He scanned the next message originating from the same source. Its header indicated that it had been transmitted ninety minutes after the first. The implied acceleration was now two point five gees.
“Clavain. Surrender now and I guarantee you a fair hearing. You cannot win.”
The transmission quality was poor: the acoustics of her voice were strange and mechanical, and whatever compression algorithm she had used had made her head seem fixed and immobile, only her mouth and eyes moving.
Next message: three gees.
“We have redetected your exhaust signature, Clavain. The temperature and blue shift of your flame indicates that you are accelerating at your operational limit. I want you to appreciate that we are nowhere near ours. This is not the ship you knew, Clavain, but something faster and more deadly. It is fully capable of intercepting you.”
The masklike face contorted into a stiff ghoulish smile. “But there is still time for negotiation. I’ll let you pick a place of rendezvous, Clavain. Just say the word and we’ll meet on your terms. A minor planet, a comet, open space—it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”
He killed the message. He was certain that Skade was bluffing about having detected his flame. The last part of the message, the invitation to reply, was just her attempt to get him to betray his position by transmitting.
“Sly, Skade,” he said. “But unfortunately I’m a hell of a lot more sly.”
But it still worried him. She was accelerating too hard, and although the blue shift could have been faked, applied to the message before it was transmitted, he sensed that in that respect at least there had been no bluff.
She was coming after him with a much faster ship than he had assumed available, and she was gaining ground by the second.
Clavain bit into his toast and listened to the Quirrenbach a bit longer.
“Play the rest,” he said.
“You have no more messages,” the corvette told him.
“Play them,” he said cautiously.
The first message was from Remontoire. His head appeared, bald and cherubic. He was more animated than Skade, and there was a good deal more emotion in his voice. He leant towards the lens, his eyes beseeching.
“Clavain. I’m hoping you’ll hear this and give it some thought. If you’ve listened to Skade then you’ll know that we can catch you up. This isn’t a trick. She’ll kill me for what I’m about to say, but if I know you at all you’ll have arranged for these messages to be wiped as soon as you play them, so there’s no real danger of this information reaching enemy hands. So here it is. There’s experimental machinery on Nightshade. You knew Skade was testing something, but not what. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a machine for suppressing inertial mass. I don’t pretend to understand how it works, but I’ve seen the evidence that it does with my own eyes. Felt it, even. We’ve ramped up to four gees now, though you’ll be able to confirm that independently. Before very long you’ll have parallactic confirmation from the origin of these signals, if you weren’t already convinced. All I’m saying is it’s real, and according to Skade it can keep suppressing more and more of our mass.” He looked hard into the camera, paused and then continued, “We can read your drive flame. We’re homing in on it. You can’t escape, Clavain, so stop running. As a friend, I beg you to stop running. I want to see you again, to talk and laugh with you.”
“Skip to next message,” he said, interrupting.
The corvette obliged; Felka’s image replaced Remontoire’s. Clavain experienced a jolt of surprise. The matter of who would pursue him had never been entirely settled in his mind, but he could have counted on Skade: she would make sure she was there when the killing missile was launched, and she would do all in her power to be the one to give the order. Remontoire would come along out of a sense of duty to the Mother Nest, emboldened by the conviction that he was executing a solemn task and that only he was truly qualified to hunt Clavain.
But Felka? He had not expected to see Felka at all.
“Clavain,” she said, her voice revealing the strain of talking under four gees. “Clavain . . . please. They’re going to kill you. Skade won’t go to any great trouble to arrange a live capture, no matter what she says. She wants to confront you, to rub your nose in what you’ve done . . .”
“What I’ve done?” he said to her recording.
“. . . and while she’ll capture you if she can, I don’t think she’ll keep you alive for long. But if you turn around and surrender, and let the Mother Nest know what you’re doing, I think there might be a hope. Are you listening, Clavain?” She reached out and traced shapes across the lens between them, exactly as if she were mapping his face, relearning its shape for the thousandth time. “I want you to come home safe and sound, that’s all. I don’t even disagree with what you’ve done. I have my doubts about a lot of things, Clavain, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have . . .”
