Alastiar Reynolds

So he had done it. There had been a moment during that state of hazy reacquaintance with reality when he had dared to imagine that the memories of recent events stemmed only from a series of troubling dreams: the kind that afflicted any soldier with anything resembling a conscience; anyone who had lived through enough wars — enough history — to know that what appeared to be the right action at the time might later turn out to be the direst of mistakes. But he had gone through with it, betraying his people. And it was

a betrayal, no matter how pure the motive. They had trusted him with a shattering secret, and he had violated that trust.There had not been time to evaluate the wisdom of defection in anything but the most cursory manner. From the moment he had seen the evacuation fleet and understood what it meant he knew that he had one opportunity to leave, and that it would mean stealing the corvette there and then. If he had waited any longer — until they got back to the Mother Nest, for instance — Skade would surely have seen his intentions. She had already had suspicions, but it would take her time to pick through the unfamiliar architecture of his mind, his antique implants and half-forgotten neural-interface protocols. He could not afford to give her that time.
So he had acted, knowing that he would probably not see Felka again, since he did not expect to remain a free man — or even a living one — after he had entered into the next and most difficult phase of his defection. It would have been far better if he had been able to see her one last time; there would have been no hope of persuading her to come with him, and no way of arranging her escape even if she had been willing, but he could have let her know his intentions, certain that his secret was safe with her. He also thought she would have understood — not necessarily agreed, but she would not have tried to argue him out of it. And if there had been a final farewell, he thought, then she might have answered the question he had never quite had the courage to ask her; the question that went back to the time of Galiana’s nest and the war-weary days on Mars when they had met for the first time. He would have asked her if she was his daughter, and she might have answered.
Now he would have to live without ever knowing, and though he might never have summoned the courage — in all the years before he had never managed it, after all — the permanence of his exile and the impossibility of ever knowing the truth felt as bleak and cold as stone.
Clavain decided he had better learn to live with it.
He had defected before, throwing away one life, and he had survived both emotionally and physically. He was older now, but not so old and weary that he could not do it again. The trick, for now, was to focus only on immediates: fact one was that he was still alive and that his injuries were minor. He thought it likely that missiles were on their way to him, but they could not have been launched until long after he had taken the corvette or they would have already shown up on the passive sensors. Someone, very probably Remontoire, had managed to delay matters sufficiently to give him this edge. It was not much of an edge, but it was a lot better than being already dead, surfing his own expanding cloud of ionised debris. That at least was worth another rueful smile. They might yet kill him, but it would not be close to home.
He scratched his beard, muscles labouring against the continual pull of acceleration. The corvette’s motors were still firing at maximum sustainable thrust: three gees that felt as rock-solid and smooth as the pull of a star. Each second, the ship was annihilating a bacterium-sized speck of anti-matter, but the anti-matter and metallic-hydrogen reaction-mass cores had barely been scratched. The corvette would take him anywhere he wanted in the system, and it would get him there in only tens of days. He could even accelerate harder if he wished, though it would stress the engines.
Fact two was that he had a plan.
The corvette’s antimatter thrusters were advanced — far more so than anything in the enemy’s fleet — but they did not employ the same technology as the Conjoiner starship drive. They could not have pushed a million-tonne starship to within a whisker of light-speed, but they did have one significant tactical advantage: they were silent across the entire neutrino-emission spectrum. Since Clavain had disabled all the usual transponders, he could be tracked only by his emission flame: the torch of relativistic particles slamming from the corvette’s exhaust apertures. But the corvette’s exhaust was already as tightly collimated as a rapier blade. There was negligible scattering away from the axis of thrust, so effectively he could only be seen by anything or anyone sitting in a very narrow cone immediately to his rear. The cone widened as it reached further behind him, but it also became steadily attenuated, like a torch beam growing weaker with distance. Only an observer near its centre would detect sufficient numbers of photons to obtain an accurate fix on his position, and if Clavain allowed the cone’s angle to tilt by no more than a handful of degrees, the beam would become too dim to betray him.
But a change in beam vector implied a change in course. The Mother Nest would not expect him to do that, only for him to maintain a minimum-time trajectory towards Epsilon Eridani, and then to Yellowstone, which huddled in a tight, warm orbit around the same star. He would get there in twelve days. Where else could he go? The corvette could not reach another system — it barely had the range to reach the cometary halo — and almost any other world apart from Yellowstone was still in nominal Demarchist control. Their hold might be faltering, but in their present paranoid state they would still attack Clavain, even if he claimed to be defecting with tactically valuable secrets. But Clavain knew all that. Even before he plunged the piezo-knife into the membrane around Skade’s comet, he had formulated a plan — maybe not the most detailed or elegant of his career, and it was far from the most likely to succeed, but he had only had minutes to assemble it and he did not think he had done too badly. Even after reconsideration, nothing better had presented itself.
And all it needed was a little trust.

