Redemption Ark

‘There’ll be worse, for certain. Don’t be surprised if there’s an attempt to overthrow this regime.’

‘That won’t happen,’ Khouri said. ‘Not when the people realise what’s at stake. They’ll see that the apparatus of government has to remain in place so that the exodus can be organised smoothly.’

The Triumvir smirked in Thorn’s direction. ‘See how hopelessly optimistic she still is, Thorn?’

‘Irina’s right, unfortunately,’ Thorn said. ‘We can expect a lot worse. But you never imagined you’d get everyone off this planet in one piece.’

‘But we have the capacity…’ Khouri said.

‘People aren’t payloads. They can’t be shipped around like neat little units. Even if the majority buy into the idea that the government is somehow sincere about the evacuation — and that will be a small miracle in its own right — it’ll only take a minority of dissenters to cause major trouble.’

‘You made a career out of being one of them,’ Khouri said.

‘I did, yes.’ Thorn smiled sadly. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not the only one out there. Still, Irina’s right. We’ll know soon enough what the general reaction will be. How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?’

‘Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,’ Khouri said. ‘But that should take care of our worst enemies. The rest we only have to hold off until the exodus is finished.’

Thorn turned to the Triumvir. ‘You’ve studied that thing in the sky more closely than any of us, Irina. Do you know how long we’ve got?’

‘No,’ she said curtly. ‘Of course I can’t say how long we’ve got, not without knowing what it is that they’re building up there. All I can do is make an extremely educated guess.’

‘So indulge us.’

She sniffed and then walked stiffly along the entire length of the window. Thorn eyed Khouri, wondering what she made of this performance. He had noticed a tension between the two women that he did not recall from his previous meetings with them. Perhaps it had always been there and he had simply missed it before, but he rather doubted it.

‘I’ll say this,’ the Triumvir stated, her heels squeaking as she turned to face the two of them. ‘Whatever it is, it’s big. Much bigger than any structure we could imagine building, even if we had the raw materials and the time. Even the smallest structures that we can single out in the cloud ought to have collapsed under their own self-gravity by now, becoming molten spheres of metal. But they haven’t. That tells me something.’

‘Go on,’ Thorn said.

‘Either they can persuade matter to become many orders of magnitude more rigid than ought to be possible, or they have some local control of gravity. Perhaps some combination of the two, even. Accelerated streams of matter can serve the same structural functions as rigid spars if they can be controlled with sufficient finesse…’ She was evidently thinking aloud, and for a moment she trailed off, before remembering her audience. ‘I suspect that they can manipulate inertia when it becomes necessary. We saw how they redirected those matter flows, bending them through right angles. That implies a profound knowledge of metric engineering, tampering with the basic substrate of space-time. If they have that ability, they can probably control gravity as well. We haven’t seen that before, I think, so it might be something they can only do on a large scale: a broad brush, so to speak. Everything we’ve seen so far — the disassembly of the rocky worlds, the Dyson motor around the gas giant — all that was watchmaker stuff. Now we’re seeing the first hints of Inhibitor heavy engineering.’

‘Now you’re scaring me,’ Thorn said.

‘Entirely my intention.’ She smiled quickly. It was the first time he had seen her smile that evening.

‘So what is it going to be?’ Khouri asked. ‘A machine to make the sun go supernova?’