Reynolds, Alastair - Redemption Ark

“My memory says they rescued one hundred and sixty thousand people,” Clavain said. “Is that shockingly wide of the mark?”

“No, it’s about right. Which sounds pretty impressive until you realise that we didn’t manage to save forty thousand others . . .”

“We were the thing that went wrong, weren’t we? If we hadn’t intervened . . .”

“No, Clavain.” Her voice was admonitionary, as if he was an old man who had committed some awful faux pas in polite company. “No. You mustn’t think like that. Look, it was like this, understand?” They were close enough for Conjoined thought. She piped images into his head, pictures from the death of Resurgam. He saw the last hours as the wolf machine—that was what they were now all calling the Inhibitor weapon—bored its gravitation sinkhole into the very heart of the star, stabbing an invisible curette deep into the nuclear-burning core. The tunnel that it had opened was exceedingly narrow, no more than a few kilometres wide at its deepest point—and though the star was being drained of blood, the process was no uncontrolled haemorrhage. Instead the fusing matter in the nuclear-burning core was allowed to squirt out in a fine jetting arc, a column of expanding, cooling hellfire that speared from the star’s surface at half the speed of light. Constrained and guided by pulses of the same gravitational energy that had cored the star in the first place, the spike was bent in a lazy parabola that caused it to douse against the dayside of Resurgam. By the time it impacted, the starfire flame was a thousand kilometres across. The effect was catastrophic and practically instantaneous. The atmosphere was boiled away in a searing flash, the icecaps and the few areas of open water following instants later. Arid and airless, the crust under the beam became molten, the spike gouging a cherry-red scar across the face of the planet. Hundreds of vertical kilometres of the planet’s surface were incinerated, gouting into space in a hot cloud of boiled rock. Shockwaves from the initial impact reached around the world and destroyed all life on the nightside: every human being, every organism that humans had brought to Resurgam. And yet they would have died soon enough without that shockwave. Within hours, the nightside had turned to face the sun. The spike continued to boil, the well of the energy at the heart of the star barely tapped. Resurgam’s crust burned away, and still the beam continued to chew into the planet’s mantle.

It took three weeks to reduce the planet to a smoking red-hot cinder, four-fifths of its previous size. Then the beam flicked to another target, another world, and began the same murderous sweep. The depletion of matter from the star’s heart would eventually bleed Delta Pavonis down to a cool husk of itself, until so much matter had been removed that fusion came to an abrupt halt. It had not happened yet, Felka said—at least not according to the lightsignals that were catching up with them from the system—but when it did, it stood every chance of being a violent event.

“So you see,” Felka said, “we were actually lucky to rescue as many as we did. It wasn’t our fault that more died. We just did what was right under the circumstances. There’s no sense feeling guilty about it. If we hadn’t shown up, a thousand other things could have gone wrong. Skade’s fleet would still have arrived, and she wouldn’t have been any more inclined to negotiate than you were.”

Clavain remembered the vile flash of a dying starship, and remembered also the ultimate death of Galiana that he had sanctioned with the decision to destroy Nightshade . Even now the thought of that was painful.

“Skade died, didn’t she? I killed her, in interstellar space. The other elements of her fleet were acting autonomously, even when we engaged them.”

“Everything was autonomous,” Felka said, with curious evasion.

Clavain watched a macaw orbit from tree to tree. “I don’t mind being consulted on strategic matters, but I’m not seeking a position of authority on this ship. It isn’t mine, for a start, no matter what Volyova might have thought. I’m too old to take command. And besides, what would the ship need with me anyway? It already has its own Captain.”

Felka’s voice was low. “So you remember the Captain?”

“I remember what Volyova told us. I don’t remember ever talking with the Captain himself. Is he still running things, the way she said he would?”

Her voice remained guarded. “Depends what you mean by running things. His infrastructure is still intact, but there’s been no sign of him as a conscious entity since we left Delta Pavonis.”

“Then the Captain’s dead, is that it?”

“No, that can’t be it either. He had fingers in too many aspects of routine shipwide functioning, so Volyova said. When he used to go into one of his catatonic states, it was like pulling the plug on the entire ship. That hasn’t happened. The ship’s still taking care of itself, keeping itself ticking over, indulging in self-repair and the occasional upgrade.”

Clavain nodded. “Then it’s as if the Captain’s still functioning on an involuntary level, but there’s no sentience there any more? Like a patient who still has enough brain function to breathe, but not much else?”

“That’s our best guess. But we can’t be totally sure. Sometimes there are little glimmers of intelligence, things that the ship does to itself without asking anyone. Flashes of creativity. It’s more as if the Captain’s still there, but buried more deeply than was ever the case before.”

“Or perhaps he just left behind a ghost of himself,” Clavain said. “A mindless shell, pottering through the same behavioural patterns.”

“Whatever it was, he redeemed himself,” Felka said. “He did something terrible, but in the end he also saved one hundred and sixty thousand lives.”

“So did Lyle Merrick,” Clavain said, remembering for the first time since he had awakened the secret within Antoinette’s ship and the necessary sacrifice the man had made. “Two redemptions for the price of one? I suppose it’s a start.” Clavain picked at a stray splinter of wood that had embedded itself in his palm, torn from the very edge of the tree stump. “So what did happen, Felka? Why have I been awakened when everyone knew it might kill me?”

“I’ll show you,” she said. She looked in the direction of the waterfall. Startled, for he had been certain that they were alone, Clavain saw a figure standing on the very edge of the lake immediately before the waterfall. The mist ebbed and swirled around the figure’s extremities.

But he recognised her.

“Skade,” he said.

“Clavain,” she answered. But she did not step closer. Her voice had been hollow, the acoustics all wrong for the environment. Clavain realised, with a jolt of irritation at how easily he had been fooled, that he was being addressed by a simulation.

“She’s a beta-level, isn’t she,” he said, talking only to Felka. “The Master of Works would have retained a good enough working memory of Skade to put a beta-level aboard any of the other ships.”

“She’s a beta-level, yes,” Felka said. “But that isn’t how it happened. Is it, Skade?”

The figure was crested and armoured. It nodded. “This beta-level is a recent version, Clavain. My physical counterpart transmitted it to you during the engagement.”

“Sorry,” Clavain said, shaking his head, “my memory may not be what it was, but I remember killing your counterpart. I destroyed Nightshade shortly after I rescued Felka.”

“That’s what you remember. It’s almost what happened, too.”

“You can’t have survived, Skade.” He said it with numb insistence, despite the evidence of his eyes.