Alastiar Reynolds

note 266
She could not speak, could only shape her own thoughts in response. Yes. How do you know my name

?note 267
Again she moved to hammer on the door that had sealed her inside the cache weapon, but when she tried to lift her arm nothing happened. She was paralysed, though still able to breathe. The presence, whatever it was, continued to feel as if it was directly behind her, looking over her shoulder.
Who … She sensed a terrible mocking delight in her own ignorance.
note 268
You speak Russish.
note 269
Why… now?
note 270
I… have. Nearly.
note 271
She felt, despite still being paralysed, a tiny easing of her terror. So the presence was a computer program, no more than that. She had simply triggered a layer of the weapon’s control mechanism that she had never knowingly invoked before. The presence felt almost preternaturally evil, but that — and the paralysis — was obviously just a refinement of the usual fear-generation mechanism.
Volyova wondered how the weapon was talking to her. She had no implants, and yet the weapon’s voice was definitely speaking directly into her skull. It could only be that the chamber she was in was functioning as a kind of high-powered inverse trawl, stimulating brain function by the application of intense magnetic fields. If it could make her feel terror, Volyova supposed, and with such finesse, it would not have been a great deal more difficult for it to generate ghost signals along her auditory nerve or, more probably, in the hearing centre itself, and to pick up the anticipatory neural firing patterns that accompanied the intention to speak.
These are desperate times…
note 272
Who made you?
There was no immediate answer from Seventeen. For a moment the fear was gone, the neural thrall interrupted by a blank instant of calm, like the drawing of breath between agonised screams.
note 273
No?
note 274
Volyova marshalled her thoughts with the care of someone placing heavy ornaments on a rickety shelf. I think the Conjoiners made you. That’s my working hypothesis, and nothing you’ve told me has led me to think it might need reconsidering .
note 275
Probably not. I’d like to know for curiosity’s sake, but the most important thing is that you’re still capable of serving me.
The weapon tickled the part of her mind that registered amusement. note 276
You did what I asked of you, in the past. Not you specifically, Seventeen –1 never asked anything of you — but whenever I asked anything of the other weapons, they always obeyed me.
note 277
No?
note 278
You’re just saying that.
note 279
You still are.
note 280
I don’t know. I think they might be.
note 281
There’s a problem you might have to attend to.
note 282
In this system, yes. I’d need you to deploy beyond the ship… beyond this chamber… and help me.
note 283
You will. I’ve looked after you for so long, taking care of you, keeping you safe from harm. I know you’ll help me.
The weapon held her suspended, stroking her mind playfully. Now she knew what a mouse felt like after the cat had caught it. She felt that she was only an instant away from having her spine broken in two.
But as abruptly as it had come, the paralysis eased. The weapon still imprisoned her, but she was regaining some voluntary muscle control.
note 284
Nothing we can’t work around…
note 285
The other one?
note 286
Her mind dwelled on the possibilities before she realised what the weapon had to be talking about. You mean the Captain .
note 287
The Captain just needs persuading, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll come around, in the end.
note 288
No… not at all. But I have faith in the Captain.
note 289
I do too.
She gasped suddenly, as if she had been stomach-punched. Her head was empty again and the horrid sense of something sitting immediately behind her had gone, as abruptly as a slamming door. There was not even a hint of the presence in her peripheral vision. She was floating alone, and although she was still imprisoned in the weapon, the feeling that it was haunted had vanished.
Volyova gathered her breath and her composure, marvelling at what had just happened. In all the years she had worked with the weapons she had never once suspected that any of them harboured a guardian subpersona, much less a machine intelligence of at least high gamma-level status — even possibly low-to-medium beta-level.
The weapon had scared the living daylights out of her. Which, she supposed, had undoubtedly been the intended affect.
There was a bustle of motion around her. The access panel — in a totally different part of the wall than she remembered — budged open an inch. Harsh blue light rammed through the gap. Through it, squinting, Volyova could just make out another spacesuited figure. ‘Khouri?’
‘Thank God. You’re still alive. What happened?’
‘Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?’ She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.
‘What, you gave it the wrong command or something?’
‘No, I gave it the right command but for a different interpreter shell than I was actually accessing.’
