Khouri felt an urge to disagree with him, but nothing in Clavain’s manner suggested that he was lying or aware of a more plausible explanation. The Captain had only emerged from his isolation in order to orchestrate his suicide, but now that the attempt had failed, and Ilia had been hurt in the process, he had retreated into some even darker psychosis. She wondered whether that made Clavain the Captain’s puppet or his weapon.
‘What can I trust you to do, in that case?’ Khouri looked from Clavain to Volyova. ‘Could you kill her?’
‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Your ship, or your Captain, wouldn’t allow me to do it. I’m certain of that. And I wouldn’t think of doing it anyway — I’m not a cold-blooded murderer, Ana.’
‘You’re just software,’ she said. ‘Software’s capable of anything.’
‘I won’t kill her, I assure you. I want those weapons because I believe in humanity. I’ve never believed that the ends justify the means. Not in this war, not in any damned war I’ve ever served in. If I have to kill to get what I want, I will. But not before I’ve done all that I can to avoid it. Otherwise I’m no better than the other Conjoiners.’
Without warning, Ilia Volyova spoke from her bed. ‘Why do you want them, Clavain?’
I could ask you the same question.‘
‘They’re my damned weapons.’
Khouri studied Volyova’s figure, but she appeared no more awake than she had five minutes earlier.
‘Actually, they don’t belong to you,’ Clavain said. ‘They’re still Conjoiner property.’
‘Taken your damned time reclaiming them, haven’t you?’
‘It isn’t me who’s doing the reclaiming, Ilia. I’m the nice man who’s come to take them off your hands before the really nasty people arrive. Then they’ll be my worry, not yours. And when I say nasty, I mean it. Deal with me and you’ll be dealing with someone reasonable. But the Conjoiners won’t even bother negotiating. They’ll just take the weapons without asking.’
‘I still find this defection story a little hard to believe, Clavain.’
‘Ilia…’ Khouri leaned closer to the bed. ‘Ilia, never mind Clavain for now. There’s something I need to know. What have you done with the cache weapons? I only counted thirteen in the chamber.’
Volyova clucked before answering. Khouri thought she sounded amused at her own cleverness. ‘I dispersed them. Killed two birds with one stone. Put them out of Clavain’s easy reach, strewn across the system. I also let them go into autonomous firing mode against the Inhibitor machinery. How are my little beauties doing, Khouri? Are the fireworks impressive tonight?’
‘There are fireworks, Ilia, but I haven’t got a fucking clue who’s winning.’?,
‘At least the battle is still continuing, then. That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?’ She did nothing visibly, but a flattened globe popped into existence above her head, looking for all the world like a cartoon thought-bubble. Though she had been blinded in the attack by the cache weapon, she now wore slender grey goggles that communicated with the implants Clavain’s proxy had installed in her head. In some respects she was now better sighted than she had been before, Khouri thought. She could see in all the wavelength and non-EM bands offered by the goggles, and she could tap into machine-generated fields with far greater clarity than had been possible before. For all that, however, she must have been quietly repulsed by the presence of the foreign machines inside her skull. Such things had always revolted her, and she would accept them now only out of necessity.
The projected globe was a mutual hallucination rather than a hologram. It was gridded with the green lines of an equatorial coordinate system, bulging at the equator and narrowing at the poles. The system’s ecliptic was a milky disc spanning the bubble from side to side, dotted with many annotated symbols. In the middle was the hard orange eye of the star, Delta Pavonis. A vermilion smudge was the ruined corpse of Roc, with a harder, offset core of red indicating the bugle-shaped vastness of the Inhibitor weapon, now locked in rotational phase with the star. The star was itself gridded with glowing lilac contour lines. The spot on the surface of the star immediately below the weapon was shown to be bulging inwards for an eighth of the star’s diameter, a quarter of the way to the nuclear-burning core. Furious violet-white rings of fusing matter radiated out from the depression, frozen like ripples on a lake, but those hotspots of fusion were mere sparks compared with the powerhouse of the core itself. And yet, as disturbing as these transformations were, the star was not the immediate centre of attention. Khouri counted twenty black triangles in the same approximate quadrant of the ecliptic as the Inhibitor weapon, and judged that those were the cache weapons.
‘This is the state of play,’ Volyova said. ‘A real-time battle display. Aren’t you jealous of my toys, Clavain?’
‘You have no idea of the importance of those weapons,’ the servitor replied.
‘Don’t I?’
‘They mean the difference between the extinction or survival of the entire human species. We know about the Inhibitors as well, Ilia, and we know what they can do. We’ve seen it in messages from the future, the human race on the brink of extinction, almost totally wiped out by Inhibitor machines. We called them the wolves, but there’s no doubt that we’re talking about the same enemy. That’s why you can’t squander the weapons here.’
‘Squander them? I am not squandering them.’ She sounded mortally affronted. ‘I am using them tactically to delay the Inhibitor processes. I’m buying valuable time for Resurgam.’
Clavain’s voice became probing. ‘How many weapons have you lost since you started the campaign?’
