[A servitor, of course, only somewhat brighter than the norm . . . does that disturb you?]
Clavain followed her through the collar and into the tunnel, drifting more than walking, guiding himself between the throat-like walls of compactified ice. He had barely been aware of the pistol he carried until it had been confiscated, but now he felt quite vulnerable without it. He fingered his utility belt, but there was nothing else on it that would serve as a weapon against the servitor, should it chose to turn against them. There were a few clamps and miniature grapples, a couple of thumb-sized signalling beacons and a standard-issue sealant spray. The only thing approaching an actual weapon—while the spray looked like a gun, it had a range of only two or three centimetres—was a short-bladed piezo-knife, sufficient to pierce spacesuit fabric but not much use against an armoured machine or even a well-trained adversary.
You know damned well it does. I’ve never had my mind invaded by a machine . . . not the way that one just did.
[It just needs to know it can trust us.]
While it trawled him he had tasted the sharp metallic tang of its intelligence. How clever is it, exactly? Turing-compliant?
[Higher. As smart as an alpha-level, at the very least. Oh, don’t give me that aura of self-righteous disgust, Clavain. You once accepted machines that were almost as intelligent as yourself.]
I’ve had time to revise my opinion on the subject.
[Is it that you feel threatened by it, I wonder?]
By a machine? No. What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave. I didn’t think that was quite what we believed in.
He felt Remontoire’s quiet presence. [I agree with Clavain. We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.]
Somewhere ahead of them was a pale lilac glow that picked out the natural patterning of the tunnel walls. Clavain could see the servitor’s dark spindly bulk against the light source. It must have been listening in to this conversation, he thought, hearing them debate what it represented.
[I regret that we had to do it. But we didn’t have any choice. We needed clever servitors.]
[It’s slavery,] Remontoire insisted.
[Desperate times call for desperate measures, Remontoire.]
Clavain peered into the pale purple gloom. What’s so desperate? I thought all we were doing was recovering some lost property.
Clavain stared into the chamber. Beyond the glass was a cavern of dizzying scale. It was bathed in rapturous blue light, filled with vast machines and an almost subliminal sense of scurrying activity. For a moment the scene was far too much to take in. Clavain felt as if he was staring into the depths of perspective in a fabulous detailed medieval painting, beguiled by the interlocking arches and towers of some radiant celestial city, glimpsing hosts of silver-leaf angels in the architecture, squadron upon squadron of them as far as the eye could see, receding into the cerulean blue of infinity. Then he grasped the scale of things and realised with a perceptual jolt that the angels were merely distant machines: droves of sterile construction servitors traversing the vacuum by the thousand as they went about their tasks. They communicated with each other using lasers, and it was the scatter and reflection of those beams that drenched the chamber in such shivering blue radiance. And it was indeed cold, Clavain knew. Dotted around the walls of the chamber he recognised the nubbed black cones of cryo-arithmetic engines, calculating overtime to suck away the heat of intense industrial activity that would otherwise have boiled the comet away.
Clavain’s attention flicked to the reason for all that activity. He was not surprised to see the ships—not even surprised to see that they were starships—but the degree to which they had been completed astonished him. He had been expecting half-finished hulks, but he could not believe that these ships were far from flight-readiness. There were twelve of them packed side by side in clouds of geodesic support scaffolding. They were identical shapes, smooth and black as torpedos or beached whales, barbed near the rear with the outflung spars and nacelles of Conjoiner drives. Though there were no obvious visual comparisons, he was certain that each of the ships was at least three or four kilometres long, much larger than Nightshade.
Skade smiled, obviously noting his reaction. [Impressed?]
Who wouldn’t be?
[Now you understand why the Master was so concerned about the risk of an unintentional weapons discharge, or even a powerplant overload. Of course, you’re wondering why we’ve started building them again.]
It’s a fair question. Would the wolves have anything to do with it, by any chance?
