House of Suns (62 page)

‘And these civilisations? What about them now?’

‘Both gone,’ Campion said four minutes later, after I had examined Hesperus for further signs of life. ‘One blossomed into a reasonably well-developed empire, encompassing about five thousand systems. Then they got into a micro-war with an outgrowth of the Vermillion Commonwealth and that was their fifteen minutes over and done with. The other culture never got beyond chemical rockets and fusion bombs before deciding they’d spare the galaxy their continued existence. Now ...’ He paused, as if he was reading from the trove again. ‘Beyond that, things aren’t so clear-cut. If the supernova happened today, it would inconvenience a number of bordering civilisations. There’d be deaths, certainly - maybe in the tens of billions. But these are technological societies that’d have the means to organise evacuation and biosphere-shielding efforts. There’s no one so close that we’d be talking about system-wide extinctions.’

‘We’re not thinking about a supernova happening now,’ I said. ‘We’re thinking about the premature collapse of a stardam. A Type Two supernova gives up its energy over the course of months, tailing off over years. When a stardam fails, you get all that energy in one flash.’

‘I know; it could be a lot worse. We know what happened to the Consentiency of the Thousand Worlds - that’s the one and only time a stardam’s ever failed on us. But that dam was smack in the middle of their empire, and they weren’t remotely ready for it.’

There was no need to remind me about Ugarit-Panth.

‘Could something like that happen now? The death of an entire civilisation?’

‘I don’t know. No one looks as vulnerable as the Consentiency did back then. And there’s still the possibility of warning them ahead of time. Even if
Silver Wings
reaches her maximum speed, she’ll still be slower than light by one part in ten thousand. That’s not much of a difference, but if we sent a light-speed signal ahead of us now, it would still reach the locals six years before you do. Granted, that isn’t sufficient time to evacuate dozens of solar systems. But it would be enough time to put contingency measures in place - time to dig bunkers, move populations underground or into armoured ships. And you’re not moving that quickly, anyway. You’re holding at point-nine-nine-nine - giving the locals sixty years, not six. That really would be enough time for them to start moving people from system to system.’

‘It worked, then. Hesperus really did manage to get some of the other engines up and running.’ I glanced at him again, but nothing had changed.

‘He is not coming back,’ Cadence said.

‘What we don’t know is the point of this mission, even if the stardam is the target,’ Campion said. ‘If the robots mean to initiate a war, then detonating a stardam in the middle of a galaxy might be seen as a psychologically valuable opening move. But it won’t inflict real damage. They’ll sterilise space for a few thousand light-years, maybe even trigger a few secondary detonations. At worst, even if we don’t warn them ahead of time, it’ll touch no more than six or seven civilisations, none of which are major players. It won’t damage the Commonality in any meaningful way. The other big-league factions, the Rebirthers, the Scapers, the Movers ... they won’t be affected either. If they’re hoping to knock the hub out of the meta-civilisation, this is the wrong way to do it.’

Perhaps all they wanted to do was punish us, I thought - to hurt us the way we had hurt that earlier machine civilisation. Not to wipe us out completely, but to let us know that the crime had not been forgotten, and most definitely not forgiven.

That did not strike me as a very robot way of thinking, though.

‘But there’s a deeper objection, above and beyond the military pointlessness,’ Campion said. ‘They
can’t
break it open. Stardams need maintenance, and sometimes they fail. But there’s nothing they can do to make one fail ahead of time if it hasn’t already started to go wrong.’

‘What if they were to use
Silver Wings
as a relativistic battering ram, driving her into the stardam at full speed? Could that achieve anything?’

‘No one knows for sure - it’s not exactly something you go around doing just for the hell of it. But there have been cases of ships ramming stardams, or Prior ringworlds, at near-light speeds. In all documented instances, the structure remained intact. Ringworlds shatter if they’re not handled properly, but they’re massively resilient against impacts. Perhaps the robots have data we don’t, enough to convince them that they can smash the dam with
Silver Wings.
It would at least explain why they needed a fast ship—’

‘If they slow down, and tamper with the dam?’ I asked.

