House of Suns (65 page)

‘If he abandons the attack, he’s innocent,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think he’s got any intention of doing that.’

Charlock looked at me as if I held all the answers. ‘Do you think he’s working for the Machine People?’

‘No, he’s doing everything he can to stop them reaching their destination.’

Charlock narrowed his eyes. ‘That still puts him on our side - doesn’t it?’

‘Not while Purslane’s still breathing.’

We waited for Galingale to respond, but he held his silence, just as I had expected. What need did he have to talk to us now? We had allowed him to get exactly where he wanted to be, unchallenged. I had been right to doubt his courage when he first volunteered to spearhead the attack against
Silver Wings.
It was not so much that it had been out of character as that I had never really known the real Galingale. Hiding amongst us, reporting back to his masters in the House of Suns - for all I knew now, he was the bravest of us all.

‘Incoming transmission,’ Betony said suddenly.

‘Galingale?’

‘No—Purslane.’

I braced myself - I was going to have to tell her about Galingale’s likely plans, even though there was little she could do to protect herself.

‘Campion,’ she said, ‘I’ve got some news for you. It’s... not great.’ Drawing a breath, the strain coming through in her voice, she continued, ‘Hesperus managed to capture Cadence. That’s not as good as it sounds, since we still don’t have control of Silver Wings. But at least we’ve managed to have a look inside her head. You’re right about the stardam - that’s where we’re headed. There’s a single-use opener somewhere aboard my ship - I don’t know where exactly, but the robots wouldn’t have taken her if they weren’t certain of that. They know more about us than we do, Campion.’ She seemed to stumble, losing her mental thread - I could feel the tiredness, each word costing her a measurable effort. ‘The stardam isn’t what we think. It’s one of ours, installed by Gentian Line—but it wasn’t put there to contain the light from a dying sun. There’s something else inside it, something we don’t know anything about. Or at least, it’s buried so far down in our memories that we can’t see it yet. Maybe you’re doing a better job than me, I don’t know. The point is, there’s something bad in that stardam, but it’s not a frozen supernova. It’s going to be worse than that.’

I was listening, but at the same time nothing she was saying was reaching my ears. I halted the playback of her transmission. ‘Purslane, listen to me now. We know that Galingale is the traitor - the one who brought the ambush down on us, the one who killed Cyphel. He’s going to use more force against Silver Wings than we’d ever risk. If Cascade is listening in, he needs to know that as well.’

‘Are you insane?’ Agrimony mouthed.

I paused the transmission. ‘No, I’m not insane. I’d just rather Cascade killed Galingale while Purslane’s still aboard the ship.’

‘But the robots’ objective—’

‘Matters less to me than keeping Purslane alive.’ I felt my face flush with false bravado. ‘I want Hesperus back as well - we owe him that much. If you’ve got a problem with that, you’d better turn your weapons on me now. We still have more than sixty thousand years to go until we reach the stardam. I’m not giving up on her now, when we’ve barely begun.’

‘Let Campion continue his transmission,’ Betony said.

I fought to keep my voice calm and level. ‘There isn’t much more to say. If Cascade has control of
Silver Wings’
weapons, then he should use everything at his disposal to take care of Galingale. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep trying to stop him, once Galingale is out of the picture.’

When the transmission was sent, I allowed Purslane’s recording to resume.

‘This is what you need to know,’ she said. ‘The Machine People weren’t the first. Long before they arose, there was another machine civilisation. Let’s call them the First Machines - it’ll do until we find out what they called themselves. How they began doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that they never became a significant force in galactic affairs. The First Machines died - wiped out by an artificial contagion.’ I sensed vast reticence, Purslane holding back more than she was telling. ‘That’s as much as Hesperus can tell me at the moment,’ she said. ‘He only knows what Cadence knows, and she did everything she could to block his intrusions.’

Why was she lying, as I surely knew she was? Not because she wanted to keep information from me. But perhaps because she was certain that Cascade was listening in.

