Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

“But I’m an old man,” he told them. “If I stay warm, I probably won’t survive that way either.”

“It’ll have to be your choice,” they told him, unhelpfully.

He was getting old, that was all. His genes were very antiquated, and though he had been through several rejuvenation programmes since leaving Mars, they had only reset a clock which then proceeded to start ticking again. Back on the Mother Nest they could have given him another half-century of virtual youth, had he wished . . . but he had never taken that final rejuvenation. The will had never been there after Galiana’s strange return and her even stranger half-death.

He did not even know if he regretted it now. If they had been able to limp to a fully equipped colony world, somewhere that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the Melding Plague, there might have been hope for him. But what difference would it have made? Galiana was still gone. He was still old inside his skull, still seeing the world through eyes that were yellow and weary with four hundred years of war. He had done what he could, and the emotional burden had cost him terribly, and he did not think he had the energy to do it one more time. It was enough that he had not totally failed this time.

And so he submitted to the reefersleep casket for the final time.

Just before he went under, he authorised a tight-beam laser transmission back to the dying Resurgam system. The message was one-time-pad coded for Zodiacal Light . If the other ship hadn’t been totally destroyed, there was a chance it would intercept and decode the signal. It would never be seen by the other Conjoiner ships, and even if Skade’s forces had somehow managed to sow receivers through Resurgam space, they would not be able to crack the encryption.

The message was very simple. It told Remontoire, Khouri, Thorn and the others that had gone with them that they were to slow and stop in the Pattern Juggler system; they would wait there for twenty years. That was enough time to allow Zodiacal Light to rendezvous with them; it was also enough time to establish a self-sustaining colony of a few tens of thousands of people, a hedge against any future catastrophe that might befall the ship.

Knowing this, feeling that in some small but significant way he had put his affairs in order, Clavain slept.

No one knew why.

The changes were not at all apparent from within; it was only from the outside—seen from an inspection shuttle—that they became manifest. The changes had happened during the slow-down phase as the great ship was decelerating into the new system. With the inching speed of land erosion, the rear of the ship’s conic hull, normally a smaller inverted cone in its own right, had become flattened, like the base of a chess piece. No control over this transformation had been possible, and indeed, much of it had already taken place before anyone had noticed. There were vaults of the great ship that were only visited by humans once or twice a century, and much of the rear of the hull fell into that category. The machinery that lurked there had been surreptitiously dismantled or relocated further up the hull, in other disused spaces. Ilia Volyova might have noticed sooner than anyone—not much had ever escaped Ilia Volyova—but she was gone now, and the ship had new tenants who were not yet as devoutly familiar with its territory.

The changes were neither life-threatening nor injurious to the ship’s performance, but they remained puzzling, and further evidence—if any were needed—that the Captain’s psyche had not completely vanished, and could be expected to surprise them still further at times in the future. There appeared little doubt that the Captain had played some role in the reshaping of the ship he had become. The question of whether the reshaping had been consciously driven, or had merely sprung from some irrational dreamlike whim, was much harder to answer.

So for the time being, because there were other things to worry about, they ignored it. Nostalgia for Infinity fell into tight orbit around the watery world and probes were sent arcing into the atmosphere and the vast turquoise oceans that nearly enclosed the world from pole to pole. Creamy cloud patterns had been dabbed on it in messy, exuberant swirls. There were no large landmasses; the visible ocean was unmarred except for a few carelessly tossed archipelagos of islands, splashes of ochre paint against corneal blue-green. The closer they had come, the more nearly certain it became that this was a Juggler World, and the indications turned out to be correct. Continental rafts of living biomass stained swathes of the ocean grey-green. The atmosphere could be breathed by humans, and there were enough trace elements in the soils and bedrocks of the islands to support self-sustaining colonies.

It wasn’t perfect, by any means. Islands on Juggler worlds had a habit of vanishing under tsunamis mediated by the great semi-sentient biomass of the oceans themselves. But for twenty years, it would suffice. If the colonists wanted to stay, they’d have time to build pontoon cities floating on the sea itself.

A chain of islands—northerly, cold, but predicted to be tectonically stable—was selected.

“Why there, in particular?” Clavain asked. “There are other islands at the same latitude, and they can’t be any less stable.”

“There’s something down there,” Scorpio told him. “We keep getting a faint signal from it.”

Clavain frowned. “A signal? But no one’s ever supposed to have been here.”

“It’s just a radio pulse, very weak,” Felka said. “But the modulation is interesting. It’s Conjoiner code.”

“We put a beacon down here?”

“We must have, at some point. But there’s no record of any Conjoiner ship ever coming here. Except . . .” She paused, unwilling to say what had to be said.

“Well?”

“It probably doesn’t mean anything, Clavain. But Galiana could have come here. It’s not impossible, and we know she would have investigated any Juggler worlds she came across. Of course, we don’t know where her ship went before the wolves found her, and by the time she made it back to the Mother Nest all on-board records were lost or corrupted. But who else could have left a Conjoiner beacon?”

“Anyone who was operating covertly. We don’t know everything that the Closed Council got up to, even now.”

“I thought it was worth mentioning, that’s all.”

He nodded. He had felt a great crescendo of hope, and then a wave of sadness that was made all the deeper by what had preceded it. Of course she had not been here. It was stupid of him even to entertain the thought. But there was something down below that merited investigation, and it was sensible to locate their settlement near the item of interest. He had no problem with that.

And that was when it happened. Slowly, unhurriedly, as if this were the most natural thing in the world for a four-kilometre-long space vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity began to lower its orbit, spiralling down into the thin upper reaches of the atmosphere. By then it had slowed itself, too, braking to sub-orbital velocity so that the friction of re-entry did not scald away the outer layer of its hull. There was panic aboard from some quarters, for the ship was acting outside of human control. But there was also a more general feeling of quiet, calm resignation about whatever was about to happen. Clavain and the Triumvirate did not understand their ship’s intentions, but it was unlikely that it meant them harm, not now.

And so it proved. As the great ship fell out of orbit it tilted, bringing its long axis into line with the vertical defined by the planet’s gravitational field. Nothing else was possible; the ship would have snapped its spine had it come in obliquely. But provided it did descend vertically, lowering down through the clouds like the detached spire of a cathedral, it would suffer no more structural stress than was imposed by normal one-gee starflight. Aboard, it even felt normal. There was only the dull roar of the motors, normally unheard, but now transmitted back through the hull via the surrounding medium of air, a ceaseless, distant thunder that became louder as the ship approached the ground.