‘We have a job to do here, Clavain. I’m not just talking about the evacuation of Resurgam. Do you honestly think I’d leave the Inhibitors to get on with their business?’
He shook his head. ‘No. As a matter of fact, I already had my suspicions.’
‘I’m dying, Clavain. I have no future. With the right intervention I might survive a few more weeks, no more than that. I suppose they might be able to do something for me on another world, assuming anyone still retains a pre-plague technology, but that would entail the tedious business of being frozen, something I have had quite enough of for one existence. So I am calling it a day.’ She raised a bird-boned wrist and thumped the bed. ‘I bequeath you this damned monstrosity of a ship. You can take it and the evacuees away from here once we’re done airlifting them from Resurgam. Here, I give it to you. It’s yours.’ She raised her voice, an effort that must have cost her more than he could even begin to imagine. ‘Are you listening, Captain? It’s Clavain’s ship now. I hereby resign as Triumvir.’
‘Captain…?’ Clavain ventured.
She smiled. ‘You’ll find out, don’t you worry.’
‘I’ll take care of the evacuees,’ Clavain said, moved at what had just happened. He nodded at Khouri as well. ‘You have my word on that. I promise you I will not let you down, Triumvir.’
Volyova dismissed him with one weary wave of her hand. ‘I believe you. You appear to be a man who gets things done, Clavain.’
He scratched his beard. ‘Then there’s just one other thing.’
‘The weapons? Who gets them in the end? Well, don’t worry. I’ve already thought of that.’
He waited, studying the series of abstract grey curves that was the Triumvir’s bed-ridden form.
‘Here’s my proposal,’ she said, her voice as thin as the wind. ‘It happens to be non-negotiable.’ Then her attention flicked to Antoinette again. ‘You. What did you say your name was?’
‘Bax,’ Antoinette said, almost stuttering on her answer.
‘Mm.’ The Triumvir sounded as if this was the least interesting thing she had heard in her life. ‘And this ship of yours… this freighter… is it really as large and fast as is claimed?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Then I’ll take it as well. You won’t need it once we’ve finished evacuating the planet. You’d just better make sure you get the job done before I die.’
Clavain looked at Bax, and then back to the Triumvir. ‘What do you want her ship for, Ilia?’
‘Glory,’ Volyova said dismissively. ‘Glory and redemption. What else did you imagine?’
Antoinette Bax sat alone on the bridge of her ship, the ship that had been hers and her father’s before that, the ship that she had loved once and hated once, the ship that was as much a part of her as her own flesh, and knew that this would be the last time. For better or for worse, nothing would be the same from this moment on. It was time to finish the process that had begun with that trip from Carousel New Copenhagen to honour a ridiculous and stupid childhood vow. For all its foolishness it had been a vow born out of kindness and love, and it had taken her into the heart of the war and into the great crushing machine of history itself. Had she known — had she had the merest inkling of what would happen, of how she would become embroiled in Clavain’s story, a story that had been running for centuries before her birth and which would see her yanked out of her own environment and flung light-years from home and decades into the future — then perhaps she might have quailed. Perhaps. But she might also have stared into the face of fear and been filled with an even more stubborn determination to do what she had promised herself all those years ago. It was, Antoinette thought, entirely possible that she would have done just that. Once a stubborn bitch, always a stubborn bitch — and if that wasn’t her personal motto, it was about time she adopted it. Her father might not have approved, but she was sure that in his heart of hearts he would have agreed and perhaps even admired her for it.
‘Ship?’
‘Yes, Antoinette?’
‘It’s all right, you know. I don’t mind. You can still call me Little Miss.’
‘It was only ever an act.’ Beast — or Lyle Merrick, more properly — paused. I did it rather well, wouldn’t you say?‘
‘Dad was right to trust you. You did look after me, didn’t you?’
‘As well as I was able to. Which wasn’t as well as I hoped. But then again, you didn’t exactly make it easy. I suppose that was inevitable, given the family connection. Your father was not exactly the most cautious of individuals, and you are very much a chip off the old block.’
‘We came through, Ship,’ Antoinette said. ‘We still came through. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Ship… Lyle…’
‘Antoinette?’
‘You know what the Triumvir wants, don’t you?’
