Steel Breeze was gone.
‘What just happened?’ Charlock said, looking around like a man who needed someone to shake him out of a bad dream. ‘Someone tell me what just happened. We were winning. We were getting through. Why did she start fighting back now?’
‘She was biding her time,’ Tansy said. ‘Waiting until all three ships were close. Must have punched through her own impasse with a sync-locked gamma-cannon.’
‘Pull Mystery Wind and Yellow Jester out of attack range,’ Betony said, clutching onto his calm façade as if it was the last firm thing in the universe. ‘And then hope and pray that they work it out for themselves, because I don’t think Silver Wings is going to sit and wait for us to make the next move.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I reached out a hand to steady myself, the other grasping the fixed handhold of the energy-pistol with renewed strength. The weapon wavered and re-centred itself on Cadence. There was another vibration, harder and sharper this time. Chimes began to sound from the white control core, emergency messages scrolling in cryptic red text across its surfaces.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘Work it out for yourself.’
‘It sounds to me as if we’re under attack. Maybe Cascade is trying to break into the ark, but I don’t think that’s it - if he was going to use force against us, he’d have done it already.’
Cadence regarded me levelly, but said nothing.
‘The whole ship must be under attack - Silver Wings herself. Those were either weapon impacts being soaked up by the impasse, or her own weapons discharging. Or both.’
Cadence tilted her head minutely. ‘An attack is in progress,’ she informed me, her tone neutral.
‘How many ships?’
‘Three of your pursuit craft - I give you this information freely, since it is valueless.’
I raised myself from my haunches, still keeping the energy-pistol aimed at her, and made my way to the command console. Recalling the sequence of commands Hesperus had already shown me, I activated the ark’s transmitter.
‘This is Purslane. I’m still here. Would someone like to tell me what’s going on?’
I waited the requisite five or six minutes, but no reply was forthcoming.
‘They cannot hear you now,’ Cadence said. ‘With the impasse raised to battle-strength, only Silver Wings herself could get a coherent signal through. This ark does not have the power to reach your friends, nor the sensitivity to detect their return transmissions.’
‘You can’t run at battle-strength for ever, though. You’re losing headway all the time you aren’t on drive. That means you consider these ships at least a plausible threat.’
‘They have weapons. They could destroy us if we do not take precautions. This is hardly a startling admission.’
There was another vibration, lasting thirty or forty seconds. Despite the many layers of field-damping between the ark and the outer boundary of Silver Wings’ impasse, it still felt like a small earthquake. I felt a stomach-churning surge as the engine snatched and grabbed, trying to maintain headway in the instants when the impasse was recycling.
‘You’re doing an awfully good job of keeping me alive,’ I said. ‘If I was a couple of robots running a ship, I wouldn’t bother going to all that trouble to neutralise acceleration, especially in a battle situation. I’d just be thinking about my immediate survival.’
‘You are our hostage. If your continued existence enables us to negotiate with our pursuers, then you are of use to us.’
‘Then they are a concern. Or you’ve got another reason for keeping me alive.’
‘They inconvenience us. They irritate us. No more than that.’
Trusting nothing Cadence said to me, I considered it worthwhile trying to signal Campion again. Again there was no sign that my message had got through. My attention wavered for a few moments, fixated on the unfamiliar technology. When I snapped back onto her, Cadence had begun to push a glistening chrome tendril from one of her leg-sockets.
I shot it. ‘Naughty.’
The energy discharge had singed the remaining part of her leg back from the stump, turning it from chrome to charred black. Cadence appeared oblivious to the damage I had just inflicted. ‘You must understand that I will do what needs to be done,’ she said, as ruthlessly calm as ever.
‘That makes two of us, then.’
‘Cascade informs me that two of the three ships have now been disposed of. The third is damaged and yet still attempting another assault. It may be that their aim is poor, or that they have simply abandoned any hope of saving you.’ Cadence’s tone became patronising. ‘Of course you feel betrayed. You have every right. How else are you expected to feel, having been deemed expendable?’
I said nothing. Arguing with that implacable silver face was beginning to bore me.
The vibrations increased in ferocity over the next ten or twelve minutes, reached a peak and then ended without warning. I waited, expecting them to return, but as the minutes wore on it began to seem as if the attack was over.
‘That’s the last ship gone,’ Cadence said. ‘Three of your fellow shatterlings dead, and to no avail. I believe the ships in question were Steel Breeze, Yellow jester and Mystery Wind. Doubtless you can tell me who was aboard them.’
‘Our ships don’t need us aboard.’
‘Yes, cling to that possibility.’ After a moment she added, ‘What I said to you earlier, before we were interrupted - the offer still stands, Purslane. Negotiate with your friends. Tell them to give up their pursuit and we will still let you leave.’
‘And Hesperus?’
