Redemption Ark

Alastair Reynolds REDEMPTION ARK

PROLOGUE

The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.

Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.

It was not what she needed.

Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three-dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of information racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per second, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving — that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic — but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active.

Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the Area Postrema, an ancient tangle of neural circuitry that handled conflicts between vision and balance. Her inner ear felt only the steady pressure of her shuttle’s acceleration, but her eyes saw a cyclically changing view as the background wheeled behind the ship. The ancient part of her brain could only reconcile that mismatch by assuming that Skade was hallucinating. It therefore sent a signal to another part of her brain that had evolved to protect the body from ingesting poisons.

Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, dangerous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated computer program. Skade knew, therefore, that by ‘switching off the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times before, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side effects.

There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better.

What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had returned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the Mother Nest as any of the war’s recent campaigns.

She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then.

[Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that something very peculiar has happened to this ship.]

The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.

I know.

[Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?]

It’s Galiana’s.

Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional image of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk.

[Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?]

Yes. There were some small design differences between the three that left together, and in as much as this matches either of the two that haven’t come back yet, it matches hers.

The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did.

[That was our conclusion as well. But something has clearly happened to this ship since it left the Mother Nest, wouldn’t you say?]

A lot of somethings, if you ask me.

[Let’s begin at the front and work backwards. There is evidence of damage — considerable damage: lacerations and gouges, whole portions of the hull that appear to have been removed and discarded, like diseased tissue. Plague, do you think?]

Skade shook her head, remembering her recent trip to Chasm City. I’ve seen the effects of the Melding Plague up close. This doesn’t look like quite the same thing.

[We agree. This is something different. Nonetheless, full plague quarantine precautions should be enforced; we might still be dealing with an infectious agent. Focus your attention towards the rear, will you?]

The voice, which was never quite like any of the other voices she heard from other Conjoiners, took on a needling, tutorial quality, as if it already knew the answers to the questions it posed. [What do you make of the regular structures embedded in the hull, Skade?]

Here and there, situated randomly, were clusters of black cubes of varying size and orientation. They appeared to have been pressed into the hull as if into wet clay, so that their faces were half-concealed by the hulk’s hull material. They radiated curving tails of smaller cubes, whipping out in elegant fractal arcs.

I’d say those are what they were trying to cut out elsewhere. Obviously they weren’t fast enough to get them all.

[We concur. Whatever they are, they should certainly be treated with the utmost caution, although they may very well be inactive now. Perhaps Galiana was able to stop them spreading. Her ship was able to make it this far, even if it returned home on autopilot. You are sure that no one is alive aboard it, Skade?]

No, and I won’t be until we open her up. But it doesn’t look promising. No movement inside, no obvious hotspots. The hull’s too cold for any life-support processes to be operational unless they’re carrying a cryo- arithmetic engine.

Skade hesitated, running a few more simulations in her head as background processes.

[Skade…?]

There could be a small number of survivors, I admit — but the bulk of the crew can’t be anything other than frozen corpses. We might be able to trawl a few memories, but even that’s probably being optimistic.

[We’re really only interested in one corpse, Skade.]

I don’t even know if Galiana’s aboard it. And even if she is… even if we directed all our efforts into bringing her back to the living…we might not succeed.

[We understand. These are difficult times, after all. While it would be glorious to succeed, failure would be worse than never having attempted it. At least in the eyes of the Mother Nest.]

Is that the Night Council’s considered opinion?

[All our opinions are considered, Skade. Visible failure cannot be tolerated. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do our best. If Galiana is aboard, we will do what we can to bring her back to us. But it must be done in absolute secrecy.]

How absolute, precisely?

[Knowledge of the ship’s return will be impossible to conceal from the rest of the Mother Nest.