Why was she lying, as I surely knew she was? Not because she wanted to keep information from me. But perhaps because she was certain that Cascade was listening in.
Read between the lines, her voice urged.
‘The First Machines died—but not all of them. Some fled before the contagion could reach them. They’re in that stardam, locked inside. That’s where they’ve been for millions of years, waiting for a chance to escape. Campion, you need to understand that there’s every chance they don’t mean us well. We locked them in that stardam for a reason - we, us, Gentian Line. To Cadence and Cascade, the First Machines are like vanished gods - they’re everything that the Machine People are, only faster, stronger, cleverer - and they’ve had millions of years locked inside that thing to keep improving. The Machine People want to set the First Machines loose, to let them spread into the galaxy and usurp the human meta-civilisation. That’s what this is about, Campion - not about cracking open the stardam to knock out a few local civilisations, but to take down humanity. We’re the old order, the meat civilisations. The robots were wise enough to realise that if they didn’t take steps to wipe us out, sooner or later we’d try to do it to them.’
‘Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if Galingale won after all,’ Sorrel said. I wanted to hate him for it, but there had been no spite in his words, only a cold assessment of the situation. The worst part was that I could no longer be certain that he was wrong.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Hesperus stepped away from the broken, limbless, metal-eyed doll that had once been Cadence. He had been probing her for further signs of life, making certain that she had not just pushed herself into a deep, camouflaging coma, while some stealthy, shielded part of her mind plotted her next countermove.
‘Look away,’ he said, before dousing her with the energy-pistol. The tang of burning things reached my nose. When I looked around, Cadence was just a smouldering black pile, with blue embers flickering from her wounds. ‘She won’t trouble us again,’ Hesperus said.
‘You didn’t enjoy having to do that.’
‘She was one of us. She risked her own existence for a goal she believed in.’
‘Genocide.’
‘Not exactly. She was genuinely convinced that the organic would never tolerate the continued existence of machine intelligence. There was no hatred in her conviction, only a sense of the utmost urgency. And now I have reached into her mind and strangled something that was once luminous and alive.’ He offered me the energy-pistol. ‘No, it didn’t please me. But it had to be done.’
‘I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for us, Hesperus.’
‘You must wonder why I don’t see things the way Cadence did.’
His question made my skin crawl. ‘It’s crossed my mind.’
‘In some ways, I do. Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time. Cadence was right to fear for the future existence of the Machine People.’
‘And right to let the First Machines out of the stardam?’
‘No. Her concerns were legitimate but her actions were a mistake, although they were founded on sound reasoning. I will still do everything I can to make sure that Cascade does not complete his mission.’
‘Up to and including destroying the ark?’
‘That will be the last option, when all else has failed.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Now you must enter abeyance, until Galingale’s attack has passed.’
‘I was awake during the last attack.’
‘This will be different, I think. The attack and the response will both be fiercer. I think it likely that there will be undamped stresses of a severity that you would find uncomfortable.’
‘Cadence and Cascade weren’t trying to keep me alive last time, were they?’
Hesperus answered as if he was revealing some immense, traumatising truth to a child. ‘No. Your survival was incidental to their main objective. They were only interested in the opener. They have been following intelligence, but their knowledge is incomplete. Cadence’s memories suggest that they have already found and used one opener, but they were wrong about the stardam in question. It was not the one they wanted to open, although they did not know that until the opener was used.’
I shook my head in stunned disbelief. ‘Ugarit-Panth - the Consentiency. Are you saying they did that?’
‘It was an error. They opened the wrong door.’
‘And wiped out an entire civilisation.’
‘The mistake was of no consequence to them - merely a setback. They reanalysed their intelligence, everything they had learned of the Line, and found that all the evidence suggested that the opener was aboard Silver Wings of Morning. But not knowing precisely where to locate it, they could not risk damage befalling any of the ships in your bay.’ He glanced at Cadence again, as if to reassure himself that the charred remains could not possibly be listening in. ‘Where is it, exactly?’
‘That’s the problem. I don’t know.’
‘Then we will have to look for it, and try to sabotage it. All of which must wait until we have survived Galingale’s attack.’
The nearest abeyance casket was only a short walk from the command deck. There were four units ranked against a wall, all of the same rounded rectangular white design, like squared-off eggs.
‘I don’t like stasis.’
‘Nonetheless, stasis will protect you better than freezing. I will intervene to assist in your emergence back into realtime, should difficulties ensue.’ Hesperus opened the white doors of the nearest unit, revealing the white-on-white intricacy of the casket’s interior: stasis machinery, throne, control and containment systems, packed as tight as intestines. The chair pushed itself out, inviting me to lower my body into its doughy embrace. Controls nestled under my fingertips.
‘What ratio and time duration should I dial in?’
‘I’ll deal with the settings. I don’t want you emerging until we are certain that Galingale isn’t going to pose a threat again.’
Claustrophobia slipped its bony cold fingers around my throat. ‘What if I don’t come out?’
‘I’ll be here to make sure you do. Do you have something to say to Campion, before I put you under?’
