Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

[We agree. This is something different. Nonetheless, full plague quarantine precautions should be enforced; we might still be dealing with an infectious agent. Focus your attention towards the rear, will you?]

The voice, which was never quite like any of the other voices she heard from other Conjoiners, took on a needling, tutorial quality, as if it already knew the answers to the questions it posed. [What do you make of the regular structures embedded in the hull, Skade?]

Here and there, situated randomly, were clusters of black cubes of varying size and orientation. They appeared to have been pressed into the hull as if into wet clay, so that their faces were half-concealed by the hulk’s hull material. They radiated curving tails of smaller cubes, whipping out in elegant fractal arcs.

I’d say those are what they were trying to cut out elsewhere. Obviously they weren’t fast enough to get them all .

[We concur. Whatever they are, they should certainly be treated with the utmost caution, although they may very well be inactive now. Perhaps Galiana was able to stop them spreading. Her ship was able to make it this far, even if it returned home on autopilot. You are sure that no one is alive aboard it, Skade?]

No, and I won’t be until we open her up. But it doesn’t look promising. No movement inside, no obvious hot spots. The hull’s too cold for any life-support processes to be operational unless they’re carrying a cryo-arithmetic engine .

Skade hesitated, running a few more simulations in her head as background processes.

[Skade . . . ?]

There could be a small number of survivors, I admit—but the bulk of the crew can’t be anything other than frozen corpses. We might be able to trawl a few memories, but even that’s probably being optimistic .

[We’re really only interested in one corpse, Skade.]

I don’t even know if Galiana’s aboard it. And even if she is . . . even if we directed all our efforts into bringing her back to the living . . . we might not succeed .

[We understand. These are difficult times, after all. While it would be glorious to succeed, failure would be worse than never having attempted it. At least in the eyes of the Mother Nest.]

Is that the Night Council’s considered opinion?

[All our opinions are considered, Skade. Visible failure cannot be tolerated. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do our best. If Galiana is aboard, we will do what we can to bring her back to us. But it must be done in absolute secrecy.]

How absolute, precisely?

[Knowledge of the ship’s return will be impossible to conceal from the rest of the Mother Nest. But we can spare them the torment of hope, Skade. It will be reported that she is dead, beyond hope of revival. Let our compatriots’ grief be quick and bright, like a nova. It will only make their efforts against the enemy more strenuous. But in the meantime we will work on her with diligence and love. If we bring her back to the living, her return will be a miracle. We will be forgiven our bending of the truth here and now.]

Skade caught herself before she laughed aloud. Bending of the truth? It sounds like an outright lie to me. And how are you going to ensure that Clavain sticks to your story?

[Why do you imagine Clavain will be a problem, Skade?]

She answered the question with a question of her own. Don’t tell me you’re planning on not telling him either?

[This is war, Skade. There is an old aphorism concerning truth and casualty with which we will not presently detain you, but we’re certain you grasp the point. Clavain is a major asset in our tactical armoury. His thinking is unlike any other Conjoiner’s, and for that reason he gives us a constant edge against the enemy. He will grieve and grieve quickly, like the others, and it will be painful. But then he will be his old self again, just when we need him the most. Better that, don’t you think, than to inflict upon him some protracted period of hope and—likely—crushing disappointment?]

The voice shifted its tone, perhaps sensing that it still needed to make its point convincingly. [Clavain is an emotional man, Skade—more so than the rest of us. He was old when he came to us, older in neurological terms than any other recruit we have ever gained. His mind is still mired in old ways of thinking. We mustn’t ever forget that. He is fragile and needs our care, like a delicate hothouse flower.]

But lying to him about Galiana . . .

[It may never come to that. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we have to examine the ship—Galiana may not be aboard after all.]

Skade nodded. That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Then we’d know that she’s still out there, somewhere .

[Yes. But then we’d have to address the small matter of whatever happened to the third ship.]

In the ninety-five years since the onset of the Melding Plague, the Conjoiners had learned a great deal about contamination management. As one of the last human factions to retain an appreciable pre-plague technology, they took quarantine very seriously indeed. In peacetime the safest and easiest option would have been to examine the ship in situ, as it drifted through space on the system’s edge. But there was too much risk of the Demarchists noticing such activity, so the investigations had to be conducted under cover of camouflage. The Mother Nest was already equipped to take contaminated craft, so it was the perfect destination.

But precautions still had to be taken, and that entailed a certain amount of work out in open space. First, servitors removed the engines, lasering through the spars that braced them on either side of the lighthugger’s tapering conic hull. An engine malfunction could have destroyed the Mother Nest, and while such a thing was nearly unthinkable, Skade was determined to take no chances while the nature of what had happened to the ship remained mysterious. While that was going on, she ordered tractor rockets to haul slugs of black unsublimated cometary ice out to the drifter, which servitors then slathered on to the hull in a metre-thick caulk. The servitors completed their work quickly, without ever coming into direct contact with the hull. The ship had been dark to begin with; now it became impossibly black.

Once that was done, Skade fired grapples into the ice, anchoring tractor rockets all around the hulk. Since the ice would be bearing all the structural stress of moving the ship, she had to attach a thousand tractors to avoid fracturing any one part of the caulk. It was exquisitely beautiful when they all ignited: a thousand pinpricks of cold blue flame stabbing out from the black spirelike core of the drifter. She kept the acceleration slow, and her calculations had been so accurate that she needed only one small corrective burst before the final approach to the Mother Nest. Such bursts were timed to coincide with blind spots in the Demarchist’s sensor coverage, blind spots which the Demarchists thought the Conjoiners knew nothing about.

Inside the Mother Nest, the hulk was hauled into a five-kilometre-wide ceramic-lined docking bay. The bay had been designed specifically for handling plague ships and was just large enough to accommodate a lighthugger with its engines removed. The ceramic walls were thirty metres thick and every item of machinery inside the bay was hardened against known plague strains. The chamber was sealed once the ship was inside it, along with Skade’s hand-picked examination team. Because the bay had only the most meagre data connections with the rest of the Mother Nest, the team had to be primed to deal with isolation from the million other Conjoiners in the Nest. That requirement made for operatives who were not always the most stable—but Skade could hardly complain. She was the rarest of all: a Conjoiner who could operate entirely alone, deep in enemy territory.