Redemption Ark

Skade readied herself. The external indicators showed that Galiana had been warmed enough to wake the Wolf. The machinery was already picking up the familiar constellations of electrical and chemical activity that showed she was beginning to think again.

Skade closed her eyes. There was a moment of transition, a perceptual jolt followed by a disorientating sense of rotation. And then she was standing on a flat hard rock just large enough to accommodate her feet. The rock was one of many; they reached into mist all around her, positioned like stepping stones in shallow grey water, linked by sharp, barnacled ridges. It was impossible to see more than fifteen or twenty metres in any direction. The air was cold and damp, scented with brine and the stench of something like rotting seaweed. Skade shivered and pulled her black gown tighter. Beneath it she was naked, her bare toes curling over the edge of the rock. Wet dark hair flicked against her eyes. She reached up and pushed it back from her brow. There was no crest on her scalp, and the absence of it made her inhale in sharp surprise. She was fully human again; the Wolf had restored her body. She heard, distantly, the crowdlike roar of ocean waves. The sky above her was a pale grey-green inseparable from the mist that reached to the ground. It made her feel nauseous.

The first fumbling attempts at communication between Skade and the Wolf had been through Galiana’s mouth, which proved to be hopelessly one-dimensional and slow compared with mind-to-mind linkage. Since then, Skade had agreed to meet the Wolf in a rendered environment, a three-dimensional simulation in which she was fully immersed and fully participatory.

The Wolf chose it, not her. It wove a space that Skade was obliged to enter under the Wolf’s strict terms. Skade could have overlaid this reality with something of her own choosing, but she feared that there might have been some nuance or detail that she was missing.

It was better to play the game according to the Wolfs rules, even if she felt in less than complete control of the situation. It was, Skade knew, a dangerously double-edged sword. She would have trusted nothing that the Wolf told her, but Galiana was in there as well, somewhere. And Galiana had learned much that might still be useful to the Mother Nest. The trick was to distinguish the Wolf from its host, which was why Skade had to be so attuned to the nuances of the environment. She never knew when Galiana might break through, if only for an instant.

I’m here. Where are you?

The tidal roar increased. The wind dragged a curtain of hair across her face. She felt precarious, surrounded by so many sharp-edged ridges. But without warning the mist opened up a little before her, and a mist-grey figure hovered into existence at the edge of vision. The figure was really no more than a suggestion of the human form; there were no details at all, and the mist continually thickened and thinned around it. It could just as easily have been a stump of weatherworn wood. But Skade felt its presence, and the presence was familiar. There was a frightening cold intelligence beaming out from the figure like a narrow searchlight. It was intelligence without consciousness; thought without emotion or any sense of self. Skade sensed only analysis and inference.

The distant roar of the tide shaped words. ‘What is it that you want of me now, Skade?’

The same thing…

‘Use your voice.’

She obeyed without question. ‘The same thing that I always want: advice.’

The tide said, ‘Where are we, Skade?’

‘I thought you decided that.’

‘That isn’t what I meant. I mean, where exactly is her body?’

‘Aboard a ship,’ Skade said. ‘In interstellar space, midway between Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis.’ She wondered how the Wolf had been able to tell that they were no longer in the Mother Nest. Perhaps it had been a lucky guess, she told herself, with no real sense of conviction.

‘Why?’

‘You know why. The weapons are around Resurgam. We must recover them before the machines arrive.’

The figure became momentarily clearer. For an instant there was a hint of snout, dark canine eyes and a lupine glint from steely incisors.

‘You must appreciate that I have mixed feelings about such a mission.’

Skade tugged her gown even tighter. ‘Why?’

‘You already know why. Because that of which I am a part would be inconvenienced by the use of those weapons.’

‘I don’t want a debate,’ Skade said, ‘just assistance. You have two choices, Wolf. Let the weapons fall into someone else’s hands — someone you have no influence over — or help me to recover them. You see the logic, don’t you? If any human faction has to obtain them, surely it had better be one you know, one you have already infiltrated.’