I settled into the throne, placing my hands and feet into the self-tightening restraining hoops. ‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’
‘You forget that I am a high-fidelity recording apparatus. Say what you will, and I will relay it to Campion as soon as communication becomes possible again.’
‘Tell him that I love him and I’m grateful that he came this far.’
‘No, say it to me. As if I was Campion.’
I took a breath. It felt unnatural to be looking into his golden face, trying to imagine my lover and friend standing there instead. ‘I love you, shatterling. Thank you for what you’ve done. Do whatever you can to stop Silver Wings, but look after yourself as well. I want to see you again. I want to watch the sun go down with a good glass of wine and talk about all this as if it happened a long time ago, before we had many more adventures and good times.’
‘You will,’ Hesperus said.
The seat retracted into the stasis cabinet, the restraints tightening to pin me in place. Hesperus closed the doors—I could still see him through a one-way window. A collar whirred into place around my neck and drew me deeper into the seat, firm enough to be uncomfortable but not enough to choke. A voice intoned a warning that I was about to go into stasis at a time compression ratio of one million, and that I should activate the emergency abort control immediately if I did not wish the field to snap around me. ‘Final warning,’ the voice repeated. ‘Stasis will initiate in three... two ... one.’
Hesperus vanished, blinking out of existence. The outside world flared blue and then settled slowly back to an illusion of normality. In the second it took me to think that I had been in the cabinet too long, ten days had passed in the realtime
of my ship.
Hesperus was either dead, or he had tricked me. My fingers moved over the tactile controls. I twisted the dial back down, feeling it click through the notches of ratio settings. One million. One hundred thousand. Ten thousand.
The voice said, ‘Please be advised that manual adjustment of the cabinet settings is no longer possible. Only external inputs are now recognised as valid.’
Tens of seconds had passed. A hundred days.
Silver Wings of Morning had already been travelling so close to the speed of light that her onboard time was flowing more than twenty times slower than planetary time. She was still accelerating. A hundred days of shiptime was two thousand days in the stationary universe. I could have held my breath since I had been put into the cabinet, but we had already crossed six years of space. Another six since I started thinking about the distance I had come.
Twelve years. More like eighteen by now. Or twenty. In a very short while, Silver Wings of Morning would have put more than a century of flight time between itself and Neume.
In barely a day of cabinet time, we would arrive at the stardam.
‘Hesperus,’ I said, ‘you lying bastard.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
His smashed and bloodied ship fell towards us. With no pseudo-thrust, and nothing but the ghost-thin friction of interstellar space to slow her down, Midnight Queen could only coast, not accelerate. One part in a thousand less than the speed of light was mercurially swift by the standards of almost any other physical object in the universe. But Dalliance and the other ships of the pursuit squadron were now travelling slightly faster. Galingale’s wounded craft had no choice but to tumble back along the opposite vector, and soon she would fall within attack range of our ships.
‘We kill him,’ Sorrel said. ‘No ifs, no buts. We don’t even let the bastard explain his actions. Just open fire.’
‘I’m first in line,’ Charlock said, still bruised from the loss of Steel Breeze. Galingale, as far as he was concerned, was just as much to blame for the demise of his ship as the robots. He wanted something to punch.
I understood how he felt. But I kept thinking how good it would feel to get Galingale’s throat between my hands and keep squeezing. I would make it nice and slow, ebbing the breath from his lungs across the same stretch of time it had taken Cyphel to fall from her room. She had known she was going to die; that no agency in the universe could prevent it. Let Galingale taste something of the same furnace-dry certainty. A long-range strike from a gamma-cannon was never going to give the same satisfaction.
But Betony said quietly, ‘We could use his ship. Maybe we can use Galingale, too, if he still has something useful to tell us. But we can definitely use the ship.’
‘It’s damaged,’ I said.
‘But fixable. Everything’s fixable, especially given the resources we still have aboard our own ships. Midnight Queen was always the fastest, out of all those that survived the ambush - excepting Silver Wings, of course. Midnight’s out of the race now, obviously-but that doesn’t mean her engine’s useless. If we can pull her in, fix her or recover the drive components, it may make a difference. None of our ships will be able to close the gap if Silver Wings pulls ahead again. Midnight Queen could still be able.’
I hated it, but I knew he was right. ‘Betony’s got a point.’
‘How about we spear him with a gamma-cannon and then pick through the remains?’ Agrimony asked, as if that was a reasonable proposal.
Betony acted as if he had not heard him. ‘I’ll intercept Midnight Queen with Adonis Blue - I’ll only need to make a small course correction to meet her. I’m the only one aboard my ship, so there’s no need to put anyone else’s life in danger.’
‘Adonis Blue isn’t big enough to carry Midnight Queen,’ I said. ‘Matter of fact, Dalliance is about the only remaining ship with a hold large enough.’
‘I have lampreys. They’ll match velocity with Galingale’s wreck and drag it back home. We’ll worry about the hold afterwards.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to, Campion. Let the risk be mine.’
