Then the bubble expanded again, swelling up to the size of a small spacecraft. Some of the whisking arms did not swing out of the way in time, and their sharp extremities punched through the undulating membrane. The sensors flipped into overload, unable to process the howling torrent of gravitational and particle flux. Inexorably, matters were shifting out of control. Vital control systems in the rear of Nightshade were shutting down. The arms began to move spasmodically, lashing against each other like the limbs of ill-orchestrated dancers. Nodules and flanges sheered off. Scarves of glowing plasma ripped between the boundary and its encasing machinery. The boundary bloated again; its membrane swallowed cubic hectares of support machinery. The failing machinery could no longer hold it stable. Dim explosions pulsed within the bubble. A major control arm severed itself and swung back into the side of Nightshade’s hull. Skade sensed a chain of explosions surging along the side of her ship, pink blossoms cascading towards the bridge. Her beautiful machinery was ripping itself to pieces. The bubble squirmed larger, oozing through the failing constraints of the sheered and buckled arms. Emergency alarms sounded, internal barricades clanging down throughout the ship. Whiteness glared from the heart of the bubble as matter within it underwent a partial transition to the pure photonic state. A catastrophic reversion to the state-three quantum vacuum, in which all matter was massless…
The photo-leptonic flash surged through the membrane. The few arms that were still functioning were snapped backwards like broken fingers. There was a brief, furious sizzle of plasma discharge and then the bubble swept larger, engulfing Nightshade and dissipating at the same time. Skade felt it slam through her, like a sudden cold front on a warm day. At the same time a shock wave shook the ship, throwing Skade against a wall. Ordinarily the wall would have deformed to absorb the energy of the collision, but this time the impact was hard and metallic.
Yet the ship remained around her. She was able to think. She could still hear klaxons and emergency messages, and the barricades were still closing. But the excursion event had passed. The bubble had shattered, but while it had damaged her ship — perhaps profoundly, perhaps beyond the point of repair — it had not destroyed it.
Skade willed her consciousness rate back down to her normal processing speed. Her crest throbbed with the excess blood heat it had to dissipate — she felt light-headed — but that would soon pass. She appeared to have suffered no injuries, even in the violent crash against the wall. Her armour moved at her will, undamaged by the impact. She took hold of a wall restraint and tugged herself into the middle of the corridor. She had no weight, for Nightshade was drifting and had never been equipped for spin-generated gravity.
Molenka?
There was no response. The entire shipboard network was down, preventing neural communication unless the subjects were extremely close to each other. But she knew where Molenka had been before the bubble had swelled out of control. She called aloud, but there was still no answer, and then set off in the direction of the machinery. The critical volume was still pressurised, though she had to persuade the internal doors to let her through.
The glossy, curved surfaces of the alien machinery, like black glass, had shifted since she was last within this part of the ship. She wondered how much of the change had happened during the failed attempt to expand the bubble. The air prickled with ozone and a dozen less familiar smells, and against the continuous background of klaxons and spoken alarms she heard sparking and shearing sounds.
‘Molenka?’ she called again.
[Skade.] The neural response was incredibly weak, but it was recognisably Molenka. She was close now, certainly.
Skade pushed forwards, hand over hand, the movements of her armour stiff. The machinery surrounded her on all sides, smooth black ledges and protrusions, like the water-carved rock in some ancient underground cavern. It widened out, admitting her to an occlusion five or six metres from side to side. The scalloped walls were studded with data-input sockets. A window set into the far side of the chamber offered a view of the smashed and buckled containment machinery jutting from the rear of her ship. Even now some of the arms were still moving, ticking lazily back and forth like the last twitching limbs of a dying creature. Seen with her eyes, the damage appeared much worse than she had been led to believe. Her ship had been gutted, its viscera ripped out for inspection.
