Galactic North (23 page)

It looked as if I was going to lose a lot more than sleep.

Even if we didn’t have another ship to worry about, we were in more than enough trouble. We were too far out from Shiva-Parvati to get back again, and yet we were moving too slowly to make it to another system. Even if the engines kept working as they were now, we’d take far too long to reach relativistic speed, where time dilation became appreciable. At twenty-five per cent of the speed of light, what would have been a twenty-year hop before became an eighty-year crawl now . . . and that was an eighty-year crawl in which almost all that time would be experienced aboard ship. Across that stretch of time, reefersleep was a lottery. Our caskets were designed to keep people frozen for five to ten years, not four-fifths of a century.

I was scared. I’d gone from feeling calmly in control to feeling total devastation in about five minutes.

I didn’t want to let the rest of the crew know that we had a potential crisis on our hands, at least not until I’d spoken to Weather. I’d already crossed swords with Van Ness, but he was still my captain, and I wanted to spare him the dif ficulty of a frightened crew, at least until I knew all the facts.

Weather was awake when I arrived. In all my visits, I’d never found her sleeping. In the normal course of events Conjoiners had no need of sleep: at worst, they’d switch off certain areas of brain function for a few hours.

She read my face like a book. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

So much for the notion that Conjoiners were not able to interpret facial expressions. Just because they didn’t
make
many of them didn’t mean they’d forgotten the rules.

I sat down on the fold-out stool.

“I’ve tried to push the engines back up to normal cruise thrust. I’m already seeing red on two dials, and we haven’t even exceeded point-two gees.”

She thought about this for several moments: what for Weather must have been hours of subjective contemplation. “You didn’t appear to be pushing your engines dangerously during the chase.”

“I wasn’t. Everything looked normal up until now. I think we must have taken some damage to one of the drives, during Voulage’s softening-up assault. I didn’t see any external evidence, but—”

“You wouldn’t, not necessarily. The interior architecture of one of our drives is a lot more complicated, a lot more delicate, than is normally appreciated. It’s at least possible that a shock-wave did some harm to one of your engines, especially if your coupling gear—the shock-dampening assembly—was already compromised.”

“It probably was,” I said. “The spar was already stressed.”

“Then you have your explanation. Something inside your engine has broken, or is considered by the engine itself to be dangerously close to failure. Either way, it would be suicide to increase the thrust beyond the present level.”

“Weather, we need both those engines to get anywhere, and we need them at normal efficiency.”

“It hadn’t escaped me.”

“Is there anything you can do to help us?”

“Very little, I expect.”

“But you must know something about the engines, or you wouldn’t have been able to help Voulage.”

“Voulage’s engines weren’t damaged,” she explained patiently.

“I know that. But you were still able to make them work better. Isn’t there something you can do for us?”

“From here, nothing at all.”

“But if you were allowed to get closer to the engines . . . might that make a difference?”

“Until I’m there, I couldn’t possibly say. It’s irrelevant though, isn’t it? Your captain will never allow me out of this room.”

“Would you do it for us if he did?”

“I’d do it for me.”

“Is that the best you can offer?”

“All right, then maybe I’d for it for you.” Just saying this caused Weather visible discomfort, as if the utterance violated some deep personal code that had remained intact until now. “You’ve been kind to me. I know you risked trouble with Van Ness to make things easier in my cell. But you need to understand something very important. You may care for me. You may even think you like me. But I can’t give you back any of that. What I feel for you is . . .” Weather hesitated, her mouth half-open. “You know we call you the retarded. There’s a reason for that. The emotions I feel . . . the things that go on in my head . . . simply don’t map onto anything you’d recognise as love, or affection, or even friendship. Reducing them to those terms would be like . . .” And then she stalled, unable to finish.

“Like making a sacrifice?”

“You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me.”

“There’s more to love than fascination. And you said it yourself: you’re halfway back to being human again.”

“I said I wasn’t a Conjoiner any more. But that doesn’t mean I could ever be like you.”

“You could try.”

“You don’t understand us.”

“I want to!”

Weather jammed her olive eyes tight shut. “Let’s . . . not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? I only wanted to spare you any unnecessary emotional pain. But if we don’t get this ship moving properly, that’ll be the least of your worries. ”

“I know.”

“So perhaps we should return to the matter of the engines. Again: none of this will matter if Van Ness refuses to trust me.”

My cheeks were smarting as if I’d been slapped hard in the face. Part of me knew she was only being kind, in the harshest of ways. That part was almost prepared to accept her rejection. The other part of me only wanted her more, as if her bluntness had succeeded only in sharpening my desire. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I was insane to think a Conjoiner could ever feel something in return. But I remembered the gentle way she’d stroked my fingers, and I wanted her even more.

“I’ll deal with Van Ness,” I said. “I think there’s a little something that will convince him to take a risk. You start thinking about what you can do for us.”

“Is that an order, Inigo?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody’s going to order you to do anything. I gave you my word on that, and I’m not about to break it. Nothing you’ve just said changes that.”

She sat tight-lipped, staring at me as if I was some kind of byzantine logic puzzle she needed to unscramble. I could almost feel the furious computation of her mind, as if I was standing next to a humming turbine. Then she lifted her little pointed chin minutely, saying nothing, but letting me know that if I convinced Van Ness, she would do what she could, however ineffectual that might prove.

The captain was tougher to crack than I’d expected. I’d assumed he would fold as soon as I explained our predicament—that we were going nowhere, and that Weather was the only factor that could improve our situation—but the captain simply narrowed his eyes and looked disappointed.

“Don’t you get it? It’s a ruse, a trick. Our engines were fine until we let her aboard. Then all of a sudden they start misbehaving, and she turns out to be the only one who can help us.”

