Galactic North

  “You’re rushing them, aren’t you? Trying to get as many children Conjoined as you can. What are you planning?”

  “Something . . . has arisen, that’s all. The timing of your arrival is either very bad or very fortunate, depending on one’s point of view.” Before he could query her, Galiana added, “Clavain, I want you to meet someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone very precious to us.”

  She took him through a series of childproof doors until they reached a small circular room. The walls and ceiling were veined grey; tranquil after the last place. A child sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room. Clavain estimated the girl’s age as ten standard years—perhaps fractionally older. But she did not respond to Clavain’s presence in any way an adult, or even a normal child, would have. She just kept on doing the thing she had been doing when they stepped inside, as if they were not really present at all. It was not particularly clear what she was doing. Her hands moved before her in slow, precise gestures. It was as if she were playing a holoclavier or working a phantom puppet show. Now and then she would pivot around until she was facing another direction and carry on making the hand movements.

  “Her name’s Felka,” Galiana said.

  “Hello, Felka . . .” Clavain waited for a response, but none came. “I can see there’s something wrong with her.”

  “She’s one of the savants. Felka developed with machines in her head. She was the last to be born before we realised our failure.”

  Something about Felka disturbed him. Perhaps it was the way she carried on regardless, engrossed in an activity to which she appeared to attribute the utmost significance, yet which had to be without any sane purpose.

  “She doesn’t seem aware of us.”

  “Her deficits are severe,” Galiana said. “She has no interest in other human beings. She has prosopagnosia: the inability to distinguish faces. We all look alike to her. Can you imagine something stranger than that?”

  He tried, and failed. Life from Felka’s viewpoint must have been a nightmarish thing, surrounded by identical clones whose inner lives she could not begin to grasp. No wonder she was so engrossed in her game.

  “Why is she so precious to you?” Clavain asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  “She’s keeping us alive,” Galiana said.

  Of course, he asked Galiana what she meant by that. Galiana’s only response was to tell him that he was not yet ready to be shown the answer.

  “And what exactly would it take for me to reach that stage?”

  “A simple procedure.”

  Oh yes, he understood that part well enough. Just a few machines in the right parts of his brain and the truth could be his. Politely, doing his best to mask his distaste, Clavain declined. Fortunately, Galiana did not press the point, for the time had arrived for the meeting he had been promised before his arrival on Mars.

  He watched a subset of the nest file into the conference room. Galiana was their leader only inasmuch as she had founded the lab from which the original experiment had sprung and was accorded some respect deriving from seniority. She was also the most obvious spokesperson amongst them. But they all had areas of expertise that could not easily be shared amongst other Conjoined, which distinguished them from the hive mind of identical clones that still figured in the Coalition’s propaganda. If the nest was in any way like an ant colony, then it was an ant colony in which every ant fulfilled a role distinct from all the others. Naturally, no individual could be solely entrusted with a particular skill essential to the nest—that would have been dangerous overspecialisation—but neither had individuality been completely subsumed into the group mind.

  The conference room must have dated back to the days when the nest was a research outpost, or even earlier, when it was some kind of mining base in the early 2100s. It was much too big for the dour handful of Conjoiners who stood around the main table. Tactical read-outs around the table showed the build-up of strike forces above the Martian exclusion zone; probable drop trajectories for ground-force deployment.

  “Nevil Clavain,” Galiana said, introducing him to the others. Everyone sat down. “I’m just sorry that Sandra Voi can’t be with us now. We all feel the tragedy of her death. But perhaps out of this terrible event we can find some common ground. Nevil—before you came here you told us you had a proposal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.”

  “I’d really like to hear it,” one of the others murmured audibly.

  Clavain’s throat was dry. Diplomatically, this was quick-sand. “My proposal concerns Phobos—”

  “Go on,” Galiana invited.

  “I was injured there,” he said. “Very badly. Our attempt to clean out the worm infestation failed and I lost some good friends. That makes it personal between me and the worms. But I’d accept anyone’s help to finish them off.”

