'Not exactly subtle,' Merlin said. 'Self-repair mechanisms must still be functional, to one degree or another, which implies that the control systems for the gun will still work. It also means that the counter-intrusion systems will also be operational.'
'Oh, good.'
'Aren't you excited that we're about to end the longest war in human history?'
'But we're not, are we? I mean, be realistic. It'll take tens of thousands of years simply for the knowledge of this weapon's existence to reach the remotest areas of the war. Nothing will happen overnight.'
'I can see why it would disturb you,' Merlin said, tapping a finger against his teeth. 'None of us have ever known anything other than war with the Huskers.'
'Just show me where it is.'
They made one low orbital pass over the pyramid, alert for buried weapons, but no attack came. On the next pass, lower still, Merlin's ship dropped proctors to snoop ground defences. 'Maybe they had something bigger once,' Merlin said. 'Artillery that could take us out from millions of kilometres away. But if it ever existed, it's not working any more.'
They made groundfall a kilometre from the pyramid, then waited for all but three of the proctors to return to the ship. Merlin tasked the trio to secure a route into the structure, but their use was limited. Once the simple-minded machines were out of command range of the ship - which happened as soon as they had penetrated beyond the outer layer of the structure - they were essentially useless.
'Who built the pyramid? And how did you know about it?'
'The same culture that got into the war I told you about,' he said, as they clamped on the armoured carapaces of their suits in the airlock. 'They were far less advanced than the Waymakers, but they were a lot closer to them historically, and they knew enough to control the weapon and use it for their own purposes.'
'How'd they find it?'
'They stole it. By then the Waymaker culture was - how shall I put it - sleeping? Not really paying due attention to the use made of its artefacts?'
'You're being cryptic again, Merlin.'
'Sorry. Solitude does that to you.'
'Did you meet someone out there, Merlin - someone who knew about the gun, and told you where to find it?' And made you young in the process? she thought.
'My business, isn't it?'
'Maybe once. Now, I'd say we're in this together. Equal partners. Fair enough?'
'Nothing's fair in war, Sora.' But he was smiling, defusing the remark, even as he slipped his helmet down over the neck ring, twisting it to engage the locking mechanism.
'How big is the gun?' Sora asked.
The pyramid rose ahead, blank as an origami sculpture, entrance ducts around the base concealed by intervening landforms. Merlin's proctors had already found a route that would take them at least some way inside.
'You won't be disappointed,' Merlin said.
'And what are we going to do when we find it? Just drag it behind us?'
'Trust me.' Merlin's laugh crackled over the radio. 'Moving it won't be a problem.'
They walked slowly along a track cleared by proctors, covered at the same time by the hull-mounted weapons on Tyrant.
'There's something ahead,' Merlin said, a few minutes later. He raised his own weapon and pointed towards a pool of darkness fifteen or twenty metres in front of them. 'It's artefactual, definitely metallic.'
'I thought your proctors cleared the area.'
'Looks like they missed something.'
Merlin advanced ahead of her. As they approached the dark object, it resolved into an elongated form half-buried in the ice, a little to the left of the track. It was a body.
'Been here a while,' Merlin said, a minute or so later, when he was close enough to see the object properly. 'Armour's pitted by micrometeorite impacts.'
'It's a Husker, isn't it?'
Merlin's helmet nodded. 'My guess is they were in this system a few centuries ago. Must have been attracted by the pyramid, even if they didn't necessarily know its significance.'
'I've never seen one this close. Be careful, won't you?'
Merlin knelt down to examine the creature.
The shape was much more androform than Sora had been expecting, the same general size and proportions as a suited human. The suit was festooned with armoured protrusions, ridges and horns, its blackened outer surface leathery and devoid of anything genuinely mechanical. One arm was outspread, terminating in a human-looking hand, complexly gauntleted. A long, knobby weapon lay just out of reach, lines blurred by the same processes of erosion that had afflicted the Husker.
Merlin clamped his hands around the head.
'What are you doing?'
'What does it look like?' He was twisting now; she could hear the grunts of exertion, before his suit's servosystems came online and took the brunt of the effort. 'I've always wanted to find one this well preserved,' Merlin said. 'Never thought I'd get a chance to tell if an old rumour was even halfway right.'
The helmet detached from the creature's torso, cracking open along a fine seam that ran from the crown to the beaklike protrusion at the helmet's front. Vapour pulsed from the gap. Merlin placed the separated halves of the helmet on the ground, then tapped on his helmet torch, bringing light down on the exposed head. Sora stepped closer. The Husker's head was encased in curling, matt-black support machinery, like a statue enveloped in vine.
But it was well preserved, and very human.
'I don't like it,' she said. 'What does it mean?'
