“We’ve taken care of that,” Khouri said. “Some of the witnesses who made it this far have returned to the major population centres. They needed persuading, of course, to turn around when they’d got that far, but . . .”
“How did you manage it?”
The car negotiated a bend with a swish of tyres. The cubiform buildings of the Inquisition House district loomed into view, grey and slab-sided as granite cliffs. Thorn eyed them apprehensively.
“They were told they’d be allowed to take a small quota of personal effects on to the ship with them when they came back.”
“Bribery, in other words.” Thorn shook his head, wondering if any great good deed could be entirely untainted by corruption, no matter how useful a purpose that corruption served. “But I suppose you had to get the word back somehow. How many, now?”
Khouri had the numbers ready. “Fifteen hundred in orbit, at the last count. A few hundred still on the ground. When we’ve got five hundred we’ll make the next trip up from the surface, and then the transfer ship will be full, ready to shuttle them to Nostalgia.”
“They’re brave,” Thorn said. “Or very, very foolish. I’m not sure which.”
“Brave, Thorn, there’s no doubt about that. And scared, too. But you can’t blame them for that.”
They were brave, it was true. They had made the journey to the shuttles based only on the scantiest of evidence that the machines even existed. After Thorn’s arrest, rumours had run rife amongst the exodus movement. The government had continued to issue carefully engineered denials, each of which was designed to nurture in the populace’s mind the idea that Thorn’s shuttles might in fact be real. Those people who had made it to the shuttles so far had done so expressly against government advice, risking imprisonment and death as they trespassed into prohibited territory.
Thorn admired them. He doubted that he would have had the courage to follow those rumours to their logical conclusion had he not been the man who had initiated the whole movement. But he could take no pride in their achievement. They were still being deceived about their ultimate fate, a deception in which he was entirely complicit.
The car arrived at the rear of Inquisition House. Thorn and Khouri walked into the building, past the usual security checks. Thorn’s identity was still a closely guarded secret, and he had been issued with a full set of papers allowing free movement in and around Cuvier. The guards assumed he was merely another official from the House, on government business.
“Do you still think this will work?” he asked, hurrying to keep up with Khouri as she strode up the stairs ahead of him.
“If it doesn’t, we’re fucked,” she replied, in the same hushed voice.
The Triumvir was waiting in the Inquisitor’s larger room, sitting in the seat usually reserved for Thorn. She was smoking, flicking ash on to the highly polished floor. Thorn felt a spasm of irritation at this act of studied carelessness. But doubtless the Triumvir’s argument would have been that the whole planet was going to be ash before very long, so what difference did a little more make?
“Irina,” he said, remembering to use the name she had adopted for her Cuvier persona.
“Thorn.” She stood up, grinding out her cigarette on the chair’s arm. “You look well. Government custody obviously isn’t as bad as they say.”
“If that’s a joke, it isn’t in very good taste.”
“Of course.” She shrugged, as if an apology would be superfluous. “Have you seen what they’ve done lately?”
“They?”
Triumvir Ilia Volyova was looking through the window, towards the sky. “Have a guess.”
“Of course. You can’t miss it now. Do you know what’s taking shape in that cloud?”
“A mechanism, Thorn. Something to destroy our sun, I’d say.”
“Let’s talk in the office,” Khouri said.
“Oh, let’s not,” said Volyova. “There are no windows, Ana, and the view does so focus the mind, don’t you think? In a matter of minutes the fact of Thorn’s collusion will be public knowledge.” She looked at him sharply. “Won’t it?”
“If you want to call it collusion.”
Thorn had already taped his “statement”—the one where he spoke for the government, revealing that the shuttles were real, that the planet was indeed in imminent danger and that the government had, reluctantly, asked him to become the figurehead of the official exodus operation. It would be transmitted on all Resurgam television channels within the hour, to be repeated at intervals throughout the next day.
“It won’t be viewed as collusion,” Khouri said, eyeing the other woman coldly. “Thorn will be seen to be acting out of concern for the people, not his own self-interest. It will be convincing because it happens to be the truth.” Her attention flicked to him. “Doesn’t it?”
“I’m only voicing what will be common doubts,” said Volyova. “Never mind, anyway. We’ll know soon enough what the reaction is. Is it true there have already been acts of civil disturbance in some of the outlying settlements, Ana?”
“They were crushed pretty efficiently.”