Merrick did not answer her for several seconds. All her life she had imagined that the pauses were inserted cosmetically into the subpersona’s conversation, but she knew now that they had been quite real. Merrick’s simulation experienced consciousness at a rate very close to normal human thought, so his pauses indicated genuine introspection.
‘Xavier did inform me, yes.’
Antoinette was glad at least that she did not have to reveal that particular piece of the arrangement. ‘When the evacuation is done, when we’ve got as many people away from the planet as we can, then the Triumvir wants to use Storm Bird for herself. She says it’s for glory and redemption. It sounds like a suicide mission, Lyle.’
I more or less came to the same conclusion as well, Antoinette.‘ Merrick’s synthesised voice was quite unnervingly calm. ’She’s dying, so I gather, so I suppose it isn’t suicide in the old sense… but that’s a fairly pointless distinction. I gather she wishes to make amends for her past.‘
‘Khouri, the other woman, says she isn’t the monster the people on the planet make out.’ Antoinette struggled to keep her own voice as level and collected as Merrick’s. They were skirting around something dreadful, orbiting an absence neither wished to acknowledge. ‘But I guess she must have done some bad stuff in the past anyway.’
‘Then I suppose that makes two of us,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, Antoinette, I know what you are concerned about. But you mustn’t worry about me.’
‘She thinks you’re just a ship, Lyle. And no one will tell her the truth because they need her co-operation so badly. Not that it would make any difference if they did…’ Antoinette trailed off, hating herself for feeling so sad. ‘You’ll die, won’t you? Finally, the way it would have happened all those years ago if Dad and Xavier hadn’t helped you.’
I deserved it, Antoinette. I did a terrible thing, and I escaped justice.‘
‘But Lyle…’ Her eyes were stinging. She could feel tears welling inside her, stupid irrational tears that she despised herself for. She had loved her ship, then hated it — hated it because of the lie in which it had implicated her father, the lie that she had been told; and then she had come to love it again, because the ship, and the ghost of Lyle Merrick that haunted it, were both tangible links back to her father. And now that she had come to that accommodation, the knife was twisting again. What she had learned to love was being taken away from her, the last link back to her father snatched from her hands by that bitch Volyova…
Why was it never easy? All she had wanted to do was keep a vow.
‘Antoinette?’
‘We could remove you,’ she said. ‘Take you out of the ship and replace you with an ordinary subpersona. Volyova wouldn’t have to know, would she?’
‘No, Antoinette. It’s my time as well. If she wants glory and redemption, then why can’t I take a little of that for myself?’
‘You’ve already made a difference. There isn’t any need for a larger sacrifice.’
‘But this is still what I choose to do. You can’t begrudge me that, can you?’
??
?No,’ she said, her voice breaking up. ‘No, I can’t. And I wouldn’t.’
‘Promise me something, Antoinette?’
She rubbed her eyes, ashamed at her tears and yet oddly exultant at the same time. ‘What, Lyle?’
‘That you will continue to take good care of yourself, no matter what happens from here on in.’
She nodded. ‘I will. I promise.’
‘That’s good. There’s one other thing I want to say, and then I think we should go our separate ways. I can continue with the evacuation unaided. In fact, I positively refuse to let you put yourself in further danger by continuing to fly aboard me. How does that sound for an order? Impressed, aren’t you? You didn’t think I was capable of that, did you?’
‘No, Ship. I didn’t.’ She smiled despite herself.
‘One final thing, Antoinette. It was a pleasure to serve under you. A pleasure and an honour. Now, please go away and find another ship — preferably something bigger and better — to captain. I am sure you will make an excellent job of it.’
She stood up from the seat. ‘I’ll do my best, I promise.’
‘Of that I have no doubt.’
She stepped towards the door, hesitating on the threshold. ‘Goodbye Lyle,’ she said.
‘Goodbye, Little Miss.’
Chapter 40
THEY PULLED HIM shivering from the open womb of the casket. He felt like a man who had been rescued from drowning in winter. The faces of the people around him sharpened into focus, but he did not recognise any of them immediately. Someone threw a quilted thermal blanket around the narrow frame of his shoulders. They eyed him without speaking, guessing that he was in no mood for conversation and would wish instead to orientate himself by his own efforts.
