Hideaway

'Seniors . . .' Sayaca said. 'Thank you for coming here. I hope that by the time I've finished speaking, you'll feel that your time wasn't wasted.' Then she extended a hand towards the middle of the room and an image of Ghost sprang into being. 'Ever since we identified this system as our only chance of concealment, we've had to ignore the troubling aspects of the place. Bright Boy's anomalous mass-luminosity relationship, for instance. The seismic discrepancies in Cinder. Pauraque's deep-atmospheric phenomenon in Ghost. Now the time has come to deal with these puzzles. I'm afraid that what they tell us may not be entirely to our liking.'

Promising start, Merlin thought. She had spoken for more than half a minute without using a single mathematical expression.

Sayaca began to speak again, but she was cut off abruptly by another speaker. 'Sayaca, there's something we should discuss first.' Everyone's attention moved to the interjector. Merlin recognised him immediately: Weaver. Cruelly handsome, the boy had outgrown his adolescent awkwardness in the years since Merlin had first known him as one of Sayaca's class.

'What is it?' she said, only the tiniest hint of suspicion in her voice.

'Some news we've just obtained.' Weaver looked around the room, clearly enjoying his moment in the limelight while attempting to maintain the appropriate air of solemnity. 'We've been looking along the Way, as a matter of routine, monitoring the swarm that lies ahead of us. Sometimes off the line of the Way too - just in case we find anything. We've also been following the Bluethroat.'

It was so long since anyone had mentioned that name that it took Merlin an instant to place it. Of course, the Bluethroat. The part of the original ship that Crombec had flown onward, while the rest of them piled into Starling and slowed down around Bright Boy. It was not that anyone hated Crombec or wished to excise him and his followers from history, simply that there had been more than enough to focus on in the new system.

'Go on . . .' Sayaca said.

'There was a flash. A tiny burst of energy light-years from here, but in the direction we know Crombec was headed. I think the implications are clear enough. They met Huskers, even in interstellar space.'

'Force and wisdom,' said Shikra, the archivist in charge of the Cohort's most precious data troves. 'They can't have survived.'

Merlin raised his voice above the sudden murmur of debate. 'When did you find this out, Weaver?'

'A few days ago.'

'And you waited until now to let us know?'

Weaver shifted uncomfortably, beginning to sweat. 'There were questions of interpretation. We couldn't release the news until we were sure of it.' Then he nodded towards Sayaca. 'You know what I mean, don't you?'

'Believe me, I know exactly what you mean,' she said, shaking her head. She must have known that the moment was no longer hers; that even if she held the attention of the audience again, their minds would not be fully on what she had to say.

She handled it well, Merlin thought.

But irrespective of what she had found in Ghost, the news was very bad. The deaths of Crombec and his followers could only mean that the immediate volume of space was much thicker with Husker assets than anyone had dared fear. Forget the two swarms they had already known about; there might be dozens more, lurking quietly only one or two light-years from the system. And perhaps they had learned enough from Crombec's trajectory to guess that there must be other humans nearby. It would not take them long to arrive.

In a handful of years they might be here.

'This is gravely serious,' one of the other seniors said, raising her voice above the others. 'But it must not be allowed to overshadow the news Sayaca has for us.' She nodded at Sayaca expectantly. 'Continue, won't you?'

Months later, Merlin and Gallinule were alone in the Palace, standing on the balcony. Gallinule was toying with a white mouse, letting it run along the balustrade's narrow top before picking it up and placing it at the start again. They had put Weaver's spiteful sabotage long behind them, once it became clear that it had barely dented the impact of Sayaca's announcement. Even the most conservative seniors had accepted the shadow-matter hypothesis, even if the precise nature of what the shadow matter represented was not yet clear.

Which was not to say that Weaver's own announcement had been ignored, either. The Huskers were no longer a remote threat, decades away from Bright Boy. The fact that they were almost certainly converging on the system brought an air of apocalyptic gloom to the whole hideaway enterprise. They were living in end times, certain that no actions they now took would really make much difference.

It's been centuries since we made contact with another human faction, another element of the Cohort, Merlin thought. For all we know, there are no more humans anywhere in the galaxy. We are all that remains; the last niche the Huskers haven't yet sterilised. And in a few years we might all be dead as well.

'I almost envy Sayaca,' Gallinule said. 'She's completely absorbed in her work in Cinder again. As if nothing else will ever affect her. Don't you admire that kind of dedication?'

'She thinks she'll find something in Cinder that will save us all.'

'At least she's still optimistic. Or desperate, depending on your point of view. She sends her regards, incidentally.'

'Thanks,' Merlin said, biting his tongue.

Gallinule had just returned from Cinder, his third and longest trip there since Sayaca had left Ghost. Once the shadow-matter hypothesis had been accepted, Sayaca had seen no reason to stay here. Other gifted people could handle this line of enquiry while she returned to her beloved tunnels. Merlin had visited her once, but the reception she had given him had been no more than cordial. He had not gone back.

'Well, what do you think?' Gallinule said.

Suspended far out to sea was a representation of what they now knew to be lurking inside Ghost. It was the sharpest view Merlin had seen yet, gleaned by swarms of gravitational-mapping drones swimming through the atmosphere. What the thing looked like, to Merlin's eye, was a sphere wrapped around with dense, branching circuitry. The closer they looked, the sharper their focus, the more circuitry appeared, on steadily smaller scales, down to the current limiting resolution of about ten metres. Anything smaller than that was simply blurred away. But what they saw was enough. They had been right, all those months ago: this was nothing natural. And it was not quite a sphere, either: resolution was good enough now to see a teardrop shape, with the sharp end pointed more or less parallel to the surface of the liquid hydrogen ocean.

'I think it scares me,' Merlin said. 'I think it shows that this is the worst possible place we could ever have picked to hide.'

'Then we have to accept my solution,' Gallinule said. 'Become software. It can be done, you know. In a few months we'll have the technology to scan ourselves.' He held up the mouse again. 'See this little fellow? He was the first. I scanned him a few days ago.'

Merlin stared at the mouse.

'This is really him,' Gallinule continued. 'Not simply a projection of a real mouse into the Palace's environment, or even a convincing fake. Slice him open and you'd find everything you'd expect. He only exists here now, but his behaviour hasn't changed at all.'

'What happened to the real mouse, Gallinule?'

Gallinule shrugged. 'Died, of course. I'm afraid the scanning procedure's still fairly destructive.'

'So the little catch in your plan for our salvation is that we'd have to die to get inside your machine?'

'If we don't do it, we die anyway. Not much to debate, is there?'

'Not if you put it in those terms, no. We could of course experiment with the final syrinx and find a better way to escape, but I suppose that's too much of an imaginative leap for anyone to make.'