Everyone was happy.
But at heart, Skade was right: the union had always been an uneasy one. A war, at some point, was almost inevitable — especially when something like the Melding Plague came along.
But fifty-four damned years? Clavain would never have tolerated that, she thought. He would have seen the terrible waste in human effort that such a war entailed. He would either have found a way to end it decisively, or he would have sought a permanent cease-fire.
The migrainelike pressure was still with her, now a little more intense than before. Galiana had the disturbing sense that something was peering through her eyes from inside her skull, as if she was not its only tenant.
We narrowed the distance to your two ships, with the unhurried lope of ancient killers who had no racial memory of failure. You sensed our minds: bleak intellects poised on the dangerous verge of intelligence, as old and cold as the dust between the stars.
You sensed our hunger.
‘But Clavain…’ she said.
‘What about Clavain?’
‘He would have found a way to end this, Skade, one way or another. Why hasn’t he?’
Skade looked away for an instant, so that her crest was a narrow ridge turned edge-on. When she turned back she was attempting to shape a very odd expression on to her face.
You saw us take your first ship, smothering it in a caulk of inquisitive black machines. The machines gnawed the ship apart. You saw it detonate: the explosion etched a pink swan-shape on to your retina, and you felt a net of minds being ripped away, like the loss of a thousand children.
You tried to get further away, but by then it was too late.
When we reached your ship we were more careful.
This isn’t easy, Galiana.‘
‘What isn’t?’
‘It’s about Clavain.’
‘You said he returned.’
‘He did. And so did Felka. But I’m sorry to tell you that they both died.’ The words arrived one after another, slow as breaths. ‘It was eleven years ago. There was a Demarchist attack, a lucky strike against the Nest, and they both died.’
There was only one rational response: denial. ‘No!’
‘I’m sorry. I wish there was some other way…’ Skade’s crest flashed ultramarine. ‘I wish it had never happened. They were valuable assets to us…’
‘“Assets”?’
Skade must have sensed Galiana’s fury. ‘I mean they were loved. We grieved their loss, Galiana. All of us.’
‘Then show me. Open your mind. Drop the barricades. I want to see into it.’
Skade lingered near the side of the casket. ‘Why, Galiana?’
‘Because until I can see into it, I won’t know whether you’re telling the truth.’
‘I’m not lying,’ Skade said softly. ‘But I can’t allow our minds to talk. There is something inside your head, you see. Something we don’t understand, other than that it is probably alien and probably hostile.’
I don’t believe…‘
But the pressure behind her eyes suddenly became acute. Galiana experienced a vile sense of being shoved aside, usurped, crushed into a small ineffectual corner of her own skull. Something inexpressibly sinister and ancient now had immediate tenancy, squatting behind her eyes.
She heard herself speak again.
‘Me, do you mean?’
Skade seemed only mildly taken aback. Galiana admired the other Conjoiner her nerve.
‘Perhaps. Who would you be, exactly?’
I don’t have a name other than the one she gave me.‘
‘“She”?’ Skade asked amusedly. But her crest was flickering with nervous pale greens, showing terror even though her voice was calm.
‘Galiana,’ the entity replied. ‘Before I took her over. She called us — my mind — the wolves. We reached and infiltrated her ship, after we had destroyed the other. We didn’t understand much of what they were at first. But then we opened their skulls and absorbed their central nervous systems. We learned much more then. How they thought; how they communicated; what they had done to their minds.’
Galiana tried to move, even though Skade had already placed her in a state of paralysis. She tried to scream, but the Wolf — for that was exactly what she had called it — had complete control of her voice.
It was all coming back now.
‘Why didn’t you kill her?’ Skade said.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ the Wolf chided. ‘The question you should be asking is a different one: why didn’t she kill herself before it came to this? She could have, you know; it was within her power to destroy her entire ship and everyone inside it simply by willing it.’
‘So why didn’t she?’
‘We came to an arrangement, after we had killed her crew and left her alone. She would not kill herself provided we allowed her to return home. She knew what it meant: I would invade her skull, rummage through her memories.’
‘Why her?’
‘She was your queen, Skade. As soon as we read the minds of her crew, we knew she was the one we really needed.’
Skade was silent. Aquamarines and jades chased each other in slow waves from brow to nape. ‘She would never have risked leading you here.’
‘She would, provided she thought the risk was outweighed by the benefit of an early warning. It was an accommodation, you see. She gave us time to learn, and the hope of learning more. Which we have, Skade.’
Skade touched a finger to her upper lip and then held it before her as if testing the direction of the wind. ‘If you truly are a superior alien intelligence, and you knew where we were, you’d already have come to us.’
‘Very good, Skade. And you’re right, in a sense. We don’t know exactly where Galiana has brought us. I know, but I can’t communicate that knowledge to my fellows. But that won’t matter. You are a starfaring culture — fragmented into different factions, it is true — but from our perspective those distinctions do not matter. From the memories we drank, and the memories in which we still swim, we know the approximate locus of space that you inhabit. You are expanding, and the surface area of your expansion envelope grows geometrically, always increasing the likelihood of an encounter between us. It has already happened once, and it may have happened elsewhere, at other points on the sphere’s boundary.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Skade asked.
‘To frighten you. Why else?’
But Skade was too clever for that. ‘No. There’s got to be another reason. You want to make me think you might be useful, don’t you?’
‘How so?’ the voice of the Wolf purred amusedly.
‘I could kill you here and now. After all, the warning has already been delivered.’
Had Galiana been able to move, or even just blink, she would have signalled an emphatic ‘yes’. She did want to die. What else had she to live for, now? Clavain was gone. Felka was gone. She was sure of that, as sure as she was that no amount of Conjoiner ingenuity would ever free her of the thing inside her head.
Skade was right. She had served her purpose, performed her final duty to the Mother Nest. It knew that the wolves were out there, were, in all likelihood, creeping closer, scenting human blood.
There was no reason to keep her alive a moment longer. The Wolf would always be looking for a chance to escape her head, no matter how vigilant Skade was. The Mother Nest might learn something from it, some marginal hint of a motive or a weakness, but against that had to be set the awful consequences of its escape.
Galiana knew. Just as the Wolf had access to her memories, so, by some faint and perhaps deliberate process of back-contamination, she sensed some of its own history. There was nothing concrete; almost nothing that she could actually put into words. But what she sensed was an aeons-old litany of surgical xenocide; of a dreadful process of cleansing waged upon emergent sentient species. The memories had been preserved with grim bureaucratic exactitude across hundreds of millions of years of Galactic time, each new extinction merely an entry in the ledger. She sensed the occasional frenzied cleansing — a cull that had been initiated later than was desirable. She even sensed the rare instance of brutal intercession where an earlier cull had not been performe satisfactorily.