Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

“No, Ship. I didn’t.” She smiled despite herself.

“One final thing, Antoinette. It was a pleasure to serve under you. A pleasure and an honour. Now, please go away and find another ship—preferably something bigger and better—to captain. I am sure you will make an excellent job of it.”

She stood up from the seat. “I’ll do my best, I promise.”

“Of that I have no doubt.”

She stepped towards the door, hesitating on the threshold. “Goodbye Lyle,” she said.

“Goodbye, Little Miss.”

FORTY

They pulled him shivering from the open womb of the casket. He felt like a man who had been rescued from drowning in winter. The faces of the people around him sharpened into focus, but he did not recognise any of them immediately. Someone threw a quilted thermal blanket around the narrow frame of his shoulders. They eyed him without speaking, guessing that he was in no mood for conversation and would wish instead to orientate himself by his own efforts.

Clavain sat on the edge of the casket for several minutes until he had enough strength in his legs to hobble across the chamber. He stumbled at the last moment and yet made the fall appear graceful, as if he had intended to lean suddenly against the support of the porthole’s armoured frame. He peered through the glass. He could see nothing beyond except blackness, with his own ghastly reflection hovering in the foreground. He appeared strangely eyeless, his sockets crammed with shadows which were the precise black of the background vacuum. He felt a savage jolt of déjà vu, the feeling that he had been here before, contemplating his own masklike face. He tugged and nagged at the thread of memory until it spooled free, recalling a last-minute diplomatic mission, a shuttle falling towards occupied Mars, an imminent confrontation with an old enemy and friend called Galiana . . . and he remembered that even then, four hundred years ago—though it was more now, he thought—he had felt too old for the world, too old for the role it forced upon him. Had he known what lay before him then, he would have either laughed or gone insane. It had felt like the end of his life, and yet it had been only a moment from its beginning, barely separable in his memories now from his childhood.

He looked back at the people who had brought him around and then up at the ceiling.

“Dim the lights,” someone said.

His reflection disappeared. Now he could see something other than blackness. It was a swarm of stars, squashed into one hemisphere of the sky. Reds and blues and golds and frigid whites. Some were brighter than others, though he saw no familiar constellations. But the clumping of the stars, stirred into one part of the sky, meant only one thing. They were still moving relativistically, still skimming near the speed of light.

Clavain turned back to the small huddle of people. “Has the battle taken place?”

A pale dark-haired woman spoke for the group. “Yes, Clavain.” She spoke warmly, but not with the absolute assurance Clavain had expected. “Yes, it’s over. We engaged the trio of Conjoiner ships, destroying one and damaging the other two.”

“Only damaged?”

“The simulations didn’t get it quite right,” said the woman. She moved to Clavain’s side and pushed a beaker of brown fluid under his nose. He looked at her face and hair. There was something familiar about the way she wore it, something that sparked the same ancient memories that had been stirred by his reflection in the porthole. “Here, drink this. Recuperative medichines from Ilia’s arsenal. It’ll do you the world of good.”

Clavain took the beaker from the woman’s hand and sniffed at the broth. It smelt of chocolate when he had expected tea. He tipped some down his throat. “Thank you,” he said. “Do you mind if I ask your name?”

“Not at all,” the woman said. “I’m Felka. You know me quite well.”

He looked at her and shrugged. “You seem familiar . . .”

“Drink up. I think you need it.”

After several hours he was deemed to be neurologically sound. There were still things that he did not recall with great precision, but he was told this was within the error margins of the usual amnesia that accompanied reefersleep fugue, and did not indicate any untoward lapses. They gave him a lightweight bio-monitor tabard, assigned a spindly bronze servitor to him and told him he was free to move around as he pleased.

“Shouldn’t I be asking why you’ve woken me?” he said.

“We’ll get to that later,” said Scorpio, who seemed to be in charge. “There’s no immediate hurry, Clavain.”

“But I take it there’s a decision that needs to be made?”

Scorpio glanced at one of the other leaders, the woman called Antoinette Bax. She had wide eyes and a freckled nose and he felt that there were memories of her that he had yet to unearth. She nodded back, almost imperceptibly.

“We wouldn’t have woken you for the view, Clavain,” Scorpio said. “It’s a piece of crap even with the lights out.”

Felka escorted Clavain on to a flat apron of cool glistening grass. She wore a long black dress, her feet lost under the black spillage of the hem. She did not seem to mind it dragging through the dew-laden grass. They sat down facing each other, resting on tree stumps whose tops had been polished to mirrored smoothness. They had the place to themselves, except for the birds.

Clavain looked around. He felt much better now and his memory was nearly whole, but he did not remember this place at all. “Did you create this, Felka?”

“No,” she said cautiously, “but why do you ask?”

“Because it reminds me a little of the forest at the core of the Mother Nest, I suppose. Where you had your atelier. Except it has gravity, of course, which your atelier didn’t.”

“So you do remember, then.”

He scratched at the stubble on his chin. Someone had thoughtfully shaved off his beard when he was asleep. “Dribs and drabs. Not as much of what happened before I went under as I’d like.”

“What do you remember, exactly?”

“Remontoire leaving to make contact with Sylveste. You almost going with him, and then deciding not to. Not much else. Volyova’s dead, isn’t she?”

Felka nodded. “We got the planet evacuated. You and Volyova agreed to split the remaining hell-class weapons. She took Storm Bird, loaded as many weapons on to it as she could manage and rode it straight into the heart of the Inhibitor machine.”

Clavain pursed his lips and whistled quietly. “Did she make much difference?”

“None at all. But she went out with a bang.”

Clavain smiled. “I never expected anything less of her. And what else?”

“Khouri and Thorn—you remember them? They joined Remontoire’s expedition to Hades. They have shuttles, and they’ve initiated Zodiacal Light ’s self-repair systems. All they have to do is keep supplying it with raw material and it will repair itself. But it will take a little while, time enough for them to make contact with Sylveste, Khouri thinks.”

“I didn’t know quite what to make of her claim to have already been into Hades,” Clavain said, picking blades of grass from the area around his feet. He crushed them and sniffed the pulpy green residue that stained his fingers. “But the Triumvir seemed to think it was true.”

“We’ll find out sooner or later,” Felka said. “After they’ve made contact—however long that takes—they’ll take Zodiacal Light out of the system and follow our trajectory. As for us, well, it’s still your ship, Clavain, but day-to-day affairs are handled by a Triumvirate. Triumvirs Blood, Cruz and Scorpio, by popular vote. Khouri would be one of them, of course, if she hadn’t chosen to stay behind after the evacuation.”