He saw stars themselves dying, poisoned so that they shone too hot or too cold, or ripped apart in a dozen different ways. He saw ships detonating in interstellar space, when they imagined they were safe from harm. He heard a panicked chorus of human radio and laser transmissions that was at first a multitude, but which thinned out to a handful of desperate lone voices, which were themselves silenced one by one. Then he heard only the mindless warbling of machine transmissions, and even those began to fall silent as humanity’s last defences crumbled. The cleansing was spread across a volume many dozens of light-years wide. It took many decades to complete, but it was over in a flash compared with the slow grind of galactic history. And all around, orchestrating this cleansing, he sensed dim, ruthless sentience. It was an ensemble of machine minds, most of which hovered just beneath the threshold of consciousness. They were old, older than the youngest stars, and they were expert only in the art of extinction. Nothing else concerned them. ‘How far in the future is this?’ he asked Skade. ‘It’s already begun. We just don’t know it yet. But within half a century the wolves reach the core colonies, those closest to the First System. Within a century, the human race consists of a few huddling groups too afraid to travel or attempt any communication with each other.’ ‘And the Conjoiners?’ ‘We’re amongst them but just as vulnerable, just as predated. No Mother Nest remains. Conjoiner nests in some systems have been wiped out completely. That’s when they send the message back in time.’ He absorbed what she had said and nodded guardedly, prepared to accept it for the time being. ‘How did they do it?’ ‘Galiana’s Exordium experiments,’ Skade’s decorporated head answered. ‘She explored the linkage of human minds with coherent quantum states. But matter in a state of quantum superposition is entangled, in a ghostly sense, with every particle that has ever existed, or ever will exist. Her experiments were only intended to explore new modes of parallel consciousness, but she opened a window to the future, too. The conduit was imperfect, so that only faint echoes reached back to Mars. And every message sent through the channel increased the background noise. The conduit had a finite information capacity, you see. Exordium was a precious resource that could only be used at times of extreme crisis.’ Clavain felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. ‘Our history’s already been changed, hasn’t it?’ ‘Galiana learned enough to make the first star ship drive. It was a question of energy, Clavain, and the manipulation of quantum wormholes. At the heart of a Conjoiner drive is one end of a microscopic wormhole. The other end is anchored fifteen billion years in the past, sucking energy out of the quark-gluon plasma of the primordial fireball. Of course, the same technology can be applied to the manufacturing of doomsday weapons.’ ‘The hell-class weapons,’ he said. Tn our original history we had neither of these advantages. We did not achieve starflight until a century later than the Sandra Voi’s first flight. Our ships were slow, heavy, fragile, incapable of reaching more than a fifth of light-speed. The human expansion was necessarily retarded. In four hundred years only a handful of systems were successfully settled. Yet still we attracted the wolves, even in that timeline. The cleansing was brutally efficient. This version of history — the one you have known — was an attempt at an improvement. The pace of human expansion was quickened and we were given better weapons to deal with the threat once it arose.‘ ‘I see now,’ Clavain said, ‘why the hell-class weapons couldn’t be made again. Once Galiana had been shown how to make them, she destroyed the knowledge.’ ‘They were a gift from the future,’ she said pridefully. ‘A gift from our future selves.’ ‘And now?’ ‘Even in this timeline decimation happened. Again the wolves were alerted to our emergence. And it turned out that the drives were easy for them to track, across light-years of space.’ ‘So our future selves tried another tweak.’ ‘Yes. This time they reached back only into the recent past, intervening much later in Conjoiner history. The first message was an edict warning us to stop using Conjoiner drives. That was why we stopped shipbuilding a century ago. Later, we were given clues that enabled us to build stealthed drives of the kind Nightshade carries. The Demarchists thought we had built her to gain a tactical advantage over them in the war. In fact, she was designed to be our first weapon against the wolves. Later, we were given information regarding the construction of inertia-suppressing machinery. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sent to the Chateau to obtain the fragments of alien technology which would enable us to assemble the prototype inertia-suppressing machine.’ ‘And now?’ She answered him with a smile. ‘We’ve been given another chance. This time, flight is the only viable solution. The Conjoiners must leave this volume of space before the wolves arrive en masse .’ ‘Run away, you mean?’ ‘Not really your style, is it, Clavain? But sometimes it’s the only response that makes any sense. Later, we can consider a return — even a confrontation with the wolves. Other species have failed, but we are different, I think. We have already had the nerve to alter our past.’ ‘What makes you think the other poor suckers didn’t try it as well?’ ‘Clavain…’ It was Scorpio. ‘We really need to be out of here, now.’ ‘Skade… you’ve shown me enough,’ Clavain said. ‘I accept that you believe you are acting justly.’ ‘And yet you still think I am the puppet of some mysterious agency?’ ‘I don’t know, Skade. I certainly haven’t ruled it out.’ I serve only the Mother Nest.‘ ‘Fine.’ He nodded, sensing that no matter what the truth was Skade believed that she was acting correctly. ‘Now give me Felka and I’ll leave.’ ‘Will you destroy me once you have left?’ He doubted that she knew of the pinhead charges he and Scorpio had deployed. He said, ‘What will happen to you, Skade, if I leave you here, drifting? Can you repair your ship?’ ‘I don’t need to. The other craft are not far behind me. They are your real enemy, Clavain. Vastly better armed than Nightshade , and yet just as nimble and difficult to detect.’ ‘That still doesn’t mean I’d be better off not killing you.’ Skade turned around and raised her voice. ‘Bring Felka here.’ Half a minute later, two other Conjoiners appeared
