'I've scheduled a meeting. They're very anxious to talk to you.' Minla paused. 'There's something you should know, though. They've seen you make a mistake. They'll still be interested in what you have to say, but don't expect blind acceptance of your every word. They know you're human now.'
'I never said I wasn't.'
'You didn't, no. I'll give you credit for that. But for a little while some of us allowed ourselves to believe it.'
Minla turned and walked away, the tap of her stick echoing into the distance.
As space wars went, it was brief and relatively tame, certainly by comparison with some of the more awesome battles delineated in the Cohort's pictorial history. The timeworn frescos on the swallowships commemorated engagements where entire solar systems were reduced to mere tactical details, hills or ditches in the terrain of a much larger strategic landscape, and where the participants - human and Husker both - were moving at significant fractions of the speed of light and employing relativistic weapons of world-shattering destructive potential. A single skirmish could eat up many centuries of planetary time, whole lifetimes from the point of view of a starship's crew. The war itself was a thing inseparably entwined with recorded history, a monstrous, choking structure with its roots reaching into the loam of deep time, and whose end must be assumed (by all except Merlin, at least) to lie in the unimaginably remote future.
Here, the theatre of conflict was considerably less than half a light-second in diameter, encompassing only the immediate space around Lecythus, with its girdle of half-finished Dormitories and Exodus Arks. The battle lasted barely a dozen hours, between first and last detonation. With the exception of Merlin's own late intervention, no weapons more potent than hydrogen bombs were deployed. Horrific, certainly, but possessed of a certain genteel precision compared to the weapons that had consumed Plenitude.
It began with a surprise strike from the surface, using a wave of commandeered atomic rockets. It seemed that the Regressives had gained control of one of the rocket assembly and launch complexes. The rockets had no warheads, but that didn't matter: kinetic energy, and the explosive force stored in their atomic engines, was still enough to inflict havoc on their targets. The weapons had been aimed with surprising accuracy. The first wave destroyed half of the unfinished Dormitories, inflicting catastrophic damage on many of the others. By the time the second wave was rising, orbital defences had sprung into action, but by then it was too late to intercept more than a handful of the missiles. Many of the atomic rockets were being piloted by suicide crews, steering their charges through Minla's hastily erected countermeasure screens. By the third hour, the Planetary Government was beginning to retaliate against Regressive elements using atmospheric-entry interceptors, but while they could pick away at enemy fortifications on the ground, they couldn't penetrate the anti-missile cordon around the launch complex itself. Rogue warheads chipped away at the edges of aerial land masses, sending mountain-sized boulders crashing to the surface. Even as the battle raged, brutal tidal waves ravaged the already-frail coastal communities. As the hours ticked by, Minla's analysts maintained a grim toll of the total numbers of surface and orbital casualties. In the fifth and sixth hours, more Dormitories fell to the assault. Stray fire accounted for even more losses. A temporary ceasefire in the seventh hour was only caused by the temporary occultation of the launch complex by a medium-sized aerial land mass. When the skies were clear again, the rockets rose up with renewed fury.
'They've hit all but one of the Exodus Arks,' Minla said, when the battle was in its ninth hour. 'We just had time to move the final ship out of range of the atomics. But if they find a way to increase their reach, by eliminating more payload mass . . .' She turned her face from his. 'It'll all have been for nothing, Merlin. They'll have won, and the last sixty years may as well not have happened.'
He felt preternaturally calm, knowing exactly what was coming. 'What do you want me to do?'
'Intervene,' Minla said. 'Use whatever force is merited.'
'I offered once. You said no.'
'You changed your mind once. Now I'm changing mine.'
Merlin went to Tyrant. He ordered the ship to deliver a concentrated charm-torp salvo against the compromised rocket facility, bringing more energy to bear on that one tiny area of land than had been deployed in all the years of the atomic wars. There was no need for him to accompany his ship; like a well-trained dog, Tyrant was perfectly capable of carrying out his orders without direct supervision.
They watched the spectacle from orbit. When the electric-white fire erupted on the horizon of Lecythus, brightening that entire limb of the planet in the manner of a stuttering cold sunrise, Merlin felt Minla's hand tighten around his own. For all her frailty, for all that the years had taken from her, astonishing steel remained in that grip.
'Thank you,' she said. 'You may just have saved us all.'
It had been ten years.
Lecythus and its sun now lay many light-weeks to stern. The one remaining Exodus Ark had reached five per cent of the speed of light. In sixty years - faster, if the engine could be improved - it would streak into another system, one that might offer the possibility of landfall. It flew alongside the gossamer line of the Waynet, using the tube as cover from Husker long-range sensors. The Exodus Ark carried only twelve hundred exiles, few of whom would live long enough to see another world.
