“It’s long past the time for discussion, Ilia.”
“We’ll find a way,” she said desperately, not even believing herself. “We’ll find a way to make you as you were: human again.”
“Don’t be silly, Ilia. You can’t unmake what I’ve become.”
“Then we’ll find a way to make it tolerable . . . to end whatever pain or discomfort you’re in. We’ll find a way to make it better than that. We can do it, Captain. There isn’t anything you and I couldn’t achieve, if we set our minds to it.”
“I said you didn’t understand. I was right. Don’t you realise, Ilia? This isn’t about what I’ve become, or what I was. This is about what I did. It’s about the thing I can’t live with any more.”
The weapon halted. It was now pointed directly at the hull.
“You killed a man,” Volyova said. “You murdered a man and took over his body. I know. It was a crime, Captain, a terrible crime. Sajaki didn’t deserve what you did to him. But don’t you understand? The crime has already been paid for. Sajaki died twice: once with his mind in his body and once with yours. That was the punishment, and God knows he suffered for it. There isn’t any need for further atonement, Captain. It’s been done. You’ve suffered enough, as well. What happened to you would be considered justice enough by anyone. You’ve paid for that deed a thousand times over.”
“I still remember what I did to him.”
“Of course you do. But that doesn’t mean you have to inflict this on yourself now.” She glanced at the bracelet. The weapon was powering up, she observed. In a moment it would be ready for use.
“I do, Ilia. I do. This isn’t some whim, you realise. I have planned this moment for much longer than you can conceive. Through all our conversations, it was always my intention to end myself.”
“You could have done it while I was down on Resurgam. Why now?”
“Why now?” She heard what could almost have been a laugh. It was a horrid, gallows laugh, if that was the case. “Isn’t it obvious, Ilia? What good is an act of justice if there isn’t a witness to see it executed?”
Her bracelet informed her that the weapon had reached attack readiness. “You wanted me to see this happen?”
“Of course. You were always special, Ilia. My best friend; the only one who talked to me when I was ill. The only one who understood.”
“I also made you what you are.”
“It was necessary. I don’t blame you for that, I really don’t.”
“Please don’t do this. You’ll be hurting more than just yourself.” She knew that she had to make this good; that what she said now could be crucial. “Captain, we need you. We need the weapons you carry, and we need you to help evacuate Resurgam. If you kill yourself now, you’ll be killing two hundred thousand people. You’ll be committing a far greater crime than the one you feel the need to atone for.”
“But that would only be a sin of omission, Ilia.”
“Captain, I’m begging you . . . don’t do this.”
“Steer your shuttle away, please, Ilia. I don’t want you to be harmed by what is about to happen. That was never my intention. I only wanted you as a witness, someone who would understand.”
“I already understand! Isn’t that enough?”
“No, Ilia.”
The weapon activated. The beam that emerged from its muzzle was invisible until it touched the hull. Then, in a gale of escaping air and ionised armour, it revealed itself flickeringly: a metre-thick shaft of scything destructive quintessence force, chewing inexorably through the ship. This, weapon thirty-one, was not one of the most devastating tools in her arsenal, but it had immense range. That was why she had selected it for use in the attack against the Inhibitors. The quintessence beam ghosted right through the ship, emerging in a similar gale on the far side. The weapon began to track, gnawing down the length of the hull.
“Captain . . .”
His voice came back. “I’m sorry, Ilia . . . I can’t stop now.”
He sounded in pain. It was hardly surprising, she thought. His nerve endings reached into every part of Nostalgia for Infinity . He was feeling the beam slice through him just as agonisingly as if she had begun to saw off her own arm. Again, Volyova understood. It had to be much more than just a quick, clean suicide. That would not be sufficient recompense for his crime. It had to be slow, protracted, excruciating. A martial execution, with a diligent witness who would appreciate and remember what he had inflicted upon himself.
The beam had chewed a hundred-metre-long furrow in the hull. The Captain was haemorrhaging air and fluids in the wake of the cutting beam.
“Stop,” she said. “Please, for God’s sake, stop!”
“Let me finish this, Ilia. Please forgive me.”
“No. I won’t allow it.”
She did not give herself time to think about what had to be done. If she had, she doubted that she would have had the courage to act. She had never considered herself a brave person, and most certainly not someone given to self-sacrifice.
Ilia Volyova steered her shuttle towards the beam, placing herself between the weapon and the fatal gash it was knifing into Nostalgia for Infinity.
“No!” she heard the Captain call.
But it was too late. He could not shut down the weapon in less than a second, nor steer it fast enough to bring her out of the line of fire. The shuttle collided glancingly with the beam—her aim had not been dead on—and the edge of the beam obliterated the entire right side of the shuttle. Armour, insulation, interior reinforcement, pressure membrane—everything wafted away in an instant of ruthless annihilation. Volyova had a moment to realise that she had missed the precise centre of the beam, and another instant to realise that it did not really matter.
She was going to die anyway.
Her vision fogged. There was a shocking, sudden cold in her windpipe, as if someone had poured liquid helium down her throat. She attempted to take a breath and the cold rammed into her lungs. There was an awful feeling of granite solidity in her chest. Her interior organs were shock freezing.
She opened her mouth, attempting to speak, to make one final utterance. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
THIRTY-ONE
“Why, Wolf?” Felka asked.
They were meeting alone on the same iron-grey, silver-skied expanse of rockpools where she had, at Skade’s insistence, already encountered the Wolf. Now she was dreaming lucidly; she was back on Clavain’s ship and Skade was dead, and yet the Wolf seemed no less real than it had before. The Wolf’s shape lingered just beyond clarity, like a column of smoke that occasionally fell into a mocking approximation of human form.
“Why what?”
“Why do you hate life so much?”
“I don’t. We don’t. We only do what we must.”
Felka kneeled on the rock, surrounded by animal parts. She understood that the presence of the wolves explained one of the great cosmic mysteries, a paradox that had haunted human minds since the dawn of spaceflight. The galaxy teemed with stars, and around many of those stars were worlds. It was true that not all of those worlds were the right distance from their suns to kindle life, and not all had the right fractions of metals to allow complex carbon chemistry. Sometimes the stars were not stable enough for life to gain a toehold. But none of that mattered, since there were hundreds of billions of stars. Only a tiny fraction had to be habitable for there to be a shocking abundance of life in the galaxy.
But there was no evidence that intelligent life had ever spread from star to star, despite the fact that it was relatively easy to do. Looking out into the night sky, human philosophers had concluded that intelligent life must be vanishingly rare; that perhaps the human species was the only sentient culture in the galaxy.
They were wrong, but they did not discover this until the dawn of interstellar society. Then, expeditions started finding evidence of fallen cultures, ruined worlds, extinct species. There were an uncomfortably large number of them.
It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out.
The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.
That was the answer. But it did not explain why they did it.