During a brief lull when the acceleration was throttled back for technical checks, Antoinette had boarded Storm Bird. Out of sheer curiosity, expecting the information to have been erased from the ship’s archives, she had looked for herself to see whether they had anything to say on the matter of the Mandelstam Ruling.
They had, too.
But even if they hadn’t, she thought she would have guessed.
The doubts had begun to surface properly after the whole business with Clavain had started. There had been the time when Beast jumped the gun during the banshee attack, exactly as if her ship had “panicked,” except that for a gamma-level intelligence that was simply not possible.
Then there had been time when the police proxy, the one that was now counting out the rest of its life in a dank cellar in the Château, had quizzed her on her father’s relationship with Lyle Merrick. The proxy had mentioned the Mandelstam Ruling.
It had meant nothing to her at the time.
But now she knew.
Then there had been the time when Beast had inadvertently referred to itself as “I,” as if a scrupulously maintained façade had just, for the tiniest of moments, slipped aside. As if she had glimpsed the true face of something.
“Little Miss . . . ?”
“I know.”
“Know what, Little Miss?”
“What you are. Who you are.”
“Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but . . .”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Little Miss . . . if one might . . .”
“I said shut the fuck up.” Antoinette hit the panel of the flight deck console with the heel of her hand. It was the closest thing she could find to hitting Beast, and for a moment she felt a warm glow of retribution. “I know all about what happened. I found out about the Mandelstam Ruling.”
“The Mandelstam Ruling, Little Miss?”
“Don’t sound so fucking innocent. I know you know all about it. It’s the law they passed just before you died. The one about irreversible neural death sentences.”
“Irreversible neural death, Little . . .”
“The one that says that the authorities—the Ferrisville Convention—have the right to impound and erase any beta- or alpha-level copies of someone sentenced to permanent death. It says that no matter how many backups of yourself you make, no matter whether they’re simulacra or genuine neural scans, the authorities get to round them up and wipe them out.”
“That sounds rather extreme, Little Miss.”
“It does, doesn’t it? And they take it seriously, too. Anyone caught harbouring a copy of a sentenced felon is in just as much trouble themselves. Of course, there are loopholes—a simulation can be hidden almost anywhere, or beamed to somewhere beyond Ferrisville jurisdiction. But there are still risks. I checked, Beast. The authorities have caught people who sheltered copies, against the Mandelstam Ruling. They all got the death sentence, too.”
“It would seem a rather cavalier thing to do.”
She smiled. “Wouldn’t it just? But what if you didn’t even know you were sheltering one? How would that change the equation?”
“One hesitates to speculate.”
“I doubt it would change the equation one fucking inch. Not where the cops are concerned. Which would make it all the more irresponsible, don’t you think, for someone to trick someone else into harbouring an illegal simulation?”
“Trick, Little Miss?”
She nodded. She was there now. No more pussyfooting here either. “The police proxy knew, didn’t it? Just couldn’t get the evidence together, I guess—or maybe it was just letting me stew, waiting to see how much I knew.”
The mask slipped again. “I’m not entire . . .”
“I guess Xavier had to be in on it. He knows this ship like the back of his hand, every subsystem, every Goddamned wire. He certainly would have known how to hide Lyle Merrick aboard it.”
“Lyle Merrick, Little Miss?”
“You know. You remember. Not the Lyle Merrick, of course, just a copy of him. Beta- or alpha-level, I don’t know. Don’t very much care either. Wouldn’t have made a fuck of a lot of difference in a court of law, would it?”
“Now . . .”
“It’s you, Beast. You’re him. Lyle Merrick died when the authorities executed him for the collision. But that wasn’t the end, was it? You kept on going. Xavier hid a copy of Lyle aboard my father’s fucking ship. You’re it.”
Beast said nothing for several seconds. Antoinette watched the slow, hypnotic play of colours and numerics on the console. She felt as if a part of her had been violated, as if everything in the universe she had ever felt she could trust had just been wadded up and thrown away.
When Beast answered, the tone of his voice was mockingly unchanged. “Little Miss . . . I mean Antoinette . . . You’re wrong.”
“Of course I’m not wrong. You’ve as good as admitted it.”
“No. You don’t understand.”
“What part don’t I understand?”
“It wasn’t Xavier who did this to me. Xavier helped—Xavier knew all about it—but it wasn’t his idea.”
“No?”
“It was your father, Antoinette. He helped me.”
She hit the console again, harder this time. And then walked out of her ship, intending never to set foot in it again.
“Lucky old Lasher,” he said to himself. “You always wanted the glory. Now’s your big chance.”
He did not take the duty lightly, nor underestimate the risks to himself. The recovery operation was fraught with danger. The amount of fuel his shuttle carried was precisely rationed, just enough so that he could get back home again with a human-mass payload. But there was no room for error. Clavain had made it clear that there were to be no pointless heroics. If the trajectory of Skade’s shuttle took it even a kilometre outside the safe volume in which a rendezvous was possible, Lasher—or whoever the lucky one was—was to turn back, ignoring it. The only concession to be made was that each of Clavain’s shuttles carried a single modified missile, the warhead stripped out and replaced with a transponder. If they got within range of Skade’s shuttle they could attach the beacon to its hull. The beacon would keep emitting its signal for a century of subjective time, five hundred years of worldtime. It would not be easy, but there would remain a faint chance of homing in on it again, before it fell beyond the well-mapped sphere of human space. It was enough to know that they would not have abandoned Felka entirely.
Lasher saw it now. His shuttle had homed in on Skade’s, following updated coordinates from Zodiacal Light. Skade’s shuttle was now in free-fall, having burned its last microgram of antimatter. It was visible in his forward window: a gunmetal barb illuminated by his forward floods.
He opened the channel back to the lighthugger. “This is Lasher. I see it now. It’s definitely a shuttle. Can’t tell you what type, but it doesn’t look like one of ours.”
He slowed his approach. It would have been nice to wait for Scorpio’s response, but that was a luxury he did not have. There was already a twenty-minute timelag back to Zodiacal Light, and the distance was stretching continually as the larger ship maintained its ten-gee acceleration. He was permitted exactly thirty minutes here, and then he had to begin his return journey. If he stayed a minute longer he would never catch up with the lighthugger.
It would be just enough time to establish airlock connections between two unfamiliar ships, just enough time for him to get aboard and find Clavain’s daughter, or whoever she was.