He was not sure whether the same could be said for Remontoire. Deep in Remontoire’s past lay an even more horrific and protracted episode, when he had been taken prisoner by the pig pirate Run Seven. Run Seven had been one of the earliest hyperpigs, and his mind had been riddled with the psychotic scars of flawed neuro-genetic augmentation. He had captured Remontoire and isolated him from the mental communion of other Conjoiners. That had been enough of a torture, but Run Seven had not stinted on the other, older kind. And he had been very good at it.
Remontoire had escaped, finally, and the pig had died. But Clavain knew that his friend still carried profound mental wounds that now and then broke through to the surface. Clavain had watched very carefully when Remontoire made the preliminary trawls of the pig, fully aware of how easily that procedure could become a kind of torture in its own right. And while nothing that Remontoire had done had been improper — indeed, he had been almost too reticent in his enquiries — Clavain admitted to feeling a sense of misgiving. If only it had not been a pig, he thought, and if only Remontoire had not had to be associated with the prisoner’s questioning…
Clavain watched the other tender fall away from Nightshade, convinced that he had not heard the last of the pig and that the repercussions of the capture would be with them for some time. Then he smiled and told himself he was being silly. It was only a pig, after all.
Clavain issued a neural command to the simple subpersona of the tender, and with a lurch they detached from the dark whale-like hull of Nightshade. The tender whisked him inwards, through the great rushing clockwork of the centrifugal wheels, towards the green heart of the null-gee core.
This stronghold, this particular Mother Nest, was only the latest to be built. Though there had always been a Mother Nest of sorts, in the war’s early stages it had only been the largest of many camouflaged encampments. Two-thirds of the Conjoined had been spread throughout the system in smaller bases. But separation brought its own problems. The individual groups had been light-hours apart, and the lines of communication between them had been vulnerable to interception. Strategies could not be evolved in real time, nor could the group-mind state be extended to encompass two or more nests. The Conjoiners had become fragmented and nervous. Reluctantly, the decision had been taken to absorb the smaller nests into one vast Mother Nest, hoping that the advantage gained through centralisation would outweigh the danger involved in placing all their eggs in one basket.
With hindsight, the decision had been massively successful.
The tender slowed as it neared the membrane of the null-gee core. Clavain felt utterly dwarfed by the green sphere. It glowed with its own soft radiance, like a verdant miniature planet. The tender squelched through the membrane, into air.
Clavain dropped a window, allowing the core’s atmosphere to mingle with the tender’s own. His nose prickled at the vegetative assault. The air was cool and fresh and moist, its smell that of a forest after an intense midmorning thunderstorm. Though he had visited the core on countless occasions, the scent nonetheless made Clavain think not of those previous visits but of his childhood. He could not say when or where, but he had certainly walked through a forest that had this quality. It had been somewhere on Earth — Scotland, perhaps.
There was no gravity in the core, but the vegetation that filled it was not a free-floating mass. Threading the sphere from side to side were spars of oak up to three kilometres long. The spars branched and merged randomly, forming a wooden cytoskeleton of pleasing complexity. Here and there the spars bulged sufficiently to accommodate enclosed spaces, hollows that glowed with pastel lantern-light. Elsewhere, a cobweb of smaller strands provided a structural mesh to which most of the greenery was anchored. The whole assemblage was festooned with irrigation pipes and nutrient feedlines, threading back into the support machinery lurking at the very heart of the core. Sun lamps studded the membrane at irregular intervals, and were distributed throughout the green masses themselves. Now they shone with the hard blue light of high noon, but as the day progressed — they were slaved to twenty-six-hour Yellowstone time — the lamps would slide down through the spectrum towards the bronze and russet reds of evening.
Eventually night would fall. The spherical forest would come alive with the chirrups and calls of a thousand weirdly evolved nocturnal animals. Squatting on a spar near its heart during nightfall, it would be easy to believe that the forest reached away in all directions for thousands of kilometres. The distant centrifugal wheels were only visible from the last hundred metres of greenery beneath the membrane, and they were, of course, utterly silent.
The tender dodged through the mass, knowing precisely where it had to take Clavain. Now and then he saw other Conjoiners, but they were mostly children or the elderly. The children were born and raised in the one-gee triplet, but when they were six months old they were brought here at regular intervals. Supervised by the elderly, they learned the muscle and orientation skills necessary for weightlessness. For most of them it was a game, but the very best would be earmarked for duty in the arena of space war. A few, a very few, showed such heightened spatial skills that they would be steered towards battle planning.
The elderly were too frail to spend much time in the high-gee rings. Once they had come to the core, they often never left. Clavain passed a couple now. They both wore support rigs, medical harnesses that doubled as propulsion packs. Their legs trailed behind them like afterthoughts. They were coaxing a quintet of children into kicking off from one side of a woody hollow into open space.
Seen without augmented vision, the scene had a tangibly sinister quality. The children were garbed in black suits and helmets that protected their skin against sharp branches. Their eyes were hidden behind black goggles, making it difficult to interpret their expressions. The elderly were equally drab, though they wore no helmets. But their fully visible faces betrayed nothing resembling enjoyment. To Clavain they looked like undertakers engaged in some solemn burial duty that would be ruined by the slightest hint of levity.
Clavain willed his implants to reveal the truth. There was a moment of florid growth as bright structures blossomed into existence out of thin air. The children wore filmy clothes now, marked with tribal swirls and zigzags of lurid colour. Their heads were bare, unencumbered by helmets. Two were boys; three were girls. He judged their ages to lie between five and seven. Their expressions were not entirely joyous, but neither were they miserable or neutral. Instead, they all looked slightly scared and slightly exhilarated. No doubt there was some rivalry going on, each child weighing the benefits and risks of being the first to take the aerial plunge.
The elderly couple still looked much the same, but now Clavain was attuned to the thoughts they were radiating. Bathed in an aura of encouragement, their faces now looked serene and patient rather than dour. They were quite prepared to wait hours for the children.
The environment itself had also changed. The air was full of jewel-bright butterflies and dragonflies, darting to and fro on busy trajectories. Neon caterpillars worked their way through the greenery. Hummingbirds hovered and translated from flower to flower, moving like precisely programmed clockwork toys. Monkeys, lemurs and flying squirrels jumped into free space with abandon, their eyes gleaming like marbles.