Redemption Ark

‘I still don’t really know. Before she put me to sleep there was nothing the matter with her. Then I came back around and found myself here, in this room. She was in the bed. The machines had stabilised her, but that was about the best they could do. In the long term, she was still dying.’ Clavain nodded at the displays looming above Volyova. ‘I’ve seen these kinds of injuries before, during wartime. She breathed vacuum without any kind of protection against internal moisture loss. Decompression must have been rapid, but not quite quick enough to kill her instantly. Most of the damage is in her lungs — scarring of the alveoli, where ice crystals formed. She’s blind in both eyes, and there is some damage to brain function. I don’t think it’s cognitive. There’s tracheal damage as well, which makes it difficult for her to speak.’

‘She’s an Ultra,’ Thorn said with a touch of desperation. ‘Ultras don’t die just because they swallow a little vacuum.’

‘She isn’t much like the other Ultras I’ve met,’ Clavain said.‘ There were no implants in her. If there had been, she might have walked it off. At the very least, the medichines could have buffered her brain. But she had none. I understand she was repulsed by the idea of anything invading her.’

Khouri looked at the beta-level. ‘What have you done, Clavain?’

‘What it took. It was requested that I do what I could. The obvious thing was to inject a dose of medichines.’

‘Wait.’ Khouri raised a hand. ‘Who requested what?’

Clavain scratched his beard. ‘I’m not sure. I just felt an obligation to do it. You have to understand that I’m just software. I wouldn’t claim otherwise. It’s entirely possible that something booted me up and intervened in my execution, forcing me to act in a certain manner.’

Khouri and Thorn exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing, Khouri knew. The only agency that could have switched Clavain back on and made him help Volyova was the Captain.

Khouri felt cold, intensely aware that she was being observed. ‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Listen to me. I don’t know what you are, really. But you have to understand: she would sooner have died than have you do what you’ve just done.’

‘I know,’ Clavain said, extending his palms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘But I had to do it. It’s what I would have done had I been here.’

‘Ignored her deepest wish, is that what you mean?’

‘Yes, if you want to put it like that. Because someone once did the same for me. I was in the same position as her, you see. Injured — dying, in fact. I’d been wounded, but I definitely didn’t want any stinking machines in my skull. I’d have rather died than that. But someone put them in there anyway. And now I’m grateful. She gave me four hundred years of life I wouldn’t have had any other way.’

Khouri looked at the bed, at the woman lying in it, and then back to the man who had, if not saved her life, at the very least postponed her moment of death.

‘Clavain…’ she said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Clavain is a Conjoiner,’ said a voice as thin as smoke. ‘You should listen to him very carefully, because he means what he says.’

Volyova had spoken, yet there had been no movement from the figure on the bed. The only indication that she was now conscious, which had not been the case when they arrived, was a shift in the biomedical traces hovering above her.

Khouri wrenched her helmet off. Clavain’s apparition vanished, replaced by the skeletal machine. She placed the helmet on the floor and knelt by the bed. ‘Ilia?’

‘Yes, it’s me.’ The voice was like sandpaper. Khouri observed the tiniest movement of Volyova’s lips as she formed the words, but the sound came from above her.

‘What happened?’

‘There was an incident.’

‘We saw the damage to the hull when we arrived. Is…’

‘Yes. It was my fault, really. Like everything. Always my fault. Always my damned fault.’

Khouri glanced back at Thorn. ‘Your fault?’

‘I was tricked.’ The lips parted in what might almost have been a smile. ‘By the Captain. I thought he had finally come around to my way of thinking. That we should use the cache weapons against the Inhibitors.’

Khouri could almost imagine what must have happened. ‘How did he trick…’

‘I deployed eight of the weapons beyond the hull. There was a malfunction. I thought it was genuine, but it was really just a way to get me outside the ship.’

Khouri lowered her voice. It was an absurd gesture — there was nothing that could be hidden from the Captain now — but she could not help it. ‘He wanted to kill you?’

‘No,’ Volyova said, hissing her answer. ‘He wanted to kill himself, not me. But I had to be there to see it. Had to be a witness.’

‘Why?’

‘To understand his remorse. To understand that it was deliberate, and not an accident.’

Thorn joined them. He too had removed his helmet, tucking it respectfully under one arm. ‘But the ship’s still here. What happened, Ilia?’

Again that weary half-smile. ‘I drove my shuttle into the beam. I thought it might make him stop.’

‘Seems as if it did.’