‘You don’t think negotiation will work? Fine.We’ll skip it and just come in with all guns blazing.’ ‘In which case we’d better hope they don’t know how to use the hell-class weapons. Because if it comes to a straight fight, we won’t have a snowball’s chance.’ ‘I thought that Volyova turning the weapons against us wasn’t going to be a problem.’ Clavain turned from the window. ‘Remontoire can’t promise me that our pacification codes will work. And if we test them too soon we give Volyova time to find a workaround. If such a thing exists, I’m pretty sure she’ll find it.’ ‘Then we keep trying negotiation,’ Scorpio said. ‘Send the proxy, Clavain. It will buy us time and cost us nothing.’ The man did not answer him directly. ‘Do you think they understand what’s happening to their system, Scorpio?’ Scorpio blinked. Sometimes he had difficulty following the swerves and evasions of Clavain’s moods. The man was far more ambivalent and complex than any human he had known since his time aboard the yacht. ‘Understand?’ ‘That the machines are already there, already busy. If they look into the sky, surely they can’t miss what is happening. Surely they must realise that it isn’t good news.’ ‘What else can they do, Clavain? You’ve read the intelligence summaries. They probably don’t have a single shuttle down there. What can they do but pretend it isn’t happening?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Clavain said. ‘Let us transmit the proxy,’ Scorpio said. ‘Just to the ship, tight-beam only.’ Clavain said nothing for at least a minute. He had turned his attention back to the window, staring out into space. Scorpio wondered what he hoped to see out there. Did he imagine that he could unmake that glint of light, the one that had signalled Galiana’s end, if he tried hard enough? He had not known Clavain as long as some of the others, but he viewed Clavain as a rational man. But he supposed grief, the kind of howling, remorse-filled grief Clavain was experiencing, could smash rationality to shards. The impact of so familiar an emotion as sadness on the flow of history had never been properly accounted for, Scorpio thought. Grief and remorse, loss and pain, sadness and sorrow were at least as powerful shapers of events as anger, greed and retribution. ‘Clavain… ?’ he prompted. ‘I never thought there’d be choices this hard,’ the man said. ‘But H was right. The hard choices are the only ones that matter. I thought defecting was the hardest thing I had ever done. I thought I would never see Felka again. But I didn’t realise how wrong I was, how trivial that decision was. It was nothing compared with what I had to do later. I killed Galiana, Scorpio. And the worst thing is that I did it willingly.’ ‘But you got Felka back again. There are always consolations.’ ‘Yes,’ Clavain said, sounding like a man grasping for the last crumb of comfort. ‘I got Felka back. Or at least I got someone back. But she isn’t the way I left her. She carries the Wolf herself now, just a shadow of it, it’s true, but when I speak to her I can’t be sure whether it’s Felka answering or the Wolf. No matter what happens now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take anything she says at face value.‘ ‘You cared for her enough to risk your life rescuing her. That was a difficult choice as well. But it doesn’t make you unique.’ Scorpio scratched at the upraised snout of his nose. ‘We’ve all made difficult choices around here. Look at Antoinette. I know her story, Clavain. Set out to do a good deed — burying her father the way he wanted — and she ends up entangled in a battle for the entire future of the species. Pigs, humans… everything. I bet she didn’t have that in mind when she set out to salve her conscience. But we can’t guess where things will take us, or the harder questions that will follow on from one choice. You thought defecting would be an act in and of itself, but it was just the start of something much larger.’ Clavain sighed. Perhaps it was imagination, but Scorpio thought that he detected the slightest lightening of the man’s mood. His voice was softer when he spoke. ‘What about you, Scorpio? Did you have choices to make as well?’ ‘Yeah. Whether I threw my weight in with you human sons of bitches.’ ‘And the consequences?’ ‘Some of you are still sons of bitches that deserve to die in the most painful and slow way I can envisage. But not all of you.’ ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ ‘Take it while you can. I might change my mind tomorrow.’ Clavain sighed again, scratched his beard and then said, ‘All right. Do it. Transmit a beta-level proxy.’ ‘We’ll need a statement to accompany it,’ Scorpio said. ‘A laying-down of terms, if you like.’ ‘Whatever it takes, Scorp. Whatever the hell it takes.’ In their long, crushing reign, the Inhibitors had learned of fifteen distinct ways to murder a dwarf star. Doubtless, the overseer thought to itself, there were other methods, more or less efficient, which might turn out to have been invented or used at various epochs in galactic history. The galaxy was very large, very old, and the Inhibitors’ knowledge of it was far from comprehensive. But it was a fact that no new technique for starcide had been added to their repository for four hundred and forty million years. The galaxy had finished two rotations since that last methodological update. Even by the Inhibitors’ glacial reckoning, it was quite a worryingly long time during which not to learn any new tricks. Singing a star apart was the most recent method to be entered into the Inhibitor library of xenocide techniques, and though it had achieved that status four hundred and forty million years earlier, the overseer could not help view it with a trace of bemused curiosity. It was the way an aged butcher might view some newfangled apparatus designed to improve the productivity of an abbatoir. The current cleansing operation would provide a useful testbed for the technique, a chance to fully evaluate it. If the overseer was not satisfied, it would leave a record in the archive recommending that future cleansing operations employ one of the fourteen older methods of starcide. But for now it would place its faith in the efficacy of the singer. All stars already sang to themselves. The outer layers of every star rang constantly at a multitude of frequencies, like an eternally chiming bell. The great seismic modes tracked oscillations that plunged deep into the star, down to the caustic surface just above its fusing core. Those oscillations were modest in a star of dwarf type, like Delta Pavonis. But the singer tuned itself to them, swinging around the star in its equatorial rotation frame, pumping gravitational energy into the star at precisely the right resonant frequencies to enhance the oscillations. The singer was what the mammals would have called a graver, a gravitational laser. In the heart of the singer a microscopic