'It means,' Merlin said, 'that occasionally one should pay proper attention to rumours.'
'Talk to me, Merlin. Start telling me what I need to hear, or we don't take another step towards that pyramid.'
'You will like very little of it.'
She looked out of the corner of her eye at the marble-like face of the Husker. 'I already don't like it, Merlin; what have I got to lose?'
Merlin started to say something, then fell to the ground, executing the fall with the slowness that came with the moon's feeble gravity.
'Oh, nice timing,' the familiar said.
Reflexes drove Sora down with him, until the two of them were crouching low on the rusty surface. Merlin was still alive. She could hear him breathing, but each breath came like the rasp of a saw.
'I'm hit, Sora. I don't know how badly.'
'Hold on.' She accessed the telemetry from his suit, graphing a medical diagnostic on the inner glass of her helmet.
'There,' said the familiar. 'A beam-weapon penetration in the thoracic area; small enough that the self-sealants prevented any pressure loss, but not rapidly enough to stop the beam gnawing into his chest.'
'Is that bad?'
'Well, it's not good . . . but there's a chance the beam would have cauterised as it travelled, preventing any deep internal bleeding . . .'
Merlin coughed. He managed to ask her what it was.
'You've taken a laser, I think.' She was speaking quickly. 'Maybe part of the pyramid defences.'
'I really should have those proctors of mine checked out.' Merlin managed a laugh, which then transitioned into a series of racking coughs. 'Bit late for that now, don't you think?'
'If I can get you back to the ship--'
'No. We have to go on.' He coughed again, and then was a long time catching his breath. 'The longer we wait, the harder it will be.'
'After ten thousand years, you're worried about a few minutes?'
'Yes, now that the pyramid defences have been alerted.'
'You're in no shape to move.'
'I'm winded, that's all. I think I can . . .' His voice dissolved into coughs, but even while it was happening, Sora watched him push himself upright. When he spoke again his voice was hardly a wheeze. 'I'm gambling there was only one of whatever it was. Otherwise we should never have made it as far as we did.'
'I hope you're right, Merlin.'
'There's - um - something else. Ship's just given me a piece of not entirely welcome news. A few neutrino sources tha
t weren't detected when we first got here.'
'Oh, great.' Sora didn't need to be told what that meant: a Husker swarm, one that had presumably been waiting around the gas giant all along, chilled down below detection thresholds. 'Bastards must have been sleeping, waiting for something to happen here.'
'Sounds like a perfectly sensible strategy,' the familiar said, before projecting a map onto Sora's faceplate, confirming the arrival of the enemy ships. 'One of the moons has a liquid ocean. My guess is that the Huskers were parked below the ice.
Sora asked Merlin: 'How long before they get here?'
'No more than two or three hours.'
'Right. Then we'd better make damn sure we've got that gun by then, right?'
She carried him most of the way, his heels scuffing the ground in a half-hearted attempt at locomotion. But he remained lucid, and Sora began to hope that the wound really had been cauterised by the beam-weapon.
'You knew the Husker would be human, didn't you?' she said, to keep him talking.
'Told you: rumours. The alien cyborg story was just that - a fiction our own side invented. I told you it wouldn't be xenocide.'
'Not good enough, Merlin.' She was about to tell him about the symbiote in her head, then drew back, fearful that it would destroy what trust he had in her. 'I know you've been lying. I hacked your ship's log.'
They had reached the shadow of the pyramid, descending the last hillock towards the access ports spaced around the rim.
'Thought you trusted me.'
'I had to know if there was a reason not to. And I think I was right.'
She told him what she had learned: he'd been travelling for longer than he had told her - whole decades longer, by shiptime - and that he had grown old during that journey, and perhaps a little insane. And then how he had seemed to find the Brittlestar. 'Problem is, Merlin, we - I - don't know what happened to you in that thing, except that it had something to do with finding the gun, and you came out of it younger than when you went in.'
'You really want to know?'
'Take a guess.'
He started telling her some of it, while she dragged him towards their destination.
The pyramid was surrounded by tens of metres of self-repairing armour, white as bone. If the designers had not allowed deliberate entrances around its rim, Sora doubted that she and Merlin would ever have found a way to get inside.
'Should have been sentries here, once,' Merlin said, while leaning against her shoulder. 'It's lucky for us that everything falls apart, eventually. '
'Except your fabled gun.' They were moving down a sloping corridor, the walls and ceiling unblemished, the floor strewn with icy debris from the moon's surface. 'Anyway, stop changing the subject.'
Merlin coughed and resumed his narrative. 'I was getting very old and very disillusioned. I hadn't found the gun and I was about ready to give up. That, or go insane. Then I found the Brittlestar. I came out of the Waynet and there it was, sitting there pulsing gravity waves at me.'
