“Yes . . . Antoinette.”
She stood up from her seat. “Oh, and one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“No more ‘Little Miss.’”
Khouri snapped into damage-limitation mode. She made her way through the maze of partitions that divided the chamber, offering nothing more than a reassuring wave to the families and individuals who tried to stop her to ask what was going on. At that point she was still trying to work it out for herself.
It had already been agreed that her immediate deputies would assemble together in the event of anything unexpected happening. She found a dozen of them waiting for her, all looking only slightly less panicked than the people in their care.
“Vuilleumier . . .” they said, in near unison, on her arrival.
“What the hell just happened?” one asked. “We’ve got broken bones, fractures, people scared shitless. Shouldn’t someone have warned us?”
“Collision avoidance,” she said. “The ship detected a piece of debris heading towards it. Didn’t have time to shoot it away, so it moved itself.” It was a lie, and it did not even sound convincing to her, but it was at least a stab at a rational explanation. “That’s why there was no warning,” she added, by way of an afterthought. “It’s good, really: it means the safety subsystems are still working.”
“You never said they wouldn’t be,” the man told her.
“Well, now we know for sure, don’t we?” And with that she told them to spread the word that the sudden movement had been nothing to worry about, and to make sure that the injured got the care they needed.
Fortunately, no one had been killed, and the broken bones and fractures turned out to be clean breaks that could be attended to with simple procedures, without the need to take anyone beyond the chamber to the medical bay. An hour passed, and then two, and a nervous calm descended. Her explanation, it appeared, had been accepted by the majority of the evacuees.
Great, she thought. Now all I have to do is convince myself.
But an hour later the ship moved again.
This time it was less violent than before, and the only effect was to make Khouri sway and reach hastily for a support. She swore, but now it was less out of surprise than annoyance. She had no idea what she was going to tell the passengers next, and her last explanation was going to start looking less than convincing. She decided, for the time being, not to offer any explanation at all, and to let her underlings figure out what had happened. Give them time and they might come up with something better than she was capable of.
She made her way back to Ilia Volyova, thinking all the while that something was wrong, experiencing a sense of dislocation that she could not quite put her finger on. It was as if every vertical surface in the ship was minutely askew. The floor was no longer perfectly level, so that the liquid effluent in the flooded zones built up more on one side of the corridor than the other. Where it dripped from the walls it no longer fell vertically, but at a pronounced angle. By the time she reached Volyova’s bed, she could not ignore the changes. It was an effort to walk upright, and she found it easier and safer to move along one wall at a time.
“Ilia.”
She was, mercifully, awake, engrossed in the swollen bauble of her battle display. Clavain’s beta-level was by her side, the servitor’s fingers forming a contemplative steeple beneath its nose as it viewed the same abstract realisation.
“What is it, Khouri?” came Volyova’s scratch of a voice.
“Something’s happening to the ship.”
“Yes, I know. I felt it as well. So did Clavain.”
Khouri slipped her goggles on and viewed the two of them properly: the ailing woman and the elderly white-haired man who stood patiently at her bedside. They looked as if they had known each other all their lives.
“I think we’re moving,” Khouri said.
“More than just moving, I’d say,” Clavain replied. “Accelerating, aren’t we? The local vertical is shifting.”
He was right. When the ship was parked in orbit somewhere it generated gravity for itself by spinning sections of its interior. The occupants felt themselves being flung outwards, away from the ship’s long axis. But when Nostalgia for Infinity was under thrust, the acceleration created another source of false gravity exactly at right angles to the spin-generated pseudo-force. The two vectors combined to give a force that acted at an angle between them.
“About a tenth of a gee,” Clavain added, “or thereabouts. Enough to distort local vertical by five or six degrees.”
“No one asked the ship to move,” Khouri said.
“I think it decided to move itself,” Volyova said. “I imagine that was why we experienced some jolts earlier on. Our host’s fine control is a little rusty. Isn’t it, Captain?”
But the Captain did not answer her.
“Why are we moving?” Khouri asked.
“I think that might have something to do with it,” Volyova said.
The squashed bauble of the battle realisation swelled larger. At first glance it looked much as it had before. The remaining cache weapons were still displayed, together with the Inhibitor device. But there was something new: an icon that she did not remember being displayed before. It was arrowing into the arena of battle from an oblique angle to the ecliptic, exactly as if it had come in from interstellar space. Next to it was a flickering cluster of numbers and symbols.
“Clavain’s ship?” Khouri asked. “But that isn’t possible. We weren’t expecting to see it for weeks . . .”
“Seems we were wrong,” Volyova said. “Weren’t we, Clavain?”
“I can’t possibly speculate.”
“His blue shift was falling too swiftly,” Volyova said. “But I didn’t believe the evidence of my sensors. Nothing capable of interstellar flight could decelerate as hard as Clavain’s ship appeared to be slowing. And yet . . .”
Khouri finished the sentence for her. “It has.”
“Yes. And instead of being a month out, he was two or three days out, maybe fewer. Clever, Clavain, I’ll give you that. How do you manage that little trick, might I ask?”
The beta-level shook its head. “I don’t know. That particular piece of intelligence was edited from my personality before I was transmitted here. But I can speculate as well as you can, Ilia. Either my counterpart has a more powerful drive than anything known to the Conjoiners, or he has something worryingly close to inertia-suppression technology. Take your pick. Either way, I’d say it wasn’t exactly good news, wouldn’t you?”
“Are you saying the Captain saw the other ship coming in?” Khouri asked.
“You can be certain of it,” Volyova said. “Everything I see, he sees.”
“So why are we moving? Doesn’t he want to die?”
“Not here, it would seem,” Clavain said. “And not now. This trajectory will bring us back into local Resurgam space, won’t it?”
“In about twelve days,” Volyova confirmed. “Which strikes me as too long to be of any use. Of course, that’s assuming he sticks to one-tenth of a gee . . . he has no need to, ultimately. At a gee he could reach Resurgam in two days, ahead of Clavain.”
“What good will it do?” Khouri asked. “We’re just as vulnerable there as here. Clavain can reach us wherever we move to.”
“We’re not remotely vulnerable,” Volyova said. “We still have thirteen damned cache weapons and the will to use them. I can’t guess at the Captain’s deeper motive for moving us, but I know one thing: it makes the evacuation operation a good deal easier, doesn’t it?”
“You think he’s trying to help, finally?”
“I don’t know, Khouri. I’ll admit it is a distinct theoretical possibility, that is all. You’d better tell Thorn, anyway.”
“Tell him what?”