‘Why did you keep her so cold?’
‘We had to extract what we could from her brain,’ Mirsky said, ‘memories and neural patterns. We trawled them and stored them in the ship.’
‘What good was that?’
‘We knew they’d come in useful again.’
She’d been cloned from Mother Irravel. They were not identical — no Mixmaster expertise could duplicate the precise biochemical environment of Mother Irravel’s womb, or the shaping experiences of her early infancy, and their personalities had been sculpted centuries apart, in totally different worlds. But they were still close copies. They even shared memories: scripted into Irravel’s mind by medichines, so that she barely noticed each addition to her own experiences.
‘Why did you do this?’ she asked.
‘Because Irravel began something,’ Mirsky said. ‘Something I promised I’d help her finish.’
‘Why are you interested in our weapons?’ the Nestbuilder asked. ‘We are not aware of any wars within the chordate phylum at this epoch.’
‘It’s a personal matter,’ Irravel said.
The Nestbuilder hovered a metre above the trade floor, suspended in a column of microgravity. They were oxygen-breathing arthropods that had once ascended to spacefaring capability. No longer intelligent, yet supported by their self-renewing machinery, they migrated from system to system, constructing elaborate, space-filling structures from solid diamond. Other Nestbuilder swarms would arrive and occasionally occupy the new nests. There seemed no purpose to this activity, but for tens of thousands of years they had been host to a smaller, cleverer species known as the Slugs. Small communities of Slugs — anything up to a dozen — lived in warm, damp niches in a Nestbuilder’s intricately folded shell. They had long since learned how to control the host’s behaviour and exploit its subservient technology.
Irravel studied a Slug now, crawling out from under a lip of shell material.
The thing was a multicellular invertebrate not much larger than her fist; a bag of soft blue protoplasm, sprouting appendages only when they were needed. A slightly bipolar shadow near one end might have been its central nervous system, but there hardly seemed enough of it to trap sentience. There were no obvious sense or communicational organs, but a pulsing filament of blue slime reached back into the Nestbuilder’s fold. When the Slug spoke, it did so through the Nestbuilder: a rattle of chitin from the host’s mouthparts which approximated human language. A hovering jewel connected to the station’s lexical database did the rest, rendering the voice calmly feminine.
‘A personal matter? A vendetta? Then it’s true.’ The mouthparts clicked together in what humans presumed was the symbiotic creature’s laughter response. ‘You are who we suspected.’
‘She did tell you her name was Irravel, guy,’ Mirsky said, sipping black coffee with delicate movements of the exoskeletal frame she always wore in high gravity.
‘Amongst you chordates, the name is not so unusual now,’ the Slug reminded them. ‘But you do fit the description, Irravel.’
They were near one of the station’s vast picture windows, overlooking Aethra’s mighty, roiling cloud decks, fifty kilometres below. It was getting dark now and the stormplayers were preparing to start a show. Irravel saw two of their seeders descending into the clouds, robot craft tethered by a nearly invisible filament. The seeders would position the filament so that it bridged cloud layers with different static potentials; they’d then detach and return to Stormwatch, while the filament held itself in position by rippling along its length. For hundreds of kilometres around, other filaments would have been placed in carefully selected positions. They were electrically isolating now, but at the stormplayer’s discretion, each filament would flick over into a conductive state: a massive, choreographed lightning flash.
‘I never set out to become a legend,’ Irravel said. ‘Or a myth, for that matter.’
‘Yes. There are so many stories about you, Veda, that it might be simpler to assume you never existed.’
‘What makes you think otherwise?’
‘The fact that a chordate who could have been Markarian also passed this way, only a year or so ago.’ The Nestbuilder’s shell pigmentation flickered, briefly revealing a picture of Markarian’s ship.
‘So you sold weapons to him?’
‘That would be telling, wouldn’t it?’ The mouthparts clattered again. ‘You would have to answer a question of ours first.’
Outside, the opening flashes of the night’s performance gilded the horizon, like the first stirrings of a symphony. Aethra’s rings echoed the flashes, pale ghosts momentarily cleaving the sky.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘We Slugs are amongst the few intelligent starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy. During the war against intelligence, we avoided the Inhibitors by hiding ourselves amongst the mindless Nestbuilders.’
Irravel nodded. Slugs were one of the few alien species known to humanity that would even acknowledge the existence of the feared Inhibitors. Like humanity, they’d fought and beaten the revenants — at least for now.
‘The weaponry you seek enabled us to triumph — but even then only at colossal cost to our phylum. Now we are watchful for new threats.’
‘I don’t see where this is leading.’
‘We have heard rumours. Since you have come from the direction of those rumours — the local stellar neighbourhood around your phylum’s birth star — we imagined you might have information of value.’
Irravel exchanged a sideways glance with Mirsky. The old woman’s wizened, age-spotted skull looked as fragile as paper, but she remained an unrivalled tactician. They knew each other so well now that Mirsky could impart advice with the subtlest of movements, expression barely troubling the lined mask of her face.
‘What kind of information are you seeking?’
‘Information about something that frightens us.’ The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation flickered again, forming an image of… something. It was a splinter of grey-brown against speckled blackness — perhaps the Nestbuilder’s attempt at visualising a planetoid. And then something erupted across the surface of the world, racing from end to end like a film of verdigris. Where it had passed, fissures opened up, deepening until they were black fractures, as if the world were a calving iceberg. And then it blew apart, shattering into a thousand green-tinged fragments.
‘What was that?’ Irravel said.
‘We were rather hoping you could tell us.’ The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation refreshed again, and this time what they were seeing was clearly a star, veiled in a toroidal belt of golden dust. ‘Machines have dismantled every rocky object in the system where these images were captured — Ross 128, which lies within eleven light-years of your birth star. They have engendered a swarm of trillions of rocks on independent orbits. Each rock is sheathed in a pressurised bubble membrane, within which an artificial plant-based ecosystem has been created. The same machines have fashioned other sources of raw material into mirrors, larger than worlds themselves, which trap sunlight above and below the ecliptic and focus it onto the swarm.’
‘And why does this frighten you?’
The Nestbuilder leaned closer in its column of microgravity. ‘Because we saw it being resisted. As if these machines had never been intended to wreak such transformations. As if your phylum had created something it could not control.’
‘And — these attempts at resistance?’