Alastiar Reynolds

There had been a great many disasters and crises in human space, but never any indication that the weapons had been awakened. The few Conjoiners in the know began to dare to believe that the matter could be quietly forgotten: perhaps the weapons had been abandoned in deep space, or tossed into the searing face of a star.
But the weapons had not been lost.
Completely unexpectedly, not long before Clavain’s return from deep space, activation signatures had been detected in the vicinity of Delta Pavonis, a sunlike star slightly more than fifteen light-years from the Mother Nest. The neutrino signals were weak; it was possible that earlier flickers of awakening had been missed entirely. But the most recent signals were quite unambiguous: a number of the weapons had been awakened from dormancy.
The Delta Pavonis system was not on the main trade routes. It did have a single colony world, Resurgam, a settlement established by an archaeological expedition from Yellowstone that had been led by Dan Sylveste, the son of the cyberneticist Calvin Sylveste and scion of one of the wealthiest families within Demarchist society. Sylveste’s archaeologists had been picking through the remains of a birdlike race that had lived on the planet barely a million years earlier. The colony had gradually severed formal ties with Yellowstone, and a series of regimes had seen the original scientific agenda replaced by a conflicting policy of terraforming and widescale settlement. There had been coups and violence, but it was nonetheless highly unlikely that the settlers were the ones who now possessed the weapons. Scrutiny of outbound traffic records from Yellowstone showed the departure of another ship en route to Resurgam: a lighthugger, Nostalgia for Infinity , that had arrived around the system at approximately the time that the activation signatures were detected. There was scant information on the ship’s crew and history, but Clavain learned from Rust Belt immigration records that a woman named Ilia Volyova had been scouting for new crewmembers immediately before the ship’s departure. The name might or might not have been genuine — in those confused post-plague days, ships could get away with whatever identities suited them — but Volyova had reappeared. Although very few transmissions made it back to Yellowstone, one of those, panicked and fragmentary, had mentioned Volyova’s ship terrorising the colony into surrendering its former leader. For some reason, Volyova’s Ultranaut crew wanted Dan Sylveste aboard their ship.
This did not mean that Volyova was definitely in charge of the weapons, but Clavain agreed with Skade’s assessment that she was the most likely suspect. She had a ship large enough to have held the weapons, she had used violence against the colony and she had arrived on the scene at the same time as the weapons had been revived from dormancy. It was impossible to guess what Volyova wanted with the weapons, but her association with them appeared beyond question.
She was the thief they had been looking for.
Skade’s crest pulsed with ripples of jade and bronze. New memories unpacked into his head: video clips and still-frame grabs of Volyova. Clavain was not quite sure what he had been expecting, but it was not the crop-haired, round-faced, shrewlike woman that Skade revealed to him. Had he walked into a room of suspects, Volyova would have been one of the last people he would have turned to.
Skade smiled at him. She had his full attention. note 127
Thirty-nine, Skade? I thought there were forty.
note 128
You missed that part out, I think.
note 129
Clavain raised a hand. Wait. You detected some of these signals as long ago 2565 ?
note 130
Nonetheless, you’d still have detected the signals here around… when, 2580? Thirty-three years ago, Skade. Why the hell didn’t you act sooner?
note 131
Until now, that is.
Skade conceded his point with the slightest of nods. note 132
Assets? You mean lives?
note 133
She did not give him the dignity of a warning. Chunks of his past crashed into his immediate consciousness, jolting him back to past campaigns and past actions. War movies, Clavain thought, remembering the old two-dimensional, monochrome recordings he had watched during his earliest days in the Coalition for Neural Purity, sifting them — usually in vain — for any hint of a lesson that he might use against real enemies. But now the war movies that Skade showed him, slamming past in accelerated bursts, were ones in which he was the protagonist. And for the most part they were historically accurate, too: a parade of actions he had participated in. There was a hostage release in the warrens of Gilgamesh Isis, during which Clavain had lost a hand to a sulphur burn, an injury that took a year to heal. There was the time Clavain and a female Conjoiner had smuggled the brain of a Demarchist scientist out of the custody of a faction of renegade Mixmasters around Marco’s Eye. Clavain’s partner had been surgically modified so that she could keep the brain alive in her womb, following simple reverse Caesarean surgery that Clavain had administered. They had left the man’s body behind for his captors to discover. Afterwards, the Conjoiners had cloned the man a new body and packed the traumatised brain back into it.
Then there was Clavain’s recovery of a stolen Conjoiner drive from dissident Skyjacks camped in one of the outer nodes of the Bloater agrarian hive, and the liberation of an entire Pattern Juggler world from Ultra profiteers who wanted to charge for access to the mind- altering alien ocean. There were more, many more. Clavain always survived and nearly always triumphed. There were other universes, he knew, where he had died much earlier: he hadn’t been any less skilled in those histories, but his luck had just played out differently. He could not extrapolate from this run of successes and assume that he was bound to succeed at the next hurdle.
Even though he was not guaranteed to succeed, it was clear that Clavain stood a better chance than anyone else in the Closed Council.
He smiled ruefully. You seem to know me better than I know myself .
note 134
Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Con-joiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. Skade was right, of course. There was no one Clavain would have trusted to do the job other than himself, even now, at this late hour in both his career and his life. It would take decades, nearly twenty years just to reach Resurgam, and another twenty to come back with the prize. But forty years was really not a very long time when set against four or five centuries. And for most of that time he would be frozen, anyway.
Forty years; maybe five years at this end to prepare for it, and perhaps as much as a year for the operation itself… altogether, something close to half a century. He looked at Skade, observing the expectant way the ripples on her crest slowed to a halt. He knew that Skade had