was inclined to think, was very unlikely to be coincidence. ‘Here’s my guess,’ she told the Captain. ‘What we’ve seen so far was just the gathering of raw material. Now it’s being assembled in the place where the real work is about to begin. They’ve got designs on Roc. What, I don’t know. But it’s undoubtedly part of their plan.’ What she knew of the gas giant sprung on to the projection sphere. A schematic showed Roc cored open like an apple, revealing layers of annotated strata: a plunge into perplexing depths of weird chemistry and nightmarish pressure. Gases at more or less imaginable pressures and temperatures overlaid an ocean of pure liquid hydrogen that began only a scratch beneath the apparent outer layer of the planet. Beneath that, the very thought of its existence giving Volyova a faint migraine, was an ocean of hydrogen in its metallic state. Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars. But there was nothing about Roc that marked it as out of the ordinary. It had the usual family of moons, most of them icy and tidally locked to the larger world. Ions were boiling off the surfaces of the hotter moons, forming great toroidal plasma belts which encircled the giant, held in check by the giant’s own savage magnetosphere. There were no large rocky moons, which was presumably why the initial dismantling operations had taken place elsewhere. There was a ring system with some interesting resonant patterns — bicycle spokes and odd little knots — but again, it was nothing Volyova had not seen already. What did the Inhibitors want? What would begin when their matter streams had arrived at Roc? ‘You understand my misgivings, Captain. I’m sure you do. Whatever those machines are up to, it isn’t going to be good for us. They’re engines of extinction. Wiping out sentient life is what they do. The question is, can we do anything about it?’ Volyova paused and took stock. She had not yet triggered a catatonic withdrawal, and that was good. The Captain was at least prepared to let her discuss the outside events. On the other hand, she had yet to raise any of the subjects that usually triggered a shutdown. Well, it was now or never. I think we can, Captain. Perhaps not stop the machines for good, but at least throw a fairly large spanner into their works.‘ She eyed her bracelet, noting that nothing unusual was happening elsewhere in the ship. ’Of course, I’m talking about a military strike. I don’t think reasoned argument is going to work against a force that dismantles three of your planets without even saying “please” first.‘ There was something then, she thought. A tremor reaching her from somewhere else in the ship. It had happened before, and it seemed to mean something, but exactly what she was not prepared to say. It was certainly a kind of communication from whatever intelligence ruled the ship, but not necessarily of the sort she might have wished for. It was more a sign of irritation, like the low growl of a dog that did not like being disturbed. ‘Captain… I understand this is difficult. I swear I do. But we have to do something, and soon. A deployment of the cache weapons would seem to me to be our only option. We have thirty-three of them left; thirty-nine if we can salvage and re-arm the six I deployed against Hades… but I think even thirty-three will be sufficient if we can use them well and use them soon.’ The tremor intensified, subsided. She was really touching a nerve now, she thought. But the Captain was still listening. ‘The weapon we lost on the edge of the system may have been the most powerful we had,’ she went on, ‘but the six we discarded were, by my estimate at least, at the lower end of the destructive scale of the others. I think we can make do, Captain. Shall I tell you my plan? I propose that we target the three worlds where the matter streams are coming from. Ninety per cent of the extracted mass is still in orbit around each collapsed body, although more and more is being pumped towards Roc. Most of the Inhibitor machines are still around those moons. They might not survive a surprise attack, and even if they do, we can disperse and contaminate those matter reservoirs.’ She began to talk faster, intoxicated with the way the plan was unfolding in her mind. ‘The machines might be able to regroup, but they’ll need to find new worlds to dismantle. But we can beat them at that as well. We can use the other cache weapons to rip apart as many probable candidates as we can find. We can poison their wells; stop them from doing any more mining. That’ll make it harder — perhaps even impossible — for them to finish what they have in mind for the gas giant. We have a chance, but there’s a catch, Captain. You’ll have to help us do it.’ She looked at the bracelet again. Still nothing had happened, and she allowed herself to breathe a mental sigh of relief. She would not push him much more now. Merely discussing the need for his co-operation had gone further than she had imagined would be possible. But it came, then: a distant, growing howl of angry air. She heard it shrieking towards her through kilometres of corridor. ‘Captain…’ But it was too late. The gale stormed the command sphere, knocking her to the floor with its ferocity. The cigarette butt flew from her hand and executed several orbits of the chamber, caught in a whirlwind of ship air. Rats and sundry other items of loose ship debris precessed with it. She found it hard to talk. ‘Captain… I didn’t mean… ’ But then even breathing became difficult. The wind sent her skidding across the floor, arms windmilling. The noise was excruciating, like an amplification of all the years, all the decades of pain that John Brannigan had known. Then the gale died down, and the chamber was still again. Somewhere else in the ship all he had needed to do was open a pressure lock into one of the chambers that was normally under hard vacuum. Very likely no air had actually reached space during his show of strength, but the effect had been as unnerving as any hull rupture. Ilia Volyova got to her feet. Nothing seemed to be broken. She dusted herself down and, shaking, lit herself another cigarette. She smoked it for at least two minutes, until her nerves were as steady as they were going to get. Then she spoke again, calmly and quietly, like a parent talking to a baby that had just thrown a tantrum. ‘Very well, Captain. You’ve made your point very effectively. You don’t want to talk about the cache weapons. Fine. That’s your prerogative, and I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. But understand this: we’re not just talking about a small local matter here. Those Inhibitor machines haven’t just arrived around Delta Pavonis. They’ve arrived in human space . This is just the beginning. They won’t stop here, not even after they’ve wiped out all life on Resurgam for the second time in a million years. That’ll just be the warm-up exercise. It’ll be somewhere else after that. Maybe Sky’s Edge. Maybe Shiva-Parvati. Maybe Grand Teton, Spindrift, Zastruga — maybe even Yellowstone. Maybe even the First System. It probably doesn’t matter, because once one goes, the others won’t be far behind. It’ll be the end, Captain. It might take decades or it might take centuries. Doesn’t matter. It’ll still be the end of everything, the final repudiation of every human gesture — every human thought — since the dawn of time. We’ll have been erased from existence. I guarantee you something: it’ll be one hell of a shooting match, even if the outcome isn’t really in doubt. But you know what? We won’t be around to see one damned moment of it. And that pisses me off more than you can imagine.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. The rats had scampered back into the darkness and slime and the ship felt almost normal again. He appeared to have forgiven her that one indiscretion. She continued, ‘The machines haven’t paid us much attention yet. But my guess is they’ll get around to it eventually. And do you want my theory as to why we haven’t been attacked so far? It might be that they just don’t see us yet; that their senses are attuned to signs of life on a much larger scale than just a single ship. It could also be that there’s no need to worry about us; that it would be a waste of effort to go to the trouble of wiping us out individually when what they’re working on will do the job just as effectively. I suspect that’s how they think, Captain. On a much larger, slower scale than we’re used to. Why go