‘Precisely none.’
The servitor arched over her. ‘Ilia… listen to me very carefully. How many weapons have you lost?’
‘What do you mean, “lost”? Three weapons malfunctioned. So much for Conjoiner engineering, in that case. Another two were only designed to be used once. I hardly call those “losses”, Clavain.’
‘So no weapons have been destroyed by return fire from the Inhibitors?’
‘Two weapons have suffered some damage.’
‘They were destroyed entirely, weren’t they?’
‘I’m still receiving telemetry from their harnesses. I won’t know the extent of the damage until I examine the scene of the battle.’
Clavain’s image stepped back from the bed. He had turned, if that was possible, a shade paler than before. He closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath, something that might almost have been a prayer.
‘You had forty weapons to begin with. Now you have lost nine of them, by my reckoning. How many more, Ilia?’
‘As many as it takes.’
‘You can’t save Resurgam. You’re dealing with forces beyond your comprehension. All you’re doing is wasting the weapons. We need to keep them back until we can use them properly, in a way that will really make a difference. This is just an advance guard of wolves, but there’ll be many more. Yet if we can examine the weapons perhaps we can make more like them; thousands more.’
She smiled again; Khouri was certain of it. ‘So all that fine talk just now, Clavain, about how the ends don’t justify the means — did you believe a word of it?’
‘All I know is that if you squander the weapons, everyone on Resurgam will still die. The only difference is that they’ll die later, and their deaths will be outnumbered by millions more. But hand over the weapons now, and there’ll still be time to make a difference.’
‘And let two hundred thousand people die so millions can live in the future?’
‘Not millions, Ilia. Billions.’
‘You had me going for a minute there, Clavain. I was almost starting to think you might be someone I could do business with.’ She smiled, as if it was the last time she would ever smile in her life. I was wrong, wasn’t I?‘
‘I’m not a bad man, Ilia. I’m just somone who knows exactly what needs to be done.’
‘Like you said, always the
most dangerous sort.’
‘Please don’t underestimate me. I will take those weapons.’
‘You’re weeks away, Clavain. By the time you arrive, I’ll be more than ready for you.’
Clavain’s figure said nothing. Khouri had no idea what to read into that lack of response, but it troubled her greatly.
Her ship towered over her, barely contained by its prison of repair scaffolding. Storm Bird’s internal lights were on, and in the upper row of flight deck windows Antoinette saw Xavier’s silhouetted form hard at work. He had a compad in one hand and a stylus gripped between his teeth, and he was flicking ancient toggle switches above his head, taking typically diligent notes. Always the bookkeeper, she thought.
Antoinette eased her exoskeleton into a standing position. Now and then Clavain allowed the crew a few hours under conditions of normal gravity and inertia, but this was not one of those periods. The exoskeleton gave her dozens of permanent sores where the support pads and haptic motion sensors touched her skin. In a perverse way, she was almost looking forward to arriving around Delta Pavonis, since they would then be able to discard the skeletons.
She took a good long look at Storm Bird. She had not seen it since the time she had walked away, refusing to enter what no longer felt like her own territory. It felt like months ago, and some of the anger — though not all of it — had abated.
She was still pretty pissed off.
Her ship was certainly ready for the fight. To the untrained eye, there had been no drastic alteration in Storm Bird’s external appearance. The extra weapons that had been grafted on, in addition to the deterrents already present, merely amounted to a few more bulges, spines and asymmetries to add to those that were already present. With the manufactories churning out armaments by the tonne, it had been an easy enough matter to divert some of that output her way, and Scorpio had been perfectly willing to turn a blind eye. Remontoire and Xavier had even worked together to couple the more exotic weapons into Storm Bird’s control net.
For a time, she had wondered why she felt the urge to fight. She did not consider herself given to violence or heroic gestures. Pointless, stupid gestures — such as burying her father in a gas giant — were another thing entirely.
She climbed up through the ship until she reached the flight deck. Xavier carried on working after she had entered. He was too engrossed in what he was doing, and he must have become used to her never visiting Storm Bird.
She sat in the seat next to him, waiting for him to notice her and look up from his work. When he did he just nodded, giving her the space and time to say what she needed to. She appreciated that.
‘Beast?’ Antoinette said quietly.
The pause before Lyle Merrick replied was probably no longer than usual, but it felt like an eternity. ‘Yes, Antoinette?’
‘I’m back.’
‘Yes… I gathered.’ There was another long intermission. ‘I’m pleased that you’ve returned.’
The voice had the same tonal quality as ever, but something had changed. She supposed that Lyle was no longer obliged to mimic the old subpersona, the one that he had replaced sixteen years before.
‘Why?’ she asked sharply. ‘Did you miss me?’
‘Yes,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, I did.’
I don’t think I can ever forgive you, Lyle.‘
‘I wouldn’t ever want or expect your forgiveness, Antoinette. I certainly wouldn’t deserve it.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘But you understand that I made a promise to your father?’
‘That’s what Xavier said.’
