House of Suns (51 page)

‘We’ve kept signalling,’ Betony said as he brought his shuttle into whisking range of
Dalliance,
‘but there’s still been no response. If the robots are in charge, they can’t have any demands.’

‘They don’t need anything from us,’ I said. ‘Do we have a handle on the trajectory?’

‘Heading in the galactic anti-centre, parallel to the plane. She may turn once she’s reached interstellar space, but for now there’s no reason to presume she isn’t still headed for Machine Space.’

‘There’s something wrong about this, Betony.’

‘The whole thing’s wrong.’

‘Whatever’s happening here, it isn’t Purslane’s doing. Deep down, you know that.’

‘It would surprise me if it was, but I’ve been surprised before.’

I thanked him for the ride and whisked over to
Dalliance.
Sensing my arrival, the ship brought herself to immediate flight-readiness. By the time I reached the bridge, the engine was chafing at the bit, ready for the chase.

It had all happened so quickly that I felt a sense of dreamlike unreality about the whole experience. In less than twelve hours, Purslane’s ship would be travelling so close to the speed of light that the fastest ship ever built would still need a hundred thousand years to catch up with her. By the time it did, they would both be on the other side of the galaxy. The only possibility of reaching her lay in chasing now, with all safeguards thrown to the wind.

I assumed my command position, laid in a pursuit course and brought the engine to a thousand gees. Neume fell away like a stone dropped down a well. Like all worlds, it had felt as wide as the universe when I was standing on it, but now I saw it for the little silver pebble it really was - a small round rock floating in an infinitely larger void, barriered from vacuum by the thinnest gasp of an atmosphere.

For a few minutes I was alone, nothing within my immediate sensor reach, but then the other ships began to lock into formation around me, matching my acceleration for the time being. The three craft that lay ahead of us belonged to Charlock, Orache and Agrimony. Five ships followed. Mine was one of them; Betony’s another. The other three belonged to Sorrel, Tansy and Henbane, with Charlock, Orache and Agrimony riding as passengers. Soon we would be accompanied by a sixth, for Galingale had broken off from his patrol duties to join the chase. He was pushing at twelve hundred gees, coaxing
Midnight Queen
to give up her last newton of pseudo-thrust. Of all the ships that would eventually make up the pursuit squadron, his had the best chance of closing the distance on
Silver Wings of Morning,
even though he would not be able to match Purslane’s cruise ceiling.

Within an hour we had put more than three light-minutes of space between us and Neume - it was now just a bright star astern, almost washed out by the light of its sun. With our engines stable, pushed to the currently agreed limit of a thousand gees, we gathered our ships close enough for realtime conversation. A circular table formed in my bridge, duplicating the one that would appear on the other craft. Imagos of my fellow shatterlings popped into existence around it. Except for Galingale, all of them were rendered solid. Galingale’s smokiness was to remind us that he was still more than a minute down-range, and could not be expected to respond immediately to any point of debate.

‘At noon, none of us expected to be in our ships before sundown, racing away from Neume,’ Betony said. ‘But say what you like about us, we’ve always been quick and adapatable when the moment forces it upon us. Charlock, Orache and Agrimony: thank you for dispatching your ships ahead of you. Rest assured that the Line won’t forget your magnanimity.’

‘Whisking’s too dangerous, but if we can push to eleven hundred gees, even twelve, we can creep within shuttle range of our ships,’ Orache said, her hands resting on the table before her. She had long, sharp fingernails, painted midnight black for Cyphel’s funeral. ‘I know I’d rather be aboard mine than sitting back here, watching her from a distance. The three ships are already too far downstream for effective realtime control, and mine carries no protocols for this situation.’ Keeping her voice level, she added, ‘I mean battle protocols, if it wasn’t obvious.’

‘We’ll deal with protocols in a moment,’ Betony said. ‘First, I’d like Campion to speak. He knows Purslane better than any of us, and for once I don’t intend that as a criticism. We’re beyond that now. If he has insights, anything that might bear on this crisis, we should hear them.’

‘I have no insights,’ I said, ‘except for what I’ve already told you, which is that this definitely isn’t Purslane’s doing. She’s either dead, murdered by the robots, or she’s their prisoner.’

