Alastair Reynolds: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

The regions through which they were descending now were as cold and grey as any Clavain had seen. There were no entoptic generators buried in these walls to supply visual information to the implants Galiana had put in his head, and even her own aura of light was gone. They only met a few other Conjoiners, and they seemed to be moving in the same general direction; down to the nest’s basement levels. This was unknown territory to Clavain.

Where was Galiana taking him?

“If you had an escape route all along, why did you wait so long before sending the children through it?”

“I told you, we couldn’t bring them to Transenlightenment too soon. The older they were, the better,” Galiana said. “Now though…”

“There was no waiting any longer, was there?”

Eventually they reached a chamber with the same echoing acoustics as the topside hangar. The chamber was dark except for a few pools of light, but in the shadows Clavain made out discarded excavation equipment and freight pallets; cranes and de-activated robots. The air smelled of ozone. Something was still going on here.

“Is this the factory where you make the shuttles?” Clavain said.

“We manufactured parts of them here, yes,” Galiana said. “But that was a side-industry.”

“Of what?”

“The tunnel, of course.” Galiana made more lights come on. At the far end of the chamber—they were walking toward it—waited a series of cylindrical things with pointed ends; like huge bullets. They rested on rails, one after the other. The tip of the very first bullet was next to a dark hole in the wall. Clavain was about to say something when there was a sudden loud buzz and the first bullet slammed into the hole. The other bullets—there were three of them now—eased slowly forward and halted. Conjoiners were waiting to get aboard them.

He remembered what Galiana had said about no one being left behind.

“What am I seeing here?”

“A way out of the nest,” Galiana said. “And a way off Mars, though I suppose you figured that part for yourself.”

“There is no way off Mars,” Clavain said. “The interdiction guarantees that. Haven’t you learned that with your shuttles?”

“The shuttles were only ever a diversionary tactic,” Galiana said. “They made your side think we were still striving to escape, whereas our true escape route was already fully operational.”

“A pretty desperate diversion.”

“Not really. I lied to you when I said we didn’t clone. We did—but only to produce brain-dead corpses. The shuttles were full of corpses before we ever launched them.”

For the first time since leaving Deimos Clavain smiled, amused at the sheer obliquity of Galiana’s thinking.

“Of course, there was another function,” she said. “The shuttles provoked your side into a direct attack against the nest.”

“So this was deliberate all along?”

“Yes. We needed to draw your side’s attention; to concentrate your military presence in low-orbit, near the nest. Of course we were hoping the offensive would come later than it did…but we reckoned without Warren’s conspiracy.”

“Then you are planning something.”

“Yes.” The next bullet slammed into the wall, ozone crackling from its linear induction rails. Now only two remained. “We can talk later. There isn’t much time now.” She projected an image into his visual field: the Wall, now veined by titanic fractures down half its length. “It’s collapsing.”

“And Felka?”

“She’s still trying to save it.”

He looked at the Conjoiners boarding the leading bullet; tried to imagine where they were going. Was it to any kind of sanctuary he might recognise—or to something so beyond his experience that it might as well be death? Did he have the nerve to find out? Perhaps. He had nothing to lose now, after all: he could certainly not return home. But if he was going to follow Galiana’s exodus, it could not be with the sense of shame he now felt in abandoning Felka.

The answer, when it came, was simple. “I’m going back for her. If you can’t wait for me, don’t. But don’t try and stop me doing this.”

Galiana looked at him, shaking her head slowly. “She won’t thank you for saving her life, Clavain.”

“Maybe not now,” he said.

HE HAD THE feeling he was running back into a burning building. Given what Galiana had said about the girl’s deficiencies—that by any reasonable definition she was hardly more than an automaton—what he was doing was very likely pointless, if not suicidal. But if he turned his back on her, he would become something even less than human himself. He had misread Galiana badly when she said the girl was precious to them. He had assumed some bond of affection…whereas what Galiana meant was that the girl was precious in the sense of a vital component. Now—with the nest being abandoned—the component had no further use. Did that make Galiana as cold as a machine herself—or was she just being unfailingly realistic? He found the nursery after only one or two false turns, and then Felka’s room. The implants Galiana had given him were again throwing phantom images into the air. Felka sat within the crumbling circle of the Wall. Great fissures now reached to the surface of Mars. Shards of the Wall, as big as icebergs, had fractured away and now lay like vast sheets of broken glass across the regolith.

She was losing, and now she knew it. This was not just some more difficult phase of the game. This was something she could never win, and her realisation was now plainly evident in her face. She was still moving her arms frantically, but her face was red now, locked into a petulant scowl of anger and fear.

For the first time, she seemed to notice him.

Something had broken through her shell, Clavain thought. For the first time in years, something was happening that was beyond her control; something that threatened to destroy the neat, geometric universe she had made for herself. She might not have distinguished his face from all the other people who came to see her, but she surely recognised something…that now the adult world was bigger than she was, and it was only from the adult world that any kind of salvation could come.

Then she did something that shocked him beyond words. She looked deep into his eyes and reached out a hand.

But there was nothing he could do to help her.

LATER—IT SEEMED HOURS, but in fact could only have been tens of minutes—Clavain found that he was able to breathe normally again. They had escaped Mars now; Galiana, Felka and himself, riding the last bullet.

And they were still alive.

The bullet’s vacuum-filled tunnel cut deep into Mars; a shallow arc bending under the crust before rising again, thousands of kilometres away, well beyond the Wall, where the atmosphere was as thin as ever. For the Conjoiners, boring the tunnel had not been especially difficult. Such engineering would have been impossible on a planet that had plate tectonics, but beneath its lithosphere Mars was geologically quiet. They had not even had to worry about tailings. What they excavated, they compressed and fused and used to line the tunnel, maintaining rigidity against awesome pressure with some trick of piezo-electricity. In the tunnel, the bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for ten minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to the legs to maintain bloodflow to the head. Even so, it was hard to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.

They were moving at ten kilometres a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trapdoor. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them…but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.