Redemption Ark

Now they all looked at her for a moment.

‘Did you impress on her our seriousness?’ Clavain asked, turning his attention back to the beta-level. ‘Did you let her know that she would be much better off dealing with us than the rest of the Conjoiners?’

I think she got the message, yes.‘

‘And?’

‘Thanks, but no thanks, was the general idea.’

‘She’s a very foolish woman, this Volyova,’ Remontoire said. ‘That’s a shame. It would be so much easier if we could proceed in a cordial manner, without all this unfortunate need to use aggressive force.’

‘There’s another matter,’ the simulated Clavain said. ‘There’s some kind of evacuation operation in progress. You’ve already seen what the wolf machine is doing to the star, gnawing into it with some kind of focused gravity-wave probe. Soon it will reach the nuclear-burning core, releasing the energy at the heart of the star. It will be like drilling a hole into the base of a dam, unleashing water under tremendous pressure. Except it won’t be water. It will be fusing hydrogen, at stellar-core pressure and temperature. My guess is that it will convert the star into a form of flame-thrower. The core’s energy will be bled away very rapidly once the drill has reached it, and the star will die — or at least become a much dimmer and cooler star in the process. But at the same time I imagine the star itself will become a weapon capable of incinerating any planet within a few light-hours of Delta Pavonis, simply by dousing that arterial spray of fusion fire across the face of a world. I imagine it would strip the atmosphere from a gas giant and smelt a rocky world to metallic lava. They don’t necessarily know what will happen on Resurgam, but you can be certain that they wish to get away from there as soon as possible. There are already people aboard the ship, airlifted from the surface. A few thousand, at the very least.’

‘And you have evidence of this, do you?’ asked Scorpio.

‘Nothing I can prove, no.’

Then we’ll assume that they don’t exist. It’s obviously a crude attempt at convincing us not to attack.‘

Thorn stood on the surface of Resurgam, his coat buttoned high against the harsh polar wind that scraped and scoured every exposed inch of his skin. It was not quite what they would once have called a razorstorm, but it was unpleasant enough when there was no nearby shelter. He adjusted flimsy dust goggles, squinting into starlight, looking for the tiny moving star of the transfer ship.

It was dusk. The sky overhead was a deep velvet purple which shaded to black at the southern horizon. Only the brightest stars were visible through his goggles, and now and then even these would appear to dim as his eyes readjusted to the sudden flash of one of the warring weapons. To the north, and reaching some way to east and west, soft pink auroral curtains trembled in invisible wind. The lightshow was only beautiful if one had no idea what was causing it, and therefore no grasp of how portentous it was. The aurorae were fuelled by ionised particles that were being clawed and gouged off the surface of the star by the Inhibitor weapon. The inwards bulge, the tunnel that the weapon was boring into the star, now reached halfway to the nuclear-burning core. Around the walls of the tunnel, propped apart by standing waves of pumped gravitational energy, the interior structure of the star had undergone a series of drastic changes as the normal convective processes struggled to adjust to the weapon’s assault. Already the core was beginning to change its shape as the overlying mass density shifted. The song of neutrinos streaming out from the star’s heart had changed tune, signifying the imminence of the core breakthrough. There was still no clear idea about exactly what would happen when the weapon finished its work, but in Thorn’s view the best they could do was not hang around to find out.

He was waiting for the last of the day’s shuttle flights to finish boarding. The elegant craft was parked below him, surrounded by a throbbing insectile mass of potential evacuees. Fights broke out constantly as people struggled to jump the queue for the next departure. The mob revolted him, even though he felt nothing but admiration and sympathy for its individual elements. In all his years of agitation he had only ever had to deal with small numbers of trusted people, but he had always known it would come to this. The mob was an emergent property of crowds, and as such he had to take credit for bringing this particular mob into being. But he did not have to like what he had done.

Enough, Thorn thought. Now was not the time to start despising the people he had saved simply because they allowed their fears to surface. Had he been amongst them, he doubted that he would have behaved with any great saintliness. He would have wanted to get his family off the planet, and if that meant stamping on someone else’s escape plans, so be it.