Reynolds, Alastair - Redemption Ark

She did not respond immediately. The ship flew on. Clavain eyed the read-outs and tactical summaries again. For a moment, a terrible, yawning moment, he felt that he had said far too much. But then she spoke, and he knew that she had understood everything.

[I think I need to tell you about the wolves.]

THIRTY-SEVEN

When Volyova had made the decision, she felt a rush of strength, enabling her to rip the medical probes and shunts from her body, flinging them aside with wicked abandon. She retained only the goggles which substituted for her blinded eyes, while doing her best not to think of the vile machinery now floating in her skull. Other than that, she felt quite hale and hearty. She knew that it was an illusion, that she would pay for this burst of energy later, and that almost certainly she would pay for it with her life. But she felt no fear at the prospect, only a quiet satisfaction that she might at least do something with the time that remained to her. It was all very well lying here, directing distant affairs like some bed-ridden pontiff, but it was not the way she was meant to be. She was Triumvir Ilia Volyova, and she had certain standards to uphold.

“Ilia . . .” Khouri began, when she saw what was happening.

“Khouri,” she said, her voice still a croak, but finally imbued with something resembling the old fire. “Khouri . . . do this for me, and never once stop to question me or talk me out of it. Understood?”

“Understood . . . I think.”

Volyova clicked her fingers at the nearest servitor. It scuttled towards her, dodging between the squawking medical monitors. “Captain . . . have the servitor assist me to the spacecraft bay, will you? I will expect a suit and a shuttle to be waiting for me.”

Khouri steadied her, holding her in a sitting position. “Ilia, what are you planning?”

“I’m going outside. I need to have a word—a serious word—with weapon seventeen.”

“You’re in no state . . .”

Volyova cut her off with a chop of one frail hand. “Khouri, I may have a weak and feeble body, but give me weightlessness, a suit and possibly a weapon or two and you’ll find I can still do some damage. Understood?”

“You haven’t given up, have you?”

The servitor helped her to the floor. “Given up, Khouri? It’s not in my dictionary.”

Khouri helped her as well, taking the Triumvir’s other arm.

The swarm was tighter towards the middle, thinning out through dozens of kilometres. Though she was on the edge of it, she was aware of how tempting a target Storm Bird must present. The Triumvir’s defences were preoccupied with the closer attack elements, but Antoinette knew that she could not afford to count on that continuing.

Xavier’s voice came over the intercom. “Antoinette? Scorpio’s ready for departure. Says you can open the bay door any time you like.”

“We’re not close enough,” she said.

Scorpio’s voice cut over the intercom. She no longer had any difficulty distinguishing his voice from those of the other pigs. “Antoinette? This is close enough. We have the fuel to cross from here. There’s no need for you to risk Storm Bird by taking us any closer.”

“But the closer I take you, the more fuel you’ll have in reserve. Isn’t that true?”

“I can’t argue with that. Take us five hundred kilometres closer, then. And Antoinette? That really will be close enough.”

She magnified the battle view, tapping into the telemetry stream from the many cameras that now whipped around the Triumvir’s ship. The image data had been seamlessly merged and then processed to remove the motion, and while there were occasional snags and dropouts as the view was refreshed, the impression was as if she were hovering in space only two or three kilometres beyond the ship itself. The silence was one thing that the holo-dramas got right, she realised, but she had never realised how terribly, profoundly wrong that silence would be when accompanying an actual battle. It was an abject void into which her imagination projected endless screams. What did not help was the way that the Triumvir’s ship loomed out of darkness in random, fitful flashes of light, never lingering long enough for her to comprehend the form of the ship in its entirety. What she saw of the ship’s perverted architecture was nonetheless adequately disturbing.

Now she saw something that she had not seen before: a rectangle of light, like a golden door, opened somewhere along the wrinkled complexity of Nostalgia for Infinity ’s hull. It was open for only a moment, but that was long enough for something to slip through. The glare from the engine of the shuttle that had emerged caught the stepped spinal edge of a flying buttress, and as the ship gyred, orientating itself with strobing flashes of thrust, the black shadow of the buttress crawled across an acre of hull material that had the scaled texture of lizardskin.

[Everything, Clavain. At least, everything that I learned. Everything that the Wolf was prepared to let me know.]

It may not be all of the picture, Felka. It may not even be part of it.

[I know. But I still think I should tell you.]

Think about it, Felka told him. The existence of the wolves solved one cosmic riddle: the killing machines explained why it was that humanity found itself largely alone in the universe; why the Galaxy appeared barren of other intelligent cultures. It might have been that humanity was just a statistical quirk in an otherwise lifeless cosmos; that the emergence of intelligent, tool-using life was astonishingly rare and that the universe had to be a certain number of billion years old before there was a chance of such a culture arising. This possibility had lingered on until the dawn of the starfaring era, when human explorers began to pick through the ruins of other cultures around nearby stars. Far from being rare, it looked as if tool-using technological life was actually rather common. But for some reason, these cultures had all become extinct.

The evidence suggested that the extinction events happened on a short timescale compared with the evolutionary development cycles of species: perhaps no more than a few centuries. The extinctions also seemed to happen at around the time each culture attempted to make a serious expansion into interstellar space.

In other words, at around the development point that humanity—fractured, squabbling, but still essentially one species—now found itself.

Given that premise, she said, it was not too surprising to find that something like the wolves—or the Inhibitors, as some of their victims called them—existed; they were almost inevitable given the pattern of extinctions: remorseless droves of killer machines lurking between the stars, waiting patiently across the aeons for the signs of emergent intelligence . . .

Except that didn’t make any real sense, Felka continued. If intelligence was worth wiping out, for whatever reason, why not do it at source? Intelligence sprang from life; life—except in very rare and exotic niches—sprang from a common brew of chemicals and preconditions. So if intelligence were the enemy, why not intervene earlier in the development cycle?

There were a thousand ways it might have been done, especially if you were working on a timescale of billions of years. You could interfere in the formation processes of planets themselves, delicately perturbing the swirling clouds of accreting matter that gathered around young stars. You could make it happen that no planets formed in the right orbits for water to occur, or that only very heavy or very light worlds were formed. You could fling worlds into interstellar cold or dash them into the roiling faces of their mother stars.