'I'm not thinking about hiding. I'm thinking about moving. What if the moon's an escape vehicle? An Exodus Ark big enough to take the entire population?'
'You have no evidence.'
'I have this.' With that, Merlin produced one of Minla's old picture books. Seventy years had aged its pages to a brittle yellow, dimming the vibrancy of the old inks. But the linework in the illustrations was still clear enough. Merlin held the book open at a particular page, letting Minla look at it. 'Your people had a memory of arriving on Lecythus in a moon-sized ship,' he said. 'Maybe that was true. Equally, maybe it was a case of muddling one thing with another. I'm wondering if the thing you were meant to remember was not that you came by moon, but that you could leave by one.'
Minla stared at the picture. For a moment, like a breeze on a summer's day, Merlin felt a wave of almost unbearable sadness pass through the room. It was as if the picture had transported her back to her childhood, before she had set her life on the trajectory that, seventy years later, would bring it to this bed, this soundproofed room, the shameful survival of this one ship. The last time she had looked at the picture, everything had been possible, all life's opportunities open to her. She'd been the daughter of a powerful and respected man, with influence and wisdom at her fingertips. And yet from all the choices presented to her, she had selected this one dark path, and followed it to its conclusion.
'Even if it is a ship,' she said softly, 'you'll never get them all aboard.'
'I'll die trying.'
'And us? We get abandoned to our fates?'
Merlin smiled: he'd been expecting the question. 'There are twelve hundred people on this ship, some of them children. They weren't all party to your schemes, so they don't all deserve to die when you meet the Huskers. That's why I'm leaving behind weapons and a detachment of proctors to show you how to install and use them.'
For the first time since his arrival in the room, Minla spoke like a leader again. 'Will they make a difference?'
'They'll give your ship a fighting chance. That's the best I can offer.'
'Then we'll take what we're given.'
'I'm sorry it came to this. I played a part in what you became, of that I've no doubt. But I didn't make you a monster.'
'No,' she said. 'I'll at least take credit for myself, and for the fact that I saved twelve hundred of my people. If it took a monster to do that, doesn't that mean we sometimes need monsters?'
'Maybe we do. But that doesn't mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.' Gently, as if bestowing a gift, Merlin placed the picture book on Minla's recumbent form. 'I'm afraid I have to go now. There won't be much time when I get back to Lecythus.'
'Please,' she said. 'Not like this. Not this way.'
'This is how it ends,' he said, before turning from her bed and walking to the exit. 'Goodbye, Minla.'
Twenty minutes later he was in the Waynet, racing back to Lecythus.
There's a lot to tell, and one day I'll get around to writing it up properly. For now it's enough to say that I was right to trust my instincts about the moon. I just wish I'd put the clues together sooner than I did. Perhaps then Minla would never have had to commit her crimes.
I didn't save as many as I'd have wished, but I did save some of the people Minla left behind to die. I suppose that has to count for something. It was close, but if there's one thing to be said for Waymaker-level technology, it's that it's almost childishly easy to use. They were like babies with the toys of the gods. They left that moon there for a good reason, and while it was necessary for them to camouflage it - it had to be capable of fooling the Huskers, or whoever they built that sky to hide from - the moon itself was obligingly easy to break into, once our purpose became clear. And once it started moving, once its great engines came online after tens of thousands of years of quiet dormancy, no force in the universe could have held it back. I shadowed the fleeing moon long enough to establish that it was headed into a sector that appeared to be free of Husker activity, at least for now. It'll be touch and go for a few centuries, but with force and wisdom on their side, I think they'll make it.
I'm in the Waynet now, riding the flow away from Calliope. The syrinx still works, much to my relief. For a while I considered riding the contraflow, back towards that lone Exodus Ark. By the time I reached them they'd have been only days away from the encounter. But my presence wouldn't have made a decisive difference to their chances of surviving the Huskers, and I couldn't have expected much of a warm welcome.
Not after my final gift to Minla.
I'm glad she never asked me too much about those flowers, or the world they came from. If she'd wanted to know more about Lacertine, she might have sensed that I was holding something back. Such as the fact that the assassin guilds on Lacertine were masters of their craft, known throughout the worlds of the Waynet for their skill and cunning, and that no guild on Lacertine was more revered than the bio-artificers who made the sleepflowers.
It was said that they could make them in any shape, any colour, to match any known flower from any known world. It was said that they could pass all tests save the most microscopic scrutiny. It was said that if you wanted to kill someone, you gave them a gift of flowers from Lacertine.
She would have been dead not long after my departure. The flowers would have detected her presence - they were keyed to locate a single breathing form in a room, most commonly a sleeper - and when the room was quiet they would have become stealthily animate, leaving their vase and creeping from point to point with the slowness of a sundial's shadow, their movement imperceptible to the naked eye, but enough to take them to the face of the sleeper. Their tendrils would have closed around Minla's face with the softness of a lover's caress. Then the paralysing toxins would have hit her nervous system.
