House of Suns (61 page)

‘Further out?’ Betony asked. ‘I asked you to look out to fifty thousand years.’

‘I did. Here are the candidate systems, in order of interception.’ He raised his hand to an offstage displayer.

Dalliance
showed the same list. It kept scrolling, line after line. Coordinates, Commonality name for the primary and for the major planet or moon with which the system was most likely to be associated; a string of code numbers identifying surface conditions, metallicities, host civilisations or the absence thereof.

It was a long, bewildering list - hundreds of possible solar systems. Until Charlock had produced it, I had imagined it would be a relatively simple business to scan through it until something jumped out at us. I had even wondered if the target might turn out to be one of the systems under investigation by the Vigilance, but none of those were showing up.

‘She passes through each of these systems?’ Orache said - calmer now, the loss of her ship absorbed if not forgotten.

‘Maybe not, but while we’re still uncertain of her trajectory, we can’t rule any of them out.’ Charlock’s brow was glossy with perspiration - he dabbed at it ineffectually, drying his fingers on his sleeve. ‘There are hundreds of worlds where Gentian Line, or another Line of the Commonality, has had some kind of business before. But that would apply no matter which direction we looked, and none of the systems on this list are of any obvious significance.’

‘Any Prior involvement?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. I searched for relic sites, but nothing came up.’

Agrimony scratched at the skin under his collar. ‘What about cultures that have had dealings with the Machine People? There must be some in that list.’

‘A handful,’ Charlock said, ‘but according to the UA, they’ve next to no chance of still being there.’

‘How many candidates in total?’ Betony asked.

‘Three hundred and forty-eight. Of course, limiting the search sweep to fifty kilo-years was an entirely arbitrary decision. If I look further out, or allow for an additional degree of uncertainty in our projection of Purslane’s vector, we’ll start picking up thousands. That’s before we factor in stellar proper motion, galactic rotation and the degree to which the robots are allowing the gravitational field to bend their trajectory.’

‘There are nine of us,’ I said. ‘We could at least break that list down into manageable chunks and see if we find anything that way. We should send it back to Neume, as well.’

‘I’ve done that already,’ Charlock said. ‘But we’re getting fast now, and it’s going to take a while for any return signals to catch up with us. Before we dice the list into pieces, though, I think there’s something you all ought to know.’

Betony crossed his arms. ‘You found something?’

‘Not in this list. But for the sake of my own curiosity I extended the search volume a little further, just in case we were missing something obvious.’

I sensed Betony’s patience hanging by a thread. ‘And?’

‘There’s something at sixty-two thousand lights - way across the plane of the galaxy. Quite honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. But if we take the numbers at face value, it’s a very high-confidence hit. She’s aimed directly at it.’

‘At what?’ I asked.

‘One of our stardams,’ Charlock said.

*

Galingale reported in a little while later. I was outside the summer house in
Dalliance’s
gardens, making a vain effort to clear my head with some fresh air in my lungs and blue skies above me. I had told the statues to stop moving around - their slow, dreamlike enactments were too distracting. I wanted absolute stillness outside my skull, in contrast to the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions going on inside it.

‘I’m still prepared to have a crack at this,’ Galingale’s imago said, rendered with gauzy indistinction halfway up the gently sloping meadow, the others gathered around him in more solid invocations.

‘Not after what we’ve just been through,’ Betony said. ‘We’ve lost three ships; I don’t want to lose another ship
and
a good shatterling. It was a courageous offer, Galingale, but it was made before we had a real appreciation of what we’re up against. Throwing another ship at
Silver Wings
—no matter how well intentioned the gesture - won’t achieve anything.’

‘I feel that way as well,’ I said.
‘Steel
Breeze and the other ships weren’t badly equipped, and nothing they did was obviously stupid. We’re just dealing with a stronger adversary, with a rapidly improving control of Purslane’s ship.’

Galingale’s response arrived two minutes later. ‘All the more reason to strike now, before that control gets any better.’ There was more determination in his voice than I had been expecting. ‘Besides - we can change our strategy now.’

I had my hands on my hips. ‘Can we? Nothing’s changed, as far as I’m aware.’

