‘Clavain…?’ he prompted.
‘I never thought there’d be choices this hard,’ the man said. ‘But H was right. The hard choices are the only ones that matter. I thought defecting was the hardest thing I had ever done. I thought I would never see Felka again. But I didn’t realise how wrong I was, how trivial that decision was. It was nothing compared with what I had to do later. I killed Galiana, Scorpio. And the worst thing is that I did it willingly.’
‘But you got Felka back again. There are always consolations.’
‘Yes,’ Clavain said, sounding like a man grasping for the last crumb of comfort. ‘I got Felka back. Or at least I got someone back. But she isn’t the way I left her. She carries the Wolf herself now, just a shadow of it, it’s true, but when I speak to her I can’t be sure whether it’s Felka answering or the Wolf. No matter what happens now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take anything she says at face value.‘
‘You cared for her enough to risk your life rescuing her. That was a difficult choice as well. But it doesn’t make you unique.’ Scorpio scratched at the upraised snout of his nose. ‘We’ve all made difficult choices around here. Look at Antoinette. I know her story, Clavain. Set out to do a good deed — burying her father the way he wanted — and she ends up entangled in a battle for the entire future of the species. Pigs, humans… everything. I bet she didn’t have that in mind when she set out to salve her conscience. But we can’t guess where things will take us, or the harder questions that will follow on from one choice. You thought defecting would be an act in and of itself, but it was just the start of something much larger.’
Clavain sighed. Perhaps it was imagination, but Scorpio thought that he detected the slightest lightening of the man’s mood. His voice was softer when he spoke. ‘What about you, Scorpio? Did you have choices to make as well?’
‘Yeah. Whether I threw my weight in with you human sons of bitches.’
‘And the consequences?’
‘Some of you are still sons of bitches that deserve to die in the most painful and slow way I can envisage. But not all of you.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘Take it while you can. I might change my mind tomorrow.’
Clavain sighed again, scratched his beard and then said, ‘All right. Do it. Transmit a beta-level proxy.’
‘We’ll need a statement to accompany it,’ Scorpio said. ‘A laying-down of terms, if you like.’
‘Whatever it takes, Scorp. Whatever the hell it takes.’
In their long, crushing reign, the Inhibitors had learned of fifteen distinct ways to murder a dwarf star.
Doubtless, the overseer thought to itself, there were other methods, more or less efficient, which might turn out to have been invented or used at various epochs in galactic history. The galaxy was very large, very old, and the Inhibitors’ knowledge of it was far from comprehensive. But it was a fact that no new technique for starcide had been added to their repository for four hundred and forty million years. The galaxy had finished two rotations since that last methodological update. Even by the Inhibitors’ glacial reckoning, it was quite a worryingly long time during which not to learn any new tricks.
Singing a star apart was the most recent method to be entered into the Inhibitor library of xenocide techniques, and though it had achieved that status four hundred and forty million years earlier, the overseer could not help view it with a trace of bemused curiosity. It was the way an aged butcher might view some newfangled apparatus designed to improve the productivity of an abbatoir. The current cleansing operation would provide a useful testbed for the technique, a chance to fully evaluate it. If the overseer was not satisfied, it would leave a record in the archive recommending that future cleansing operations employ one of the fourteen older methods of starcide. But for now it would place its faith in the efficacy of the singer.
All stars already sang to themselves. The outer layers of every star rang constantly at a multitude of frequencies, like an eternally chiming bell. The great seismic modes tracked oscillations that plunged deep into the star, down to the caustic surface just above its fusing core. Those oscillations were modest in a star of dwarf type, like Delta Pavonis. But the singer tuned itself to them, swinging around the star in its equatorial rotation frame, pumping gravitational energy into the star at precisely the right resonant frequencies to enhance the oscillations. The singer was what the mammals would have called a graver, a gravitational laser.
In the heart of the singer a microscopic closed cosmic string, a tiny relic of the rapidly cooling early universe, had been tugged out of the seething foam of the quantum vacuum. The string was barely a scratch compared with the largest cosmic flaws, but it would suffice for the singer’s purposes. It was tugged and elongated like a loop of toffee, inflated with the same vacuum phase energy that the singer tapped for all its needs, until it had macroscopic size and macroscopic mass-energy density. Then the string was deftly knotted into a figure-of-eight configuration and plucked, generating a narrow cone of throbbing gravitational waves.
The oscillations increased in amplitude, slowly but surely. At the same time, chirping gravitational pulses with precision and elegance, the singer sculpted the patterns themselves, causing new vibrational modes to spring into play, enhancing some and suppressing others. The star’s rotation had already destroyed any spherical symmetry in the original oscillation modes, but the modes had still been symmetric with respect to the star’s axis of spin. Yet now the singer worked to instil more profoundly asymmetric modes in the star, focusing its efforts on a single equatorial point immediately between the singer and the star’s centre of mass. It increased its power and focus, the closed cosmic string oscillating even more vigorously. Immediately below the singer, on the outer envelope of the star, mass flows were pinched and reflected, heating and compressing surface hydrogen to near-fusion conditions. Fusion did indeed erupt in three or, four concentric rings of stellar matter, but that was incidental. What mattered, what the singer intended, was that the star’s spherical envelope should begin to pucker and distort. Something like a navel was appearing in the star’s seething hot surface, an inward dimple wide enough to swallow a whole rocky world. Concentric rings of fusion, circles of searing brightness, spread out from the dimple, squalling X-rays and neutrinos into space. Still the singer continued pulsing the star with gravitational energy, the timing surgically acute, and still the dimple sank deeper, as if an invisible finger were pushing against the pliant skin of a balloon. Around the dimple the star was bulging higher into space as matter was redistributed. The matter had to go somewhere, for the singer was excavating a hole deep into the star’s interior.
It would continue until it had reached the star’s nuclear-burning core.
It was a fifteen-hour trip from Resurgam orbit to Nostalgia for Infinity and Khouri spent every minute of it in a state of extreme apprehension. It was not simply the strange and worrying thing that had started to happen to Delta Pavonis, although that was certainly a significant part of it. She had seen the Inhibitor weapon start its work, pointing like a great flared bugle at the surface of the star, and she had seen the star respond by growing a furious hot eye on its surface. Magnification showed the eye to be a zone of fusion, several zones, in fact, which surrounded a deepening pit in the star’s envelope. It was in the face of the star that was turned towards Resurgam, which did not seem likely to be accidental. And whatever the weapon was doing, it was doing it with astonishing speed. The weapon had taken so long to reach readiness that Khouri had mistakenly assumed that the final destruction of Delta Pavonis would take place on the same leisurely timescale. This was clearly not going to be the case. She would have been better thinking of an elaborate build-up to an execution, with many legal hurdles and delays, but which would conclude in a single bullet shot or killing surge of electrical current. That was how it was going to be with the star: a long, grave preparation followed by an extremely swift execution.