Redemption Ark

hole in Nightshade.’

‘I’m grateful for your help, Scorpio. And I understand your feelings towards Skade after what she did. But we need you here, to supervise the weapons programme.’

‘And we don’t need you?’

‘This is about me and Felka,’ Clavain had said.

Scorpio had put a hand on his arm. ‘So take help when it’s offered. I’m not in the habit of co-operating with people, Clavain, so make the most of this rare display of magnanimity and shut the fuck up.’

Clavain had shrugged. He had not felt optimistic about the mission, but Scorpio’s enthusiasm for a fight was oddly infectious.

He had turned to Remontoire. ‘Looks as if he’s along for the ride, Rem. Certain you want to be on the team now?’

Remontoire had looked at the pig, then back at Clavain. ‘We’ll manage,’ he had said.

Now that the mission had begun the two of them were silent, letting Clavain concentrate on the business of flying. He gunned the shuttle away from Zodiacal Light, homing in on the drifting Nightshade, trying not to think of how fast they were actually moving. The two major ships were falling through space at only two per cent below the speed of light, but there was still no strong visual cue that they were moving so rapidly. The stars had been shifted in both position and colour by relativistic effects, but they still appeared perfectly fixed and stationary, even at this high tau factor. Had their trajectory taken them close to a luminous body like a star, they might have seen it swing by in the night, squashed away from sphericity by Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. But even then it would not have slammed past unless they were nearly skimming its atmosphere. The exhaust flare of another ship, heading back to Yellowstone, would have been visible, but they had the corridor to themselves. And though the hulls of both ships glowed in the near infra-red, heated by the slow, constant abrasion of interstellar hydrogen and microscopic dust grains, this was nothing Clavain’s mind could process into any visceral sense of speed. He was aware that the same collisions were a problem for the shuttle, too, though its much smaller cross section made them less likely. But cosmic rays, relativistically boosted by their motion, were eating into him every second. That was why there was armour around the flight deck.

The trip to Nightshade passed quickly, perhaps because Clavain was fearful of what he would find upon his arrival. The trio spent most of the journey unconscious, conserving suit power, knowing that there was realistically nothing they could do should Skade launch an attack.

Clavain and his companions came around when they were in visual range of the crippled lighthugger.

She was dark, of course — they were in true interstellar space here — but Clavain could see her because Zodiacal Light was shining one of its optical lasers on to her hull. He could not make out all the details he wanted to, but he could see enough to feel decidedly ill at ease. The effect was that of moonlight on a foreboding gothic edifice. The shuttle threw a tracery of moving shadows across the larger ship, making it appear to squirm and move.

The weird augmentations looked even stranger up close. Their complexity had not really been apparent before, nor the extent to which they had been twisted and sheared by the accident. But Skade had been remarkably fortunate, since the damage was largely confined to the tapering rear part of her ship. The two Conjoiner drives, thrust out from either side of the thoraxlike hull, had suffered only superficial harm. Clavain steered the shuttle closer, convincing himself that any attack would already have happened. Delicately, he nosed the skeletal craft between the stingerlike curves and arcs of the ruined faster-than-light drive.

‘She was desperate,’ he said to his companions. ‘She must have known there was no way we were going to get to Resurgam ahead of her, but that wasn’t good enough for Skade. She wanted to get there years ahead of us.’

Scorpio said, ‘She had the means, Clavain. Why are you surprised that she used them?’

‘He’s right to be surprised,’ Remontoire cut in before Clavain could answer. ‘Skade was perfectly aware of the risks of toying with the state-four transition. She denied any interest in it when I asked her about it, but I had the impression she was lying. Her own experiments must already have revealed the risks.’

‘Once thing’s for sure,’ Scorpio said. ‘She wanted those guns badly, Clavain. They must mean a fuck of a lot to her.’

Clavain nodded. ‘But we’re not really dealing with Skade, I think. We’re dealing with whatever it was that got to her in the Chateau. The Mademoiselle wanted the weapons, and she just planted the idea in Skade’s mind.’

‘This Mademoiselle interests me greatly,’ Remontoire said. He had been told some of what had happened in Chasm City. ‘I’d have liked to have met her.’

‘Too late,’ Scorpio said. ‘H had her corpse in a box — didn’t Clavain tell you?’

‘He had something in a box,’ Remontoire said testily. ‘But evidently not the part of her that mattered. That part reached Skade. Is Skade now, for all we know.’

Clavain slid the shuttle through the last pair of scissorlike blades and back into open space. This side of Nightshade was pitch black, save where the shuttle’s own floods picked out details. Clavain crept along the hull, observing that the antiship weapons were all stowed behind their invisibly seamed hatches. It meant very little: it would only require an eyeblink to deploy them, but it was undeniably reassuring that they were not already pointed at the shuttle.

‘You two know your way around this thing?’ Scorpio said.

‘Of course,’ Remontoire said. ‘It used to be our ship. You should recognise it as well. It’s the same one that pulled you out of Maruska Chung’s cruiser.’

‘The only thing I remember about that is you trying to put the fear of the devil into me, Remontoire.’

With some relief, Clavain realised that they had reached the airlock he had been looking for. There was still no sign of a reaction from the crippled ship: no lights or indications of proximity sensors coming alive. Clavain guyed them to the hull with epoxy-tipped grapples, holding his breath as the suckerlike grapple feet adhered to the ablative hull armour. But nothing happened.

‘This is the difficult part,’ Clavain said. ‘Rem, I want you to remain here on the shuttle. Scorpio’s coming inside with me.’

‘Might I ask why?’

‘Yes, although I was hoping you wouldn’t. Scorp has more experience of hand-to-hand combat than you do, almost more than me. But the main reason is I don’t trust you enough to have you inside.’

‘You trusted me to come this far.’

‘And I’m prepared to trust you to sit tight on the shuttle until we get out.’ Clavain checked the time. ‘In thirty-five minutes we’re out of return range. Wait half an hour and then leave. Not a minute more, even if Scorp and I are already coming back out of the airlock.’

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘We’ve budgeted enough fuel to return the three of us plus Felka. If you return alone you’ll have fuel to spare — fuel that we’ll badly need later. That’s what I trust you with, Rem: that responsibility.’

‘But not to come aboard,’ Remontoire said.

‘No. Not with Skade on that ship. I can’t run the risk of you defecting back to her side.’

‘You’re wrong, Clavain.’

‘Am I?’

‘I didn’t defect. Neither did you. It was Skade and the rest of them that changed sides, not us.’

‘C’mon,’ Scorpio said, tugging at Clavain’s arm. ‘We’ve got twenty-nine minutes now.’

The two of them crossed over to Nightshade. Clavain fumbled around the rim of the airlock until he found the nearly invisible recess that concealed the external controls. It was just wide enough to take his gloved hand. He felt the familiar trinity of manual switches — standard Conjoiner design — and tugged them to the open position. Even if there had been a general shipwide power failure, cells within the lock would have retained power to open the door for about a century. Even if that failed, there was a manual mechanism on the other side of the rim.

The door slid aside. Blood-red lighting glared back from the interior chamber. His eyes had become highly dark-adapted. He waited for them to adjust to the brightness and then ushered Scorpio into the generously proportioned space. He followed the pig, their bulky suits knocking together, and then sealed and pressurised the chamber. It took an eternity.

The inner door opened. The interior of the ship was bathed in the same blood-red emergency lighting. But at