‘But that would still make it the wrong command, wouldn’t it?’
Volyova turned herself around until her helmet was aligned with the slit of light. ‘It’s more technical than that. How did you get the panel open?’
‘Good old brute force. Or is that not technical enough?’
Khouri had wedged a crowbar from her suit utility kit into what must have been a hair-fine joint in the weapon’s skin, and then levered back on that until the panel slid open.
‘And how long did you take to do that?’
‘I’ve been trying to get it open since you went inside, but it only just gave way, right this minute.’
Volyova nodded, fairly certain that absolutely nothing would have happened until the weapon decided it was time to let her go. ‘Very good work, Khouri. And how long do you think it will take to get it open all the way?’
Khouri adjusted her position, re-attaching herself to the weapon so that she could apply more leverage to the bar. ‘I’ll have you out of there in a jiffy. But while I’ve got you there, so to speak, can we come to some agreement on the Thorn issue?’
‘Listen to me, Khouri. He only barely trusts us now. Show him this ship, give him even a hint of a reason to begin to guess who I am, and you won’t see him for daylight. We’ll have lost him, and with him the only possible means of evacuating that planet in anything resembling a humane manner.’
‘But he’s even less likely to trust us if we keep finding excuses for why he can’t come aboard…’
‘He’ll just have to deal with them.’
Volyova waited for a response, and waited, and then noticed that there no longer appeared to be anyone on the other side of the gap. The hard blue light that had been coming from Khouri’s suit was gone, and no hand was on the tool.
‘Khouri… ?’ she said, beginning to lose her calm again.
‘Ilia…’ Khouri’s voice came through weakly, as if she were fighting for breath. ‘I think I have a slight problem.’
‘Shit.’ Volyova reached for the end of the crowbar and tugged it through to her side of the hatch. She braced herself and then worked the gap wider, until it was just wide enough for her to push her helmet through. In intermittent flashes she saw Khouri falling into the darkness, her suit harness tumbling away from her. Crouched on the side of the weapon she also saw the belligerent lines of a heavy-construction servitor. The mantislike machine must have been under the Captain’s direct control.
‘You vicious bastard! It was me who broke into the weapon, not her…’
Khouri was very distant now, perhaps halfway to the far wall. How fast was she moving? Three or four metres per second, perhaps. It was not fast, but her suit’s armour was not designed to protect her against impacts. If she hit badly…
Volyova worked harder, forcing the hatch open inch by painful inch. Dully, she realised that she was not going to make it in time. It was taking too long. Khouri would reach the wall long before Volyova freed herself.
‘Captain… you’ve really done it now.’
She pushed harder. The crowbar slipped from her fingers, whacked the side of her helmet and went spinning into the dark depths of the machine. Volyova hissed her anger, knowing that she did not have time to go searching for the lost tool. The hatch was wide enough to wriggle through now, but to do so she would have to abandon her harness and life-support pack. She could survive long enough to fend for herself, but there would be no way to save Khouri.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit… shit… shit.’
The hatch slid open.
Volyova climbed through the hole and kicked off from the side of the weapon, leaving the servitor behind. There was no time to reflect on what had just happened, except to acknowledge that only Seventeen or the Captain could have made the hatch open.
She had her helmet drop a radar overlay over her faceplate. Volyova rotated and then got an echo from Khouri. Her fall was taking her through the long axis of the chamber, through a gallery of menacing stacked weapons. Judging by her trajectory she must have already glanced against one of the monorail tracks that threaded the chamber.
‘Khouri… are you still alive?’
‘I’m still here, Ilia…’ But she sounded as if she had been hurt. ‘I can’t stop myself.’
‘You don’t have to. I’m on my way.’
Volyova jetted after her, zooming between weapons that were both familiar to her and yet still quietly mysterious. The radar echo assumed definition and shape, becoming a tumbling human figure. Behind it, looming closer and closer, was the far wall. Volyova checked her own speed relative to it: six metres per second. Khouri could not have been moving much slower than that.
