Galactic North

  The regions through which they were descending now were as cold and grey as any Clavain had seen. There were no entoptic generators buried in these walls to supply visual information to the implants Galiana had put in his head, and even her own aura of light was gone. They only met a few other Conjoiners, and they were all moving in the same general direction: down to the nest’s basement levels. This was unknown territory for Clavain.

  Where was Galiana taking him?

  “If you had an escape route all along, why did you wait so long before sending the children through it?”

  “I told you, we couldn’t bring them to Transenlightenment too soon. The older they were, the better,” Galiana said. “Now, though—”

  “There was no waiting any longer, was there?”

  Eventually they reached a chamber with the same echoing acoustics as the topside hangar. The chamber was dark except for a few pools of light, but in the shadows Clavain made out discarded excavation equipment and freight pallets; cranes and deactivated robots. The air smelled of ozone. Something was still going on there.

  “Is this the factory where you make the shuttles?” Clavain said.

  “We manufactured parts of them here, yes,” Galiana said, “but that was a side-industry.”

  “Of what?”

  “The tunnel, of course.” Galiana made more lights come on. At the far end of the chamber—they were walking towards it—waited a series of cylindrical things with pointed ends, like huge bullets. They rested on rails, one after the other. The tip of the very first bullet was next to a dark hole in the wall. Clavain was about to say something when there was a sudden loud buzz and the first bullet slammed into the hole. The remaining three bullets eased slowly forward and halted. Conjoiners were waiting to board them.

  He remembered what Galiana had said about no one being left behind.

  “What am I seeing here?”

  “A way out of the nest,” Galiana said. “And a way off Mars, though I suppose you figured that part out for yourself. ”

  “There is no way off Mars,” Clavain said. “The Interdiction guarantees that. Haven’t you learned that with your shuttles?”

  “The shuttles were only ever a diversionary tactic,” Galiana said. “They made your side think we were still striving to escape, whereas our true escape route was already fully operational.”

  “A pretty desperate diversion.”

  “Not really. I lied to you when I said we didn’t clone. We did—but only to produce braindead corpses. The shuttles were full of corpses before we ever launched them.”

  For the first time since leaving Deimos, Clavain smiled, amused by the sheer obliquity of Galiana’s thinking.

  “Of course, the shuttles performed another function,” she said. “They provoked your side into a direct attack against the nest.”

  “So this was deliberate all along?”

  “Yes. We needed to draw your side’s attention; to concentrate your military presence in low orbit, near the nest. Of course, we were hoping the offensive would come later than it did . . . but we reckoned without Warren’s conspiracy. ”

  “Then you are planning something.”

  “Yes.” The next bullet slammed into the wall, ozone crackling from its linear induction rails. Now only two remained. “We can talk later. There isn’t much time left.” She projected an image into his visual field: the Wall, now veined by titanic fractures down half its length. “It’s collapsing. ”

  “And Felka?”

  “She’s still trying to save it.”

  He looked at the Conjoiners boarding the leading bullet; tried to imagine where they were going. Was it to any kind of sanctuary he might recognise—or to something so beyond his experience that it might as well be death? Did he have the nerve to find out? Perhaps. He had nothing to lose now, after all: he certainly could not return home. But if he was going to follow Galiana’s exodus, it could not be with the sense of shame he now felt in abandoning Felka.

  The answer, when it came, was simple. “I’m going back for her. If you can’t wait for me, don’t. But don’t try to stop me doing this.”

  Galiana looked at him, shaking her head slowly. “She won’t thank you for saving her life, Clavain.”

  “Maybe not now,” he said.

  He had the feeling he was running back into a burning building. Given what Galiana had said about the girl’s deficiencies—that by any reasonable definition she was hardly more than an automaton—what he was doing was very likely pointless, if not suicidal. But if he turned his back on her, he would become something less than human himself. He had misread Galiana badly when she said the girl was precious to them. He had assumed some bond of affection . . . whereas what Galiana meant was that the girl was precious in the sense of a vital component. Now— with the nest being abandoned—the component had no further use. Did that make Galiana as cold as a machine herself—or was she just being unfailingly realistic?

  He found the nursery after only one or two false turns, and then Felka’s room. The implants Galiana had given him were once again throwing phantom images into the air. Felka sat within the crumbling circle of the Wall. Great fissures now reached to the surface of Mars. Shards of the Wall, as big as icebergs, had fractured away and now lay like vast sheets of broken glass across the regolith.

  She was losing, and she knew it. This was not just some more difficult phase of the game. This was something she could never win, and her realisation was now plainly evident in her face. She was still moving her arms frantically, but her face was red, locked into a petulant scowl of anger and fear.

  For the first time, she seemed to notice him.

  Something had broken through her shell, Clavain thought. For the first time in years, something was happening that was beyond her control; something that threatened to destroy the neat, geometric universe she had made for herself. She might not have distinguished his face from all the other people who came to see her, but she surely recognised something . . . that now the adult world was bigger than she was, and it was only from the adult world that any kind of salvation could come.

  Then she did something that shocked him beyond words. She looked deep into his eyes and reached out a hand.

  But there was nothing he could do to help her.

  Later—it felt like hours, but in fact could only have been tens of minutes—Clavain found that he was able to breathe normally again. They had escaped Mars now: Galiana, Felka and himself, riding the last bullet.

  And they were still alive.

