Alastiar Reynolds

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.
note 1
The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.
I know.
note 2
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.
note 3
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. note 4
A lot of somethings, if you ask me.
note 5
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 .
note 6
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. note 7
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.
note 8
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.
note 9
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.
note 10
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.
note 11
Is that the Night Council’s considered opinion?
note 12
How absolute, precisely?
note 13
Skade caught herself before she laughed aloud. Bending of the truth? It sounds like an outright lie to me. And how are you going to ensure that Clavain sticks to your story ?
note 14
She answered the question with a question of her own. Don’t tell me you’re planning on not telling him either ?
note 15
The voice shifted its tone, perhaps sensing that it still needed to make its point convincingly. note 16
But lying to him about Galiana…
note 17
Skade nodded. That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Then we’d know that she’s still out there, somewhere .
note 18
In the ninety-five years since the onset of the Melding Plague, the Conjoiners had learned a great deal about contamination management. As one of the last human factions to retain an appreciable pre-plague technology, they took quarantine very seriously indeed. In peacetime the safest and easiest option would have been to examine the ship in situ , as it drifted through space on the system’s edge. But there was too much risk of the Demarchists noticing such activity, so the investigations had to be conducted under cover of camouflage. The Mother Nest was already equipped to take contaminated craft, so it was the perfect destination.
But precautions still had to be taken, and that entailed a certain amount of work out in open space. First, servitors removed the engines, lasering through the spars that braced them on either side of the lighthugger’s tapering conic hull. An engine malfunction could have destroyed the Mother Nest, and while such a thing was nearly unthinkable, Skade was determined to take no chances while the nature of what had happened to the ship remained mysterious. While that was going on, she ordered tractor rockets to haul slugs of black unsublimated cometary ice out to the drifter, which servitors then slathered on to the hull in a metre-thick caulk. The servitors completed their work quickly, without ever coming into