I want to know if anything untoward happens, Molenka. We may need much more out of this equipment, and I want to have absolute confidence in it.
Now it was Jastrusiak’s turn. [We have everything under control, Skade. The machinery is in a perfectly stable state-two condition. Small instabilities are damped back to the mean.]
Good. But try to keep those instabilities in check, will you?
Skade was about to add that they terrified her, but thought better of it. She must not reveal her fears to the others, not when so much depended on them accepting her leadership. It was difficult enough to make members of a hive mind submit to her will, and the one thing that would have undermined her control would have been the faintest hint of doubt in her own abilities.
There were no more irregularities in the field. Satisfied, Skade continued her journey to the sleeper bay.
Only two of the reefersleep caskets were occupied. Skade had instigated Felka’s wake-up cycle six hours earlier. Now the nearer of the two caskets was easing open, exposing Felka’s unconscious form. Skade softened her approach to the casket, crouching down on her metal haunches until she was level with Felka. The casket’s diagnostic aura told her that Felka was merely sleeping now, in a mild REM state. Skade observed the tremble of her eyelids and placed a steel hand on to Felka’s forearm. She squeezed gently, and Felka moaned and shifted.
Felka. Felka. Wake up now.
Felka came around slowly. Skade waited patiently, doting on Felka with something close to affection.
Felka. Understand me. You are coming out of reefersleep. You have been frozen for six weeks. You will feel discomfort and disorientation, but it will fade. You have nothing to fear.
Felka opened her eyes to a pained squint, affronted even by the dim blue lighting of the sleep bay. She moaned again and tried to get out of the casket, but the effort was too much for her, especially under two gees.
Easy.
Felka mumbled and slurred a series of sounds, over and over, until they formed recognisable words. ‘Where am I?’
Aboard Nightshade. You remember, don’t you? We went after Clavain, into the inner system.
‘Clavain…’ She said nothing more for ten or fifteen seconds, before adding, ‘Dead?’
I don’t think so, no.
Felka succeeded in opening her eyes a little wider. Tell me… what happened.‘
Clavain fooled us with the corvette. He made it to the Rust Belt. You remember that much, I think. Remontoire and Scorpio went in after him. No one else could go — they were the only ones who stood a chance of moving covertly through Yellowstone space. I wouldn’t let you go, for obvious reasons. Clavain cares about you, Felka, and that makes you valuable to me.
‘Hostage?’
No, of course not. Merely one of us. Clavain is the lamb that has left the fold, not you. Clavain is the one we want back, Felka. Clavain is the prodigal son.
They went to Nightshade’s flight deck. Felka sipped a chocolate-flavoured broth laced with restorative medichines.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
Skade showed Felka a display of the rear starfield, with one dim yellow-red star outlined in green. That was Epsilon Eridani, two hundred times fainter than it had been even from the remote vantage point of the Mother Nest. It was now ten million times fainter than the sun that burned in Yellowstone’s sky. They were truly in interstellar space now, for the first time in Skade’s life.
Six weeks out from Yellowstone, over thirteen hundred AU. We’ve been maintaining two gees for most of that time, which means that we’ve already reached one-quarter light-speed. A conventional ship would be struggling to reach an eighth of the speed of light by now, Felka. But we can do better than this if we have to.
Which was true, Skade knew, but there would be little practical advantage in accelerating harder. Relativity ensured that. Arbitrarily high acceleration would compress the subjective duration of their journey to Resurgam, but it would make almost no difference to the objective time that the journey consumed. And it was that objective time which was the only relevant factor in the wider picture: it would still take the same amount of time to reach Resurgam as measured by external observers, and more decades still to rendezvous with the other elements of the exodus fleet.
Still, there were other reasons to consider an increase in acceleration. And at the back of Skade’s mind was a dangerous and alluring possibility that would change the rules entirely.
‘And the other ship?’ Felka asked. ‘Where is that?’
Skade had already told her about the vessel behind them. Now a second circle bisected by two cross hairs appeared on the display almost exactly centred above the one that demarked Epsilon Eridani.
That’s it. It’s very faint, but there’s a clear tau-neutrino source there, and it’s moving on the same course as us.
‘But a long way behind,’ Felka said.
Yes. Three or four weeks behind us, easily.
‘It could be a commercial ship, Ultras or something, on a similar heading.’
Skade nodded. I’ve considered that possibility, but I don’t find it likely. Resurgam isn’t a very popular destination for Ultras, and if that ship were headed for another colony in the same part of the sky, we’d have seen lateral motion by now. We haven’t — she’s dead on our tail, Felka.
‘A stern chase.’
Yes, deliberately following us. They have a modest tactical advantage, you see. Our flame points towards them; theirs points away from us. I can track them because we have military-grade neutrino detectors, but it is still difficult. But they need no finesse to spot us. I have separated our thrust beams into four components and given them a small angular offset, but they need only detect a tiny amount of leaked radiation to fix our position. We are neutrino-quiet, however, and that will give us a definitive advantage after turnover, when we have to point our flame towards Resurgam. But it won’t come to that. That ship can’t ever catch us, no matter how hard it tries.
The ship should be falling behind already,‘ Felka said. ’Is it?‘
No. So far she has maintained two gees all the way out from the Rust Belt.
I didn’t think normal ships could accelerate that hard.‘
They can’t, not usually. But there are methods, Felka. Do you know the story of Irravel Veda?
‘Of course,’ Felka said.
When she was pursuing Run Seven she modified her own ship to manage two gees. But she did it the crude way — not by improving the efficacy of her Conjoiner drives, but by stripping her ship down to a skeleton. She left all her passengers behind on a comet to save mass.
‘And you think that other ship must be doing something similar?’
There’s no other explanation. But it won’t help them. Even at two gees they cannot close the gap between us, and the gap will widen if we increase our inertia-suppression effect. They cannot match three gees, Felka; there is only so much mass you can strip out of a ship before you haven’t got a ship at all. They must be very near the limit already.
‘It must be Clavain,’ she said.
You seem very certain.
‘I never thought he’d give up, Skade. It just isn’t his style. He wants those weapons very badly, and he isn’t going to let you get your cold steel hands on them without a fight.’
Skade wanted to shrug, but her armour would not allow it. Then it confirms what I have always suspected, Felka. Clavain is not a rationalist. He is a man fond of gestures, no matter how futile or stupid they might be. This is merely his grandest and most hopeless gesture to date.