But that was not what drew Skade’s attention. In the approximate centre of the occlusion floated an undulating sac, its skin a milky translucence behind which something shifted in and out of visibility. The sac was five-pointed, throwing out blunt pseudopodia that corresponded in proportion and arrangement to the head and limbs of a human. Indeed, Skade saw, the thing within it was human, a shape she glimpsed in shattered parts rather than any unified whole. There was a ripple of dark clothing and a ripple of paler flesh.
Molenka?
Though she was only metres away, the reply felt astonishingly distant.
[Yes. It’s me. I’m trapped, Skade. Trapped inside part of the bubble.]
Skade shivered, impressed by the woman’s calm. She was clearly going to die, and yet her reporting of her predicament had an admirable detachment. It was the attitude of a true Conjoiner, convinced that her essence would live on in the wider consciousness of the Mother Nest, and that physical death amounted only to the removal of an inessential peripheral element from a much more significant whole. But, Skade reminded herself, they were a long way from the Mother Nest now. The bubble, Molenka?
[It fragmented as it passed through the ship. It glued itself to me, almost deliberately. Almost as if it was looking for someone to surround, someone to embed within itself.] The five-pointed thing wobbled revoltingly, hinting at some awful instability that was on the point of collapsing.
What state are you in, Molenka?
[It must be state one, Skade… I don’t feel any different. Just trapped… and distant. I feel very, very distant.] The bubble fragment began to contract, exactly as Molenka had said it was likely to do. The body-shaped membrane shrunk down until its surface conformed closely with Molenka’s body. For a dreadful moment she looked quite normal, except that she was covered in a shifting glaze of pearly light. Skade dared to hope that the bubble would choose that instant to collapse, freeing Molenka. But at the same time she knew it was not about to happen.
The bubble quivered again, hiccoughed and twitched. Molenka’s expression — it was quite visible — became obviously frightened. Even through the faint neural channel that connected them, Skade felt the woman’s fear and apprehension. It was as if the glaze was tightening around her.
[Help me, Skade. I can’t breathe.]
I can’t. I don’t know what to do.
Molenka’s skin was tight against the membrane. She was starting to suffocate. Normal speech would have been impossible by now, but the automatic routines in her head would have already started shutting down non-essential parts of her brain, conserving vital resources to squeeze three or four extra minutes of consciousness from her last breath. [Help me. Please…]
The membrane tightened further. Skade watched, unable to turn away, as it squeezed Molenka. Her pain gushed across the neural link. It was all that Skade recognised: there was no further room for rational thought. She reached out, desperate to do something even if the gesture was hopeless. Her fingers skimmed the surface of the membrane. It shrank further, hastened by the contact. The neural link began to break up. The collapsing membrane was crushing Molenka alive, the pressure destroying the delicate loom of Conjoiner implants that floated in her skull.
The membrane halted, quivered, and then shrank down with shocking speed. When Molenka was three-quarters of her normal size, the figure within the membrane turned abruptly scarlet. Skade felt the screaming howl of abrupt neural severance before her own implants curtailed the link. Molenka was dead. But the human-shaped form lingered even as it collapsed further. Now it was a mannequin, now a horrid marionette, now a doll, now a thumb-sized figurine, losing shape and d
efinition as the material within liquefied. Then the contraction stopped, the milky envelope stabilising.
Skade reached out and grasped the marble-sized thing that had been Molenka, knowing that she must dispose of it into vacuum before the field contracted even further. The matter within the membrane — that matter that had once been Molenka — was already under savage compression, and she did not want to think about what would happen should it spontaneously expand.
She tugged at the marble, but the thing barely moved, as if it were locked rigid at that precise point in space and time. She increased her suit’s strength and finally the marble began to shift. It had all of Molenka’s inertial mass within it, perhaps more, and it would be just as difficult to stop or steer.
Skade began to make her laborious way to the nearest dorsal airlock.
The projection helix spun up to speed. Clavain stood with his hands on the railing that surrounded it, peering at the indistinct shape that appeared within the cylinder. It resembled a squashed bug, a fan of soft ropelike entrails spilling from one end of a hard, dark carapace.
‘She isn’t going anywhere in a hurry,’ Scorpio said.
