Alastiar Reynolds

Thorn took his first tentative steps aboard Nostalgia for Infinity

. He looked around with frantic, wide-eyed intent, desperate not to miss a single detail or nuance of detail that might betray deception or even the tiniest hint that things were not completely as claimed. He was afraid to blink. What if some vital slip that would have exposed the whole thing as a facade happened when he had his eyes closed? What if the two of them were waiting for him to blink, like conjurors playing with an audience’s attention?Yet there appeared to be no deception here. Even if the trip in the shuttle had not convinced him of that fact — and it was difficult to imagine how that could have been faked — the supreme evidence was here.
He had travelled through space. He was no longer on Resurgam, but inside a colossal spacecraft: the Triumvir’s long-lost lighthugger. Even the gravity felt different.
‘You couldn’t have made this…’ he said, as he walked alongside his two companions. ‘Not in a hundred years. Not unless you were Ultras to begin with. And then why would you need to fake it anyway?’
‘So you’re prepared to believe our story?’ the Inquisitor asked him.
‘You’ve got your hands on a starship. I can hardly deny that. But even a ship this size, and from what I’ve seen it’s at least as big as Lorean ever was, even a ship this size can’t accommodate two hundred thousand sleepers. Can it?’
‘It won’t need to,’ the other woman told him. ‘Remember, this is an evacuation operation, not a pleasure cruise. Our objective is only to get people away from Resurgam. We’ll put the most vulnerable into reefersleep. But the majority will have to stay awake and suffer rather cramped conditions. They won’t enjoy it, but it’s a hell of an improvement on being dead.’
There was no arguing with that. None of his own plans had ever guaranteed a luxurious ride off the planet.
‘How long do you think people will have to spend here, before they can return to Resurgam?’ he asked.
The women exchanged glances. ‘Returning to Resurgam may never be an option,’ the older one said.
Thorn shrugged. ‘It was a sterile rock when we arrived. We can start from scratch if we have to.’
‘Not if the planet doesn’t exist. It could be that bad, Thorn.’ She knuckled the wall of the ship as they walked on. ‘But we can keep people here as long as we need to — years, decades even.’
‘We could reach another star system, then,’ he countered. ‘This is a starship, after all.’
Neither of them said anything.
‘I still want to see what it is we’re so frightened of,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is that’s posing such a threat.’
The older one, Irina, said, ‘Do you sleep well at night, Thorn?’
‘As well as anyone.’
‘I’m afraid all that’s about to end. Follow me, will you?’

Antoinette was aboard Storm Bird

, running systems checks, when the message came in. The freighter was still berthed in the rim repair bay in Carousel New Copenhagen, but most of the serious damage had been rectified or patched over. Xavier’s monkeys had worked around the clock, since neither he nor Antoinette could afford to occupy this bay for an hour longer than necessary. The monkeys had agreed to work even though most of the other hyperprimate workers in the carousel were on strike or sick with an extremely rare prosimian virus that had mysteriously crossed a dozen species barriers overnight. Xavier detected, so he claimed, a degree of sympathy from the workers. None of them were great fans of the Ferrisville Convention, and the fact that Antoinette and Xavier were being persecuted by the police only made the primates more willing to break the usual labour rules. Nothing came without costs, of course, and Xavier would end up owing the workers rather more than he might have wished, but there were certain trade-offs that one simply had to accept. That was a rule Antoinette’s father had quoted often enough, and she had grown up with the same resolutely pragmatic approach.Antoinette was tapping through tokamak field configuration settings, a compad tucked under one arm and a pen between her teeth, when the console chimed. Her first thought was that something she had done had triggered an error somewhere else in the ship’s control web.
She spoke with the pen still in place, knowing that Beast would be able to make sense of her gruntings. ‘Beast… fix that, will you?’
‘Little Miss, the signal in question is a notification of the arrival of a message.’
‘Xavier?’
‘Not Mr Liu, Little Miss. The message, in so far as one can deduce from the header information, originated well outside the carousel.’
‘Then it’s the cops. Funny. They don’t usually call; they just show up, like a turd on the doorstep.’
Tt doesn’t appear to be the authorities either, Little Miss. Might one suggest that the most prudent course of action would be to view the message in question?‘
‘Clever clogs.’ She pulled the pen from her mouth and tucked it behind her ear. ‘Pipe it through to my ’pad, Beast.‘
‘Very well, Little Miss.’
The screen of tokamak data shuffled aside. In its place a face resolved, speckled with coarse-resolution pixels. Whoever was sending was trying to get away with taking up as little bandwidth as possible. Nonetheless, she recognised the face very well.
‘Antoinette… it’s me again. I hope you made it back safely.’ Nevil Clavain paused, scratching at his beard. ‘I’m bouncing this transmission through about fifteen relays. Some of them are pre-plague, some of them may even go back to the Amerikano era, so the quality may not be of the best. I’m afraid there’s no possibility of you being able to reply, and no possibility of my being able to send another message; this is emphatically my one and only shot. I need your help, Antoinette. I need your help very badly.’ He smiled awkwardly. I know what you’re thinking: that I said I’d kill you if our paths ever crossed again. I meant it, too, but I said it because I hoped you’d take me seriously and stay out of trouble. I really hope you believe that, Antoinette, or else there isn’t much chance that you’re likely to agree to my next request.‘
‘Your next request?’ she mouthed, staring in disbelief at the compad.
‘What I need, Antoinette, is for you to come and rescue me. I’m in rather a lot of trouble, you see.’
She listened to what he had to say, but there was not a great deal more to the message. Clavain’s request was simple enough, and it was, she admitted, within her capabilities to do what he wanted. Even the co-ordinates he had given her were precise enough that she would not have to do any real searching. There was a tight time window, very tight, actually, and there was a not inconsiderable degree of physical risk, quite aside from any associated with Clavain himself. But it was all very feasible. She could tell that Clavain had worked through the details himself before calling her, anticipating almost all the likely problems and objections she might have. In that respect, she could not help but admire his dedication.
But it still didn’t make a shred of difference. The message was from Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis; the same Clavain who had lately started inhabiting her dreams, personifying what had previously been the merely faceless terror of the spider induction wards. It was Clavain who presided over the glistening machines as they lowered themselves into her brainpan.
It didn’t matter that he had once saved her life.
‘You have got to be fucking kidding,’ Antoinette said.