I want to know what happened to me.

They looked at her, and then at each other. She could almost feel the intense buzz of their thoughts crackling through the air like the ionisation breakdown that presaged a thunderstorm.
The first of the surgeons projected calm and reassurance. note 211
I said I want to know what happened to me.
note 212 The surgeon’s gloss of calm faltered.
In need of what?
note 213
For some reason she could not see into any of their heads. For most Con-joiners, waking to experience such isolation would have been a profoundly disturbing experience. But Skade was equipped for it. She endured it stoically, reminding herself that she had experienced degrees of isolation almost as extreme during her time in the Closed Council. Those had ended; this would end. It would only be a matter of time until…
What is wrong with my implants?
note 214
She knew that the surgeon was a man named Delmar. So why am I isolated ?
But almost before she had phrased the question she knew what the answer would be. It was because they did not want her to be able to see what she looked like through their eyes. Because they did not want her to know the immediate truth of what had happened to her.
note 215
Never mind…I know. Why did you bother waking me?
note 216
She could not move her head, only her eyes. Through the blur of peripheral vision she saw Remontoire approach the bed, or table, or couch, where they had woken her. He wore an electric-white medical tunic against a background of pure white. His head was an oddly disconnected sphere bobbing towards her. Swan-necked medical servitors moved out of his way. The surgeon folded his arms across his chest and looked on with an expression of stern disapproval. His colleagues had made a discreet exit, leaving only the three of them in the room.
Skade peered ‘down’ towards the foot of the bed but could see only an out-of-focus whiteness that might have been illusory. There was a quiet mechanical humming, but nothing that she would not have expected in a medical room.
Remontoire knelt down beside her. note 217
You tell me what happened and I’ll tell you what I remember.
Remontoire glanced back at the surgeon. He allowed Skade to hear the thought he pushed into Delmar’s head. note 218
note 219
note 220 Remontoire nodded and smiled as the man ushered his machines from the room, their swan-necks lowering elegantly to pass through the doorway. note 221note 222
Skade tried moving her head again, but still without success. Come closer, Remontoire. I can’t see you very easily. They won’t show me what happened .
note 223
I remember.
note 224
She remembered taking Clavain to the comet but not the rest of it. And did he get away ?
note 225
It was difficult to respond, though she had known from the moment of waking that something bad had happened to her. Caught me ?
note 226
Show me, damn you.
note 227
Describe it, then. Describe it, Remontoire!
note 228
For a moment she pushed aside her own morbid curiosity. I take it he’s dead ?
note 229
As angry as she was, and despite her morbid curiosity, she had to admit that the matter of Clavain was at least as fascinating to her as her own predicament. And the two things were not unconnected, were they? She did not yet fully understand what had happened to her, but it was enough to know that it had been Clavain’s doing. It did not matter that it might not have been intentional.
There were no accidents in treason.
Where is he?
note 230
The Demarchists would crucify him.
Remontoire nodded. note 231
We have optical monitors strewn through the halo. Surely he’ll have fallen into the line of sight of another one by now.
note 232
Were missiles launched?
note 233
She felt drool loosen itself and trail down her chin. We have to stop him, Remontoire. Grasp that .
note 234
She bit down on her fury. We have the prototype .
note 235
Skade said nothing for several seconds, calculating how much she could prudently reveal. This was Inner Sanctum business, after all, sensitive even by the clandestine standards of Closed Council. It is, Remontoire .
The door opened. One of the servitors ducked under and in, followed by Delmar. Remontoire stood and extended his hands, palms facing forwards.
note 236
Delmar stood by the door, arms folded. note 237
Skade hissed at Remontoire. He moved closer, bending down so that their heads were only centimetres apart, permitting mind-to-mind contact without amplification by the room’s systems. It can be done. The prototype has a higher acceleration ceiling than you have assumed .
note 238
A lot. You’ll see. But all you need to know is that the prototype can get close enough to Clavain’s approximate position to pick up his trail again, and then close within weapons range. I’ll need you on the crew, of course. You’re a soldier, Remontoire. You know the weapons better than I do.
