Redemption Ark

The overseer never questioned its work. It knew only that it was acting for the ultimate good of sentient life. It was not at all concerned that the crisis it was acting to avert, the crisis that would become an unmanageable cosmic disaster if intelligent life was permitted to spread, lay a total of thirteen Turns — three billion years — in the future.

It did not matter.

Time meant nothing to the Inhibitors.

CHAPTER 7

[Skade? I’m afraid there’s been another accident.]

What kind of accident?

[A state-two excursion.]

How long did it last?

[Only a few milliseconds. It was enough, though.]

The two of them — Skade and her senior propulsion technician — were crouched in a black-walled space near Nightshade’s stern, while the prototype was berthed in the Mother Nest. They were squeezed into the space with their backs arched and their knees pressed against their chests. It was unpleasant, but after her first few visits Skade had blanked out the sensation of postural comfort, replacing it with a cool Zenlike calm. She could endure days squashed into inhumanly small hideaways — and she had. Beyond the walls, secluded in numerous cramped openings, were the intricate and perplexing elements of the machinery. Direct control and fine-tuning of the device was only possible here, where there were only the most rudimentary links to the normal control network of the ship.

Is the body still here?

[Yes.]

I’d like to see it.

[There isn’t an awful lot left to see.]

But the man unplugged his compad and led the way, shuffling sideways in a crablike manner. Skade followed him. They moved from one hideaway to another, occasionally having to inch through constrictions caused by protruding elements of the machinery. It was all around them, exerting its subtle but undeniable effect on the very space-time in which they were embedded.

No one, not even Skade, really understood quite how the machinery worked. There were guesses, some of them very scholarly and plausible, but at heart there remained a gaping chasm of conceptual ignorance. Much of what Skade knew about the machinery consisted only of documented cause and effect, with little understanding of the physical mechanisms underpinning its behaviour. She knew that when the machinery was functioning it tended to settle into several discrete states, each of which was associated with a measurable change in the local metric… but the states were not rigidly isolated, and it had been known for the device to oscillate wildly between them. Then there was the associated problem of the various field geometries, and the tortuously complex way they fed back into the state stability…

State two, you said? Exactly what mode were you in before the accident?

[State one, as per instructions. We were exploring some of the nonlinear field geometries.]

What was it this time? Heart failure, like the last one?

[No, at least, I don’t think heart failure was the main cause of death. Like I said, there isn’t much left to go on.]

Skade and the technician pushed ahead, wriggling through a tight elbow between adjoining chunks of the machinery. The field was in state zero at the moment, for which there were no measurable physiological effects, but Skade could not entirely shake a feeling of wrongness, a nagging sense that the world had been skewed minutely away from normality. It was illusory; she would have needed highly sensitive quantum-vacuum probes to detect the device’s influence. But the feeling was there all the same.

[Here we are.]

Skade looked around. They had emerged into one of the larger open spaces in the bowels of the device. It was a scalloped black-walled chamber just large enough to stand up in. Numerous compad input sockets woodwormed the walls.

This is where it happened?

[Yes. The field shear was at its highest here.]

I’m not seeing a body.

[You’re just not looking closely enough.]

She followed his gaze. He was focusing on a particular part of the wall. Skade moved over and touched the wall with the gloved tips of her fingers. What had looked like the same gloss-black as the rest of the chamber revealed itself to be scarlet and cloying. There was perhaps a quarter of an inch of something glued to most of the wall on one side of the chamber.

Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.