House of Suns (57 page)

‘Leave him as he is,’ I said. ‘He wishes to use his hands, but not to speak. The Ghost Soldiers do not respond to spoken orders.’

Relictus beckoned the figure to step off the rack. Its metal boots clattered on the floor as it took several hesitant paces. Relictus raised his arm. The figure echoed the movement. He gestured a more complicated command, and the figure walked stiffly to the table and picked up his quill. Relictus made it perform a few more simple tasks then commanded it to return to the rack, whereupon it was resecured.

The guards fastened Relictus’s hands and removed the mask.

‘Docile,’ I acknowledged.

‘It will do anything you ask of it. Now that it has grown used to me as its master, I could even send it into battle against the other Ghost Soldiers. It would fight them willingly.’

‘It would make no difference to us, other than to prove a point. Why is it so easily commanded, Relictus?’

‘Such pliability is in the nature of false souls, milady. Calidris could do nothing about that. They are essentially innocent creatures who will do as they are told, provided they are told with sufficient authority. Think of them as very obliging children. They may be excellent warriors, but there is no hatred or evil in them. The evil is in those who would create them, or send them to burn villages.’

‘Then you have learned nothing that is useful to me,’ I said, preparing to turn away in disgust. ‘Countless lives were lost to bring you this specimen, Relictus. Villages have burned for the sake of your idle curiosity. I expected you to find a flaw, a literal chink in the armour.’

‘I have,’ he said, almost by way of an afterthought. ‘I can kill thousands of them now, if you command it.’

I asked him how such a thing was possible.

‘They must all be copies of the same soul, or copies of a small number of individual souls. That is the only way Calidris can make them in such numbers. I spoke of the method by which a spell might be multiplied.’

‘Yes ...’

‘Think of an apparatus for duplicating his gestures - the precise movements of his arms, the precise movements of his fingers. A mannequin may be conjured to follow his gestures, or it may be done with wire and pulleys, connected to a kind of armour that Calidris fastens around himself. The mannequin may be enchanted to speak as he speaks, or his own voice may be conveyed to another mouth by a series of tubes. Either way, the result is similar. One spell may be said to have the effect of two. Or three, if the apparatus is more elaborate. Or ten. Practically speaking, there is no limit, especially if magic itself is harnessed.’

‘So Calidris gave rise to thousands of false souls with a single spell. I still don’t see—’

‘The souls are all the same. They are animated with the same infernal fire. It means that they ...’ Relictus grimaced, lost for words as he strove to communicate the mysteries of his art to a novice such as me. ‘Milady, when you summoned Calidris you did so with the blood-bound needle.’

‘My greatest mistake.’

‘Nonetheless, it serves to illustrate my point. At that moment your pain was his pain - your blood his. A spell had united you. Something analogous applies to the false souls. Each is united with its sibling because they were forged in the same instant, with the same utterance. That is their strength, because it gives Mordax an army of unlimited size. It is also their weakness, because they are all vulnerable to a single counter-spell.’

‘A spell known to you?’

‘A spell I am confident I can derive, given a little more time. With every day I learn more of Calidris’s work. In a short while I will know enough to formulate the counter-spell.’

I looked at the armoured creature, remembering what Relictus had said about it being as innocent as a child. The empty visor was looking back at me, a glimmer of red smoke showing though the glassy slits of its eyes. I sensed a dim curiosity, much like that of a simple animal or slave, but nothing in the way of malice. I should not have cared to have been alone with the Ghost Soldier, but I believed Relictus when he said that it was devoid of guile or hatefulness.

‘And then - what will happen?’

‘It will die, along with every false soul created by the same spell. That might be a regiment of Ghost Soldiers, or it might be the entire army. Either way, the loss could be decisive.’

‘Then you must do it,’ I said, ‘and with the utmost urgency. The future security of the human species depends on you.’

‘She’s turning,’ Betony said, when the fact of it could no longer be disputed.

