Redemption Ark

The Inhibitors remembered little of the war itself. Their own history had been chaotic, muddled and almost certainly subject to crude retroactive tampering. They could not be sure what was documented fact and what was a fiction some earlier incarnation of themselves had manufactured for the purposes of cross-species propaganda. It was probable that they had once been organic, spined, warm-blooded land-dwellers with bicameral minds. The faint shadow of that possible past could be discerned in their cybernetic architectures.

For a long time they had clung to the organic. But at some point their machine selves had become dominant, sloughing their old forms. As machine intelligences, they roamed the galaxy. The memory of planetary dwelling became dim, and then was erased entirely, no more relevant than the memory of tree dwelling.

All that mattered was the great work.

In her quarters, after she had made certain that Remontoire and Felka were aware that the mission’s objective had been achieved, Skade had the armour return her head to the pedestal. She found that her thoughts took on a different texture when she was sessile. It was something to do with the slight differences between the blood recirculation systems, the subtle flavouring of neurochemicals. On the pedestal she felt calm and inwardly focused, open to the presence that she always carried with her.

[Skade?] The Night Council’s voice was tiny, almost childlike, but utterly unignorable. She had come to know it well.

Yes.

[You feel that you have been successful, Skade?]

Yes.

[Tell us, Skade.]

Clavain is dead. Our missiles reached him. The kill still has to be confirmed… but I’m certain of it.

[Did he die well, in the Roman sense?]

He didn’t surrender. He kept running all the while, even though he must have known he’d never get far enough away with his engines damaged.

[We didn’t think he would ever surrender, Skade. Still, it was quick for him. You’ve done well, Skade. We are satisfied. More than satisfied.]

Skade wanted to nod, but the pedestal prevented it. Thank you.

The Night Council allowed her time to gather her thoughts. It was always mindful of her, always patient with her. On more than one occasion the voice had told Skade that it valued her as highly as it valued any of the elite few, perhaps more so. The relationship, in so far as Skade appreciated it, was like that between a teacher and a gifted, keenly inquisitive pupil.

Skade did not often ask herself where the voice came from or what precisely it represented. The Night Council had warned her not to dwell on such matters, for fear that her thoughts might be intercepted by others.

Skade found herself recalling the occasion on which the Night Council had first made itself known to her and revealed something of its nature.

[We are a select core of Conjoiners,] it had told her, [a Closed Council so secret, so hyper-secure, that our existence is not known, or even suspected, by the most senior orthodox Council members. We are deeper than the Inner Sanctum, though the Sanctum is at times our unwitting client, our puppet in wider Conjoiner affairs. But we do not lie within it. Our relationship to these other bodies can only be expressed in the mathematical language of intersecting sets. The details need not concern you, Skade.]

The voice had gone on to tell her that she had been singled out. She had performed excellently in the most dangerous of recent Conjoiner operations, a covert mission deep into Chasm City to recover key elements vital to the inertia-suppression technology programme. No one else had made it out alive except Skade.