The hospital was near the core of the ship, safely distant from the sleeting energies of interstellar radiation or the exotic emissions of the Waynet. Many of its patients were veterans of the Regressive War, victims of the viciously ingenious injuries wrought by the close conjunction of vacuum and heat, radiation and kinetic energy. Most of them would be dead by the time the fusion engine was silenced for cruise phase. For now they were being afforded the care appropriate to war heroes, even those who screamed bloodcurdling pleas for the painkilling mercy of euthanasia.
In a soundproofed private annexe of that same complex, Minla also lay in the care of machines. This time the assassins had come closer than ever before, and they had very nearly achieved their objective. Yet she'd survived, and the prognosis for a complete recovery - so Merlin was informed - was deemed higher than seventy-five per cent. More than could be said of Minla's aides, injured in the same attack, but they were at least receiving the best possible care in Tyrant's frostwatch cabinets. The exercise was, Merlin knew, akin to knitting together human-shaped sculptures from a bloody stew of meat and splintered bone, and then hoping that those sculptures would retain some semblance of mind. Minla would have presented no challenge at all, but the Planetary Director had declined the offer of frostwatch care herself, preferring to give up her place to one of her underlings. Knowing that, Merlin allowed himself a momentary flicker of empathy.
He walked into the room, coughing to announce himself. 'Hello, Minla.'
She lay on her back, her head against the pillow, though she was not asleep. Slowly she turned to face Merlin as he approached. She looked very old, very tired, but she still found the energy to form a smile.
'It's so good of you to come. I was hoping, but . . . I didn't dare ask. I know how busy you've been with the engine upgrade study.'
'I could hardly not pay you a visit. Even though I had a devil of a job persuading your staff to let me through.'
'They're too protective of me. I know my own strength, Merlin. I'll get through this.'
'I believe you will.'
Minla's gaze settled on his hand. 'Are those for me?'
He had a bouquet of alien flowers. They were of a peculiar dark hue, a shade that ought to have appeared black in the room's subdued gold lighting yet which was clearly and unmistakably purple, revealed by its own soft inner illumination. They had the look of a detail that had been hand-tinted in a black and white photograph, so that it appeared to float above the rest of the image.
'Of course,' Merlin said. 'I always bring flowers, don't I?'
'You always used to. Then you stopped.'
'P
erhaps it's time to start again.'
He set them by her bedside, in the water-filled vase that was already waiting. They were not the only flowers in the room, but the purple ones seemed to suck the very colour from the others.
'They're beautiful,' Minla said. 'It's like I've never seen anything precisely that colour before. It's as if there's a whole circuit in my brain that's never been activated until now.'
'I chose them especially. They're famous for their beauty.' Minla lifted her head from the pillow, her eyes brightening with curiosity. 'Now you'll have to tell me where they're from.'
'It's a long story.'
'That never stopped you before.'
'A world called Lacertine. It's ten thousand light-years from here; many days of shiptime, even in the Waynet. I don't even know if it still exists.'
'Tell me about Lacertine,' she said, pronouncing the name of the world with her usual scrupulousness.
'It's a very beautiful planet, orbiting a hot blue star. They say the planet must have been moved into its present orbit by the Waymakers, from another system entirely. The seas and skies are a shimmering electric blue, the forests a dazzle of purple and violet and pink; colours that you've only ever seen when you close your eyes against the sun and see patterns behind your eyelids. White citadels rise above the treeline, towers linked by a filigree of delicate bridges.'
'Then there are people on Lacertine?'
Merlin thought of the occupants, and nodded. 'Adapted, of course. Everything that grows on Lacertine was bioengineered to tolerate the scalding light from the sun. They say if something can grow there, it can grow almost anywhere.'
'Have you been there?'
He shook his head ruefully. 'Never been within a thousand light-years of the place.'
'I'll never see it. Nor any of the other places you've told me about.'
'There are places I'll never see. Even with the Waynet, I'm still just one human man, with one human life. Even the Waymakers didn't live long enough to glimpse more than a fraction of their empire.'
'It must make you very sad.'
'I take each day as it comes. I'd rather take good memories from one world than fret about the thousand I'll never see.'
'You're a wise man,' Minla said. 'We were lucky to get you.'
Merlin smiled. He was silent for many moments, letting Minla enjoy the last calmness of mind she would ever know. 'There's something I need to tell you,' he said eventually.
She must have heard something in his tone of voice. 'What, Merlin?'
'There's a good chance you're all going to die.'
Her tone became sharp. 'We don't need you to remind us of the risks.' 'I'm talking about something that's going to happen sooner rather than later. The ruse of shadowing the Waynet didn't work. It was the best thing to do, but there was always a chance . . .' Merlin spread his hands in exaggerated apology, as if there had ever been something he could have done about it. 'Tyrant's detected a Husker attack swarm, six elements lying a light-month ahead of you. You don't have time to steer or slow down. They'd shadow every move you made, even if you tried to shake them off.'
'You promised us--'
'I promised you nothing. I just gave you the best advice I could. If you hadn't shadowed the Waynet, they'd have found you even sooner.'
