Redemption Ark

The bridge was a third of the way back from the prow, one point three five kilometres of vertical distance when the ship was accelerating. Most of the technology in it — indeed, most of the technology aboard the ship — was ancient, both in feel and function. Nothing about that surprised Clavain: Ultras were notoriously conservative, and it was precisely because they hadn’t adopted nano-technologies to any great degree that they continued to play a role in these post-plague days. There were general-purpose manufactories in the belly of the ship, now running full-time on weapons production, with no capacity to be spared to upgrade the fabric and infrastructure of Zodiacal Light. It had not taken Clavain very long to settle into the museumlike ambience of the huge old ship; he knew such robustness would serve them well in any battle against Triumvir Volyova.

The bridge itself was a spherical chamber within a gimballed arrangement that permitted it to swivel according to whether the ship was under thrust or rotating. The walls were quilted with projection systems, showing exterior views of the ship captured by drones, tactical representations of the immediate volume of space and simulations of various approach strategies for the arrival in the Resurgam system. Other parts of the walls were filled with scrolling text in old-fashioned Norte script, a steady litany of shipboard faults and the automatic systems that were triggered to fix them.

A railinged, circular dais made of grilled red metal held seats, display and control systems. The dais could accommodate about twenty people before it became uncomfortable; Clavain judged that it was somewhere near its maximum capacity right now. Scorpio was there, of course, with Lasher, Shadow, Blood and Cruz: three of his pig deputies and a one-eyed human woman from the same criminal underworld. Antoinette Bax and Xavier Liu, filthy from hastily abandoned repairwork, sat near the back, and the rest of the dais was taken up by a broad mixture of pigs and baseline humans, many of who had come directly from the Chateau’s employment. They were experts in the technology H had pieced together and, like Scorpio and his associates, had been convinced that they were better off joining Clavain’s expedition than staying behind in Chasm City or the Rust Belt. Even Pauline Sukhoi was there, ready to return to the work that had wrenched askew her personal reality. To Clavain she looked like a woman who had just stumbled out of a haunted house.

There’s been a development,‘ Clavain said when he had their attention. ’I don’t quite know what to make of it.‘

A cylindrical display tank, an antique imaging system, sat in the middle of the dais. The interior of the tank contained a single transparent blade of helical profile that could be rotated at great speed. Coloured lasers buried in the base of the tank pulsed beams of light upwards, where they were intercepted by the moving surface of the blade.

A perfectly flat square of light appeared in the tank, rotating slowly to bring itself into view of all those on the bridge. This is a two-dimensional image of the sky ahead of us,‘ Clavain said. ’Already there are strong relativistic effects: the stars shifted out of their usual positions, and their spectra shifted into the blue. Hot stars appear dimmer, since they were already emitting most of their flux in the UV. Dwarf stars pop out of nowhere, since we’re suddenly seeing IR flux that used to be invisible. But it isn’t the stars I’m interested in today.‘ He pointed to the middle of the square, to one dim, starlike object. This thing here, which looks like a star as well, is the exhaust signature from Skade’s lighthugger. She’s done her best to make her drive invisible, but we’re still seeing enough stray photons from Nightshade to maintain a fix.’

‘Can you estimate her thrust output?’ Sukhoi asked.

Clavain nodded. ‘Yes. The temperature of her flame says she’s running her drive at nominal thrust — that would give her a gee of acceleration, for a typical million-tonne ship. Nightshade’s engines are smaller, but she’s also a small ship by lighthugger standards. It shouldn’t make that much difference, yet she’s managing two gees, and she’s occasionally pushed it to three. Like us, she has inertia-suppressing machinery. But I know she can push it much harder than this.’

‘We can’t,’ Sukhoi said, turning paler than ever. ‘Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick.’

Clavain smiled patiently. ‘Point taken, Pauline. But whatever Skade manages, we must find a way to do as well. That isn’t what’s troubling me, though. It’s this.’ The wheeling images changed almost imperceptibly. Skade’s signature became slightly brighter.

‘She’s thrusting harder, or she’s changed her beam geometry,’ Antoinette said.