Galactic North (24 page)

The truth couldn’t hurt, I decided. “Van Ness told me something I didn’t know. It put things into perspective. I understand now why he might not feel positively disposed towards Conjoiners.”

“And does that alter the way you think about me?”

I said nothing for several paces. “I don’t know, Weather. Until now I never really gave much thought to those horror stories about the Spiders. I assumed they’d been exaggerated, the way things often are during wartime.”

“But now you’ve seen the light. You realise that, in fact, we are monsters after all.”

“I didn’t say that. But I’ve just learned that something I always thought untrue—that Conjoiners would take prisoners and convert them into other Conjoiners—really happened. ”

“To Van Ness?”

She didn’t need to know all the facts. “To someone close to him. The worst was that he got to meet that person after her transformation.”

After a little while, Weather said, “Mistakes were made. Very, very bad mistakes.”

“How can you call taking someone prisoner and stuffing their skull full of Conjoiner machinery a ‘mistake,’ Weather? You must have known exactly what you were doing, exactly what it would do to the prisoner.”

“Yes, we did,” she said, “but we considered it a kindness. That was the mistake, Inigo. And it was a kindness, too: no one who tasted Transenlightenment ever wanted to go back to the experiential mundanity of retarded consciousness. But we did not anticipate how distressing this might be to those who had known the candidates beforehand.”

“He felt that she didn’t love him any more.”

“That wasn’t the case. It’s just that everything else in her universe had become so heightened, so intense, that the love for another individual could no longer hold her interest. It had become just one facet in a much larger mosaic.”

“And you don’t think that was cruel?”

“I said it was a mistake. But if Van Ness had joined her . . . if Van Ness had submitted to the Conjoined, known Transenlightenment for himself . . . they would have reconnected on a new level of personal intimacy.”

I wondered how she could be so certain. “That doesn’t help Van Ness now.”

“We wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If there were ever to be . . . difficulties again, we wouldn’t take candidates so indiscriminately.”

“But you’d still take some.”

“We’d still consider it a kindness,” Weather said.

Not much was said as we traversed the connecting spar out to the starboard engine. I watched Weather alertly, transfixed by the play of colours across her cooling crest. Eventually she whirled around and said, “I’m not going to
do
anything, Inigo, so stop worrying about it. This collar’s bad enough, without feeling you watching my every move.”

“Maybe the collar isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Van Ness thinks you want to blow up the ship. I guess if you had a way to do that, we wouldn’t get much warning.”

“No, you wouldn’t. But I’m not going to blow up the ship. That’s not within my power, unless you let me turn the input dials all the way into the red. Even Voulage wasn’t that stupid.”

I wiped my sweat-damp hand on the thigh of my trousers. “We don’t know much about how these engines work. Are you sensing anything from them yet?”

“A little,” she admitted. “There’s crosstalk between the two units, but I don’t have the implants to make sense of that. Most Conjoiners don’t need anything that specialised, unless they work in the drive crèches, educating the engines. ”

“The engines need educating?”

Not answering me directly, she said, “I can feel the engine now. Effective range for my implants is a few dozen metres under these conditions. We must be very close.”

“We are,” I said as we turned a corner. Ahead lay the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. They were all showing blue-green now, but only because I’d throttled the engine back to a whisper of thrust.

“I’ll need to get closer if I’m going to be any use to you,” Weather told me.

“Step up to the panel. But don’t touch anything until I give you permission.”

I knew there wasn’t much harm she could do here, even if she started pushing the dials. She’d need to move more than one to make things dangerous, and I could drop her long before she had a chance to do that. But I was still nervous as she stood next to the hexagon and cocked her head to one side.

I thought of what lay on the other side of that wall. Having traversed the spar, we were now immediately inboard of the engine, about halfway along its roughly cylindrical shape. The engine extended for one hundred and ten metres ahead of me, and for approximately two hundred and fifty metres in either direction to my left and right. It was sheathed in several layers of conventional hull material, anchored to the
Petronel
by a shock-absorbing cradle and wrapped in a mesh of sensors and steering-control systems. Like any shipmaster, my understanding of those elements was so total that it no longer counted as acquired knowledge. It had become an integral part of my personality.

But I knew nothing of the engine itself. My log book, with its reams of codified notes and annotations, implied a deep and scholarly grasp of all essential principles. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Conjoiner drive was essentially a piece of magic we’d been handed on a plate, like a coiled baby dragon. It came with instructions on how to tame its fire, and make sure it did not come to harm, but we were forbidden from probing its mysteries. The most important rule that applied to a Conjoiner engine was a simple one: there were no user-serviceable components inside. Tamper with an engine—attempt to take it apart, in the hope of reverse-engineering it—and the engine would self-destruct in a mini-nova powerful enough to crack open a small moon. Across settled space, there was no shortage of mildly radioactive craters testifying to failed attempts to break that one prohibition.

Ultras didn’t care, as a rule. Ultras, by definition, already had Conjoiner drives. It was governments and rich planet-bound individuals who kept learning the hard way. The Conjoiner argument was brutal in its simplicity: there were principles embodied in their drives that “retarded” humanity just wasn’t ready to absorb. We were meant to count ourselves lucky that they let us have the engines in the first place. We weren’t meant to go poking our thick monkey fingers into their innards.

And so long as the engines kept working, few of us had any inclination to do so.

Weather took a step back. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I thought that perhaps the dial indications might be in error, suggesting that there was a fault where none existed . . . but that isn’t the case.”

“You can feel that the engine is really damaged?”

“Yes,” she told me. “And it’s this one, the starboard unit.”

