House of Suns (64 page)

‘Purslane was just doing what any of us would do in the same circumstances - putting the Line ahead of herself,’ Charlock said. ‘It’s brave and selfless - everything we’d expect from her. That doesn’t mean we bow to her wishes.
Midnight Queen
is still faster and better armed than any of the ships we already lost, including mine. Galingale may still have a chance of crippling Silver Wings with a broadside shot before we have to consider destroying her.’

From his padded seat Galingale shrugged and nodded, as if the matter was of no great importance to him. ‘It’s your call, ladies and gentleman. I am more than willing to attempt a crippling attack. That was our agreement, wasn’t it?’

‘Don’t expose yourself to excessive risk,’ Betony said. ‘Maintain impassor effectiveness as far as you can, and get out of there the instant you start receiving overwhelming return fire. I’d rather get you and your ship back in one piece than have to start planning another memorial.’

‘Your concern is noted, but you needn’t worry on that score. I’m not about to do anything remotely heroic.’ Galingale paused, his attention switching to a read-out aboard his ship. ‘I’m going silent now. I need time to rerun my weapons checks and get myself into the right frame of mind. I promise I’ll take care of myself.’

‘Good luck, Galingale,’ I said.

He went dark. In less than half an hour he would be within range of Silver Wings. None of us were in a mood to fill the intervening time with speculation as to the likely outcome of that encounter. My fingers delved into my pocket and touched the eyedropper of Synchromesh.

For a moment it was tempting to take the easy way out, but my hand stayed where it was. I owed it to Purslane, as much as to Galingale.

‘They will not do it,’ Cadence said, as if I had asked for her thoughts on the matter. ‘Even if they had the means to stop you - which they do not - they would never be able to commit the act itself.’

‘Is that your considered opinion?’

‘For what it is worth.’

‘Well, for what it’s worth, shut your ugly silver face before I put a hole in it.’

‘Put a hole in it by all means. My self-awareness is distributed throughout my body. You should try it sometime. Having all that precious humanity squeezed into a few hundred cubic centimetres of brain tissue inside that easily smashed box of bone you call a skull - not an arrangement I would put a great deal of faith in if my existence depended on it.’

‘We’ve been around for six million years - longer if you include prehistory. You’ve been around for ... how long exactly?’

‘It is not the span of time that counts, but what you do with it. While you humans have been grubbing around the galaxy, looking for a sense of purpose, a meaning to pin on the chain of cosmic accidents that brought you shambling into existence, we have been doing great things. In the span of time that it takes you to sneeze, I can run the equivalent of a year’s worth of human consciousness. Imagine all the thinking we have done since our emergence.’

‘It’s not doing you a lot of good now, is it?’

‘Is she trying your patience, Purslane?’

I almost let go of the energy-pistol in shock and relief. Hesperus had finally spoken. The lights were on in his head, whirling and gyring behind the coloured glass of his skull facets. Cadence must have been talking to keep me distracted from the signs of his recovery.

‘You’re back.’

‘As if I was never gone.’ He moved an arm and dabbed at the cratered black wound in his chest. ‘Not as bad as it looks, trust me - it’s what’s inside that matters.’

He was talking like Abraham Valmik, the Spirit of the Air. Cadence tracked his movements with the blank-faced indifference of a machine ballerina. I wondered if she had detected the change in his mannerisms.

‘Are you... all right?’ I asked.

‘On the mend. The aspic helped. I am sorry that it was necessary to shut myself down with so little warning, but there was nothing I could do about that. How are you doing with our guest?’

‘She’s been the life and soul of the party.’

‘I can imagine. No funny business, no tricks?’

‘Just the one. I let her off with a warning shot.’

‘So I see.’ He pressed his hands against the floor and pushed himself to his feet. He had been unsteady and stiff-legged before blacking out, but now his old fluency of movement was returning. ‘You did well, Purslane - very well indeed. Shall I take the energy-pistol now? I imagine you could do with some rest.’

‘In a while. There’s something I need to tell you, Hesperus. We know where this ship’s headed.’ I looked guardedly at Cadence, but she had already listened in to the entirety of my conversation with Campion. ‘It’s a stardam, one of Gentian Line’s, more than sixty thousand years from Neume.’

