Yet something kept her on the edge of sanity: the discovery that two hundred sleepers were missing. There was no sign that they’d been butchered like the others, which left the possibility that they’d been abducted by Captain Run Seven. It was madness — it would not begin to compensate for the loss of the others — but her psychology allowed no other line of thought.
She could find them again.
Her plan was disarmingly simple. It crystallised in her mind with the clarity of a divine vision. It would be done.
She would repair the ship. She would hunt down Seven. She would recover the sleepers from him. And enact whatever retribution she deemed fit.
She found the chamber where the four Conjoiners had slept, well away from the main dormitories, in a part of the ship through which the pirates were not likely to have wandered. She was hoping she could revive them and seek their assistance. There seemed no way they could make things worse for her now.
But hope faded when she saw the scorch marks of weapon blasts around the bulkhead; the door forced.
She stepped inside anyway.
They’d been a sect on Mars, originally; a clique of cyberneticists with a particular fondness for self- experimentation. In 2190, their final experiment had involved distributed processing — allowing their enhanced minds to merge into one massively parallel neural net. The resultant event — a permanent, irrevocable escalation to a new mode of consciousness — was known as the Transenlightenment.
There’d been a war, of course.
Demarchists had long seen both sides. They used neural augmentation themselves, policed it so that they never approached the Conjoiner threshold. They’d brokered the peace, defusing the suspicion surrounding the Conjoiners. Conjoiners had fuelled Demarchist expansion from Europa with their technologies, fused in the white heat of Transenlightenment. Four of them were along as observers because the Hirondelle used their ramscoop drives.
Irravel still didn’t trust them.
And maybe it didn’t matter. The reefersleep units — fluted caskets like streamlined coffins — were riddled with blast holes. Grimacing against the smell, Irravel examined the remains inside. They’d been cut open, but the pirates seemed to have abandoned the job halfway through, not finding the kinds of implants they were expecting. And maybe not even recognising that they were dealing with anything other than normal humans, Irravel thought — especially if the pirates who’d done this hadn’t been amongst Seven’s more experienced crewmembers; just trigger-happy thugs.
She examined the final casket, the one furthest from the door. It was damaged, but not so badly as the others. The display car-touches were still alive, a patina of frost still adhering to the casket’s lid. The Conjoiner inside looked intact: the pirates had never reached him. She read his nameplate: Remontoire.
‘Yeah, he’s a live one,’ said a voice behind Irravel. ‘Now back off real slow.’
Heart racing, Irravel did as she was told. Slowly, she turned around, facing the woman whose voice she recognised.
‘Mirsky?’ she said.
‘Yeah, it’s your lucky day.’ Mirsky was wearing her suit, but without the helmet, making her head appear shrunken in the moat of her neck-ring. She had a gun on Irravel, but she pointed it half-heartedly, as if this was a stage in their relationship she wanted to get over as quickly as possible.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Same as you, Veda. Trying to figure out how much shit we’re in; how difficult it’ll be to get this ship moving again. Guess we had the same idea about the Conjoiners. Seven went berserk when he heard they’d been killed, but I figured it was worth checking how thorough the job had been.’
‘Stop; slow down. Start at the beginning. Why aren’t you with Seven?’
Mirsky pushed past her and consulted the reefersleep indicators. ‘Seven and me had a falling out. Fill in the rest yourself.’ With quick jabs of her free hand she called up different display modes, frowning at each. ‘Shit; this ain’t gonna be easy. If we wake the guy without his three friends, he’s gonna be psychotic; no use to us at all.’
‘What kind of falling out?’
‘Seven reckoned I was holding back too much in the interrogation, not putting you through enough hell.’ She scratched at the silver box on the side of her head. ‘Maybe we can wake him, then fake the cybernetic presence of his friends — what do you think?’
‘Why am I still alive, if Seven broke into the sleeper chambers? Why are you still alive?’
‘Seven’s a sadist. Abandonment’s more his style than a quick and clean execution. As for you, the pig cut a deal with your second-in-command.’
The implication of that sunk in. ‘Markarian gave him the codes?’
‘It wasn’t you, Veda.’
Strange relief flooded Irravel. She could never be absolved of the crime of losing the cargo, but at least her degree of complicity had lessened.
‘But that was only half the deal,’ Mirsky continued. ‘The rest was Seven promising not to kill you if Markarian agreed to join the Hideyoshi, our main ship.’ She told Irravel that there’d been a transmitter rigged to her reefersleep unit, so that Markarian would know she was still alive.
‘Seven must have known he was taking a risk leaving both of us alive.’
‘A pretty small one. The ship’s in pieces and Seven will assume neither of us has the brains to patch it back together.’ Mirsky slipped the gun into a holster. ‘But Seven assumed the Conjoiners were dead. Big mistake. Once we figure out a way to wake Remontoire safely, he can help us fix the ship; make it faster, too.’
‘You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you?’
‘More or less. Something tells me you aren’t absolutely ready to start trusting me, though.’
‘Sorry, Mirsky, but you don’t make the world’s most convincing turncoat.’
Mirsky reached up and gripped the box attached to the side of her head. ‘Know what this is? A loyalty shunt. Makes simian stem cells; pumps them into the internal carotid artery, just above the cavernous sinus. They jump the blood-brain barrier and build a whole bunch of transient structures tied to primate dominance hierarchies; alpha-male shit. That’s how Seven kept us under his command — he was King Monkey. But I’ve turned it off now.’
‘That’s supposed to reassure me?’
‘No, but maybe this will.’
Mirsky tugged at the box, ripping it away from the side of her head in curds of blood.
Irravel felt the Hirondelle turn like a compass needle. The ram-scoops gasped at interstellar gas, sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum. The engines spat twin beams of thrust, pressing Irravel into her seat with two gees of acceleration. Hardly moving now, still in the local frame of the cometary halo, but in only six months she would be nudging light-speed.
Her seat floated on a boom in the middle of the dodecahedral bridge. ‘Map,’ Irravel said, and was suddenly drowning in stars: an immense thirty-light-year-wide projection of human settled space, centred on the First System.
‘There’s the bastard,’ Mirsky said, pointing from her own hovering seat, her voice only slightly strained under the gee-load. ‘Map — give us projection of the Hideyoshi’s vector, and plot our intercept.’
The pirate ship’s icon was still very close to Luyten 726-8; less than a tenth of a light-year out. They had not seen Seven until now. The thrust from his ship was so tightly focused that it had taken until this point for the widening beams of the exhaust to sweep over Hirondelle’s sensors. But now they knew where he was headed. A dashed line indicated the likely course, arrowing right through the map’s heart and out towards the system Lalande 21185. Now came the intercept vector: a near-tangent that sliced Seven’s course beyond Sol.
‘When does it happen?’ Irravel said.
‘Depends on how much attention Seven’s paying to what’s coming up behind him, for a start, and what kind of evasive stunts he can pull.’
‘Most of my simulations predict an intercept between 2325 and 2330,’ Remontoire said.
