Redemption Ark

Not to be something better than humanity, but as a gift, a promise of what humanity could be if we only realised our potential. Instead, they painted her as some coldly reductionist monster. They were so terribly wrong. Galiana didn’t think of love as some ancient Darwinian trick of brain chemistry that had to be eradicated from the human mind. She saw it as something that had to be brought to its culmination, like a seed that needed to be nurtured as it grew. But they never understood that part. And the trouble was you had to be Conjoined before you appreciated what it was that she had achieved.

Clavain paused, taking a moment to review the disposition of his forces around the Triumvir’s ship. There had been two more deaths in the last minute, but the steady encroachment of his forces continued. Yes, we did make love, back in my first days amongst the Conjoined. But there came a time when it was no longer necessary, except as a nostalgic act. It felt like something that children do: not wrong, not primitive, not even dull, just no longer of any interest. It wasn’t that we had stopped loving each other, or had lost our thirst for sensory experience. It was simply that there were so many more rewarding ways of achieving that same kind of intimacy. Once you’ve touched someone else’s mind, walked through their dreams, seen the world through their eyes, felt the world through their skin… well… there never seemed to be any real need to go back to the old way. And I was never much one for nostalgia. It was as if we had stepped into a more adult world, crammed with its own pleasures and enticements. We had no reason to look back at what we were missing.

She did not respond immediately. The ship flew on. Clavain eyed the readouts and tactical summaries again. For a moment, a terrible, yawning moment, he felt that he had said far too much. But then she spoke, and he knew that she had understood everything.

[I think I need to tell you about the wolves.]

CHAPTER 37

When Volyova had made the decision, she felt a rush of strength, enabling her to rip the medical probes and shunts from her body, flinging them aside with wicked abandon. She retained only the goggles which substituted for her blinded eyes, while doing her best not to think of the vile machinery now floating in her skull. Other than that, she felt quite hale and hearty. She knew that it was an illusion, that she would pay for this burst of energy later, and that almost certainly she would pay for it with her life. But she felt no fear at the prospect, only a quiet satisfaction that she might at least do something with the time that remained to her. It was all very well lying here, directing distant affairs like some bed-ridden pontiff, but it was not the way she was meant to be. She was Triumvir Ilia Volyova, and she had certain standards to uphold.

‘Ilia…’ Khouri began, when she saw what was happening.

‘Khouri,’ she said, her voice still a croak, but finally imbued with something resembling the old fire. ‘Khouri… do this for me, and never once stop to question me or talk me out of it. Understood?’

‘Understood… I think.’

Volyova clicked her ringers at the nearest servitor. It scuttled towards her, dodging between the squawking medical monitors. ‘Captain… have the servitor assist me to the spacecraft bay, will you? I will expect a suit and a shuttle to be waiting for me.’

Khouri steadied her, holding her in a sitting position. ‘Ilia, what are you planning?’

‘I’m going outside. I need to have a word — a serious word — with weapon seventeen.’

‘You’re in no state…’

Volyova cut her off with a chop of one frail hand. ‘Khouri, I may have a weak and feeble body, but give me weightlessness, a suit and possibly a weapon or two and you’ll find I can still do some damage. Understood?’

‘You haven’t given up, have you?’

The servitor helped her to the floor. ‘Given up, Khouri? It’s not in my dictionary.’

Khouri helped her as well, taking the Triumvir’s other arm.

On the edge of the combat swarm, though still within range of potentially damaging weapons, Antoinette disengaged the evasive pattern she had been running and throttled Storm Bird down to one gee. Through Storm Bird’s windows she could see the elongated shape of the Triumvir’s lighthugger, visible at a distance of two thousand kilometres as a tiny scratch of light. Most of the time it was dark enough that she did not see the ship at all, but two or three times a minute a major explosion — some detonating mine, warhead, drive-unit or weapons-trigger — threw light against the hull, momentarily picking it out the way a lighthouse might glance against a jagged pinnacle rising from the depths of a storm-racked ocean. But there was never any doubt about where the ship was. Sparks of flame were swarming around it, so bright that they smeared across her retina, etching dying pink arcs and helices against the stellar backdrop, the trails reminding her of the fiery sticks children had played with during fireworks shows in the old carousel. Pinpricks of light within the swarm signified smaller armaments detonating, and very occasionally Antoinette saw the hard red or green line of a laser precursor beam, caught in outgassing air or propellant from one or other of the ships. Absently, cursing her mind’s ability to focus on the most trivial of things at the wrong time, she realised that this was a detail that they always got wrong in the space opera holo-dramas, where laser beams were invisible, the sinister element of invisibility adding to the drama. But a real close-range space battle was a far messier affair, with gas clouds and chaff shards erupting all over the place, ready to reflect and disperse any beam weapon.

The swarm was tighter towards the middle, thinning out through dozens of kilometres. Though she was on the edge of it, she was aware of how tempting a target Storm Bird must present. The Triumvir’s defences were preoccupied with the closer attack elements, but Antoinette knew that she could not afford to count on that continuing.

Xavier’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Antoinette? Scorpio’s ready for departure. Says you can open the bay door any time you like.’

‘We’re not close enough,’ she said.

Scorpio’s voice cut over the intercom. She no longer had any difficulty distinguishing his voice from those of the other pigs. ‘Antoinette? This is close enough. We have the fuel to cross from here. There’s no need for you to risk Storm Bird by taking us any closer.’

‘But the closer I take you, the more fuel you’ll have in reserve. Isn’t that true?’

‘I can’t argue with that. Take us five hundred kilometres closer, then. And Antoinette? That really will be close enough.’

She magnified the battle view, tapping into the telemetry stream from the many cameras that now whipped around the Triumvir’s ship. The image data had been seamlessly merged and then processed to remove the motion, and while there were occasional snags and dropouts as the view was refreshed, the impression was as if she were hovering in space only two or three kilometres beyond the ship itself. The silence was one thing that the holo- dramas got right, she realised, but she had never realised how terribly, profoundly wrong that silence would be when accompanying an actual battle. It was an abject void into which her imagination projected endless screams. What did not help was the way that the Triumvir’s ship loomed out of darkness in random, fitful flashes of light, never lingering long enough for her to comprehend the form of the ship in its entirety. What she saw of the ship’s perverted architecture was nonetheless adequately disturbing.

Now she saw something that she had not seen before: a rectangle of light, like a golden door, opened somewhere along the wrinkled complexity of Nostalgia for Infinity’s hull. It was open for only a moment, but that was long enough for something to slip through. The glare from the engine of the shuttle that had emerged caught the stepped spinal edge of a flying buttress, and as the ship gyred, orientating itself with strobing flashes of thrust, the black shadow of the buttress crawled across an acre of hull material that had the scaled texture of lizardskin.

What about the wolves, Felka?

[Everything, Clavain. At least, everything that I learned. Everything that the Wolf was prepared to let me know.]

It may not be all of the picture, Felka. It may not even be part of it.

[I know. But I still think I should tell you.]

It was not simply about the war against intelligence, she told Clavain. That was only part of it; only one detail in their vast, faltering program of cosmic stewardship. Despite