At first all was still dead, but the suit was sending power and data pulses into the console, and after a few minutes the console’s upper surface began to glow with faint-but-brightening readouts. Merlin settled into a chair with his elbow on the console and his fist jammed under his helmet ring. He expected a long wait before anything useful could be mined from the frozen architecture. Branching diagrams played across his faceplate, showing active memory registers and their supposed contents. Merlin skimmed, determined not to be distracted by anything but the charts he had come for. The lives of the crew, the cultural records they carried with them, the systems and worlds this ship had known, the battles it had fought, might have been of interest to him under other circumstances. Now was the time for a ruthless focus.
He found the navigation files. There were thousands of branches to the tree, millions of documents in those branches, but his long familiarity with Cohort data architecture enabled him to dismiss most of what he saw. He carried on searching, humming an old Plenitude tune to cheer himself up. Gradually he slowed and fell silent. Just as disappointment was beginning to creep in, he hit a tranche of Waynet maps that were an improvement on anything he had for this sector. Within a few seconds the data was flowing into his suit and onward to the memory cores of his own ship. Satisfied at last, he made to unspool.
Something nagged at him.
Merlin backtracked. He shuffled up and down trees until he found the set of records that had registered on his subconscious even as his thoughts had been on the charts.
Syrinx study and analysis
Beneath that, many branches and sub-branches relating to the examination and testing of a fully active syrinx. A pure cold shiver ran through him.
Something jabbed into his back, just below the smooth hump of his life-support unit. Merlin did the only thing that he could, under the circumstances, which was to turn slowly around, raising his hands in the age-old gesture. The spool stretched from his glove, uncoupled, whisked back into its housing in the wrist.
Another suit looked back at him. There was a female face behind the visor, and the thing that had jabbed him was a gun.
‘Do you understand me?’
The voice coming through in his helmet spoke Main. The accent was unfamiliar, but he had no trouble with the meaning. Merlin swallowed and cleared his throat.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. The only reason you’re not dead is that you’re wearing a Cohort suit, not a Husker one. Otherwise I’d have skipped this part and blown a hole right through you. Move away from the console.’
‘I’m happy to.’
‘Slowly.’
‘As slow as you like.’ Merlin’s mouth felt dry again, his windpipe tight. ‘I’m a friend. I’m not here to steal anything, just to borrow some of your charts.’
‘Borrowing, is that what you call it?’
‘I’d have asked if there was anyone to ask.’ He eased from the console, and risked a slow lowering of his arms. ‘The ship looked dead. I had no reason to assume anyone was alive. Come to think of it, how are you alive? There were no life signs, no energy sources…
‘Shut up.’ She waggled the gun. ‘Where are you from? Which swallowship, which motherbase?’
‘I haven’t come from a swallowship. Or a motherbase.’ Merlin grimaced. He could see no good way of explaining his situation, or at least none that was likely to improve the mood of this person with the gun. ‘I’m what you might call a freelancer. My name is Merlin…’
She cut him off. ‘If that’s what you’re calling yourself, I’d give some serious thought to picking another name.’
‘It’s worked well enough for me until now.’
‘There’s only one Merlin. Only one that matters, anyway.’
He gave a self-effacing smile. ‘Word got round, then. I suppose it was inevitable, given the time I’ve been travelling.’
‘Word got round, yes. There was a man called Merlin, and he left the Cohort. Shall I tell you what we were taught to think of Merlin?’
‘I imagine you’re going to.’
‘There are two views on him. One is that Merlin was a fool, a self-deluding braggart with an ego to match the size of his delusion.’
‘I’ve never said I was a saint.’
‘The other view is that Merlin betrayed the Cohort, that he stole from it and ran from the consequences. That he never had any intention of returning. That he’s a liar and criminal and deserves to die for it. So the choice is yours, really. Clown or traitor. Which Merlin are you?’
‘Is there a third option?’
‘No.’ Behind the visor, her eyes narrowed. He could only see the upper part of her face, but it was enough to tell that she was young. ‘I don’t remember exactly when you ran. But it’s been thousands of years, I know that much. You could be anyone. Although why anyone would risk passing themselves off under that name…’
‘Then that proves it’s me, doesn’t it? Only I’d be stupid enough to keep calling myself Merlin.’ He tried to appeal to the face. ‘It has been thousands of years, but not for me. I’ve been travelling at near the speed of light for most of that time. Tyrant – my ship – is Waynet capable. I’ve been searching these files…’
‘Stealing them.’
‘Searching them. I’m deep into territory I don’t know well enough to trust, and I thought you might have better charts. You do, as well. But there’s something else. Your name, by the way? I mean, since we’re having this lovely conversation…’
He read the hesitation in her eyes. A moment when she was on the verge of refusing him even the knowledge of her name, as if she had no intention of him living long enough for it to matter. But something broke and she yielded.
‘Teal. And what you mean, something else?’
‘In these files. Mention of a syrinx. Is it true? Did you have a syrinx?’
‘If your ship is Waynet capable then you already have one.’
Merlin nodded. ‘Yes. But mine is damaged, and it doesn’t function as well as it used to. I hit a bad kink in the Waynet, and each transition’s been harder than the one before. I wasn’t expecting to find one here – it was the charts that interested me – but now I know what I’ve stumbled on…’
‘You’ll steal it.’
‘No. Borrow it, on the implicit understanding that I’m continuing to serve the ultimate good of the Cohort. Teal, you must believe me. There’s a weapon out there that can shift the balance in this war. To find it I need Tyrant, and Tyrant needs a syrinx.’
‘Then I have some bad news for you. We sold it.’ Her tone was off-hand, dismissive. ‘It was a double-star system, a few lights back the way we’d come. We needed repairs, material, parts the swallowship couldn’t make for itself. We made contact – sent in negotiators. I was on the diplomatic party. We bartered. We left them the syrinx and Pardalote got the things we needed.’
Merlin turned aside in disgust. ‘You idiots.’
Teal swiped the barrel of the gun across his faceplate. Merlin flinched back, wondering how close she had been to just shooting him there and then.
‘Don’t judge us. And don’t judge Pardalote for the decisions she took. You weren’t there, and you haven’t the faintest idea what we went through. Shall I tell you how it was for me?’
Merlin wisely said nothing.
‘There’s a vault near the middle of the ship,’ Teal went on. ‘The best place to hide power, if you’re going to use it. One by one our frostwatch cabinets failed us. There were a thousand of us, then a hundred… then the last ten. Each time we woke up, counted how many of us were still alive, drew straws to see who got the cabinets that were still working. There were always less and less. I’m the last one, the last of us to get a working cabinet. I ran it on a trickle of power, just the bare minimum. Set the cabinet to wake me if anyone came near.’