‘Full thrust…’ Clavain said aloud, to himself. He knew a burst of full thrust would get him away from the comet. Either it would sever the grapple lines or it would rip chunks of the comet’s surface away with him.
‘Clavain,’ said a man’s voice, ‘I think you need to think about this.’
Neither of them could reach him neurally. The corvette would not allow those kinds of signals through its hull.
‘Thanks, Rem… but as a matter of fact, I’ve already given it a fair bit of thought. She wants those weapons too badly. It’s the wolves, isn’t it, Skade? You need the weapons for when the wolves come.’
‘I as good as spelled it out to you, Clavain. Yes, we need the weapons to defend ourselves against the wolves. Is that so reprehensible? Is ensuring our own survival such a damning thing to do? What would you prefer — that we capitulate, offer ourselves up to them?’
‘How do you know they’re coming?’
‘We don’t. We merely consider their arrival to be likely, based on the information available to us…’
‘There’s more to it than that.’ His fingers skated over the main thrust controls. In a few seconds he would have to use full burn or stay behind.
‘We just know, Clavain. That’s all you have to know. Now let us back aboard the corvette. We’ll forget all about this, I assure you.’
‘Not good enough, I’m afraid.’
He fired the main engine, working the other thrusters to steer the blinding violet arc of the drive flame away from the comet’s surface. He did not want to hurt either of them. Clavain disliked Skade but wished her no harm. Remontoire was his friend, and he had only left him on the comet because he did not see the point of implicating him in what he was about to do.
The corvette stretched against its guys. He could feel the vibration of the engine working its way through the hull, into his bones. Overload indicators were flicking into the red.
‘Clavain, listen to me,’ Skade said. ‘You can’t take that ship. What are you going to do with it — defect to the Demarchists?’
‘It’s a thought.’
‘It’s also suicide. You’ll never make it to Yellowstone. If we don’t kill you, the Demarchists will.’
Something snapped. The shuttle yawed and then slammed against the restraints of the remaining grapple lines. Through the cockpit window Clavain saw the severed line whiplash into the surface of the comet, slicing through the caul of stabilising membrane. It gashed a meter-wide wound in the surface. Black soot erupted out like octopus ink.
‘Skade’s right. You won’t make it, Clavain — there’s nowhere for you to go. Please, as a friend — I beg you not to do this.’
‘Don’t you understand, Rem? She wants those weapons so she can take them with her. Those twelve ships? They’re not all for the taskforce. They’re part of something bigger. It’s an evacuation fleet.’
He felt the jolt as another line snapped, coiling into the comet with savage energy.
‘So what if they are, Clavain?’ Skade said.
‘What about the rest of humanity? What are those poor fools meant to do when the wolves arrive? Take their own chances?’
‘It’s a Darwinian universe.’
‘Wrong answer, Skade.’
The final line snapped at that moment. Suddenly he was accelerating away from the comet at full burn, squashed into his seat. He yelped at the pain from his damaged ribs. He watched the indicators normalise, the needles trembling back into green or white. The motor pitch died away to subsonic; the hull oscillations subsided. Skade’s comet grew smaller.
By eye, Clavain orientated himself toward the sharp point of light that was Epsilon Eridani.
Chapter 11
DEEP WITHIN NOSTALGIA for Infinity, Ilia Volyova stood at the epicentre of the thing that had once been her Captain, the thing that in another life had called itself John Armstrong Brannigan. She was not shivering, and that still struck her as wrong. Visits to the Captain had always been accompanied by extreme physical discomfort, lending the whole exercise the faintly penitential air of a pilgrimage. On the occasions when they were not visiting the Captain to measure the extent of his growth — which could be slowed, but not stopped — they had generally been seeking his wisdom on some matter or other. It seemed only right and proper that some burden of suffering should be part of the bargain, even if the Captain’s advice had not always been absolutely sound, or even sane.