She lost whatever thread she was following, staring into infinity before refocusing. “Clavain . . . there’s something I have to tell you, something that I think might make a difference. I’ve never spoken of this to you before, but now I think the time is right. Am I being cynical? Yes, avowedly. I’m doing this because I think it might persuade you to turn back; no other reason than that. I hope you can forgive me.”
Clavain clicked a finger at the corvette’s wall, making it drop the volume of the music. For a heartbreaking moment there was near silence, Felka’s face hovering before him. Then she spoke again.
“It was on Mars, Clavain, when you were Galiana’s prisoner for the first time. She kept you there for months and then released you. You must remember what it was like back then.”
He nodded. Of course he remembered. What difference did four hundred years make?
“Galiana’s nest was hemmed in from all sides. But she wouldn’t give up. She had plans for the future, big plans, the kind that involved expanding the numbers of her disciples. But the nest lacked genetic diversity. Whenever new DNA came her way, she seized it. You and Galiana never made love on Mars, Clavain, but it was easy enough for her to obtain a cell scraping without your knowledge.”
“And?” he whispered.
Felka’s message continued seamlessly. “After you’d gone back to your side, she combined your DNA with her own, splicing the two samples together. Then she created me from the same genetic information. I was born in an artificial womb, Clavain, but I am still Galiana’s daughter. And still your daughter, too.”
“Skip to next message,” he said, before she could say another word. It was too much; too intense. He could not process the information in one go, even though she was only telling him what he had always suspected—prayed—was the case.
But there were no other messages.
Fearfully, Clavain asked the corvette to spool back and replay Felka’s transmission. But he had been much too thorough: the ship had dutifully erased the message, and now all that remained was what he carried in his memory.
He sat in silence. He was far from home, far from his friends, embarked on something that even he was not sure he believed in. It was entirely likely that he would die soon, un-commemorated except as a traitor. Even the enemy would not do him the dignity of remembering him with any more affection than that. And now this: a message that had reached across space to claw at his feelings. When he had said goodbye to Felka he had managed a singular piece of self-deception, convincing himself that he no longer thought of her as his daughter. He had believed it, too, for the time it took to leave the Nest.
But now she was telling him that he had been right all along. And that if he did not turn around he would never see her again.
But he could not turn around.
Clavain wept. There was nothing else to do.
SIXTEEN
Thorn took his first tentative steps aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. He looked around with frantic, wide-eyed intent, desperate not to miss a single detail or nuance of detail that might betray deception or even the tiniest hint that things were not completely as claimed. He was afraid to blink. What if some vital slip that would have exposed the whole thing as a façade happened when he had his eyes closed? What if the two of them were waiting for him to blink, like conjurors playing with an audience’s attention?
Yet there appeared to be no deception here. Even if the trip in the shuttle had not convinced him of that fact—and it was difficult to imagine how that could have been faked—the supreme evidence was here.
He had travelled through space. He was no longer on Resurgam, but inside a colossal spacecraft: the Triumvir’s long-lost lighthugger. Even the gravity felt different.
“You couldn’t have made this . . .” he said, as he walked alongside his two companions. “Not in a hundred years. Not unless you were Ultras to begin with. And then why would you need to fake it anyway?”
“So you’re prepared to believe our story?” the Inquisitor asked him.
“You’ve got your hands on a starship. I can hardly deny that. But even a ship this size, and from what I’ve seen it’s at least as big as Lorean ever was, even a ship this size can’t accommodate two hundred thousand sleepers. Can it?”
“It won’t need to,” the other woman told him. “Remember, this is an evacuation operation, not a pleasure cruise. Our objective is only to get people away from Resurgam. We’ll put the most vulnerable into reefersleep. But the majority will have to stay awake and suffer rather cramped conditions. They won’t enjoy it, but it’s a hell of an improvement on being dead.”
There was no arguing with that. None of his own plans had ever guaranteed a luxurious ride off the planet.
“How long do you think people will have to spend here, before they can return to Resurgam?” he asked.
The women exchanged glances. “Returning to Resurgam may never be an option,” the older one said.
Thorn shrugged. “It was a sterile rock when we arrived. We can start from scratch if we have to.”
“Not if the planet doesn’t exist. It could be that bad, Thorn.” She knuckled the wall of the ship as they walked on. “But we can keep people here as long as we need to—years, decades even.”