‘No one’s going to say it, so it may as well be me. It’s been a while, Campion.’ Galingale looked around at the others. ‘We haven’t heard from Purslane for a whole day. Her silence began before the battle, so it can’t just be the difficulty of getting a signal through the impasse. We should have heard from her since - we know our attack didn’t come close to doing any real damage to
Silver Wings.’

‘Then she’s still alive.’

‘And not talking?’ Galingale was staring at me with genuine sympathy. ‘She’d have been in touch, Campion. Unless the robots found a way to get to her.’

‘She was safe.’

‘She was secure in the ark. But we both know the robots weren’t going to let her stay there unchallenged, especially if she started getting on their nerves.’ He raised his hands suddenly, anticipating my response. ‘I’m not saying she’s dead - I’m just saying we have to consider it as a possibility, whereas before it was a stone certainty that she was still alive. Now we don’t have the luxury of that knowledge.’

‘I do.’

‘For the sake of argument, how does this change things?’ Betony asked.

‘Our ships exposed themselves to broadside attack. That’s not a risk we ought to take again. With lateral-mounted gamma-cannons, we have the tactical advantage in a stern-chase. Our ships are designed to shoot forward, not behind.’

There was no need to discuss the case of
Silver Wings.
Galingale was correct in all respects, and every one of us knew it. When you already have some of the fastest ships in the galaxy, defending against pursuers is seldom the highest priority. That did not mean our ships were powerless against a chasing adversary, but that the most effective weapons - the ones that were too large or cumbersome to steer - were normally optimised for forward attack.

‘She’ll still have an impasse raised as soon as you enter weapons range,’ Charlock said. ‘What makes you think you’ll get through it any easier than our ships did?’

‘I’m not saying I will. But at least I won’t be trying to hit a specific target, or avoid hitting sensitive areas. I can just concentrate my fire wherever I sense the greatest weakness in the impasse, or the underlying hull. Now we know that the stardam is her objective, stopping that ship - destroying her, if necessary - has become more important than just slowing her.’

He was glossing over the uncertainties regarding the destination, the possibility that it might not be the stardam, but I was ready to let that slide for now.

‘Without an opener, they won’t achieve anything,’ I said.

‘And you’d stake the reputation of the Line, and the future stability of several human civilisations, on that assumption? Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.’

‘I won’t sanction it,’ Betony said. ‘Not while we know Purslane’s still alive. She may come through with a transmission at any moment - we can’t guess the conditions she’s under.’

I allowed myself a moment’s relief.

‘But it’ll take a while for
Midnight Queen
to reach attack position, won’t it?’ Betony went on.

‘If I put myself into abeyance and disengage all safeguards, I can be within attack range in thirty hours. Unless Silver Wings slows down, no other ship has the capability to cross that gap.’

Betony began to turn away. ‘Do it. You have Line authority.’

‘What...’ I started to say.

Betony silenced me. ‘He keeps a channel open the whole while. He doesn’t get authorisation to attack until we’ve reviewed the data again, when he’s nearly in range. That’s thirty hours, Campion. If we haven’t heard from Purslane by then, I think even you would have to admit...’ But that was as much as he could bring himself to say.

‘I swear I won’t attack unless we know she’s beyond all hope,’ Galingale said. ‘Now excuse me, if you will. I need to make some arrangements.’

His imago buzzed with static and vanished from the garden.

Synchromesh did things to my body. It slowed other processes besides the perception of time. But after more than two hours of keeping that weapon on Cadence - more than twenty hours of actual time—I began to sense a growing heaviness in my abdomen, a warning rumble that there were biological processes that were no longer happy about being held in check. My thoughts took on a frayed, burred quality, like old rope. I began to slip in and out of alertness - more than once daydreaming that Hesperus was in fact up and well, and that between us we had managed to overcome the robots. Each time I snapped out of these interludes with a renewed determination to stay watchful, but the effort was taxing. Cadence was watching me with venomous interest, listening to the ebb and flow of my mental processes. To her, my mind was lit up like a stained-glass window. She was waiting for certain facets to darken, and then she would act.

