Redemption Ark

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.