* * *
Two thousand kilometres, then a thousand, then five hundred. Closer, his sensors struggled to deal with the clump of Inhibitor machines as a single entity, throwing back wildly conflicting estimates for distance, scale and geometric disposition. The best he could do was to focus his efforts on the larger nodes, refining his hull-camouflaging to provide a better line-of-sight match with the cosmic background. He adjusted his thrust vectoring, losing some acceleration but steering his ship’s exhaust beams away from the shifting concentrations of enemy machines. The exhausts were invisible, all but undetectable via the methods available to Remontoire. He hoped the same disadvantage applied to the aliens, but it paid not to take chances.
The clumps reorganised, shifting nearer. They were still too far away and too vaguely dispersed to make an effective target for the hypometric weapon. He was also wary of using it against them except as a tool of last resort. There was always the danger that he’d show it to them too many times, giving them enough data to conjure up a response. It had already happened with other weapons: time and again the Inhibitors had evolved effective defences against human technologies, including some of those already bequeathed by Aura. It was possible that the alien machines were not evolving them at all, but simply retrieving countermeasures from some ancient, jumbled racial memory. This conjecture alarmed Remontoire more than the idea that they might have developed their adaptations and responses through intelligent thinking. There was always the hope that one kind of intelligence could be beaten by the application of another kind, or that intelligence—self-regarding, prone to doubt—might even conspire in its own downfall. But what if there was no intelligence in the Inhibitor activities, just a process of archival retrieval, an utterly mindless bureaucracy of systematised extinction? The galaxy was a very old place and it had seen many clever ideas. More than likely, the Inhibitors already possessed ancient data on the humans’ new weapons and technologies. If they had not yet developed effective responses, it was only because that retrieval system was slow, the archive itself vastly distributed. What that meant was that there was nothing the humans could do, in the long run. No way to outgun the Inhibitors, except on a very local scale. Think galac-tically, think beyond the immediate handful of solar systems, and it was already over.
But through the channel of her mother, Aura had told them that it wasn’t over, not yet. According to Aura there was a means of buying time, if not outright victory, over the Inhibitors.
Snatches, fragments: that was all they could glean from Aura’s confused messages. But out of the noise had emerged hints of a signal. Time and again a cluster of words had appeared.
Hela. Quaiche. Shadows.
These were shards broken loose from a larger whole that Aura had been too young to articulate. All Remontoire could do was guess at the shape of that bigger picture, using what they had learned before Skade had kidnapped her. Skade and Aura were both gone now, he believed, but he still had those shards. They had to mean something, no matter how unlikely it appeared. And there was, tantalisingly, a clear link between two of them. Hela and Quaiche: the words meant something in association. But of the Shadows he knew nothing at all.
What were they, and what difference would they make?
The aggregate was very close now. It had begun to grope horns around either side of his ship, dark pincers flickering with buried violet lightning. Hints of cubic symmetries could now be glimpsed in sheared edges and stepped curves. He reviewed his options, taking account of the systems damaged in the Conjoiner attack. He wasn’t willing to use the hypometric weapon just yet, and doubted that he’d be able to spin up for a second attack before the undamaged elements took him out.
Ahead, the planet had grown noticeably larger. He had pushed the other aggregate from his mind, but it was still ahead of him, still skimming towards the fragile Juggler biosphere and its human parasites. Half the world was in darkness, the rest a marbled turquoise speckled by white clouds and swirling storm systems.
Remontoire made up his mind: it would have to be the bladder-mines.
In a fraction of a second, apertures popped open along the habitat hull of his trident-shaped ship. In another fraction of a second, launchers flung half a dozen melon-sized munitions in all directions. The hull clanged as the weapons were deployed.
Then there was silence.
An entire second passed, then the munitions detonated in an exactly choreographed sequence. There was no stutter of blinding-white flashes; these were not fusion devices or antimatter warheads. They were, in fact, only bombs in the very loosest sense of the word. Where each munition had detonated there was, suddenly, a twenty-kilometre-wide sphere of something just sitting there, like a rapidly inflated barrage balloon. The surface of each sphere was wrinkled, like the skin of a shrivelling fruit, shaded a purple-black and prone to nauseating surges of colour and boundary radius. Where two spheres happened to intersect—because their munitions had been closer than twenty kilometres apart when they detonated—the merged boundaries twinkled with sugary emanations of violet and pastel-blue.
The mechanisms inside the bladder mines were as intricate and unfathomable as those inside the hypometric weapon. There were even weird points of correspondence between the two technologies—odd parts that looked vaguely similar, suggesting that, perhaps, they had originated from the same species, or the same epoch of galactic history.
Remontoire’s suspicion was that the bladder-mines represented an early step towards the metric-engineering technology of the Shrouders. Whereas the Shrouders had learned how to encase entire stellar-sized volumes of space in shells of re-engineered space-time (with its own uncanny defensive properties), the bladder-mines produced unstable shells a mere twenty kilometres wide. They decayed back to normal space-time within a few seconds, popping out of existence in a shiver of exotic quanta. Where they had been, the local properties of the metric showed tiny indications of earlier stress. But the shells could never be made larger or more permanent, at least not by using the technology Aura had given them.
