Redemption Ark

‘You cared for her enough to risk your life rescuing her. That was a difficult choice as well. But it doesn’t make you unique.’ Scorpio scratched at the upraised snout of his nose. ‘We’ve all made difficult choices around here. Look at Antoinette. I know her story, Clavain. Set out to do a good deed — burying her father the way he wanted — and she ends up entangled in a battle for the entire future of the species. Pigs, humans… everything. I bet she didn’t have that in mind when she set out to salve her conscience. But we can’t guess where things will take us, or the harder questions that will follow on from one choice. You thought defecting would be an act in and of itself, but it was just the start of something much larger.’

Clavain sighed. Perhaps it was imagination, but Scorpio thought that he detected the slightest lightening of the man’s mood. His voice was softer when he spoke. ‘What about you, Scorpio? Did you have choices to make as well?’

‘Yeah. Whether I threw my weight in with you human sons of bitches.’

‘And the consequences?’

‘Some of you are still sons of bitches that deserve to die in the most painful and slow way I can envisage. But not all of you.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘Take it while you can. I might change my mind tomorrow.’

Clavain sighed again, scratched his beard and then said, ‘All right. Do it. Transmit a beta-level proxy.’

‘We’ll need a statement to accompany it,’ Scorpio said. ‘A laying-down of terms, if you like.’

‘Whatever it takes, Scorp. Whatever the hell it takes.’

In their long, crushing reign, the Inhibitors had learned of fifteen distinct ways to murder a dwarf star.

Doubtless, the overseer thought to itself, there were other methods, more or less efficient, which might turn out to have been invented or used at various epochs in galactic history. The galaxy was very large, very old, and the Inhibitors’ knowledge of it was far from comprehensive. But it was a fact that no new technique for starcide had been added to their repository for four hundred and forty million years. The galaxy had finished two rotations since that last methodological update. Even by the Inhibitors’ glacial reckoning, it was quite a worryingly long time during which not to learn any new tricks.

Singing a star apart was the most recent method to be entered into the Inhibitor library of xenocide techniques, and though it had achieved that status four hundred and forty million years earlier, the overseer could not help view it with a trace of bemused curiosity. It was the way an aged butcher might view some newfangled apparatus designed to improve the productivity of an abbatoir. The current cleansing operation would provide a useful testbed for the technique, a chance to fully evaluate it. If the overseer was not satisfied, it would leave a record in the archive recommending that future cleansing operations employ one of the fourteen older methods of starcide. But for now it would place its faith in the efficacy of the singer.