‘What would they want with a stardam?’

‘I was hoping you might have some ideas in that direction.’

‘Can they open it?’

‘Not without an opener. But I think there’s at least a possibility that there’s one aboard Silver Wings.’

‘Of which you had no knowledge?’

‘That I used to know about, maybe. I’m not certain, Hesperus, but from the moment the possibility arose, it felt right to me. I was the custodian of the single-use opener. I’ve been keeping it for the Line, from the moment we installed that dam. That’s why they wanted my ship.’

He turned his gold face to address Cadence. ‘Is this correct? Is the stardam your objective, the opener the reason you had to get aboard
Silver Wings of Morning?’

‘What do you think, traitor?’ she asked.

Hesperus walked over to the broken robot. He stood next to her with the pistol in one hand, the other clenched behind his back as if he feared the harm he might do her. ‘I am the traitor because I have chosen not to embark on a course of deliberate genocide against co-sentients?’

They were talking for my benefit, I realised. The two machines could have communicated their thoughts in a quicksilver eyeblink, but they wanted me to hear what they had to say.

‘They butchered machines. Why should machines spare a thought for the organic?’

‘They killed an earlier race of robots. They should not have done so. But it was not butchery, nor was it murder. We should not mistake unintentional slaughter for premeditation.’

‘They wanted to be able to kill those robots.’

‘Should the need ever arise,’ Hesperus corrected. ‘That was wrong, but it was also understandable. The robots were a new form of creation. Historically, the new has often vanquished the old. Ask reptiles.’

Cadence looked aside. ‘Collaborator.’

Hesperus released the pistol, letting it hover in the air, still aimed at Cadence. He knelt down and touched his finger against her chest, just below the breastbone. As I had seen when the robots examined him, his finger sank into her armour as if it had turned soft.

‘The thing I would still like to know is what you hope to gain by opening the stardam. No matter where the dam is located, you must know that at best you can only hurt a small part of the meta-civilisation. Is that your intention? An ultimately pointless gesture?’

He dug his fingers in deeper, until he was up to his knuckles. Metal was blending with metal- gold into silver. I could not even be sure that his fingers had any independent existence.

‘You are not going to learn anything from me, Hesperus.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

Cadence flinched, arching her torso. Hesperus’s other hand was holding her down at the shoulder. ‘Easy now,’ he said, not without kindness. ‘Resisting me won’t help you. You see now that I am stronger than before - stronger than you ever imagined. The barricades you have put up, the flimsy screens you think will hide your secrets, are nothing to me now.’

‘What
are
you?’ she asked, with a kind of terrified fascination, still not able to let go of her curiosity.

‘Something more than you will ever be. I am Hesperus. I am Valmik. I am the Spirit of the Air. I am the oldest thinking creature in the galaxy, older than the oldest shatterling, and I can see through you like thin smoke.’ Then he lifted his hand from her shoulder and touched a finger to her lips. He made a shushing sound. ‘No, don’t try to kill yourself. You can’t turn yourself off now, no matter how much you want to. That time has passed.’

Beneath his grasp the torso flexed once. I wanted to look away. I told myself that it was just one robot sucking information from another, a neutral exchange of information between two machines.

‘Now,’ Hesperus said, ‘the stardam. Tell me what you
really
want with it, Cadence. Then we’ll talk about putting you out of your misery.’

Aconite’s signal had left Neume at the speed of light, but it had to catch up with ships that were moving nearly that fast within a day of departure. By the time it reached us it was redshifted so heavily, stretched so far outside the usual recognition bandpass, that at first our ships did not identify it as a Gentian transmission.

‘I wasn’t expecting to hear back from Neume so quickly,’ Charlock said.

Betony shook his head. ‘This can’t be about the stardam. They’re contacting us about something else.’

The only thing to do was play the transmission. Copies of Aconite’s imago appeared on our bridges. Even before he had spoken, the expression on his face told us everything we needed to know about the nature of the communication. It was not going to be good news.

