either laughed or gone insane. It had felt like the end of his life, and yet it had been only a moment from its beginning, barely separable in his memories now from his childhood. He looked back at the people who had brought him around and then up at the ceiling. ‘Dim the lights,’ someone said. His reflection disappeared. Now he could see something other than blackness. It was a swarm of stars, squashed into one hemisphere of the sky. Reds and blues and golds and frigid whites. Some were brighter than others, though he saw no familiar constellations. But the clumping of the stars, stirred into one part of the sky, meant only one thing. They were still moving relativistically, still skimming near the speed of light. Clavain turned back to the small huddle of people. ‘Has the battle taken place?’ A pale dark-haired woman spoke for the group. ‘Yes, Clavain.’ She spoke warmly, but not with the absolute assurance Clavain had expected. ‘Yes, it’s over. We engaged the trio of Conjoiner ships, destroying one and damaging the other two.’ ‘Only damaged?’ ‘The simulations didn’t get it quite right,’ said the woman. She moved to Clavain’s side and pushed a beaker of brown fluid under his nose. He looked at her face and hair. There was something familiar about the way she wore it, something that sparked the same ancient memories that had been stirred by his reflection in the porthole. ‘Here, drink this. Recuperative medichines from Ilia’s arsenal. It’ll do you the world of good.’ Clavain took the beaker from the woman’s hand and sniffed at the broth. It smelt of chocolate when he had expected tea. He tipped some down his throat. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask your name?’ ‘Not at all,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Felka. You know me quite well.’ He looked at her and shrugged. ‘You seem familiar…’ ‘Drink up. I think you need it.’ His memory came back in swathes, like a city recovering from a power failure: block by random block, utilities stuttering and flickering before normal service was resumed. Even when he felt all right, there came other medichine therapies, each of which dealt with specific areas of brain function, each of which was administered in doses more carefully tuned than the last, while Clavain grimaced and cooperated with the minimum of good grace. By the end of it he did not want to see another thimbleful of chocolate in his life. After several hours he was deemed to be neurologically sound. There were still things that he did not recall with great precision, but he was told this was within the error margins of the usual amnesia that accompanied reefersleep fugue, and did not indicate any untoward lapses. They gave him a lightweight bio-monitor tabard, assigned a spindly bronze servitor to him and told him he was free to move around as he pleased. ‘Shouldn’t 1 be asking why you’ve woken me?’ he said. ‘We’ll get to that later,’ said Scorpio, who seemed to be in charge. ‘There’s no immediate hurry, Clavain.’ ‘But I take it there’s a decision that needs to be made?’ Scorpio glanced at one of the other leaders, the woman called Antoinette Bax. She had wide eyes and a freckled nose and he felt that there were memories of her that he had yet to unearth. She nodded back, almost imperceptibly. ‘We wouldn’t have woken you for the view, Clavain,’ Scorpio said. ‘It’s a piece of crap even with the lights out.’ Somewhere in the heart of the immense vessel was a place that felt like it belonged in some entirely different part of the universe. It was a glade, a place of grass and trees and synthetic blue skies. There were holographic birds in the air: parrots and hornbills and suchlike, skimming from tree to tree in cometlike flashes of bright primary colour, and there was a waterfall in the distance which looked suspiciously real, hazed in a swirling talcum-blue mist where it emptied into a small dark lake. Felka escorted Clavain on to a flat apron of cool glistening grass. She wore a long black dress, her feet lost under the black spillage of the hem. She did not seem to mind it dragging through the dew-laden grass. They sat down facing each other, resting on tree stumps whose tops had been polished to mirrored smoothness. They had the place to themselves, except for the birds. Clavain looked around. He felt much better now and his memory was nearly whole, but he did not remember this place at all. ‘Did you create this, Felka?’ ‘No,’ she said cautiously, ‘but why do you ask?’ ‘Because it reminds me a little of the forest at the core of the Mother Nest, I suppose. Where you had your atelier. Except it has gravity, of course, which your atelier didn’t.’ ‘So you do remember, then.’ He scratched at the stubble on his chin. Someone had thoughtfully shaved off his beard when he was asleep. ‘Dribs and drabs. Not as much of what happened before I went under as I’d like.’ ‘What do you remember, exactly?’ ‘Remontoire leaving to make contact with Sylveste. You almost going with him, and then deciding not to. Not much else. Volyova’s dead, isn’t she?’ Felka nodded. ‘We got the planet evacuated. You and Volyova agreed to split the remaining hell-class weapons. She took Storm Bird , loaded as many weapons on to it as she could manage and rode it straight into the heart of the Inhibitor machine.’ Clavain pursed his lips and whistled quietly. ‘Did she make much difference?’ ‘None at all. But she went out with a bang.’ Clavain smiled. ‘I never expected anything less of her. And what else?’ ‘Khouri and Thorn — you remember them? They joined Remontoire’s expedition to Hades. They have shuttles, and they’ve initiated Zodiacal Light’s self-repair systems. All they have to do is keep supplying it with raw material and it will repair itself. But it will take a little while, time enough for them to make contact with Sylveste, Khouri thinks.’ ‘I didn’t know quite what to make of her claim to have already been into Hades,’ Clavain said, picking blades of grass from the area around his feet. He crushed them and sniffed the pulpy green residue that stained his fingers. ‘But the Triumvir seemed to think it was true.’ ‘We’ll find out sooner or later,’ Felka said. ‘After they’ve made contact — however long that takes — they’ll take Zodiacal Light out of the system and follow our trajectory. As for us, well, it’s still your ship, Clavain, but day-to-day affairs are handled by a Triumvirate. Triumvirs Blood, Cruz and Scorpio, by popular vote. Khouri would be one of them, of course, if she hadn’t chosen to stay behind after the evacuation.’ ‘My memory says they rescued one hundred and sixty thousand people,’ Clavain said. ‘Is that shockingly wide of the mark?’