They had kept him cold to arrest the progress of the Melding Plague. For a time, the reefersleep casket in which he was kept could maintain the cold. But the Captain’s relentless growth had finally encroached on the casket itself, subverting and incorporating its systems into his own burgeoning template. The casket had continued functioning, after a fashion, but it had proved necessary to plunge the entire area around it into cryogenic cold. Trips to the Captain required the donning of many layers of thermal clothing. It was not easy to breathe the chill air that infested his realm: each inhalation threatened to shatter the lungs into a million glassy shards. Volyova had chain-smoked during those visits, though they were easier for her than for the others. She had no internal implants, nothing that the plague could reach and corrupt. The others — all dead now — had considered her squeamish and weak for not having them. But she saw the envy in their eyes when they were forced to spend time in the vicinity of the Captain. Then, if only for a few minutes, they wanted to be her. Desperately.
Sajaki, Hegazi, Sudjic… she could barely remember their names, it seemed like such a long time ago.
Now the place was no cooler than any other part of the ship, and much warmer than some areas. The air was humid and still. Glistening films textured every surface. Condensation ran in rivulets down the walls, dribbling around knobbly accretions. Now and then, with a rude eructation, a mass of noxious shipboard effluent would burst from a cavity and ooze to the floor. The ship’s biochemical recycling processes had long ago escaped human control. Instead of crashing, they had evolved madly, adding weird feedback loops and flourishes. It was a constant and wearying battle to prevent the ship from drowning in its own effluent. Volyova had installed bilge pumps at thousands of locations, redirecting the slime back to major processing vats where crude chemical agents could degrade it. The drone of the bilge pumps provided a background to every thought, like a single sustained organ note. The sound was always there. She had simply stopped noticing it.
If one knew where to look, and if one had the particular visual knack for extracting patterns from chaos, one could just about tell where the reefersleep casket had been. When she had allowed him to warm — she had fired a flechette round into the casket’s control system — he had begun to consume the surrounding ship at a vastly accelerated rate, ripping it apart atom by atom and merging it with himself. The heat had been like a furnace. She had not waited to see what the effects of the transformations would be, but it had seemed clear enough that the Captain would continue until he had assimilated much of the ship. As horrific as that prospect had been, it had been preferable to letting the ship remain in the control of another monster: Sun Stealer. She had hoped that the Captain would succeed in wresting some control from the parasitic intelligence that had invaded Nostalgia for Infinity.
She had, remarkably, been right. The Captain had eventually subsumed the whole ship, warping it to his own feverish whim. There was, Volyova knew, something unique about this particular case of plague infection. As far as anyone knew there was only one strain of Melding Plague, and the contamination that had reached the ship was the same kind that had done such damage in the Yellowstone system and elsewhere. Volyova had seen images of Chasm City after the plague, the twisted and grotesque architecture that the city had assumed, like a sick dream of itself. But while those transformations possessed at times what appeared to have been purpose, or even artistry, no real intelligence could be said to lie behind them. The shapes the buildings had taken on were in some sense pre-ordained by their underlying biodesign principles. But
what had happened on Infinity was different. The plague had inhabited the Captain for long years before reshaping him. Was it possible that some symbiosis had been achieved, and that when the plague finally went wild, consuming and altering the ship, the transformations were in some sense expressions of the Captain’s subconscious?
She suspected so, and at the same time hoped not. For no matter which way one looked at it, the ship had become something monstrous. When Khouri had come up from Resurgam, Volyova had done her best to be blase about the transformations, but that act had been as much for her benefit as Khouri’s. The ship unnerved her on many levels. Shortly before she had allowed him to warm, she had come to an understanding of the Captain’s crimes, gaining a fleeting glimpse into the cloister of guilt and hate that was his mind. Now it was as if that mind had been vastly expanded, to the point where she could walk around inside it. The Captain had become the ship. The ship had inherited his crimes and become a monument to its own villainy.
