“To meet her on her own terms, you mean?”
“If I was it, and I thought she wanted to kill me, that’s what I’d do.”
“That would also make it more difficult for us to kill it, wouldn’t it?”
“There’d be that as well,” Dreyfus admitted.
They stood in silence, waiting for something to come out of the sky and rescue them. Occasionally a strobing flash pushed through the darkness: evidence of lightning or—perhaps—something taking orbit around Yellowstone, something that had nothing to do with weather.
After a long while, Dreyfus started speaking again.
“I had a simple choice, Sparv. The nukes were available and ready to go. They’d have destroyed SIAM and taken out the Clockmaker. We’d already got Jane out, so we knew what it was capable of. We knew the things it could do to people even if it didn’t kill them. And we knew there were still survivors inside that structure, people it hadn’t got to yet. Including Valery.”
“You don’t have to talk about this now, Boss. It can wait.”
“It’s waited eleven years,” Dreyfus said.
“I think that’s long enough, don’t you?”
“I’m just saying… I pushed you earlier. But I had no idea what I was doing.”
“There was something else, of course. We still needed to know what we’d been dealing with. If we nuked SIAM without gaining any further intelligence on the Clockmaker, we’d never know what to do to stop something like it happening again. That was vital, Sparv. As a prefect, I couldn’t ignore my responsibility to the future security of the Glitter Band.”
“So what happened?”
“From the technical data we’d already recovered, and Jane’s testimony, we knew that the Clockmaker was susceptible to intense magnetic fields. Nothing else—no physical barrier or conventional weapon
– seemed able to stop or slow it. I realised that if we could pin the Clockmaker down, if we could freeze it, we could get the surviving citizens out alive. That’s when I knew we had to power up the Atalanta.”
“The Atalanta,” Sparver echoed.
“It was a ship designed to undercut the Conjoiners in the starship-building business. Thing is, although it worked, it never worked well enough to make it economical. So they mothballed it, left it in orbit around Yellowstone while they worked out what to do with it. It’d been there for decades but was still perfectly intact, exactly the way it had been when it was last powered down.”
“What was so special about this ship?”
“It was a ramscoop,” Dreyfus said.
“A starship built around a single massive engine designed to suck in interstellar hydrogen and use it for reaction mass. Because it didn’t have to carry its own fuel around, it could go almost as fast as it liked, right up to the edge of light-speed. That was the idea, anyway. But the drive system was cumbersome, and the intake field generated so much friction that the ship was never as fast as its designers had hoped. But that didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want the ship to move. I just wanted its intake. The scoop generator was fifteen kilometres across, Sparv: a swallowing mouth wide enough to encompass SIAM in its entirety.”
“A magnetic field,” Sparver said.
“I sent a Heavy Technical Squad aboard the Atalanta. We attached high-burn tugs to shift its orbit, to bring it close to SIAM. We couldn’t get its reactors back on line fast enough, so we jump-started the
ramscoop using the engines on our corvettes. In an hour the field was building strength. In two we had it positioned around SIAM.” Dreyfus paused, the words suddenly drying up in his mouth.
“We knew there was a risk. The human survivors in SIAM were going to be exposed to that same magnetic field. There was no telling what it would do to their nervous systems, let alone the implants most of them were carrying. The best we could do was to try to focus the field on the area where we’d last pinpointed the Clockmaker, and try to hold the field strength as low as possible elsewhere.”
“It was better than just nuking. At least you gave them a chance.”
“Yes,” Dreyfus said.
“You said they survived. When you told me about it earlier.”
“They did. But the effects of the field had been… worse than we feared. We froze the Clockmaker, recovered its relics, studied it as best we could and then retreated with the survivors. That took the rest of the six hours. Then we nuked. We thought we’d destroyed the Clockmaker, of course. In truth, it’d had packed itself down into one of the relics, waiting to be reopened like a jack-in-the-box.”
“And the survivors?” Sparver asked eventually.
It took Dreyfus an equally long time to answer.
“They were all taken care of. Including Valery.”
“They’re still alive?”
“All of them. In Hospice Idlewild. The Mendicants were asked to look after a consignment of brain-damaged sleepers. They were never told where those people really came from.”
“Valery’s with them, isn’t she?”
Dreyfus’ eyes were beginning to sting.
“I visited her once, Sparv. Just after the crisis, when it had all blown over. I thought I could live with what she’d become. But when I saw her, when I saw how little of my wife was left, I knew I couldn’t. She was tending the gardens, kneeling in soil. She had flowers in her hand. When she looked at me, she smiled. But she didn’t really know who I was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That was when I went back to Jane. I told her I couldn’t live with what I’d done to them. So she authorised the memory block.”
“And Valery?”
“I never went back to see her. Not in eleven years.”
Presently Dreyfus became aware of a rising sound, louder than the wind. He looked up in time to see a large ship come slamming through the clouds, its hull still glowing from a high-speed re-entry. He recognised it immediately as a deep-system cruiser, although he could not identify the ship itself. It circled overhead, landing gear clawing down from its reptile-smooth belly, weapons erupting through the hull as if they were the retractile spines of some poisonous fish. The pilot selected a patch of level ground large enough to accommodate the ninety-metre-long vehicle and descended slowly, using brief coughs of steering thrust to manage the descent.
Dreyfus and Sparver raised their hands in salute and started walking towards the parked ship, Dreyfus’ stiff right leg dragging in the ice. A ramp lowered from the belly. Almost immediately, a suited figure began walking down it, picking its way cautiously down the cleated surface. The figure’s small stature, the
way she walked, told Dreyfus exactly who she was.
“Thalia,” he called out, delighted.
“It is you, isn’t it?” She answered on the suit-to-suit channel.
“Are you okay, sir?”
“I’ll mend, thanks to Sparver. What are you doing here?”
“As soon as Prefect Gaffney got to you, we knew there was no point in concealing this location from Aurora. We would have come sooner, but we’ve been tied up with evacuees.”
“I understand completely. You came quickly enough as it is.” Thalia walked across the rough ground until they were only a few metres from each other.
“I’m sorry about what happened, sir.”
“Sorry about what?”
“I screwed up, sir. The upgrades… I was unprepared.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“But maybe if I hadn’t gone in alone, if I’d had a back-up squad with me… things might have been different.”
“I very much doubt it. Aurora had already considered every possible eventuality. She’d have found a way through no matter what precautions you took. It might have taken longer, but it would still have happened. Don’t cut yourself up about it, Deputy.” Dreyfus extended a hand, inviting her closer. She crossed the remaining ground and let her suit touch his. Dreyfus held one of her arms, Sparver the other.