  Galiana glanced quickly at her compatriots before answering. “A joint assault operation?”

  “It could work.”

  “Yes . . .” Galiana looked lost, momentarily. “I suppose it could be a way out of the impasse. Our own attempt failed, too—and the Interdiction’s stopped us from trying again.” Again, she seemed to fall into reverie. “But who would really benefit from the flushing out of Phobos? We’d still be quarantined here.”

  Clavain leaned forward. “A cooperative gesture might be exactly the thing to lead to a relaxation in the terms of the Interdiction. But don’t think of it that way. Think instead of reducing the current threat from the worms.”

  “Threat?”

  Clavain nodded. “It’s possible that you haven’t noticed. ” He leaned further forward, elbows on the table. “We’re concerned about the Phobos worms. They’ve begun altering the moon’s orbit. The shift is tiny at the moment, but too large to be anything other than deliberate.”

  Galiana looked away from him for an instant, as if weighing her options, then said, “We were aware of this, but you weren’t to know that.”

  Was that an indication of gratitude from Galiana?

  He had assumed the worms’ activity could not have escaped Galiana. “We’ve seen odd behaviour from other worm infestations across the system, things that begin to look like emergent intelligence, but never anything this purposeful. This infestation must have come from a batch with some subroutines we never even guessed existed. Do you have any ideas about what they might be up to?”

  Again, there was the briefest of hesitations, as if she was communing with her compatriots for the right response. Then she nodded towards a male Conjoiner sitting opposite her, Clavain guessing that the gesture was entirely for his benefit. His hair was black and curly, his face as smooth and untroubled by expression as Galiana’s, with something of the same beautifully symmetrical bone structure.

  “This is Remontoire,” said Galiana. “He’s our specialist on the Phobos situation.”

  Remontoire nodded politely. “In answer to your question, we currently have no viable theories as to what they’re doing, but we do know one thing: they’re raising the apocentre of the moon’s orbit.” Apocentre, Clavain knew, was the Martian equivalent of apogee for an object orbiting Earth: the point of highest altitude in an elliptical orbit. Remontoire continued, his voice as preternaturally calm as a parent reading slowly to a child, “The natural orbit of Phobos is actually inside the Roche limit for a gravitationally bound moon; Phobos is raising a tidal bulge on Mars but, because of friction, the bulge can’t quite keep up with Phobos. It’s causing Phobos to spiral slowly closer to Mars, by about two metres a century. In a few tens of millions of years, what’s left of the moon will crash into Mars.”

  “You think the worms are elevating the orbit to avoid a cataclysm so far in the future?”

  “I don’t know,” Remontoire said. “I suppose the orbital alterations could also be a by-product of some less meaningful worm activity.”

  “I agree,” Clavain said. “But the danger remains. If the worms can elevate the moon’s
apocentre—even accidentally—we can assume they also have the means to lower its pericentre. They could drop Phobos on top of your nest. Does that scare you sufficiently that you’d consider cooperation with the Coalition?”

  Galiana steepled her fingers before her face; a human gesture of deep concentration that her time as a Conjoiner had not quite eroded. Clavain could almost feel the web of thought looming the room: ghostly strands of cognition reaching between each Conjoiner at the table, and beyond into the nest proper.

  “A winning team, is that your idea?” she said at length.

  “It’s got to be better than war,” Clavain said. “Hasn’t it?”

  Galiana might have been about to answer him when her face grew troubled. Clavain saw the wave of discomposure sweep over the others almost simultaneously. Something told him that it was nothing to do with his proposal.

  Around the table, half the display facets switched automatically over to another channel. The face that Clavain was looking at was much like his own, except that the face on the screen was missing an eye. It was his brother. Warren was overlaid with the official insignia of the Coalition and a dozen system-wide media cartels.

  He was in the middle of a speech. “. . . express my shock,” Warren said. “Or, for that matter, my outrage. It’s not just that they’ve murdered a valued colleague and a deeply experienced member of my team. They’ve murdered my brother.”

