He checked the progress of the Inhibitor aggregate, neither gratified nor disappointed to see that it was exactly where he had predicted it would be. Something had changed, though: his departure from the Zodiacal Light had drawn the attention of the other protagonists. One of Skade’s former allies was moving on an intercept trajectory with his ship at a higher acceleration than he could sustain. The other Conjoiner craft would engage him within fifteen minutes. Five or six minutes after that, a second aggregate would have reached him.
Remontoire allowed himself a flicker of disquiet, just enough to pump some adrenalin into his blood. Then he blocked it, the way one slammed the door on a boisterous party.
He knew, rationally, that the logical thing would have been to remain on the Zodiacal Light, where his co-ordination and insight were most valued. He could have programmed a beta-level simulation of himself to fly this ship, or asked for a volunteer. There would have been dozens of willing candidates, some of whom had been equipped with Conjoiner implants of their own. But he had insisted on taking the ship himself. It wasn’t just because he had spent more time than most of them learning the ways of the hypometric weapon. There was also a sense of obligation: it was something he had to do.
It was, he knew, because of Ana Khouri. He had made a mistake in letting her travel down to the planet on her own. From a military perspective it had been exactly the right thing to do: no point committing already overstretched resources when there was every likelihood that Aura was already dead. More than that, he thought, when there was every chance that Aura had already been as useful to them as she was ever going to be. Also, nothing much larger than an escape capsule had stood a chance of reaching the surface anyway, with the Inhibitor blockade in maximum effect.
But Clavain wouldn’t have seen it that way. Nine times out of ten he had based his decisions upon the strict application of military sense. He wouldn’t have lived through five hundred years otherwise. But one time out often he would disregard the rules entirely and do something that made no sense except on a humane level.
Remontoire thought it likely that this would have been one of those occasions. No matter that Skade and Aura were probably both dead: Clavain would have gone down with Khouri even if the rescue attempt itself was almost guaranteed to end in their deaths.
Time and again over the years Remontoire had examined the minutiae of Clavain’s life, the critical points, trying to work out if those irrational acts had helped or hindered his old friend. He reviewed Clavain’s decisions once more while he waited for the Conjoiner ship to meet him. As always he arrived at no satisfactory answer. But he had decided that this was a time when he needed to live by Clavain’s rules rather than the rigid gamesmanship of tactical analysis.
A clock rang in his brain. His fifteen minutes were up.
There had been no point thinking about the approaching Conjoiner ship before it arrived: a quick review of the options had shown him that nothing would be gained by deviating from his present course.
The other ship pushed through his concentric sensor boundaries like a fish nosing through sharply defined sea currents. In his mind’s eye it became a tangible thing rather than a vague hint in the sensor data.
It was a moray-class corvette like Skade’s craft, just as light-suckingly black as Remontoire’s ship, but shaped more like a weirdly barbed fish-hook than the trident form of his own machine. Even at close range, the spectral whisper of its highly stealthed drives was barely detectable. On average, its hull radiated at a chill 2.7 kelvin above absolute zero. Up close, in the microwave spectrum, it was a quilt of hot and cold spots. He mapped the emplacement of cryo-arithmetic engines; observed those that were functioning less efficiently than their neighbours; observed also those that were running worryingly cold, teetering on the edge of algorithmic-cycle runaway. The occasional blue flicker sparked as one of the nodes dropped below I kelvin, before being dragged back into lockstep with its cohorts.
Ships could be made arbitrarily cold, and could therefore be made to blend in with the background radiation of the early universe, which was still shining after fifteen billion years. But the background map was not smooth: cosmic inflation had magnified tiny flaws in the expanding universe to produce subtle variations in the background, depending on which way one looked. They were deviations from true anisotropy: wrinkles in the face of creation. Unless they could adjust their hull temperatures to match those fluctuations, ships could only achieve an imperfect match with the background spectrum. Under some circumstances, hunting for those tiny signs of mismatch was the only way to detect enemy ships at all.
But the Conjoiner ship was maintaining the coldness of its hull purely as camouflage against Inhibitor forces in the vicinity. It was making no real effort to hide itself from Remontoire. In fact, it was even trying to speak to him.
There was one thing about Conjoiners that even the non-augmented had to admire: they didn’t give up. Twenty-eight thousand unanswered requests for negotiation wouldn’t deter a twenty-eight thousand and first.
Remontoire allowed the narrow line of the message laser to scribe against his hull until it found one of the few sensor patches.
He examined the transmission through copious layers of mental fire-walling. Eventually, after many seconds of cogitation, he decided that it was safe to unpack the transmission into the most sensitive parts of his own mind. The message format was in natural language rather than any of the high-level Con-joiner protocols. Nicely insulting touch, he thought: from the perspective of Skade’s allies, it was the Conjoiner equivalent of baby talk.
[Remontoire? It’s you, isn’t it? Why won’t you talk to us?]
He composed a thought in the same format. Why are you so certain I’m Remontoire?
[You were always more fond of wild gestures than you’d ever admit. This is straight out of Clavain’s book of daring escapades.]
Someone has to do it.
[It’s a brave effort, Remontoire, but it’s pointless worrying about those people on the planet. Nothing we can do can help them now. They’re not even relevant to the future outcome of the war.]
We’d best let them hang, then. That’d be Skade’s way, wouldn’t it?
[Skade would do what she could for them if she thought they were going to make a difference. But you’re only making things worse. Don’t take the battle down there. Don’t stretch things up here when we most need to consolidate our forces.]
Another plea for co-operation? Skade must be turning in her grave.
[She was a pragmatist, Remontoire, much like yourself. She would have seen that now is the time to amalgamate our parties, to pool our knowledge-base and inflict real damage on the enemy machines.]
What you mean is that you’ve achieved all you can through deception and theft. You know I’ll never trust you that way again. Now you have nothing to lose by negotiating.
[With regret, we acknowledge that tactical errors were made. But now that Skade is—as you have alluded—very probably dead… ]
The ducklings are waddling around looking for a new mother duck.
[Adopt the analogy of your choice, Remontoire. We only offer the outstretched hand of friendship. The situation here is more complex than we’ve hitherto realised. You must have seen this for yourself: the teasing hints in the data, the scraps—too small and insignificant on their own—but which add up to a clear conclusion. We’re not just dealing with wolves, Remontoire. There is something else.]