[Perhaps you should tell me why you think we ever stopped making them.]
I’m afraid no one ever had the decency to tell me.
[You’re an intelligent man. You must have formed a few theories of your own.]
For a moment Clavain thought of telling her that the matter had never really concerned him; that the decision to stop making starships had happened when he was in deep space, a fait accompli by the time he returned, and—given the immediate need to help his side win the war—not the most pressing issue at hand.
But that would have been a lie. It had always troubled him.
Generally it’s assumed that we stopped making them for selfish economic reasons, or because we were worried that the drives were falling into the wrong hands—Ultras and other undesirables. Or that we discovered a fatal flaw in the design that meant that the drives had a habit of exploding now and again.
[Yes, and there are at least half a dozen other theories in common currency, ranging from the faintly plausible to the ludicrously paranoid. What was your understanding of the reason?]
We’d only ever had a stable customer relationship with the Demarchists. The Ultras bought their drives off second- or third-hand sources, or stole them. But once our relationship with the Demarchists began to deteriorate, which happened when the Melding Plague crashed their economy, we lost our main client. They couldn’t afford our technology, and we weren’t willing to sell it to a faction that showed increasing signs of hostility.
[A very pragmatic answer, Clavain.]
I never saw any reason to look for any deeper explanation.
[There is, of course, quite a grain of truth in that. Economic and political factors did play a role. But there was something else. It can’t have escaped your attention that our own internal shipbuilding programme has been much reduced.]
We’ve had a war to fight. We have enough ships for our needs as it is.
[True, but even those ships have not been active. Routine interstellar traffic has been greatly reduced. Travel between Conjoiner settlements in other systems has been cut back to a minimum.]
Again, effects of a war—
[Had remarkably little to do with it, other than providing a convenient cover story.]
Despite himself, Clavain almost laughed. Cover story?
[Had the real reason ever come out, there would have been widespread panic across the whole of human-settled space. The socio-economic turmoil would have been incomparably greater than anything caused by the present war.]
And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why?
[You were right, in a sense. It was to do with the wolves, Clavain.]
He shook his head. It can’t have been.
[Why not?]
Because we didn’t learn about the wolves until Galiana returned. And Galiana didn’t encounter them until after we separated . There was no need to remind Skade that both of these events had happened long after the edict to stop shipbuilding.
Skade’s helmet nodded a fraction. [That’s true, in a sense. Certainly, it wasn’t until Galiana’s return that the Mother Nest obtained any detailed intelligence concerning the nature of the machines. But the fact that the wolves existed—the fact that they were out there—that was already known, many years before.]
It can’t have been. Galiana was the first to encounter them.
[No. She was merely the first to make it back alive—or at least the first to make it back in any sense at all. Before that, there had only been distant reports, mysterious instances of ships vanishing, the odd distress signal. Over the years the Closed Council collated these reports and came to the conclusion that the wolves, or something like the wolves, was stalking interstellar space. That was bad enough, yet there was an even more disturbing conclusion, one that led to the edict. The pattern of losses pointed to the fact that the machines, whatever they were, homed in on a specific signature from our engines. We concluded that the wolves were drawn to us by the tau-neutrino emissions that are a characteristic of our drives.]
And Galiana?
[When she returned we knew we’d been right. And she gave a name to our enemy, Clavain. We owe her that much, if nothing else.]
Then Skade reached into his head and planted an image. What she showed him was pitiless blackness studded by a smattering of faint, feeble stars. The stars did nothing to nullify the darkness, serving only to make it more absolute and cold. This was how Skade now perceived the cosmos, as ultimately inimical to life as an acid bath. But between the stars was something other than emptiness. The machines lurked in those spaces, preferring the darkness and the cold. Skade made him experience the cruel flavour of their intelligence. It made the thought processes of the Master of Works seem comforting and friendly. There was something bestial in the way the machines thought, a furious slavering hunger that would eclipse all other considerations.