as our immediate plans were concerned. Following our earlier discussion, the three uncrewed ships were running on independent parallel tracks to Silver Wings, so that when they caught up with her, they could direct their energies into her sides rather than into the more vulnerable area of her stern. Seen in the display, the three ships formed an equilateral triangle, spaced five seconds apart. Silver Wings lay at the apex of a tetrahedron, ten seconds from any of the pursuing craft, but with that margin slowly decreasing. At three seconds, the ships would be able to target their weapons with sufficient accuracy to disable their prey without destroying it.

  What was clear, although not yet understood, was that the distance was closing quicker than expected. It was not that our ships were accelerating any harder than intended, for they had already been pushed to the limits of their engines, with all nonessential megatonnage ejected from their cargo holds. For some reason, Silver Wings was not making as much headway as before she had executed her turn. Detailed analysis of her movements since leaving Neume even revealed that the slowdown - more accurately, a barely measurable reduction in acceleration - had begun sooner than the turn.

  ‘They know we’re behind them,’ Betony said. ‘There’s no reason in the world for them not to go as fast as they can. So what are they doing? Why aren’t they pushing her as hard as she’ll go?’

  ‘Maybe it’s sabotage,’ Orache mused. ‘Could Purslane and Hesperus have got into the engine?’

  I nodded. ‘Hesperus, perhaps. But if he was in a position to sabotage it ...’

  Betony nodded. ‘Why stop there? He’d go all the way, if he were able: shut her down completely.’

  ‘They’ve got ships,’ I said, almost as the idea formed in my mind. ‘A hold full of them, and most of them are still spaceworthy. We already know they made it into the white ark. From what I remember, that ship had its guts stripped out and a parametric engine stuffed inside instead.’

  Betony gave a sharp little laugh. ‘You think they may be running the ark’s motor, counteracting Silver Wings’ own engine.’

  ‘It’s an idea. Purslane’s not one to give up without a fight. Perhaps they couldn’t get out of the bay, but they could still turn on some of those engines.’

  ‘Enough to flatten space around Silver Wings, bring her to a dead stop?’

  ‘Probably not. Probably not even enough to take more than a few per cent off her engine efficiency, and even then only if they get every operational ship up and running.’ I grinned, burning with sudden pride and admiration, for I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this was exactly what Purslane had in mind. ‘But that’s what they’ll be trying to do. Did Purslane sound as if she was ready to curl up and surrender?’

  ‘Not to me,’ Agrimony said.

  ‘Me neither. And with Hesperus on her side—’

  ‘She never did give us an explanation of how he came back from the dead after all that time,’ Henbane said.

  ‘She knew the other machines were listening in. Maybe there were things she had to keep from them.’

  A sonorous chime interrupted our discussion: the signal that the three ships would soon be entering weapons range. Wordlessly we turned our attention back to the display and waited for the seconds to drain by.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The wait had become almost unendurable, the conviction growing in me that Hesperus must have failed, when a quick blur of motion signalled his return. He nodded at me from beyond the outer door of the ark’s airlock, his image appearing on a panel to the right of the inner door. My hand moved to the ancient control that would grant him entry.

  ‘I am done, Purslane. You may open the door again.’ His voice buzzed from the panel. It was vacuum outside, but he was generating a radio signal from within his body.

  ‘Hesperus?’

  ‘It is me.’

  I stilled my hand. He need not have said another wo
rd; I already had a bone-deep conviction that this was not him but one of the other two robots. ‘I thought we agreed on a code phrase,’ I said, as fear pushed its chill hand into my flesh and ran a loving caress down my spine.

  ‘My memory is still not what it was.’

  ‘You were fine when you left. You’ve been fine ever since you woke up from your coma.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I am still experiencing problems. Would you be so good as to let me in?’

  ‘The code phrase.’