Read between the lines, her voice urged.

‘The First Machines died—but not all of them. Some fled before the contagion could reach them. They’re in that stardam, locked inside. That’s where they’ve been for millions of years, waiting for a chance to escape. Campion, you need to understand that there’s every chance they don’t mean us well. We locked them in that stardam for a reason - we, us, Gentian Line. To Cadence and Cascade, the First Machines are like vanished gods - they’re everything that the Machine People are, only faster, stronger, cleverer - and they’ve had millions of years locked inside that thing to keep improving. The Machine People want to set the First Machines loose, to let them spread into the galaxy and usurp the human meta-civilisation. That’s what this is about, Campion - not about cracking open the stardam to knock out a few local civilisations, but to take down humanity. We’re the old order, the meat civilisations. The robots were wise enough to realise that if they didn’t take steps to wipe us out, sooner or later we’d try to do it to them.’

‘Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if Galingale won after all,’ Sorrel said. I wanted to hate him for it, but there had been no spite in his words, only a cold assessment of the situation. The worst part was that I could no longer be certain that he was wrong.

Hesperus stepped away from the broken, limbless, metal-eyed doll that had once been Cadence. He had been probing her for further signs of life, making certain that she had not just pushed herself into a deep, camouflaging coma, while some stealthy, shielded part of her mind plotted her next countermove.

‘Look away,’ he said, before dousing her with the energy-pistol. The tang of burning things reached my nose. When I looked around, Cadence was just a smouldering black pile, with blue embers flickering from her wounds. ‘She won’t trouble us again,’ Hesperus said.

‘You didn’t enjoy having to do that.’

‘She was one of us. She risked her own existence for a goal she believed in.’

‘Genocide.’

‘Not exactly. She was genuinely convinced that the organic would never tolerate the continued existence of machine intelligence. There was no hatred in her conviction, only a sense of the utmost urgency. And now I have reached into her mind and strangled something that was once luminous and alive.’ He offered me the energy-pistol. ‘No, it didn’t please me. But it had to be done.’

‘I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for us, Hesperus.’

‘You must wonder why I don’t see things the way Cadence did.’

His question made my skin crawl. ‘It’s crossed my mind.’

‘In some ways, I do. Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time. Cadence was right to fear for the future existence of the Machine People.’

‘And right to let the First Machines out of the stardam?’

‘No. Her concerns were legitimate but her actions were a mistake, although they were founded on sound reasoning. I will still do everything I can to make sure that Cascade does not complete his mission.’

‘Up to and including destroying the ark?’

‘That will be the last option, when all else has failed.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Now you must enter abeyance, until Galingale’s attack has passed.’

‘I was awake during the last attack.’

‘This will be different, I think. The attack and the response will both be fiercer. I think it likely that there will be undamped stresses of a severity that you would find uncomfortable.’

‘Cadence and Cascade weren’t trying to keep me alive last time, were they?’

Hesperus answered as if he was revealing some immense, traumatising truth to a child. ‘No. Your survival was incidental to their main objective. They were only interested in the opener. They have been following intelligence, but their knowledge is incomplete. Cadence’s memories suggest that they have already found and used one opener, but they were wrong about the stardam in question. It was not the one they wanted to open, although they did not know that until the opener was used.’

I shook my head in stunned disbelief. ‘Ugarit-Panth - the Consentiency. Are you saying they did that?’

‘It was an error. They opened the wrong door.’

‘And wiped out an entire civilisation.’

‘The mistake was of no consequence to them - merely a setback. They reanalysed their intelligence, everything they had learned of the Line, and found that all the evidence suggested that the opener was aboard Silver Wings of Morning. But not knowing precisely where to locate it, they could not risk damage befalling any of the ships in your bay.’ He glanced at Cadence again, as if to reassure himself that the charred remains could not possibly be listening in. ‘Where is it, exactly?’

‘That’s the problem. I don’t know.’