‘Dead in the water,’ Antoinette Bax concurred. She whistled. ‘She’s drifting, just falling through space. Holy shit. What do you think happened to her?’
‘Something bad, but not something catastrophic,’ Clavain said quietly, ‘or else we wouldn’t see her at all. Scorp, can you zoom in and enhance the rear section? It looks like something happened there.’
Scorpio was controlling the hull cameras, slaved to pan over the drifting starship as they slammed past it with a velocity differential of more than a thousand kilometres per second. They would be within effective weapons range for only an hour. Zodiacal Light was not even accelerating at the moment; the inertia-suppressing systems were switched off and the engines were quiet. Great flywheels had spun the lighthugger’s habitation core up to one gee of centrifugal gravity. Clavain enjoyed not having to struggle around under higher gravity or wear an exoskeletal rig. It was even more pleasant not having to suffer the disturbing physiological effects of the inertia-suppression field.
‘There,’ Scorpio said when he had finished adjusting the settings. ‘That’s as clear as it’s going to get, Clavain.’
‘Thanks.’
Remontoire, the only one amongst them still wearing an exoskeletal rig, stepped closer to the cylinder, brushing past Pauline Sukhoi with a whirr of servos.
‘I don’t recognise those structures, Clavain, but they look intentional.’
Clavain nodded. That was his opinion as well. The basic shape of the light-hugger was still as it should have been, but from her rear erupted a complicated splay of twisted filaments and arcs, like the mainsprings and ratchets of some clockwork mechanism caught in the act of exploding.
‘Would you care to speculate?’ Clavain asked Remontoire.
‘She was desperate to escape us, desperate to pull ahead. She might have considered something extreme.’
‘Extreme?’ Xavier asked. He had one hand around Antoinette’s waist. The two of them were filthy with machine oil.
‘She already had inertia suppression,’ Remontoire said. ‘But 1 think this was something else — a modification of the same equipment to push it into a different state.’
‘Such as?’ Xavier asked.
Clavain looked at Remontoire, too.
Remontoire said, ‘The technology will suppress inertial mass — that’s what Skade called a state-two field — but it doesn’t remove it entirely. In a state-three field, however, all inertial mass drops to zero. Matter becomes photonic, unable to travel at anything other than the speed of light. Time dilation becomes infinite, so the ship would remain frozen in the photonic state until the end of time.’
Clavain nodded at his friend. Remtontoire appeared perfectly willing to wear the exoskeleton even though it was functioning as a form of restraint, capable of immobilising him should Clavain decide that he could not be trusted.
‘What about state four?’ Clavain asked.
‘That might be more useful,’ Remontoire said. ‘If she could tunnel through state three, skipping it entirely, she might be able to achieve a smooth transition to a state-four field. Inside that field, the ship would flip into a tachyonic mass state, unable to do anything but travel faster than light.’
‘Skade tried that?’ Xavier asked reverently.
‘It’s as good an explanation as any I can think of,’ Remontoire said.
‘What do you think happened?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Some sort of field instability,’ Pauline Sukhoi said, the pale reflection of her haunted face hanging in the display tank. She spoke slowly and solemnly. ‘Managing a bubble of altered space-time makes fusion containment look like the kind of game children play on their birthdays. My suspicion is that Skade first created a microscopic bubble, probably sub-atomic, certainly no larger than a bacterium. At that scale, it’s deceptively easy to manipulate. See those sickles and arms?’ She nodded at the image, which had rotated slightly since it had first appeared. Those would have been her field generators and containment systems. They would have been supposed to allow the field to expand in a stable fashion until it encased the ship. A bubble expanding at light-speed would take less than half a millisecond to swallow a ship the size of Nightshade, but altered vacuum expands superluminally, like inflationary space-time. A state-four bubble has a characteristic doubling time in the order of ten to the minus forty-three seconds. That doesn’t give much time to react if things start going wrong.‘
‘And if the bubble kept growing… ?’ Antoinette asked.