  ‘I no longer remember it.’ The tall, broad figure - his coloration was still darkened for camouflage - spun his head around to look over his shoulder. It was a lizard-like movement, lacking any human quality. ‘I cannot be certain, but I think Cadence or Cascade may have achieved entry into the chamber. Time may now be of the essence, if you still desire my assistance.’

  ‘Get away from the door. I don’t know which one you are, but I know I’m not talking to Hesperus.’

  ‘You are mistaken, Purslane.’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s an energy-pistol in my hand - I just had the maker dispense it for me. It’s aimed straight at you, with the beam set for maximum dispersion.’ The densely packed weapon was cold in my fist, taking the burden of its own weight with the faint, insect-like buzz of levators. ‘I can do it. Hesperus told me how to kill a Machine Person. Don’t aim for any one spot, but spread the focus around, taking out as much function as possible. You may be holographic, but you’re not indestructible.’

  ‘If you were to discharge an energy weapon, you would damage the airlock, leading to fatal decompression.’

  ‘Then it’s a good job I’m wearing a spacesuit. That came out of the maker as well.’

  The figure took a step backwards, stiff as a knight in armour. It must have made a decision at that point - analysed my voice and concluded that I was beyond persuasion - because I watched its profile shift, the metal skin creasing and stretching, tapering at the waist, broadening at the hips and chest, until I was looking at the elegant, ballerina-like form of Cadence. Her skin was still dark rather than silvery, but in all other respects she had reverted to her normal appearance.

  ‘That was easy,’ I said.

  ‘I have killed Hesperus,’ she said, using her normal voice. ‘He will not be returning to help you now.’

  My mind freewheeled. ‘Where did you kill him?’

  ‘In this chamber.’

  ‘Not good enough. I want to know exactly where.’

  Cadence cocked her head, looking away from the ark. ‘By that ship, the green one with the retracted stasis foils.’

  It was one of the ships I had told Hesperus to visit, but she might just have been lucky in her guess, or seen him move on the cameras monitoring the bay.

  ‘Bring me the body and we’ll talk about it.’

  ‘There is no body. I disintegrated him.’ Cadence lifted up one arm, the armour of her sleeve folding open in a subtle, ingenious way, allowing a vicious assemblage of barrels and tubes to spring out. ‘Cascade and I have always been armed, from the moment we moved amongst you.’ Then she let her arm fall in a stiff arc, mannequin-like, until the cluster of weapons was pointed directly at me. ‘Open the door, Purslane, before it is necessary for me to use force.’

  ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘Clemency. A desire not to inflict further harm. We are machines, not butchers. We value life, even the tawdry approximation of life that is the organic.’

  ‘You’re still going to have to kill me if you want to get inside the ark.’

  ‘I would rather not have to do that. Can we not talk now? It was a brave and clever thing that you and Hesperus attempted to do. Despite our combined wisdom, we did not foresee that you would use these ships against us, to slow down Silver Wings of Morning. She is a lovely machine, incidentally - worthy of us.’

  ‘I’m glad you like her. I’m planning on having her back.’

  ‘That was always the arrangement, was it not?’ Then Cadence angled her doll-like head again, the chamber’s light flaring off the elegant ridge of her metal cheekbones and the luscious, bee-stung swell of her steel lips. ‘I am puzzled, Purslane. You have a weapon capable of harming me, and you claim to be wearing a spacesuit. You have nothing to gain from my continued existence, yet you have not opened fire.’

  ‘I thought I’d let you have your say first.’ My hand tightened around the weapon. The levators held it in place with such determined control that it felt as if I was holding a fixed support, like the knob of a banister. ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘The ark’s engine is still running. Although this will have only a marginal impact on our chances of success, it would still be better if it was turned off.’

  ‘So kill me and do it.’

  Cadence held up her hand and allowed the clustered weapon to fold itself back into her arm. ‘You did not believe that I was capable of clemency, but I will prove it to you now. Deactivate the engine and we will come to an arrangement that guarantees your survival. I will give you time to consider this proposal.’