‘Then we will have to look for it, and try to sabotage it. All of which must wait until we have survived Galingale’s attack.’

The nearest abeyance casket was only a short walk from the command deck. There were four units ranked against a wall, all of the same rounded rectangular white design, like squared-off eggs.

‘I don’t like stasis.’

‘Nonetheless, stasis will protect you better than freezing. I will intervene to assist in your emergence back into realtime, should difficulties ensue.’ Hesperus opened the white doors of the nearest unit, revealing the white-on-white intricacy of the casket’s interior: stasis machinery, throne, control and containment systems, packed as tight as intestines. The chair pushed itself out, inviting me to lower my body into its doughy embrace. Controls nestled under my fingertips.

‘What ratio and time duration should I dial in?’

‘I’ll deal with the settings. I don’t want you emerging until we are certain that Galingale isn’t going to pose a threat again.’

Claustrophobia slipped its bony cold fingers around my throat. ‘What if I don’t come out?’

‘I’ll be here to make sure you do. Do you have something to say to Campion, before I put you under?’

I settled into the throne, placing my hands and feet into the self-tightening restraining hoops. ‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’

‘You forget that I am a high-fidelity recording apparatus. Say what you will, and I will relay it to Campion as soon as communication becomes possible again.’

‘Tell him that I love him and I’m grateful that he came this far.’

‘No, say it to me. As if I was Campion.’

I took a breath. It felt unnatural to be looking into his golden face, trying to imagine my lover and friend standing there instead. ‘I love you, shatterling. Thank you for what you’ve done. Do whatever you can to stop Silver Wings, but look after yourself as well. I want to see you again. I want to watch the sun go down with a good glass of wine and talk about all this as if it happened a long time ago, before we had many more adventures and good times.’

‘You will,’ Hesperus said.

The seat retracted into the stasis cabinet, the restraints tightening to pin me in place. Hesperus closed the doors—I could still see him through a one-way window. A collar whirred into place around my neck and drew me deeper into the seat, firm enough to be uncomfortable but not enough to choke. A voice intoned a warning that I was about to go into stasis at a time compression ratio of one million, and that I should activate the emergency abort control immediately if I did not wish the field to snap around me. ‘Final warning,’ the voice repeated. ‘Stasis will initiate in three... two ...
one.’

Hesperus vanished, blinking out of existence. The outside world flared blue and then settled slowly back to an illusion of normality. In the second it took me to think that I had been in the cabinet too long, ten days had passed in the realtime of my ship.

Hesperus was either dead, or he had tricked me. My fingers moved over the tactile controls. I twisted the dial back down, feeling it click through the notches of ratio settings. One million. One hundred thousand. Ten thousand.

The voice said, ‘Please be advised that manual adjustment of the cabinet settings is no longer possible. Only external inputs are now recognised as valid.’

Tens of seconds had passed. A hundred days.

Silver Wings of Morning had already been travelling so close to the speed of light that her onboard time was flowing more than twenty times slower than planetary time. She was still accelerating. A hundred days of shiptime was two thousand days in the stationary universe. I could have held my breath since I had been put into the cabinet, but we had already crossed six years of space. Another six since I started thinking about the distance I had come.

Twelve years. More like eighteen by now. Or twenty. In a very short while, Silver Wings
of
Morning would have put more than a century of flight time between itself and Neume.

In barely a day of cabinet time, we would arrive at the stardam.

‘Hesperus,’ I said, ‘you lying bastard.’

His smashed and bloodied ship fell towards us. With no pseudo-thrust, and nothing but the ghost-thin friction of interstellar space to slow her down,
Midnight Queen
could only coast, not accelerate. One part in a thousand less than the speed of light was mercurially swift by the standards of almost any other physical object in the universe. But
Dalliance
and the other ships of the pursuit squadron were now travelling slightly faster. Galingale’s wounded craft had no choice but to tumble back along the opposite vector, and soon she would fall within attack range of our ships.