Redemption Ark

‘Trace atoms? You’re joking. By the time they get to where the blast happened…’ Antoinette shook her head.

Clavain shook his in return. ‘There’ll still be a slightly enhanced density — one or two atoms per cubic metre — of the kind of elements you don’t normally find in interplanetary space. Hull isotopes, that kind of thing. Nightshade’s hull will sample and analyse the medium. The hull is covered with epoxy- coated patches that will snare anything larger than a molecule, and then there are mass spectrometers that will sniff the atomic constituency of the vacuum itself. Algorithms will process the forensic data, comparing the curves and histograms of abundance and isotope ratios against plausible scenarios for the destruction of a vessel of the corvette’s composition. The results won’t be unambiguous, for the statistical errors will be almost as large as the effects Skade’s attempting to measure. But I’ve seen it done before. The pull of the data will be in favour of there having been very little organic matter aboard the corvette.’ Clavain reached up and touched the side of his head, slowly enough that it could not be seen as threatening. ‘And then there are the isotopes in my implants. They’ll be harder to detect, a lot harder, but Skade will expect to find them if she looks hard enough. And when she doesn’t…’

‘She’ll figure out what you did,’ Antoinette said.

Again Clavain nodded. ‘But I took all that into consideration. It will take time for Skade to make a thorough search. You can still make it back into neutral territory, but only if you start home immediately.’

‘You’re really that keen to get to the Rust Belt, Clavain?’ asked Antoinette. ‘They’ll eat you alive, whether it’s the Convention or the zombies.’

‘No one said defecting was a risk-free activity.’

‘You defected once already, right?’ Antoinette asked.

Clavain caught his drifting helmet and secured it to his belt by the helmet’s chin loop. ‘Once. It was a long time ago. Probably a bit before your time.’

‘Like four hundred years before my time?’

He scratched his beard. ‘Warm.’

‘Then it is you. You are him.’

‘Him?’

‘That Clavain. The historical one. The one everyone says has to be dead by now. The Butcher of Tharsis.’

Clavain smiled. ‘For my sins.’

CHAPTER 18

Thorn hovered above a world that was being prepared for death. They had made the trip from Nostalgia for Infinity in one of the smaller, nimbler ships that the two women had shown him in the hangar bay. The craft was a two-seat surface-to-orbit shuttle with the shape of a cobra’s head: a hoodlike wing curving smoothly into fuselage, with the cabin viewing windows positioned either side of the hull like snake eyes. The undercurve was scabbed and warted by sensors, latching pods and what he took to be various sorts of weapon. Two particle-beam muzzles jutted from the front like hinged venom fangs, and the ship’s entire skin was mosaiced with irregular scales of ceramic armour, shimmering green and black.

‘This will get us there and back?’ Thorn had asked.

‘It will,’ Vuilleumier had assured him. ‘It’s the fastest ship here, and probably the one with the smallest sensor footprint. Light armour, though, and the weapons are more for show than anything else. You want something better armoured, we’ll take it — just don’t complain if it’s slow and easily tracked.’

‘I’ll let you be the judge.’

‘This is very foolish, Thorn. There’s still time to chicken out.’

‘It isn’t a question of foolishness or otherwise, Inquisitor.’ He could not snap out of the habit of calling her that. ‘I simply won’t co-operate until I know that this threat is real. Until I can verify that for myself — with my own eyes, and not through a screen –1 won’t be able to trust you.’

‘Why would we lie to you?’

‘I don’t know, but you are, I think.’ He had studied her carefully, their eyes meeting, he holding her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. ‘About something. I’m not sure what, but neither of you are being totally honest with me. Yet some of the time you are, and that’s the part I don’t fully understand.’

‘All we want to do is save the people of Resurgam.’

‘I know. I believe that part, I really do.’

They had taken the snake-headed ship, leaving Irina back aboard the larger vessel. The departure had been rapid, and though he had done his best, Thorn had not been able to sneak a look backwards. He had still not seen Nostalgia for Infinity from the outside, not even on the approach from Resurgam. Why, he wondered, would the two of them go to such lengths to hide the outside of their ship? Perhaps he was just imagining it, and he would get that view on the way back.

‘You can take the ship yourself,’ Irina had told him. ‘It doesn’t need flying. We can program a trajectory into it and let the autonomics handle any contingency. Just tell us how close you want to get to the Inhibitors.’

‘It doesn’t have to be close. A few tens of thousands of kilometres should be good enough. I’ll be able to see that arc, if it’s bright enough, and probably the tubes that are being dropped into the atmosphere. But I’m not going out there on my own. If you want me badly enough, one of you can come with me. That way I’ll know it really isn’t a trap, won’t I?’

‘I’ll go with him,’ Vuilleumier had offered.

Irina had shrugged. ‘It’s been nice knowing you.’

The trip out had been uneventful. As on the journey from Resurgam, they had spent the boring part of it asleep — not in reefersleep, but in a dreamless drug-induced coma.

Vuilleumier did not wake them until they were within half a light-second of the giant. Thorn awoke with a vague sense of irritation, a bad taste in his mouth and various aches and pains where there had been none before.

‘Well, the good news is that we’re still alive, Thorn. The Inhibitors either don’t know we’re here, or they just don’t care.’

‘Why wouldn’t they care?’

‘They must know from experience that we can’t offer them any real trouble. In a little while we’ll all be dead, so why worry about one or two of us now?’

He frowned. ‘Experience?’

‘It’s in their collective memory, Thorn. We’re not the first species they’ve done this to. The success rate must be pretty high, or else they’d revise the strategy.’

They were in free-fall. Thorn unhitched from his seat, tugging aside the acceleration webbing, and kicked over to one of the slitlike windows. He felt a little better now. He could see the gas giant very clearly, and it did not look like a well planet.

The first things that he noticed were the three great matter streams curving in from elsewhere in the system. They twinkled palely in the light from Delta Pavonis, thin ribbons of translucent grey like great ghostly brushstrokes daubed across the sky, flat to the ecliptic and sweeping away to infinity. The flow of matter along the streams was just tangible, as one boulder or another caught the sun for an instant; it was a fine-grained creep that reminded Thorn of the sluggish currents in a river on the point of freezing. The matter was travelling at hundreds of kilometres per second, but the sheer immensity of the scene rendered even that speed glacial. The streams themselves were many, many kilometres wide. They were, he supposed, like planetary rings that had been unwound.

His gaze followed the streams to their conclusions. Near the gas giant, the smooth mathematical curves — arcs describing orbital trajectories — were curtailed by abrupt hairpins or doglegs as the streams were routed to particular moons. It was as if the artist painting the elegant swathes had been jolted at the last instant. The orientation of the moons with respect to the arriving streams was changing by the hour, of course, so the stream geometries were themselves subject to constant revision. Now and then a stream would have to be dammed back,