quantum computer — led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran. The trick — the really difficult part — was to prevent the computer from running even faster as it chilled, spiralling into a runaway process. The smaller the engine, the more susceptible it was to that kind of instability.
Perhaps that was what had happened to Skade’s ship. In space, the engines had worked to suck heat away from the corvette’s hull, making the ship vanish into the near-zero background of cosmic radiation. But the ship had sustained damage, perhaps severing the delicate web of control systems monitoring the cryo-arithmetic engines. By the time it hit Ararat’s ocean it had become a howling mouth of interstellar cold. The water had begun to freeze around it, the odd patterns and structures betraying the obscene violation of physical law taking place.
Could anyone still be alive inside it?
Vasko noticed something then. It was possible that he was the first. It was a keening sound at the very limit of his hearing, a sensation so close to ultrasound that he barely registered it as noise at all. It was more like a kind of data arriving by a sensory channel he had never known he possessed.
It was like singing. It was like a million fingers circling the wet rims of a million wine glasses.
He could barely hear it, and yet it threatened to split his skull open.
‘Sir,’ Vasko said, ‘I can hear something. The iceberg, sir, or whatever it is — it’s making a noise.’
‘It’s the sun,’ Clavain said, after a moment. ‘It must be warming the ice, stressing it in different ways, making it creak and shiver.’
‘Can you hear it, sir?’
Clavain looked at him with an odd expression on his face. ‘No, son, I can’t. These days, there are a lot of things I can’t hear. But I’m taking your word for it.’
‘Closer,’ Scorpio said.
Through dark, dank corridors of the great drowned ship, Antoinette Bax walked alone. She held a torch in one hand and the old silver helmet in the other, her fingers tucked through the neck ring. Lolloping ahead of her with the eagerness of a hunting dog, the wandering golden circle of torchlight defined the unsettling sculptural formations that lined the walls: here an archway that appeared to be made from spinal vertebrae, there a mass of curled and knotted intestinal tubes. The crawling shadows made the tubes writhe and contort like copulating snakes.
A steady damp breeze blew up from the lower decks, and from some unguessable distance Antoinette heard the clanging report of a hesitant, struggling mechanism — a bilge pump, maybe, or perhaps the ship itself remaking a part of its own fabric. Sounds propagated unpredictably through the ship, and the noise could just as easily have originated mere corridors away as from some location kilometres up or down the spire.
Antoinette hitched high the collar of her coat. She would have preferred company — any company — but she knew that this was the way it had to be. On each of the very few occasions in the past when she had elicited anything from the Captain that might be construed as a meaningful response, it had always been when she was alone. She took this as evidence that the Captain was prepared to reveal himself to her, and that there was an element of trust — however small — in their relationship. True or not, Antoinette had always believed that she stood a better chance of communicating with the Captain than her peers did. It was all about history. She had owned a ship herself once, and although that ship had been much smaller than the
‘Talk to me, John,’ she had said on previous occasions. ‘Talk to me as someone you can trust, as someone who appreciates a little of what you are.’
There had never been an unequivocal answer, but if she looked at all the instances when she had drawn some response, however devoid of content, it appeared to her that the Captain was more likely to do
‘Captain,’ she said now, holding aloft the helmet, ‘you left a calling card, didn’t you? I’ve come to give it back. Now you have to keep your side of the bargain.’
There was no response.
‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she said. ‘I really don’t like it down here. Matter of fact, it scares the hell out of me. I like my ships small and cosy, with decor I chose myself.’ She cast the torch beam around, picking out an overhanging globular mass filling half the corridor. She stooped under the shock-frozen black bubbles, brushing her fingers against their surprising warmth and softness. ‘No, this isn’t me at all. But I guess this is your empire, not mine. All I’m saying is that I hope you realise what it takes to bring me down here. And I hope you’re going to make it worthwhile for me.’
Nothing happened. But she had never expected success at first bite.
‘John,’ she said, deciding to risk familiarity, ‘we think something may be happening in the wider system. My guess is you may have some suspicions about this as well. I’ll tell you what we think, anyway — then you can decide for yourself.’
The character of the breeze changed. It was warmer now, with an irregularity about it that made her think of ragged breathing.
Antoinette said, ‘Khouri came back. She dropped out of the sky a couple of days back. You remember Khouri, don’t you? She spent a lot of time aboard, so I’d be surprised if you didn’t. Well, Khouri says there’s a battle going on around Ararat, something that makes the Demarchist-Conjoiner war look like a snowball fight. If she isn’t lying, we’ve got two squabbling human factions up there, plus a really frightening number of wolf machines. You remember the wolves, don’t you, Captain? You saw Ilia throw the cache weapons at them, and you saw what good it did.’
There it was again. The breeze had become a faint suction.
In Antoinette’s estimation that already made it a class-one apparition. ‘You’re here with me, aren’t you?’
Another shift in the wind. The breeze returned, sharpened to a howl. The howl ripped her hair loose, whipping it in her eyes.
She heard a word whispered in the wind:
‘Yes, Captain. Ilia. You remember her well, don’t you? You remember the Triumvir. I do, too. I didn’t know her for long, but it was long enough to see that she isn’t the kind of woman you’d forget in a hurry.’
The wind had died down. All that remained was a nagging suction.
A small, sane voice warned Antoinette to stop now. She had achieved a clear result: a class one by anyone’s definition, and almost certainly (if she had not imagined the voice) a class two. That was enough for one day, wasn’t it? The Captain was nothing if not temperamental. According to the records she had left behind, Ilia Volyova had pushed him into a catatonic sulk many times by trying to coax just one more response from him. Often it had taken the Captain weeks to emerge from one of those withdrawals.
But the Triumvir had had months or years to build up her working relationship with the Captain. Antoinette did not think she had anywhere near as much time.
‘Captain,’ she said, ‘I’ll lay the cards on the table. The seniors are worried. Scorpio’s so worried he’s pulled Clavain back from his island. They’re taking Khouri seriously. They’ve already gone to see if they can get her baby back for her. If she’s right, there’s a Conjoiner ship already in our ocean, and it was damaged by the wolves. They’re here, Captain. It’s crunch time. Either we sit here and let events happen around us, or we think about the next move. I’m sure you know what I mean by that.’
Abruptly, as if a door or valve had slammed shut somewhere, the suction stopped. No breeze, no noise, only Antoinette standing alone in the corridor with the small puddle of light from her torch.
‘Holy shit,’ Antoinette said.
But then, ahead of her, a cleft of light appeared. There was a squeal of metal and part of the corridor wall hinged aside. A new sort of breeze hit her face, a new concoction of biomechanical smells.
Through the cleft she saw a new corridor, curving sharply down towards underlying decks. Golden-green light, firefly pale, oozed up from the depths.
‘I guess I was right about the calling card,’ she said.
