There’s a crisis, she told him. A crisis in the deep galactic future, three billion years from now. Except it wasn’t really “deep” at all.
Thirteen turns of the Galactic spiral, that was all. Before the glaciers had rolled in, you could have walked on to a beach on Earth and picked up a sedimentary rock that was older than three billion years.
Thirteen turns of the wheel? It was nothing in cosmic terms. It was almost upon them.
What crisis? Clavain asked.
A collision, Felka told him.
THIRTY-EIGHT
When she was five hundred kilometres closer to the battle, Antoinette left the bridge unattended, trusting the ship to take care of itself for three or four minutes while she said goodbye to Scorpio and his squad. By the time she reached the huge depressurised bay where the pigs were waiting, the exterior door had eased open and the first of the three shuttles had already launched. She saw the blue spark of its exhaust flame veering towards the glittering nest of light that was the core of the battle. Two trikes followed immediately behind it, and then the second shuttle was jacked forward, pushed by the squat hydraulic rams that were normally used for moving bulky cargo pallets.
Scorpio was already buckling himself into his trike alongside the third shuttle. Since the trikes aboard Storm Bird had not needed to make the journey all the way from Zodiacal Light, they carried far more armour and weaponry than the other units. Scorpio’s own armour was an eye-wrenching combination of luminous colour and reflective patches. The frame of his trike was almost impossible to make out behind the layers of armour and the flanged and muzzled shapes of projectile and beam weapons. Xavier was helping him with his final systems checks, disconnecting a compad from a diagnostics port under the saddle of the trike. He gave a thumbs-up sign and patted Scorpio’s armour.
“Looks like you’re ready,” Antoinette said through her suit’s general comm channel.
“You didn’t have to risk your ship,” Scorpio said. “But since you did, I’ll make the extra fuel count.”
“I don’t envy you this, Scorpio. I know you’ve already lost quite a few of your soldiers.”
“They’re our soldiers, Antoinette, not just mine.” He made the control fascia of his trike light up with displays, luminous dials and targeting grids, while beyond him the second shuttle departed from the bay, shoved into empty space by the loading rams. The ignition of its drive painted a hard blue radiance against Scorpio’s armour. “Listen,” he said. “There’s something you ought to appreciate. If you knew what the life expectancy of a pig in the Mulch was, nothing that’s happened today would seem quite so tragic. Most of my army would have died years ago if they hadn’t signed up for Clavain’s crusade. I figure they owe Clavain, not the other way round.”
“It doesn’t mean they should die today.”
“And most of them won’t. Clavain always knew we’d have to accept some losses, and my pigs knew it as well. We never took a block of Chasm City without spilling some pig blood. But most of us will make it back, and we’ll make it with the weapons. We’re already winning, Antoinette. Once Clavain used the pacification code, Volyova’s war was over.” Scorpio tugged down his flash visor with one stubby gauntlet. “We’re not even fighting the war now. This is just a mopping-up operation.”
“Can I still wish you good luck?”
“You can wish me what the hell you like. It won’t make any difference. If it did, it would mean I hadn’t prepared well enough.”
“Good luck, Scorpio. Good luck to you and all your army.”
The third shuttle was being pushed forwards to the departure point. She watched it depart along with the remaining trikes—along with Scorpio—and then told her ship to seal up and head away from the battle.
Weapon seventeen was the only one of the five that she had not withdrawn back into the safety and seclusion of Nostalgia for Infinity. She parked her shuttle next to it, moored close enough that there would be no chance of attacking the shuttle without harming the weapon. Then she depressurised the entire cabin, not wishing to go through the time-consuming rigmarole of cycling through the airlock. The powered suit assisted her movements, giving her a false sense of strength and vitality. But perhaps not all of that was down to the suit.
Volyova hauled herself from the shuttle’s open lock, and for a moment she was poised midway between the ship and the looming side of weapon seventeen. She felt terribly vulnerable, but the spectacle of the battle was hypnotic. In every direction she looked, all she saw was rushing ships, the dancing sparks of exhaust flames and the brief blue-edged flowers of nuclear and matter-antimatter explosions. Her radio crackled with constant interference. Her suit’s radiation sensor was chirping off the scale. She killed them both, preferring peace and quiet.
Volyova had parked the shuttle directly over the hatch in the side of weapon seventeen. Her fingers felt clumsy as they tapped the commands into the thick studs of her suit bracelet, but she worked slowly and made no mistakes. Given the shutdown order Clavain had transmitted to the weapon, she did not necessarily expect that any of her commands would be acted upon.
But the hatch slid open, sickly green light spewing out.
“Thank you,” Ilia Volyova said, to no one in particular.
Headfirst, she sunk into the green well. All evidence of the war vanished like a bad dream. Above her, Volyova could see only the armoured belly lock of her shuttle, and all around her she could make out only the interior machinery of the weapon, bathed in the same insipid green glow.
She worked through the procedure she had gone through before, at every step expecting failure, but knowing that she had absolutely nothing to lose. The weapon’s fear generators were still firing at full tilt, but this time she found the anxiety reassuring rather than disturbing. It meant that critical weapon functions were still active, and that Clavain had only stunned rather than killed weapon seventeen. She had never seriously thought otherwise, but there had always been a trace of doubt in her mind. What if Clavain himself had not properly understood the code?
But the weapon was not dead, just sleeping.
And then it happened, just as it had happened that first time. The hatch snapped closed, the interior of the weapon began to shift alarmingly and she sensed something approaching, an unspeakable malevolence rushing towards her. She steeled herself. The knowledge that all she was dealing with was a sophisticated subpersona did not make the experience any less unsettling.
There it was. The presence oozed behind her, a shadow that always hovered just on the very edge of her peripheral vision. Once again, she was paralysed, and as before the fear was ten times worse than what she had just been experiencing.
[There’s no rest for the wicked, is there, Ilia?]
She remembered that the weapon could read her thoughts. I thought I’d just drop by to see how you were doing, Seventeen. You don’t mind, do you?
[Then that’s all this is? A social call?]
Well, actually it’s a bit more than that.
[I thought it might be. You only ever come when you want something, don’t you?]
You don’t exactly go out of your way to make me feel welcome, Seventeen.
[What, the enforced paralysis and the sense of creeping terror? You mean you don’t like that?]
I don’t think I was ever meant to like it, Seventeen.
She detected the tiniest hint of a sulk in the weapon’s reply. [Perhaps.]
Seventeen . . . there’s a matter we need to talk about, if you don’t mind . . .
[I’m not going anywhere. You’re not either.]
No. I don’t suppose I am. Are you aware of the difficulty, Seventeen? The code that won’t allow you to fire?
Now the sulk—if that was what it had been—shifted to something closer to indignation. [How could I not know about it?]
I was just checking, that’s all. About this code, Seventeen . . .
[Yes?]
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you ignoring it, is there?
[Ignore the code?]
Something along those lines, yes. You having a certain degree of free will and all that, I thought it might just be worth raising, as—shall we say—a matter for debate, if nothing else . . . Of course, I know it’s unreasonable to expect you to be capable of such a thing . . .
[Unreasonable, Ilia?]
Well, you’re bound to have your limitations. And if, as Clavain says, this code is causing a system interrupt at root level . . . well, there’s not a lot I can expect you to do about it, is there?
[What would Clavain know?]