Redemption Ark

It was recognised, without the details necessarily being understood, that Clavain had been forced into making a dreadful personal decision. Some of the crewmembers grasped that Galiana had already ‘died’ long before, and that what had happened now was only the drawing of a line beneath that event. But it was, as others appreciated, much worse than that. Galiana’s earlier death had only ever been provisional. The Conjoiners had kept her frozen, thinking that she could at some point be cleansed of the Wolf. The likelihood of that happening must have been small, but at the back of Clavain’s mind there must have remained the ghost of a hope that the Galiana he had loved since that ancient meeting on Mars could be brought back to him, healed and renewed. But now he had personally removed that possibility for ever. It was said that a large factor in his decision had been Felka’s persuasion, but it was still Clavain who had made the final choice; it was he who carried the blood of that merciful execution on his hands.

Clavain’s withdrawal was less serious to ship affairs than it might have appeared; he had already abrogated much of the responsibility to others, so that the battle preparations continued smoothly and efficiently without his day-to-day intervention. Mechanical production lines were now running at full capacity, spewing out weapons and armour. Zodiacal Light’s hull bristled with antiship armaments. As training regimes honed the battalions of Scorpio’s army into savagely efficient units, they began to realise how much their previous successes had been down to good fortune, but that would certainly not be the case in the future. They might fail, but it would not be because of any lack of tactical preparation or discipline.

With Skade’s ship destroyed, they had less need to worry about an attack while they were en route. Deep-look scans confirmed that there were other Conjoiner ships behind them, but they could only match Zodiacal Light’s acceleration, not exceed it. It appeared that no one was willing to attempt another state-four transition after what had happened to Nightshade.

Halfway to Resurgam, the ship had switched into deceleration mode, thrusting in the direction of flight, which immediately made it a harder target for the pursuing craft since they no longer had a relativistically boosted exhaust beam to lock on to. The risk of attack had dropped even further, leaving the crew free to concentrate on the mission’s primary objective. Data from the approaching system became steadily more comprehensive, too, focusing minds on the specifics of the recovery operation.

It was clear that something very odd was happening around Delta Pavonis. Scans of the planetary system showed the inexplicable omission of three moderately large terrestrial bodies, as if they had simply been deleted from existence. More worrying still was what had replaced the system’s major gas giant: only a remnant of the giant’s metallic core now remained, enveloped in a skein of liberated matter many dozens of times wider than the original planet. There were hints of an immense mechanism that had been used to spin the planet apart: arcs and cusps and coils that were in the process of being dismantled and retransformed into new machinery. And at the heart of the cloud was something even larger than those subsidiary components: a two-thousand-kilometre-wide engine that could not possibly be of human origin.

Remontoire had helped Clavain build sensors to pick up the neutrino signatures of the hell-class weapons. As they had neared the system they had established that thirty-three of the weapons were in essentially the same place, while six more were dormant, waiting in a wide orbit around the neutron star Hades. One weapon was unaccounted for, but Clavain had known about that before he left the Mother Nest. More detailed scans, which became possible only when they had slowed to within a quarter of a light-year of their destination, showed that the thirty-three weapons were almost certainly aboard a ship of the same basic type as Zodiacal Light, probably stuffed into a major storage bay. The ship — it had to be the Triumvir’s vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity — hovered in interplanetary space, orbiting Delta Pavonis at the Lagrange point between the star and Resurgam.