‘That would very much depend on the point you wanted to make, Clavain.’
He realised that he gained nothing more by lying to her. He sighed, feeling a tremendous weight lift off his shoulders. ‘I can’t destroy any of the weapons.’
‘Good…’ she purred. ‘Negotiation is all about transparency, you see. Tell me, can the weapons ever be destroyed remotely, Clavain?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is a code, unique to each weapon.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know those codes. But I am searching for them, trying permutations.’
‘So you might get there eventually?’
Clavain scratched his beard. ‘Theoretically. But don’t hold your breath.’
‘You’ll keep searching, though?’
‘I’d like to know what they are, wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t have to, Clavain. I have my own self-destruct systems grafted to each weapon, entirely independent of anything your own people might have installed at root level.’
‘You strike me as a prudent woman, Ilia.’
‘I take my work very seriously, Clavain. But then so do you.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘So what happens now? I’m still not going to give you the things, you know. I still have other weapons.’
Clavain watched the battle on extreme magnification, glints of light peppering the space around the Triumvir’s ship. The first fatalities had already been recorded. Fifteen of Scorpio’s pigs were dead, killed by Volyova’s hull defences before they got within thirty kilometres of the ship. Other assault teams were reportedly closer — one team might even have reached the hull — but whatever the outcome, it no longer stood any chance of being a bloodless campaign.
I know,‘ Clavain said, before ending the conversation.
He placed Remontoire in complete control of Zodiacal Light, and then assigned himself one of the last remaining spacecraft in the ship’s bay. The ex-civilian shuttle was one of H’s; he recognised the luminous arcs and slashes of the banshee war markings as they stammered into life. The wasp-waisted ship was small and lightly armoured, but it carried the last functioning inertia-suppression device and that was why he had kept it back until now. On some subconscious level he must have always known he would want to join the battle, and this ship would get him there in little more than an hour.
Clavain was suited-up, cycling through the airlock connection that allowed access to the berthed ship, when she caught up with him.
‘Clavain.’
He turned around, his helmet tucked under his arm. ‘Felka,’ he said.
‘You didn’t tell me you were leaving.’
I didn’t have the nerve.‘
She nodded. ‘I’d have tried talking you out of it. But I understand. This is something you have to do.’
He nodded without saying anything.
‘Clavain…’
‘Felka, I’m so sorry about what I…’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, taking a step closer. I mean, it does matter — of course it matters — but we can talk about it later. On the way.‘
‘On the way where?’ he said stupidly.
‘To battle, Clavain. I’m coming with you.’
It was only then that he realised that she was carrying a suit herself, bundled under one arm, the helmet dangling from her fist like an overripe fruit.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you die, I want to die as well. It’s as simple as that, Clavain.’
They fell away from Zodiacal Light Clavain watched the ship recede, wondering if he would ever set foot in it again. ‘This won’t be comfortable,’ he warned as he gunned the thrust up to its ceiling. The inertia-suppression bubble swallowed four-fifths of the banshee craft’s mass, but the bubble’s effective radius did not encompass the flight deck. Clavain and Felka felt the full crush of eight gees building up like a series of weights being placed on their chests.
‘I can take it,’ she told him.
‘It’s not too late to turn back.’
‘I’m coming with you. There’s a lot we need to discuss.’
Clavain called a battle realisation into view, appraising any changes that had taken place since he had gone to fetch his spacesuit. His ships swarmed around Nostalgia for Infinity like enraged hornets, arcing tighter with each loop. Twenty-three members of Scorpio’s army were now dead, most of them pigs, but the closest of the attack swarm were now within kilometres of the great ship’s hull; at such close range they became very difficult targets for Volyova’s medium-range defences. Storm Bird, identified by its own fat icon, was now approaching the edge of the combat swarm. The Triumvir had pulled all but one of her hell-class weapons back within cover of the lighthugger. Elsewhere, on the general system-wide view, the wolf weapon continued to sink its single gravitational fang into the meat of the star. Clavain contracted the displays until they were just large enough to view, and then turned to Felka. ‘I’m afraid talking isn’t going to be too easy.’
[Then we won’t talk, will we?]
He looked at her, startled that she had spoken to him in the Conjoiner fashion, opening a window between their heads, pushing words and much more than words into his skull. Felka…
[It’s all right, Clavain. Just because I didn’t do this very often doesn’t mean I couldn’t…]
I never thought you couldn’t… it’s just... They were close enough for Conjoined thought, he realised, even though there was no Conjoiner machinery in the ship itself. The fields generated by their implants were strong enough to influence each other without intermediate amplification, provided they were no more than a few metres apart.
[You’re right. Normally I didn’t want to. But you aren’t just anyone.]
You don’t have to if you don’t…
[Clavain: a word of warning. You can look all the way into my head. There are no barriers, no partitions, no mnemonic blockades. Not to you, at least. But don’t look too deeply. It’s not that you’d see anything private, or anything I’m ashamed of… it’s just…]
I might not be able to take it?
[Sometimes I can’t take it, Clavain, and I’ve lived with it since I was born.]
