Redemption Ark

Skade’s head and shoulders appeared in an oval projection volume, blurred at the edges. Clavain remembered the last time he had seen her like this, when she had transmitted a message to him when he was still on his way to Yellowstone. He had assumed at the time that Skade’s stiff posture was a function of the message format, but now that he saw it again he began to have doubts. Her head was immobile while she spoke, as if clamped in the kind of frame surgeons used when making precise operations on the brain. Her neck vanished into absurd gloss-black armour, like something from the Middle Ages. And there was something else strange about Skade, although he could not quite put his finger on it…

‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Please do me the courtesy of viewing this transmission in its entirety and giving careful consideration to what I am about to propose. I do not make this offer lightly, and I will not make it twice.’

He waited for her to continue.

‘You have proven difficult to kill,’ Skade said. ‘All my attempts have failed so far, and there is no assurance that anything I try in the future will work either. That doesn’t mean I expect you to live, however. Have you looked behind you recently? Rhetorical question: I’m sure that you have. You must be aware, even with your limited detection capabilities, that there are more ships out there. Remember the task force you were supposed to lead, Clavain? The Master of Works has finished those ships. Three of them are approaching you from behind. They are better armed than Nightshade: heavy relativistic railguns, ship-to-ship boser and graser batteries, not to mention long-range stingers. And they have a bright target to aim at.’

Clavain knew about the other ships, even though they only showed up at the extreme limit of his detectors. He had started turning Skade’s light-sails to his own side, training his own optical lasers on to them as they passed in the night and steering them into the paths of the chasing ships. The chances of a collision remained small, and the pursuers could always deploy similar anti-sail defences of the sort Clavain had invented, but it had been enough to force Skade to abandon sail production.

‘I know,’ he whispered.

Skade continued, ‘But I’m willing to make a deal, Clavain. You don’t want to die, and I don’t really want to kill you. Frankly, there are other problems I would sooner expend energy on.’

‘Charming.’ He sipped at his tea.

‘So I will let you live, Clavain. And, more importantly, I will let you have Felka back.’

Clavain put his cup aside.

‘She is very ill, Clavain, retreating back into dreams of the Wall. All she does now is make circular structures around herself, intricate games that demand her total attention every hour of the day. They are surrogates for the Wall. She has abandoned sleep, like a true Conjoiner. I’m worried for her, I really am. You and Galiana worked so hard to make her more fully human… and yet I can see that work crumbling away by the day, just as the Great Wall crumbled away on Mars.’ Skade’s face formed a stiff sad smile. ‘She doesn’t recognise people at all, now. She shows no interest in anything outside her increasingly narrow set of obsessions. She doesn’t even ask about you, Clavain.’

‘If you hurt her…’ he found himself saying.

But Skade was still talking. ‘But there may still be time to make a difference, to repair some of the harm, if not all of it. It’s up to you, Clavain. Our velocity differential is small enough now that a transfer operation is possible. If you turn away from my course and show no sign of returning to it, I will send Felka to you aboard a corvette — fired into deep space, of course.’

‘Skade

‘I will expect your response immediately. A personal transmission would be nice, but, failing that, I will expect to see a change in your thrust vector.’ She sighed, and it was in that moment that Clavain realised what had been troubling him about Skade since the start of the transmission. It was the way she never drew breath, never once stopped to take in air.

‘One final thing. I’ll give you a generous margin of error before I decide that you have rejected my offer. But when that margin has ended, I will still put Felka aboard a corvette. The difference is, I won’t make it easy for you to find her. Think of that, Clavain, will you? Felka, all alone between the stars, so far from companionship. She might not understand. Then again, she very well might.’ Skade hesitated, then added, ‘You’d know, I suppose, better than anyone. She’s your daughter, after all. The question is, how much does she really mean to you?’

Skade’s transmission ended.

Remontoire was conscious. He smiled with quiet amusement as Clavain entered the room that served as both his quarters and his prison. He could not be said to look sparklingly well — that would never be the case — but neither did he look like a man who had only recently been frozen, and before that, technically, deceased.