‘I’m not quite sure,’ Remontoire replied.
Then she heard a volley of muted clunks as dozens of armoured irised bulkheads snicked shut up and down the ship.
‘You’ll be able to return to your quarters shortly,’ the crab said. ‘This is just a precaution.’
She recognised the voice, even if the timbre was not entirely as she remembered it. ‘Skade? I thought you were…’
‘They’ve allowed me to slave this proxy,’ the crab said, wiggling the tiny jointed manipulators between its foreclaws. It was stuck to the wall by circular pads on the ends of its legs. From under the crab’s glossy white shell protruded various barbs, muzzles and lacerating and stabbing devices. It was very clearly an old assassination device that Skade had commandeered.
‘It’s good of you to see us off,’ Felka said, relieved that Skade would not be accompanying them.
‘See you off?’
‘When the light-lag exceeds a few seconds, won’t it be impracticable to slave the proxy?’
‘What light-lag? I’m on the ship, Felka. My quarters are only a deck or two below your own.’
Felka remembered being told that Skade’s injuries were so severe that it required a roomful of Doctor Delmar’s equipment just to keep her alive. ‘I didn’t think
The crab waved a manipulator, dismissing her protestations. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come down later; we’ll have a little chat.’
‘I’d like that,’ Felka said. ‘There’s a great deal you and I need to talk about, Skade.’
‘Of course there is. Well, I must be going; urgent matters to attend to.’
A hole puckered open in one wall; the crab scuttled through it, vanishing into the ship’s hidden innards.
Felka looked at Remontoire. ‘Seeing as we’re all Closed Council, I suppose I can talk freely. Did she say anything more about the Exordium experiments when you were with Clavain?’
Remontoire kept his voice very low. It was no more than a gesture; they had to assume that Skade would be able to hear everything that went on in the ship, and would also be able to read their minds at source. But Felka understood precisely why he felt the need to whisper. ‘Nothing. She even lied about where the edict to cease shipbuilding came from.’
Felka glared at the wall, forcing it to provide her with somewhere to sit down. A ledge pushed out from the wall opposite Remontoire and she eased herself on to it. It was good to be off her feet; she had spent far too long of late in the weightless environment of her atelier, and the gee of shipboard thrust was wearying.
She stared out through the cupola and down, and saw the lobed shadow of one of
‘What did she tell him?’ Felka asked.
‘Some story about the Closed Council piecing together the evidence of the wolf attacks from a variety of ship losses.’
‘Implausible.’
‘I don’t think Clavain believed her. But she couldn’t mention Exordium; she obviously wanted him to know the bare minimum for the job, and yet she couldn’t avoid talking about the edict to some extent.’
‘Exordium’s at the heart of all this,’ Felka said. ‘Skade must have known that if she gave Clavain a thread to pull on he’d have unravelled the whole thing, right back to the Inner Sanctum.’
‘That’s as far as he’d have been able to take it.’
‘Knowing Clavain, I wouldn’t be so sure. She wanted him as an ally because he isn’t the kind to stop at a minor difficulty.’
‘But why couldn’t she have just told him the truth? The idea that the Closed Council picked up messages from the future isn’t so shocking, when you think about it. And from what I’ve gathered the content of those messages was sketchy at best, little more than vague premonitionary suggestions.’
‘Unless you were part of it, it’s difficult to describe what happened. But I only participated once. I don’t know what happened in the other experiments.’
‘Was Skade involved in the programme when you participated?’
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘But that was after our return from deep space. The edict was issued much earlier, long before Skade was recruited to the Conjoined. The Closed Council must have already been running Exordium experiments before Skade joined us.’
Felka eyed the wall again. It was entirely reasonable to indulge in speculation about something like Exordium, Felka knew — Skade could hardly object to it, given the fact that it was so central to what was now happening — but she still felt as if they were on the brink of committing some unspeakably treasonous act.
But Remontoire continued speaking, his voice low yet assured. ‘So Skade joined us… and before very long she was in the Closed Council and actively involved in the Exordium experiments. At least one of the experiments coincided with the edict, so we can assume there was a direct warning about the tau-neutrino effect. But what about the other experiments? What warnings came through during those? Were there even warnings?’ He looked at Felka intently.
She was about to answer, about to tell him something, when the seat beneath her forced itself upwards, the suddenness of it taking her breath away. She expected the pressure to abate, but it did not. By her own estimation her weight, which had been uncomfortable enough beforehand, had just doubled.
Remontoire looked out and downwards, as Felka had done a few minutes before.
‘What just happened? We seem to be accelerating harder,’ she observed.
‘We are,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’
Felka followed his gaze, hoping to see something different in the view. But as accurately as she could judge, nothing had changed. Even the blue glow behind the engines seemed no brighter.
Gradually, the acceleration became tolerable, if not something she would actually describe as pleasant. With forethought and economy she could manage most of what she had been doing before. The ship’s servitors did their best to assist, helping people get in and out of seats, always ready to spring into action. The other Conjoiners, all somewhat lighter and leaner than Felka, adapted with insulting ease. The interior surfaces of the ship hardened and softened themselves on cue, aiding movement and limiting injury.
But after an hour it increased again. Two and a half gees. Felka could stand it no longer. She asked to be allowed back to her quarters, but learned it was still not possible to go into that part of the ship. Nonetheless the ship partitioned a fresh room for her and extruded a couch she could lie on. Remontoire helped her on to it, making it perfectly clear that he had no better idea than she did of what was happening.
I don’t understand,‘ Felka said, wheezing between words. ’We’re just accelerating. It’s what we always knew we’d have to do if we stood a chance of reaching Clavain.‘
Remontoire nodded. ‘But there’s more to it than that. Those engines were already operating near their peak efficiency when we boosted to one gee.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning we shouldn’t have been able to accelerate so much harder. And definitely not three times as hard. I didn’t see any auxiliary boosters attached to our hull, either. The only other way Skade could have done it would be by jettisoning two-thirds of the mass we had when we left the Mother Nest.’
With some effort Felka shrugged. She had a profound lack of interest in the mechanics of spaceflight — ships were a means to an end as far as she was concerned — but she could work her way through an argument easily enough. ‘So the engines must be capable of working harder than you assumed.’
‘Yes. That’s what I thought.’
‘And?’
‘They can’t be. We both looked out. You saw that blue glow? Scattered light from the exhaust beam. It would have had to get a lot brighter, Felka, bright enough that we’d have noticed. It didn’t.’ Remontoire paused. ‘If anything, it got fainter, as if the engines had been throttled back a little. As if they weren’t having to work as hard as before.’
‘That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?’
‘No,’ Remontoire said. ‘No sense at all. Unless Skade’s secret machinery had something to do with it.’
