The beam had chewed a hundred-metre-long furrow in the hull. The Captain was haemorrhaging air and fluids in the wake of the cutting beam.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, for God’s sake, stop!’
‘Let me finish this, Ilia. Please forgive me.’
‘No. I won’t allow it.’
She did not give herself time to think about what had to be done. If she had, she doubted that she would have had the courage to act. She had never considered herself a brave person, and most certainly not someone given to self-sacrifice.
Ilia Volyova steered her shuttle towards the beam, placing herself between the weapon and the fatal gash it was knifing into Nostalgia for Infinity.
‘No!’ she heard the Captain call.
But it was too late. He could not shut down the weapon in less than a second, nor steer it fast enough to bring her out of the line of fire. The shuttle collided glancingly with the beam — her aim had not been dead on — and the edge of the beam obliterated the entire right side of the shuttle. Armour, insulation, interior reinforcement, pressure membrane — everything wafted away in an instant of ruthless annihilation. Volyova had a moment to realise that she had missed the precise centre of the beam, and another instant to realise that it did not really matter.
She was going to die anyway.
Her vision fogged. There was a shocking, sudden cold in her windpipe, as if someone had poured liquid helium down her throat. She attempted to take a breath and the cold rammed into her lungs. There was an awful feeling of granite solidity in her chest. Her interior organs were shock freezing.
She opened her mouth, attempting to speak, to make one final utterance. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
Chapter 31
‘WHY, WOLF?’ FELKA asked.
They were meeting alone on the same iron-grey, silver-skied expanse of rockpools where she had, at Skade’s insistence, already encountered the Wolf. Now she was dreaming lucidly; she was back on Clavain’s ship and Skade was dead, and yet the Wolf seemed no less real than it had before. The Wolf’s shape lingered just beyond clarity, like a column of smoke that occasionally fell into a mocking approximation of human form.
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you hate life so much?’
‘I don’t. We don’t. We only do what we must.’
Felka kneeled on the rock, surrounded by animal parts. She understood that the presence of the wolves explained one of the great cosmic mysteries, a paradox that had haunted human minds since the dawn of spaceflight. The galaxy teemed with stars, and around many of those stars were worlds. It was true that not all of those worlds were the right distance from their suns to kindle life, and not all had the right fractions of metals to allow complex carbon chemistry. Sometimes the stars were not stable enough for life to gain a toehold. But none of that mattered, since there were hundreds of billions of stars. Only a tiny fraction had to be habitable for there to be a shocking abundance of life in the galaxy.
But there was no evidence that intelligent life had ever spread from star to star, despite the fact that it was relatively easy to do. Looking out into the night sky, human philosophers had concluded that intelligent life must be vanishingly rare; that perhaps the human species was the only sentient culture in the galaxy.
They were wrong, but they did not discover this until the dawn of interstellar society. Then, expeditions started finding evidence of fallen cultures, ruined worlds, extinct species. There were an uncomfortably large number of them.
It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out.
The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.
That was the answer. But it did not explain why they did it.
‘But why?’ she asked the Wolf. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to act the way you do. If you hate life so much, why not end it once and for all?’
‘For good?’ The Wolf appeared amused, curious about her speculations.
‘You could poison every world in the galaxy or smash every world apart. It’s as if you don’t have the courage to finally finish life for good.’
There was a slow, avalanche-like sigh of pebbles. ‘It isn’t about ending intelligent life,’ the Wolf said.
‘No?’
‘It is about the exact opposite, Felka. It is about life’s preservation. We are life’s keepers, steering life through its greatest crisis.’
‘But you murder. You kill entire cultures.’
The Wolf shifted in and out of vision. Its voice, when it answered, was tauntingly similar to Galiana’s. ‘Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, Felka.’
No one saw much of Clavain after Galiana’s death. There was an unspoken understanding amongst his crew, one that percolated right down through to the lowliest ranks of Scorpio’s army, that he was not to be disturbed by anything except the gravest of problems: matters of extreme shipwide urgency, nothing less. It remained unclear whether this edict had come from Clavain himself, or was simply something that had been assumed by his immediate deputies. Very probably it was a combination of the two. He became a shadowy figure, occasionally seen but seldom heard, a ghost stalking Zodiacal Light’s corridors in the hours when the rest of the ship was asleep. Occasionally, when the ship was under high gravity, they heard the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of his exoskeleton on the deck plates as he traversed a corridor above them. But Clavain himself was an elusive figure.
It was said that he spent long hours in the observation cupola, staring into the blackness behind them, transfixed by the starless wake. Those who saw him remarked that he looked much older than at the start of the voyage, as if in some way he remained anchored to the faster flow of world-time, rather than the dilated time that passed aboard the ship. It was said that he looked like a man who had given up on the living, and was now only going through the burdensome motions of completing some final duty.