‘Take him if you wish. No matter what he told you, he is damaged beyond effective repair.’
‘You’re not looking too good yourself. Aren’t you upset that Cascade hasn’t come down to try and rescue you?’
‘He knows I pose no risk to the success of this mission. I cannot be coerced or manipulated. I cannot be tortured or deceived. If I imagined there was the slightest danger of you learning something of tactical value, I would destroy myself. If Cascade felt the same way, he could reach into me and kill me himself.’
‘Where are we headed?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there.’
‘Hesperus already looked inside you, when he was damaged and you were trying to see what he knew. Isn’t that a concern?’
‘He saw very little. He is even weaker now, and we have modified our protocols to block the one channel he was able to penetrate. It was an oversight, an unacceptable one, but no great damage was done. We still have the ship, which was always our objective.’
‘My ship.’
‘You’ve done well with her. She is very fast.’
‘Is that all it is, Cadence? Is that all this is about?’
She cocked her head. ‘What else could it be? Speed is of the essence. Your ship is unquestionably fast.’
‘End of story.’
‘Yes.’
‘It seems to me that you came a long, long way just to find a very fast ship. Hesperus and I don’t think you learned very much when you were on Neume.’ I shifted to a more comfortable position, resigned to the fact that this was going to be a long wait. There had been no change in Hesperus since his lights had gone out; nothing to indicate he was ever coming back to life. ‘Did you kill Cyphel?’ I asked. ‘You can tell me now. It’s not going to make a difference to our relationship.’
‘Then why ask?’
‘Old-fashioned curiosity.’
‘Then yes, we killed Cyphel.’
‘By throwing her off a balcony? Sorry, but that doesn’t strike me as quite your style. I’ve seen how quickly you can move, how you can change form and colour when you need to. I can’t help thinking you’d have preferred to kill her some other, less clumsy way.’
‘It would have been a mistake to assassinate her in a way that identified us as the culprits.’
‘No; you didn’t do Cyphel. That was someone else. Her d
eath might have suited you; it might have put us off the immediate trail of solving the mystery of the ambush, but it wasn’t you. And you didn’t want me to know that, did you?’
Something quickened behind her eyes: alarm or interest, I could not say for certain.
‘What you know, what you do not know, is of no concern to me.’
‘I know why we were ambushed. It was to prevent the emergence of information damaging to the Commonality. If a handful of us hadn’t been late, it would have been all over for Gentian Line. The secret that we were about to reveal to the wider galaxy would have stayed a secret. But no one allowed for you.’
‘Then the ambushers were acting in the interests of humans,’ Cadence said, with an amused tone. ‘From your standpoint, they were doing the right and proper thing. Far from hating them, far from seeking to bring them to justice, you should applaud their efforts. If you care about your species, you should do all in your power to complete the work the ambushers began. Tell your friends to turn their ships around, return to Neume and concentrate their weapons on any remaining Gentian shatterlings. Then turn that fire on themselves, until none are left. As a final grace note, you could be the last to commit suicide; the last to take that secret to her grave. Would that not be a reasonable course of action, Purslane? Would that not be the decent thing to do?’
‘It might, if you didn’t already know about the ambush and the reasons for it.’
‘Well, there is that.’
I tipped the Synchromesh into my eyes, one cold, clear drop into each. ‘You didn’t come to suppress the emergence of that knowledge. Something else brought you to Neume, and I don’t think it was my ship, either.’
‘Why else?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what I’m going to find out, one way or another.’
‘And then?’
‘I’ll stop you. There are a million ways to do it.’
‘Almost all of which happen to involve your death.’
‘But like you say - that would be the decent thing to do. I’m not above a grand gesture if I think it’ll serve a higher good. It just may not be your higher good we’re talking about.’
I lifted my sleeve and adjusted the dial on my chronometer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Charlock might have lost his prized Steel Breeze, but he still had enough grip on events to remember the search he had been running before the failed attack. There was only a slight waver in his voice as his imago spoke, addressing us all.
‘The battle didn’t change a damned thing. Silver Wings varied her course during the initial assault, but as soon as it was over - as soon as we lost Mystery Wind and Yellow jester- she fell back on exactly the same vector she was following before. The course projections I showed you earlier are still valid. She’ll still skirt the Harmonious Concordance in seven thousand years, passing within fifteen years of the present boundary. I think we agreed that that isn’t likely to be the destination.’
‘Further out?’ Betony asked. ‘I asked you to look out to fifty thousand years.’
‘I did. Here are the candidate systems, in order of interception.’ He raised his hand to an offstage displayer.
Dalliance showed the same list. It kept scrolling, line after line. Coordinates, Commonality name for the primary and for the major planet or moon with which the system was most likely to be associated; a string of code numbers identifying surface conditions, metallicities, host civilisations or the absence thereof.
