Redemption Ark

and perhaps even admired her for it.

‘Ship?’

‘Yes, Antoinette?’

‘It’s all right, you know. I don’t mind. You can still call me Little Miss.’

‘It was only ever an act.’ Beast — or Lyle Merrick, more properly — paused. I did it rather well, wouldn’t you say?‘

‘Dad was right to trust you. You did look after me, didn’t you?’

‘As well as I was able to. Which wasn’t as well as I hoped. But then again, you didn’t exactly make it easy. I suppose that was inevitable, given the family connection. Your father was not exactly the most cautious of individuals, and you are very much a chip off the old block.’

‘We came through, Ship,’ Antoinette said. ‘We still came through. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Ship… Lyle…’

‘Antoinette?’

‘You know what the Triumvir wants, don’t you?’

Merrick did not answer her for several seconds. All her life she had imagined that the pauses were inserted cosmetically into the subpersona’s conversation, but she knew now that they had been quite real. Merrick’s simulation experienced consciousness at a rate very close to normal human thought, so his pauses indicated genuine introspection.

‘Xavier did inform me, yes.’

Antoinette was glad at least that she did not have to reveal that particular piece of the arrangement. ‘When the evacuation is done, when we’ve got as many people away from the planet as we can, then the Triumvir wants to use Storm Bird for herself. She says it’s for glory and redemption. It sounds like a suicide mission, Lyle.’

I more or less came to the same conclusion as well, Antoinette.‘ Merrick’s synthesised voice was quite unnervingly calm. ’She’s dying, so I gather, so I suppose it isn’t suicide in the old sense… but that’s a fairly pointless distinction. I gather she wishes to make amends for her past.‘

‘Khouri, the other woman, says she isn’t the monster the people on the planet make out.’ Antoinette struggled to keep her own voice as level and collected as Merrick’s. They were skirting around something dreadful, orbiting an absence neither wished to acknowledge. ‘But I guess she must have done some bad stuff in the past anyway.’

‘Then I suppose that makes two of us,’ Merrick said. ‘Yes, Antoinette, I know what you are concerned about. But you mustn’t worry about me.’

‘She thinks you’re just a ship, Lyle. And no one will tell her the truth because they need her co-operation so badly. Not that it would make any difference if they did…’ Antoinette trailed off, hating herself for feeling so sad. ‘You’ll die, won’t you? Finally, the way it would have happened all those years ago if Dad and Xavier hadn’t helped you.’

I deserved it, Antoinette. I did a terrible thing, and I escaped justice.‘

‘But Lyle…’ Her eyes were stinging. She could feel tears welling inside her, stupid irrational tears that she despised herself for. She had loved her ship, then hated it — hated it because of the lie in which it had implicated her father, the lie that she had been told; and then she had come to love it again, because the ship, and the ghost of Lyle Merrick that haunted it, were both tangible links back to her father. And now that she had come to that accommodation, the knife was twisting again. What she had learned to love was being taken away from her, the last link back to her father snatched from her hands by that bitch Volyova…

Why was it never easy? All she had wanted to do was keep a vow.

‘Antoinette?’

‘We could remove you,’ she said. ‘Take you out of the ship and replace you with an ordinary subpersona. Volyova wouldn’t have to know, would she?’

‘No, Antoinette. It’s my time as well. If she wants glory and redemption, then why can’t I take a little of that for myself?’

‘You’ve already made a difference. There isn’t any need for a larger sacrifice.’

‘But this is still what I choose to do. You can’t begrudge me that, can you?’

‘No,’ she said, her voice breaking up. ‘No, I can’t. And I wouldn’t.’

‘Promise me something, Antoinette?’

She rubbed her eyes, ashamed at her tears and yet oddly exultant at the same time. ‘What, Lyle?’

‘That you will continue to take good care of yourself, no matter what happens from here on in.’

She nodded. ‘I will. I promise.’

‘That’s good. There’s one other thing I want to say, and then I think we should go our separate ways. I can continue with the evacuation unaided. In fact, I positively refuse to let you put yourself in further danger by continuing to fly aboard me. How does that sound for an order? Impressed, aren’t you? You didn’t think I was capable of that, did you?’

‘No, Ship. I didn’t.’ She smiled despite herself.

‘One final thing, Antoinette. It was a pleasure to serve under you. A pleasure and an honour. Now, please go away and find another ship — preferably something bigger and better — to captain. I am sure you will make an excellent job of it.’

She stood up from the seat. ‘I’ll do my best, I promise.’

‘Of that I have no doubt.’

She stepped towards the door, hesitating on the threshold. ‘Goodbye Lyle,’ she said.

‘Goodbye, Little Miss.’

CHAPTER 40

They pulled him shivering from the open womb of the casket. He felt like a man who had been rescued from drowning in winter. The faces of the people around him sharpened into focus, but he did not recognise any of them immediately. Someone threw a quilted thermal blanket around the narrow frame of his shoulders. They eyed him without speaking, guessing that he was in no mood for conversation and would wish instead to orientate himself by his own efforts.

Clavain sat on the edge of the casket for several minutes until he had enough strength in his legs to hobble across the chamber. He stumbled at the last moment and yet made the fall appear graceful, as if he had intended to lean suddenly against the support of the porthole’s armoured frame. He peered through the glass. He could see nothing beyond except blackness, with his own ghastly reflection hovering in the foreground. He appeared strangely eyeless, his sockets crammed with shadows which were the precise black of the background vacuum. He felt a savage jolt of déjà vu, the feeling that he had been here before, contemplating his own masklike face. He tugged and nagged at the thread of memory until it spooled free, recalling a last-minute diplomatic mission, a shuttle falling towards occupied Mars, an imminent confrontation with an old enemy and friend called Galiana… and he remembered that even then, four hundred years ago — though it was more now, he thought — he had felt too old for the world, too old for the role it forced upon him. Had he known what lay before him then, he would have either laughed or gone insane. It had felt like the end of his life, and yet it had been only a moment from its beginning, barely separable in his memories now from his childhood.

He looked back at the people who had brought him around and then up at the ceiling.

‘Dim the lights,’ someone said.

His reflection disappeared. Now he could see something other than blackness. It was a swarm of stars, squashed into one hemisphere of the sky. Reds and blues and golds and frigid whites. Some were brighter than others, though he saw no familiar constellations. But the clumping of the stars, stirred into one part of the sky, meant only one thing. They were still moving relativistically, still skimming near the speed of light.

Clavain turned back to the small huddle of people. ‘Has the battle taken place?’