‘And the high rate of acceleration? How did you manage that without Skade’s magic box of tricks?’
‘Skade didn’t create that technology from scratch. She stole it, or enough pieces to figure out the rest. She wasn’t the only one with access to it, however. I met a man who had tapped the same motherlode.’
‘And this man is aboard the ship?’
‘No, he left us to our own devices. It’s my ship, Rem.’ Clavain whipped out an arm encased in the support rig and patted the rough metal wall of Remon-toire’s cell. ‘She’s called Zodiacal Light. She’s carrying a small army. Skade’s ahead of us, but I’m not going to let her get her hands on those weapons without a struggle.’
‘Ah. Skade.’ Remontoire nodded, smiling.
‘Something amusing you?’
‘Has she been in touch?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes. That’s why I woke you. What are you getting at?’
‘Did she make it clear what had…’ Remontoire trailed off, leaving Clavain aware that he was being observed closely. ‘Evidently not.’
‘What?’
‘She nearly died, Clavain. When you escaped from the comet, the one where we met the Master of Works.’
‘Clearly she got better.’
‘Well, that very much depends…’ Again, Remontoire trailed off. ‘This isn’t about Skade, is it? I can see that concerned paternal look in your eye.’ In one easy movement he swung himself off the bed, sitting quite normally on the edge, as if the five gees of acceleration did not apply to him at all. Only a tiny twitching vein in the side of his head betrayed the tension he was under. ‘Let me guess. She still has Felka, doesn’t she.’
Clavain said nothing, waiting for Remontoire to continue.
‘I tried to have Felka come with me and the pig,’ he said, ‘but Skade wasn’t having it. Said Felka was more useful to her as a bargaining chip. I couldn’t talk her out of it. If I’d have argued too strenuously, she wouldn’t have let me come after you at all.’
‘You came to kill me.’
‘I came to stop you. My intention was to persuade you to come back with me to the Mother Nest. Of course, I’d have killed you if it came to it, but then you’d have done precisely the same to me if it was something you believed in sufficiently.’ Remontoire paused. ‘I believed I could talk you out of it. No one else would have given you a chance.’
‘We’ll talk about that later. It’s Felka who matters now.’
There was a long silence between the two men. Clavain adjusted his position, determined that Remontoire should not see how uncomfortable he was.
‘What’s happened?’ Remontoire asked.
‘Skade’s offered to turn Felka over provided I abandon the chase. She’ll drop her behind Nightshade, in a shuttle. At maximum burn it can shift to a rest frame we can reach with one of our shuttles.’
Remontoire nodded. Clavain sensed his friend thinking deeply, chewing over permutations and possibilities.
‘And if you refuse?’
‘She’ll still ditch Felka, but she won’t make it easy for us to catch her. At best, I’ll have to forfeit the chase to ensure a safe recovery. At worst, I’ll never find her. We’re in interstellar space, Rem. There’s a hell of a lot of nothing out there. With Skade’s flame ahead of us and ours behind, there are huge deadspots in our sensor coverage.’
There was another long silence while Remontoire thought again. He eased back on to the bed, assisting the flow of blood to his brain.
‘You can’t trust Skade, Clavain. She has absolutely no need to convince you of her sincerity, since she doesn’t think you’ll ever have anything she needs or anything that can hurt her. This is not a two-prisoner game, like they taught you back on Deimos.’
‘I must have scared her,’ Clavain said. ‘She wasn’t expecting us to catch up so easily.’
‘Even so…’ Remontoire hovered on the edge of saying something for several minutes.
‘You realise why I woke you now.’
‘Yes, I think I do. Run Seven was in a similar position to Skade when he had Irravel Veda on his tail, trying to get back her passengers.’
‘Seven made you serve him. You were forced to give him advice, tactics he could use against Irravel.’
‘It’s an entirely different situation, Clavain.’