Volyova squirted more thrust from her harness. Ten… twenty metres per second. She saw Khouri now, grey and doll-like, with one arm flopping limply into space. The figure swelled. Volyova applied reverse thrust in incremental stabs, feeling the frame creak at the unusual load it was being expected to distribute. Fifty metres from Khouri… forty. She looked in a bad way: a human arm was definitely not meant to articulate that way.
Tlia… that wall’s coming up awfully fast.‘
‘So am I. Hold on. There may be a slight…’ They thumped together. ‘… impact.’
Mercifully, the collision had not thrown Khouri off on another trajectory. Volyova held on to her by her unharmed arm just long enough to unwind a line and fasten it to Khouri’s belt and then let her go. The wall was visible now, no more than fifty metres away.
Volyova braked, her thumb hard down on the thruster toggle, ignoring the protestations from the suit’s subpersona. The line tethering Khouri extended to maximum tautness, Khouri hanging between her and the wall. But they were slowing. The wall was not rushing towards them with quite the same sense of inevitability.
‘Are you all right?’ Volyova asked.
I think I may have broken something. How did you get out of the weapon? When the machine flicked me off, the hatch was still nearly shut.‘
I managed to get it open a little wider. But I had some help, I think.‘
‘The Captain?’
‘Possibly. But I don’t know if it means he’s fully on our side after all.’ She concentrated on flying for a moment, keeping the tether taut as she swung around. The pale green ghosts of the thirty-three cache weapons loomed on her radar; she plotted a course through them back to the airlock.
I still don’t know why he set the servitor on you,‘ Volyova said. Maybe he wanted to warn us off rather than kill us. As you say, he could have killed us already. Just possibly he prefers to have us around.’
‘You’re reading a lot into one hatch.’
‘That’s why I don’t think we should count on the Captain’s assistance, Khouri.’
‘No?’
‘There’s someone else we could ask for help,’ Volyova said. ‘We could ask Sylveste.’
‘Oh no.’
‘You met him once before, inside Hades.’
‘Ilia, I had to die to get inside that fucking thing. It’s not something I’m going to do twice.’
‘Sylveste has access to the stored knowledge of the Amarantin. He might know of a suitable response to the Inhibitor threat, or at the very least have some idea of how long we have left to come up with one. His information could be vital, Ana, even if he can’t help us in a material sense.’
‘No way, Ilia.’
‘You don’t actually remember dying, do you? And you’re fine now. There were no ill effects.’
Khouri’s voice was very weak, like someone mumbling on the edge of sleep. ‘You fucking do it, if it’s that easy.’
Presently — and not a moment too soon — Volyova saw the pale rectangle which marked the airlock. She approached it slowly, winding Khouri in and depositing her first into the lock. By then the injured woman was unconscious.
Volyova pulled herself in, closed the door behind them and waited for the lock to pressurise. When the air pressure had reached nine-tenths of a bar she wrenched her own helmet off, her ears popping, and flicked sweat-drenched hair from her eyes. The biomedical displays on Khouri’s suit were all in the green: nothing to worry about. All she had to do now was drag her to somewhere where she could get medical attention.
The door into the rest of the ship irised open. She pushed herself towards it, hoping she had the strength to haul Khouri’s dead weight along behind her.
‘Wait.’
The voice was calm and familiar, yet it was not one she had heard in a long time. It reminded her of unspeakable cold, of a place where the other crewmembers had feared to tread. It was coming from the wall of the chamber, hollowly resonant.
‘Captain?’ she said.
‘Yes, Ilia. It’s me. I’m ready to talk now.’

Skade led Felka and Remontoire down into the bowels of Nightshade

, deep into the realm of influence of her machinery. By turns, Remontoire started to feel light-headed and feverish. At first he thought it was his imagination, but then his pulse started racing and his heart thundered in his chest. The sensations worsened with every level that they descended, as if they were lowering themselves into an invisible fog of psychotropic gas.Something’s happening.
The head snapped around to look at him, while the ebony servitor continued striding forwards. note 290
What’s going on?
note 291
He answered judiciously. As much as anyone, I suppose. It isn’t something I’ve ever needed to think about. It’s just something we live with .
note 292
What have you done? Learned how to switch it off?
note 293 Skade’s head twisted around again. She smiled indulgently; waves of opal and cerise flickered back and forth along her crest, signifying, Remontoire imagined, the effort that was required to translate the concepts she took for granted into terms a mere genius could grasp. note 294I don’t doubt it.
note 295
And now?
note 296
‘Exordium gave you all that?’ Felka asked, speaking aloud.