‘It won’t,’ Sukhoi said. ‘At least, you wouldn’t ever know about it if it does. No one would.’
‘Skade’s lucky she has a ship left,’ Xavier said.
Sukhoi nodded. ‘It must have been a small accident, probably during the transition between states. She may have hit state three, converting a small chunk of her ship to pure white light. A small photo-leptonic explosion.’
‘It looks survivable,’ Scorpio said.
‘Are there life-signs?’ Antoinette asked.
Clavain shook his head. ‘None. But there wouldn’t be, not with Nightshade. The prototype’s designed for maximum stealth. Our usual scanning methods won’t work.’
Scorpio adjusted some settings, causing the colours of the image to shift to spectral greens and blues. ‘Thermal,’ he said. ‘She still has power, Clavain. If there’d been a major systems blow-out, her hull would be five degrees cooler by now.’
‘I don’t doubt that there are survivors,’ Clavain said.
Scorpio nodded. ‘Some, maybe. They’ll lie low until we’re ahead of them, out of sensor range. Then they’ll kick into repair mode. Before you know it they’ll be on our tail, just as much a problem as they ever were.’
‘I’ve thought about that, Scorp,’ said Clavain.
The pig nodded. ‘And?’
‘I’m not going to attack them.’
Scorpio’s wild dark eyes flared. ‘Clavain…’
‘Felka is still alive.’
There was an awkward silence. Clavain felt it press around him. They were all looking at him, even Sukhoi, each of them thanking their stars that they did not have to take this decision.
‘You don’t know that,’ Scorpio said. Clavain saw the lines of tension etched into his jaw. ‘Skade lied before and killed Lasher. She hasn’t given us any evidence that she really has Felka. That’s because she doesn’t have her, or because Felka is dead now.’
Calmly, Clavain said, ‘What evidence could she give? There isn’t anything she couldn’t fake.’
‘She could have learned something from Felka, something only she would know.’
‘You never met Felka, Scorp. She’s strong — much stronger than Skade assumes. She wouldn’t give Skade anything Skade could use to control me.’
‘Then perhaps she does have her, Clavain. But that doesn’t mean she’s awake. She?
??s probably in reefersleep, so she doesn’t cause any trouble.’
‘What difference would that make?’ Clavain asked.
‘She wouldn’t feel anything,’ Scorpio said. ‘We have enough weapons now, Clavain. Nightshade is a sitting duck. We can take her out instantly, painlessly. Felka won’t know a thing.’
Clavain reached for his anger, forcing it to lie low. ‘Would you say that if she hadn’t murdered Lasher?’
The pig thumped the railing. ‘She did, Clavain. That’s all that matters.’
‘No…’ Antoinette said. ‘It isn’t all that matters. Clavain’s right. We can’t start acting like a single human life doesn’t matter. We become as bad as the wolves if we do that.’
Xavier, next to her, beamed proudly. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Scorpio. I know she killed Lasher, and I know how much that pissed you off.’
‘You have no idea,’ Scorpio said. He did not sound angry so much as regretful. ‘And don’t tell me a single human life suddenly matters. It’s just because you know her. Skade is human, too. What about her, and her allies aboard that ship?’
Cruz, who had been silent until then, spoke softly. ‘Listen to Clavain. He’s right. We’ll get another chance to kill Skade. This just doesn’t feel right.’
‘Might I make a suggestion?’ Remontoire said.
Clavain looked at Remontoire uneasily. ‘What, Rem?’
‘We are just — just — within shuttle range. It would cost us more antimatter, a fifth of our remaining stocks, but we may never get another chance like this.’
‘Another chance to do what?’ Clavain asked.
Remontoire blinked, surprised, as if this was entirely too obvious to state. ‘To rescue Felka, of course.’
Chapter 29
REMONTOIRE’S CALCULATION HAD been unerringly accurate; so much so that Clavain suspected he had already costed the energy expenditure of the shuttle flight before the rescue operation had been more than a glint in Clavain’s eye.