“There’ll be worse, for certain. Don’t be surprised if there’s an attempt to overthrow this regime.”
“That won’t happen,” Khouri said. “Not when the people realise what’s at stake. They’ll see that the apparatus of government has to remain in place so that the exodus can be organised smoothly.”
The Triumvir smirked in Thorn’s direction. “See how hopelessly optimistic she still is, Thorn?”
“Irina’s right, unfortunately,” Thorn said. “We can expect a lot worse. But you never imagined you’d get everyone off this planet in one piece.”
“But we have the capacity . . .” Khouri said.
“People aren’t payloads. They can’t be shipped around like neat little units. Even if the majority buy into the idea that the government is somehow sincere about the evacuation—and that will be a small miracle in its own right—it’ll only take a minority of dissenters to cause major trouble.”
“You made a career out of being one of them,” Khouri said.
“I did, yes.” Thorn smiled sadly. “Unfortunately, I’m not the only one out there. Still, Irina’s right. We’ll know soon enough what the general reaction will be. How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?”
“Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,” Khouri said. “But that should take care of our worst enemies. The rest we only have to hold off until the exodus is finished.”
Thorn turned to the Triumvir. “You’ve studied that thing in the sky more closely than any of us, Irina. Do you know how long we’ve got?”
“No,” she said curtly. “Of course I can’t say how long we’ve got, not without knowing what it is that they’re building up there. All I can do is make an extremely educated guess.”
“So indulge us.”
She sniffed and then walked stiffly along the entire length of the window. Thorn eyed Khouri, wondering what she made of this performance. He had noticed a tension between the two women that he did not recall from his previous meetings with them. Perhaps it had always been there and he had simply missed it before, but he rather doubted it.
“I’ll say this,” the Triumvir stated, her heels squeaking as she turned to face the two of them. “Whatever it is, it’s big. Much bigger than any structure we could imagine building, even if we had the raw materials and the time. Even the smallest structures that we can single out in the cloud ought to have collapsed under their own self-gravity by now, becoming molten spheres of metal. But they haven’t. That tells me something.”
“Go on,” Thorn said.
“Either they can persuade matter to become many orders of magnitude more rigid than ought to be possible, or they have some local control of gravity. Perhaps some combination of the two, even. Accelerated streams of matter can serve the same structural functions as rigid spars if they can be controlled with sufficient finesse . . .” She was evidently thinking aloud, and for a moment she trailed off, before remembering her audience. “I suspect that they can manipulate inertia when it becomes necessary. We saw how they redirected those matter flows, bending them through right angles. That implies a profound knowledge of metric engineering, tampering with the basic substrate of space-time. If they have that ability, they can probably control gravity as well. We haven’t seen that before, I think, so it might be something they can only do on a large scale: a broad brush, so to speak. Everything we’ve seen so far—the disassembly of the rocky worlds, the Dyson motor around the gas giant—all that was watchmaker stuff. Now we’re seeing the first hints of Inhibitor heavy engineering.”
“Now you’re scaring me,” Thorn said.
“Entirely my intention.” She smiled quickly. It was the first time he had seen her smile that evening.
“So what is it going to be?” Khouri asked. “A machine to make the sun go supernova?”
“No,” the Triumvir replied. “We can rule that out, I think. They may have a technology that can do it, but it would only work on heavy stars, the kind that are already predestined to blow up. That would be a formidable weapon, I admit. You could sterilise a volume of space dozens of light-years wide if you could trigger a premature supernova. I don’t know how you would do it—maybe by tuning the nuclear cross sections to prohibit fusion for elements lighter than iron, thereby shifting the peak in the curve of binding energy. The star would suddenly have nothing to fuse, no means to support its outer envelope against collapse. They may have done it once, you know. Earth’s sun is in the middle of a bubble in the interstellar medium, blown open by a recent supernova. It intersects other structures right out to the Aquila Rift. They may have been natural events, or we might be seeing the scars left behind by Inhibitor sterilisation events millions of years before the Amarantin xenocide. Or the bubbles might have been blown open by the weapons of fleeing species. We’ll probably never know, no matter how hard we look. But that won’t happen here. There are no supergiant stars in this part of the galaxy now, nothing capable of undergoing a supernova. They must have evolved different weapons for dealing with lower-mass stars like Delta Pavonis. Less spectacular—no use for sterilising more than a solar system—but perfectly effective on that level.”