‘Why would the robots do this?’ Charlock asked. ‘They’ve nothing to gain by taking her prisoner, or even killing her. The ship was already theirs.’

‘If Purslane chose to go against the Line—’ Tansy began.

‘She didn’t,’ I snapped back. ‘I was with her just before she went up. She wasn’t thrilled about losing
Silver Wings,
but she was resigned to it. She also wanted the robots to help Hesperus as best they could - if that meant donating her ship, she was happy to oblige.’

‘Could she have been bluffing?’ asked Sorrel, scratching at the fine, grey-flecked down of his beard. ‘I’m sorry, but someone has to ask. If Purslane had this planned out in advance, she wouldn’t have wanted you to know about it.’

‘She wasn’t bluffing.’

‘You can’t know that for sure. None of us are mind-readers. If she was sufficiently determined ...’

I stared Sorrel down. We had never crossed swords before, but neither had I ever counted him a close friend. ‘Trust me: Purslane had no intention of taking her own ship.’

‘We’ll assume Campion’s right for now,’ Betony said. ‘Our primary objective is stopping that ship. Once we’ve done that, once we’ve recovered her, we can work out what happened.’

‘How do you propose to stop
Silver Wings,
short of destroying her?’ Tansy enquired. ‘Sorry, I probably could have put that better, but you can’t just throw a rope around her and hope she slows down.’

‘We’ll aim to cripple her, without hurting anyone onboard,’ said Betony. ‘That’s the best we can hope for now.’

‘Has anyone tried signalling Purslane?’ asked Charlock.

Betony nodded. ‘We’ve been trying from the moment she broke orbit, but there’s been no response.’

‘Which proves nothing,’ I said. ‘If the robots have taken control, they’re not going to have any interest in talking to us.’

‘Do you think Purslane’s still alive?’ Tansy asked me.

‘I hope so.’

‘That’s a non-answer.’

‘It’s the best I’ve got. Please don’t press the point.’

To my relief, she chose not to.

‘There’s something we do need to consider, before engaging
Silver Wings,’
Orache said, tapping the tips of her nails against the ghost surface of the table. ‘If the robots have taken control, we can assume that they’re acting as agents of the Machine People. Firing on Purslane’s ship, even with the intention of slowing her down, could be construed as a hostile act. Viewed from certain quarters, it could be interpreted as a declaration of war against the Machine People.’

‘No one would be that stupid,’ Agrimony said. ‘This is an isolated incident, a ship taken without due explanation. We have every right to reclaim Line property.’

Orache’s expression was steely, brooking no dissent. ‘I said “from certain quarters”. At the very least, we might be banished from the Commonality. I need hardly tell you how catastrophic that would be for Gentian Line, especially in this time of maximum need. At worst, we might provoke the robots into retaliatory action.’

‘We’ll justify our actions,’ Betony said.

‘Then you’d better hope someone’s ready to listen. In between those outcomes is a spread of possibilities, almost all of them bad. Another Line might decide to attack us, just to show the robots where they stand. If a sufficient number of turnover civilisations decided to combine their forces against us, we might face difficulties.’

‘We’ll crush them, if they have the temerity,’ Betony told her. ‘If the Machine People turn on us, we’ll crush them as well. They’re fast and strong, but we’ve been around a lot longer than they have.’

I raised what I hoped was the voice of reason. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a lot we don’t know about those robots - a lot we don’t know about the Machine People, for that matter.’

‘What are you driving at?’ Charlock asked.

‘Just that we ought to keep open minds. We already have grounds to assume that it was my visit to the Vigilance that somehow caused the ambush in the first place. Doctor Meninx had his reasons for visiting the Vigilance; so did Hesperus. The same might also have applied to Cadence and Cascade.’

‘They came to us, not the Vigilance,’ Sorrel said.

‘My point still stands. The Vigilance was suddenly the focus of lots of attention, and because of my strand we got entangled in the same affair. The machines may have decided it was in their interests to visit us instead.’

Sorrel looked unconvinced. ‘I don’t see why that would be the case. If the Vigilance is the thing everyone’s interested in, why not go there directly?’