At twenty-four hours, the chronometer brought me back into realtime. I felt just as drained and foggy-headed as when I had been in thrall to Synchromesh, but now each second hit me with unbridled force.

‘It’s becoming difficult now,’ Cadence observed.

I stood up, my legs two pillars of numbness slowly transmogrifying to burning pain. With effort I walked to the command console again, still holding the energy-pistol on Cadence. I might have missed it, but I did not think we had come under attack again.

‘Campion,’ I said, speaking at the console, ‘this is Purslane. I’m still here, wondering if you can hear me now. Anything I need to know?’

The silence stretched like tortured spacetime. I prowled the room, eyeing the two broken robots, wondering what was keeping Campion. A side-effect of Synchromesh withdrawal is that the ordinary flow of time can occasionally seem sluggish, until the brain readjusts. But even with this knowledge I still felt as if an unreasonable amount of time had passed. I was just about to send another message when his voice came over the speaker.

‘You’re still alive!’ Campion said delightedly. ‘Thank God. We hadn’t heard anything for so long, we were starting to fear the worst. We knew you couldn’t get a signal through when the impasse was raised, but after the attack was over we couldn’t understand why you were still silent. I started worrying, all right? You know about the attack, I’m assuming. We managed to hit Silver Wings, but not as well as we’d hoped. The good news is we only lost ships, not shatterlings. Charlock, Orache and Agrimony are still with us, aboard our vehicles. The main thing is, we haven’t given up. We also think we may know where you’re headed. Talk to me, Purslane. Tell me what’s happening.’

‘Before you say anything else, tell me the destination,’ I said.

His reply came back a little more than four minutes later. They had closed the gap, although only by a small margin.

‘Nothing’s definite,’ Campion said, ‘but we’ve extrapolated your course and found something. We don’t know the significance of it yet - there’s a mountain of uncertainty to deal with. But on the face of it, if we take our best estimate of your trajectory and run it out to sixty-two kilo-lights, there’s something there. It’s not just another solar system or the boundary of a mid-level empire. There’s a stardam, Purslane - and it’s one of ours.’

I glanced at Cadence, making sure she was not getting up to any mischief. ‘A Gentian stardam. You’re certain about that.’

‘Beyond any doubt. It’s been there for three million years - half the age of the Line. At least, it looks like one of ours - we’re the ones who are supposed to be monitoring it, making sure it keeps doing its job.’

I thought of the stardam Campion had stabilised near the Centaurs’ solar system. ‘What do you mean, it looks like one of ours? Either it is or it isn’t. There should be a clear record in the trove of when we installed it, who was involved, the client civilisation or civilisations, what kind of sun needed trapping, why it wasn’t a job for the Rebirthers or Movers.’

‘It’s definitely Gentian,’ Campion came back, ‘but the trove record is much sparser than we’d normally expect. And it’s difficult to corroborate, too. According to the trove, the shatterling in charge of the initial installation was Orpine - he was the one who gathered the ringworlds and placed them around the star. But Orpine’s dead - he went more than a dozen circuits ago.’

In other words, I thought to myself, attrition had taken Orpine not very long after he would have installed the stardam. Searching my mind, I tried to recall the circumstances of his disappearance, but without access to my trove I was powerless. Attrition had taken more than a hundred shatterlings even before the ambush, and with the best will in the world I could not recall the precise details of how each had died. In some cases it would never be known.

‘Orpine vanished,’ Campion went on. ‘We don’t know what happened to him. Since then, the stardam’s taken care of itself - we’ve monitored it, of course, and once every circuit or so, one of us has been tasked with making an inspection fly-by. Other than that, there’s really not much to say. The star in question was an O-type supergiant, brushing within a dozen lights of two emergent cultures, neither of which had regained interstellar capability at the time the dam was installed. If the star had blown, it would have disassociated the ozone in the atmospheres of their homeworlds, leading to massive genetic damage in the human populations. They’d have all died out within a year. Scaper intervention might have helped... but contact was considered risky, and this was at a time when Gentian Line was anxious to assert itself within the Commonality.’