Skade answered without speaking, refusing to indulge in Felka’s preferred mode of communication. note 297
Remontoire nodded; he had no reason to think she might be lying. From scratch ?
note 298
What kind of head start ? He watched mauve and turquoise striations pulse along Skade’s crest.
note 299
Remontoire recalled that Skade had once been involved in a high-security mission into Chasm City, an operation that had resulted in the deaths of many other operatives. The operation had clearly been sanctioned at Inner Sanctum level; even as a Closed Council member he knew little other than that it had happened.
You helped recover those technologies, Skade? I understand you were lucky to get out alive.
note 300
And the prototype?
note 301
He looked at Felka, then back to Skade. Ambitious, I’ll give you that .
note 302
This other faction…the one you recovered the items from — why didn’t they make the same breakthrough ? He had the impression that Skade was framing her thoughts with extreme care.
note 303
The vacuum imposes inertia?
note 304
Remontoire sat down. I’ll stop here, if you don’t mind .
‘I don’t feel well either,’ Felka said, squatting down next to him. ‘I feel sick and light-headed.’
The servitor turned around stiffly, animated like a haunted suit of armour. note 305
Remontoire grinned at the armoured servitor. Fine for you, then .
note 306
So what does the machine do? Does all the matter within the bubble have zero inertia?
note 307
But there are other modes?
note 308 She paused, eyeing Remontoire. note 309I’ll be fine for now. Tell me more about your magic box.
Skade smiled, as stiffly as usual, but with what looked to Remontoire like pride. note 310
I’ll bet they did.
Is there a third state?‘ Felka asked.
note 311
‘And beyond that — on the other side of the singularity? Is there a state four?’
note 312
How much testing, exactly?
note 313
And now?
note 314 Skade clapped her hands together with a creak of armour. note 315But that’s not why you developed it . Remontoire climbed to his feet. Still lightheaded, he steadied himself against the wall. It was the closest he had come to intoxication in a great while. This excursion had been interesting enough, but he was now more than ready to return upship, where the blood in his body would behave as nature had intended.
note 316
It was for when the wolves arrive — the same reason you’ve built that evacuation fleet.
note 317
Even if we can’t fight them, you’ve at least given us a means of running away very, very quickly.

Clavain opened his eyes from another bout of forced sleep. Cool dreams of walking through Scottish forests in the rain seduced him for a few dangerous moments. It was so tempting to return to unconsciousness, but then old soldierly instincts forced him to snap into grudging alertness. There had to be a problem. He had instructed the corvette not to wake him until it had something useful or ominous to report, and a quick appraisal of the situation revealed that this was most emphatically the latter.

Something was following him. Details were available on request.
Clavain yawned and scratched at the now generous growth of beard that he sported. He caught a glimpse of himself in the cabin window and registered mild alarm at what he saw. He looked wild-eyed and maniacal, as if he had just stumbled from the depths of a cave. He ordered the corvette to stop accelerating for a few minutes, then gathered some water into his hands from the faucet, cupping the amoeba-like droplets between his palms, and then endeavoured to splash them over his face and hair, slicking and taming hair and beard. He glanced at his reflection again. The result was not a great improvement, but at least he no longer looked feral.
Clavain unharnessed himself and set about preparing coffee and something to eat. It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely. This, on the basis of the evidence, looked like the kind which could be contemplated after first sating his appetite.
He filled the cabin with music: one of Quirrenbach’s unfinished symphonies. He sipped the coffee, leafing through the corvette’s status log entries while he did so. He was pleased but not surprised to see that the ship had operated flawlessly ever since his departure from Skade’s comet. There was still adequate fuel to carry him all the way to circum-Yellowstone space, including the appropriate orbital insertion procedures once he arrived. The corvette was not the problem.
Transmissions had been received from the Mother Nest as soon as his departure had become evident. They had been tight-beamed on to him, maximally encrypted. The corvette had unpacked the messages and stored them in time-sequence.
