Redemption Ark

‘We’ll do just what we promised: take them by force.’

‘Look up, Clavain, will you? I want to show you something. You alluded to some knowledge of it before, but I want you to be completely certain of the facts.’

She had programmed the display sphere to come alive at that moment, rilled with an enlargement of the dismantled world. The cloud of matter was curdled and torn, flecked by dense nodes of aggregating matter. But the trumpetlike object growing at its heart was ten times larger than any other structure, and now appeared almost fully formed. Although it was difficult for her sensors to see with any clarity through the megatonnes of matter that still lay along the line of sight, there was a suggestion of immense complexity, a bewildering accretion of lacy detail, from a scale of many hundreds of kilometres across to the limit of her scanning resolution. The machinery had a muscular, organic look, knotted and swollen with gristle, sinews and glandular nodes. It did not look like anything a human imagination would have produced by design. And even now layers of matter were being added to the titanic machine: she could see the density streams where mass flows were still taking place. But the thing looked worrying close to being finished.

‘Have you seen much of that before now, Clavain?’ she asked.

‘A little. Not as clearly as this.’

‘What did you make of it?’

‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve made of it first, Ilia?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘I came to the obvious conclusion, Clavain. I watched three small worlds get ripped apart by machines, before they moved on to this one. They’re alien. They were drawn here by something Dan Sylveste did.’

‘Yes. We assumed he had something to do with it. We know about these machines, too — at least, we’ve had our suspicions that they exist.’

‘Who is «we», exactly?’ she asked.

The Conjoiners, I mean. I only defected recently.‘ He paused before continuing. ’A few centuries ago, we launched expeditions into deep interstellar space, much further out than anything achieved by any other human faction. Those expeditions encountered the machines. We codenamed them wolves, but I think we can assume we’re seeing essentially the same entities here.‘

‘They have no name for themselves,’ Volyova said. ‘But we call them the Inhibitors. It’s the name they gained during their heyday.’

‘You learned all that from observation?’

‘No,’ Volyova said. ‘Not as such.’

She was telling him too much, she thought. But Clavain was so persuasive that she could almost not help herself. Before very long, if she were not careful, she would have told him everything about what had happened around Hades: how Khouri had been given a glimpse into the galaxy’s dark prehuman history, endless chapters of extinction and war stretching back to the dawn of sentient life itself…

There were things she was prepared to discuss with Clavain, and there were things she would rather keep to herself, for now.

‘You’re a woman of mystery, Ilia Volyova.’

‘I’m also a woman with a lot of work to do, Clavain.’ She made the sphere zoom in on the burgeoning machine. ‘The Inhibitors are building a weapon. I have strong suspicions that it will be used to trigger some kind of cataclysmic stellar event. They triggered a flare to wipe out the Amarantin, but I think this will be different — much larger and probably more terminal. And I simply cannot allow it to happen. There are two hundred thousand people on Resurgam, and they will all die if that weapon is used.’

‘I sympathise, believe me.’

‘Then you’ll understand that I won’t be handing over any weapons, now or at any point in the future.’

For the first time Clavain appeared exasperated. He rubbed a hand through his shock of hair, bristling it into a mess of jagged white spikes. ‘Give me the weapons and I’ll see that they’re used against the wolves. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Except that I don’t believe you. And if these weapons are as potent as you say, I’m not sure I’m willing to hand them over to any other party. We’ve looked after them for centuries, after all. No harm was done. I’d say that puts us in rather a good light, wouldn’t you? We’ve been responsible custodians. It would be quite cavalier of us to let any old bunch of rogues get their hands on them now, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘Especially as you admit that you’re not the rightful owners, Clavain.’

‘You’ll regret dealing with the Conjoiners, Ilia.’

‘Mm. But at least I’ll be dealing with a legitimate faction.’

Clavain pushed the fingers of his right hand against his brow, like someone fighting a migraine. ‘No, you won’t be. Not in the sense you think. They only want the weapons so they can scuttle off into deep space with them.’

‘And I suppose you have some vastly more magnanimous use in mind?’