“There’s also the matter of the other ship Weps says is closing on us.”

“That ship might not even exist. It could be a sensor ghost, a hallucination she’s making the
Petronel
see.”

“Captain—”

“That would work for her, wouldn’t it? It would be exactly the excuse she needs to force our hands.”

We were in his cabin, with the door locked: I’d warned him I had a matter of grave sensitivity that we needed to discuss. “I don’t think this is any of her doing,” I said calmly, vowing to hold my temper under better control than before. “She’s too far from the engines or sensor systems to be having any mental effect on them, even if we hadn’t locked her in a room that’s practically a Faraday cage to begin with. She says one or other of the engines was damaged during the engagement with the
Cockatrice
, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve that. I think you’re wrong about her.”

“She’s got us right where she wants us, lad. She’s done something to the engines, and now—if you get your way— we’re going to let her get up close and personal with them.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Whatever takes her fancy. Blowing us all up is one possibility. Did you consider that?”

“She’d blow herself up as well.”

“Maybe that’s exactly the plan. Could be that she prefers dying to staying alive, if being shut out from the rest of the Spiders is as bad as you say it is. She didn’t seem to be real keen on being rescued from that wreck, did she? Maybe she was hoping to die aboard it.”

“She looked like she was trying to stay alive to me, Captain. There were a hundred ways she could have killed herself aboard the
Cockatrice
before we boarded, and she didn’t. I think she was just scared of us, scared that we were going to be like all the other Ultras. That’s why she kept running.”

“A nice theory, lad. It’s a pity so much is hanging on it, or I might be inclined to give it a moment’s credence.”

“We have no choice but to trust her. If we don’t let her try something, most of us won’t ever see another system.”

“Easy for you to say, son.”

“I’m in this as well. I’ve got just as much to lose as anyone else on this ship.”

Van Ness studied me for what felt like an eternity. Until now his trust in my competence had always been implicit, but Weather’s arrival had changed all that.

“My wife didn’t die in a terraforming accident,” he said slowly, not quite able to meet my eyes as he spoke. “I lied to you about that, probably because I wanted to start believing the lie myself. But now it’s time you heard the truth, which is that the Spiders took her. She was a technician, an expert in Martian landscaping. She’d been working on the Schiaparelli irrigation scheme when she was caught behind Spider lines during the Sabaea Offensive. They stole her from me, and turned her into one of them. Took her to their recruitment theatres, where they opened her head and pumped it full of their machines. Rewired her mind to make her think and feel like them.”

“I’m sorry,” I began. “That must have been so hard—”

“That’s not the hard part. I was told that she’d been executed, but three years later I saw her again. She’d been taken prisoner by the Coalition for Neural Purity, and they were trying to turn her back into a person. They hadn’t ever done it before, so my wife was to be a test subject. They invited me to their compound in Tychoplex, on Earth’s Moon, hoping I might be able to bring her back. I didn’t want to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to work; that it was always going to be easier thinking that she was already dead.”

“What happened?”

“When she saw me, she remembered me. She called me by name, just as if we’d only been apart a few minutes. But there was a coldness in her eyes. Actually, it was something beyond coldness. Coldness would mean she felt some recognisably human emotion, even if it was dislike or contempt. It wasn’t like that. The way she looked at me, it was as if she was looking at a piece of broken furniture, or a dripping tap, or a pattern of mould on the wall. As if it vaguely bothered her that I existed, or was the shape I was, but that she could feel nothing stronger than that.”

“It wasn’t your wife any more,” I said. “Your wife died the moment they took her.”

“That’d be nice to believe, wouldn’t it? Trouble is, I’ve never been able to. And trust me, lad: I’ve had long enough to dwell on things. I know a part of my wife survived what they did to her in the theatres. It just wasn’t the part that gave a damn about me any more.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling as if I’d been left drifting in space while the ship raced away from me. “I had no idea.”

“I just wanted you to know: with me and the Spiders, it isn’t an irrational prejudice. From where I’m sitting, it feels pretty damn rational.” Then he drew an enormous intake of breath, as if he needed sustenance for what was to come. “Take the girl to the engine if you think it’s the only way we’ll get out of this mess. But don’t let her out of your sight for one second. And if you get the slightest idea that she might be trying something—and I mean the
slightest
idea—you kill her, there and then.”

I clamped the collar around Weather’s neck. It was a heavy ring fashioned from rough black metal. “I’m sorry about this,” I told her, “but it’s the only way Van Ness will let me take you out of this room. Tell me if it hurts, and I’ll try to do something about it.”

“You won’t need to,” she said.

The collar was a crude old thing that had been lying around the
Petronel
since her last bruising contact with pirates. It was modified from the connecting ring of a space helmet, the kind that would amputate and shock-freeze the head if it detected massive damage to the body below the neck. Inside the collar was a noose of monofilament wire, primed to tighten to the diameter of a human hair in less than a second. There were complicated moving parts in the collar, but nothing that a Conjoiner could influence. The collar trailed a thumb-thick cable from its rear, which ran all the way to an activating box on my belt. I’d only need to give the box a hard thump with the heel of my hand, and Weather would be decapitated. That wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d die instantly—with all those machines in her head, Weather would be able to remain conscious for quite some time afterwards—but I was reasonably certain it would limit her options for doing harm.

“For what it’s worth,” I told her as we made our way out to the connecting spar, “I’m not expecting to have to use this. But I want you to be clear that I will if I have to.”

She walked slightly ahead of me, the cable hanging between us. “You seem different, Inigo. What happened between you and the captain, while you were gone?”