Redemption Ark

‘Are you going to leave me here?’ he asked.

‘Yes. For now. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I can still space you if you do anything I don’t like.’

Clavain reached up and removed his own helmet, twisting it free. He let it drift away, tumbling across the lock like a small metal moon. ‘I’m not planning on doing anything that might annoy any of you.’

‘That’s good.’

‘But listen to me carefully. You’re in danger just being out here. We need to get out of the war zone as quickly as possible.’

‘Relax, guy,’ the man said. ‘We’ve got time to service some systems. There aren’t any zombies for light-minutes in any direction.’

‘It’s not the Demarchists you need to worry about. I was running from my own people, from the Conjoiners. They have a stealthed ship out here. Not nearby, I grant you, but it can move quickly, it has long-range missiles and I guarantee that it is looking for me.’

Antoinette said, I thought you said you’d faked your death.‘

He nodded. ‘I’m assuming Skade will have taken out my corvette with those same long-range missiles. She’ll have assumed I’m aboard it. But she won’t stop there. If she’s as thorough as I think she is, she’ll sweep the area with Nightshade just to make sure, searching for trace atoms.’

‘Trace atoms? You’re joking. By the time they get to where the blast happened…’ Antoinette shook her head.

Clavain shook his in return. ‘There’ll still be a slightly enhanced density — one or two atoms per cubic metre — of the kind of elements you don’t normally find in interplanetary space. Hull isotopes, that kind of thing. Nightshade’s hull will sample and analyse the medium. The hull is covered with epoxy-coated patches that will snare anything larger than a molecule, and then there are mass spectrometers that will sniff the atomic constituency of the vacuum itself. Algorithms will process the forensic data, comparing the curves and histograms of abundance and isotope ratios against plausible scenarios for the destruction of a vessel of the corvette’s composition. The results won’t be unambiguous, for the statistical errors will be almost as large as the effects Skade’s attempting to measure. But I’ve seen it done before. The pull of the data will be in favour of there having been very little organic matter aboard the corvette.’ Clavain reached up and touched the side of his head, slowly enough that it could not be seen as threatening. ‘And then there are the isotopes in my implants. They’ll be harder to detect, a lot harder, but Skade will expect to find them if she looks hard enough. And when she doesn’t…’

‘She’ll figure out what you did,’ Antoinette said.

Again Clavain nodded. ‘But I took all that into consideration. It will take time for Skade to make a thorough search. You can still make it back into neutral territory, but only if you start home immediately.’

‘You’re really that keen to get to the Rust Belt, Clavain?’ asked Antoinette. ‘They’ll eat you alive, whether it’s the Convention or the zombies.’

‘No one said defecting was a risk-free activity.’

‘You defected once already, right?’ Antoinette asked.

Clavain caught his drifting helmet and secured it to his belt by the helmet’s chin loop. ‘Once. It was a long time ago. Probably a bit before your time.’

‘Like four hundred years before my time?’

He scratched his beard. ‘Warm.’

‘Then it is you. You are him.’

‘Him?’

‘That Clavain. The historical one. The one everyone says has to be dead by now. The Butcher of Tharsis.’

Clavain smiled. ‘For my sins.’

CHAPTER 18

Thorn hovered above a world that was being prepared for death. They had made the trip from Nostalgia for Infinity in one of the smaller, nimbler ships that the two women had shown him in the hangar bay. The craft was a two-seat surface-to-orbit shuttle with the shape of a cobra’s head: a hoodlike wing curving smoothly into fuselage, with the cabin viewing windows positioned either side of the hull like snake eyes. The undercurve was scabbed and warted by sensors, latching pods and what he took to be various sorts of weapon. Two particle-beam muzzles jutted from the front like hinged venom fangs, and the ship’s entire skin was mosaiced with irregular scales of ceramic armour, shimmering green and black.

‘This will get us there and back?’ Thorn had asked.

‘It will,’ Vuilleumier had assured him. ‘It’s the fastest ship here, and probably the one with the smallest sensor footprint. Light armour, though, and the weapons are more for show than anything else. You want something better armoured, we’ll take it — just don’t complain if it’s slow and easily tracked.’

‘I’ll let you be the judge.’

‘This is very foolish, Thorn. There’s still time to chicken out.’

‘It isn’t a question of foolishness or otherwise, Inquisitor.’ He could not snap out of the habit of calling her that. ‘I simply won’t co-operate until I know that this threat is real. Until I can verify that for myself — with my own eyes, and not through a screen –1 won’t be able to trust you.’

‘Why would we lie to you?’