  Clavain felt the deepest of chills. “What is this?”

  “A live transmission from Deimos,” Galiana breathed. “It’s going out to all the nets, right out to the trans-Pluto habitats.”

  “What they did was an act of unspeakable treachery,” Warren said. “Nothing less than the premeditated, cold-blooded murder of a peace envoy.” And then a video clip sprang up to replace Warren. The image must have been snapped from Deimos or one of the Interdiction satellites. It showed Clavain’s shuttle, lying in the dust close to the dyke. He watched the Ouroborus destroy the shuttle, then saw the image zoom in on himself and Voi, running for sanctuary. The Ouroborus took Voi. But this time there was no ladder lowered down for him. Instead, he saw weapon beams scythe out from the nest towards him, knocking him to the ground. Horribly wounded, he tried to get up, to crawl a few centimetres nearer to his tormentors, but the worm was already upon him.

  He watched himself get eaten.

  Warren was back again. “The worms around the nest were a Conjoiner trap. My brother’s death must have been planned days—maybe even weeks—in advance.” His face was a granite-like mask of military composure. “There can only be one outcome from such an act—something the Conjoiners must have well understood. For months they’ve been goading us towards hostile action.” He paused, then nodded at an unseen audience. “Well, now they’re going to get it. In fact, our response has already commenced.”

  “Dear God, no,” Clavain said, but the evidence was everywhere now: all around the table he could see the updating orbital spread of the Coalition’s dropships, knifing down towards Mars.

  “I think it’s war,” Galiana said.

  Conjoiners stormed onto the roof of the nest, taking up defensive positions around the domes and the dyke’s edge. Most of them carried the same guns they had used against the Ouroborus. Smaller numbers were setting up automatic cannon on tripods. One or two were manhandling large anti-assault weapons into position. Most of it was war surplus. Fifteen years ago the Conjoiners had avoided extinction by deploying weapons of awesome ferocity— but those ship-to-ship armaments were simply too destructive to use against a nearby foe. Now it would be more visceral, closer to the primal templates of combat, and none of what the Conjoiners were marshalling would be much use against the kind of assault Warren had prepared, Clavain knew. They could slow an attack, but not much more than that.

  Galiana had given him another breather mask, made him don lightweight chameleoflage armour and then forced him to carry one of the smaller guns. The gun felt alien in his hands; something he had never expected to carry again. The only possible justification for carrying it was to use it against his brother’s forces—against his own side.

  Could he do that?

  It was clear that Warren had betrayed him; he had surely been aware of the worms around the nest. So his brother was capable not just of contempt, but of treacherous murder. For the first time, Clavain felt genuine hatred for Warren. He must have hoped that the worms would destroy the shuttle completely and kill Clavain and Voi in the process. It must have pained him to see Clavain make it to the dyke . . . pained him even more when Clavain called to talk about the tragedy. But Warren’s larger plan had not been affected. The diplomatic link between the nest and Deimos was secure—even the Demarchists had no immediate access to it. So Clavain’s call from the surface could be quietly ignored; spysat imagery doctored to make it appear as if he had never reached the dyke . . . had in fact been repelled by Conjoiner treachery. Inevitably the Demarchists would unravel the deception given time . . . but if Warren’s plan succeeded, they would all be embroiled in war long before then. That, thought Clavain, was all that Warren had ever wanted.

  Two brothers, Clavain thought. In many ways so alike. Both had embraced war once, but like a fickle lover Clavain had wearied of its glories. He had not even been injured as severely as Warren . . . but perhaps that was the point, too. Warren needed another war to avenge what one had stolen from him.

  Clavain despised and pitied him in equal measure.

  He searched for the safety clip on the gun. The rifle, now that he studied it more closely, was not all that different from those he had used during the war. The read-out said the ammo-cell was fully charged.

  He looked into the sky.

  The attack wave broke orbit hard and steep above the Wall: five hundred fireballs screeching towards the nest. The insertion scorched centimetres of ablative armour from most of the ships; fried a few others that came in just fractionally too hard. Clavain knew exactly what was happening: he had studied possible attack scenarios for years, the range of outcomes burned indelibly into his memory.

