Redemption Ark

The Captain did not respond. But the ship had not immediately plunged into the catatonic state. According to the monitor bracelet on her wrist, ship-wide servitor activity continued normally.

‘But I’ll assume you don’t know about the machines yet, aside from what you may have picked up during Khouri’s last visit. What kind of machines, you ask? Alien ones, that’s what. We don’t know where they’ve come from. All that we know is that they’re here, now, in the Delta Pavonis system. We think Sylveste — you remember him? — must have inadvertently summoned them here when he went into the Hades artefact.’ Of course he remembered Sylveste, if he was capable of remembering anything at all from his previous existence. It was Sylveste they had brought aboard to heal the Captain. But Sylveste had only been playing with their wishes, his eye on Hades all along.

‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘that’s guesswork, but it seems to fit the facts. Khouri knows a lot about these machines, more than me. But the way she learned about them means she can’t easily articulate everything she knows. We’re still in the dark in a lot of areas.’

She told the Captain about what had happened so far, replaying observations on the bridge’s display sphere. She explained how the swarms of Inhibitor machines had begun dismantling three smaller worlds, sucking out their cores and processing the eviscerated material into highly refined belts of orbital matter.

‘It’s impressive,’ she said. ‘But it’s not so far beyond our own capabilities that I’m quivering in my boots. Not just yet. But what worries me is what they have in mind next.’

The mining operations had come to an abrupt and precise halt two weeks earlier. The artificial volcanoes studding the equators of the three worlds had stopped belching matter, leaving a final curtailed arc of processed material climbing into orbit.

By then, by Volyova’s estimate, at least half the mass of each world had been elevated into orbital storage. Only hollowed-out husks remained below. It was fascinating to watch them subside once the mining was over, crumpling down into compact orange balls of radioactive slag. Some machines detached themselves from the surface, but many appeared to have served their purpose and were not recycled. The apparent wastefulness of that gesture chilled Volyova. It suggested to her that the machines did not care about the effort they had already expended in earlier replication cycles, that in some sense it made no difference compared with the importance of the task ahead.

Yet millions of smaller machines remained. The debris rings themselves had appreciable self-gravity and needed constant shepherding. Various breeds of processor swam through the ore lanes, ingesting and excreting. Volyova detected the occasional flare of exotic radiation from the vicinity of the works. Awesome alchemical mechanisms had been unleashed. The raw dirt of the worlds was being coaxed into specialised and rare new forms, types of matter that simply did not exist in nature.

But before the volcanoes had ceased spewing dirt, a new process had already started. A matter stream had peeled away from the space around each world, a filament of processed material that extended in a long tongue until it was light-seconds in length. The shepherding machines had obviously injected enough energy into each stream to kick them out of the gravitational wells of their progenitor worlds. The tongues of matter were now on an interplanetary trajectory, following a soft parabolic which hugged the ecliptic. They distended until they were light-hours from end to end. Volyova extrapolated the parabolas — there were three of them — and found that they would converge on the same point in space, at precisely the same time.

There was nothing there at the moment. But by the time they got there, something else would have arrived: the system’s largest gas giant. That conjunction, Volyova was inclined to think, was very unlikely to be coincidence. ‘Here’s my guess,’ she told the Captain. ‘What we’ve seen so far was just the gathering of raw material. Now it’s being assembled in the place where the real work is about to begin. They’ve got designs on Roc. What, I don’t know. But it’s undoubtedly part of their plan.’

What she knew of the gas giant sprung on to the projection sphere. A schematic showed Roc cored open like an apple, revealing layers of annotated strata: a plunge into perplexing depths of weird chemistry and nightmarish pressure. Gases at more or less imaginable pressures and temperatures overlaid an ocean of pure liquid hydrogen that began only a scratch beneath the apparent outer layer of the planet. Beneath that, the very thought of its existence giving Volyova a faint migraine, was an ocean of hydrogen in its metallic state. Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.