Redemption Ark

the flow stopped while another intersected it. Or perhaps it was done with astonishingly tight timing, so that the streams passed through each other without any of the constituent masses actually colliding.

‘We don’t know how they steer them like that,’ Vuilleumier told him, her voice low and confidential. ‘There’s a lot of momentum in those streams, mass fluxes of billions of tonnes a second. Yet they change direction easily. Maybe they’ve got tiny little black holes positioned up there, so they can slingshot the streams around them. That’s what Irina thinks, anyway. Scares the hell out of me, I can tell you. Although she thinks they might also be able to turn off inertia when they need to, so they can make the streams swerve like that.’

‘That doesn’t sound much more encouraging.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But even if they can do that to inertia, or make black holes to order, they obviously can’t do it on a huge scale or we’d be dead already. They have their limitations. We have to believe that.’

The moons, a few dozen kilometres wide, were visible as tight knots of light, barbs on the ends of the infailing streams. The matter plunged into each moon through a mouthlike aperture, perpendicular to the plane of orbital motion. By rights, the unbalanced mass flux should have been forcing each moon into a new orbit. Nothing like that was happening, which suggested that, again, the normal laws of momentum conservation were being suppressed, or ignored, or put on hold until some later reckoning.

The outermost moon was laying the arc that would eventually enclose the gas giant. When Thorn had seen it from Nostalgia for Infinity it had been possible to believe that it was never destined for closure. No such assurance was possible now. The ends had continued moving outwards from the moon, the tube being extruded at a rate of a thousand kilometres every four hours. It was emerging as quickly as an express train, an avalanche of super-organised matter.

It was not magic, just industry. Thorn reminded himself of that, difficult as it was to believe it. Within the moon, mechanisms hidden beneath its icy crust were processing the incoming matter stream at demonic speed, forging the unguessable components that formed the thirteen-kilometre-wide tube. The two women had not speculated in his presence about whether the tube was solid or hollow or crammed with twinkling alien clockwork.

But it was not magic. Physical laws as Thorn understood them might be melting like toffee in the vicinity of the Inhibitor engines, but that was only because they were not the ultimate laws they appeared to be, rather mere statutes or regulations to be adhered to most of the time but broken under duress. Yet even the Inhibitors were constrained to some degree. They could work wonders, but not the impossible. They needed matter, for instance. They could work it with astonishing speed, but they could not, on the evidence gleaned so far, conjure it from nothing. It had been necessary to shatter three worlds to fuel this inferno of creativity.

And whatever they were doing, vast though it was, was necessarily slow. The arc had to be grown around the planet at a mere two hundred and eighty metres a second; it could not be created instantly. The machines were mighty, but not Godlike.

That was, Thorn decided, about all the consolation they were going to get.

He turned his attention to the two lower moons. The Inhibitors had moved them into perfectly circular orbits just above the cloud layer. Their orbits intersected periodically, but the slow, diligent cable-laying continued unabated.

This part of the process was much clearer now. Thorn could see the elegant curves of the extruded tubes emerging whip-straight from the trailing face of each moon, before flexing down towards the cloud deck. Several thousand kilometres aft of each moon, the tubes plunged into the atmosphere like syringes. The tubes were moving with orbital speed when they touched air — many kilometres per second — and they gouged livid claw marks into the atmosphere. There was a thin band of agitated rust-red immediately beneath the track of each moon which reached two or three times around the planet, each pass offset from the previous one because of the gas giant’s rotation. The two moons were etching a complex geometric pattern into the shifting clouds, a pattern that resembled an extravagant calligraphic flourish. On some level Thorn appreciated that it was beautiful, but it was also quietly sickening. Something atrocious and final was surely going to happen to the planet. The calligraphic marks were elaborate funerary rites for a dying world.

‘I take it you believe us now,’ Vuilleumier said.

‘I’m inclined to,’ Thorn said. He rapped the window. ‘I suppose this might not be glass, as it appears, but some three-dimensional screen… but I don’t think I’ll presume that much ingenuity on your behalf. Even if I went outside in a suit, to look at it for myself, I wouldn’t be certain that the faceplate was glass either.’

‘You’re a suspicious man.’

‘I’ve learned that it helps one get by.’ Thorn returned to his seat, having seen enough for the moment. ‘All right. Next question. What’s going on down there? What are they up to?’

‘It’s not necessary to know, Thorn. The fact that something bad is going to happen is information enough.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Those machines…’ Vuilleumier gestured at the window. ‘We know what they do, but not how they do it. They wipe out cultures, slowly and painstakingly. Sylveste brought them here — unwittingly, perhaps, although I wouldn’t take anything as read where that bastard’s concerned — and now they’ve come to do the job. That’s all you or any of us need to know. We just have to get everyone away from here as quickly as possible.’

‘If these machines are as efficient as you say, that won’t do us a great deal of good, will it?’

‘It’ll buy us time,’ she said. ‘And there’s something else. The machines are efficient, but they’re not quite as efficient as they used to be.’

‘You told me they were self-replicating machines. Why would they become less efficient? If anything they should keep getting cleverer and faster as they learn more and more.’

‘Whoever made them didn’t want them to get too clever. The Inhibitors created the machines to wipe out emergent intelligence. It wouldn’t have made much sense if the machines filled the niche they were supposed to be keeping empty.’

I suppose not…‘ Thorn was not going to let it lie that easily. ’There’s more you have to tell me, I think. But in the meantime I want to get closer.‘

‘How much closer?’ she asked guardedly.

‘This ship’s streamlined. It can take atmosphere, I think.’

‘That wasn’t in the agreement.’

‘So sue me.’ He grinned. ‘I’m naturally inquisitive, just like you.’

Scorpio came to cold, clammy consciousness, shivering uncontrollably. He pawed at himself, peeling a glistening layer of fatty gel from his naked skin. It came away in revolting semitranslucent scabs, slurping as it detached from the underlying flesh. He was careful with the area around the burn scar on his right shoulder, fingering its perimeter with tentative fascination. There was no inch of the burn that he did not know intimately, but in touching it, tracing the wrinkled topology of its shoreline where smooth pig flesh changed to something with the leathery texture of cured meat, he was reminded of the duty that was his and his alone, the duty that he had set himself since escaping from Quail. He must never forget Quail, and nor must he forget that — as altered as the man had been — Quail was fully human in the genetic sense, and that it was humans who had to bear the brunt of Scorpio’s retribution.

There was no pain now, not even from the burn, but there was discomfort and disorientation. His ears roared continually, as if he had his head shoved up a ventilation duct. His vision was blurred, revealing little more than vague amorphic shapes. Scorpio reached up and peeled more of the transparent gel from his face. He blinked. Things were clearer now, but the roaring remained. He looked around, still shivering and cold, but alert enough to take note of where he was and what was happening to him.

He had awakened inside one half of what appeared to be a cracked metal egg, curled in an unnatural foetal position with his lower half still immersed in the revolting mucous gel. Plastic pipes and connectors lay around him. His throat and nasal passages were sore, as if the pipes had recently been shoved into him. They did not appear to have been removed with the utmost care. The other half of the metal egg lay just to one side, as if the two halves had only recently been disunited. Beyond it, and all around, was the instantly identifiable interior of a spacecraft: all polished blue metal and curved, perforated struts that reminded him of ribs. The roar in his ears was the sound of thrust. The ship was travelling somewhere, and the fact that he could hear the motors told him that the ship was probably a small one, not large enough for force-cradled engines. A shuttle, then, or something similar. Definitely