‘If we can get a warning signal ahead of you, the relevant civilisations can place an armada around that dam, above and beyond the defensive systems already in place.
Silver Wings
would make a difficult target at cruise speed, but if she was forced to slow to system speeds, I wouldn’t rate her chances very highly.’

‘Me neither,’ I said, more to myself than Campion. I had still not told him about the earlier wave of Machine People and the awful, inexcusable thing we had done to them. The knowledge sat inside me like a dark stone, trying to force its way to the surface. I did not want Cadence or Cascade to know how much Hesperus had told me, because some of his knowledge could only have come from his time as the Spirit of the Air. ‘But if they had an opener,’ I said, almost before I could examine the words and decide if it was wise to say them aloud, ‘a one-time opener, like the one the Line gave you when you were sent to the Centaurs... that would work, wouldn’t it?’

‘I only used the opener to adjust the stardam.’

‘But there are openers that do more than that. You only had Line authorisation to make adjustments - it was too soon to take the stardam apart; the energy levels were still much too high. But if they’d sent you to dismantle a stardam that had already served its purpose, so that those ringworlds could be used elsewhere—’

‘They’d have given me a single-use opener with full dismantlement privileges,’ Campion said, finishing my sentence for me four minutes later. ‘But they don’t give out those unless there’s a cast-iron reason, with full Line oversight. The key’s tuned to a specific stardam - it can’t be made to open another one prematurely.’

‘But somewhere there must be a key for this stardam. If not a key, then at least the information to make it.’

Campion corrected me. ‘There’s only ever one key that lets you take a stardam apart. It’s made at the same time as the dam, code-locked at the deepest levels. Nothing else will work, and no one keeps a record of those codes. The thinking is, better to lose the key and never be able to open the dam than risk a duplicate copy falling into the wrong hands. It means some of our ringworlds are tied up shielding stars that have already turned cinder, but that’s a price worth paying.’

‘And the one for this stardam?’

‘Destroyed in a micro-war, only a few hundred thousand years after the dam was installed. According to the trove, anyway. But at this point I’m not sure I’d take anything in the troves as gospel. We thought we were being clever, lying to Ugarit-Panth. But we’ve been feeding ourselves another set of lies all along.’

I looked at Cadence again. All of a sudden, with the revelatory force of daylight breaking over a dark landscape, it was clear to me why they wanted my ship.

Silver Wings of Morning
was completely incidental to their plans. It helped that she was fast, but there were other fast ships in Gentian Line and mere speed was not the central issue. They had not come all the way to our reunion on the off-chance of getting a ride to the stardam. If all they needed was to reach that point in space, they could have saved time and effort just by going there directly. They had not even taken control of Sainfoin’s ship when they were her guests.

They had come for me. Not because of my ship, or because of something in my head, but because there was something in my ship they needed. Long before the terms of my censure had been decided upon, the robots had been steering the Line towards a single objective.

Because somewhere inside
Silver Wings of Morning
was the single-use opener, keyed to the stardam.

I felt dizzy, as if I had ascended into thin air too quickly. It was not a question of needing corroboration. Now that the idea had fixed itself into my skull, I knew that I was right. On some level, I had known all along. Ancient memories could be scrubbed, but they could never be wiped completely.

I had always been a hoarder, unwilling to throw anything away.

There had been a reason for that.

‘Purslane,’ Campion said, when the dizziness had begun to ease, if not pass completely, ‘there’s something you ought to know, in case we lose contact again. Galingale’s going to have another try at crippling
Silver Wings.
There’s no harm in the robots knowing our intentions - they’ ll have guessed them by now if they’ve seen
Midnight Queen
coming closer. If there’s anything you can do to protect yourself, you should do it.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘But there’s something you need to know as well. Nothing matters more than stopping this ship. We may not know why the robots want to break open that stardam, but we can be sure it’s not going to be in our best interests. Now that we know the destination - I’ m certain about that, by the way -
Silver Wings
must not be allowed to get there. I’m not talking about crippling her, Campion. You can’t risk failure now, not when so much is at stake. Tell Galingale to use everything he has. Tell him to shoot me down.’

