Skade had told him that the signals from the lost weapons had been detected more than thirty years earlier. The memories he had been given and the data he now had access to confirmed her story. But there was no explanation for why the recovery of the weapons had suddenly become a matter of vital urgency to the Mother Nest. Skade had said that the war had made it difficult to stage an attempt any sooner than now, but that was surely only part of the truth. There had to be something else: a crisis, or the threat of a crisis, which made the recovery of the weapons vastly more important than it had been before. Something had scared the Inner Sanctum.
Clavain wondered if Skade — and by implication the Inner Sanctum — knew something about the wolves that he had yet to be told. Since Galiana’s return, the wolves had been classified as a disturbing but distant threat, something to worry about only when humankind began to push deeper into interstellar space. But what if some new intelligence had been received? What if the wolves were closer?
He wanted to dismiss the idea, but found himself unable to do so. For the remainder of the trip his thoughts circled like vultures, examining the idea from every angle, mentally stripping it to the bone. It was only when Skade again pushed her thoughts into his head that he forced himself to bury his internal enquiries beneath conscious thought.
[We’re nearly there, Clavain. You appreciate that none of what you see here can be shared with the rest of the Mother Nest?]
Of course. I hope you were discreet about whatever you were doing out here. If you’d drawn the enemy’s attention you could have compromised everything.
[But we didn’t, Clavain.]
That’s not the point. There weren’t supposed to be any operations within ten light-hours of—
[Listen, Clavain.] She leaned forwards from the tight confines of her seat, the restraint webbing taut against the black curves of her spacesuit. [There’s something you need to grasp: the war isn’t our main concern any more. We’re going to win it.]
Don’t underestimate the Demarchists.
[Oh, 1 won’t. But we must keep them in perspective. The only serious issue now is the recovery of the hell-class weapons.]
Does it have to be recovery? Or would you settle for destruction? Clavain watched her reaction carefully. Even after his admittance to the Closed Council Skade’s mind was closed to him.
[Destruction, Clavain? Why on Earth would we want to destroy them?]
You told me that your main objective was to stop them from falling into the wrong hands.
[That remains the case, yes.]
So you’d allow them to be destroyed? That would achieve the same end, wouldn’t it? And I imagine it’d be very much easier from a logistical point of view.
[Recovery is our preferred outcome.]
Preferred?
[Very much preferred, Clavain.]
Presently, the corvette’s motors burned harder. Barely visible, a dark cometary husk hoved out of the darkness. The ship’s forward floods glanced across its surface, hunting and questing. The comet spun slowly, more rapidly than the Mother Nest but still within reasonable limits. Clavain judged the size of the filthy snowball to be perhaps seven or eight kilometers across — an order of magnitude smaller than home. It could easily have been hidden within the Mother Nest’s hollowed-out core.
The corvette hovered close to the frothy black surface of the comet, arresting its drift with stuttering spikes of violet-flamed thrust before firing anchoring grapples. They slammed into the ground, piercing the nearly invisible epoxy skein that had been thrown around the comet for structural reinforcement.
You’ve been busy little beavers. How many people have you got here, Skade, doing whatever it is they do?
[No one. Only a handful of us have ever visited here, and no one ever stays permanently. All activities have been totally automated. Periodically a Closed Council operative arrives to check on things, but for the most part the servitors have worked unsupervised.]
Servitors aren’t that clever.
[Ours are.]
Clavain, Remontoire and Skade donned helmets and left the corvette via its surface lock, jumping across several metres of space until they collided with the reinforcement membrane. It caught them like flies on glue paper, springing back and forth until their impact energy was damped away. When the membrane had ceased its oscillations Clavain gently ripped his arm away from the adhesive surface and then levered himself into a standing position. The adhesive was sophisticated enough to yield to normal motions, but it would remain sticky against any action sufficiently violent to send someone away from the comet at escape velocity. Similarly, the membrane was rigid under normal forces, but would deform elastically if something impacted it at more than a few metres per second. Walking was possible provided it was done reasonably slowly, but anything more vigorous would result in the subject becoming embroiled and immobilised until they relaxed.
Skade, whose crested helmet made her difficult to mistake, led the way, following what must have been a suit homing trace. After five minutes of progress they arrived at a modest depression in the comet’s surface. Clavain discerned a black entrance hole at the depression’s lowest point, almost lost against the sooty blackness of the comet’s surface. There was a circular gap in the membrane, protected by a ring-shaped collar.
Skade knelt by the blackness, the adhesive gripping her knees via oozing capillary flow. She knocked the rim of the collar twice and then waited. After perhaps a minute a servitor bustled from the darkness, unfolding a plethora of jointed legs and appendages as it cleared the tight restriction of the collar. The machine resembled a belligerent iron grasshopper. Clavain recognised it as a general construction model — there were thousands like it back at the Mother Nest — but there was something unnervingly confident and cocky about the way it moved.
[Clavain, Remontoire… let me introduce you to the Master of Works.]
The servitor?
[The Master’s more than just a servitor, I assure you.]
Skade shifted to spoken language. ‘Master… we wish to see the interior. Please let us through.’
