Redemption Ark

The Amarantin, the birdlike creatures who had lived on Resurgam a million years earlier, had been one such species. The effort to cleanse them had been protracted, allowing many of them to slip into various hidden sanctuaries. The last act of the culling machines had been to annihilate Resurgam’s biosphere by triggering a catastrophic stellar flare. Delta Pavonis had since settled down to normal sunlike activity, but it was only now that Resurgam was beginning to support life again.

Their work done, the Inhibitors had vanished back into the stellar cold. Nine hundred and ninety thousand years passed.

Then humans came, drawn to the enigma of the vanished Amarantin culture. Their leader had been Sylveste, the ambitious scion of a wealthy Yellowstone family. By the time Khouri, Volyova and Nostalgia for Infinity arrived in the system, Sylveste had put in place his plans for exploring the neutron star on the system’s edge, convinced that Hades had something to do with the Amarantin extinction. Sylveste had coerced the crew of the starship into helping him, using its cache of weapons to break through shells of defensive machinery and finally penetrating to the heart of a moon-sized artefact — they called it Cerberus — which orbited the neutron star.

Sylveste had been right all along about the Amarantin. But in verifying his theory he had also sprung a primed Inhibitor trap. At the heart of the Cerberus object, Sylveste had died in a massive matter-antimatter explosion.

And at the same time he had not died at all. Khouri knew; she had met and spoken to Sylveste after his ‘death’. So far as she was capable of understanding it, Sylveste and his wife had been stored as simulations in the crust of the neutron star itself. Hades, it turned out, was one of the sanctuaries that the Amarantin had used when they were being harried by the Inhibitors. It was an element of something much older than either the Amarantin or the Inhibitors, a transcendent information storage and processing system, a vast archive. The Amarantin had found a way inside it, and so, much later, had Sylveste. That was as much as Khouri knew, and as much as she wanted to know.

She had met the stored Sylveste only once. In the more than sixty years that had passed since then — the time that Volyova had spent carefully infiltrating the very society that feared and loathed her — Khouri had allowed herself to forget that Sylveste was still out there, was still in some sense alive in the Hades computational matrix. On those rare occasions when she did think about him, she found herself wondering if he ever gave a moment’s thought to the consequences of his actions all those years ago; if memories of the Inhibitors ever stirred him from vain dreams of his own brilliance. She doubted it, for Sylveste had not struck her as someone overly troubled by the results of his own deeds. And in any case, by Sylveste’s accelerated reckoning, for time passed very rapidly in the Hades matrix, the events must have been centuries of subjective time in his past, as inconsequential as childhood misdeeds. Very little could touch him in there, so what was the point of worrying about him?

But that hardly helped those who were still outside the matrix. Khouri and Volyova had spent only twenty of those sixty-plus years out of reefersleep, for their infiltration scheme had been necessarily slow and episodic. But of those twenty years, Khouri doubted that a single day had passed when she had not thought of — and worried about — the prospect of the Inhibitors.

Now at least her worry had transmuted into certainty. They were here; the thing that she had dreaded had finally started.

And yet it was not to be a quick, brutal culling. Something titanic was being brought into existence, something that required the raw material of three entire worlds. For the time being the activities of the Inhibitors could not be detected from Resurgam, even with the tracking systems put in place to spot approaching lighthuggers. But Khouri doubted that this could continue to be the case. Sooner or later the activities of the alien machines would exceed some threshold and the citizenry would begin to glimpse strange apparitions in the sky.

Very likely, all hell would break loose.

But by then it might not even matter.

CHAPTER 10

Xavier saw one ship detach itself from the bright flow of other vessels on the main approach corridor to Carousel New Copenhagen, tugged down his helmet’s binoculars and swept space until he locked on to the ship itself. The image enlarged and stabilised, the spined pufferfish profile of Storm Bird rotating as the ship executed a slow turn. The Taurus IV salvage tug was still nosing against its hull, like a parasite looking for one last nibble.

Xavier blinked hard, requesting a higher magnification zoom. The image swelled, wobbled and then sharpened.

‘Dear God,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell have you done to my ship?’