‘But that would only be a sin of omission, Ilia.’
‘Captain, I’m begging you… don’t do this.’
‘Steer your shuttle away, please, Ilia. I don’t want you to be harmed by what is about to happen. That was never my intention. I only wanted you as a witness, someone who would understand.’
I already understand! Isn’t that enough?‘
‘No, Ilia.’
The weapon activated. The beam that emerged from its muzzle was invisible until it touched the hull. Then, in a gale of escaping air and ionised armour, it revealed itself flickeringly: a metre-thick shaft of scything destructive quintessence force, chewing inexorably through the ship. This, weapon thirty-one, was not one of the most devastating tools in her arsenal, but it had immense range. That was why she had selected it for use in the attack against the Inhibitors. The quintessence beam ghosted right through the ship, emerging in a similar gale on the far side. The weapon began to track, gnawing down the length of the hull.
‘Captain…’
His voice came back. ‘I’m sorry, Ilia… I can’t stop now.’
He sounded in pain. It was hardly surprising, she thought. His nerve endings reached into every part of Nostalgia for Infinity. He was feeling the beam slice through him just as agonisingly as if she had begun to saw off her own arm. Again, Volyova understood. It had to be much more than just a quick, clean suicide. That would not be sufficient recompense for his crime. It had to be slow, protracted, excruciating. A martial execution, with a diligent witness who would appreciate and remember what he had inflicted upon himself.
The beam had chewed a hundred-metre-long furrow in the hull. The Captain was haemorrhaging air and fluids in the wake of the cutting beam.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, for God’s sake, stop!’
‘Let me finish this, Ilia. Please forgive me.’
‘No. I won’t allow it.’
She did not give herself time to think about what had to be done. If she had, she doubted that she would have had the courage to act. She had never considered herself a brave person, and most certainly not someone given to self-sacrifice.
Ilia Volyova steered her shuttle towards the beam, placing herself between the weapon and the fatal gash it was knifing into Nostalgia for Infinity.
‘No!’ she heard the Captain call.
But it was too late. He could not shut down the weapon in less than a second, nor steer it fast enough to bring her out of the line of fire. The shuttle collided glancingly with the beam — her aim had not been dead on — and the edge of the beam obliterated the entire right side of the shuttle. Armour, insulation, interior reinforcement, pressure membrane — everything wafted away in an instant of ruthless annihilation. Volyova had a moment to realise that she had missed the precise centre of the beam, and another instant to realise that it did not really matter.
She was going to die anyway.
Her vision fogged. There was a shocking, sudden cold in her windpipe, as if someone had poured liquid helium down her throat. She attempted to take a breath and the cold rammed into her lungs. There was an awful feeling of granite solidity in her chest. Her interior organs were shock freezing.
She opened her mouth, attempting to speak, to make one final utterance. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
CHAPTER 31
‘Why, Wolf?’ Felka asked.
They were meeting alone on the same iron-grey, silver-skied expanse of rockpools where she had, at Skade’s insistence, already encountered the Wolf. Now she was dreaming lucidly; she was back on Clavain’s ship and Skade was dead, and yet the Wolf seemed no less real than it had before. The Wolf’s shape lingered just beyond clarity, like a column of smoke that occasionally fell into a mocking approximation of human form.
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you hate life so much?’
‘I don’t. We don’t. We only do what we must.’
Felka kneeled on the rock, surrounded by animal parts. She understood that the presence of the wolves explained one of the great cosmic mysteries, a paradox that had haunted human minds since the dawn of spaceflight. The galaxy teemed with stars, and around many of those stars were worlds. It was true that not all of those worlds were the right distance from their suns to kindle life, and not all had the right fractions of metals to allow complex carbon chemistry. Sometimes the stars were not stable enough for life to gain a toehold. But none of that mattered, since there were hundreds of billions of stars. Only a tiny fraction had to be habitable for there to be a shocking abundance of life in the galaxy.
But there was no evidence that intelligent life had ever spread from star to star, despite the fact that it was relatively easy to do. Looking out into the night sky, human philosophers had concluded that intelligent life must be vanishingly rare; that perhaps the human species was the only sentient culture in the galaxy.
They were wrong, but they did not discover this until the dawn of interstellar society. Then, expeditions started finding evidence of fallen cultures, ruined worlds, extinct species. There were an uncomfortably large number of them.
It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out.
The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.
That was the answer. But it did not explain why they did it.
‘But why?’ she asked the Wolf. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to act the way you do. If you hate life so much, why not end it once and for all?’
‘For good?’ The Wolf appeared amused, curious about her speculations.
‘You could poison every world in the galaxy or smash every world apart. It’s as if you don’t have the courage to finally finish life for good.’
There was a slow, avalanche-like sigh of pebbles. ‘It isn’t about ending intelligent life,’ the Wolf said.
‘No?’
‘It is about the exact opposite, Felka. It is about life’s preservation. We are life’s keepers, steering life through its greatest crisis.’
‘But you murder. You kill entire cultures.’
The Wolf shifted in and out of vision. Its voice, when it answered, was tauntingly similar to Galiana’s. ‘Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, Felka.’
No one saw much of Clavain after Galiana’s death. There was an unspoken understanding amongst his crew, one that percolated right down through to the lowliest ranks of Scorpio’s army, that he was not to be disturbed by anything except the gravest of problems: matters of extreme shipwide urgency, nothing less. It remained unclear whether this edict had come from Clavain himself, or was simply something that had been assumed by his immediate deputies. Very probably it was a combination of the two. He became a shadowy figure, occasionally seen but seldom heard, a ghost stalking Zodiacal Light’s corridors in the hours when the rest of the ship was asleep. Occasionally, when the ship was under high gravity, they heard the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of his exoskeleton on the deck plates as he traversed a corridor above them. But Clavain himself was an elusive figure.
It was said that he spent long hours in the observation cupola, staring into the blackness behind them, transfixed by the starless wake. Those who saw him remarked that he looked much older than at the start of the voyage, as if in some way he remained anchored to the faster flow of world-time, rather than the dilated time that passed aboard the ship. It was said that he looked like a man who had given up on the living, and was now only going through the burdensome motions of completing some final duty.