Redemption Ark

what I learned in the Closed Council, just as you wouldn’t if you were in my position.’

He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t expect anything less.’

‘But even if I wanted to tell you, I don’t think I know everything. Not any more. There are layers within layers. I was never privy to Inner Sanctum secrets, and I haven’t been allowed near Closed Council data for years.’ Felka tapped the file against her temple. ‘Some of the Closed Council members even want me to have my memories permanently scrubbed, so that I’ll forget what I learned during my active Council years. The only thing that’s stopping them is my odd brain anatomy. They can’t swear they wouldn’t scrub the wrong memories.’

‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’

She nodded. ‘But there is a solution, Clavain. A pretty simple one, when you think about it.’

‘Which is?’

‘You could always join the Closed Council.’

Clavain sighed, grasping for an objection and knowing that even if he found one it would be unlikely to satisfy Felka. ‘I’ll have some more of that tea, if you don’t mind.’

Skade strode through the curving grey corridors of the Mother Nest, her crest flaming with the scarlet of intense concentration and anger. She was on her way to the privy chamber, where she had arranged to meet Remontoire and a quorum of corporeal Closed Council members.

Her mind was running near its maximum processing rate. She was contemplating how she would handle what was sure to be a delicate meeting, perhaps the most crucial in her campaign to recruit Clavain to her side. Most of the Closed Council were putty in her hands, but there were a few that worried her, a few that would need more than the usual amount of convincing.

Skade was also reviewing the digested final performance data from the secret systems inside Nightshade, which were feeding into her skull via the compad now resting across her abdomen like a piece of armour. The numbers were encouraging; there was nothing, other than the problem of keeping the breakthrough secret, to prevent a more extensive test of the machinery. She had already informed the Master of Works of the good news, so that the final technical refinements could be incorporated into the exodus fleet.

Although she had assigned a large fraction of herself to these issues, Skade was also replaying and processing a recording, a transmission that had recently arrived from the Ferrisville Convention.

It was not good.

The spokesperson hovered ahead of Skade, his back to the direction of her travel, his feet sliding ineffectually above the flooring. Skade was replaying the transmission at ten times normal speed, lending the man’s gestures a manic quality.

‘This is a formal request to any representative of the Conjoined faction,’ said the Convention spokesman. ‘It is known to the Ferrisville Convention that a Conjoiner vessel was involved in the interception and boarding of a Demarchist ship in the neighbourhood of the Contested Volume around gas-giant…’

Skade fast-forwarded. She had already played the message eighteen times, searching for nuance or deception. She knew that what followed was a supremely tedious list of legal strictures and Convention statutes, all of which she had checked and found to be watertight.

‘… Unknown to the Conjoined faction, Maruska Chung, the shipmaster of the Demarchist vessel, had already made formal contact with officers of the Ferrisville Convention regarding the transfer into our custody of a prisoner. The prisoner in question had been detained aboard the Demarchist vessel after his arrest on a military asteroid under Demarchist jurisdiction, in accordance with…’

More boiler-plate. Fast-forward again.

‘… prisoner in question, a hyperpig known to the Ferrisville Convention as “Scorpio”, is already sought for the following crimes in contravention of emergency powers general statute number…‘

She allowed the message to cycle over again, but detected nothing that had not already been clear. The bureaucratic gnome of the Convention seemed too obsessed with the minutiae of treaties and sub-clauses to be capable of real deception. He was almost certainly telling the truth about the pig.

Scorpio was a criminal known to the authorities, a vicious murderer with a predilection for killing humans. Chung had told the Convention that she was bringing him back into their care, presumably tight-beaming ahead before Nightshade had been close enough to snoop on her transmissions.

And Clavain, damn him again, had not done what he should have done, which was wipe the Demarchists out of existence the first chance he got. The Convention would have grumbled at that, but he would have been entirely within his rights. He could not have been expected to know about the shipmaster’s prisoner of war, and he was not obliged to ask questions before opening fire. Instead, he had rescued the pig.

‘… request the immediate return of the prisoner into our custody, unharmed and uncontaminated by Conjoiner neural-infiltration systems, within twenty-six standard days. Failure to comply with this request…’ The Convention spokesman paused, wringing his hands in miserly anticipation. ‘… Failure to comply would be greatly to the detriment of relations between the Conjoined faction and the Convention, as I need hardly stress.’

Skade understood perfectly. It was not that the prisoner was of any tangible value to the Convention. But as a coup — as a trophy — the prisoner’s value was incalculable. Law and order were already in a state of extreme collapse in Convention airspace, and the pigs were a powerful, and not always lawful, group in their own right. It had been bad enough when Skade had gone to Chasm City herself on covert Council business and had almost ended up dead. Matters had certainly not improved since. The pig’s recapture and execution would send a powerful signal to other miscreants, especially the more criminally inclined pig factions. Had Skade been in the spokesman’s position, she would have made much the same demand.

But that didn’t make the pig any less of a problem. On the face of it, knowing what Skade knew, there was no need to comply. It would not be long now before the Convention was of no consequence at all. The Master of Works had assured her that the exodus fleet would be ready in seventy days, and she had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the Master’s estimate.

Seventy days.

In eighty or ninety it would be done. In barely three months nothing else would matter. But there was the problem. The fleet’s existence, and the reason for its existence, had to remain a matter of total secrecy. The impression had to be given that the Conjoiners were pressing ahead towards the military victory that every neutral observer expected. Anything else would invite suspicion both from within and without the Mother Nest. And if the Demarchists discovered the truth, there was a chance — a slim one, but not something she could dismiss — that they might rally, using the information to gain allies that had previously remained neutral. Right now they were a spent force, but if they combined with the Ultras, they might present a real obstacle to Skade’s ultimate objective.

No. The charade of coming victory demanded a degree of obeisance to the Convention. Skade would have to find a way of returning the pig, and it would have to happen before suspicion was roused.

Her fury reached a crescendo. She made the spokesman freeze ahead of her. His body blackened to a silhouette. She strode through him, scattering him like a flock of startled ravens.

CHAPTER 6

The Inquisitor’s private aircraft could have made extremely short shrift of the journey to Solnhofen, but she decided to make the final leg of the trip by surface transport, having the plane drop her off at the nearest reasonably sized community to her destination.

The place was called Audubon, a sprawl of depots, shacks and domes pierced by slev rails, cargo pipelines and highways. From the perimeter, the fine-filigreed fingers of dirigible docking masts poked into the slate-grey northern sky. But there were no airships moored today and no sign that any had come in lately.

The plane had dropped her off on a patch of concreted ground between two depots. The concrete was scabbed and rutted. She walked across it swiftly, her booted feet scuffing the bristlelike tufts of Resurgam-tolerant grass that ripped through the concrete here and there. With some trepidation she watched the plane arc back towards Cuvier, ready to serve some other government official until she requested that it take her back home.

‘Get in, get out fast,’ she muttered under her breath.