machine sentries. That was the answer. But it did not explain why they did it. ‘But why?’ she asked the Wolf. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to act the way you do. If you hate life so much, why not end it once and for all?’ ‘For good?’ The Wolf appeared amused, curious about her speculations. ‘You could poison every world in the galaxy or smash every world apart. It’s as if you don’t have the courage to finally finish life for good.’ There was a slow, avalanche-like sigh of pebbles. ‘It isn’t about ending intelligent life,’ the Wolf said. ‘No?’ ‘It is about the exact opposite, Felka. It is about life’s preservation. We are life’s keepers, steering life through its greatest crisis.’ ‘But you murder. You kill entire cultures.’ The Wolf shifted in and out of vision. Its voice, when it answered, was tauntingly similar to Galiana’s. ‘Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, Felka.’ No one saw much of Clavain after Galiana’s death. There was an unspoken understanding amongst his crew, one that percolated right down through to the lowliest ranks of Scorpio’s army, that he was not to be disturbed by anything except the gravest of problems: matters of extreme shipwide urgency, nothing less. It remained unclear whether this edict had come from Clavain himself, or was simply something that had been assumed by his immediate deputies. Very probably it was a combination of the two. He became a shadowy figure, occasionally seen but seldom heard, a ghost stalking Zodiacal Light’s corridors in the hours when the rest of the ship was asleep. Occasionally, when the ship was under high gravity, they heard the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of his exoskeleton on the deck plates as he traversed a corridor above them. But Clavain himself was an elusive figure. It was said that he spent long hours in the observation cupola, staring into the blackness behind them, transfixed by the starless wake. Those who saw him remarked that he looked much older than at the start of the voyage, as if in some way he remained anchored to the faster flow of world-time, rather than the dilated time that passed aboard the ship. It was said that he looked like a man who had given up on the living, and was now only going through the burdensome motions of completing some final duty. It was recognised, without the details necessarily being understood, that Clavain had been forced into making a dreadful personal decision. Some of the crewmembers grasped that Galiana had already ‘died’ long before, and that what had happened now was only the drawing of a line beneath that event. But it was, as others appreciated, much worse than that. Galiana’s earlier death had only ever been provisional. The Conjoiners had kept her frozen, thinking that she could at some point be cleansed of the Wolf. The likelihood of that happening must have been small, but at the back of Clavain’s mind there must have remained the ghost of a hope that the Galiana he had loved since that ancient meeting on Mars could be brought back to him, healed and renewed. But now he had personally removed that possibility for ever. It was said that a large factor in his decision had been Felka’s persuasion, but it was still Clavain who had made the final choice; it was he who carried the blood of that merciful execution on his hands. Clavain’s withdrawal was less serious to ship affairs than it might have appeared; he had already abrogated much of the responsibility to others, so that the battle preparations continued smoothly and efficiently without his day-to-day intervention. Mechanical production lines were now running at full capacity, spewing out weapons and armour. Zodiacal Light’s hull bristled with antiship armaments. As training regimes honed the battalions of Scorpio’s army into savagely efficient units, they began to realise how much their previous successes had been down to good fortune, but that would certainly not be the case in the future. They might fail, but it would not be because of any lack of tactical preparation or discipline. With Skade’s ship destroyed, they had less need to worry about an attack while they were en route . Deep-look scans confirmed that there were other Conjoiner ships behind them, but they could only match Zodiacal Light’s acceleration, not exceed it. It appeared that no one was willing to attempt another state-four transition after what had happened to Nightshade . Halfway to Resurgam, the ship had switched into deceleration mode, thrusting in the direction of flight, which immediately made it a harder target for the pursuing craft since they no longer had a relativistically boosted exhaust beam to lock on to. The risk of attack had dropped even further, leaving the crew free to concentrate on the mission’s primary objective. Data from the approaching system became steadily more comprehensive, too, focusing minds on the specifics of the recovery operation. It was clear that something very odd was happening around Delta Pavonis. Scans of the planetary system showed the inexplicable omission of three moderately large terrestrial bodies, as if they had simply been deleted from existence. More worrying still was what had replaced the system’s major gas giant: only a remnant of the giant’s metallic core now remained, enveloped in a skein of liberated matter many dozens of times wider than the original planet. There were hints of an immense mechanism that had been used to spin the planet apart: arcs and cusps and coils that were in the process of being dismantled and retransformed into new machinery. And at the heart of the cloud was something even larger than those subsidiary components: a two-thousand-kilometre-wide engine that could not possibly be of human origin. Remontoire had helped Clavain build sensors to pick up the neutrino signatures of the hell-class weapons. As they had neared the system they had established that thirty-three of the weapons were in essentially the same place, while six more were dormant, waiting in a wide orbit around the neutron star Hades. One weapon was unaccounted for, but Clavain had known about that before he left the Mother Nest. More detailed scans, which became possible only when they had slowed to within a quarter of a light-year of their destination, showed that the thirty-three weapons were almost certainly aboard a ship of the same basic type as Zodiacal Light , probably stuffed into a major storage bay. The ship — it had to be the Triumvir’s vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity — hovered in interplanetary space, orbiting Delta Pavonis at the Lagrange point between the star and Resurgam. Now, finally, they had some measure of their adversary. But what of Resurgam itself? There was no radio or other EM-band traffic coming from the system’s sole inhabited planet, but the colony had clearly not failed. Analysis of the atmosphere’s constituent gases revealed ongoing terraforming activity, with sizeable expanses of water now visible on the surface. The icecaps had withered back towards the poles. The air was warmer and wetter than it had been in nearly a million years. The infra-red signatures of surface flora matched the patterns expected from terran genestock, modified for cold, dry, low-oxygen survivability. Hot thermal blotches showed the sites of large brute-force atmospheric reprocessors. Refined metals indicated intense surface industrialisation. At extreme magnification, there were even the suggestions of roads or pipelines, and the occasional moving echo of a fat transatmospheric cargo vehicle, like a dirigible. The planet was certainly inhabited, even now. But whoever was down there was not much interested in communicating with the outside world. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Scorpio told Clavain. ‘You came here to take the weapons, that’s all. There’s no need to make this any more complicated than it has to be.’ Clavain had been alone until the pig had visited him. ‘Just deal with the starship, is that it?’ ‘We can start negotiations immediately if we transmit a beta-level proxy. They can have the weapons ready for us when we arrive. Nice quick turnaround and we’re away. The other ships won’t even have reached the system.’ ‘Nothing’s ever that easy, Scorp.’ Clavain spoke with morose resignation, his eyes focused on the starfield beyond the window.