Clavain sat on the edge of the casket for several minutes until he had enough strength in his legs to hobble across the chamber. He stumbled at the last moment and yet made the fall appear graceful, as if he had intended to lean suddenly against the support of the porthole’s armoured frame. He peered through the glass. He could see nothing beyond except blackness, with his own ghastly reflection hovering in the foreground. He appeared strangely eyeless, his sockets crammed with shadows which were the precise black of the background vacuum. He felt a savage jolt of déjà vu, the feeling that he had been here before, contemplating his own masklike face. He tugged and nagged at the thread of memory until it spooled free, recalling a last-minute diplomatic mission, a shuttle falling towards occupied Mars, an imminent confrontation with an old enemy and friend called Galiana… and he remembered that even then, four hundred years ago — though it was more now, he thought — he had felt too old for the world, too old for the role it forced upon him. Had he known what lay before him then, he would have either laughed or gone insane. It had felt like the end of his life, and yet it had been only a moment from its beginning, barely separable in his memories now from his childhood.
He looked back at the people who had brought him around and then up at the ceiling.
‘Dim the lights,’ someone said.
His reflection disappeared. Now he could see something other than blackness. It was a swarm of stars, squashed into one hemisphere of the sky. Reds and blues and golds and frigid whites. Some were brighter than others, though he saw no familiar constellations. But the clumping of the stars, stirred into one part of the sky, meant only one thing. They were still moving relativistically, still skimming near the speed of light.
Clavain turned back to the small huddle of people. ‘Has the battle taken place?’
A pale dark-haired woman spoke for the group. ‘Yes, Clavain.’ She spoke warmly, but not with the absolute assurance Clavain had expected. ‘Yes, it’s over. We engaged the trio of Conjoiner ships, destroying one and damaging the other two.’
‘Only damaged?’
‘The simulations didn’t get it quite right,’ said the woman. She moved to Clavain’s side and pushed a beaker of brown fluid under his nose. He looked at her face and hair. There was something familiar about the way she wore it, something that sparked the same ancient memories that had been stirred by his reflection in the porthole. ‘Here, drink this. Recuperative medichines from Ilia’s arsenal. It’ll do you the world of good.’
Clavain took the beaker from the woman’s hand and sniffed at the broth. It smelt of chocolate when he had expected tea. He tipped some down his throat. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask your name?’
‘Not at all,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Felka. You know me quite well.’
He looked at her and shrugged. ‘You seem familiar…’
‘Drink up. I think you need it.’
His memory came back in swathes, like a city recovering from a power failure: block by random block, utilities stuttering and flickering before normal service was resumed. Even when he felt all right, there came other medichine therapies, each of which dealt with specific areas of brain function, each of which was administered in doses more carefully tuned than the last, while Clavain grimaced and cooperated with the minimum of good grace. By the end of it he did not want to see another thimbleful of chocolate in his life.
After several hours he was deemed to be neurologically sound. There were still things that he did not recall with great precision, but he was told this was within the error margins of the usual amnesia that accompanied reefersleep fugue, and did not indicate any untoward lapses. They gave him a lightweight bio-monitor tabard, assigned a spindly bronze servitor to him and told him he was free to move around as he pleased.
‘Shouldn’t 1 be asking why you’ve woken me?’ he said.
‘We’ll get to that later,’ said Scorpio, who seemed to be in charge. ‘There’s no immediate hurry, Clavain.’
‘But I take it there’s a decision that needs to be made?’
Scorpio glanced at one of the other leaders, the woman called Antoinette Bax. She had wide eyes and a freckled nose and he felt that there were memories of her that he had yet to unearth. She nodded back, almost imperceptibly.
‘We wouldn’t have woken you for the view, Clavain,’ Scorpio said. ‘It’s a piece of crap even with the lights out.’
Somewhere in the heart of the immense vessel was a place that felt like it belonged in some entirely different part of the universe. It was a glade, a place of grass and trees and synthetic blue skies. There were holographic birds in the air: parrots and hornbills and suchlike, skimming from tree to tree in cometlike flashes of bright primary colour, and there was a waterfall in the distance which looked suspiciously real, hazed in a swirling talcum-blue mist where it emptied into a small dark lake.
Felka escorted Clavain on to a flat apron of cool glistening grass. She wore a long black dress, her feet lost under the black spillage of the hem. She did not seem to mind it dragging through the dew-laden grass. They sat down facing each other, resting on tree stumps whose tops had been polished to mirrored smoothness. They had the place to themselves, except for the birds.
