He looked at the Conjoiners boarding the leading bullet; tried to imagine where they were going. Was it to any kind of sanctuary he might recognize-or to something so beyond his experience that it might as well be death? Did he have the nerve to find out? Perhaps. He had nothing to lose now, after all; he could certainly not return home. But if he was going to follow Galiana’s exodus, it could not be with the sense of shame he now felt in abandoning Felka.
The answer, when it came, was simple. “I’m going back for her. If you can’t wait for me, don’t. But don’t try and stop me doing this.”
Galiana looked at him, shaking her head slowly. “She won’t thank you for saving her life, Clavain.”
“Maybe not now,” he said.
He had the feeling he was running back into a burning building. Given what Galiana had said about the girl’s deficiencies-that by any reasonable definition she was hardly more than an automaton-what he was doing was very likely pointless, if not suicidal. But if he turned his back on her, he would become something even less than human himself. He had misread Galiana badly when she said the girl was precious to them. He had assumed some bond of affection…whereas what Galiana meant was that the girl was precious in the sense of a vital component. Now-with the nest being abandoned-the component had no further use. Did that make Galiana as cold as a machine herself-or was she just being unfailingly realistic? He found the nursery after only one or two false turns, and then Felka’s room.
The implants Galiana had given him were again throwing phantom images into the air. Felka sat within the crumbling circle of the Wall. Great fissures now reached to the surface of Mars. Shards of the Wall, as big as icebergs, had fractured away and now lay like vast sheets of broken glass across the regolith.
She was losing, and now she knew it. This was not just some more difficult phase of the game. This was something she could never win, and her realization was now plainly evident in her face. She was still moving her arms frantically, but her face was red now, locked into a petulant scowl of anger and fear.
For the first time, she seemed to notice him.
Something had broken through her shell, Clavain thought. For the first time in years, something was happening that was beyond her control; something that threatened to destroy the neat, geometric universe she had made for herself. She might not have distinguished his face from all the other people who came to see her, but she surely recognized something…that now the adult world was bigger than she was, and it was only from the adult world that any kind of salvation could come.
Then she did something that shocked him beyond words. She looked deep into his eyes and reached out a hand.
But there was nothing he could do to help her.
Later-it seemed hours, but in fact could only have been tens of minutes-Cla-vain found that he was able to breathe normally again. They had escaped Mars now; Galiana, Felka and himself, riding the last bullet.
And they were still alive.
The bullet’s vacuum-filled tunnel cut deep into Mars; a shallow arc bending under the crust before rising again, two thousand kilometers away, well beyond the Wall, where the atmosphere was as thin as ever.
For the Conjoiners, boring the tunnel had not been especially difficult. Such engineering would have been impossible on a planet that had plate tectonics, but beneath its lithosphere Mars was geologically quiet.
They had not even had to worry about tailings. What they excavated, they compressed and fused and used to line the tunnel, maintaining rigidity against awesome pressure with some trick of piezo-electricity.
In the tunnel, the bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for six minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to the legs to maintain blood flow to the head. Even so, it was hard to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.
They were moving at ten kilometers a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trapdoor. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them…but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.
In half a minute, they were in true space.
“The Interdiction’s sensor web can’t track us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spysats directly over the nest. That was a mistake, Clavain-even though we did our best to reinforce your thinking with the shuttle launches. But now we’re well outside your sensor footprint.”
Clavain nodded. “But that won’t help us once we’re far from the surface. Then, we’ll just look like another ship trying to reach deep space. The web may be late locking onto us, but it’ll still get us in the end.”
“It would,” Galiana said. “If deep space was where we were going.”
Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain, thought, she would fall forever. If that was the case, he had only brought forward her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had inflicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess-even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years…
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
Galiana issued some neural command which made the bullet seem to become transparent.
“There,” she said.
Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in, until the object was much clearer.
Dark-misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.
“Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”
“Yes,” Galiana said.
“But the worms-”
“Don’t exist anymore.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed…but that was only what we wanted you to think.”
For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”
“Ever since the cease-fire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”
Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device which lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something which had never existed before in the whole of human experience.
He was looking at a starship.
“We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try and stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”
“Where are you going?”
“Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.”
“What about the Demarchists?”
“They won’t stop us.” It was said with total assurance-implying, what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumored that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.
Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”
“That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny-we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one tenth of a millimeter per second-but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Think about it. The tube in Mars was two thousand kilometers long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over six minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”