She studied the contours that marked where the casket had been. During the latter stages of the Captain’s illness, the reefersleep unit, pressed up against one wall, had begun to extend silvery fronds in all directions. They could be traced back through the casket’s fractured casing into the Captain himself, fused deeply with his central nervous system. Now those sensory feelers encompassed the entire ship, worming, bifurcating and reconnecting like immense squid axons. There were several dozen locations where the silver feelers converged into what Volyova had come to think of as major ganglial processing centres, fantastically intricate tangles. There was no physical trace of the Captain’s old body now, but his intelligence, distended, confused, spectral, undoubtedly still inhabited the ship. Volyova had not decided whether those nodes were distributed brains or simply small components of a much larger shipwide intellect. All that she was sure of was that John Brannigan was still present.
Once, when she had been shipwrecked around Hades and had assumed Khouri to be dead, she had been waiting for Infinity to execute her. She was expecting it. She had warmed the Captain by then, told him of the crimes she had uncovered, given him every reason to punish her.
But he had spared her and then rescued her. He had allowed her back aboard the ship, which was still in the process of being consumed and transformed. He had ignored all her attempts at communication, but had made it possible for her to survive. There had been pockets where his transformations were less severe, and she had found that she could live in them. She had discovered that they even moved around, if she decided to inhabit a different portion of the ship. So Brannigan, or whatever was running the ship, knew she was aboard, and knew what she needed to stay alive. Later, when she had found Khouri, the ship had allowed her to come aboard as well.
It had been like inhabiting a haunted house occupied by a lonely but protective spirit. Whatever they needed, within reason, the ship provided. But it would not relinquish absolute control. It would not move, except to make short in-system flights. It would not give them access to any of its weapons, let alone the cache.
Volyova had continued her attempts at communication, but they had all been fruitless. When she spoke to the ship, nothing happened. When she scrawled visual messages, there was no response. And yet she remained convinced that the ship was paying attention. It had become catatonic, withdrawn into its own private abyss of remorse and recrimination.
The ship despised itself.
But then Khouri had left, returning to Resurgam to infiltrate Inquisition House and lead the whole damned planet on a wild goose chase, just so she and Volyova could get into any place they needed without question.
Those first few months of solitude had been trying, even for Ilia Volyova. They had forced her to the conclusion that she quite liked human companionship after all. Having nothing for company except a sullen, silent, hateful mind had almost pushed her to the edge.
But then the ship, in its own small way, had begun to talk back. At first, she had almost not noticed its efforts. There had been a hundred things that needed doing each day, and no time to stop and be quiet and wait for the ship to make its fumbling gestures of conciliation. Rat infestations… bilge pump failures… the continual process of redirecting the plague away from critical areas, fighting it with nano-agents, fire, refrigerants and chemical sprays.
Then one day the servitors had started behaving oddly. Like the rats that had turned rogue, they had once been part of the ship’s repair and redesign infrastructure. The smartest of them had been consumed by the plague, but the oldest, stupidest machines had endured. They continued to toil away at their allotted tasks, only dimly aware that the ship had changed around them. For the most part they neither helped nor hindered Volyova, so she had let them be. Very occasionally they were useful, but it was such a rare occurrence that she had long since stopped counting on it.
But then the servitors began to help her. It started with a routine bilge pump failure. She had detected the pump breakdown and travelled downship to inspect the problem. When she arrived, to her astonishment she had found a servitor waiting there, carrying more or less exactly the right tools she needed to fix the unit.
Her first priority had been to get the pump chugging again. When the local flood had subsided she had sat down and taken stock. The ship still looked the way it had when she had woken up. The corridors still stretched away like mucus-coated windpipes. Vile substances continued to ooze and drip from every orifice in the ship’s fabric. The air remained cloying, and at the back of every thought was the constant Gregorian chant of the other bilge pumps.
But something had definitely changed.