‘There are enough similarities for me.’ Clavain made his frame elevate him to a standing position. ‘Here’s the picture, Rem. Skade will expect a response from me in a matter of days. You’re going to help me choose that response. Ideally, I want Felka back without losing sight of the objective.’
‘You thawed me out in desperation, then? Better the devil you know, as they say?’
‘You’re my oldest and closest friend, Rem. I just don’t know if I can trust you any more.’
‘And should the advice I give you be good… ?’
‘That might put me in a more trusting frame of mind, I suppose.’ Clavain forced a smile. ‘Of course, I’d also have Felka’s advice on that as well.’
‘And if we fail?’
Clavain said nothing. He just turned and left.
*
Four small shuttles arced away from Zodiacal Light, each falling into its own half-hemisphere of the relativistically distorted starscape. The exhaust streams of the ships glittered in the backwash from Zodiacal Light’s main flames. The trajectories were achingly beautiful, flung out from the mother ship like the curved arms of a chandelier.
If only this wasn’t an action in a war, Clavain thought, then it might almost be something to be proud of…
He watched their departure from an observation cupola near the prow of his ship, feeling an obligation to wait until he could no longer make them out. Each shuttle carried a valued crewmember, plus a quota of fuel that he would rather not have had to spend before reaching Resurgam. If all went well, Clavain would get back the four shuttles and their crew. But he would never see most of the fuel again. There was only a tiny margin of error, enough that one ship could bring back a human-mass payload in addition to its pilot.
He hoped he was playing this one correctly.
It was said that the taking of hard decisions was something that became easier with repetition, like any difficult activity. There was, perhaps, some truth in that assertion. But if so, Clavain found that it most certainly did not apply in his own case. He had taken several extraordinarily difficult decisions lately, and each had been, in its own unique way, harder than the last. So it was with the matter of Felka.
It was not that he did not want Felka back, if there was a way that could be achieved. But Skade knew how much he wanted the weapons as well. She also knew that it was not a selfish issue with Clavain. He could not be bargained with in the usual sense, since he did not want the weapons for his own personal gain. But with Felka she had the perfect instrument of negotiation. She knew that the two of them had a special bond, one that went back to Mars. Was Felka really his daughter? He didn’t know, even now. He had convinced himself that she might be, and she had told him she was… but that had been under possible duress, when she had been trying to persuade him not to defect. If anything, that admission had only served to slowly undermine his own certainties. He would not know for sure until he was again in her presence, and he could ask her properly.
And should it really matter? Her value as a human being had nothing to do with any hypothetical genetic connection with himself. Even if she was his daughter, he hadn’t known that, or even suspected it, until long after he had rescued her from Mars. And yet something had made him go back into Galiana’s nest, at great risk to himself, because he had felt a need to save her. Galiana had told him it was pointless, that she wasn’t a thinking human being in any sense that he recognised it, just a mindless information-processing vegetable.
And he had proven her wrong. It was probably the only time in his life when he had ever done that to Galiana.
And yet still it didn’t matter. This was all about humanity, Clavain thought, not abou
t blood ties or loyalty. If he forgot that, then he might as well let Skade take the weapons with her. And he might as well defect back to the spiders and leave the rest of the human race to its fate. And yet if he failed to recover the weapons, what use was a single human gesture, no matter how well intentioned?
The four ships were gone. Clavain hoped and prayed that he had made the right decision.
A beetle-backed government car hissed through the streets of Cuvier. It had been raining again, but recently the clouds had cleared. The dismantled planet was now clearly visible during many hours of each evening. The cloud of liberated matter was a lacy many-armed thing. It gleamed red and ochre and pale green and occasionally flickered with slow electrical storms, pulsing like the courtship display of some uncatalogued deep-sea animal. Hard shadows and bright symmetric foci marked the sites within the cloud where Inhibitor machinery was coming into existence, aggregating and solidifying. There had been a time when it was possible to think that what had happened to the planet was some rare but natural event. Now no such comfort existed.