I hoped it was painless. I hoped it was quick. But what I remembered of the Lacertine assassins was that they were known for their cleverness, not their clemency.
Afterwards, I deleted the sleepflowers from the bio-library.
I knew Minla for less than a year of my life, and for seventy years by another reckoning. Sometimes when I think of her I see a human being in all her dimensions, as real as anyone I've ever known. Other times, I see something two-dimensional, like a faded illustration in one of her books, so thin that the light shines through her.
I don't hate her, even now. But I wish time and tide had never brought us together.
A comfortable number of light-hours behind me, the Waynet has just cut into Calliope's heart. It has already sliced through the photosphere and the star's convection zone. Quite what has happened, or is happening, or will happen, when it touched (or touches, or will touch) the nuclear-burning core is still far from clear.
Theory says that no impulse can travel faster than light. Since my ship is already riding the Waynet's flow at very nearly the speed of light, it seems impossible that any information concerning Calliope's fate will ever be able to catch up with me. And yet . . . several minutes ago I swear that I felt a kick, a jolt in the smooth glide of my flight, as if some report of that destructive event had raced up the flow at superluminal speed, buffeting my little ship.
There's nothing in the data to suggest any unusual event, and I don't have any plans to return to Lecythus and see what became of that world when its sun was gored open. But I still felt something, and if it reached me up the flow of the Waynet, if that impulse bypassed the iron barrier of causality itself, I can't begin to imagine the energies that must have been involved, or what must have happened to the strand of the Waynet behind me. Perhaps it's unravelling, and I'm about to breathe my last breath before I become a thin smear of naked quarks, stretched across several billion kilometres of interstellar space.
That would certainly be one way to go.
Frankly, it would be nice to have the luxury to dwell on such fears. But I still have a gun to find, and I'm not getting any younger.
Mission resumed.
MERLIN'S GUN
r /> Punishment saved Sora.
If her marksmanship had not been the worst in her class, she would never have been assigned the task of overseeing proctors down in ship's docks. She would not have had to stand for hours, alone except for her familiar, running a laser-stylus across the ore samples the proctors brought back to the swallowship, dreaming of finishing shift and meeting Verdin. It was boring - menial work. But because the docks were open to vacuum, the work required a pressure suit.
'Got to be a drill,' she said, when the attack began.
'No,' her familiar said. 'It really does seem as if they've caught up with us.'
Sora's calm evaporated.
'How many?'
'Four elements of the swarm; standard attack pattern; coherent-matter weapons at maximum range . . . novamine countermeasures deployed but seemingly ineffective . . . initial damage reports severe and likely underestimate--'
The floor pitched under her feet. The knee-high androform proctors looked to each other nervously. The machines had no more experience of battle than Sora, and unlike her they had never experienced the simulations of warcreche.
Sora dropped the clipboard.
'What do I do?'
'My advice,' her familiar said, 'is that you engage that old mammalian flight response and run like hell.'
She obeyed, stooping down low-ceilinged corridors festooned with pipes, snaking around hand-painted murals that showed decisive battles from the Cohort's history: squadrons of ships exchanging fire, worlds wreathed in flame. The endgame was much swifter than those languid paintings suggested. The swarm had been chasing Snipe for nine years of shiptime, during which Sora had passed through warcreche to adulthood. Yet beyond the ship's relativistic frame of reference, nearly sixty years had passed. Captain Tchagra had done all she could to lose the swarm. Her last gamble had been the most desperate of all: using the vicious gravity of a neutron star to slingshot the swallowship on another course, one that the chasing ships ought not to have been able to follow, unless they skimmed the neutron star even more suicidally. But they had, forcing Snipe to slow from relativistic flight and nurse its wounds in a fallow system. It was there that the swarm attacked.
Near the end, the floor drifted away from Sora's feet as ship's gravity faltered, and she had to progress hand over hand.
'This is wrong,' Sora said, arriving in the pod bay. 'This section should be pressurised. And where is everyone?'
'Attack must be a lot worse than those initial reports suggested. I advise you to get into a pod as quickly as you can.'
'I can't go, not without Verdin.'
'Let me worry about him.'
Knowing better than to argue, Sora climbed into the nearest of the cylindrical pods mounted on a railed pallet ready for injection into the tunnel. The lid clammed shut, air rushing in.
'What about Verdin?'
'Safe. The attack was bad, but I'm hearing reports that the aft sections made it.'
'Get me out of here, then.'
'With all pleasure.'
Acceleration came suddenly, numbness gloving her spine.
'I've got worse news,' her familiar said. The voice was an echo of Sora's own, but an octave lower and calmer, like a slightly older and more sensible sister. 'I'm sorry, but I had to lie to you. My highest duty is your preservation. I knew that if I didn't lie, you wouldn't save yourself.'
