‘You know why. The weapons are around Resurgam. We must recover them before the machines arrive.’
The figure became momentarily clearer. For an instant there was a hint of snout, dark canine eyes and a lupine glint from steely incisors.
‘You must appreciate that I have mixed feelings about such a mission.’
Skade tugged her gown even tighter. ‘Why?’
‘You already know why. Because that of which I am a part would be inconvenienced by the use of those weapons.’
‘I don’t want a debate,’ Skade said, ‘just assistance. You have two choices, Wolf. Let the weapons fall into someone else’s hands — someone you have no influence over — or help me to recover them. You see the logic, don’t you? If any human faction has to obtain them, surely it had better be one you know, one you have already infiltrated.’
Above, the sky became less opaque. A silver sun scoured through the pale green canopy. Light sparkled on the ridges linking the rockpools and stones, tracing a pattern that reminded Skade of the synaptic pathways revealed by a slice through brain tissue. Then the mist closed in again and she was colder than before, colder and more vulnerable.
‘So what is the problem?’
‘There’s a ship behind me. It’s been on my tail ever since we left Yellowstone space. We have inertia-suppression machinery, Wolf. Our inertial mass is twenty-five per cent at the moment. Yet the other ship is still playing catchup, as if it has the same technology aboard it.’
‘Who is operating this other ship?’
‘Clavain,’ she said, watching the Wolf’s reaction with great interest. ‘At least, I’m reasonably certain it must be him. I was trying to bring him back to the Mother Nest after he defected. He gave me the slip around Yellowstone. He got his hands on another ship, stealing it from the Ultras. But I don’t know where he got the technology from.’
The Wolf appeared troubled. It shifted in and out of the mist, its form contorting with each moment of clarity. ‘Have you tried killing him?’
‘Yes, but I haven’t managed it — he’s very tenacious, Wolf. And he hasn’t been deterred, which was my next hope.’
‘That’s Clavain for you.’ Skade wondered whether that was the Wolf or Galiana speaking, or some incomprehensible fusion of the two. ‘Well, what did your precious Night Council suggest, Skade?’
‘That I push the machinery harder.’
The Wolf faded, returned. ‘And if Clavain continues to match you step for step… ? Have you considered what you might do then?’
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘Fears must be faced, Skade. The unthinkable must be contemplated. There is a way to slip ahead of him, if only you have the nerve to do it.’
‘I won’t do it. I don’t know how to do it.’ Skade felt dizzy, on the point of toppling from the smooth platform of rock. The ridges looked sharp enough to cut her skin. ‘We know nothing about how the machinery operates in that regime.’
‘You can learn,’ the Wolf told her teasingly. ‘Exordium would show you what you needed to do, wouldn’t it?’
‘The more exotic the technology, the more difficult it is to interpret the messages describing it, Wolf.’
‘But I could help you.’
Skade narrowed her eyes. ‘Help me?’
‘In Exordium. Our minds are linked now, Skade. There’s no reason why we couldn’t continue to the next phase of the experiment. My mind could filter and process the Exordium information. With the clues we will receive, I could show you exactly what you need to do to make the state-four transition.’
‘It’s that easy? You’d help me, just to make sure I get the weapons?’
‘Of course.’ For a moment the Wolf’s voice was playful. There was that flash of incisor again. ‘But of course, it wouldn’t just be you and me.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Bring Felka.’
‘No, Wolf
‘Bring Felka, or I won’t help you.’
She started to argue, knowing how futile it would be; knowing that ultimately she had no choice but to do what the Wolf wished. The mist had closed in again. The analytic scrutiny of the Wolf’s mind suddenly ceased, like a torch beam being switched off. Skade was quite alone. She shivered against the cold, hearing the long slow groan of the distant tide.