‘Your father was a good man, Antoinette. He only wanted the best for you.’
‘The best for you as well, Lyle.’
‘I’m in his debt. I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘How do you live with what you did?’
There was something that might have been a laugh, or even a self-deprecating snigger. ‘The part of me that mattered the most isn’t greatly troubled by that question, you know. The flesh-and-blood me was executed. I’m just a shadow, the only shadow that the eraserheads missed.’
‘A shadow with a highly evolved sense of self-preservation.’
‘Again, that’s nothing I’d deny.’
I want to hate you, Lyle.‘
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Millions already do.’
She sighed. ‘But I can’t afford to. This is still my ship. You are still running it whether I like it or not. True, Lyle?’
I was already a pilot, Little… I mean Antoinette. I already had an intimate knowledge of spacecraft operations before my small mishap. It hasn’t been difficult for me to integrate myself with Storm Bird. I doubt that a real subpersona would ever prove an adequate replacement.‘
She sneered. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to replace you.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But my reasons are pragmatic. I can’t afford to, not without seriously fucking up my ship’s performance. I don’t want to go through the learning curve of integrating a new gamma-level, especially not now.’
‘That’s reason enough for me.’
‘I’m not finished. My father made a deal with you. That means you made a deal with the Bax family. I can’t renege on that, even if I wanted to. It wouldn’t be good for business.’
‘We’re a little far from any business opportunities now, Antoinette.’
‘Well, maybe. But there’s one other thing. Are you listening?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’re going into battle. You’re going to help me. And by that I mean you’re going to fly this ship and make it do whatever the fuck I ask of it. Understood? I mean everything. No matter how much danger it puts me in.’
‘Vowing to protect you was also part of the arrangement I made with your father, Antoinette.’
She shrugged. ‘That was between you and him, not me. From now on I take my own risks, even if they’re the kind that might get me killed. Got that?’
‘Yes… Antoinette.’
She stood up from her seat. ‘Oh, and one other thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘No more “Little Miss”.’
Khouri was down in the reception bay, showing her face and generally doing her best to reassure the evacuees that they had not been forgotten, when she felt the entire ship lurch to one side. The movement was sudden and violent, enough to knock her off her feet and send her crashing bruisingly into the nearest wall. Khouri swore, a thousand possibilities flashing through her mind, but her thoughts were immediately drowned under the vast roar of panic that emanated from the two thousand passengers. She heard screams and shouts, and it was many seconds before the sound began to die down to a general rumble of disquiet. The motion had not repeated itself, but any illusions they had that the ship was a solid and unchanging thing had just been annihilated.
Khouri snapped into damage-limitation mode. She made her way through the maze of partitions that divided the chamber, offering nothing more than a reassuring wave to the families and individuals who tried to stop her to ask what was going on. At that point she was still trying to work it out for herself.
It had already been agreed that her immediate deputies would assemble together in the event of anything unexpected happening. She found a dozen of them waiting for her, all looking only slightly less panicked than the people in their care.
‘Vuilleumier…’ they said, in near unison, on her arrival.
‘What the hell just happened?’ one asked. ‘We’ve got broken bones, fractures, people scared shitless. Shouldn’t someone have warned us?’
‘Collision avoidance,’ she said. ‘The ship detected a piece of debris heading towards it. Didn’t have time to shoot it away, so it moved itself.’ It was a lie, and it did not even sound convincing to her, but it was at least a stab at a rational explanation. ‘That’s why there was no warning,’ she added, by way of an afterthought. ‘It’s good, really: it means the safety sub
systems are still working.’
‘You never said they wouldn’t be,’ the man told her.
‘Well, now we know for sure, don’t we?’ And with that she told them to spread the word that the sudden movement had been nothing to worry about, and to make sure that the injured got the care they needed.
Fortunately, no one had been killed, and the broken bones and fractures turned out to be clean breaks that could be attended to with simple procedures, without the need to take anyone beyond the chamber to the medical bay. An hour passed, and then two, and a nervous calm descended. Her explanation, it appeared, had been accepted by the majority of the evacuees.
Great, she thought. Now all I have to do is convince myself.
But an hour later the ship moved again.
This time it was less violent than before, and the only effect was to make Khouri sway and reach hastily for a support. She swore, but now it was less out of surprise than annoyance. She had no idea what she was going to tell the passengers next, and her last explanation was going to start looking less than convincing. She decided, for the time being, not to offer any explanation at all, and to let her underlings figure out what had happened. Give them time and they might come up with something better than she was capable of.
She made her way back to Ilia Volyova, thinking all the while that something was wrong, experiencing a sense of dislocation that she could not quite put her finger on. It was as if every vertical surface in the ship was minutely askew. The floor was no longer perfectly level, so that the liquid effluent in the flooded zones built up more on one side of the corridor than the other. Where it dripped from the walls it no longer fell vertically, but at a pronounced angle. By the time she reached Volyova’s bed, she could not ignore the changes. It was an effort to walk upright, and she found it easier and safer to move along one wall at a time.