Sora thought about that, while she watched the ship die from the vantage point of her pod. The Husker weapons had hit its middle sphere, barely harming the parasol of the swallowscoop. Bodies fell into space, stiff and tiny as snowflakes. Light licked from the sphere. Snipe became a flower of hurting whiteness, darkening as it bloomed.
'What did you lie about?'
'About Verdin. I'm sorry. He didn't make it. None of them did.'
Sora waited for the impact of the words, aware that what she felt now was only a precursor to the shock, like the moment when she touched the hot barrel of a gun in warcreche, and her fingers registered the heat but the pain itself did not arrive instantly, giving her time to prepare for its sting. She waited, for what she knew - in all likelihood - would be the worst thing she had ever felt. And waited.
'What's wrong with me? Why don't I feel anything?'
'Because I'm not allowing it. Not just now. If you opt to grieve at some later point then I can restore the appropriate brain functions.'
Sora thought about that too.
'You couldn't make it sound any more clinical, could you?'
'Don't imagine this is easy for me, Sora. I don't exactly have a great deal of experience in this matter.'
'Well, now you're getting it.'
She was alone, no arguing with that. None of the other crew had survived - and she had only made it because she was on punishment duty for her failings as a soldier. No use looking for help: the nearest Cohort motherbase was seventy light-years towards the Galactic Core. Even if there were swallowships within broadcast range it would take decades for the nearest to hear her; decades again for them to curve around and rescue her. No; she would not be rescued. She would drift here, circling a nameless sun, until her energy reserves could not even sustain frostwatch.
'What about the enemy?' Sora said, seized by an urge to gaze upon her nemesis. 'Where are the bastards?'
A map of the system scrolled across the faceplate of her helmet, overlaid with the four Husker ships that had survived the slingshot around the neutron star. They were near the two Ways that punched through the system, marked on the map as fine straight flaws, surrounded by shaded hazard regions. Perhaps, like the Cohort, the Huskers were trying to find a way to enter the Waynet without being killed; trying to gain the final edge in a war that had lasted twenty-three thousand years. The Huskers had been at war with the Cohort ever since those ruthless alien cyborgs had emerged from ancient Dyson spheres near the Galactic Core.
'They're not interested in me,' Sora said. 'They know that even if anyone survived the attack, they won't survive much longer. That's right, isn't it?'
'They're nothing if not pragmatic.'
'I want to die. I want you to put me to sleep painlessly and then kill me. You can do that, can't you? I mean, if I order it?'
Sora did not complete her next thought. What happened, instead, was that her consciousness stalled, except for the awareness of the familiar, thoughts bleeding into her own. She had experienced something like this stalling aboard Snipe, when the crew went into frostwatch for the longest transits between engagements. But no frostwatch had ever felt this long. After an age, her thoughts oozed back to life. She groped for the mental routines that formed language.
'You lied again!'
'This time I plead innocence. I just put you in a position where you couldn't give me the order you were about to. Seemed the best thing under the circumstances.'
'I'll bet it did.' In that instant of stalled thought, the pod had turned opaque, concealing the starscape and the debris of the ship. 'What else?'
The pod turned glassy across its upper surface, revealing a slowly wheeling starscape above filthy ice. The glass, once perfectly transparent, now had a smoky lustre. 'Once you were sleeping,' the familiar said, 'I used the remaining fuel to guide the pod to a cometary shard. It seemed safer than drifting.'
'How long?' Sora was trying to guess from the state of the pod, but the interior looked as new as when she had ejected from Snipe. The sudden smokiness of the glass was alarming, however: Sora did not want to think how many years of cosmic ray abrasion would be required to scuff the material to that degree. 'Are we talking years or decades, or more than that?'
'Shall I tell you why I woke you, first?'
'If it's going to make any difference--'
'I think it makes all the difference, quite frankly.' The familiar paused for effect. 'Someone has decided to pay this system a visit.'
Sora saw it on the map now, revised to account for the new relative positions of the celestial bodies in this system. The unidentified ship was denoted by a l
ilac arrow, moving slowly between Waynet transit nodes, the thickened points where the Way lines intercepted the ecliptic plane.
'It must have a functioning syrinx,' Sora said, marvelling, and for the first time feeling as if death was not the immediately preferable option. 'It must be able to use the Ways.'
'Worth waking you up for, I think.'
Sora had eight hours to signal the ship before it reached the other node of the Waynet. She left the pod - stiff, aching and disorientated, but basically functional - and walked to the edge of a crater, one that the familiar had mapped on the cometary shard some years earlier. Three thousand years earlier, to be precise, for that was how long it had taken to scratch the sheen from the glass. The news had been shocking, at first - until Sora realised that the span of time was not in itself important. All that she had ever known was the ship; now that it was gone, it hardly mattered how much time had passed.