Clavain bit into a slice of toast. ‘Play ’em. Oldest first. Then erase immediately.‘
He could have guessed what the first few messages would be like: frantic requests from the Mother Nest for him to turn around and come home. The first few gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming — or pretending to assume — that he had some excellent justification for what looked like a defection attempt. But they had been half-hearted. Then the messages gave up on that tack and simply started threatening him.
Missiles had been launched from the Mother Nest. He had turned off his course and lost them. He had assumed that would be the end of it. A corvette was fast. There was nothing else that could catch him, unless he turned to interstellar space.
But the next set of messages did not emanate from the Mother Nest at all. They came from a tiny but measurable angle away from its position, a few arc-seconds, and they were steadily blue-shifted, as if originating from a moving source.
He calculated the rate of acceleration: one point five gees. He ran the numbers through his tactical simulator. It was as he’d expected: no ship with that rate of acceleration could catch him in local space. For a few minutes he allowed himself to feel relief while still pondering the point of the pursuer. Was it merely a psychological gesture? It seemed unlikely. Conjoiners were not greatly enamoured of gestures.
‘Open the messages,’ he said.
The format was audio-visual. Skade’s head popped into the cabin, surrounded by an oval of blurred background. The communication was verbal; she knew that he would never allow her to insert anything into his head again.
‘Hello, Clavain,’ she said. ‘Please listen and pay attention. As you may have gathered, we are pursuing you with Nightshade . You will assume that we cannot catch you, or come within missile or beam-weapon range. These assumptions are incorrect. We are accelerating and will continue to increase our acceleration at regular intervals. Study the Doppler shift of these transmissions carefully if you doubt me.’
The disembodied head froze; vanished.
He scanned the next message originating from the same source. Its header indicated that it had been transmitted ninety minutes after the first. The implied acceleration was now two point five gees.
‘Clavain. Surrender now and I guarantee you a fair hearing. You cannot win.’
The transmission quality was poor: the acoustics of her voice were strange and mechanical, and whatever compression algorithm she had used had made her head seem fixed and immobile, only her mouth and eyes moving.
Next message: three gees.
‘We have redetected your exhaust signature, Clavain. The temperature and blue shift of your flame indicates that you are accelerating at your operational limit. I want you to appreciate that we are nowhere near ours. This is not the ship you knew, Clavain, but something faster and more deadly. It is fully capable of intercepting you.’
The masklike face contorted into a stiff ghoulish smile. ‘But there is still time for negotiation. I’ll let you pick a place of rendezvous, Clavain. Just say the word and we’ll meet on your terms. A minor planet, a comet, open space — it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’
He killed the message. He was certain that Skade was bluffing about having detected his flame. The last part of the message, the invitation to reply, was just her attempt to get him to betray his position by transmitting.
‘Sly, Skade,’ he said. ‘But unfortunately I’m a hell of a lot more sly.’
But it still worried him. She was accelerating too hard, and although the blue shift could have been faked, applied to the message before it was transmitted, he sensed that in that respect at least there had been no bluff.
She was coming after him with a much faster ship than he had assumed available, and she was gaining ground by the second.
Clavain bit into his toast and listened to the Quirrenbach a bit longer.
‘Play the rest,’ he said.
‘You have no more messages,’ the corvette told him.

Clavain was studying newsfeeds when the corvette announced receipt of a new batch of messages. He examined the accompanying information, noting that there was nothing from Skade this time.

‘Play them,’ he said cautiously.
The first message was from Remontoire. His head appeared, bald and cherubic. He was more animated than Skade, and there was a good deal more emotion in his voice. He leant towards the lens, his eyes beseeching.
‘Clavain. I’m hoping you’ll hear this and give it some thought. If you’ve listened to Skade then you’ll know that we can catch you up. This isn’t a trick. She’ll kill me for what I’m about to say, but if I know you at all you’ll have arranged for these messages to be wiped as soon as you play them, so there’s no real danger of this information reaching enemy hands. So here it is. There’s experimental machinery on Nightshade . You knew Skade was testing something, but not what. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a machine for suppressing inertial mass. I don’t pretend to understand how it works, but I’ve seen the evidence that it does with my own eyes. Felt it, even. We’ve ramped up to four gees now, though you’ll be able to confirm that independently. Before very long you’ll have parallactic confirmation from the origin of these signals, if you weren’t already convinced. All I’m saying is it’s real, and according to Skade it can keep suppressing more and more of our mass.’ He looked hard into the camera, paused and then continued, ‘We can read your drive flame. We’re homing in on it. You can’t escape, Clavain, so stop running. As a friend, I beg you to stop running. I want to see you again, to talk and laugh with you.’
