Alastiar Reynolds

155
Remontoire pushed a thought into their heads. note 156
What the hell is it, Skade?
note 157
Clavain followed her through the collar and into the tunnel, drifting more than walking, guiding himself between the throatlike walls of compactified ice. He had barely been aware of the pistol he carried until it had been confiscated, but now he felt quite vulnerable without it. He fingered his utility belt, but there was nothing else on it that would serve as a weapon against the servitor, should it chose to turn against them. There were a few clamps and miniature grapples, a couple of thumb-sized signalling beacons and a standard-issue sealant spray. The only thing approaching an actual weapon — while the spray looked like a gun, it had a range of only two or three centimetres — was a short-bladed piezo-knife, sufficient to pierce spacesuit fabric but not much use against an armoured machine or even a well-trained adversary.
You know damned well it does. I’ve never had my mind invaded by a machine… not the way that one just did.
note 158
While it trawled him he had tasted the sharp metallic tang of its intelligence. How clever is it, exactly? Turing-compliant ?
note 159
I’ve had time to revise my opinion on the subject.
note 160
By a machine? No. What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave. I didn’t think that was quite what we believed in.
He felt Remontoire’s quiet presence. note 161
Somewhere ahead of them was a pale lilac glow that picked out the natural patterning of the tunnel walls. Clavain could see the servitor’s dark spindly bulk against the light source. It must have been listening in to this conversation, he thought, hearing them debate what it represented.
note 162
note 163 Remontoire insisted.
note 164
Clavain peered into the pale purple gloom. What’s so desperate? I thought all we were doing was recovering some lost property .

The Master of Works brought them to the interior of Skade’s comet, calling them to a halt inside a small, airless blister set into the interior wall of the hollowed-out body. They stationed themselves by hooking limbs into restraint straps attached to the blister’s stiff alloy frame. The blister was hermetically sealed from the comet’s main chamber. The vacuum that had been achieved within was so high-grade that even the vapour leakage from Clavain’s suit would have caused an unacceptable degradation.
Clavain stared into the chamber. Beyond the glass was a cavern of dizzying scale. It was bathed in rapturous blue light, filled with vast machines and an almost subliminal sense of scurrying activity. For a moment the scene was far too much to take in. Clavain felt as if he was staring into the depths of perspective in a fabulous detailed medieval painting, beguiled by the interlocking arches and towers of some radiant celestial city, glimpsing hosts of silver-leaf angels in the architecture, squadron upon squadron of them as far as the eye could see, receding into the cerulean blue of infinity. Then he grasped the scale of things and realised with a perceptual jolt that the angels were merely distant machines: droves of sterile construction servitors traversing the vacuum by the thousand as they went about their tasks. They communicated with each other using lasers, and it was the scatter and reflection of those beams that drenched the chamber in such shivering blue radiance. And it was indeed cold, Clavain knew. Dotted around the walls of the chamber he recognised the nubbed black cones of cryo-arithmetic engines, calculating overtime to suck away the heat of intense industrial activity that would otherwise have boiled the comet away.
Clavain’s attention flicked to the reason for all that activity. He was not surprised to see the ships — not even surprised to see that they were starships — but the degree to which they had been completed astonished him. He had been expecting half-finished hulks, but he could not believe that these ships were far from flight-readiness. There were twelve of them packed side by side in clouds of geodesic support scaffolding. They were identical shapes, smooth and black as torpedos or beached whales, barbed near the rear with the outflung spars and nacelles of Conjoiner drives. Though there were no obvious visual comparisons, he was certain that each of the ships was at least three or four kilometres long, much larger than Nightshade .
Skade smiled, obviously noting his reaction. note 165
Who wouldn’t be?
note 166
It’s a fair question. Would the wolves have anything to do with it, by any chance?
note 167
I’m afraid no one ever had the decency to tell me.
note 168
For a moment Clavain thought of telling her that the matter had never really concerned him; that the decision to stop making starships had happened when he was in deep space, a fait accompli by the time he returned, and — given the immediate need to help his side win the war — not the most pressing issue at hand.
But that would have been a lie. It had always troubled him.
Generally it’s assumed that we stopped making them for selfish economic reasons, or because we were worried that the drives were falling into the wrong hands — Ultras and other undesirables. Or that we discovered a fatal flaw in the design that meant that the drives had a habit of exploding now and again.
note 169
We’d only ever had a stable customer relationship with the Demarchists. The Ultras bought their drives off second– or third-hand sources, or stole them.