  The bullet’s vacuum-filled tunnel cut deep into Mars; a shallow arc curving under the crust before rising again, thousands of kilometres away, well beyond the Wall, where the atmosphere was as thin as ever. For the Conjoiners, boring the tunnel had not been especially difficult. Such engineering would have been impossible on a planet that had plate tectonics, but beneath its lithosphere, Mars was geologically quiet. They had not even had to worry about tailings. What they excavated, they compressed and fused and used to line the tunnel, maintaining rigidity against awesome pressure with some trick of piezoelectricity. In the tunnel, the bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for ten minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to their legs to maintain bloodflow to their brains. Even so, it was difficult to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.

  They were moving at ten kilometres a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trap door. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them . . . but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.

  In half a minute, they were in true space.

  “The Interdiction’s sensor web can’t track us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spysats directly over the nest. That was a mistake, Clavain
—even though we did our best to reinforce your thinking with the shuttle launches. But now we’re well outside your sensor footprint.”

  Clavain nodded. “But that won’t help us once we’re far from the surface. Then we’ll just look like another ship trying to reach deep space. The web may be late locking on to us, but it’ll still get us in the end.”

  “It would,” Galiana said, “if deep space was where we were going.”

  Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain thought, she would fall for ever. If that was the case, he had only postponed her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had in flicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess—even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years . . .

  “Where are you taking us?” he asked.

  Galiana issued some neural command that made the bullet’s skin become transparent.

  “There,” she said.

  Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in until the object was much clearer.

  Dark—misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.

  “Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”

  “Yes,” Galiana said.

  “But the worms—”

  “Don’t exist any more.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed, but that was only what we wanted you to think.”

  For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”

  “Ever since the ceasefire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”

  Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device that lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something that had never existed before in the whole of human experience.

  He was looking at a starship.

  “We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try to stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface of Mars, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.”

  “What about the Demarchists?”

  “They won’t stop us.” She spoke with total assurance— implying . . . what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumoured that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.

  Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”

  “That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny—we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one-tenth of a millimetre per second—but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Think about it. The tube in Mars was a thousand kilometres long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over ten minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”

  Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”

  “Complete deceleration in one-fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”

  “I can’t survive that.”

  “No, you can’t. Not the way you are right now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be any damage they can’t fix in Phobos.”

  “It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”

  “You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”

  “And you still tell me none of this was planned?”

  “It wasn’t, but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though . . . you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind . . . at the back of our mind—”

  “You always hoped it might come to this?”

  Galiana smiled.

  He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.

  Clavain nodded assent, preparing for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.

  He was ready to defect.

  GLACIAL

  Nevil Clavain picked his way across a mosaic of shattered ice. The field stretched away in all directions, gouged by sleek-sided crevasses. They had mapped the largest cracks before landing, but he was still wary of surprises; his breath caught every time his booted foot cracked through a layer of ice. He was aware of how dangerous it would be to wander from the red path his implants were painting across the glacier field.

  He only had to remind himself of what had happened to Martin Setterholm.

  They had found his body a month ago, shortly after their arrival on the planet. It had been near the main American base; a stroll from the perimeter of the huge, deserted complex of stilted domes and ice-walled caverns. Clavain’s friends had found dozens of dead within the buildings, and most of them had been easily identified against the lists of base personnel that the expedition had pieced together. But Clavain had been troubled by the gaps, and had wondered if any further dead might be found in the surrounding ice fields. He had explored the warrens of the base until he found an airlock that had never been closed, and though snowfalls had long since obliterated any footprints, there was little doubt in which direction a wanderer would have set off.

  Long before the base had vanished over the horizon behind him, Clavain had run into the edge of a deep, wide crevasse. And there at the bottom—just visible if he leaned over the edge—was a man’s outstretched arm and hand. Clavain had gone back to the others and had them return with a winch to lower him into the depths, descending thirty or forty metres into a cathedral of stained and sculpted ice. The body had come into view: a figure in an old-fashioned atmospheric survival suit. The man’s legs were bent in a horrible way, like those of a strangely articulated alien. Clavain knew it was a man because the fall had jolted his helmet from its neck-ring; the corpse’s well-preserved face was pressed halfway into a pillow of ice. The helmet had ended up a few metres away.

  No one died instantly on Diadem. The air was breathable for short periods, and the man had clearly
had time to ponder his predicament. Even in his confused state of mind he must have known that he was going to die.

  “Martin Setterholm,” Clavain had said aloud, picking up the helmet and reading the nameplate on the crown. He felt sorry for him, but could not deny himself the small satisfaction of accounting for another of the dead. Setterholm had been amongst the missing, and though he had waited the better part of a century for it, he would at least receive a proper funeral now.

  There was something else, but Clavain very nearly missed it. Setterholm had lived long enough to scratch out a message in the ice. Sheltered at the base of the glacier, the marks he had gouged were still legible. Three letters, it seemed to Clavain: an "I,” a "V” and an “F.”

  IVF.

  The message meant nothing to Clavain, and even a deep search of the Conjoiner collective memory threw up only a handful of vaguely plausible candidates. The least ridiculous was “in vitro fertilisation,” but even that seemed to have no immediate connection with Setterholm. But then again, he had been a biologist, according to the base records. Did the message spell out the chilling truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?

  But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact details of Setterholm’s death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway, just one more example of the way most of them had died: not by suicide or violence but through carelessness, recklessness or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures— like not wandering into a crevasse zone without the right equipment—had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all happened swiftly.

  Galiana talked about it as if it was some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners speculated about an emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.