note 239
It’s a little bit late for that, wouldn’t you say?
Remontoire said nothing, but she knew she had made her point. And he would come around to her viewpoint soon enough. He was a Conjoiner to the core, and would therefore accept any course of action, no matter how ruthless, that benefited the Mother Nest. That was the difference between Remontoire and Clavain.
note 240
Yes, Remontoire?
note 241
You’d have a demand of your own?
note 242
Skade narrowed her eyes. She was about to refuse when she realised that her grounds for doing so — that the operation had to be remain entirely within the purview of the Closed Council — made no difference where Felka was concerned.
What possible good would Felka’s presence serve?
note 243
Skade knew he was right, though it pained her to admit it. Clavain would have been an immensely valuable asset to the operation to recover the hell-class weapons, and his loss would make the operation very much more difficult. On one level, she could see the attraction of bringing him back into the fold, so that he could be pinned down and his hard-won expertise sucked out like so much bone marrow. But a live capture would be inordinately more difficult than a long-range kill, and until she succeeded there would remain the possibility of him reaching the other side. The Demarchists would be fascinated to hear about the new shipbuilding programme, the rumours of evacuation plans and savage new weapons.
Skade could not be certain, but she thought that the news might be enough to reinvigorate the enemy, gaining them allies who had thus far remained neutral. If the Demarchists rallied and managed to launch some kind of last-ditch attack on the Mother Nest, with the support of the Ultras and any number of previously neutral factions, all could be lost.
No. She had to kill Clavain; that was simply not open to debate. Equally, she had to give every impression that she was ready to act reasonably, just as she would have done under any other state of war. Which meant that she had to accept Felka’s presence.
This is blackmail, isn’t it?
note 244
He won’t listen to her, even if…
note 245
He’s an old man, Remontoire. An old man with delusions. They’re not my responsibility.
The servitors moved aside to allow him to leave. She watched the seemingly detached ovoid of his face bob out of the room like a balloon. There had been instants in their conversation when she had almost sensed cracks in the neural blockade, pathways that Delmar had — through understandable oversight — not completely disabled. The cracks had been like strobe flashes, opening up brief frozen windows into Remontoire’s skull. Very probably he had not even been aware of her intrusions. Perhaps she had even imagined them.
But if she had imagined them, she had also imagined the horror that went with them. And the horror came from what Remontoire was seeing.
Delmar…I really would like to know the facts…
note 246
Show me now, you bastard.
He came closer to her side. The first of the swan-necked servitors towered over him, the chrome segments of its neck gleaming. The machine angled its head back and forth, digesting what lay below it.
note 247
The blockades came down like heavy metal shutters: clunk, clunk, clunk through her skull. A barrage of neural data crashed in. She saw herself through Delmar’s eyes. The thing down on the medical couch was her, recognisably so — her head was bizarrely unharmed — but she was not remotely the right shape. She felt a twisting spasm of revulsion, as if she had just accessed a photograph from some bleak pre-industrial archive of medical nightmares. She wanted desperately to turn the page, to move on to the next pitiful atrocity.
She had been bisected.
The tether must have fallen across her from her left shoulder to her right hip, a precise diagonal severance. It had taken her legs and her left arm. Carapacial machinery hugged the wounds: gloss-white humming scabs of medical armour, like huge pus-filled blisters. Fluid lines erupted from the machinery and trailed into white modules squatting by her side. She looked as if she was bursting out of a white steel chrysalis. Or being consumed by it, transformed into something strange and phantasmagoric.
Delmar…
note 248
You don’t understand. This… state … doesn’t concern me at all. We’re Conjoiners, aren’t we? There isn’t anything we can’t repair, given time. I know you can fix me, eventually . She felt his relief.note 249
But eventually isn’t good enough. In a few days, three at the most, I need to be on a ship.

CHAPTER 13