Redemption Ark

‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Your ship, or your Captain, wouldn’t allow me to do it. I’m certain of that. And I wouldn’t think of doing it anyway — I’m not a cold-blooded murderer, Ana.’

‘You’re just software,’ she said. ‘Software’s capable of anything.’

‘I won’t kill her, I assure you. I want those weapons because I believe in humanity. I’ve never believed that the ends justify the means. Not in this war, not in any damned war I’ve ever served in. If I have to kill to get what I want, I will. But not before I’ve done all that I can to avoid it. Otherwise I’m no better than the other Conjoiners.’

Without warning, Ilia Volyova spoke from her bed. ‘Why do you want them, Clavain?’

I could ask you the same question.‘

‘They’re my damned weapons.’

Khouri studied Volyova’s figure, but she appeared no more awake than she had five minutes earlier.

‘Actually, they don’t belong to you,’ Clavain said. ‘They’re still Conjoiner property.’

‘Taken your damned time reclaiming them, haven’t you?’

‘It isn’t me who’s doing the reclaiming, Ilia. I’m the nice man who’s come to take them off your hands before the really nasty people arrive. Then they’ll be my worry, not yours. And when I say nasty, I mean it. Deal with me and you’ll be dealing with someone reasonable. But the Conjoiners won’t even bother negotiating. They’ll just take the weapons without asking.’

‘I still find this defection story a little hard to believe, Clavain.’

‘Ilia…’ Khouri leaned closer to the bed. ‘Ilia, never mind Clavain for now. There’s something I need to know. What have you done with the cache weapons? I only counted thirteen in the chamber.’

Volyova clucked before answering. Khouri thought she sounded amused at her own cleverness. ‘I dispersed them. Killed two birds with one stone. Put them out of Clavain’s easy reach, strewn across the system. I also let them go into autonomous firing mode against the Inhibitor machinery. How are my little beauties doing, Khouri? Are the fireworks impressive tonight?’

‘There are fireworks, Ilia, but I haven’t got a fucking clue who’s winning.’?

‘At least the battle is still continuing, then. That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?’ She did nothing visibly, but a flattened globe popped into existence above her head, looking for all the world like a cartoon thought-bubble. Though she had been blinded in the attack by the cache weapon, she now wore slender grey goggles that communicated with the implants Clavain’s proxy had installed in her head. In some respects she was now better sighted than she had been before, Khouri thought. She could see in all the wavelength and non-EM bands offered by the goggles, and she could tap into machine-generated fields with far greater clarity than had been possible before. For all that, however, she must have been quietly repulsed by the presence of the foreign machines inside her skull. Such things had always revolted her, and she would accept them now only out of necessity.

The projected globe was a mutual hallucination rather than a hologram. It was gridded with the green lines of an equatorial coordinate system, bulging at the equator and narrowing at the poles. The system’s ecliptic was a milky disc spanning the bubble from side to side, dotted with many annotated symbols. In the middle was the hard orange eye of the star, Delta Pavonis. A vermilion smudge was the ruined corpse of Roc, with a harder, offset core of red indicating the bugle-shaped vastness of the Inhibitor weapon, now locked in rotational phase with the star. The star was itself gridded with glowing lilac contour lines. The spot on the surface of the star immediately below the weapon was shown to be bulging inwards for an eighth of the star’s diameter, a quarter of the way to the nuclear-burning core. Furious violet-white rings of fusing matter radiated out from the depression, frozen like ripples on a lake, but those hotspots of fusion were mere sparks compared with the powerhouse of the core itself. And yet, as disturbing as these transformations were, the star was not the immediate centre of attention. Khouri counted twenty black triangles in the same approximate quadrant of the ecliptic as the Inhibitor weapon, and judged that those were the cache weapons.

‘This is the state of play,’ Volyova said. ‘A real-time battle display. Aren’t you jealous of my toys, Clavain?’

‘You have no idea of the importance of those weapons,’ the servitor replied.

‘Don’t I?’

‘They mean the difference between the extinction or survival of the entire human species. We know about the Inhibitors as well, Ilia, and we know what they can do. We’ve seen it in messages from the future, the human race on the brink of extinction, almost totally wiped out by Inhibitor machines. We called them the wolves, but there’s no doubt that we’re talking about the same enemy. That’s why you can’t squander the weapons here.’