I understand.
He could see into the surface layers of her personality, feel the surface traffic of her thoughts. The data was calm. There was nothing that he could not examine; no sensory experience or memory that he could not unravel and open as if it were one of his own. But beneath that calm surface layer, glimpsed like something rushing behind smoked glass, there lay a howling storm of consciousness. It was frantic and ceaseless, like a machine always on the point of ripping itself apart, but one that would never find respite in its own destruction.
He pulled back, terrified that he might fall in.
[You see what I mean?]
I always knew you lived with something like that. I just didn’t…
[It isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault, not even Galiana’s. It’s just the way lam.]
He understood then, perhaps more thoroughly than at any point since he had known her, just what Felka’s craving was like. Games, complex games, sated that howling machine, gave it something to work on, slowed it to something less furious. When she had been a child, the Wall had been all that she needed, but the Wall had been taken from her. After that, nothing had ever been enough. Perhaps the machine would have evolved as Felka grew. Or perhaps the Wall would always have turned out to be inadequate. All that mattered now was that she find surrogates for it: games or puzzles, labyrinths or riddles, which the machine could process and thereby give her the tiniest degree of inner calm.
Now I understand why you think the Jugglers might be able to help.
[Even if they can’t change me — and I’m not even sure I want them to change me — they might at least give me something to think about, Clavain. So many alien minds have been imprinted in their seas, so many patterns stored. I might even be able to make sense of something that the oth
er swimmers haven’t. I might even be valuable.]
I always said I’d do what I could. But it hasn’t got any easier. You understand that, don’t you?
[Of course.]
Felka…
She must have read enough of his mind to see what he was about to ask. [I lied, Clavain. I lied to save you, to get you to turn around.]
He already knew; Skade had told him. But until now he had never entirely dismissed the possibility that Skade herself might have been lying; that Felka was indeed his daughter. It would have been a white lie, in that case. I’ve been responsible for enough of those in my time.
[It was still a lie. But I didn’t want Skade to kill you. It seemed better not to tell the truth…]
You must have known that I’d always wondered…
[It was natural for you to wonder, Clavain. There was always a bond between us, after you saved my life. And you were Galiana’s prisoner before I was born. It would have been easy for her to harvest genetic material…] Her thoughts became hazy. [Clavain… do you mind if I ask you something?]
There aren’t any secrets between us, Felka.
[Did you make love with Galiana, when you were her prisoner?]
He answered with a calm clarity of mind that surprised even himself. I don’t know. I think so. I remember it. But then what do memories mean, after four hundred years? Maybe I’m just remembering a memory. I hope that isn’t the case. But afterwards… when I had become one of the Conjoined…
[Yes?]
We did make love. Early on, we made love often. The other Conjoiners didn’t like it, I think — they saw it as an animal act, a primitive throwback to baseline humanity. Galiana didn’t agree, of course. She was always the sensual one, the one who revelled in the realm of the senses. That was what her enemies never truly understood about her — that she honestly loved humanity more than they did. It was why she made the Conjoined. Not to be something better than humanity, but as a gift, a promise of what humanity could be if we only realised our potential. Instead, they painted her as some coldly reductionist monster. They were so terribly wrong. Galiana didn’t think of love as some ancient Darwinian trick of brain chemistry that had to be eradicated from the human mind. She saw it as something that had to be brought to its culmination, like a seed that needed to be nurtured as it grew. But they never understood that part. And the trouble was you had to be Conjoined before you appreciated what it was that she had achieved.
Clavain paused, taking a moment to review the disposition of his forces around the Triumvir’s ship. There had been two more deaths in the last minute, but the steady encroachment of his forces continued. Yes, we did make love, back in my first days amongst the Conjoined. But there came a time when it was no longer necessary, except as a nostalgic act. It felt like something that children do: not wrong, not primitive, not even dull, just no longer of any interest. It wasn’t that we had stopped loving each other, or had lost our thirst for sensory experience. It was simply that there were so many more rewarding ways of achieving that same kind of intimacy. Once you’ve touched someone else’s mind, walked through their dreams, seen the world through their eyes, felt the world through their skin… well… there never seemed to be any real need to go back to the old way. And I was never much one for nostalgia. It was as if we had stepped into a more adult world, crammed with its own pleasures and enticements. We had no reason to look back at what we were missing.
She did not respond immediately. The ship flew on. Clavain eyed the readouts and tactical summaries again. For a moment, a terrible, yawning moment, he felt that he had said far too much. But then she spoke, and he knew that she had understood everything.
[I think I need to tell you about the wolves.]
Chapter 37
WHEN VOLYOVA HAD made the decision, she felt a rush of strength, enabling her to rip the medical probes and shunts from her body, flinging them aside with wicked abandon. She retained only the goggles which substituted for her blinded eyes, while doing her best not to think of the vile machinery now floating in her skull. Other than that, she felt quite hale and hearty. She knew that it was an illusion, that she would pay for this burst of energy later, and that almost certainly she would pay for it with her life. But she felt no fear at the prospect, only a quiet satisfaction that she might at least do something with the time that remained to her. It was all very well lying here, directing distant affairs like some bed-ridden pontiff, but it was not the way she was meant to be. She was Triumvir Ilia Volyova, and she had certain standards to uphold.
