The Inhibitors were moving. A clump of wolf machines — they moved in clumps, aggregations, flickering clouds, rather than ordered squadrons or detachments — had left its former position. Between ninety-five and ninety-nine per cent of the wolf assets around p Eridani 40 — estimated by mass, or volume (it was difficult to be sure how much wolf machinery had actually followed them from Delta Pavonis) — held station, but according to the sensor returns, which could not always be trusted, the small aggregate — between one and five per cent of the total force — was on its way to the planet.
It accelerated smoothly, leaving physics squirming in its wake. When Inhibitor machinery moved, it did so without any hint of Newtonian reaction. The recent modifications to the Conjoiner drives had approximated something of the same effect by making the exhaust particles undergo rapid decay into a non-observable quantum state. But the wolves used a different principle. Even up close, there was no hint of any thrusting medium. The best guess — and guess it was — was that the Inhibitor drives employed a form of the quantum Casimir effect, using the unbalanced vacuum pressure on two parallel plates to skip themselves through space-time. The fact that the machines accelerated several trillion times faster than theory allowed was deemed slightly less embarrassing than having no theory at all.
He ran a simulation, predicting the flight path of the aggregate. It might fracture into smaller elements, or combine with another, but if it continued on its present course, it was destined to skim the planet’s immediate airspace.
This troubled Remontoire. So far the alien machines had avoided coming that close. It was as if, scripted deep into their controlling routines, was an edict, a fundamental command to avoid unnecessary contact with Pattern Juggler worlds.
But humans had taken the battle to the waterlogged planet. How deep did that edict run? Perhaps the visible downing of Skade’s corvette had tripped some switch, the damage already done. Perhaps Inhibitor machinery had already entered the biosphere. In which case even this Juggler planet might not be safe for very much longer.
The aggregate had been underway for nearly a second, from Remontoire’s point of view. Assuming the usual acceleration curves, it would reach the planet’s airspace in under forty minutes. In his present state of consciousness, that would seem like an eternity. But Remontoire knew better than to believe that.
Remontoire’s trident-shaped ship departed from the parking bay in the side of the Zodiacal Light. Almost immediately he felt the spinal compression as the main drive came on, as hard and unforgiving as a fall on to concrete. The hull creaked and protested as the acceleration ramped up through five, six, seven gees. The single outrigger-mounted engine was a microminiature Conjoiner drive, engineered with watchmaker precision, every component squeezed down to neurotic tolerances. It would have made Remontoire nervous, had he permitted himself to feel nervousness.
He was the only living thing aboard the recently manufactured ship. Even he seemed something of an afterthought, crammed into a tiny eyelike hollow in the long carbon-black needle of the hull. There were no windows, and only the bare minimum of sensor apertures, but through his implants Remontoire barely perceived the little craft, sensing it only as a glassy extension of his personal space. Beyond the hard boundaries of the ship was a less tangible sphere of sensor coverage: passive and active contacts tickling the part of his brain associated with the proprioceptive knowledge of his own body image.
The thrust levelled out at eight gees. There was no inertial protection against that acceleration, even though bulk control of inertia had been within the reach of Conjoiner technology for more than half a century. It couldn’t be allowed. The other technology that the ship carried — the glittering, tinsel-like machinery of the hypometric weapon — was highly intolerant of alterations to the local metric. The hypometric weapons were difficult enough to use in nearly flat, unmolested space-time. But within the influence of inertial technology they became malevolently unpredictable, like spiteful imps. Remontoire would have liked to have accelerated even harder, but above eight gees there was a real danger of shifting the weapon’s tiny components out of alignment.
The weapon itself wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Shrouded in a cigar-shaped nacelle flung out as an extension from the same outrigger that held the drive, there was no muzzle, no exhaust, no surface detailing of any kind. The only design constraint had been to arrange for the weapon to be as far from the human occupant as possible. It was, Remontoire thought, a measure of the device’s threatening glamour that he actually felt safer with the dangerous, unstable miniature Conjoiner drive between him and the quixotic weapon.
He checked the progress of the Inhibitor aggregate, neither gratified nor disappointed to see that it was exactly where he had predicted it would be. Something had changed, though: his departure from the Zodiacal Light had drawn the attention of the other protagonists. One of Skade’s former allies was moving on an intercept trajectory with his ship at a higher acceleration than he could sustain. The other Conjoiner craft would engage him within fifteen minutes. Five or six minutes after that, a second aggregate would have reached him.
Remontoire allowed himself a flicker of disquiet, just enough to pump some adrenalin into his blood. Then he blocked it, the way one slammed the door on a boisterous party.
He knew, rationally, that the logical thing would have been to remain on the Zodiacal Light, where his co-ordination and insight were most valued. He could have programmed a beta-level simulation of himself to fly this ship, or asked for a volunteer. There would have been dozens of willing candidates, some of whom had been equipped with Conjoiner implants of their own. But he had insisted on taking the ship himself. It wasn’t just because he had spent more time than most of them learning the ways of the hypometric weapon. There was also a sense of obligation: it was something he had to do.
It was, he knew, because of Ana Khouri. He had made a mistake in letting her travel down to the planet on her own. From a military perspective it had been exactly the right thing to do: no point committing already overstretched resources when there was every likelihood that Aura was already dead. More than that, he thought, when there was every chance that Aura had already been as useful to them as she was ever going to be. Also, nothing much larger than an escape capsule had stood a chance of reaching the surface anyway, with the Inhibitor blockade in maximum effect.
But Clavain wouldn’t have seen it that way. Nine times out of ten he had based his decisions upon the strict application of military sense. He wouldn’t have lived through five hundred years otherwise. But one time out of ten he would disregard the rules entirely and do something that made no sense except on a humane level.
Remontoire thought it likely that this would have been one of those occasions. No matter that Skade and Aura were probably both dead: Clavain would have gone down with Khouri even if the rescue attempt itself was almost guaranteed to end in their deaths.
Time and again over the years Remontoire had examined the minutiae of Clavain’s life, the critical points, trying to work out if those irrational acts had helped or hindered his old friend. He reviewed Clavain’s decisions once more while he waited for the Conjoiner ship to meet him. As always he arrived at no satisfactory answer. But he had decided that this was a time when he needed to live by Clavain’s rules rather than the rigid gamesmanship of tactical analysis.