‘Skip to next message,’ he said, interrupting.
The corvette obliged; Felka’s image replaced Remontoire’s. Clavain experienced a jolt of surprise. The matter of who would pursue him had never been entirely settled in his mind, but he could have counted on Skade: she would make sure she was there when the killing missile was launched, and she would do all in her power to be the one to give the order. Remontoire would come along out of a sense of duty to the Mother Nest, emboldened by the conviction that he was executing a solemn task and that only he was truly qualified to hunt Clavain.
But Felka? He had not expected to see Felka at all.
‘Clavain,’ she said, her voice revealing the strain of talking under four gees. ‘Clavain… please . They’re going to kill you. Skade won’t go to any great trouble to arrange a live capture, no matter what she says. She wants to confront you, to rub your nose in what you’ve done…’
‘What I’ve done?’ he said to her recording.
‘… and while she’ll capture you if she can, I don’t think she’ll keep you alive for long. But if you turn around and surrender, and let the Mother Nest know what you’re doing, I think there might be a hope. Are you listening, Clavain?’ She reached out and traced shapes across the lens between them, exactly as if she were mapping his face, relearning its shape for the thousandth time. I want you to come home safe and sound, that’s all. I don’t even disagree with what you’ve done. I have my doubts about a lot of things, Clavain, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have…‘
She lost whatever thread she was following, staring into infinity before refocusing. ‘Clavain… there’s something I have to tell you, something that I think might make a difference. I’ve never spoken of this to you before, but now I think the time is right. Am I being cynical? Yes, avowedly. I’m doing this because I think it might persuade you to turn back; no other reason than that. I hope you can forgive me.’
Clavain clicked a finger at the corvette’s wall, making it drop the volume of the music. For a heartbreaking moment there was near silence, Felka’s face hovering before him. Then she spoke again.
‘It was on Mars, Clavain, when you were Galiana’s prisoner for the first time. She kept you there for months and then released you. You must remember what it was like back then.’
He nodded. Of course he remembered. What difference did four hundred years make?
‘Galiana’s nest was hemmed in from all sides. But she wouldn’t give up. She had plans for the future, big plans, the kind that involved expanding the numbers of her disciples. But the nest lacked genetic diversity. Whenever new DNA came her way, she seized it. You and Galiana never made love on Mars, Clavain, but it was easy enough for her to obtain a cell scraping without your knowledge.’
‘And?’ he whispered.
Felka’s message continued seamlessly. ‘After you’d gone back to your side, she combined your DNA with her own, splicing the two samples together. Then she created me from the same genetic information. I was born in an artificial womb, Clavain, but I am still Galiana’s daughter. And still your daughter, too.’
‘Skip to next message,’ he said, before she could say another word. It was too much; too intense. He could not process the information in one go, even though she was only telling him what he had always suspected — prayed — was the case.
But there were no other messages.
Fearfully, Clavain asked the corvette to spool back and replay Felka’s transmission. But he had been much too thorough: the ship had dutifully erased the message, and now all that remained was what he carried in his memory.
He sat in silence. He was far from home, far from his friends, embarked on something that even he was not sure he believed in. It was entirely likely that he would die soon, uncommemorated except as a traitor. Even the enemy would not do him the dignity of remembering him with any more affection than that. And now this: a message that had reached across space to claw at his feelings. When he had said goodbye to Felka he had managed a singular piece of self-deception, convincing himself that he no longer thought of her as his daughter. He had believed it, too, for the time it took to leave the Nest.
But now she was telling him that he had been right all along. And that if he did not turn around he would never see her again.
But he could not turn around.
Clavain wept. There was nothing else to do.

CHAPTER 16