His spread of munitions was already decaying. The spheres popped away one by one, in random sequence.
Remontoire surveyed the damage. Where the shells had detonated, the intersected Inhibitor machinery had been ripped out of existence. There were curved mathematically smooth wounds in the groping aggregation of cubic elements. The lightning was arcing through the ruined structure, its mad flickering suggesting nothing so much as pain and rage.
Hit them when they’re down, Remontoire thought. He issued the mental command that would fling a final spread of bladder-mines into the surrounding machinery.
This time, nothing happened. Error messages stormed his brain: the launcher mechanism had failed, succumbing to damage from the earlier attack. He had been fortunate that it had worked once.
For the first time, Remontoire permitted himself more than an instant of real, blood-freezing fear. His options were now seriously diminished. He had no hull-armouring: that was another alien technology they had gleaned from Aura, but like in-ertial suppression it did not work well in proximity with the hypometric weapon. The hull-armouring came from the grubs; the h-weapon and the bladder-mines from a different culture. There were, unfortunately, compatibility issues. All he had left was the hypometric weapon and his conventional armaments, but there was still no clear focus for an attacking move.
The hull shuddered as his conventional mines were released from their hatches. Fusion detonations painted the sky. He felt the electromagnetic backwash play havoc with his implants, strobing abstract shapes through his visual field.
The Inhibitors were still there. He fired two Stinger missiles, watching them slam away on hundred-gee intercepts. Nothing happened: they hadn’t even detonated properly. He had no beam .weapons, nothing more to offer.
Remontoire became very calm. His experience told him that nothing would be gained by using the hypometric weapon other than giving the machines another chance to study its operation
al function. He also knew that the wolves had yet to capture one of the weapons, and that he could not allow it to happen today.
He prepared the suicide command, visualising the coronet of fusion mines packed into the nacelle of the alien weapon. They would make a spectacular flash as they went off, almost as bright as the one that would follow an instant later when the Conjoiner drive went the same way. There was, he thought very little chance that either would be appreciated by spectators.
Remontoire adjusted his state of mind so that he felt no fear, no apprehension about his own death. He felt only a tingle of irritation that he would not be around to see how events unfurled. In every significant respect he approached the matter of his own demise with the bored acceptance of someone waiting to sneeze. There were, he thought, some consolations to being a Conjoiner.
He was about to execute the command when something happened. The remaining machinery began to pull away from his ship, retreating with surprising speed. Beyond the machinery, his sensors picked up suggestions of weapons discharges and a great deal of moving mass—bladder-mine detonations, the signatures subtly different from the ones he had used. Antimatter and fusion warhead bursts followed, then the streaking exhaust plumes of missiles, and finally a single massive explosion that had to be a crustbuster device.
None of it would have made much difference ordinarily, but he had weakened the Inhibitor machinery with his own assault. The mass sensor teased out the signature of a single small ship, consistent, he realised now, with a Conjoiner moray-class corvette.
He guessed that it was the same ship he had spared. They had turned around, or perhaps had shadowed him all along. Now they were doing their best to draw the Inhibitor machinery away from him. Remontoire knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the gesture was suicidal: they couldn’t hope to make it back to their faction in the engagement. Yet they had taken a decision to help him, even after their earlier attack and his refusal to hand over the hypometric weapon. Typical Conjoiner thinking, he reflected: they would not hesitate to shift tactics at the last minute if that shift was deemed beneficial to the long-term interests of the Mother Nest. They had no capacity for frustration, no capacity for shame.
They had tried to negotiate with him, and when that had failed they had tried to take what they wanted by force. That hadn’t worked either, and to rub it in he had made a show of sparing them. Was this a demonstration of their gratitude? Perhaps, he thought, but it was likely to be more for the benefit of those observing the battle, for Remontoire’s allies and the other Conjoiner factions, than for himself: let them see the brave sacrifice they had made here. Let them see the wiping clean of the slate. If twenty-eight thousand and one offers to share resources had failed, perhaps this gesture would be the thing that made a difference.
Remontoire didn’t know: not yet. He had other matters on his mind.
His ship pulled away from the entanglement of wolf and Conjoiner assets. Behind, naked energy and naked force strove to gore matter down to its fundamentals. Something absurdly bright lit up the sky, something so intense that he swore a glimmer of it reached him through the black hull of his ship.
He turned his attention to the other aggregate, the one that was now very close to the planet. At extreme magnification he saw a black mass squatting a few hours into the dayside of the planet, hovering above a specific point on the surface. It was doing something.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hela, 2727
QUAICHE WAS ALONE in his garret, save for the scrimshaw suit. He heard only his own breathing and the attentive sounds of the couch on which he rested. The jalousies were half-drawn, the room scribed with parallel lines of fiery red.
