Redemption Ark

Something had certainly gone wrong since the old days, when the kills had happened cleanly and methodically, and no major outbreaks slipped through the net. The overseer could not avoid drawing conclusions. The great galaxy-encompassing machine for holding back intelligence — the machine of which the overseer was one dutiful part — was failing. Intelligence was starting to slip through the cracks, threatening infestation. The situation had certainly worsened in the last few million years, and yet this was nothing compared with the thirteen Galactic Turns — the three billion years — that lay ahead, before the time of crisis arrived. The overseer had grave doubts that intelligence could be held in check until then. It was almost enough to make it give up now, and let this particular species go uncleansed. They were quadrupedal vertebrate oxygen-breathers, after all. Mammals. It felt a distant echo of kinship, something that had never troubled it when it was extinguishing ammonia-breathing gasbags or spiny insectoids.

The overseer forced itself out of this mood. Very probably it was just this sort of thinking that was decreasing the success rate of cleansings.

No, the mammals would die. That was the way, and that was how it would be.

The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space. The mammals had probably not even evolved locally, meaning that this would only be phase one of a more protracted cleansing. The last lot had really botched things up, it thought. Of course, there was always a desire to perform a cleansing with the minimum amount of environmental damage. Worlds and suns were not to be converted into weapons unless a class-three breakout was imminent, and even then it was to be avoided wherever possible. The overseer did not like inflicting unnecessary devastation. It had a keen sense of the irony of ripping apart stars now, when the whole point of its work was to avoid greater destruction three billion years down the line. But what was done was done. A certain amount of additional damage had now to be tolerated.

Messy. But that, as the overseer reflected, was ‘life’.

The Inquisitor looked out across rain-soaked Cuvier. Her own reflection hovered beyond the window, a spectral figure stalking the city.

‘Will you be all right with this one, ma’am?’ the guard who had brought him asked.

‘I’ll cope,’ she said, not yet turning around. ‘If I can’t, you’re only a room away. Undo his cuffs and then leave us alone.’

‘Are you certain, ma’am?’

‘Undo his cuffs.’