Twenty minutes had passed since the first hint that
Silver Wings of Morning
might be altering her course. At first, we had read nothing into it, assuming only that the robots had made a small, temporary course adjustment in response to the three ships zeroing in on her. The advantage in making such an adjustment was not at all obvious, but - since we could not begin to guess at the robots’ tactical thinking -we had assumed that Purslane’s ship would eventually resume its original heading, having gained some microscopic but quantifiable advantage over its pursuers.

But she did not stop turning. During the course of those twenty minutes
Silver Wings
had altered her trajectory by a dozen degrees, and there was no sign of her stopping.

Machine Space, the spray of exiled stars we called the Monoceros Ring, circumscribed an arc around the main disc of the Milky Way. Provided a ship confined its trajectory to a course parallel to the surface of that disc, it was bound to make Machine Space sooner or later - even if it took a hundred thousand years, rather than ten or twenty. But a ship would only have to steer a little off-parallel to guarantee missing the Monoceros Ring entirely. As
Silver Wings
continued her course change, her projected destination slowly moved away from Machine Space.

The course correction continued for another hour, until the ship fell back onto a straight vector. The change had cost the robots a little headway, but they would soon regain that advantage when we performed the same turn, as we were obliged to do if we wished to continue the chase.

‘Why did they wait until now?’ Betony asked. ‘They must have known which direction they wanted to head in when they left Neume. All this has done is cost them time.’

‘Our pursuit must have forced them to revise their plan,’ Henbane said.

‘Not necessarily,’ I replied. ‘I think they always knew exactly where they were going. They wanted us to think that they were returning to Machine Space, so that’s the course they set when they departed orbit. They must have been intending to switch onto a different target as soon as they were out of observational range, when they were a year or two out from Neume. But they weren’t counting on such a fast response from us: we launched the pursuit fleet after them so quickly that they realised there’s no hope of completing that turn without us seeing it. So they’ve executed it now, before they reach high relativistic speed. It’s difficult enough to turn a ship at six-tenths of light, but it’s ten times harder at nine-tenths, or faster.’

‘But if they’re not heading back to Machine Space ...’ Sorrel said.

‘We have a hard fix on her course now,’ said Charlock, his imago glancing aside at a hovering read-out. ‘Of course, she may still have a few changes up her sleeve. But if we take this as read, we can extrapolate out to a thousand lights with an error of only a few thousand AU at the far end.’

‘Show us,’ Betony said, his face still set in a rictus of total concentration.

A map of the galaxy sprang into existence on Dalliance’s displayer. The map zoomed in on our present position in the Scutum-Crux Spiral Arm, the scale enlarging until there was a visible gap between the bright, constellated smudge of our ships and the silver circle of Neume. We were still technically inside its solar system, but would soon punch through the star’s heliopause into true interstellar space, where only cinder-dark comets swam.

‘Here’s where we think she’s heading,’ Charlock said as a red line pushed ahead of
Silver Wings of Morning.
As the vector touched the edge of the box, the scale changed to encompass a greater volume of space. ‘Nothing after ten years,’ Charlock remarked. ‘Increasing to one hundred. No hits so far - she never comes within two years of a catalogued system.’ The scale lurched again, until the box was a thousand lights across, but still the red line sailed on without touching anything. Now it was thickening as the cumulative error became visible. ‘Close approach to a bachelor sun at nine hundred and thirty years,’ Charlock said, doubtfully. ‘Maybe that’s the target.’

‘No worlds, no rubble, no ice,’ Betony said. ‘There’s no reason for them to stop there.’

Bachelor suns were stars that had had their planetary systems ripped away by encounters with other stars early in their history. They were useless to all meta-civilisations, save as wormhole-tappable fuel sources.

‘Increasing to ten thousand years,’ Charlock said. ‘Well outside the Scutum-Crux Arm now. Error radius approaching six months. After seven thousand years, she comes within fifteen years of the perimeter of the Harmonious Concordance, a mid-level empire of seventeen hundred settled systems.’