‘No…’
The mist closed in further. The rockpool swallowed the stone beneath her feet, and then with the same perceptual twist she was back in the metal prison of her armour aboard Nightshade. The gravity was an oppressive crush. She traced a steel finger down the alloy curve of her thigh, remembering how flesh had felt, remembering the sense of cold and the porous texture of the rock beneath her feet. Skade felt the stirrings of unwanted emotions: loss, regret, horror, the aching memory of wholeness. But there were things that needed to be done that transcended such concerns. She crushed the emotions out of existence, preserving only the thinnest residue of anger.
That would help her, in the days that lay ahead.
Chapter 27
ON THE RARE occasions when he made any kind of ship-board journey at all, Clavain moved around Zodiacal Light in an exoskeletal support, constantly bruised and chafed by the pressure points of the framework. They were at five gees now, accelerating in close lock-step with Nightshade, which was now only three light-days ahead. Each time Skade had ramped up her acceleration, Clavain had persuaded Sukhoi to increase theirs to an even higher rate, and this, with no little reluctance, she had done. Little more than a week of shiptime later, Skade would be seen to respond with an increase of her own. The pattern was obvious: even Skade was unwilling to push the machinery any harder than was absolutely necessary.
Pauline Sukhoi did not use an exoskeletal rig herself. When she met with Clavain she did so in a form-fitting travelling couch in which she lay almost horizontally, on her back, labouring for breath between each utterance. Like much else on the ship the couch had a crudely welded makeshift look. The manufactories were running around the clock to make weapons, combat equipment, reefersleep caskets and spare parts; anything else had to be knocked together in less sophisticated workshops.
‘Well?’ Sukhoi asked, the force of the acceleration heightening her haunted appearance by pulling her skin deep into her eye sockets.
‘I need seven gees,’ Clavain said. ‘Six and a half at the very least. Can you give it to me?’
‘I’ve given you everything I can, Clavain.’
‘That’s not quite the answer I wanted.’
She threw a schematic against one wall, hard red lines against corroded brown metalwork. It was a cross section of the ship with a circle superimposed over the thickened midship and stern where the hull was widest and where the motors were attached.
‘See this, Clavain?’ Sukhoi made the circle flare brighter. ‘The bubble of suppressed inertia swallows most of our length now, which is enough to drop our effective mass to a fifth of what it should be. But we still feel the full force of that five gees here, in the front of the ship.’ She indicated the small cone of the hull, jutting forwards of the bubble’s edge.
Clavain nodded. ‘The field’s so weak here that you need fancy detectors to measure it at all.’
‘Correct. Our bodies, and the fabric of the ship around us, still have nearly their full quota of inertial mass. The floor of the ship pushes against us at five gees, so we feel five gees of force. But that’s only because we’re outside the bubble.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘This.’ Sukhoi altered the picture, making the circle expand until it enclosed the entire volume of the starship. ‘The field geometry is complex, Clavain, and it depends complicatedly on the degree of inertial suppression. At five gees, we can exclude the entire inhabited portion of the ship from the major effects of the machinery. But at six… it doesn’t work. We fall within the bubble.’
‘But we’re already effectively inside it,’ Clavain said.
‘Yes, but not so much that we feel anything. At si
x gees, however, the field effects would rise above the threshold of physiological detectability. Sharply, too: it isn’t a linear effect. We’d go from experiencing five gees to experiencing only one.’
Clavain adjusted his position, trying to find a posture that would relieve one or more pressure points. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘But we’d also feel our inertial mass to be a fifth of what it should be. Every part of your body, every muscle, every organ, every bone, every fluid, has evolved under normal conditions of inertia. Everything changes, Clavain, even the viscosity of blood.’ Sukhoi steered her couch around him, collecting her breath. ‘I have seen what happens to people who fall into fields of extreme inertial suppression. Very often they die. Their hearts stop beating properly. There are other things that can happen to them, too, especially if the field isn’t stable…’ With effort, she looked him in the eye. ‘Which it won’t be, I assure you.’
Clavain said, ‘I still want it. Will routine machinery still work normally? Reefersleep caskets, that kind of thing?’
