Redemption Ark

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. [Skade…]

I said I want to know what happened to me.

[You are alive. You were injured, but you survived. You are still in need of…] The surgeon’s gloss of calm faltered.

In need of what?

[You still need to be properly healed. But everything can be made good.]

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?

[Nothing’s wrong with your implants.]