'It would take a pair of neutron stars,' the familiar said, 'orbiting around each other, to generate that kind of signature.'
'What happened next?' Sora asked.
'Don't really remember. Not properly. I went - or was taken - inside it - and there I met . . .' He paused, and for a moment she thought it was because he needed to catch his breath. But that wasn't the reason. 'I met entities, I suppose you'd call them. I quickly realised that they were just highly advanced projections of a maintenance programme left behind by the Waymakers.'
'They made you young, didn't they?'
'I don't think it was stretching their capabilities overmuch, put it like that.'
The corridor flattened out, branching in several different directions. Merlin leaned toward one of the routes.
'Why?'
'So I could finish the job. Find the gun.'
The corridor opened out into a chamber: a bowl-ceilinged control room, unpressurised and lit only by the wavering light of their helmets. Seats and consoles were arrayed around a single spherical projection device, cradled in ash-coloured gimbals. Corpses slumped over some of the consoles, but nothing remained except skeletons draped in colourless rags. Presumably they had rotted away for centuries before the chamber was finally opened to vacuum, and even that would have been more than twenty thousand years ago.
'They must have been attacked by a bioweapon,' Merlin said, easing himself into one of the seats, which - after exhaling a cloud of dust - seemed able to take his weight. 'Something that left the machines intact.'
Sora walked around, examining the consoles, all of which betrayed a technology beyond anything the Cohort had known for millennia. Some of the symbols on them were recognisable antecedents of those used in Main, but there was nothing she could actually read.
Merlin made a noise that might have been a grunt of suppressed pain, and when Sora looked at him, she saw that he was spooling the optical cable from his suit sleeve, just as he had when they had first met on the cometary shard. He lifted back an access panel on the top of the console, exposing an intestinal mass of silvery circuits. He seemed to know exactly where to place the end of the cable, allowing its microscopic cilia to tap into the ancient system.
The projection chamber was warming to life now: amber light swelling from its heart, solidifying into abstract shapes, neutral test representations. For a moment, the chamber showed a schematic of the ringed gas giant and its moons, with the locations of the approaching Husker ships marked with complex ideograms. The familiar was right: their place of sanctuary must have been the moon with the liquid ocean. Then the shapes moved fluidly, zooming in on the gas giant.
'You wanted to know where the gun was,' Merlin said. 'Well, I'm about to show you.'
The view enlarged on a cyclonic storm near the planet's equator, a great swirling red eye in the atmosphere.
'It's a metastable storm,' Sora said. 'Common feature of gas giants. You're not telling me--'
Merlin's gauntleted fingers were at work now, flying across an array of keys marked with symbols of unguessable meaning. 'The storm's natural, of course, or at least it was before these people hid the gun inside it, exploiting the pressure differentials to hold the gun at a fixed point in the atmosphere, for safekeeping. There's just one small problem.'
'Go ahead . . .'
'The gun isn't a gun. It functions as a weapon, but that's mostly accidental. It certainly wasn't the intention of the Waymakers.'
'You're losing me, Merlin.'
'Maybe I should tell you about the ring.'
Something was happening to the surface of the gas giant now. The cyclone was not behaving in the manner of other metastable storms Sora had seen. It was spinning perceptibly, throwing off eddies from its curlicued edge like the tails of seahorses. It was growing a bloodier red by the second.
'Yes,' Sora said. 'Tell me about the ring.'
'The Waymakers gave it to me, when they made me young. It's a reminder of what I have to do. You see, if I fail, it will be very bad for every thinking creature in this part of the galaxy. What did you see when you looked at the ring, Sora?'
'A red gem, with two lights orbiting inside it.'
'Would you be surprised if I told you that the lights represent two neutron stars, two of the densest objects in the universe? And that they're in orbit about each other, spinning around their mutual centre of gravity?'
'Inside the Brittlestar.'
She caught his glance, directed quizzically toward her. 'Yes,' Merlin said slowly. 'A pair of neutron stars, born in supernovae, bound together by gravity, slowly spiralling closer and closer to each other.'
The cyclonic storm was whirling insanely now, sparks of subatmospheric lightning flickering around its boundary. Sora had the feeling that titanic - and quite inhuman - energies were being unleashed, as if something very close to magic was being deployed beneath the clouds. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen.
'I hope you know how to fire this when t
he time comes, Merlin.'
'All the knowledge I need is carried by the ring. It taps into my bloodstream and builds structures in my head that tell me exactly what I need to know, on a level so deep that I hardly know it myself.'
'Husker swarm will be within range in ninety minutes,' the familiar said, 'assuming attack profiles for the usual swarm boser and charm-torp weapon configurations. Of course, if they have any refinements, they might be in attack range a little sooner than that--'