‘I won’t make any promises, but…’
He smiled. ‘Then this is what we do. We freeze Scorpio’s army, or as many of them as we can manage, in the new caskets. Anybody who we can’t freeze, or who we might need to consult, we can rig-up to a life-support system, enough to keep them breathing and pumping blood at the right rate. That will work, won’t it?’
‘Again, no promises.’
‘Six gees, Sukhoi. That’s all I’m asking of you. You can do it, can’t you?’
‘I can. And I will, if you insist upon it. But understand this: the quantum vacuum is a nest of snakes…’
‘And we’re poking it with a very sharp stick, yes.’
Sukhoi waited until he was done. ‘No. That was before. At six gees we are down in the pit with the snakes, Clavain.’
He let her have her moment, then patted the iron husk of the travel couch. ‘Just do it, Pauline. I’ll worry about the analogies.’
She spun the couch around and wheeled off towards the elevator that would ferry her down ship. Clavain watched her go, then winced as another pressure sore announced itself.
The transmission came in a little while later. Clavain scrubbed it for buried informational attack, but it was clean.
It was from Skade, in person. He took it in his quarters, enjoying a brief respite from the high acceleration. Sukhoi’s experts had to crawl over their inertial machinery and they did not like doing that while the systems were functional. Clavain sipped on tea while the recording played itself out.
Skade’s head and shoulders appeared in an oval projection volume, blurred at the edges. Clavain remembered the last time he had seen her like this, when she had transmitted a message to him when he was still on his way to Yellowstone. He had assumed at the time that Skade’s stiff posture was a function of the message format, but now that he saw it again he began to have doubts. Her head was immobile while she spoke, as if clamped in the kind of frame surgeons used when making precise operations on the brain. Her neck vanished into absurd gloss-black armour, like something from the Middle Ages. And there was something else strange about Skade, although he could not quite put his finger on it…
‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Please do me the courtesy of viewing this transmission in its entirety and giving careful consideration to what I am about to propose. I do not make this offer lightly, and I will not make it twice.’
He waited for her to continue.
‘You have proven difficult to kill,’ Skade said. ‘All my attempts have failed so far, and there is no assurance that anything I try in the future will work either. That doesn’t mean I expect you to live, however. Have you looked behind you recently? Rhetorical question: I’m sure that you have. You must be aware, even with your limited detection capabilities, that there are more ships out there. Remember the task force you were supposed to lead, Clavain? The Master of Works has finished those ships. Three of them are approaching you from behind. They are better armed than Nightshade: heavy relativistic railguns, ship-to-ship boser and graser batteries, not to mention long-range stingers. And they have a bright target to aim at.’
Clavain knew about the other ships, even though they only showed up at the extreme limit of his detectors. He had started turning Skade’s light-sails to his own side, training his own optical lasers on to them as they passed in the night and steering them into the paths of the chasing ships. The chances of a collision remained small, and the pursuers could always deploy similar anti-sail defences of the sort Clavain had invented, but it had been enough to force Skade to abandon sail production.
‘I know,’ he whispered.
Skade continued, ‘But I’m willing to make a deal, Clavain. You don’t want to die, and I don’t really want to kill you. Frankly, there are other problems I would sooner expend energy on.’
‘Charming.’ He sipped at his tea.
‘So I will let you live, Clavain. And, more importantly, I will let you have Felka back.’
Clavain put his cup aside.
‘She is very ill, Clavain, retreating back into dreams of the Wall. All she does now is make circular structures around herself, intricate games that demand her total attention every hour of the day. They are surrogates for the Wall. She has abandoned sleep, like a true Conjoiner. I’m worried for her, I really am. You and Galiana worked so hard to make her more fully human… and yet I can see that work crumbling away by the day, just as the Great Wall crumbled away on Mars.’ Skade’s face formed a stiff sad smile. ‘She doesn’t recognise people at all, now. She shows no interest in anything outside her increasingly narrow set of obsessions. She doesn’t even ask about you, Clavain.’
