Alastiar Reynolds

Skade .
note 117
Iknow what I’m letting myself in for, Skade .
note 118
Remontoire rose from his seat. note 119
She regarded Remontoire with an absence of emotion that Clavain found far more chilling than mere anger. note 120
He’s right. I am ready. And willing.
Skade nodded. note 121
Clavain could not help gripping the armrests of his chair, knowing as he did so how ridiculous the instinct was. This was how he had felt four hundred years earlier, when Galiana had first introduced him to Transenlightenment. It had been in her nest on Mars, and she had infected his mind with droves of machines after he had been injured. She had given him a glimpse then, no more than that, but in the moments before it arrived he had felt like a man standing before the rushing wall of a tsunami, counting down the seconds until he was engulfed. He felt like that now, even though he was anticipating no actual change in consciousness. It was enough to know that he was about to be granted access to secrets so shattering that they merited layers of hierarchy within an otherwise omniscient hive mind.
He waited… but nothing happened.
note 122
He relaxed his grip on the seat. I feel exactly the same .
note 123
Clavain looked around him at the ringed walls of the chamber. Nothing had altered; nothing felt different. He examined his memory and there seemed to be nothing lurking there that had not been present a minute earlier. I don’t …
note 124
You wouldn’t tell me what you were looking for. I still don’t know.
note 125
And what question would you like me to ask, Skade?
note 126
I don’t know anything about any hell- class…
But he faltered, fell silent. He knew exactly what the hell-class weapons were.
Now that the information was available to him, Clavain realised that he had heard rumours of the weapons on many occasions during his time amongst the Conjoined. Their bitterest enemies told cautionary tales of the Conjoiners’ hidden stockpile of ultimate weapons, doomsday devices so ferocious in their destructive capability that they had hardly been tested, and had certainly never been used in any actual engagements. The weapons were supposedly very old, manufactured during the very earliest phase of Conjoiner history. The rumours varied in detail, but all the stories agreed on one thing: there had been forty weapons, and none of them were precisely alike.
Clavain had never taken the rumours seriously, assuming that they must have originated with some forgotten piece of fear-mongering by one of the Mother Nest’s counter-intelligence units. It was unthinkable that the weapons could ever have been real. In all the time he had been amongst the Conjoined, no official hint of the existence of such weapons had ever come his way. Galiana had never spoken of them, and yet if the weapons were truly old — dating back to the Mars era — she could not possibly have been unaware of their existence.
But the weapons had existed.
Clavain sifted through his bright new memories with grim fascination. He had always known there were secrets within the Mother Nest, but he had never suspected that something so momentous could have been concealed for so long. He felt as if he had just discovered a vast, hidden room in a house he had lived in nearly all his life. The feeling of dislocation — and betrayal — was acute.
There were forty weapons, just like in the old tales. Each was a prototype, exploiting some uniquely subtle and nastily inventive principle of breakthrough physics. And Galiana did indeed know about them. She had authorised the construction of the weapons in the first place, at the height of the Conjoiner persecution. At the time, her enemies had been effective only by weight of numbers rather than technical superiority. With the forty new weapons she could have wiped the slate clean, but at the eleventh hour she had chosen not to: better to be erased from existence than have genocide on her hands.
But that had not been the end. There had been blunders by the enemy, lucky breaks and contingencies. Galiana’s people had been pushed to the brink, but they had never quite been excised from history.
Afterwards, Clavain learned that the weapons had been locked away for safekeeping, stockpiled inside an armoured asteroid in another system. Murky images flickered through his mind’s eye: barricaded vaults, fierce cybernetic watchdogs, perilous traps and deadfalls. Galiana had clearly feared the weapons as much as she feared her enemies, and though she was not willing to dismantle the weapons, she had done her best to put them beyond immediate use. The data that had allowed them to be made in the first place was erased, and apparently this had been sufficient to prevent any further attempts at duplication. Should the weapons ever be needed again — should another time of mass persecution arise — the weapons were still there to be used; but distance — years of flight-time — meant there was a generous cooling-off period built into the arrangement. Her forty hell-class weapons could only ever be used in cold blood, and that was the way it should be.
But the weapons had been stolen. The impregnable asteroid had been breached and by the time a Conjoiner investigative team arrived there was no trace of the thieves. Whoever had done it had been clever enough both to break through the defences and to avoid waking the weapons themselves. In their dormant condition the forty weapons could not be tracked, remotely destroyed or pacified.
There had been many attempts to locate the lost weapons, Clavain learned, but so far all had failed. Knowledge of the cache had been a closely guarded secret to begin with; the theft was kept even more hush-hush, with only a few very senior Conjoiners knowing what had happened. As the decades passed, they held their collective breaths: in the wrong hands, the weapons could shatter worlds like glass. Their only hope was that the thieves did not realise the potency of what they had stolen.
Decades became a century, then two centuries.