'We aren't using the ramscoop design. You said we'd be safe if we stuck to fusion motors. The electromagnetic signature--'
'I said you'd be safer. There were never any cast-iron guarantees.'
'You lied to us.' Minla turned suddenly spiteful. 'I never trusted you.'
'I did all in my power to save you.'
'Then why are you standing there looking so calm, when you know we're going to die?' But before Merlin had time to answer, Minla had seen the answer for herself. 'Because you can leave,' she said, nodding at her own percipience. 'You have your ship, and a syrinx. You can slip into the Waynet and outrun the enemy.'
'I'm leaving,' Merlin said. 'But I'm not running.'
'Aren't they one and the same?'
'Not this time. I'm going back to Plenitude, I mean Lecythus, to do what I can for the people we left behind. The people you condemned to death.'
'Me, Merlin?'
'I examined the records of the Regressive War: not just the official documents, but Tyrant's own data logs. And I saw what I should have seen at the time, but didn't. It was a ruse. It was too damned easy, the way they took control of that rocket factory. You let them, Minla.'
'I did nothing of the kind.'
'You knew the whole evacuation project was never going to be ready on time. The Space Dormitories were behind schedule, there were problems with the Exodus Arks--'
'Because you told us falsehoods about the helium in the moon's soil.'
Merlin raised a warning hand. 'We'll get to that. The point is, your plans were in tatters. But you could still have completed more Dormitories and ships, if you'd been willing to leave the system a little later. You could still have saved more people than you did, albeit at a slightly increased risk to your own survival. But that wasn't acceptable. You wanted to leave there and then. So you engineered the whole Regressive attack, set it up as a pretext for an early departure.'
'The Regressives were real!' Minla hissed.
'But you gave them the keys to that rocket silo, and the know-how to target and guide those missiles. Funny how their attack just missed the one station that you were occupying, you and all your political cronies, and that you managed to move the one Exodus Ark to safety just in time. Damned convenient, Minla.'
'I'll have you shot for this, Merlin.'
'Good luck. Try laying a hand on me, and see how far it gets you. My ship's listening in on this conversation. It can put proctors into this room in a matter of seconds.'
'And the moon, Merlin? Do you have an excuse for the error that cost us so dearly?'
'I don't know. Possibly. That's why I'm going back to Lecythus. There are still people on the surface - Regressives, allies, I don't care. And people you abandoned in orbit, as well.'
'They'll all die. You said it yourself.'
He raised a finger. 'If they don't leave. But maybe there's a way. Again, I should have seen it sooner. But that's me all the way. I take a long time to put the pieces together, but I get there in the end. Just like Dowitcher, the man who gave your father the whetstone.'
'It was just a stone.'
'So you said. In fact, it was a vital clue to the nature of your world. It took spring tides and neap tides to lay down those patterns. But you said it yourself: Lecythus doesn't have spring tides and neap tides. Not any more, at least.'
'I'm sure this means something to you.'
'Something happened to your moon, Minla. When that whetstone formed, your moon was raising tides on Lecythus. When the moon and Calliope were tugging on your seas in the same direction, you got a spring tide. When they were balancing each other, you got a neap tide. Hence the patterning on the whetstone. But now the tides are the same from day to day. Calliope's still there, so that only leaves the moon. It isn't exerting the same gravitational pull it used to. Like you told me, the surface gravity is much lower than you'd expect. Oh, it weighs something - but nowhere near as much as it should, based on its size and appearance. If you could skip forward a few hundred million years and examine a piece of whetstone laid down now, you'd probably find very faint variations in sediment thickness. But whatever the effect is now, it must be insignificant compared to the time when your whetstone was formed. Yet the moon's still there, in what appears to be the same orbit. So what's happened?'
'You tell me, Merlin.'
'I don't think it's a moon any more. I think the original moon got ripped to pieces to make your armoured sky. I don't know how much of the original mass was used for that, but I'm guessing it was quite a significant fraction. The question is, what happened to the remains?'
'I'm sure you have a theory.'
'I think they made a fake moon out of the leftovers. It sits there in
your sky, it orbits Lecythus, but it doesn't pull on your seas the way the old one used to. It has gravity, but it's not enough to affect the oceans to the same degree. And you're right: it's much less dense than I expected. I really should have paid more attention. Maybe if I did I could have spared Lecythus all this bloodshed.'
'And now you understand everything?'
'I understand that the moon's new. It's not been sitting there long enough to soak up billions of years of particles from the solar wind. That's why you didn't find the helium you were expecting.'
'So what is it?'
'That's what I'm keen to find out. The thing is, I know what Dowitcher was thinking now. He knew that wasn't a real moon. Which begs the question: what's inside it? And could it make a difference to the survivors you left behind?'
'Hiding inside a shell won't help them,' Minla said. 'You already told us we'd achieve nothing by digging tunnels into Lecythus.'