Felka went back to her game, ignoring the two of them. Skade issued the coded sequence of neural commands that would make the Exordium machinery initiate coherence coupling. ‘It’s starting, Wolf.’ ‘I know. I can feel it, too.’ Felka looked up from her game. Skade sensed herself become plural. From out of the sea fog, from a direction she could neither describe nor point to, came a feeling of something receding into vast, chill distance, like a white corridor reaching to the bleak edge of eternity. The hairs on the back of Skade’s neck prickled. She knew that there was something profoundly wrong about what she was doing. The pre- monitionary sense of evil was quite tangible. But she had to stand her ground and do what had to be done. Like the Wolf said, fears had to be faced. Skade listened intently. She thought she heard voices whispering down the corridor. ‘Beast?’ ‘Yes, Little Miss?’ ‘Have you been completely honest with me?’ ‘Why would one have been anything other than honest, Little Miss?’ ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering, Beast.’ Antoinette was alone on the lower flight deck of Storm Bird . Her freighter was locked in a loom of heavy repair scaffolding in one of Zodiacal Light’s shuttle bays, braced to withstand even the increased acceleration rate of the light-hugger. The freighter had been here ever since they had taken the lighthugger, the damage it had sustained painstakingly being put right under Xavier’s expert direction. Xavier had relied on hyperpigs and shipboard servitors to help him do the work, and at first the repairs had gone more slowly than they would have with a fully trained monkey workforce. But although they had some dexterity problems, the pigs were ultimately cleverer than hyperprimates, and once the initial difficulties had been overcome and the servitors programmed properly, the work had gone very well. Xavier hadn’t just repaired the hull; he had completely re-armoured it. The engines, from docking thrusters right up to the main tokamak fusion powerplant, had been overhauled and tweaked for improved performance. The deterrents, the many weapons buried in camouflaged hideaways around the ship, had been upgraded and linked into an integrated weapons command net. There was no point pussyfooting now, Xavier had said. They had no reason to pretend that Storm Bird was just a freighter any more. Where they were headed, there would be no nosey authorities to hide anything from. But once the acceleration rate had increased and they all had to either stay still or submit to the use of awkward, bulky exoskeletons, Antoinette had made fewer visits to her ship. It was not just that the work was nearly done, and there was nothing for her to supervise; there was something else that kept her away. She supposed that on some level she had always had her suspicions. There had been times when she felt that she was not alone on Storm Bird; that Beast’s vigilance extended to more than just the mindless watchful scrutiny of a gamma- level persona. That there had been something more to him. But that would have meant that Xavier — and her father — had lied to her. And that was something she was not prepared to deal with. Until now. During a brief lull when the acceleration was throttled back for technical checks, Antoinette had boarded Storm Bird . Out of sheer curiosity, expecting the information to have been erased from the ship’s archives, she had looked for herself to see whether they had anything to say on the matter of the Mandelstam Ruling. They had, too. But even if they hadn’t, she thought she would have guessed. The doubts had begun to surface properly after the whole business with Clavain had started. There had been the time when Beast jumped the gun during the banshee attack, exactly as if her ship had ‘panicked’, except that for a gamma-level intelligence that was simply not possible. Then there had been time when the police proxy, the one that was now counting out the rest of its life in a dank cellar in the Chateau, had quizzed her on her father’s relationship with Lyle Merrick. The proxy had mentioned the Mandelstam Ruling. It had meant nothing to her at the time. But now she knew. Then there had been the time when Beast had inadvertently referred to itself as T, as if a scrupulously maintained facade had just, for the tiniest of moments, slipped aside. As if she had glimpsed the true face of something. ‘Little Miss… ?’ ‘I know.’ ‘Know what, Little Miss?’ ‘What you are. Who you are.’ ‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but…’ ‘Shut the fuck up.’ ‘Little Miss… if one might…’ ‘I said shut the fuck up.’ Antoinette hit the panel of the flight deck console with the heel of her hand. It was the closest thing she could find to hitting Beast, and for a moment she felt a warm glow of retribution. ‘I know all about what happened. I found out about the Mandelstam Ruling.’ ‘The Mandelstam Ruling, Little Miss?’ ‘Don’t sound so fucking innocent. I know you know all about it. It’s the law they passed just before you died. The one about irreversible neural death sentences.’ ‘Irreversible neural death, Little…’ The one that says that the authorities — the Ferrisville Convention — have the right to impound and erase any beta– or alpha-level copies of someone sentenced to permanent death. It says that no matter how many backups of yourself you make, no matter whether they’re simulacra or genuine neural scans, the authorities get to round them up and wipe them out.‘ ‘That sounds rather extreme, Little Miss.’ ‘It does, doesn’t it? And they take it seriously, too. Anyone caught harbouring a copy of a sentenced felon is in just as much trouble themselves. Of course, there are loopholes — a simulation can be hidden almost anywhere, or beamed to somewhere beyond Ferrisville jurisdiction. But there are still risks. I checked, Beast. The authorities have caught people who sheltered copies, against the Mandelstam Ruling. They all got the death sentence, too.’ ‘It would seem a rather cavalier thing to do.’ She smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it just? But what if you didn’t even know you were sheltering one? How would that change the equation?’ ‘One hesitates to speculate.’ ‘I doubt it would change the equation one fucking inch. Not where the cops are concerned. Which would make it all the more irresponsible, don’t you think, for someone to trick someone else into harbouring an illegal simulation?’ ‘Trick, Little Miss?’
