Redemption Ark

Thorn looked down, his face a mask that she found difficult to read. Was he disappointed or understanding? He had no idea what it had been like to fall towards Hades knowing that certain death awaited her. She had been resurrected once, after meeting Sylveste and Pascale, but there had been no promises that they would repeat the favour. The act itself had consumed a considerable fraction of the computational resources of the Hades object, and they — whoever were the agents that directed its endless calculations — might not sanction the same thing again. It was easy for Thorn; he had no idea what it had been like.

Thorn…‘ she began.

But at that moment pink and blue light stammered across the side of his face.

Khouri frowned. ‘What was that?’

Thorn turned back towards space. ‘Lights. Flashing lights, like distant lightning. I’ve been watching them every time I walk past a porthole. They seem to lie near to the ecliptic plane, in the same half of the sky as the Inhibitor machine. They weren’t there when we left orbit. Whatever it is must have started in the last twelve hours. I don’t think it’s anything to do with the weapon itself.’

‘Then it must be our weapons,’ Khouri said. ‘Ilia must have started using them already.’

‘She said she’d give us a period of grace.’

It was true; Ilia Volyova had promised them that she would not deploy any of the cache weapons for thirty days, and that she would review her decision based on the success of the evacuation operation.

‘Something must have happened,’ Khouri said.

‘Or she lied,’ Thorn said quietly. In the shadows he took her hand again, and with one finger traced a line from her wrist to the conjunction of her middle and forefingers.

‘No. She wouldn’t have lied. Something’s happened, Thorn. There’s been a change of plan.’

It came out of the darkness two hours later. There was nothing that could be done to prevent some of the occupants of the transfer craft from seeing Nostalgia for Infinity from the outside, so all Khouri and Thorn could do was wait and hope that the reaction was not too extreme. Khouri had wanted to slide baffles across the portholes — the ship was of too old a design for the portholes to be simply sphinctered out of existence — but Thorn had warned her that she should do nothing that implied that the view was in any way odd or troublesome.

He whispered, ‘It may not be as bad as you expect. You know what a lighthugger’s meant to look like, and so the ship disturbs you because the Captain’s transformations have turned it into something monstrous. But most of the people we’re carrying were born on Resurgam. Most of them haven’t ever seen a starship, or even any images of what one should look like. They have a very vague idea based on the old records and the space operas they’ve been fed by Broadcasting House. Nostalgia for Infinity may strike them as a bit… unusual… but they won’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that she’s a plague ship.’

‘And when they get aboard?’ Khouri asked.

‘Now that might be a different story.’

Thorn, however, turned out to be more or less correct. The shocking excrescences and architectural flourishes of the ship’s mutated exterior looked pathological to Khouri, but she knew more about the plague than anyone on Resurgam. It turned out that relatively few of the passengers were as disturbed as she had expected. Most were prepared to accept that the flourishes of diseased design served some obscure military function. This, after all, was the ship that they believed had wiped out an entire surface colony. They had few preconceptions about what it should look like, other than that it was, by its very nature, evil.

‘They’re relieved that there’s a ship here at all,’ Thorn told her. ‘And most of them can’t get anywhere near a porthole anyway. They’re taking what they’re hearing with a large pinch of salt, or they just don’t care.’

‘How can they not care when they’ve thrown away their lives to come this far?’

‘They’re tired,’ Thorn told her. ‘Tired and past caring about anything except getting off this ship.’

The transfer craft executed a slow pass down the side of Infinity’s hull. Khouri had seen the approach enough times to view the prospect with only mild interest. But now something made her frown again.

‘That wasn’t there before,’ she said.

‘What?’

She kept her voice low and refrained from pointing. ‘That… scar. Do you see it?’

‘That thing? I can’t miss it.’

The scar was a meandering gash that wandered along the hull for several hundred metres. It appeared to be deep, very deep, in fact, gouging far into the ship, and it had every sign of being recent: the edges were sharp and there were no traces of any attempts at repair. Something squirmed in Khouri’s stomach.

‘It’s new,’ she said.

CHAPTER 32