It was a long, bewildering list - hundreds of possible solar systems. Until Charlock had produced it, I had imagined it would be a relatively simple business to scan through it until something jumped out at us. I had even wondered if the target might turn out to be one of the systems under investigation by the Vigilance, but none of those were showing up.
‘She passes through each of these systems?’ Orache said - calmer now, the loss of her ship absorbed if not forgotten.
‘Maybe not, but while we’re still uncertain of her trajectory, we can’t rule any of them out.’ Charlock’s brow was glossy with perspiration - he dabbed at it ineffectually, drying his fingers on his sleeve. ‘There are hundreds of worlds where Gentian Line, or another Line of the Commonality, has had some kind of business before. But that would apply no matter which direction we looked, and none of the systems on this list are of any obvious significance.’
‘Any Prior involvement?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. I searched for relic sites, but nothing came up.’
Agrimony scratched at the skin under his collar. ‘What about cultures that have had dealings with the Machine People? There must be some in that list.’
‘A handful,’ Charlock said, ‘but according to the UA, they’ve next to no chance of still being there.’
‘How many candidates in total?’ Betony asked.
‘Three hundred and forty-eight. Of course, limiting the search sweep to fifty kilo-years was an entirely arbitrary decision. If I look further out, or allow for an additional degree of uncertainty in our projection of Purslane’s vector, we’ll start picking up thousands. That’s before we factor in stellar proper motion, galactic rotation and the degree to which the robots are allowing the gravitational field to bend their trajectory.’
‘There are nine of us,’ I said. ‘We could at least break that list down into manageable chunks and see if we find anything that way. We should send it back to Neume, as well.’
‘I’ve done that already,’ Charlock said. ‘But we’re getting fast now, and it’s going to take a while for any return signals to catch up with us. Before we dice the list into pieces, though, I think there’s something you all ought to know.’
Betony crossed his arms. ‘You found something?’
‘Not in this list. But for the sake of my own curiosity I extended the search volume a little further, just in case we were missing something obvious.’
I sensed Betony’s patience hanging by a thread. ‘And?’
‘There’s something at sixty-two thousand lights - way across the plane of the galaxy. Quite honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. But if we take the numbers at face value, it’s a very high-confidence hit. She’s aimed directly at it.’
‘At what?’ I asked.
‘One of our stardams,’ Charlock said.
*
Galingale reported in a little while later. I was outside the summer house in Dalliance’s gardens, making a vain effort to clear my head with some fresh air in my lungs and blue skies above me. I had told the statues to stop moving around - their slow, dreamlike enactments were too distracting. I wanted absolute stillness outside my skull, in contrast to the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions going on inside it.
‘I’m still prepared to have a crack at this,’ Galingale’s imago said, rendered with gauzy indistinction halfway up the gently sloping meadow, the others gathered around him in more solid invocations.
‘Not after what we’ve just been through,’ Betony said. ‘We’ve lost three ships; I don’t want to lose another ship and a good shatterling. It was a courageous offer, Galingale, but it was made before we had a real appreciation of what we’re up against. Throwing another ship at Silver Wings—no matter how well intentioned the gesture - won’t achieve anything.’
‘I feel that way as well,’ I said. ‘Steel Breeze and the other ships weren’t badly equipped, and nothing they did was obviously stupid. We’re just dealing with a stronger adversary, with a rapidly improving control of Purslane’s ship.’
Galingale’s response arrived two minutes later. ‘All the more reason to strike now, before that control gets any better.’ There was more determination in his voice than I had been expecting. ‘Besides - we can change our strategy now.’
I had my hands on my hips. ‘Can we? Nothing’s changed, as far as I’m aware.’
‘No one’s going to say it, so it may as well be me. It’s been a while, Campion.’ Galingale looked around at the others. ‘We haven’t heard from Purslane
for a whole day. Her silence began before the battle, so it can’t just be the difficulty of getting a signal through the impasse. We should have heard from her since - we know our attack didn’t come close to doing any real damage to Silver Wings.’
‘Then she’s still alive.’
‘And not talking?’ Galingale was staring at me with genuine sympathy. ‘She’d have been in touch, Campion. Unless the robots found a way to get to her.’
‘She was safe.’
‘She was secure in the ark. But we both know the robots weren’t going to let her stay there unchallenged, especially if she started getting on their nerves.’ He raised his hands suddenly, anticipating my response. ‘I’m not saying she’s dead - I’m just saying we have to consider it as a possibility, whereas before it was a stone certainty that she was still alive. Now we don’t have the luxury of that knowledge.’
‘I do.’
‘For the sake of argument, how does this change things?’ Betony asked.
‘Our ships exposed themselves to broadside attack. That’s not a risk we ought to take again. With lateral-mounted gamma-cannons, we have the tactical advantage in a stern-chase. Our ships are designed to shoot forward, not behind.’