thought, she would fall for ever. If that was the case, he had only postponed her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had inflicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess — even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years…
‘Where are you taking us?’ he asked.
Galiana issued some neural command that made the bullet’s skin become transparent.
‘There,’ she said.
Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in until the object was much clearer.
Dark — misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.
‘Phobos,’ Clavain said, wonderingly. ‘We’re going to Phobos.’
‘Yes,’ Galiana said.
‘But the worms—’
‘Don’t exist any more.’ She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. ‘Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed, but that was only what we wanted you to think.’
For a moment he was lost for words. ‘You’ve had people in Phobos all along?’
‘Ever since the ceasefire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.’
Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device that lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something that had never existed before in the whole of human experience.
He was looking at a starship.
‘We’ll be leaving soon,’ Galiana said. ‘They’ll try to stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface of Mars, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.’ She paused. ‘There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.’
‘What about the Demarchists?’
‘They won’t stop us.’ She spoke with total assurance — implying… what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumoured that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.
Clavain thought of something. ‘What about the worms’ altering the orbit?’
‘That was our doing,’ Galiana said. ‘We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny — we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one-tenth of a millimetre per second — but there was no way to hide it.’ Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. ‘We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Think about it. The tube in Mars was a thousand kilometres long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over ten minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.’
Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. ‘How much more abruptly?’
‘Complete deceleration in one-fifth of a second.’ She let that sink home. ‘That’s around five thousand gees.’
‘I can’t survive that.’
‘No, you can’t. Not the way you are right now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be any damage they can’t fix in Phobos.’
‘It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.’
‘You’ll become Conjoined, yes.’ Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. ‘The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.’
‘And you still tell me none of this was planned?’
‘It wasn’t, but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though… you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind… at the back of our mind—’
‘You always hoped it might come to this?’
Galiana smiled.
He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.
Clavain nodded assent, preparing for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.
He was ready to defect.
GLACIAL
Nevil Clavain picked his way across a mosaic of shattered ice. The field stretched away in all directions, gouged by sleek-sided crevasses. They had mapped the largest cracks before landing, but he was still wary of surprises; his breath caught every time his booted foot cracked through a layer of ice. He was aware of how dangerous it would be to wander from the red path his implants were painting across the glacier field.
He only had to remind himself of what had happened to Martin Setterholm.
They had found his body a month ago, shortly after their arrival on the planet. It had been near the main American base; a stroll from the perimeter of the huge, deserted complex of stilted domes and ice-walled caverns. Clavain’s friends had found dozens of dead within the buildings, and most of them had been easily identified against the lists of base personnel that the expedition had pieced together. But Clavain had been troubled by the gaps, and had wondered if any further dead might be found in the surrounding ice fields. He had explored the warrens of the base until he found an airlock that had never been closed, and though snowfalls had long since obliterated any footprints, there was little doubt in which direction a wanderer would have set off.
Long before the base had vanished over the horizon behind him, Clavain had run into the edge of a deep, wide crevasse. And there at the bottom — just visible if he leaned over the edge — was a man’s outstretched arm and hand. Clavain had gone back to the others and had them return with a winch to lower him into the depths, descending thirty or forty metres into a cathedral of stained and sculpted ice. The body had come into view: a figure in an old-fashioned atmospheric survival suit. The man’s legs were bent in a horrible way, like those of a strangely articulated alien. Clavain knew it was a man because the fall had jolted his helmet from its neck-ring; the corpse’s well-preserved face was pressed halfway into a pillow of ice. The helmet had ended up a few metres away.
No one died instantly on Diadem. The air was breathable for short periods, and the man had clearly had time to ponder his predicament. Even in his confused state of mind he must have known that he was going to die.
‘Martin Setterholm,’ Clavain had said aloud, picking up the helmet and reading the nameplate on the crown. He felt sorry for him, but could not deny himself the small satisfaction of accounting for another of the dead. Setterholm had been amongst the missing, and though he had waited the better part of a century for it, he would at least receive a proper funeral now.