‘Could that be the target?’ asked Tansy. ‘Allowing for minor course adjustments—’

‘Universal Actuary predicts only a fifty per cent likelihood that the Harmonious Concordance is still in existence, dropping to eleven per cent by the time
Silver Wings
would actually get there,’ Sorrel said, reading from his own displayer. ‘That’s an awfully long punt for something that has only a one-in-nine chance of still being there.’

‘The UA isn’t always on the nail,’ Tansy said.

‘But it’s correct more often than it’s wrong,’ Sorrel replied, ‘and the Harmonious Concordance has all the right indicators for a textbook rise-and-fall. Unless they’re counting on dealing with the shrivelled remnants of a former empire, I can’t see this being the target.’

‘I don’t see it either,’ Betony said. ‘Increase the search volume, Charlock.’

‘We’re already out to ten thousand.’

‘Then we need to look further.’

Charlock shrugged, though his expression told us he no longer expected to gain much from this game. ‘Fifty thousand,’ he said, as the box swelled again. ‘Error radius is now two and a half years - wide enough that we’re going to be picking up systems all the way through. We’re punching through a lot of galaxy here. You’re going to have to trawl through several thousand candidates.’

‘List the systems in order of interception,’ Betony said. ‘We’ll work through them one at a time, see if anything jumps out at us. In the meantime, keep refining our estimate of
Silver Wings’
heading. We may be able to narrow that error radius a little.’

‘We’re wasting our time,’ Henbane said. ‘For all we know, she’s going to turn in a completely different direction half an hour from now.’

‘Then we’ll repeat the exercise,’ Betony said, gruffly indifferent to the other shatterling. ‘They’re headed somewhere. I’ll sleep a lot easier when I know where it is.’

‘Or maybe you won’t,’ I said.

*

I imagined Aconite standing before me. I had come to like him and would have been glad of his company now. I was alone aboard
Dalliance,
temporarily free of the other imagos.

‘There’s something on my mind,’ I said, speaking a message that he would not hear until many hours from now, back on Neume. ‘It’s going to sound insane, but I can’t stop thinking about it, and I’m hoping it may have some bearing on Mezereon’s interrogations. There was something about Cyphel’s body that wasn’t right.’

I thought of Aconite scratching his beard and looking sceptical. What could possibly be right about a body that had fallen several kilometres onto a hard surface?

‘She keeps coming to me,’ I said. ‘In my dreams. Telling me to pay attention. It’s as if my subconscious has worked out what’s wrong, but it hasn’t yet managed to communicate that to my conscious mind. Now I’m hoping someone back on Neume can see what I’m missing. There are dozens of you, and you have the imagery the Ymirians would have already recorded up to the moment of her death. Maybe there’s something ...’ I paused, aware of how absurd I might sound when my transmission was received. But I could not ignore Cyphel, the urgency I heard in her voice when she admonished me for not paying attention. ‘She had a long way to fall, Ack. What if she was alive all the way down, and she knew who had killed her? Could she have got a message to us?’

I ended my recording. It was several minutes more before I found the courage of my convictions and actually sent it.

 

The turn had changed nothing as far as our immediate plans were concerned. Following our earlier discussion, the three uncrewed ships were running on independent parallel tracks to
Silver Wings,
so that when they caught up with her, they could direct their energies into her sides rather than into the more vulnerable area of her stern. Seen in the display, the three ships formed an equilateral triangle, spaced five seconds apart.
Silver Wings
lay at the apex of a tetrahedron, ten seconds from any of the pursuing craft, but with that margin slowly decreasing. At three seconds, the ships would be able to target their weapons with sufficient accuracy to disable their prey without destroying it.

What was clear, although not yet understood, was that the distance was closing quicker than expected. It was not that our ships were accelerating any harder than intended, for they had already been pushed to the limits of their engines, with all nonessential megatonnage ejected from their cargo holds. For some reason,
Silver Wings
was not making as much headway as before she had executed her turn. Detailed analysis of her movements since leaving Neume even revealed that the slowdown - more accurately, a barely measurable reduction in acceleration - had begun sooner than the turn.