R
elictus may have disappointed Calidris, but he did not disappoint me. Our losses continued without respite, but in his dungeon the failed apprentice at last pieced together the elements of the counter-spell. Because of his restraints, he could test only the simplest parts of it in isolation. He pored over the details for many weeks, refusing to allow even the minutest detail to go unexamined.

‘The instant I conjure this spell, Calidris will know of it,’ Relictus said. ‘I must be confident of success, for if I fail, I shall not get a second chance. Calidris will adapt his methods, and this one opportunity will slip through our fingers.’

‘Do what you must.’

Eventually he pronounced himself ready. The text of the spell occupied an entire page, as complicated and difficult as a piece of chamber music. Once he had begun to utter it, there would be no going back, and the tiniest mistake, the smallest imprecision, would render the entire spell ineffective.

‘I must be unbound,’ Relictus said. ‘If I do not have complete freedom of movement, the spell will be miscast.’

‘Keep that knife on his neck,’ I told Lanius, who was with me in the dungeon.

Relictus shook his head slowly. ‘The knife will impede me.’

‘I should trust you, when you could just as easily use your magic to escape this dungeon?’ I asked.

‘If I did, milady, my absence would still be the least of your worries. Count Mordax would triumph eventually, and that would be as bad for me as it would for you. You have little option but to trust me now.’

‘Take away the knife,’ I growled.

Relictus rubbed a finger across his throat, where the knife had nicked his skin and drawn a thin line of blood. I knew then that he would not betray us. He had already had time to utter a debilitating spell, and yet he had held his tongue.

He walked to the Ghost Soldier and undid its fastenings.

‘Why do you free it?’ I asked.

‘As an effective demonstration of the spell’s potency, milady. Otherwise you would see little difference.’

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

‘Perfectly so. Can you not see how trusting it has become?’ He beckoned the Ghost Soldier to step forward, then raised an arm indicating that it should stop. ‘It understands nothing of what I say. It still thinks I mean it no harm. I think it even likes me, in a limited fashion. I have been far kinder to it than the captain who once ordered it into battle.’

‘Are you ready to cast the spell?’

He returned to his desk, pushed hair from his wild eyes and ran a finger down the lines of the spell, formulated in the cluttered symbolic language of magicians. His finger stopped once, moved back a line, and I saw hesitation in his face. Then he nodded and resumed his progress.

‘There is no reason to delay. I am as ready now as I shall ever be,’ Relictus declared.

‘Then do it.’

He closed his eyes once, reopened them after a moment, inhaled deeply and began speaking. The words meant nothing to me; the gestures indecipherable. But their effect on the Ghost Soldier was beyond argument. It began to jerk, the armour twitching. Relictus was so absorbed in the accurate recitation of the spell that I do not think he allowed himself to record its consequences. When he was halfway through the spell (I followed the progress of his finger as he moved from line to line) the armour toppled over, the Ghost Soldier thrashing on the dungeon floor like a man in the grip of palsy. Its movements became more frenzied. A noise began to issue from the armour, like the wind through a draughty door. The figure quickened its movements. The head thrashed from side to side. The arms and legs beat the ground, moving so rapidly that the eye struggled to keep up. Relictus continued with his recitation. Three-quarters of the way down, the Ghost Soldier’s paroxysm reached a moment of maximum violence - the armour thrashing, the sound a squeal of agony - and then it began to calm, its movements slowing, its strength ebbing. Before Relictus had reached the last line of his spell, the creature was still. The red smoke was no longer visible.

‘It is done,’ he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve and drawing a series of deep, relieved breaths. ‘I do not believe I made any error of recitation. Judging by the state of the Ghost Soldier, the formulation was correct.’