It was recognised, without the details necessarily being understood, that Clavain had been forced into making a dreadful personal decision. Some of the crewmembers grasped that Galiana had already ‘died’ long before, and that what had happened now was only the drawing of a line beneath that event. But it was, as others appreciated, much worse than that. Galiana’s earlier death had only ever been provisional. The Conjoiners had kept her frozen, thinking that she could at some point be cleansed of the Wolf. The likelihood of that happening must have been small, but at the back of Clavain’s mind there must have remained the ghost of a hope that the Galiana he had loved since that ancient meeting on Mars could be brought back to him, healed and renewed. But now he had personally removed that possibility for ever. It was said that a large factor in his decision had been Felka’s persuasion, but it was still Clavain who had made the final choice; it was he who carried the blood of that merciful execution on his hands.
Clavain’s withdrawal was less serious to ship affairs than it might have appeared; he had already abrogated much of the responsibility to others, so that the battle preparations continued smoothly and efficiently without his day-to-day intervention. Mechanical production lines were now running at full capacity, spewing out weapons and armour. Zodiacal Light’s hull bristled with antiship armaments. As training regimes honed the battalions of Scorpio’s army into savagely efficient units, they began to realise how much their previous successes had been down to good fortune, but that would certainly not be the case in the future. They might fail, but it would not be because of any lack of tactical preparation or discipline.
With Skade’s ship destroyed, they had less need to worry about an attack while they were en route. Deep-look scans confirmed that there were other Conjoiner ships behind them, but they coul
d only match Zodiacal Light’s acceleration, not exceed it. It appeared that no one was willing to attempt another state-four transition after what had happened to Nightshade.
Halfway to Resurgam, the ship had switched into deceleration mode, thrusting in the direction of flight, which immediately made it a harder target for the pursuing craft since they no longer had a relativistically boosted exhaust beam to lock on to. The risk of attack had dropped even further, leaving the crew free to concentrate on the mission’s primary objective. Data from the approaching system became steadily more comprehensive, too, focusing minds on the specifics of the recovery operation.
It was clear that something very odd was happening around Delta Pavonis. Scans of the planetary system showed the inexplicable omission of three moderately large terrestrial bodies, as if they had simply been deleted from existence. More worrying still was what had replaced the system’s major gas giant: only a remnant of the giant’s metallic core now remained, enveloped in a skein of liberated matter many dozens of times wider than the original planet. There were hints of an immense mechanism that had been used to spin the planet apart: arcs and cusps and coils that were in the process of being dismantled and retransformed into new machinery. And at the heart of the cloud was something even larger than those subsidiary components: a two-thousand-kilometre-wide engine that could not possibly be of human origin.
Remontoire had helped Clavain build sensors to pick up the neutrino signatures of the hell-class weapons. As they had neared the system they had established that thirty-three of the weapons were in essentially the same place, while six more were dormant, waiting in a wide orbit around the neutron star Hades. One weapon was unaccounted for, but Clavain had known about that before he left the Mother Nest. More detailed scans, which became possible only when they had slowed to within a quarter of a light-year of their destination, showed that the thirty-three weapons were almost certainly aboard a ship of the same basic type as Zodiacal Light, probably stuffed into a major storage bay. The ship — it had to be the Triumvir’s vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity — hovered in interplanetary space, orbiting Delta Pavonis at the Lagrange point between the star and Resurgam.
Now, finally, they had some measure of their adversary. But what of Resurgam itself? There was no radio or other EM-band traffic coming from the system’s sole inhabited planet, but the colony had clearly not failed. Analysis of the atmosphere’s constituent gases revealed ongoing terraforming activity, with sizeable expanses of water now visible on the surface. The icecaps had withered back towards the poles. The air was warmer and wetter than it had been in nearly a million years. The infra-red signatures of surface flora matched the patterns expected from terran genestock, modified for cold, dry, low-oxygen survivability. Hot thermal blotches showed the sites of large brute-force atmospheric reprocessors. Refined metals indicated intense surface industrialisation. At extreme magnification, there were even the suggestions of roads or pipelines, and the occasional moving echo of a fat transatmospheric cargo vehicle, like a dirigible. The planet was certainly inhabited, even now. But whoever was down there was not much interested in communicating with the outside world.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Scorpio told Clavain. ‘You came here to take the weapons, that’s all. There’s no need to make this any more complicated than it has to be.’
Clavain had been alone until the pig had visited him. ‘Just deal with the starship, is that it?’
‘We can start negotiations immediately if we transmit a beta-level proxy. They can have the weapons ready for us when we arrive. Nice quick turnaround and we’re away. The other ships won’t even have reached the system.’
‘Nothing’s ever that easy, Scorp.’ Clavain spoke with morose resignation, his eyes focused on the starfield beyond the window.
‘You don’t think negotiation will work? Fine.We’ll skip it and just come in with all guns blazing.’
‘In which case we’d better hope they don’t know how to use the hell-class weapons. Because if it comes to a straight fight, we won’t have a snowball’s chance.’
‘I thought that Volyova turning the weapons against us wasn’t going to be a problem.’
