Redemption Ark

‘Yes. And instead of being a month out, he was two or three days out, maybe fewer. Clever, Clavain, I’ll give you that. How do you manage that little trick, might I ask?’

The beta-level shook its head. ‘I don’t know. That particular piece of intelligence was edited from my personality before I was transmitted here. But I can speculate as well as you can, Ilia. Either my counterpart has a more powerful drive than anything known to the Conjoiners, or he has something worryingly close to inertia-suppression technology. Take your pick. Either way, I’d say it wasn’t exactly good news, wouldn’t you?’

‘Are you saying the Captain saw the other ship coming in?’ Khouri asked.

‘You can be certain of it,’ Volyova said. ‘Everything I see, he sees.’

‘So why are we moving? Doesn’t he want to die?’

‘Not here, it would seem,’ Clavain said. ‘And not now. This trajectory will bring us back into local Resurgam space, won’t it?’

‘In about twelve days,’ Volyova confirmed. ‘Which strikes me as too long to be of any use. Of course, that’s assuming he sticks to one-tenth of a gee… he has no need to, ultimately. At a gee he could reach Resurgam in two days, ahead of Clavain.’

‘What good will it do?’ Khouri asked. ‘We’re just as vulnerable there as here. Clavain can reach us wherever we move to.’

‘We’re not remotely vulnerable,’ Volyova said. ‘We still have thirteen damned cache weapons and the will to use them. I can’t guess at the Captain’s deeper motive for moving us, but I know one thing: it makes the evacuation operation a good deal easier, doesn’t it?’

‘You think he’s trying to help, finally?’

‘I don’t know, Khouri. I’ll admit it is a distinct theoretical possibility, that is all. You’d better tell Thorn, anyway.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘To start accelerating things. The bottleneck may be about to change.’

CHAPTER 34

A figure grew to flickering solidity within Zodiacal Light’s imaging tank. Clavain, Remontoire, Scorpio, Blood, Cruz and Felka sat in a rough semicircle around the device as the man’s form sharpened and then took on animation.

‘Well,’ Clavain’s beta-level said. ‘I’m back.’

Clavain had the uneasy sense that he was looking at his own reflection flipped left-to-right, all the subtle asymmetries of his face thrown into exaggerated relief. He did not like beta-levels, especially not of himself. The whole idea of being mimicked rankled him, and the more accurate the mimicry the less he liked it. Am I supposed to be flattered, he thought, that my essence is so easily captured by an assemblage of mindless algorithms?

Tou’ve been hacked,‘ Clavain told his image.

‘I’m sorry?’

Remontoire leaned towards the tank and spoke. ‘Volyova stripped out large portions of you. We can see her handiwork, the damage she left, but we can’t tell exactly what she did. Very probably all she managed was to delete sensitive memory blocks, but since we can’t know for sure, we’ll have to treat you as potentially viral. That means that you’ll be quarantined once this debriefing is over. Your memories won’t be neurally merged with Clavain’s, since there’s too much risk of contamination. You’ll be frozen on to a solid-state memory substrate and archived. Effectively, you’ll be dead.’

Clavain’s image shrugged apologetically. ‘Let’s just hope I can be of some service before then, shall we?’

‘Did you learn anything?’ Scorpio asked.

‘I learned a lot, I think. Of course, I can’t be sure which of my memories are genuine, and which are plants.’

‘We’ll worry about that,’ Clavain said. ‘Just tell us what you found out. Is the commander of the ship really Volyova?’

The image nodded keenly. ‘Yes, it’s her.’

‘And does she know about the weapons?’ asked Blood.

‘Yes, she does.’

Clavain looked at his fellows, then back to the tank. ‘Right, then. Is she going to hand them over without a fight?’

‘I don’t think you can count on that, no. As a matter of fact, I think you’d better assume she’s going to make matters a little on the awkward side.’

Felka spoke now. ‘What does she know about the weapons’ origin?’

‘Not much, I think. She might have some vague inkling, but I don’t think it is a great interest of hers. She does know a little about the wolves, however.’

Felka frowned. ‘How so?’

‘I don’t know. We never got that chatty. We’d better just assume that Volyova has already had some tangential involvement with them — and survived, as I need hardly point out. That makes her at least worthy of our respect, I think. She calls them the Inhibitors, incidentally. I never got to the bottom of why.’

‘I know why,’ Felka said quietly.

‘She may not have had any direct involvement with them,’ Remontoire said. ‘There is already wolf activity in this system, and must have been for some time. Very probably all she’s done is make some shrewd deductions.’

I think her experience goes a little deeper than that,‘ Clavain’s beta-level answered, but made no further elaboration.

I agree,‘ Felka said.