Thorn had seen the way people in Cuvier dealt with the phenomenon. For the most part they ignored it. When the thing was in the sky they walked down the streets without looking up. Even when the fact of its existence could not be ignored, they seldom looked at the thing directly, or even referred to it in anything but the most oblique terms. It was as if a massive act of collective denial might make it go away, an omen that the people had decided to reject.
Thorn sat in one of the car’s two rear seats, behind the driver’s partition. There was a small flickering television screen sunk into the back of the driver’s seat. Blue light played across Thorn’s face as he watched footage taken from far outside the city. The clip was fuzzy and hand-held shaky, but it showed all that it needed to. The first of the two shuttles was still on the ground — the camera panned over it, lingering on the surreal juxtaposition of sleek machine and jumbled rockscape — but the second was in the air, coming back down from orbit. The shuttle had already made several trips to just above Resurgam’s atmosphere where the much larger in-system craft was in orbit. Now the camera view jogged upwards, catching the descending ship as it lowered itself towards the landing site, settling down on a tripod of flames.
‘It could be faked,’ Thorn said quietly. ‘I know it isn’t, but that’s what people will think.’
Khouri was sitting next to him, dressed as Vuilleumier. She said, ‘You can fake anything if you try hard enough. But it isn’t as easy as it used to be, not now that everything’s stored using analogue media. I’m not sure even a whole government department could produce something convincing enough.’
‘The people will still be suspicious.’
The camera panned across the sparse, nervous-looking crowd that was still on the ground. There was a small encampment three hundred metres from the parked shuttle, the dusty tents difficult to distinguish from fallen boulders. The people looked like refugees from any world, any century. They had come thousands of kilometres, converging on this point from a variety of settlements. It had cost them greatly: roughly a tenth of their number had not completed the journey. They had brought enough possessions to make the overland crossing, while knowing — if the underground intelligence network was efficient in its dissemination of information — that they would be allowed to bring nothing aboard the ship but the clothes they stood in. Near the encampment was a small hole in the ground where belongings were tossed before each party boarded the shuttle. These were possessions that had been treasured until the last possible moment, even though the logical thing would have been to leave them behind at home, before making the difficult journey across Resurgam. There were photographs and children’s toys, and all of them would be buried, human relics to add to the million-year-old store of Amarantin artefacts that the planet still held.
‘We’ve taken care of that,’ Khouri said. ‘Some of the witnesses who made it this far have returned to the major population centres. They needed persuading, of course, to turn around when they’d got that far, but…’
‘How did you manage it?’
The car negotiated a bend with a swish of tyres. The cubiform buildings of the Inquisition House district loomed into view, grey and slab-sided as granite cliffs. Thorn eyed them apprehensively.
‘They were told they’d be allowed to take a small quota of personal effects on to the ship with them when they came back.’
‘Bribery, in other words.’ Thorn shook his head, wondering if any great good deed could be entirely untainted by corruption, no matter how useful a purpose that corruption served. ‘But I suppose you had to get the word back somehow. How many, now?’
Khouri had the numbers ready. ‘Fifteen hundred in orbit, at the last count. A few hundred still on the ground. When we’ve got five hundred we’ll make the next trip up from the surface, and then the transfer ship will be full, ready to shuttle them to Nostalgia.’
‘They’re brave,’ Thorn said. ‘Or very, very foolish. I’m not sure which.’
‘Brave, Thorn, there’s no doubt about that. And scared, too. But you can’t blame them for that.’
They were brave, it was true. They had made the journey to the shuttles based only on the scantiest of evidence that the machines even existed. After Thorn’s arrest, rumours had run rife amongst the exodus movement. The government had continued to issue carefully engineered denials, each of which was designed to nurture in the populace’s mind the idea that Thorn’s shuttles might in fact be real. Those people who had made it to the shuttles so far had done so expressly against government advice, risking imprisonment and death as they trespassed into prohibited territory.