In reply Clavain heard the buzzing, wasplike voice of the Master. ‘I am not familiar with these two individuals.’
‘Clavain and Remontoire both have Closed Council clearance. Here, read my mind. You’ll see I am not being coerced.’
There was a pause while the machine stepped closer to Skade, easing the full mass of its body from the collar. It had many legs and limbs, some tipped with picklike feet, others ending in specialised grippers, tools or sensors. On either side of its wedge-shaped head were major sensor clusters, packed together like faceted compound eyes. Skade stood her ground while the servitor advanced, until it was towering over her. The machine lowered its head and swept it from side to side, and then jerked backwards.
I will want to read their minds as well.‘
‘Be my guest.’
The servitor moved to Remontoire, angled its head and swept him. It took a little longer with him than it had spent on Skade. Then, seemingly satisified, it proceeded to Clavain. He felt it rummaging through his mind, its scrutiny fierce and systematic. As the machine trawled him, a torrent of remembered smells, sounds and visual images burst into his consciousness, and then each image vanished to be replaced by another. Now and then the machine would pause, back up and retrieve an earlier image, lingering over it suspiciously. Others it skipped over with desultory disinterest. The process was mercifully quick, but it still felt like he was being ransacked.
Then the scanning stopped, the torrent ceased and Clavain’s mind was his own again.
‘This one is conflicted. He appears to have had doubts. I have doubts about him. I cannot retrieve deep neural structures. Perhaps I should scan him at higher resolution. A modest surgical procedure would permit…’
Skade interrupted the servitor. ‘That’s not necessary, Master. He’s entitled to his doubts. Let us through, will you?’
‘This is not in order. This is most
irregular. A limited surgical intervention…’ The machine still had its clusters of sensors locked on to Clavain.
‘Master, this is a direct command. Let us pass.’
The servitor pulled away. ‘Very well. I comply under duress. I will insist that the visit be brief.’
‘We won’t detain you,’ Skade said.
‘No, you will not. You will also remove your weapons. I will not permit high-energy-density devices within my comet.’
Clavain glanced down at his suit’s utility belt, unclipping the low-yield boser pistol he had barely been aware he was carrying. He moved to place the pistol on the ice, but even as he did so there was a whiplike blur of motion from the Master of Works, flicking the pistol from his hand. He saw it spin off into the darkness above him, flung away at greater than escape velocity. Skade and Remontoire did likewise, and the Master disposed of their weapons with the same casual flick. Then the servitor spun round, its legs a dancing blur of metal, and then thrust itself back into the hole.
[Come on. It doesn’t really like visitors, and it’ll start getting irritated if we stay too long.]
Remontoire pushed a thought into their heads. [You mean it’s not irritated yet?]
What the hell is it, Skade?
[A servitor, of course, only somewhat brighter than the norm… does that disturb you?]
Clavain followed her through the collar and into the tunnel, drifting more than walking, guiding himself between the throatlike walls of compactified ice. He had barely been aware of the pistol he carried until it had been confiscated, but now he felt quite vulnerable without it. He fingered his utility belt, but there was nothing else on it that would serve as a weapon against the servitor, should it chose to turn against them. There were a few clamps and miniature grapples, a couple of thumb-sized signalling beacons and a standard-issue sealant spray. The only thing approaching an actual weapon — while the spray looked like a gun, it had a range of only two or three centimetres — was a short-bladed piezo-knife, sufficient to pierce spacesuit fabric but not much use against an armoured machine or even a well-trained adversary.
You know damned well it does. I’ve never had my mind invaded by a machine… not the way that one just did.
[It just needs to know it can trust us.]
While it trawled him he had tasted the sharp metallic tang of its intelligence. How clever is it, exactly? Turing-compliant?
[Higher. As smart as an alpha-level, at the very least. Oh, don’t give me that aura of self-righteous disgust, Clavain. You once accepted machines that were almost as intelligent as yourself.]
I’ve had time to revise my opinion on the subject.
[Is it that you feel threatened by it, I wonder?]
By a machine? No. What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave. I didn’t think that was quite what we believed in.
He felt Remontoire’s quiet presence. [I agree with Clavain. We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.]
Somewhere ahead of them was a pale lilac glow that picked out the natural patterning of the tunnel walls. Clavain could see the servitor’s dark spindly bulk against the light source. It must have been listening in to this conversation, he thought, hearing them debate what it represented.
[I regret that we had to do it. But we didn’t have any choice. We needed clever servitors.]
[It’s slavery,] Remontoire insisted.
[Desperate times call for desperate measures, Remontoire.]
Clavain peered into the pale purple gloom. What’s so desperate? I thought all we were doing was recovering some lost property.
The Master of Works brought them to the interior of Skade’s comet, calling them to a halt inside a small, airless blister set into the interior wall of the hollowed-out body. They stationed themselves by hooking limbs into restraint straps attached to the blister’s stiff alloy frame. The blister was hermetically sealed from the comet’s main chamber. The vacuum that had been achieved within was so high-grade that even the vapour leakage from Clavain’s suit would have caused an unacceptable degradation.