‘There’s no easy way to do this,’ he said, speaking slowly and clearly. ‘I’ve just been talking to Mezereon, concerning the interrogation of Grilse. She ran all our names past him, all thousand shatterlings, even those we know died circuits ago. She was looking for a flicker of recognition, a sense that the names meant something more to him. With his brain spread out like a carpet, it was a simple matter to monitor his responses. Well, she got something. She got hits - more than a dozen. He knows her, of course, and me, and the other shatterlings he’s been interviewed by since we captured him. A handful of us he’d have heard of before - he’s a Marcellin. We all go back to Abigail, Ludmilla and the Golden Hour. And he had a prior interest in the Line - it all adds to the noise. But still Mezereon found something she couldn’t ignore. She got a name that she wouldn’t have expected otherwise - a hit that couldn’t be ascribed to our great popularity and fame. A shatterling known to Grilse who was never involved in the interrogations. A shatterling who is alive, still amongst us.’

I allowed myself a moment’s respite. So the problem was at Aconite’s end, not ours. He was just keeping us informed.

But Aconite was still talking.

‘If I could have found a way of sending this information selectively, so that it reached only those of you I want to hear it, I would have done so. But the protocols don’t allow for that, and in any case - even if I managed to encrypt the message—the signal itself would still have been visible. It would have made no difference, I think - he’d still know that his name had been uncovered.’ He drew in a deep breath, steeling himself for what he was about to disclose. ‘We think it’s Galingale. Grilse’s hit may be spurious - only he will ever be able to confirm or deny that - but we can’t think of any reason why he’d show such a strong reaction to that one name, that one face. He knows Galingale. That makes Galingale the infiltrator, the traitor, the one who has always been with us. Of course, there may be others. But someone had to bring Campion’s thread to the attention of our enemies, the ones who committed the ambush. And if Galingale is the traitor, then we don’t need to look any further to know who killed Cyphel.’ The imago gave a half-smile. ‘Speaking of Campion: I hope you’re hearing this, old man. You were right about Cyphel. There
was
something wrong but the rest of us were too blind to see it. She sent us a message. Not from the grave, exactly, but during that long fall when she was pushed from her balcony. She knew who’d done it - she’d seen him clearly. She knew she was going to die - nothing in the city could save her, and she knew a fall from that height wasn’t survivable, even with Line medicine. But she was still a clever, clever girl, and she tried to get a message through to us.’

‘The rings,’ I said quietly.

Betony was puzzled. ‘The what?’

‘Campion knew something was wrong,’ Aconite went on, oblivious to our interruptions. ‘He couldn’t put his finger on it, and maybe we wouldn’t have been clever enough to see it if we had ... but taking Grilse’s reaction into consideration as well, there’s no doubt. Cyphel swapped her rings from her left hand to her right. Campion noticed it, and knew something was wrong - but he just couldn’t place it. But we had imagery of Cyphel, and the records made of her body after the fall. When we compared them, the rings had moved. She had time to do that as she was falling. It was all she could do. She couldn’t scratch his name into her skin - she knew there wasn’t going to be much of her left to recognise after she hit the Benevolence structure. But the rings? They’d survive the fall, and she hoped we’d realise their significance. She wanted us to see that something was wrong - that she was murdered rather than just fell by accident - and moving her rings was the only means she had to tell us that.’

‘It wouldn’t have given us Galingale, not that easily,’ Tansy said.

‘But if we had a hint that he was already implicated, as we do—’ Betony said.

‘We have to stop him,’ I said.

Betony sent a command to freeze Aconite’s transmission - the rest of it could wait until we had dealt with this most urgent of matters. According to the tactical forecast, Galingale would be within attack range of Silver Wings
of
Morning in less than five minutes.

‘He’s got the signal by now,’ Henbane said. ‘He knows we know.’

Betony reopened the channel to Midnight Queen. ‘Galingale ... we need to talk. If you’ve seen Aconite’s transmission, then you’ll know we have reasonable grounds for concern. Our fears may be unfounded - I know and trust you well enough to feel certain that is the case. But I can’t dismiss them out of hand. Abandon your attack and return to the rest of the pursuit fleet, and we’ll take it from there.’