Redemption Ark

squirm through the tiniest opening, reassembling on the other side. Nonetheless, the battle had taken time. By Skade’s estimate, it might have taken many days for the whole ship to fall. Many weeks, even.

She shivered at the thought of it.

A day after they had first entered, her servitors found some human bodies that were nearly intact, except that their heads had been swallowed by black helmets of surrounding cubes. The alien machinery appeared inert. The servitors removed parts of the helmets and found that prongs of machine-growth reached into the corpses’ skulls, through the eye sockets or the ears or the nasal cavity. Further study showed that the prongs had bifurcated many times, until they reached microscopic scale. They extended deep into the brains of the dead, establishing connections with their native Conjoiner implants.

But the machines, and their hosts, were now very much dead.

Skade tried to work out what had happened; the ship’s records were thoroughly scrambled. It was obvious that Galiana had encountered something hostile, but why hadn’t the cubes simply destroyed her ship in one go? The infiltration had been slow and painstaking, and it only made sense if the cubes wanted to keep the ship intact for as long as possible.

There had been another ship: two had gone on — what had happened to that one?

[Ideas, Skade?]

Yes. But nothing I like.

[You think the cubes wanted to learn as much as possible, don’t you?]

I can’t think of any other reason. They put taps into their minds, reading their neural machinery. They were intelligence-gathering.

[Yes. We agree. The cubes must have learned a great deal about us. We have to consider them a threat, even if we don’t yet know where Galiana was when they found her. But there is a glimmer of hope, wouldn’t you say?]

Skade failed to see what that glimmer could possibly be. Humanity had been searching for an unambiguous alien intelligence for centuries. All they had found so far had been tantalising leads — the Pattern Jugglers, the Shrouders, the archaeological remains of another eight or nine dead cultures. They had never encountered another extant machine-using intelligence, nothing to measure themselves against.

Until now.

And what this machine-using intelligence did, so it seemed, was stalk, infiltrate and slaughter, and then invade skulls.

It was not, Skade conceded, the most fruitful of first encounters.

Hope? Are you serious?

[Yes, Skade, because we don’t know that the cubes were ever able to transmit that knowledge back to whatever it was that sent them. Galiana’s ship made it back home, after all. She must have steered it here, and she would not have done that if she thought there was any danger of leading the enemy back to us. Clavain would be proud, I think. She was still thinking of us; still thinking of the Mother Nest.]

But she ran the risk…

The voice of the Night Council cut her off sharply. [The ship is a warning, Skade. That is what Galiana intended and that is how we must read it.]

A warning?

[That we must be ready. They are still out there, and one way or another we will meet them again.]

You almost sound as if you were expecting them to arrive.

But the Night Council said nothing.

It was another week before they found Galiana, for the ship was vast and there had been many changes to its interior that prohibited a rapid search. Skade had gone inside it herself, along with other sweep teams. They wore heavy ceramic armour over their pressure suits, oiled carapacial plaques that made movement awkward unless one exercised great care and forethought. After several minutes of fumbling and locking herself into postures that could only be got out of by laborious back-tracking, Skade wrote a hasty body-image/motion patch and assigned it to run on a clump of idle neural circuits. Things became easier then, though she had the unpleasant feeling that a shadowy counterpart of herself was driving her. Skade made a mental note to revise the script later, so that the movement routines would feel totally voluntary no matter how illusory that might be.

By then the servitors had done about all they were able. They had secured large volumes of the ship, spraying diamond-fibred epoxy over the ruins of the alien machines, and they had DNA-sampled most of the corpses in the explored zones. Every individual sample of genetic material had been identified against the crew manifests in the Mother Nest, preserved since the departure of the exploratory fleet, but there were many names on the list that had yet to be matched to DNA samples.

There were bound to be names Skade would never match. When the first ship had returned home, the one carrying Clavain, the Mother Nest had learned that there had been a decision in deep space, dozens of light-years out, to split the expedition. One party wanted to come back home, having heard rumours of war against the Demarchists. They also felt that it was time to deliver the data they had already accrued — far too much to be transmitted home.

The separation had not been acrimonious. There had been regret, and sadness, but no real sense of disunity. After the usual period of debate typical of any Conjoiner decision-making process, the split came to be viewed as the most logical course of action. It allowed the expedition to continue, while safeguarding the return of what had already been learned. But while Skade knew exactly who had chosen to stay out there in deep space, she had no way of knowing what had happened subsequently. She could only guess at the exchanges that had taken place between the remaining two ships. The fact that this was Galiana’s ship did not mean that she had to be on it, so Skade readied herself for the inevitable disappointment should that prove to be the case.

More than that, it would be a disappointment for the entire Mother Nest. Galiana was their figurehead, after all. She was the woman who had created the Conjoiners in the first place, four hundred years ago and eleven light- years away, in a huddle of labs beneath the surface of Mars. She had been away for nearly two centuries; long enough to assume the mythic stature that she had always resisted during her time amongst them. And she had returned — if she was indeed aboard this ship — on Skade’s watch. It hardly mattered that she was very likely dead, along with all the others. For Skade, it would be enough to bring home her remains.

But she found more than remains.

Galiana’s resting place, if it could be called that, was a long way from the central core of the ship. She had secured herself behind armoured barricades, well away from the others. Careful forensic study showed that the data links between Galiana’s resting place and the remainder of the ship had been deliberately severed from within. She had obviously tried to isolate herself, cutting her mind off from the other Conjoiners on the ship.

Self-sacrifice or self-preservation? Skade wondered.

Galiana was in reefersleep, cooled down to a point where all metabolic processes were arrested. But the black machines had still reached her. They had smashed through the armour of the reefersleep casket, cramming themselves into the space between Galiana and the casket’s interior surface. When the casket was dismantled, the machines formed a mummylike shell of pure black around Galiana. There was no doubt that it was she: scans peering through the cocoon picked out bone structure, which matched Galiana’s perfectly. The body within appeared to have suffered no damage or decay during the flight, and the sensors were even able to pick up weak signals from Galiana’s implant web. Although the signals were too faint to allow mind-to-mind linkage, it was clear that something inside the cocoon was still capable of thought, and was still reaching out.

Attention shifted to the cocoon itself. Chemical analysis of the cubes drew a blank: they appeared not to be ‘made’ of anything, or to possess any kind of atomic granularity. The faces of the cubes were simply blank walls of sheer force, transparent to certain forms of radiation. They were very cold — still active in a way that none of the other machines had been so far. But the individual cubes did not resist being prised away from the larger mass, and once they were separated they shrunk rapidly, dwindling down to microscopic size. Skade’s team attempted to focus scanners on the cubes themselves, trying to glimpse anything buried beneath the facets, but they were never quick enough. Where the cubes had been they found only a few micrograms of smouldering ashes. Presumably there were mechanisms at the heart of the cubes that were programmed to self-destruct under certain circumstances.

Once Skade’s team had removed most of the surrounding plaque, they took Galiana to a dedicated room