‘Ilia…’ Khouri began, when she saw what was happening.
‘Khouri,’ she said, her voice still a croak, but finally imbued with something resembling the old fire. ‘Khouri… do this for me, and never once stop to question me or talk me out of it. Understood?’
‘Understood… I think.’
Volyova clicked her ringers at the nearest servitor. It scuttled towards her, dodging between the squawking medical monitors. ‘Captain… have the servitor assist me to the spacecraft bay, will you? I will expect a suit and a shuttle to be waiting for me.’
Khouri steadied her, holding her in a sitting position. ‘Ilia, what are you planning?’
‘I’m going outside. I need to have a word — a serious word — with weapon seventeen.’
‘You’re in no state…’
Volyova cut her off with a chop of one frail hand. ‘Khouri, I may have a weak and feeble body, but give me weightlessness, a suit and possibly a weapon or two and you’ll find I can still do some damage. Understood?’
‘You haven’t given up, have you?’
The servitor helped her to the floor. ‘Given up, Khouri? It’s not in my dictionary.’
Khouri helped her as well, taking the Triumvir’s other arm.
On the edge of the combat swarm, though still within range of potentially damaging weapons, Antoinette disengaged the evasive pattern she had been running and throttled Storm Bird down to one gee. Through Storm Bird’s windows she could see the elongated shape of the Triumvir’s lighthugger, visible at a distance of two thousand kilometres as a tiny scratch of light. Most of the time it was dark enough that she did not see the ship at all, but two or three times a minute a major explosion — some detonating mine, warhead, drive-unit or weapons-trigger — threw light against the hull, momentarily picking it out the way a lighthouse might glance against a jagged pinnacle rising from the depths of a storm-racked ocean. But there was never any doubt about where the ship was. Sparks of flame were swarming around it, so bright that they smeared across her retina, etching dying pink arcs and helices against the stellar backdrop, the trails reminding her of the fiery sticks children had played with during fireworks shows in the old carousel. Pinpricks of light within the swarm signified smaller armaments detonating, and very occasionally Antoinette saw the hard red or green line of a laser precursor beam, caught in outgassing air or propellant from one or other of the ships. Absently, cursing her mind’s ability to focus on the most trivial of things at the wrong time, she realised that this was a detail that they always got wrong in the space opera holo-dramas, where laser beams were invisible, the sinister element of invisibility adding to the drama. But a real close-range space battle was a far messier affair, with gas clouds and chaff shards erupting all over the place, ready to reflect and disperse any beam weapon.
The swarm was tighter towards the middle, thinning out through dozens of kilometres. Though she was on the edge of it, she was aware of how tempting a target Storm Bird must present. The Triumvir’s defences were preoccupied with the closer attack elements, but Antoinette knew that she could not afford to count on that continuing.
Xavier’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Antoinette? Scorpio’s ready for departure. Says you can open the bay door any time you like.’
‘We’re not close enough,’ she said.
Scorpio’s voice cut over the intercom. She no longer had any difficulty distinguishing his voice from those of the other pigs. ‘Antoin
ette? This is close enough. We have the fuel to cross from here. There’s no need for you to risk Storm Bird by taking us any closer.’
‘But the closer I take you, the more fuel you’ll have in reserve. Isn’t that true?’
‘I can’t argue with that. Take us five hundred kilometres closer, then. And Antoinette? That really will be close enough.’
She magnified the battle view, tapping into the telemetry stream from the many cameras that now whipped around the Triumvir’s ship. The image data had been seamlessly merged and then processed to remove the motion, and while there were occasional snags and dropouts as the view was refreshed, the impression was as if she were hovering in space only two or three kilometres beyond the ship itself. The silence was one thing that the holo-dramas got right, she realised, but she had never realised how terribly, profoundly wrong that silence would be when accompanying an actual battle. It was an abject void into which her imagination projected endless screams. What did not help was the way that the Triumvir’s ship loomed out of darkness in random, fitful flashes of light, never lingering long enough for her to comprehend the form of the ship in its entirety. What she saw of the ship’s perverted architecture was nonetheless adequately disturbing.
Now she saw something that she had not seen before: a rectangle of light, like a golden door, opened somewhere along the wrinkled complexity of Nostalgia for Infinity’s hull. It was open for only a moment, but that was long enough for something to slip through. The glare from the engine of the shuttle that had emerged caught the stepped spinal edge of a flying buttress, and as the ship gyred, orientating itself with strobing flashes of thrust, the black shadow of the buttress crawled across an acre of hull material that had the scaled texture of lizardskin.
What about the wolves, Felka?
[Everything, Clavain. At least, everything that I learned. Everything that the Wolf was prepared to let me know.]
It may not be all of the picture, Felka. It may not even be part of it.