Alastiar Reynolds

emotional state. Remontoire was not exactly thrilled either.
As Closed Council members, it would have been unthinkable for either of them to do anything as dangerous as board a captured enemy ship. They were taking enough of a risk by leaving the Mother Nest. Many of the other Conjoiners, Skade included, wanted him to join the Closed Council, where they could tap his wisdom more efficiently and keep him out of harm’s way. With her authority in the Council, Skade could make life awkward for him if he persisted in remaining outside, relegating him to token duties or even some kind of miserable forced retirement. There were other avenues of punishment and Clavain took none of them lightly. He had even begun to consider the possibility that perhaps he should join the Closed Council after all. At least he would learn some answers that way, and perhaps begin to exert influence over the aggressors.
But until he took a bite of that apple he was still a soldier. No restrictions applied to him, and he was damned if he was going to act as if they did.
He continued with the business of readying his suit. For a time, a good two or three centuries, that process had been much easier and quicker. You donned a mask and some communications gear and then stepped through a membrane of smart matter stretched over a door that was otherwise open to vacuum. As you went through it, a layer of the membrane slithered around you, forming an instant skintight suit. Upon your return, you stepped through the same membrane and your suit returned to it, oozing off like enchanted slime. It made the act of stepping outside a ship about as complex as slipping on a pair of sunglasses. Of course, such technologies had never made much sense in wartime — too vulnerable to attack — and they made even less sense in the post-plague era, when only the hardiest forms of nanotechnology could be deployed in sensitive applications.
Clavain supposed that he should have been irritated at the extra effort that was now needed. But in many ways he found the act of suiting-up — the martial donning of armour plating, the rigorous subsystem criticality checks, the buckling-on of weapons and sensors — to be strangely reassuring. Perhaps it was because the ritualistic nature of the exercise felt like a series of superstitious gestures against illfortune. Or perhaps it was because it reminded him of what things had been like during his youth.
He left the airlock, kicking off towards the enemy ship. The claw-shaped craft was bright against one dark limb of the gas giant. It was damaged, certainly, but there had been no outgassing to suggest a loss of hull integrity. There had even been a chance of a survivor. Although the infra-red scans had been inconclusive, laser-ranging devices had detected slight back-and-forth movement of the entire ship. There could be any number of explanations for that movement, but the most obvious was the presence of at least one person still moving around inside, kicking off from the hull now and then. But the scarabs hadn’t found any survivors, and neither had his sweep team.
Something caught his eye: a writhing pale green filament of lightning in the dark crescent of the gas giant. He had barely given the freighter a second thought since the Demarchist vessel had emerged, but Antoinette Bax’s ship had never emerged from the atmosphere. In all likelihood she was dead, killed in one of the several thousand ways it was possible to die in an atmosphere. He had no idea what she had been doing, and doubted that it would have been anything he would have approved of. But she had been alone — hadn’t she? — and that was no way to die in space. Clavain remembered the way she had ignored the shipmaster’s warning and realised that he rather admired her for it. Whatever else she had been, he could not deny that she had been brave.
He thudded into contact with the enemy ship, absorbing the impact by bending his knees. Clavain stood up, his soles adhering to the hull. Holding a hand against his visor to cut down sun glare, he turned back to look at Nightshade , relishing the rare opportunity to see his ship from the outside. Nightshade was so dark that at first he had trouble making it out. Then his implants boxed it in with a pulsing green overlay, scale and distance annotated by red gradations and numerals. The ship was a lighthugger, with interstellar capability. Nightshade’s slender hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow, streamlined for maximum near-light cruise efficiency. Braced near the thickest point of the hull, just before it retapered to a blunt tail, was a pair of engines, thrown out from the hull on slender spars. They were what the other human factions called Conjoiner drives, for the simple reason that the Conjoiners had a monopoly on their construction and distribution. For centuries the Conjoiners had allowed the Demarchists, Ultras and other starfaring factions to use the technology, while never once hinting at the mysterious physical processes that allowed the tamperproof engines to function in the first place.
But all that had changed a century ago. Practically overnight, the Conjoiners had ceased production of their engines. No explanation had been given, nor any promise that production would ever be resumed.
From that moment on, the existing Conjoiner drives became astonishingly valuable. Terrible acts of piracy were waged over issues of ownership. The event had certainly been one of the contributing causes of the current war.
Clavain knew there were rumours that the Conjoiners had continued building the engines for their own uses. He also knew, as far as he could be certain of anything, that these rumours were false. The edict to cease production had been immediate and universal. More than that, there had been a sharp decline in the use of existing ships, even by his own faction. But what Clavain did not know was why the edict had been issued in the first place. He guessed that it had originated in the Closed Council, but beyond that he had no idea why it had been deemed necessary.
And yet now the Closed Council had made Nightshade . Clavain had been entrusted with the prototype on this proving mission, but the Closed Council had revealed few of its secrets. Remontoire and Skade evidently knew more than he did, and he was willing to bet that Skade knew even more than Remontoire. Skade had spent most of the trip hidden away somewhere, presumably tending some ultra-secret military hardware. Clavain’s efforts to find out what she was up to had all drawn a blank.
And he still had no idea why the Closed Council had sanctioned the building of a new starship. This late in the war, against an enemy that was already in retreat, what sense did it make? If he joined the Council he might not get all the answers he wanted — he would still not have penetrated the Inner Sanctum — but he would be a lot closer than he was now.
It almost sounded tempting.
Disgusted at the ease with which he had been manipulated by Skade and the others, Clavain turned from the view, the overlay vanishing as he made his cautious way to the entry point.
Soon he was inside the bowels of the Demarchist vessel, passing along ducts and tubes that would not normally have held air. Clavain requested an intelligence upload on the design of the ship and imagined a faint tickle as the knowledge appeared in his head. There was an instant eerie sense of familiarity, like a sustained episode of déjà vu . He arrived at an airlock, finding it a tight fit in his cumbersome armoured suit. Clavain sealed the hatch behind him, air roared in, and then the inner door allowed him to pass through into the pressurised part of the ship. His overwhelming impression was of darkness, but then his helmet clicked into high-sensitivity mode, dropping infra- red and sonar overlays across his normal visual field.
note 54
One of the sweep-team members was waiting for him. Clavain angled himself so that his face was aligned with the woman’s and then hitched himself against the interior wall.
What have you found?
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Every last one of them?