Redemption Ark

Felka had watched the comet fall behind Nightshade. It dwindled so slowly at first that the whole departure had a curious dreamlike quality, like casting off from a lonely moonlit island. She thought of her atelier in the green heart of the comet, of her filigreed wooden puzzles, each as intricately worked as scrimshaw. Then she thought of her wall of faces and the glowing mice in her maze, and could not quite assure herself that she would ever see any of them again. Even if she returned, she thought, it would be to profoundly changed circumstances, with Clavain either dead or a prisoner. Denied his help, she knew that she would curl inwards, back into the comforting hollow of her past, when the only thing that had mattered in the world had been her beloved Wall. And the horrible thing was that the idea did not revolt her in the slightest, but rather left her with a nagging glow of anticipation. It would have been different when Galiana was alive; different even when she was gone but when Felka still had Clavain’s companionship to anchor her to the real world, with all its crushing simplicities.

The last thing she had done, after sealing her atelier and assigning a servitor to look after her mice, had been to go down to the vault and visit Galiana, to say goodbye to her frozen body one final time. But the door into the vault had refused to open for her. There had been no time to make enquiries; it was either go now or miss Nightshade’s departure. So she had left, never having made that final farewell, and she wondered now why it made her feel so guilty.

All they shared was some genetic material, after all.

Felka had retired to her quarters once the Mother Nest was too small and dim to see with the naked eye. An hour after departure the ship ramped the gravity to one gee, instantly defining ‘up’ as being towards the sharp prow of the long conic hull. After another two hours, during which the Mother Nest fell a light-second behind Nightshade, a message came across the ship’s intercom. It was politely aimed at Felka; she was the only Conjoiner on the ship who was not routinely tuned into the general grid of neural communications.

The message instructed her to move up the ship, ascending in the direction of flight towards the prow, which was now above her head. When she dallied, a Conjoiner, one of Skade’s technicians, politely ushered her through corridors and shafts until she was many levels above her starting point. She refused to allow a map of the ship to be burned into her short-term memory — such instant familiarity would have denied her the boredom-alleviating pleasure of working out Nightshade’s layout for herself — but it was easy enough to tell that she was closer to the prow. The curvature of the outer walls was sharper, and the individual rooms were smaller. It did not take her long to conclude that there could be no more than a dozen people on Nightshade, including Remon-toire and herself. Her companions were all Closed Council, though she did not even attempt to unwrap their minds.

The rooms were spartan, usually windowless chambers that the ship had denned according to the current needs of the crew. The room where she found Remontoire was on the outer edge of the hull, with a blister-shaped observation cupola set into one wall. Remontoire was sitting on an extruded ledge, his expression calm and his fingers steepled neatly above one knee. He was deep in conversation with a white mechanical crab that was perched just below the rim of the cupola.

‘What’s happening?’ Felka asked. ‘Why did I have to leave my quarters?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ Remontoire replied.

Then she heard a volley of muted clunks as dozens of armoured irised bulkheads snicked shut up and down the ship.

‘You’ll be able to return to your quarters shortly,’ the crab said. ‘This is just a precaution.’

She recognised the voice, even if the timbre was not entirely as she remembered it. ‘Skade? I thought you were…’

‘They’ve allowed me to slave this proxy,’ the crab said, wiggling the tiny jointed manipulators between its foreclaws. It was stuck to the wall by circular pads on the ends of its legs. From under the crab’s glossy white shell protruded various barbs, muzzles and lacerating and stabbing devices. It was very clearly an old assassination device that Skade had commandeered.

‘It’s good of you to see us off,’ Felka said, relieved that Skade would not be accompanying them.

‘See you off?’

‘When the light-lag exceeds a few seconds, won’t it be impracticable to slave the proxy?’

‘What light-lag? I’m on the ship, Felka. My quarters are only a deck or two below your own.’

Felka remembered being told that Skade’s injuries were so severe that it required a roomful of Doctor Delmar’s equipment just to keep her alive. ‘I didn’t think

The crab waved a manipulator, dismissing her protestations. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come down later; we’ll have a little chat.’