Redemption Ark

The collision would happen, and the results — from the collison and the wars that would accompany it-would be utterly catastrophic. Life in the Milky Way would not end immediately; a few flickering flames of sentience would struggle on for another couple of billion years, but because of the measures they had taken to survive in the first place, they would be little more than machines themselves. Nothing resembling the pre-collision societies would ever arise again.

Almost as soon as she had registered the fact that the weapon was firing, the beam shut down, leaving weapon seventeen exactly as she found it. By Volyova’s estimation, the weapon had broken free of Clavain’s control for perhaps half a second. It might even have been less than that.

She fumbled her suit-radio on. Khouri’s voice was there immediately. ‘Ilia…? Ilia…? Can you—’

‘I can hear you, Khouri. Is something the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter, Ilia. It’s just that you seem to have done whatever it was you set out to do. The cache weapon landed a direct hit on Zodiacal Light’

She closed her eyes, tasting the moment, wondering why it felt far less like victory than she had imagined it would. ‘A direct hit?’

‘Yes.’

‘It can’t have been. I didn’t see the flash as the Conjoiner drives went up.’

‘I said it was a direct hit. I didn’t say it was a fatal hit.’

By then Volyova had managed to call up a long-range grab of Zodiacal Light on the shuttle’s console. She piped it through to her helmet faceplate, studying the damage with awed fascination. The beam had sliced through the hull of Clavain’s ship like a knife through bread, snipping off perhaps a third of its length. The needle-nosed prow, glittering with carved facets of diamond-threaded ice, was buckling away from the rest of the hull in ghastly slow motion, like some toppling spire. The wound that the beam had excavated was still shining a livid shade of red, and there were explosions on either side of the severed hull. It was the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful thing she had seen in some time. It was just a shame she was not seeing it with her own eyes.

That was when the shuttle jarred to one side. Volyova thumped against one wall, for she had not had time to buckle herself back into the control seat. What had happened? Had the weapon adjusted its direction of aim, shoving her shuttle in the process? She steadied herself and directed her goggles to the window, but the weapon was in the same orientation as it had been when it had stopped firing. Again the shuttle jarred to one side, and this time she felt, through the tactile-transmitting fabric of her gloves, the shrill scrape of metal against metal. It was exactly as if another ship were brushing against her own.

She arrived at this conclusion only a moment before the first figure came through the still open airlock door. She cursed herself for not closing the lock behind her, but she had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that she was wearing a suit. She should have been thinking about intruders rather than her own life-support needs. It was exactly the kind of mistake she would never have made had she been well, but she supposed she could allow herself one or two errors this late in the game. She had, after all, delivered something of a winning move against Clavain’s ship. The broken hull was drifting away now, trailing intricate strands of mechanical gore.

‘Triumvir?’ The figure was speaking, his voice buzzing in her helmet. She studied the intruder’s armour, noting baroque ornamentation and dazzling juxtapositions of luminous paint and mirrored surface.

‘You have that pleasure,’ she said.

The figure had a wide-muzzled weapon pointed at her. Behind, two more similarly armoured specimens had squeezed into the cabin. The first tugged up a black flash visor; through the thick dark glass of his helmet she caught the not-quite-human facial anatomy of a hyperpig.

‘My name is Scorpio,’ the pig informed her. ‘I’m here to accept your surrender, Triumvir.’

She clucked in surprise. ‘My surrender?

‘Yes, Triumvir.’

‘Have you looked out of the window lately, Scorpio? I really think you ought to.’

There was a moment while her intruders conferred amongst themselves. She sensed to the second the moment when they became aware of what had just happened. There was the minutest lowering of the gun muzzle, a flicker of hesitation in Scorpio’s eyes.

‘You’re still our prisoner,’ he said, but with a good deal less conviction than before,