‘If you hurt her…’ he found himself saying.
But Skade was still talking. ‘But there may still be time to make a difference, to repair some of the harm, if not all of it. It’s up to you, Clavain. Our velocity differential is small enough now that a transfer operation is possible. If you turn away from my course and show no sign of returning to it, I will send Felka to you aboard a corvette — fired into deep space, of course.’
‘Skade
‘I will expect your response immediately. A personal transmission would be nice, but, failing that, I will expect to see a change in your thrust vector.’ She sighed, and it was in that moment that Clavain realised what had been troubling him about Skade since the start of the transmission. It was the way she never drew breath, never once stopped to take in air.
‘One final thing. I’ll give you a generous margin of error before I decide that you have rejected my offer. But when that margin has ended, I will still put Felka aboard a corvette. The difference is, I won’t make it easy for you to find her. Think of that, Clavain, will you? Felka, all alone between the stars, so far from companionship. She might not understand. Then again, she very well might.’ Skade hesitated, then added, ‘You’d know, I suppose, better than anyone. She’s your daughter, after all. The question is, how much does she really mean to you?’
Skade’s transmission ended.
Remontoire was conscious. He smiled with quiet amusement as Clavain entered the room that served as both his quarters and his prison. He could not be said to look sparklingly well — that would never be the case — but neither did he look like a man who had only recently been frozen, and before that, technically, deceased.
‘I wondered when you’d pay me a visit,’ he said, with what struck Clavain as disarming cheerfulness. He lay on his back, his head on a pillow, his hands steepled across his chest, but in every sense appearing relaxed and calm.
Clavain’s exoskeleton eased him into a sitting position, shifting pressure from one set of sores to another.
‘I’m afraid things have been a tiny bit difficult,’ Clavain said. ‘But I’m glad to see that you’re in one piece. It wasn’t propitious to have you thawed until now.’
‘I understand,’ Remontoire said, with a dismissive wave of one hand. ‘It can’t…’
&
nbsp; ‘Wait.’ Clavain looked at his old friend, taking in the slight changes in his facial appearance that had been necessary for Remontoire to function as an agent in Yellowstone society. Clavain had become used to him being totally hairless, like an unfinished mannequin.
‘Wait what, Clavain?’
‘There are some ground rules you need to be aware of, Rem. You can’t leave this room, so please don’t embarrass me by making an attempt to do so.’
Remontoire shrugged, as if this was no great matter. I wouldn’t dream of it. What else?‘
‘You can’t communicate with any system beyond this room, not while you’re in here. So, again, please don’t try.’
‘How would you know if I did try?’
‘1 would.’
‘Fair enough. Anything else?’
‘I don’t know if I can trust you yet. Hence the precautions, and my general reluctance to wake you before now.’
‘Perfectly understandable.’
‘I’m not finished. I dearly want to trust you, Rem, but I’m not certain that I can. And I can’t afford to risk the success of this mission.’ Remontoire started to speak, but Clavain raised a finger and continued talking. ‘That’s why I won’t be taking any chances. None at all. If you do anything, no matter how apparently trivial, that I think might be in any way to the detriment of the mission, I’ll kill you. No ifs, no buts. Absolutely no trial. We’re a long way from the Ferrisville Convention now, a long way from the Mother Nest.’
‘I gathered we were on a ship,’ Remontoire said. ‘And we’re accelerating very, very hard. I wanted to find something I could drop to the floor, so that I might have an idea of exactly how hard. But you’ve done a very good job of leaving me with nothing. Still, I can guess. What is it now — four and a half gees?’
‘Five,’ Clavain said. ‘And we’ll soon be pushing to six and higher.’
‘This room doesn’t remind me of any part of Nightshade. Have you captured another lighthugger, Clavain? That can’t have been easy.’
‘I had some help.’