  The anti-assault guns were already working—locking on to the plasma trails as they flowered overhead, swinging down to find the tiny spark of heat at the head, computing refraction paths for laser pulses, spitting death into the sky. The unlucky ships flared a white that hurt the back of the eye and rained down in a billion dulling sparks. A dozen— then a dozen more. Maybe fifty in total before the guns could no longer acquire targets. It was nowhere near enough. Clavain’s memory of the simulations told him that at least four hundred units of the attack wave would survive both re-entry and the Conjoiner’s heavy defences.

  Nothing that Galiana could do would make any difference.

  And that had always been the paradox. Galiana was capable of running the same simulations. She must always have known that her provocations would bring down something she could never hope to defeat.

  Something that was always going to destroy her.

  The surviving members of the wave were levelling out now, commencing long, ground-hugging runs from all directions. Cocooned in their dropships, the soldiers would be suffering punishing gee-loads, but it was nothing they were not engineered to withstand: their cardiovascular systems had been augmented with the sort of non-neural implants the Coalition grudgingly tolerated.

  The first of the wave came arcing in at supersonic speeds. All around, worms struggled to snatch them out of the sky, but mostly they were too slow to catch the dropships. Galiana’s people manned their cannon positions and did their best to fend off as many as they could. Clavain clutched his gun, not firing yet. Best to save his ammo-cell power for a target he stood a chance of injuring.

  Above, the first dropships made hairpin turns, nosing suicidally down towards the nest. Then they fractured cleanly apart, revealing falling pilots clad in bulbous armour. Just before the moment of impact, each pilot’s armour exploded into a mass of black shock-absorbing balloons, looking something like a blackberry, bouncing
across the nest before the balloons deflated just as swiftly to leave the pilot standing on the ground. By then the pilot—now properly a soldier—would have a comprehensive computer-generated map of the nest’s nooks and crannies; enemy positions graphed in real-time from the down-looking spysats.

  Clavain fell behind the curve of a dome before the nearest soldier got a lock on him. The firefight was beginning now. He had to hand it to Galiana’s people—they were fighting like devils. And they were at least as well coordinated as the attackers. But their weapons and armour were simply inadequate. Chameleoflage was only truly effective against a solitary enemy, or a massed enemy moving in from a common direction. With Coalition forces surrounding him, Clavain’s suit was going crazy trying to match every background, like a chameleon in a house of mirrors.

  The sky overhead looked strange now—darkening purple. And the purple was spreading in a mist across the nest. Galiana had deployed some kind of chemical smoke-screen: infrared and optically opaque, he guessed. It would occlude the spysats and might be primed to adhere only to enemy chameleoflage. That had never been in Warren’s simulations. Galiana had just given herself the slightest of edges.

  A soldier stepped out of the mist, the obscene darkness of a gun muzzle trained on Clavain. His chameleoflage armour was dappled with vivid purple patches, ruining its stealthiness. The man fired, but his discharge wasted itself against Clavain’s armour. Clavain returned the compliment, dropping his compatriot. What he had done, he thought, was not technically treason. Not yet. All he had done was act in self-preservation.

  The man was wounded, but not yet dead. Clavain stepped through the purple haze and knelt down beside the soldier. He tried not to look at the man’s wound.

  “Can you hear me?” he said. There was no answer from the man, but beneath his visor, Clavain thought he saw the man’s lips shape a word. The man was just a kid—hardly old enough to remember much of the last war. “There’s something you have to know,” Clavain continued. “Do you realise who I am?” He wondered how recognisable he was, under the breather mask. Then something made him relent. He could tell the man he was Nevil Clavain—but what would that achieve? The soldier would be dead in minutes; maybe sooner than that. Nothing would be served by the soldier knowing that the basis for his attack was a lie; that he would not in fact be laying down his life for a just cause. The universe could be spared a single callous act.