He was in her hands. Totally.Clavain did what he could to extend the suit’s durability. He brought up certain rarely used neural routines that allowed him to slow his own metabolism, so that he would use as little air and power as possible. There was no real point in staying conscious; it gained him nothing except the opportunity to endlessly reflect on whether he was going to live or die.Drifting alone in space, Clavain prepared to sink into unconsciousness. He thought of Felka, who he did not believe he would ever see again, and wondered about her message. He did not know if he wanted it to be true or not. He hoped also that she would find a way to come to terms with his defection, that she would not hate him for it and that she would not resent the fact that he had continued with it despite her plea.He had originally defected to the side of the Conjoiners because he had believed it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. There had been almost no time to plan his defection or evaluate the correctness of it. The moment had arisen when he had to make his choice, there and then. He had known that there was no going back.It was the same now. The moment had presented itself… and he had seized it, mindful of the consequences, knowing that he might turn out to be wrong, that his fears might turn out to be groundless or the paranoid delusions of an old, old man, but knowing that it must be done.That, he suspected, was the way it would always be for him.He remembered a time when he lay under fallen rubble, in a pocket of air beneath a collapsed structure on Mars. It had been about four standard months after the Tharsis Bulge campaign. He remembered the broken-spined cat that he had kept alive, how he had shared his rations with the injured animal even when the thirst had felt like acid etching away his mouth and throat; even when the hunger had been far, far worse than the pain of his own injuries. He remembered that the cat had died shortly after the two of them had been pulled from the rubble, and wondered whether the kindest thing would have been for it to have died earlier, rather than have its own painful existence prolonged for a few more days. And yet he knew that if the same thing were to happen again he would keep the cat alive, no matter how pointless the gesture. It was not just that keeping the cat alive had given him something to focus on other than his own discomfort and fear. There had been something more. What, he couldn’t easily say. But he had a feeling that it was the same impulse that was driving him towards Yellowstone, the same impulse that had made him seek Antoinette Bax’s help.Alone and fearful, far from any world, Nevil Clavain fell into unconsciousness.CHAPTER 17
The two women brought Thorn to a room within Nostalgia for Infinity . The centrepiece of the room was an enormous spherical display apparatus, poised in the middle of the chamber like a single grotesque eyeball. Thorn had an unshakeable feeling of intense scrutiny, as if not just the eye but also the entire fabric of the ship was studying him with great owl-like interest and not a little malice. Then he began to take in the particulars of what confronted him. There was evidence of damage everywhere. Even the display apparatus itself appeared to have been subjected to recent and crude repairs.‘What happened here?’ Thorn asked. ‘It looks as if there was a gunfight or something.’‘We’ll never know for sure,’ Inquisitor Vuilleumier said. ‘Clearly the crew wasn’t as united as we thought during the Sylveste crisis. It looks from the internal evidence as if there was some sort of factional dispute aboard the ship.’‘We always suspected this was the case,’ the other woman, Irina, added. ‘Evidently there was trouble brewing just below the surface. Seems that whatever happened around Cerberus/Hades was enough to spark off a mutiny. The crew must have killed each other, leaving the ship to take care of itself.’‘Handy for us,’ Thorn said.The women exchanged glances. ‘Perhaps we should move on to the item of interest,’ Vuilleumier said.They played a movie for him. It was holographic, running in the big eye. Thorn assumed that it was a computer synthesis assembled from data that the ship had gathered from a multitude of sensor bands and viewpoints. What it presented was a God’s-eye view, the view of a being able to apprehend entire planets and their orbits.‘I must ask you to accept something,’ Irina said. ‘It is difficult to accept, but it must be done.’Tell me,‘ Thorn said.‘The entire human species is poised on the brink of sudden and catastrophic extinction.’‘That’s quite a claim. I hope you can justify it.’‘I can, and I will. The important thing to grasp is that the extinction, if it is to happen, will begin here, now, around Delta Pavonis. But this is merely the start of something that will become greater and bloodier.’Thorn could not help but smile. ‘Then Sylveste was right, is that it?’‘Sylveste knew nothing about the details, or the risks he was taking. But he was correct in one assumption: he believed that the Amarantin had been wiped out by external intervention, and that it had something to do with their sudden emergence as a spacefaring culture.’‘And the same thing’s going to happen to us?’Irina nodded. ‘The mechanism will be different this time, it seems. But the agents are the same.’‘And they are?’‘Machines,’ Irina told him. ‘Starfaring machines of immense age. For millions of years they’ve hidden between the stars, waiting for another culture to disturb the great galactic silence. All they exist to do is detect the emergence of intelligence and then suppress it. We call them the Inhibitors.’‘And now they’re here?’‘The evidence would suggest so.’They showed him what had happened so far, how a squadron of Inhibitor machines had arrived in the system and set about the dismantling of three worlds. Irina shared with Thorn her suspicion that Sylveste’s activities had probably drawn them, and that there might even be further waves converging on the Resurgam system from further out, alerted by the expanding wavefront of whatever signal had activated the first machines.He watched the three worlds die. One was a metallic planet; the other two were rocky moons. The machines swarmed and multiplied on the surfaces of the moons, covering them in a plaque of specialised industrial forms. From the equators, plumes of mined matter belched into space. The moons were being cored out like apples. The matter plumes were directed into the maws of three colossal processing engines orbiting the dying bodies. Streams of refined matter, segregated into distinct ores and isotopes and granularities, were then flung into interplanetary space, arcing out along lazy