Clavain stared into the chamber. Beyond the glass was a cavern of dizzying scale. It was bathed in rapturous blue light, filled with vast machines and an almost subliminal sense of scurrying activity. For a moment the scene was far too much to take in. Clavain felt as if he was staring into the depths of perspective in a fabulous detailed medieval painting, beguiled by the interlocking arches and towers of some radiant celestial city, glimpsing hosts of silver-leaf angels in the architecture, squadron upon squadron of them as far as the eye could see, receding into the cerulean blue of infinity. Then he grasped the scale of things and realised with a perceptual jolt that the angels were merely distant machines: droves of sterile construction servitors traversing the vacuum by the thousand as they went about their tasks. They communicated with each other using lasers, and it was the scatter and reflection of those beams that drenched the chamber in such shivering blue radiance. And it was indeed cold, Clavain knew. Dotted around the walls of the chamber he recognised the nubbed black cones of cryo-arithmetic engines, calculating overtime to suck away the heat of intense industrial activity that would otherwise have boiled the comet away.
Clavain’s attention flicked to the reason for all that activity. He was not surprised to see the ships — not even surprised to see that they were starships — but the degree to which they had been completed astonished him. He had been expecting half-finished hulks, but he could not believe that these ships were far from flight-readiness. There were twelve of them packed side by side in clouds of geodesic support scaffolding. They were identical shapes, smooth and black as torpedos or beached whales, barbed near the rear with the outflung spars and nacelles of Conjoiner drives. Though there were no obvious visual comparisons, he was certain that each of the ships was at least three or four kilometres long, much larger than Nightshade.
Skade smiled, obviously noting his reaction. [Impressed?]
Who wouldn’t be?
[Now you understand why the Master was so concerned about the risk of an unintentional weapons discharge, or even a powerplant overload. Of course, you’re wondering why we’ve started building them again.]
It’s a fair question. Would the wolves have anything to do with it, by any chance?
[Perhaps you should tell me why you think we ever stopped making them.]
I’m afraid no one ever had the decency to tell me.
[You’re an intelligent man. You must have formed a few theories of your own.]
For a moment Clavain thought of telling her that the matter had never really concerned him; that the decision to stop making starships had happened when he was in deep space, a fait accompli by the time he returned, and — given the immediate need to help his side win the war — not the most pressing issue at hand.
But that would have been a lie. It had always troubled him.
Generally it’s assumed that we stopped making them for selfish economic reasons, or because we were worried that the drives were falling into the wrong hands — Ultras and other undesirables. Or that we discovered a fatal flaw in the design that meant that the drives had a habit of exploding now and again.
[Yes, and there are at least half a dozen other theories in common currency, ranging from the faintly plausible to the ludicrously paranoid. What was your understanding of the reason?]
We’d only ever had a stable customer relationship with the Demarchists. The Ultras bought their drives off second- or third-hand sources, or stole them. But once our relationship with the Demarchists began to deteriorate, which happened when the Melding Plague crashed their economy, we lost our main client. They couldn’t afford our technology, and we weren’t wil
ling to sell it to a faction that showed increasing signs of hostility.
[A very pragmatic answer, Clavain.]
I never saw any reason to look for any deeper explanation.
[There is, of course, quite a grain of truth in that. Economic and political factors did play a role. But there was something else. It can’t have escaped your attention that our own internal shipbuilding programme has been much reduced.]
We’ve had a war to fight. We have enough ships for our needs as it is.
[True, but even those ships have not been active. Routine interstellar traffic has been greatly reduced. Travel between Conjoiner settlements in other systems has been cut back to a minimum.]
Again, effects of a war—
[Had remarkably little to do with it, other than providing a convenient cover story.]
Despite himself, Clavain almost laughed. Cover story?
[Had the real reason ever come out, there would have been widespread panic across the whole of human-settled space. The socio-economic turmoil would have been incomparably greater than anything caused by the present war.]
And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why?
[You were right, in a sense. It was to do with the wolves, Clavain.]
He shook his head. It can’t have been.
[Why not?]
Because we didn’t learn about the wolves until Galiana returned. And Galiana didn’t encounter them until after we separated. There was no need to remind Skade that both of these events had happened long after the edict to stop shipbuilding.
Skade’s helmet nodded a fraction. [That’s true, in a sense. Certainly, it wasn’t until Galiana’s return that the Mother Nest obtained any detailed intelligence concerning the nature of the machines. But the fact that the wolves existed — the fact that they were out there — that was already known, many years before.]
It can’t have been. Galiana was the first to encounter them.
[No. She was merely the first to make it back alive — or at least the first to make it back in any sense at all. Before that, there had only been distant reports, mysterious instances of ships vanishing, the odd distress signal. Over the years the Closed Council collated these reports and came to the conclusion that the wolves, or something like the wolves, was stalking interstellar space. That was bad enough, yet there was an even more disturbing conclusion, one that led to the edict. The pattern of losses pointed to the fact that the machines, whatever they were, homed in on a specific signature from our engines. We concluded that the wolves were drawn to us by the tau-neutrino emissions that are a characteristic of our drives.]