angry with the man who had just saved her. ‘No. You don’t understand. I mean it is exactly what Galiana would want you to do. I know , Clavain. I touched her mind again, when we met the Wolf.’ ‘There’s no part of Galiana still there, Felka.’ ‘There is. The Wolf did its best to hide her, but… I could sense her.’ She looked into his face, studying its ancient, latent mysteries. Of all the faces she knew, this was the one she had the least trouble recognising, but what exactly did that mean? Were they united by anything more than contingency, circumstance and shared history? She remembered how she had lied to Clavain about being his daughter. Nothing in his mood suggested that he had learned of that lie. ‘Felka ‘Listen to me, Clavain.’ She clasped his hand, squeezing it to demand his attention, ‘Listen to me. I never told you this before because it disturbed me too much. But in the Exordium experiments, I became aware of a mind reaching towards mine, from the future. I sensed unspeakable evil. But I also sensed something that I recognised. It was Galiana.’ ‘No…’ Clavain said. She squeezed his hand harder. ‘It’s the truth. But it wasn’t her fault. I see it now. It was her mind, after the Wolf had taken her over. Skade allowed the Wolf to participate in the experiments. She needed its advice about the machinery.’ Clavain shook his head. ‘The Wolf would never have collaborated with Skade.’ ‘But it did. She convinced it that it needed to help her. That way she would recover the weapons, not you.’ ‘How would that benefit the Wolf?’ ‘It wouldn’t. But it was better that the weapons be seized by an agency that the Wolf had some influence over, rather than a third party like yourself. So it agreed to help her, knowing that it could always find a way to destroy the weapons once they were close at hand. I was there, Clavain, in its domain.’ ‘The Wolf allowed that?’ ‘It demanded it. Or rather, the part of it that was still Galiana did.’ Felka paused. She knew how difficult this must be for Clavain. It was agonising for her, and yet Galiana had meant even more to Clavain. ‘Then there would have to be a part of Galiana that still remembers us, is that what you mean? A part that still remembers what it was like before?’ ‘She still remembers, Clavain. She still remembers, and she still feels.’ Again Felka paused, knowing that this was going to be the hardest part of all. ‘That’s why you have to do it.’ ‘Do what?’ ‘What you always planned to do before Skade told you that she had Galiana. You have to destroy the Wolf.’ Again she looked into his face, marvelling at its age, feeling sorrow for what she was doing to him. ‘You have to destroy the ship.’ ‘But if I do that,’ Clavain said suddenly and excitedly, as if he had spotted a fatal flaw in Felka’s argument, ‘I’ll kill Galiana.’ ‘I know,’ Felka said. ‘I know. But you still have to do it.’ ‘You can’t know that.’ ‘I can, and I do. I felt her, Clavain. I felt her willing you to do this.’ He watched it alone and in silence, from the vantage point of the observation cupola near Zodiacal Lights prow. He had given instructions that he was to remain undisturbed until he made himself available again, even though that might mean many hours of solitude. After forty-five minutes his eyes had become highly dark-adapted. He stared into the sea of endless night behind his ship, waiting for the sign that the work was done. The occasional cosmic ray scratched a false trail across his vision, but he knew that the signature of the event would be different and impossible to mistake. Against that darkness, too, it would be unmissable. It grew from the heart of blackness: a blue-white glint that flared to its maximum brightness over the course of three or four seconds, and then declined slowly, ramping down through spectral shades of red and rust-brown. It burned a vivid hole into his vision, a searing violet dot that remained even when he closed his eyes. He had destroyed Nightshade . Skade, despite her best efforts, had not located all the demolition charges that they had glued to her ship. And because they were pinheads, it had only taken one to do the necessary work. The demolition charge had merely been the initiator for the much larger cascade of detonations: first the antimatter-fuelled and –tipped warheads, and then the Conjoiner drives themselves. It would have been instantaneous, and there would have been no warning. He thought of Galiana, too. Skade had assumed that he would never attack the ship once he knew or even suspected that she was aboard. And perhaps Skade had been right, too. But Felka had convinced him that it had to be done. She alone had touched Galiana’s mind and felt the agony of the Wolf’s presence. She alone had been able to convey that single, simple message back to Clavain. Kill me. And so he had. He started weeping as the full realisation of what he had done hit home. There had always been the tiniest possibility that she could be made well again. He had, he supposed, never fully come to terms with her absence because that tiny hope had always made it possible to deny the fact of her death. But no such succour was possible now. He had killed the thing he most loved in the universe. Clavain began to weep, silently and alone. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry … He felt her approaching the monstrosity that he had become. Through senses that had no precise human analogue, the Captain became aware of the blunt metallic presence of Volyova’s shuttle sidling close to him. She did not think that his omniscience was this total, he knew. In the many conversations that they had enjoyed he had learned that she still viewed him as a prisoner of Nostalgia for Infinity , albeit a prisoner who had in some sense merged with the fabric of his prison. And yet Ilia had assiduously mapped and catalogued the nerve bundles of his new, vastly enlarged anatomy, tracing the way they interfaced with and infiltrated the ship’s old cybernetic network. She must be fully aware, on an analytical level, that there was no point in distinguishing between the prison and the prisoner any more. Yet she appeared unable to make that last mental leap, unable to cease viewing him as something inside the ship. It was, perhaps, just too violent a readjustment of their old relationship. He could not blame her for that final failure of imagination. He would have had grave difficulties with it himself had the tables been reversed. The Captain felt the shuttle intrude into him. It was an indescribable sensation, really: as if a stone had been pushed through his skin, painlessly, into a neat hole in