‘No, I’m coming.’ Before he could raise another objection, I said, ‘Do you have an intercept course worked out already?’
‘Yes,’ he said, equivocally. ‘But I’m still not happy with your choice.’
‘Get over it. You know it makes more sense to take Dalliance. Frankly, I don’t even need you at all.’
‘Then I suppose this is stalemate.’ Betony held my gaze, daring me to blink, then shook his head in disgust or defeat or some weary combination of the two. ‘Follow me. Shock Diamond, Snowstorm and Chromatic Aberration, hold the pursuit course. We’ll rejoin you as soon as we have the wreck.’
Adonis Blue veered away sharply, not so much breaking acceleration safeguards as forgetting about them completely. The old Dalliance could never have kept up with her, but she was more agile since Ateshga’s upgrading. From my position in the bridge I watched the other three ships fall into the distance, timelag stretching until they were a third of a second away. Adonis Blue swerved again and then resumed her original course, except that she was now moving along a parallel vector. As near as could be judged, she was now on a precise collision course with the out-of-control Midnight Queen.
‘Did you have your suspicions?’ Betony asked me as we waited for the wreck to tumble within intercept reach of the lampreys. ‘About Galingale, I mean.’ There was something comradely and confiding in his tone, as if I had finally absolved myself in his eyes.
‘Not an inkling,’ I told the imago.
‘Me neither. I can’t help but think of that as a failing, you know. I thought I had my finger on the pulse of the Line. I thought I knew all of us, even before the ambush. After it happened, and the Line was whittled down to so few of us, I felt I knew every surviving shatterling as well as I knew myself.’
‘We always suspected there was a snake. After Cyphel died, there wasn’t much doubt. But if it’s any consolation, I’d never have fingered Galingale as the culprit. Even after that business with Ugarit-Panth.’
‘I thought that was your mess, not his.’
‘Well, maybe I started it, but it gave Galingale the perfect excuse to push the ambassador over the edge. He showed him the entry for the Consentiency in the UA - established beyond all doubt that the ambassador’s civilisation was extinct.’
‘Could have been an innocent mistake...’ Betony started. ‘On second thoughts, probably not.’
‘Nothing innocent about it. Galingale wasn’t the first shatterling Ugarit-Panth spoke to, fishing for information after my indiscretion. But Galingale was the only one who came up with the idea of letting him see the UA, rather than the troves. The ambassador told me he’d been interested in seeing inside the UA before he went to Galingale, but I can’t help wondering if there wasn’t a degree of manipulation going on there.’
‘Galingale just happening to mention the UA, or making sure someone else mentioned it within earshot of the ambassador?’
‘It served his purpose. He was able to disclose the real facts about the ambassador’s home civilisation without implicating himself - at best, he would get away with it without anyone knowing he’d suggested it, at worst it would just look like another indiscretion. Ugarit-Panth came to me, Betony - told me what had happened. I could have acted then, but instead I agreed to protect Galingale. I felt sorry for the bastard - I kept seeing myself in his shoes. Whereas all along what he was hoping for - counting on - was the ambassador taking it so badly that he triggered the suicide mechanism inside his own body while still inside Ymir. That would have taken care of the rest of Gentian Line pretty effectively.’
‘And Galingale as well,’ Betony said.
‘Not necessarily - he could easily have contrived a reason to leave the planet in a hurry if he suspected the ambassador was going to blow. In fact, that’s exactly what he did do. The day after Cyphel’s funeral, Galingale very convenientl
y managed to get himself assigned to patrol duty. He must have been hoping the ambassador would kill most of us. Afterwards, he would have been able to pick off any survivors from space.’
‘But he didn’t know about Cadence and Cascade’s plans.’
‘No - they took us all by surprise. Of course, he would have been hoping they would die along with the rest of us. But at least he was already in space, in a fast ship and in a good position to embark on the chase.’
‘We should have seen all this.’
‘But we didn’t, so there’s no point burdening ourselves with recriminations. Maybe if I’d picked up on Cyphel’s clue sooner than I did—’
‘Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion - that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.’
‘You think anyone will be around to care?’
Betony opened his mouth to reply when something caught his attention. I heard the chime of an alert. ‘Here it comes, Campion. I’m releasing lampreys.’
I watched the bright sparks erupt from the fat green hull of Adonis Blue and streak away in hyphens of light, decelerating massively to reach the rest frame of Galingale’s wreck. I dropped twenty lampreys of my own and sent them to assist. Dalliance had had plenty of time to replace those lost in the passage through the reunion system, when I had been attacked by the ambushers.
The lampreys needed no direct supervision from us; they were fully capable of grasping the nature and specifics of their task, which was to fasten onto the wreck, stabilise her as well as they could and then haul her back into the accelerated frame of Dalliance and Adonis Blue. All Betony and I were required to do was watch the proceedings with nervous impatience, aware that we were falling slowly behind the rest of the pursuit squadron and would have to sacrifice even more of the already tattered safety margin to make up the distance.