Redemption Ark

H said, ‘The Mademoiselle protected her secrets well. When we stormed the Chateau she destroyed many of the items she had recovered from the grub’s spacecraft. Others, Skade had taken with her. But enough remained for us to make a start. Recently, progress has been gratifyingly swift. Did you notice how easily my ships outran the Convention, how easily they slipped unnoticed through tightly policed airspace?’

Clavain nodded, remembering how quick the journey to Yellowstone had appeared. ‘You’ve learned how to do it too.’

‘In a very modest fashion, I admit. But yes, we’ve installed inertia-suppressing technology on some of our ships. Simply reducing the mass of a ship by four-fifths is enough to give us an edge over a Convention cutter. I imagine the Conjoiners have done rather better than that.’

Grudgingly, Clavain admitted, ‘Perhaps.’

‘Then they’ll know that the technology is extraordinarily dangerous. The quantum vacuum is normally in a very stable minimum, Mr Clavain, a nice deep valley in the landscape of possible states. But as soon as you start tampering with the vacuum — cooling it, to damp the fluctuations that give rise to inertia — you change the entire topology of that landscape. What were stable minima become precarious peaks and ridges. There are adjacent valleys that are associated with very different properties of immersed matter. Small fluctuations can lead to violent state transitions. Shall I tell you a horror story?’ ‘I think you’re going to.’

‘I recruited the very best, Mr Clavain, the top theorists from the Rust Belt. Anyone who had shown the slightest interest in the nature of the quantum vacuum was brought here and made to understand that their wider interests would be best served by helping me.’

‘Blackmail?’ Clavain asked.

‘Good grief, no. Merely gentle coercion.’ H glanced back at Clavain and grinned, revealing sharply pointed incisors. ‘For the most part it wasn’t even necessary. I had resources that the Demarchists lacked. Their own intelligence network was crumbling, so they knew nothing of the grub. The Conjoiners had their own programme, but to join them would have meant becoming Conjoined as well — no small price for scientific curiosity. The workers I approached were usually more than willing to come to the Chateau, given the alternatives.’ H paused, and his voice took on an elegiac tone it had lacked before. ‘One amongst their number was a brilliant defector from the Demarchists, a woman named Pauline Sukhoi.’

‘Is she dead?’ Clavain asked. ‘Or something worse than dead?’

‘No, not at all. But she has left my employment. After what happened — the disturbing event — she couldn’t bring herself to continue. I understood perfectly and made sure that Sukhoi found alternative employment back in the Rust Belt.’

‘Whatever happened, it must have been truly disturbing,’ Clavain said.

‘Oh, it was. For all of us, but especially for Sukhoi. Many experiments were in progress,’ said H. ‘Down here, in the basement levels of the Chateau, there were a dozen little teams working on different aspects of the grub technology. Sukhoi had been on the project for a year, and had shown herself to an excellent if fearless researcher. It was Sukhoi who explored some of the less stable state transitions.’

H led him past several doors that opened into large dark chambers, until they arrived at one in particular. He did not enter the room. ‘Something terrible happened here. No one associated with the work would ever go into this room afterwards. They say damp records the past. Do you feel it also, Mr Clavain? A sense of foreboding, an animal instinct that you should not enter?’

‘Now that you’ve planted the suggestion that there’s something odd about the room, I can’t honestly say what I feel.’

‘Step inside,’ H said.

Clavain entered the room, stepping down to the smooth flat floor. The room was cold, but then again, the entire basement level had been cold. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, picking out the generous dimensions of the chamber. Here and there the floor and walls and ceiling were interrupted by metal struts or sockets, but no apparatus or analysis equipment remained. The room was completely empty and very clean.

He walked around the perimeter. He could not say that he enjoyed being in the room, but everything he felt — a mild sense of panic, a mild sense of presence — could have been psychosomatic. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

H spoke from the door. ‘There was an accident in this room, involving only Sukhoi’s project. Sukhoi was injured, but not critically, and she soon made a good recovery.’

‘And none of the other people in Sukhoi’s team were injured?’