He could feel, very faintly—and only because he had learned to feel it—the tiny residual side-to-side and back-to-front lurching of the Lady Morwenna as it progressed along the Way. Far from annoying him, the swaying was a source of reassurance. The instant the cathedral became rock steady, he would know that they were losing ground on Haldora. But the cathedral had not stopped for more than a century, and then only for a matter of hours during a reactor failure. Ever since then, even as it had grown in size, doubling and then quadrupling in height, it had kept moving, sliding along the Way at the exact speed necessary to keep Haldora fixed directly above, and therefore transmitted via the mirrors into his pinned-open, ever-watchful eyes. No other cathedral on the Way had such a record: the Lady Morwenna’s nearest rival, the Iron Lady, had failed for an entire rotation fifty-nine years earlier. The shame of that breakdown—having to wait in the same spot until the other cathedrals came around again after three hundred and twenty days—still hung heavy six decades later. Every other cathedral, including the Lady Morwenna, had a stained-glass window in commemoration of that humiliation.
The couch propelled him to the westerly window, tipping up slightly to improve his view. As he moved, the mirrors shuffled around him, maintaining sight-lines. No matter which way he steered the couch, Haldora was the predominant object reflected back to him. He was seeing it after multiple reflections, the light jogged through right angles, reversed and inverted again, magnified and diminished by achromatic lenses, but it was still the light itself, not some second- or third-hand image on a screen. It was always there, but the view was never quite the same from hour to hour. For one thing, the illumination of Haldora changed throughout the forty-hour cycle of Hela’s orbit: from fully lit face, to crescent, to storm-racked nightside. And even during any given phase the details of shading and banding were never quite the same from one pass to the next. It was enough, just, to stave off the feeling that the image had been branded into his brain.
It was not all that he saw, of course. Surrounding Haldora was a ring of black shading to silver grey, and then—packed into a band of indistinct detail—his immediate surroundings. He could look to one side and shift Haldora into his peripheral vision, for the mirrors were focusing the image on to his eyes, not just his pupils. But he did not do this very often, fearful that a vanishing would happen when the planet did not have his full attention.
Even with Haldora looming head-on, he had learned how to make the most of his peripheral vision. It was surprising how the brain was able to fill in the gaps, suggesting details that his eyes were really not capable of resolving. More than once it had struck Quaiche that if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was—how much of it was stitched to-gether not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork—they would go quietly mad.
He looked at the Way. In the far easterly distance, in the direction that the Lady Morwenna was headed, there was a distinct -twinkling. That was the northern limit of the Gullveig Mountains, the largest range in Hela’s southern hemisphere. It was the last major geological feature to be crossed before the relative ease of the Jarnsaxa Flats and the associated fast run to the Devil’s Staircase. The Way cut through the northern flanks of the Gullveig Range, pushing through foothills via a series of high-walled canyons. And that was where an icefall had been reported. It was said to be a bad one, hundreds of metres deep, completely blocking the existing alignment. Quaiche had personally interviewed the leader of the Permanent Way repair team earlier that day, a man named Wyatt Benjamin who had lost a leg in some ancient, unspecified accident.
“Sabotage, I’d say,” Benjamin had told him. “A dozen or so demolition charges placed in the wall during the last crossing, with delayed timing fuses. A spoiling action by trailing cathedrals. They can’t keep up, so they don’t see why anyone else should.”
“That would be quite a serious allegation to make in public,” Quaiche had said, as if the very thought had never occurred to him. “Still, you may be right, much as it pains me to admit it.”
“Make no mistake, it’s a stitch-up.”
“The question is, who’s going to clear it? It would need to be done in—what, ten days at the maximum, before we reach the obstruction?”
Wyatt Benjamin had nodded. “You may not wan
t to be that close when it’s cleared, however.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not going to be chipping this one away.”
Quaiche had absorbed that, understanding exactly what the man meant. “There was a fall of that magnitude three, four years ago, wasn’t there? Out near Glum Junction? I seem to remember it was cleared using conventional demolition equipment. Shifted the lot in fewer than ten days, too.”
“We could do this one in fewer than ten days,” Benjamin told him, “but we only have about half of our usual allocation of equipment and manpower.”
“That sounds odd,” Quaiche had replied, frowning. “What’s wrong with the rest?”
“Nothing. It’s just that it’s all been requisitioned, men and machines. Don’t ask me why or who’s behind it. I only work for the Permanent Way. And I suppose if it was anything to do with Clocktower business, you’d already know, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose I would,” Quaiche had said. “Must be a bit lower down than Clocktower level. My guess? Another office of the Way has discovered something they should have fixed urgently already, a job that got forgotten in the last round. They need all that heavy machinery to get it done in a rush, before anyone notices.”
“Well, we’re noticing,” Benjamin had said. But he had seemed to accept the plausibility of Quaiche’s suggestion.
“In that case, you’ll just have to find another means of clearing the blockage, won’t you?”
“We already have another means,” the man had said.
“God’s Fire,” Quaiche had replied, forcing awe into his voice.
“If that’s what it takes, that’s what we’ll have to use. It’s why we carry it with us.”
“Nuclear demolitions should only ever be used as the absolute final last resort,” Quaiche had said, with what he hoped was the appropriate cautioning tone. “Are you quite certain that this blockage can’t be shifted by conventional means?”