Clavain turned from the window. ‘Remontoire can’t promise me that our pacification codes will work. And if we test them too soon we give Volyova time to find a workaround. If such a thing exists, I’m pretty sure she’ll find it.’
‘Then we keep trying negotiation,’ Scorpio said. ‘Send the proxy, Clavain. It will buy us time and cost us nothing.’
The man did not answer him directly. ‘Do you think they understand what’s happening to their system, Scorpio?’
Scorpio blinked. Sometimes he had difficulty following the swerves and evasions of Clavain’s moods. The man was far more ambivalent and complex than any human he had known since his time aboard the yacht.
‘Understand?’
‘That the machines are already there, already busy. If they look into the sky, surely they can’t miss what is happening. Surely they must realise that it isn’t good news.’
‘What else can they do, Clavain? You’ve read the intelligence summaries. They probably don’t have a single shuttle down there. What can they do but pretend it isn’t happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ Clavain said.
‘Let us transmit the proxy,’ Scorpio said. ‘Just to the ship, tight-beam only.’
Clavain said nothing for at least a minute. He had turned his attention back to the window, staring out into space. Scorpio wondered what he hoped to see out there. Did he imagine that he could unmake that glint of light, the one that had signalled Galiana’s end, if he tried hard enough? He had not known Clavain as long as some of the others, but he viewed Clavain as a rational man. But he supposed grief, the kind of howling, remorse-filled grief Clavain was experiencing, could smash rationality to shards. The impact of so familiar an emotion as sadness on the flow of history had never been properly accounted for, Scorpio thought. Grief and remorse, loss and pain, sadness and sorrow were at least as powerful shapers of events as anger, greed and retribution.
‘Clavain… ?’ he prompted.
‘I never thought there’d be choices this hard,’ the man said. ‘But H was right. The hard choices are the only ones that matter. I thought defecting was the hardest thing I had ever done. I thought I would never see Felka again. But I didn’t realise how wrong I was, how trivial that decision was. It was nothing compared with what I had to do later. I killed Galiana, Scorpio. And the worst thing is that I did it willingly.’
‘But you got Felka back again. There are always consolations.’
‘Yes,’ Clavain said, sounding like a man grasping for the last crumb of comfort. ‘I got Felka back. Or at least I got someone back. But she isn’t the way I left her. She carries the Wolf herself now, just a shadow of it, it’s true, but when I speak to her I can’t be sure whether it’s Felka answering or the Wolf. No matter what happens now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take anything she says at face value.‘
‘You cared for her enough to risk your life rescuing her. That was a difficult choice as well. But it doesn’t make you unique.’ Scorpio scratched at the upraised snout of his nose. ‘We’ve all made difficult choices around here. Look at Antoinette. I know her story, Clavain. Set out to do a good deed — burying her father the way he wanted — and she ends up entangled in a battle for the entire future of the species. Pigs, humans… everything. I bet she didn’t have that in mind when she set out to salve her conscience. But we can’t guess where things will take us, or the harder questions that will follow on from one choice. You thought defecting would be an act in and of itself, but it was just the start of something much larger.’
Clavain sighed. Perhaps it was imagination, but Scorpio thought that he detected the slightest lightening of the man’s mood. His voice was softer when he spoke. ‘What about you, Scorpio? Did you have choices to make as well?’
‘Yeah. Whether I threw my weight in with you human
sons of bitches.’
‘And the consequences?’
‘Some of you are still sons of bitches that deserve to die in the most painful and slow way I can envisage. But not all of you.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘Take it while you can. I might change my mind tomorrow.’
Clavain sighed again, scratched his beard and then said, ‘All right. Do it. Transmit a beta-level proxy.’
‘We’ll need a statement to accompany it,’ Scorpio said. ‘A laying-down of terms, if you like.’
‘Whatever it takes, Scorp. Whatever the hell it takes.’
In their long, crushing reign, the Inhibitors had learned of fifteen distinct ways to murder a dwarf star.
Doubtless, the overseer thought to itself, there were other methods, more or less efficient, which might turn out to have been invented or used at various epochs in galactic history. The galaxy was very large, very old, and the Inhibitors’ knowledge of it was far from comprehensive. But it was a fact that no new technique for starcide had been added to their repository for four hundred and forty million years. The galaxy had finished two rotations since that last methodological update. Even by the Inhibitors’ glacial reckoning, it was quite a worryingly long time during which not to learn any new tricks.
Singing a star apart was the most recent method to be entered into the Inhibitor library of xenocide techniques, and though it had achieved that status four hundred and forty million years earlier, the overseer could not help view it with a trace of bemused curiosity. It was the way an aged butcher might view some newfangled apparatus designed to improve the productivity of an abbatoir. The current cleansing operation would provide a useful testbed for the technique, a chance to fully evaluate it. If the overseer was not satisfied, it would leave a record in the archive recommending that future cleansing operations employ one of the fourteen older methods of starcide. But for now it would place its faith in the efficacy of the singer.