Merlin waited a moment then nodded. ‘Can I make a suggestion?’
‘If it makes you feel better.’
‘My ship is warm, it has air, and it’s still capable of moving. I feel we’d get to a position of trust a lot quicker if we could speak face to face, without all this glass and vacuum between us.’
He caught her sneer. ‘What makes you think I’d ever trust you?’
‘People come round to me,’ Merlin said.
The syrinx was a matte-black cone about as long as Merlin was tall. It rested in a cradle of metal supports, sharp end pointing aft, in a compartment just forward of Tyrant’s engine bay. Syrinxes seemed to work better when they were somewhere close to the centre of mass of a ship, but beyond that there were no clear rules, and much of what was known had been pieced together through guesswork and experimentation.
‘It still works, to a degree,’ Merlin said, stroking a glove along the tapering form. ‘But it’s dying on me. I daren’t say how many more transits I’ll get out it.’
‘What would you have done if it had failed?’ Teal asked, managing to make the question sound peremptory and businesslike, as if she had no real interest in the answer.
They had taken off their helmets, but were still wearing the rest of their suits. Merlin had closed the airlock, but kept Tyrant docked with the larger ship. He had shown Teal through the narrow warren of his linked living quarters without stopping to comment, keen to show her that at least the syrinx was a verifiable part of his story.
‘I doubt I’d have had much time to worry about it, if it failed. Probably ended up as an interesting smear, that’s all.’ Merlin offered a smile, but Teal’s expression remained hard and unsympathetic.
‘A quick death’s nothing to complain about.’
She was a hard one for him to fathom. Her head looked too small, too childlike, jutting out from the neck ring of her suit. She was short haired, hard boned, tough and wiry-looking at the same time. He had been right about her eyes, even through the visor. They had seen too much pain and hardship, bottled too much of it inside themselves, and now it was leaking back out.
‘You still don’t trust me, and that’s fine. But let me show you something else.’ Merlin beckoned her back through into the living area, then made one of the walls light up with images and maps and text from his private files. The collage was dozens of layers deep, with the records and annotations in just as many languages and alphabets.
‘What is this supposed to prove?’
He skimmed rectangles aside, flicking them to the edge of the wall. Here were Waynet charts, maps of solar systems, schematics of the surfaces of worlds and moons. ‘The thing I’m looking for,’ he said, ‘the weapon, the gun, whatever you want to call it – this is everything that I’ve managed to find out about it. Clues, rumours, whispers, from a hundred worlds. Maybe they don’t all point to the same thing – I’d be amazed if they did. But some of them do, I’m sure of it, and before long I’m going to find the piece that ties the whole thing together.’ He stabbed a finger at a nest of numbers next to one of the charts. ‘Look how recent these time tags are, Teal. I’m still searching – still gathering evidence.’
Her face was in profile, bathed in the different colours of the images. The slope of her nose, the angle of her chin, reminded him in certain small ways of Sayaca.
She turned to him sharply, as if she had been aware of his gaze.
‘I saw pictures of you,’ Teal said. ‘They showed us them in warcreche. They were a warning against irresponsibility. You look much older than you did in those pictures.’
‘Travel broadens the mind. It also puts a large number of lines on you.’ He nodded at the collage of records. ‘I’m no angel, and I’ve made mistakes, but this proves I’m still committed. Which means we’re both in the same boat, doesn’t it? Lone survivors, forced together, each needing to trust the other. Are you really the last of your crew?’
There was a silence before she answered.
‘Yes. I knew it before I went under, the last time. There were still others around, but mine was the last reliable cabinet – the only one that stood a chance of working.’
‘You were chosen, to have the best chance?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded, thinking again of those inner scars. ‘Then I’ve a proposition.’ He raised a finger, silencing her before she could get a word out. ‘The Huskers did something terrible to you and your people, as they did mine. They deserve to be punished for that, and they will be. Together we can make it happen.’
‘By finding your fabled weapon?’
‘By finding the syrinx that’ll help me carry on with my search. You said that system wasn’t far away. If it’s on the Waynet, I can reach it in Tyrant. We backtrack. If you traded with them once, we can trade again. You’ve seen that system once before, so you have the local knowledge I most certainly lack.’
She glanced away, her expression clouded by very obvious misgivings.
‘We sold them a syrinx,’ Teal said. ‘One of the rarest, strangest things ever made. All you have is a little black ship and some stories. What could you ever offer them that would be worth that?’
‘I’d think of something,’ Merlin said.
The transition, when it came, was the hardest so far. Merlin had been expecting the worst and had made sure the two of them were buckled in as tightly as their couches allowed, side by side in Tyrant’s command deck. When they slipped into the Waynet it had felt like an impact, a solid scraping blow against the ship, as if it were grinding its way along the flank of an asteroid or iceberg. Alarms sounded, and the hull gave off moans and shrieks of structural complaint. Tyrant yawed violently. Probes and stabilisers flaked away from the hull.
But it held. Merlin waited for the instruments to settle down, and for the normal smooth motion of the flow to assert itself. Only then did he start breathing again.
‘We’re all right. Once we’re in the Way, it’s rarely too bad. It’s just coming in and out that’s becoming problematic.’ Long experience told him it was safe to unbuckle, and he motioned for Teal to do likewise. She had kept her suit on and her helmet nearby, as if either of those things stood any chance of protecting her if the transition failed completely. Merlin had removed all but the clothes he normally wore in Tyrant – baggy and tending to frills and ornamentation.
‘How long until we come out again?’
Merlin squinted at one of the indicators. ‘About six hours. We’re moving very quickly now – only about a hundred billionth part less than the speed of light. Do you see those circles that shoot past us every second?’
They were like the glowing ribs of a tunnel, whisking to either side in an endless, hypnotic procession.
‘What are they?’
‘Constraining hoops. Anchored back into fixed space. They pin down the Way, keep it flowing in the right direction. In reality, they’re about eight light hours apart – far enough that you could easily drop a solar system between them. I think about the Waymakers a lot, you know. They made an empire so old that by the time it fell hardly anyone remembered anything that came before it. Light and wealth and all the sunsets anyone could ever ask for.’