Redemption Ark

[I’m afraid it’s exactly what you think it is.]

Skade stirred her hand through the red substance. The covering had enough adhesion to form a single sticky mass, even in zero gravity. Now and then she felt something harder — a shard of bone or machinery — but nothing larger than a thumbnail had remained in one piece.

Tell me what happened.

[He was near the field focus. The excursion to state two was only momentary, but it was enough to make a difference. Any movement would have been fatal, even an involuntary twitch. Maybe he was already dead before he hit the wall.]

How fast was he moving?

[Kilometres per second, easily.]

It would have been painless, I suppose. Did you feel him hit?

[Throughout the ship. It was like a small bomb going off.]

Skade willed her gloves to clean themselves. The residue flowed back on to the wall. She thought of Clavain, wishing that she had some of his tolerance for sights like this. Clavain had seen horrid things during his time as a soldier, enough that he had developed the necessary mental armour to cope. With one or two exceptions, Skade had fought all her battles at a distance.

[Skade…?]

Her crest must have reflected her discomposure. Don’t worry about me. Just try to find out what went wrong, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

[And the testing programme?]

The programme continues, of course. Now get this mess cleaned up.

Felka floated in another chamber of her quiet residential spar. Where tools had been tethered to her waist earlier many small metal cages now orbited her, clacking gently against each other when she moved. Each cage contained a clutch of white mice, scratching and sniffing at their constraints. Felka paid them no attention; they had not been caged for long, they were well fed and shortly they would all enjoy a sort of freedom.

She squinted into gloom. The only source of light was the faint radiance of the adjacent room, separated from this one by a twisting throat of highly polished wood the colour of burned caramel. She found the UV lamp attached to one wall and flicked it on.

One side of the chamber — Felka had never bothered deciding which way was up — was sheeted over with bottle-green glass. Behind the glass was something that at first glance resembled a convoluted wooden plumbing system, a palimpsest of pipes and channels, gaskets and valves and pumps. Diagonals and doglegs of wood spanned the maze, bridging different regions, their function initially unclear. The pipes and channels had only three wooden sides, with the glass forming the fourth wall so that whatever flowed or scurried along them would be visible.

Felka had already introduced about a dozen mice to the system via one-way doors near the edge of the glass. They had quickly taken divergent paths at the first few junctions and were now metres apart, nosing through their own regions of the labyrinth. The lack of gravity did riot bother them at all; they could obtain enough traction against the wood to scamper freely in any direction. The more experienced mice, in fact, eventually learned the art of coasting down pipes, minimising the frictional area they exposed to the wood or glass. But they seldom learned that trick until they had been in the maze for several hours and through several reward cycles.

Felka reached for one of the cages attached to her waist, flipping open the catch so that the contents — three white mice — spilled into the maze. Away they went, momentarily gleeful to have escaped the metal prisons.

Felka waited. Sooner or later one of the mice would run into a trapdoor or flap that was connected to a delicate system of spring-loaded wooden levers. When the mouse pushed past the flap, the movement caused the levers to shift. The movement would often be transmitted across the maze, causing a shutter to open or close one or two metres away from the original trigger point. Another mouse, working its way through a remote stretch of the maze, might suddenly find its way blocked where previously it had been clear. Or the mouse might be forced to make a decision where previously none had been required, anxieties of possibility momentarily clouding its tiny rodent brain. It was quite probable that the choices of the second mouse would activate another trigger system, causing a distant reconfiguration of another part of the maze. Floating in the middle, Felka would watch it happen, the wood shifting through endless permutations, running a blind program whose agents were the mice themselves. It was fascinating enough to watch, after a fashion.