Redemption Ark

told him that the three Conjoiner ships had streaked past at half the speed of light relative to Nostalgia for Infinity, just as the simulations had predicted. Weapons had been deployed, their activation sequences as carefully choreographed as the individual explosions in a fireworks performance. The Conjoiners had used particle beams and heavy relativistic railguns for the most part. Infinity had fired back with lighter versions of the same armaments, while also deploying two of the salvaged cache weapons. Both sides made much use of decoys and feints, and in the most critical phase of the engagement savage accelerations were endured as the ships tried to deviate from predicted flight-paths.

Neither side had been able to claim victory. One Conjoiner ship had been destroyed and damage wrought on the other two, but Clavain considered this almost as close to failure as having inflicted no damage at all. Two enemies were almost as dangerous as three.

And yet the outcome could have been so much worse. Nostalgia for Infinity had sustained some damage, but not enough to prevent it from making it to another solar system. None of the occupants had been hurt and none of the critical systems had been taken out.

‘But we’re not home and dry,’ Felka told him.

Clavain turned from Skade’s image. ‘We’re not?’

‘The two ships that survived? They’re turning around. Slowly but surely, they’re sweeping back around to chase us.’

Clavain let out a laugh. ‘But it’ll take them light-years to make the turn.’

#8216;It wouldn’t if they had inertia-suppression technology. But the machinery must have been damaged during the engagement. That doesn’t mean they can’t repair it again, however.’ She looked at Skade, but the image made no reaction. It was as if she had become a statue poised at the water’s edge, a slightly macabre decorative feature of the glade.

‘If they can, they will,’ Clavain said.

Felka agreed. ‘The Triumvirate ran simulations. Under certain assumptions, we can always outrun the pursuing ships — at least in our reference frame — for as long as you care to specify. We just have to keep crawling closer and closer to the speed of light. But that isn’t much of a solution in my book.’

‘It isn’t in mine either.’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t happen to be practical. We do need to stop to make repairs, and sooner rather than later. That’s why we woke you, Clavain.’

Clavain walked back to the tree stumps. He lowered himself on to his with a crick of leg joints. ‘If there’s a decision to be taken, there must be some choices on the table. Is that the case?’

‘Yes.’

He waited patiently, listening to the soothing white-noise hiss of the waterfall. ‘Well?’

Felka spoke with a reverent hush. ‘We’re a long way out, Clavain. The Resurgam system is nine light-years behind us and there isn’t another settled colony for fifteen light-years in any direction. But there’s a solar system dead ahead of us. Two cool stars. It’s a wide binary, but one of the stars has formed planets in stable orbits. They’re mature, at least three billion years old. There’s one world in the habitable zone that has a couple of small moons. Indications are that it has an oxygen atmosphere and a lot of water. There are even chlorophyll bands in the atmosphere.’

Clavain asked, ‘Human terraforming?’

‘No. There’s no sign of human presence ever having established itself around these stars. Which leaves only one possibility, I think.’

‘The Pattern Jugglers.’

She was evidently pleased that it did not need to be spelled out. ‘We always knew we’d stumble on more Juggler worlds as we moved further out into the galaxy. We shouldn’t be surprised to find one now.’

‘Dead ahead, just like that?’

‘It isn’t dead ahead, but it’s close enough. We can slow down and reach it. If it’s anything like the other Juggler worlds there may even be dry land; enough to take a few settlers.’

‘How many is a few?’

Felka smiled. ‘We won’t know until we get there, will we?’

Clavain made his decision — it was, in truth, little more than a blessing on the obvious choice — and then returned to sleep. There were few medics amongst his crew, and almost none of them had received formal training beyond a few hasty memory uploads. But he trusted them when they said that he could not expect to survive more than one or two further cycles of freezing and thawing.

‘But I’m an old man,’ he told them. ‘If I stay warm, I probably won’t survive that way either.’

‘It’ll have to be your choice,’ they told him, unhelpfully.

He was getting old, that was all. His genes were very antiquated, and though he had been through several rejuvenation programmes since leaving Mars, they had only reset a clock which then proceeded to start ticking again. Back on the Mother Nest they could have given him another half-century of virtual youth, had he wished… but he had never taken that final rejuvenation. The will had never been there after Galiana’s strange return and her even stranger half-death.

He did not even know if he regretted it now. If they had been able to limp to a fully equipped colony world, somewhere that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the Melding Plague, there might have been hope for him. But what difference would it have made? Galiana was still gone. He was still old inside his skull, still seeing the world through eyes that were yellow and weary with four hundred years of war. He had done what he could, and the emotional burden had cost him terribly, and he did not think he had the energy to do it one more time. It was enough that he had not totally failed this time.

And so he submitted to the reefersleep casket for the final time.

Just before he went under, he authorised a tight-beam laser transmission back to the dying Resurgam system. The message was one-time-pad coded for Zodiacal Light If the other ship hadn’t been totally destroyed, there was a chance it would intercept and decode the signal. It would never be seen by the other Conjoiner ships, and even if Skade’s forces had somehow managed to sow receivers through Resurgam space, they would not be able to crack the encryption.

The message was very simple. It told Remontoire, Khouri, Thorn and the others that had gone with them that they were to slow and stop in the Pattern Juggler system; they would wait there for twenty years. That was enough time to allow Zodiacal Light to rendezvous with them; it was also enough time to establish a self-sustaining colony of a few tens of thousands of people, a hedge against any future catastrophe that might befall the ship.

Knowing this, feeling that in some small but significant way he had put his affairs in order, Clavain slept.

He woke to find that Nostalgia for Infinity had changed itself without consulting anyone.

No one knew why.

The changes were not at all apparent from within; it was only from the outside — seen from an inspection shuttle — that they became manifest. The changes had happened during the slow-down phase as the great ship was decelerating into the new system. With the inching speed of land erosion, the rear of the ship’s conic hull, normally a smaller inverted cone in its own right, had become flattened, like the base of a chess piece. No control over this transformation had been possible, and indeed, much of it had already taken place before anyone had noticed. There were vaults of the great ship that were only visited by humans once or twice a century, and much of the rear of the hull fell into that category. The machinery that lurked there had been surreptitiously dismantled or relocated further up the hull, in other disused spaces. Ilia Volyova might have noticed sooner than anyone — not much had ever escaped Ilia Volyova — but she was gone now, and the ship had new tenants who were not yet as devoutly familiar with its territory.

The changes were neither life-threatening nor injurious to the ship’s performance, but they remained puzzling, and further evidence — if any were needed — that the Captain’s psyche had not completely vanished, and could be expected to surprise them still further at times in the future. There appeared little doubt that the Captain had played some role in the reshaping of the ship he had become. The question of whether the reshaping had been consciously driven, or had merely sprung from some irrational dreamlike whim, was much harder to answer.

So for the time being, because there were other things to worry about, they ignored it. Nostalgia for Infinity fell into tight orbit around the watery world and probes were sent arcing into the