When the armored door to the hangar was shut the Conjoiners attacked his m-suit with enzymic sprays.
The sprays digested the fabric in seconds, leaving Clavain wheezing in a pool of slime. Then a pair of Conjoiners helped him unsteadily to his feet and waited patiently while he caught his breath from the mask. Through tears of exhaustion he saw that the hangar was racked full of half-assembled spacecraft; skeletal geodesic shark-shapes designed to punch out of an atmosphere, fast.
“Sandra Voi is dead,” he said, removing the mask to speak.
There was no way the Conjoiners could not have seen this for themselves, but it seemed inhuman not to acknowledge what had happened.
“I know,” Galiana said. “But at least you survived.”
He thought of the man falling into the Ouroborus. “I’m sorry about your…” But then trailed off, because for all his depth of knowledge concerning the Conjoiners, he had no idea what the appropriate term was.
“You placed your life in danger in trying to save him.”
“He didn’t have to die.”
Galiana nodded sagely. “No; in all likelihood he didn’t. But the risk to yourself was too great. You heard what he said. Your death would be made to seem our fault; justification for a pre-emptive strike against our nest. Even the Demarchists would turn against us if we were seen to murder a diplomat.”
Taking another suck from the mask, he looked into her face. He had spoken to her over low-bandwidth video- links, but only in person was it obvious that Galiana had hardly aged in fifteen years. A decade and a half of habitual expression should have engraved existing lines deeper into her face-but Conjoiners were not known for their habits of expression. Galiana had seen little sunlight in the intervening time, cooped here in the nest, and Martian gravity was much kinder to bone structure than the one-gee of Deimos. She still had the cruel beauty he remembered from his time as a prisoner. The only real evidence of aging lay in the filaments of gray threading her hair; raven-black when she had been his captor.
“Why didn’t you warn us about the worms?”
“Warn you?” For the first time something like doubt crossed her face, but it was only fleeting. “We assumed you were fully aware of the Ouroborus infestation. Those worms have been dormant-waiting-for years, but they’ve always been there. It was only when I saw how low your approach was that I realized…”
“That we might not have known?”
Worms were area-denial devices; autonomous prey-seeking mines. The war had left many pockets of the solar system still riddled with active worms. The machines were intelligent, in a one-dimensional way.
Nobody ever admitted to deploying them and it was usually impossible to convince them that the war was over and that they should quietly deactivate.
“After what happened to you in Phobos,” Galiana said, “I assumed there was nothing you needed to be taught about worms.”
He never liked thinking about Phobos: the pain was still too deeply engraved. But if it had not been for the injuries he had sustained there he would never have been sent to Deimos to recuperate; would never have been recruited into his brother’s intelligence wing to study the Conjoiners. Out of that phase of deep immersion in everything concerning the enemy had come his peacetime role as negotiator-and now diplomat-on the eve of another war. Everything was circular, ultimately. And now Phobos was central to his thinking because he saw it as a way out of the impasse-maybe the last chance for peace. But it was too soon to put his idea to Galiana. He was not even sure the mission could still continue, after what had happened.
“We’re safe now, I take it?”
“Yes; we can repair the damage to the dyke. Mostly, we can ignore their presence.”
“We should have been warned. Look, I need to talk to my brother.”
“Warren? Of course. It’s easily arranged.”
They walked out of the hangar; away from the half-assembled ships. Somewhere deeper in the nest, Clavain knew, was a factory where the components for the ships were made, mined out of Mars or winnowed from the fabric of the nest. The Conjoiners managed to launch one every six weeks or so; had been doing so for six months. Not one of the ships had ever managed to escape the Martian atmosphere before being shot down…but sooner or later he would have to ask Galiana why she persisted with this provocative folly.
Now, though, was not the time-even if, by Warren’s estimate, he only had three days before Galiana’s next provocation.
The air elsewhere in the nest was thicker and warmer than in the hangar, which meant he could dispense with the mask. Galiana took him down a short, gray-walled, metallic corridor which ended in a circular room containing a console. He recognized the room from the times he had spoken to Galiana from Deimos. Galiana showed him how to use the system then left him in privacy while he established a connection with Deimos.
Warren’s face soon appeared on a screen, thick with pixels like an impressionist portrait. Conjoiners were only allowed to send kilobytes a second to other parts of the system. Much of that bandwidth was now being sucked up by this one video link.
“You’ve heard, I take it,” Clavain said.
Warren nodded, his face ashen. “We had a pretty good view from orbit, of course. Enough to see that Voi didn’t make it. Poor woman. We were reasonably sure you survived, but it’s good to have it confirmed.”
“Do you want me to abandon the mission?”
Warren’s hesitation was more than just time-lag. “No…I thought about it, of course, and high command agrees with me. Voi’s death was tragic-no escaping that. But she was only along as a neutral observer.
If Galiana consents for you to stay, I suggest you do so.”
“But you still say I only have three days?”
“That’s up to Galiana, isn’t it? Have you learned much?”
“You must be kidding. I’ve seen shuttles ready for launch, that’s all. I haven’t raised the Phobos proposal, either. The timing wasn’t exactly ideal, after what happened to Voi.”
“Yes. If only we’d known about that Ouroborus infestation.”
Clavain leaned closer to the screen. “Yes. Why the hell didn’t we? Galiana assumed that we would, and I don’t blame her for that. We’ve had the nest under constant surveillance for fifteen years. Surely in all that time we’d have seen evidence of the worms?”
“You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, maybe the worms weren’t always there.”
Conscious that there could be nothing private about this conversation-but unwilling to drop the thread-Clavain said: “You think the Conjoiners put them there to ambush us?”
“I’m saying we shouldn’t disregard any possibility, no matter how unpalatable.”
“Galiana would never do something like that.”
“No, I wouldn’t.” She had just stepped back into the room. “And I’m disappointed that you’d even debate the possibility.”
Clavain terminated the link with Deimos. “Eavesdropping’s not a very nice habit, you know.”
“What did you expect me to do?”
“Show some trust? Or is that too much of a stretch?”
“I never had to trust you when you were my prisoner,” Galiana said. “That made our relationship infinitely simpler. Our roles were completely defined.”
“And now? If you distrust me so completely, why did you ever agree to my visit? Plenty of other specialists could have come in my place. You could even have refused any dialogue.”
“Voi’s people pressured us to allow your visit,” Galiana said. “Just as they pressured your side into delaying hostilities a little longer.”
“Is that all?”
She hesitated slightly now. “I…knew you.”
“Knew me? Is that how you sum up a year of imprisonment? What about the thousands of conversations we had; the times when we put aside our differences to talk about something other than the damned war?
You kept me sane, Galiana. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s why I’ve risked my life to come here and talk you out of another provocation.”
“It’s completely different now.”