‘The Vigilance won’t deal with robots, only organic intelligences. Ask
them
why. Hesperus was planning to disguise himself as a human, but that would have involved considerable sacrifices for him, paring down his abilities until he could only just get by - he may never have succeeded. Cadence and Cascade may not have been prepared to go that far, or had already judged that there was too much risk of detection. Can you imagine how bad it would have looked if the Machine People were found to be infiltrating human civilisations? That would probably have been enough to trigger a galaxy-wide diplomatic crisis, irrespective of anything we do. So they came to us instead, knowing that we’d obtained data from the Vigilance that was in some way sensitive. They were hoping to access the information through us, bypassing the Vigilance completely.’

Sorrel asked, ‘You think they were paying us that much attention?’

‘Someone was,’ I said, with a weary shrug.

‘You think there’s a connection between the robots and the House of Suns?’ Betony asked.

‘Everything’s connected,’ I answered. ‘That doesn’t mean everyone’s working towards the same goal.’

‘I was prepared to believe that we might have incurred the wrath of another Line,’ Betony said. ‘That the ambush might have been our payment for something we did a dozen circuits ago, some careless act we barely gave a second thought to at the time.’

‘But you don’t feel that way now,’ I said.

‘Not if the machines are involved. And let’s face it - they appear to be, don’t they?’ Betony glanced around at all of us. ‘No disrespect to Sainfoin—’

‘But it looks as if they used her to get to us,’ I said. ‘In which case whatever we’re involved in is of direct interest to the Machine People. They sent Hesperus. I think they also sent Cadence and Cascade. The only question is, did they all have the same objectives?’

‘If they all originated with the Machine People, can’t we take that as read?’ Sorrel asked.

‘Not necessarily. The Machine People may be just as fractious as any human civilisation.’ Just thinking through the permutations, trying to shuffle the evidence of recent events into some kind of rational structure, was making my head throb. I pressed fingers against my brow. ‘All I’m saying is, Cadence and Cascade may have been following different orders from Hesperus, or been given more latitude to accomplish whatever it was they were sent to do.’

‘From where I’m sitting, they didn’t do very much at all,’ Tansy said. ‘Came to the reunion, survived the ambush, spent time on Neume and then agreed to return home with news of the attack. What am I missing?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Apart from the fact that they had Hesperus with them when they left, which presumably wasn’t a detail they’d planned for. Other than that, though - unless they were being sneakier than we realised - they didn’t gain access to any of our secrets, or learn anything on Neume that we didn’t learn as well. I don’t even remember them paying much attention to the interrogations - I got the impression they were never particularly interested.’

‘Maybe they already knew everything Grilse and the others were likely to say,’ Charlock said.

‘So if it wasn’t our secrets, if it wasn’t the information known by the prisoners, what were they after?’ asked Sorrel.

‘Something else, obviously,’ I said. ‘Something that’s either staring us in the face, something so obvious that we can’t see it, or something even we don’t know about.’

‘But which has something to do with us,’ Charlock said.

Galingale’s smoky image spoke for the first time. ‘Excuse the interruption, but it seems to me that we’re all agreed on one thing: this is not in character for Purslane. I’m with Campion: she’s been duped by the robots. Let’s not forget that they were the ones who first dropped hints that they needed a fast ship. It was just Purslane’s bad luck that hers happened to fit the bill, and that she needed her wrists slapped.’

Betony stiffened his jaw, but didn’t interrupt.

‘She’s a victim of circumstance here, nothing more. Luckily, this is Purslane we’re talking about. She’s smart and adaptable, and it’s her ship that they’ve tried to steal. I’d imagine the chances are excellent that she’s still alive. At the same time, we can’t disregard the possibility that the robots may have gained control of
Silver Wings’
weapons. It may be something of a challenge to approach her.’

‘There are safeguards, to prevent one Line ship firing on another,’ Sorrel said.

After a minute, Galingale answered, ‘None that can’t be circumvented, if those robots are sufficiently resourceful. I just don’t think we should be blind to the risks. But we have armour, impassors, weapons of our own and a clear numerical advantage. I propose that we disable acceleration safeguards on the three lead ships and let them get as close to Purslane as they can.’