Redemption Ark

She reached up with the gauntleted arms of her suit, placing one hand on either side of her neck as if about to strangle herself. But her metal hands were evidently capable of great gentleness. Clavain heard a click somewhere within Skade’s chest, and then the metal pillar of her neck began to rise from between her shoulders. She was removing her own head. Clavain watched, entranced and repelled, as the lower part of the pillar emerged. It ended in thrashing, segmented appendages. They dribbled pink baubles of coloured fluid — blood, perhaps, or something entirely artificial.

‘Skade…’ he said. ‘This isn’t necessary.’

‘Oh, it is very necessary, Clavain. I want you to apprehend fully what it is you’ve done to me. I want you to feel the horror of it.’

‘I think he’s getting the picture,’ Scorpio said.

‘Just give me Felka, then I’ll leave you.’

She hefted her own head, cradling it in one hand. It continued to speak. ‘Do you hate me, Clavain?’

‘None of this is personal, Skade. I just think you’re misguided.’

‘Misguided because I care about the survival of our people?’

‘Something got to you, Skade,’ Clavain said. ‘You were a good Conjoiner once, one of the best. You truly served the Mother Nest, just as I did. But then you were sent on the Chateau operation.’

He had pricked her interest. He saw the involuntary widening of her eyes. ‘The Chateau des Corbeaux? What does that have to do with anything?’

‘A lot more than you’d like to think,’ Clavain said. ‘You were the only survivor, Skade, but you didn’t come back alone. You probably don’t remember very much of what actually happened down there, but that doesn’t matter. Something got to you, I’m certain of that. It’s responsible for everything that’s happened lately.’ He tried to smile. ‘That’s why I don’t hate you, or even much blame you. You’re either not the Skade I knew, or you think you’re serving something higher than yourself.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘But possibly true. I should know, Skade, I went there myself. How do you think we stayed on your tail all this time? The Chateau was the source for the technology you and I both used. Alien technology, for manipulating inertia. Except you used it for much more than that, didn’t you?’

‘I used it to serve an end, that’s all.’

‘You tried to move faster than light, just the way Galiana did.’ He saw another flicker of interest at the mention of Galiana’s name. ‘Why, Skade? What was so important that you had to do this? They’re just weapons.’

‘You want them badly, too.’

Clavain nodded. ‘But only because I’ve seen how badly you want them. You showed me that fleet, too, and that made me think you were planning on getting away from this part of space. What is it, Skade? What have you seen in your crystal ball?’

‘Shall I show you, Clavain?’

‘Show me?’ he asked.

‘Allow me access to your mind and I’ll implant exactly what I was shown. Then you will know. And perhaps see things my way.’

‘Don’t…’ Scorpio said.

Clavain lowered his mental defences. Skade’s presence was sudden and intrusive, so much so that he flinched. But she did not attempt to do more than paint images in his mind, as she had promised.

Clavain saw the end of everything. He saw chains of human habitats spangling with bright pinpricks of annihilating fire. Nuclear garlands dappled the surfaces of worlds too unimportant to dismantle. He saw comets and asteroids being steered into colonies, wave upon wave of them, far too many to be neutralised by the existing defences. Flares were lifted from the surfaces of stars, focused and daubed across the faces of worlds, sterilising all in their path. He saw rocky worlds being pulverised, smashed into hot clouds of interplanetary rubble. He saw gas giants being spun apart, ruined like the toys of petulant children. He saw stars themselves dying, poisoned so that they shone too hot or too cold, or ripped apart in a dozen different ways. He saw ships detonating in interstellar space, when they imagined they were safe from harm. He heard a panicked chorus of human radio and laser transmissions that was at first a multitude, but which thinned out to a handful of desperate lone voices, which were themselves silenced one by one. Then he heard only the mindless warbling of machine transmissions, and even those began to fall silent as humanity’s last defences crumbled.

The cleansing was spread across a volume many dozens of light-years wide. It took many decades to complete, but it was over in a flash compared with the slow grind of galactic history.

And all around, orchestrating this cleansing, he sensed dim, ruthless sentience. It was an ensemble of machine minds, most of which hovered just beneath the threshold of consciousness. They were old, older than the youngest stars, and they were expert only in the art of extinction. Nothing else concerned them.

‘How far in the future is this?’ he asked Skade.