Thorn admired them. He doubted that he would have had the courage to follow those rumours to their logical conclusion had he not been the man who had initiated the whole movement. But he could take no pride in their achievement. They were still being deceived about their ultimate fate, a deception in which he was entirely complicit.
The car arrived at the rear of Inquisition House. Thorn and Khouri walked into the building, past the usual security checks. Thorn’s identity was still a closely guarded secret, and he had been issued with a full set of papers allowing free movement in and around Cuvier. The guards assumed he was merely another official from the House, on government business.
‘Do you still think this will work?’ he asked, hurrying to keep up with Khouri as she strode up the stairs ahead of him.
‘If it doesn’t, we’re fucked,’ she replied, in the same hushed voice.
The Triumvir was waiting in the Inquisitor’s larger room, sitting in the seat usually reserved for Thorn. She was smoking, flicking ash on to the highly polished floor. Thorn felt a spasm of irritation at this act of studied carelessness. But doubtless the Triumvir’s argument would have been that the whole planet was going to be ash before very long, so what difference did a little more make?
Trina,‘ he said, remembering to use the name she had adopted for her Cuvier persona.
‘Thorn.’ She stood up, grinding out her cigarette on the chair’s arm. ‘You look well. Government custody obviously isn’t as bad as they say.’
‘If that’s a joke, it isn’t in very good taste.’
‘Of course.’ She shrugged, as if an apology would be superfluous. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done lately?’
‘They?’
Triumvir Ilia Volyova was looking through the window, towards the sky. ‘Have a guess.’
‘Of course. You can’t miss it now. Do you know what’s taking shape in that cloud?’
‘A mechanism, Thorn. Something to destroy our sun, I’d say.’
‘Let’s talk in the office,’ Khouri said.
‘Oh, let’s not,’ said Volyova. ‘There are no windows, Ana, and the view does so focus the mind, don’t you think? In a matter of minutes the fact of Thorn’s collusion will be public knowledge.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Won’t it?’
‘If you want to call it collusion.’
Thorn had already taped his ‘statement’ — the one where he spoke for the government, revealing that the shuttles were real, that the planet was indeed in imminent danger and that the government had, reluctantly, asked him to become the figurehead of the official exodus operation. It would be transmitted on all Resurgam television channels within the hour, to be repeated at intervals throughout the next day.
‘It won’t be viewed as collusion,’ Khouri said, eyeing the other woman coldly. ‘Thorn will be seen to be acting out of concern for the people, not his own self-interest. It will be convincing because it happens to be the truth.’ Her attention flicked to him. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘I’m only voicing what will be common doubts,’ said Volyova. ‘Never mind, anyway. We’ll know soon enough what the reaction is. Is it true there have already been acts of civil disturbance in some of the outlying settlements, Ana?’
‘They were crushed pretty efficiently.’
‘There’ll be worse, for certain. Don’t be surprised if there’s an attempt to overthrow this regime.’
‘That won’t happen,’ Khouri said. ‘Not when the people realise what’s at stake. They’ll see that the apparatus of government has to remain in place so that the exodus can be organised smoothly.’
The Triumvir smirked in Thorn’s direction. ‘See how hopelessly optimistic she still is, Thorn?’
‘Irina’s right, unfortunately,’ Thorn said. ‘We can expect a lot worse. But you never imagined you’d get everyone off this planet in one piece.’
‘But we have the capacity…’ Khouri said.
‘People aren’t payloads. They can’t be shipped around like neat little units. Even if the majority buy into the idea that the government is somehow sincere about the evacuation — and that will be a small miracle in its own right — it’ll only take a minority of dissenters to cause major trouble.’
‘You made a career out of being one of them,’ Khouri said.
‘I did, yes.’ Thorn smiled sadly. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the only one out there. Still, Irina’s right. We’ll know soon enough what the general reaction will be. How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?’