  My heart beat in my chest like a pulsar about to spin itself to pieces. I sensed that I was only one mistake, one ill-judged remark, from instant death. I could not attack Cadence even if I wanted to. Despite what I had told her, I was not wearing a spacesuit. There had not been time for the maker to produce one; it had been all I could do to make a weapon.

  I had to show that I was in control.

  ‘Get away from the ship. I won’t shoot you because there’ll still be Cascade, and for all I know you two can make copies of yourselves. But you wanted Silver Wings for a reason and whatever that is, it must be important to you. Hugely important, if you’d risk war with the entire human meta-civilisation.’

  Cadence must have believed me, because she took several steps backwards.

  ‘You cannot stop us,’ she said. ‘We are in control.’

  ‘If you say so. The thing is, I’m not convinced you’ve any plans to keep me alive once we get to wherever we’re going. Which means that if I’m going to die anyway - and I’m reasonably sure that’s the case - then I might as well get to do it on my terms, achieving something in the process.’

  With a firmness that I had never heard in her voice before, Cadence said, ‘Do not do this. It will not be in your best interests.’

  ‘Got your attention. That’s good.’

  I had the impression of intense, feverish computation; the working out of a near-infinite spectrum of outcomes. If a machine could have sweated, Cadence would have. ‘We can still negotiate,’ she said. ‘I will leave now and give you time to think things through. If you disengage the ark, you may dictate arrangements for your survival. If they are acceptable to us, we will comply.’

  I had not been expecting this, but I tried to keep that to myself. ‘What kind of arrangements?’

  ‘You will bargain with the other humans on our behalf. You will persuade them to stop following us on the understanding that we will let you leave.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to believe you’d follow through on that?’

  Cadence started to say something - another calm answer, her voice as beautiful and unruffled as it ever was - but she did not complete her sentence. What happened in the instant that followed was too fast for my eyes or mind to follow. All I could do was put it together afterwards, assembling the sequence of events from the broken fragments that had made it past the hopelessly constricted bottleneck of my animal senses.

  Hesperus had attacked Cadence. Lacking a weapon - for there had not been time to mint one before he left the ark - his only option had been to use stealth and surprise. This he had done with considerable success, for nothing in Cadence’s reaction showed that she had had any idea that Hesperus was creeping up on her in the shadows of the cargo bay. I recalled now how my first impression of him, when Campion walked him onto Dalliance’s bridge, had been of the hunting cat I owned in Palatial, and the statue of David in the hallway of the family mansi
on. Those impressions - contradictory, but complementary - came back to me with renewed force as he sprang onto the other robot, ramming her to the ground. The two dark forms wrestled, their movements so accelerated that all I could make out was a writhing dark mass, like a kind of quantum probability cloud made of metal. It all took place in the absolute silence of vacuum. Then there was a flash, bright enough to illuminate the entire chamber for a single dazzling moment, and then there were two robots again.

  They both lay very still.

  They were both broken.

  Hesperus was on his back, five or six metres from Cadence. There was a dark hole punched right through him, where his heart would have been had he been human. His skin flickered from dark to gold, gold to dark, and then stayed the way it was. Nothing moved behind the glass windows of his skull. Cadence was sprawled on her side facing Hesperus, for all the world as if she had just decided to lie down and take a nap. Her weapon arm had been severed at the elbow, wrenched away from the rest of her - it lay three or four metres beyond Hesperus. A squirming mass of silver machinery, oozing with mercurial unguents, erupted through her stump. Hesperus looked dead, but there was something alive in Cadence. Unable to leave the ark, I could do nothing but watch.

  ‘Hesperus,’ I said into the door panel, ‘you’ve got to get up.’

  Cadence stirred, but only minutely. Lights flickered in her head and the fingers of her good arm twitched. The fingers of the severed arm, on the far side of Hesperus, also twitched. The angle of her head adjusted in stiff increments until she was looking at the severed arm. Her expression was fiercely serene.