Clavain looked around. He felt much better now and his memory was nearly whole, but he did not remember this place at all. ‘Did you create this, Felka?’
‘No,’ she said cautiously, ‘but why do you ask?’
‘Because it reminds me a little of the forest at the core of the Mother Nest, I suppose. Where you had your atelier. Except it has gravity, of course, which your atelier didn’t.’
‘So you do remember, then.’
He scratched at the stubble on his chin. Someone had thoughtfully shaved off his beard when he was asleep. ‘Dribs and drabs. Not as much of what happened before I went under as I’d like.’
‘What do you remember, exactly?’
‘Remontoire leaving to make contact with Sylveste. You almost going with him, and then deciding not to. Not much else. Volyova’s dead, isn’t she?’
Felka nodded. ‘We got the planet evacuated. You and Volyova agreed to split the remaining hell-class weapons. She took Storm Bird, loaded as many weapons on to it as she could manage and rode it
straight into the heart of the Inhibitor machine.’
Clavain pursed his lips and whistled quietly. ‘Did she make much difference?’
‘None at all. But she went out with a bang.’
Clavain smiled. ‘I never expected anything less of her. And what else?’
‘Khouri and Thorn — you remember them? They joined Remontoire’s expedition to Hades. They have shuttles, and they’ve initiated Zodiacal Light’s self-repair systems. All they have to do is keep supplying it with raw material and it will repair itself. But it will take a little while, time enough for them to make contact with Sylveste, Khouri thinks.’
‘I didn’t know quite what to make of her claim to have already been into Hades,’ Clavain said, picking blades of grass from the area around his feet. He crushed them and sniffed the pulpy green residue that stained his fingers. ‘But the Triumvir seemed to think it was true.’
‘We’ll find out sooner or later,’ Felka said. ‘After they’ve made contact — however long that takes — they’ll take Zodiacal Light out of the system and follow our trajectory. As for us, well, it’s still your ship, Clavain, but day-to-day affairs are handled by a Triumvirate. Triumvirs Blood, Cruz and Scorpio, by popular vote. Khouri would be one of them, of course, if she hadn’t chosen to stay behind after the evacuation.’
‘My memory says they rescued one hundred and sixty thousand people,’ Clavain said. ‘Is that shockingly wide of the mark?’
‘No, it’s about right. Which sounds pretty impressive until you realise that we didn’t manage to save forty thousand others…’
‘We were the thing that went wrong, weren’t we? If we hadn’t intervened…’
‘No, Clavain.’ Her voice was admonitionary, as if he was an old man who had committed some awful faux pas in polite company. ‘No. You mustn’t think like that. Look, it was like this, understand?’ They were close enough for Conjoined thought. She piped images into his head, pictures from the death of Resurgam. He saw the last hours as the wolf machine — that was what they were now all calling the Inhibitor weapon — bored its gravitation sinkhole into the very heart of the star, stabbing an invisible curette deep into the nuclear-burning core. The tunnel that it had opened was exceedingly narrow, no more than a few kilometres wide at its deepest point — and though the star was being drained of blood, the process was no uncontrolled haemorrhage. Instead the fusing matter in the nuclear-burning core was allowed to squirt out in a fine jetting arc, a column of expanding, cooling hellfire that speared from the star’s surface at half the speed of light. Constrained and guided by pulses of the same gravitational energy that had cored the star in the first place, the spike was bent in a lazy parabola that caused it to douse against the dayside of Resurgam. By the time it impacted, the starfire flame was a thousand kilometres across. The effect was catastrophic and practically instantaneous. The atmosphere was boiled away in a searing flash, the icecaps and the few areas of open water following instants later. Arid and airless, the crust under the beam became molten, the spike gouging a cherry-red scar across the face of the planet. Hundreds of vertical kilometres of the planet’s surface were incinerated, gouting into space in a hot cloud of boiled rock. Shockwaves from the initial impact reached around the world and destroyed all life on the nightside: every human being, every organism that humans had brought to Resurgam. And yet they would have died soon enough without that Shockwave. Within hours, the nightside had turned to face the sun. The spike continued to boil, the well of the energy at the heart of the star barely tapped. Resurgam’s crust burned away, and still the beam continued to chew into the planet’s mantle.