“You’re warm, I’ll give you that.”
“Warm?”
“Hot. Very hot, as it happens.”
“Start telling me what the hell this is all about, Clavain. If they’re Conjoiner weapons, how have you only just found out about them?”
“They emit tracer signals, Ilia. We homed in on them.”
“But you’re not Conjoiners.”
“No . . .” Clavain conceded this point with a sweep of one arm, neatly synchronised with the servitor. “But I’ll be honest with you, if only because it might help swing the negotiations in my favour. The Conjoiners do want those weapons back. And they’re on their way here as well. As a matter of fact, there’s a whole fleet of heavily armed Conjoiner vessels immediately behind Zodiacal Light.”
She remembered what the pig, Scorpio, had said about Clavain’s crew bloodying the noses of the spiders. “Why tell me this?” Volyova said.
“It alarms you, I see. I don’t blame you for that. I’d be alarmed, too.” The image scratched its beard. “That’s why you should consider negotiating with me first. Let me take the weapons off your hands. I’ll deal with the Conjoiners.”
“Why do you think you’d have any more luck than me, Clavain?”
“Couple of reasons, Ilia. One, I’ve already outsmarted them on a few occasions. Two, and perhaps more pertinent, until very recently I was one.”
The Captain whispered in her ear. “I’ve done a check, Ilia. There was a Nevil Clavain with Conjoiner connections.”
Volyova addressed Clavain. “And you think that would make a difference, Clavain?”
He nodded. “The Conjoiners aren’t vindictive. They’ll leave you alone if you have nothing to offer them. If you still have the weapons, however, they’ll take you apart.”
“There’s a small flaw in your thinking,” Volyova said. “If I had the weapons, wouldn’t I be the one doing the taking apart?”
Clavain winked at her. “Know how to use them that well, do you?”
“I have some experience.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve barely switched the bloody things on, Ilia. If you had, we’d have detected them centuries ago. Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, won’t I?”
Clavain—she had to stop thinking of it as Clavain—scratched his beard again. “I didn’t mean to offend. But the weapons are dangerous. I’m quite sincere in my suggestion that you hand them over now and let me worry about them.”
“And if I say no?”
“We’ll do just what we promised: take them by force.”
“Look up, Clavain, will you? I want to show you something. You alluded to some knowledge of it before, but I want you to be completely certain of the facts.”
She had programmed the display sphere to come alive at that moment, filled with an enlargement of the dismantled world. The cloud of matter was curdled and torn, flecked by dense nodes of aggregating matter. But the trumpetlike object growing at its heart was ten times larger than any other structure, and now appeared almost fully formed. Although it was difficult for her sensors to see with any clarity through the megatonnes of matter that still lay along the line of sight, there was a suggestion of immense complexity, a bewildering accretion of lacy detail, from a scale of many hundreds of kilometres across to the limit of her scanning resolution. The machinery had a muscular, organic look, knotted and swollen with gristle, sinews and glandular nodes. It did not look like anything a human imagination would have produced by design. And even now layers of matter were being added to the titanic machine: she could see the density streams where mass flows were still taking place. But the thing looked worrying close to being finished.
“Have you seen much of that before now, Clavain?” she asked.
“A little. Not as clearly as this.”
“What did you make of it?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve made of it first, Ilia?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I came to the obvious conclusion, Clavain. I watched three small worlds get ripped apart by machines, before they moved on to this one. They’re alien. They were drawn here by something Dan Sylveste did.”
“Yes. We assumed he had something to do with it. We know about these machines, too—at least, we’ve had our suspicions that they exist.”
“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?” she asked.
“The Conjoiners, I mean. I only defected recently.” He paused before continuing. “A few centuries ago, we launched expeditions into deep interstellar space, much further out than anything achieved by any other human faction. Those expeditions encountered the machines. We codenamed them wolves, but I think we can assume we’re seeing essentially the same entities here.”
“They have no name for themselves,” Volyova said. “But we call them the Inhibitors. It’s the name they gained during their heyday.”
“You learned all that from observation?”
“No,” Volyova said. “Not as such.”
She was telling him too much, she thought. But Clavain was so persuasive that she could almost not help herself. Before very long, if she were not careful, she would have told him everything about what had happened around Hades: how Khouri had been given a glimpse into the galaxy’s dark prehuman history, endless chapters of extinction and war stretching back to the dawn of sentient life itself . . .
There were things she was prepared to discuss with Clavain, and there were things she would rather keep to herself, for now.
“You’re a woman of mystery, Ilia Volyova.”
“I’m also a woman with a lot of work to do, Clavain.” She made the sphere zoom in on the burgeoning machine. “The Inhibitors are building a weapon. I have strong suspicions that it will be used to trigger some kind of cataclysmic stellar event. They triggered a flare to wipe out the Amarantin, but I think this will be different—much larger and probably more terminal. And I simply cannot allow it to happen. There are two hundred thousand people on Resurgam, and they will all die if that weapon is used.”
“I sympathise, believe me.”
“Then you’ll understand that I won’t be handing over any weapons, now or at any point in the future.”
For the first time Clavain appeared exasperated. He rubbed a hand through his shock of hair, bristling it into a mess of jagged white spikes. “Give me the weapons and I’ll see that they’re used against the wolves. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she said cheerfully. “Except that I don’t believe you. And if these weapons are as potent as you say, I’m not sure I’m willing to hand them over to any other party. We’ve looked after them for centuries, after all. No harm was done. I’d say that puts us in rather a good light, wouldn’t you? We’ve been responsible custodians. It would be quite cavalier of us to let any old bunch of rogues get their hands on them now, wouldn’t it?” She smiled. “Especially as you admit that you’re not the rightful owners, Clavain.”
“You’ll regret dealing with the Conjoiners, Ilia.”
“Mm. But at least I’ll be dealing with a legitimate faction.”
Clavain pushed the fingers of his right hand against his brow, like someone fighting a migraine. “No, you won’t be. Not in the sense you think. They only want the weapons so they can scuttle off into deep space with them.”
“And I suppose you have some vastly more magnanimous use in mind?”
Clavain nodded. “I do, as a matter of fact. I want to put them back into the hands of the human race. Demarchists . . . Ultras . . . Scorpio’s army . . . I don’t care who takes them over, so long as they convince me that they’ll do the right thing with them.”
“Which is?”