She had put the tools back on the rack that the servitor carried. When she was done the machine had whipped smartly around on its tracks and whirred off into the distance, vanishing around the ribbed curve of the corridor.
‘You can hear me, I think,’ she had said aloud. ‘Hear me and see me. You also know that I’m not here to hurt you. You could have killed me already, John, especially if you control the servitors — and you do, don’t you?’
She had not been the least bit surprised when no answer was forthcoming. But she had persisted.
‘You remember who I am, of course. I’m the one who warmed you. The one who guessed what you’d done. Perhaps you think I was punishing you for your actions. You’d be wrong. It’s not my style; sadism bores me. If I wanted to punish you, I’d have killed you — and there were a thousand ways I could have done it. But it wasn’t what I had in mind. I just want you to know that my personal opinion on the matter is that you’ve suffered enough. You have suffered, haven’t you?’ She had paused, listening to the musical tone of the pump, satisfying herself that it was not going to immediately fail again.
‘Well, you deserved it,’ she said. ‘You deserved to spend time in hell for what you did. Perhaps you have. Only you will ever know what it was like to live like that, for so long. Only you will ever know if the state you’re in now is any kind of improvement.’
There had been a distant tremor at that point; she had felt it through the flooring. She wondered if it was just a scheduled pumping operation going on somewhere else in the ship or whether the Captain had been commenting on her remark.
‘It’s better now, isn’t it? It has to be better. You’ve escaped now, and become the spirit of the ship you once commanded. What more could any Captain desire?’
There had been no answer. She had waited several minutes, hoping for another seismic rumble or some equally cryptic signal. Nothing had come.
‘About the servitor,’ she had said. ‘I’m grateful, thank you. It was a help.’
But the ship had said nothing.
What she found from then on, however, was that the servitors were always there to help her when they could. If her intentions could be guessed, the machines would race ahead to bring the tools or equipment she needed. If it was a long job, a servitor would even bring her food and water, transported from one of the functioning dispensaries. If she asked the
ship directly to bring her something, it never happened. But if she stated her needs aloud, as if talking to herself, then the ship seemed willing to oblige. It could not always help her, but she had the distinct impression that it was doing its best.
She wondered if she was wrong, whether perhaps it was not John Brannigan who was haunting her, but some markedly lower-level intelligence. Perhaps the reason that the ship was keen to serve her was that its mind was only as complex as a servitor’s, infected with the same obedient routines. Perhaps when she addressed her thoughts directly to Brannigan, talking to him as if he listened, she was imagining more intelligence present than was really the case.
Then the cigarettes had turned up.
She had not asked for them, nor even suspected that there was another hoard of them to be found anywhere on the ship now that she had exhausted the last of her personal supply. She had examined them with curiosity and suspicion. They looked as if they had been manufactured by one of the trading colonies that the ship had dealt with decades ago. They did not appear to have been made by the ship itself, from local raw materials. They smelt too good for that. When she lit one of them up and smoked it to a stub, it tasted too good as well. She had smoked another one, and that had also tasted fine.
‘Where did you find these?’ she asked. ‘Where in the name of…’ She inhaled again, filling her lungs for the first time in weeks with something other than the taste of shipboard air. ‘Never mind. I don’t need to know. I’m grateful.’
From then on there had been no doubt in her mind: Brannigan was with her. Only another member of the crew could have known about her cigarette habit. No machine would have thought to bring her an offering like that, no matter how deeply ingrained its instinct for servility. So the ship must have wanted to make peace.
Progress had been slow since then. Now and then something had happened which had forced the ship back into its shell, the servitors shutting down and refusing to help her for days on end. It sometimes happened after she had been talking to the Captain too freely, trying to coax him out of his silence with cod-psychology. She was not good at psychology, she reflected ruefully. This whole horrible mess had begun when her experiments with Gunnery Officer Nagorny had driven him insane. If that hadn’t happened, there would have been no need to recruit Khouri, and everything might have been different…