“What’s wrong with it? Is it anything we can fix?”

“One question at a time, Inigo.” Weather smiled tolerantly before continuing, “There’s been extensive damage to critical engine components, too much for the engine’s own self-repair systems to address. The engine hasn’t failed completely, but certain reaction pathways have now become computationally intractable, which is why you’re seeing the drastic loss in drive efficiency. The engine is being forced to explore other pathways, those that it can still manage given its existing resources. But they don’t deliver the same output energy.”

She was telling me everything and nothing. “I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “Are you saying there’s nothing that can be done to repair it?”

“Not here. At a dedicated Conjoiner manufacturing facility, certainly. We’d only make things worse.”

“We can’t run on just the port engine, either—not without rebuilding the entire ship. If we were anywhere near a moon or asteroid, that might just be an option, but not when we’re so far out.”

“I’m sorry the news isn’t better. You’ll just have to resign yourselves to a longer trip than you were expecting.”

“It’s worse than that. There’s another ship closing in on us, probably another raider like Voulage. It’s very close now. If we don’t start running soon, they’ll be on us.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me this sooner?”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“To the trust between us, possibly.”

“I’m sorry, Weather. I didn’t want to distract you. I thought things were bad enough as they were.”

“And you thought I’d be able to work a miracle if I wasn’t distracted?”

I nodded hopelessly. I realised that, as naive as it might seem, I’d been expecting Weather to wave a hand over the broken engine and restore it to full, glittering functionality. But knowing something of the interior workings of the drive was not the same as being able to fix it.

“Are we really out of options?” I asked.

“The engine is already doing all it can to provide maximum power, given the damage it has taken. There really is no scope to make things better.”

Desperate for some source of optimism, I thought back to what Weather had said a few moments before. “When you talked about the computations, you seemed to be saying that the engine needed to do some number-crunching to make itself work.”

Weather looked conflicted. “I’ve already said too much, Inigo.”

“But if we’re going to die out here, it doesn’t matter what you tell me, does it? Failing that, I’ll swear a vow of silence. How does that sound?”

“No one has ever come close to working out how our engines function,” Weather said. “We’ve played our hand in that, of course: putting out more than our share of mis-information over the years. And it’s worked, too. We’ve kept careful tabs on the collective thinking concerning our secrets. We’ve always had contingencies in place to disrupt any research that might be headed in the right direction. So far we’ve never had cause to use a single one of them. If I were to reveal key information to you, I would have more to worry about than just being an outcast. My people would come after me. They’d hunt me down, and then they’d hunt you down as well. Conjoiners will consider any necessary act, up to and including local genocide, to protect the secrets of the C-drive.” She paused for a moment, letting me think she was finished, before continuing on the same grave note, “But having said that, there are layers to our secrets. I can’t reveal the detailed physical principles upon which the drive depends, but I can tell you that the conditions in the drive, when it is at full functionality, are enormously complex and chaotic. Your ship may ride a smooth thrust beam, but the reactions going on inside the drive are anything but smooth. There is a small mouth into hell inside every engine: bubbling, frothing, subject to vicious and unpredictable state-changes. ”

“Which the engine needs to smooth out.”

“Yes. And to do so, the engine needs to think through some enormously complex, parallel computational problems. When all is well, when the engine is intact and running inside its normal operational envelope, the burden is manageable. But if you ask too much of the engine, or damage it in some way, that burden becomes heavier. Eventually it exceeds the means of the engine, and the reactions become uncontrolled.”

“Nova.”

“Quite,” Weather said, favouring my response with a tiny nod.

“Then let me get this straight,” I said. “The engine’s damaged, but it could still work if the computations weren’t so complicated.”

Weather answered me guardedly. “Yes, but don’t underestimate how difficult those computations have now become. I can feel the strain this engine is under, just holding things together as they are.”

“I’m not underestimating it. I’m just wondering if we couldn’t help it do better. Couldn’t we load in some new software, or assist the engine by hooking in the
Petronel
’s own computers?”

“I really wish it was that simple.”

“I’m sorry. My questions must seem quite simple-minded. But I’m just trying to make sure we aren’t missing anything obvious.”

“We aren’t,” she said. “Take my word on it.”

I returned Weather to her quarters and removed the collar. Where it had been squeezing her neck, the skin was marked with a raw pink band, spotted with blood. I threw the hateful thing into the corner of the room and returned with a medical kit.

“You should have said something,” I told her as I dabbed at the abrasions with a disinfectant swab. “I didn’t realise it was cutting into you all that time. You seemed so cool, so focused. But that must have been hurting all the while.”

“I told you I could turn off pain.”

“Are you turning it off now?”

“Why?”

“Because you keep flinching.”

Weather reached up suddenly and took my wrist, almost making me drop the swab. The movement was as swift as a snakebite, but although she held me firmly, I sensed no aggressive intentions. “Now it’s my turn not to understand,” she said. “You were hoping I might be able to do something for you. I couldn’t. That means you’re in as much trouble as you ever were. Worse, if anything, because now you’ve heard it from me. But you’re still treating me with kindness.”

“Would you rather we didn’t?”

“I assumed that as soon as my usefulness to you had come to an end—”

“You assumed wrongly. We’re not that kind of crew.”

“And your captain?”

“He’ll keep his word. Killing you would never have been Van Ness’s style.” I finished disinfecting her neck and began to rummage through the medical kit for a strip of bandage. “We’re all just going to have to make do as best we can, you included. Van Ness reckoned we should send out a distress call and wait for rescue. I wasn’t so keen on that idea before, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t so bad after all.” She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking of exactly the same objections I’d voiced to Van Ness, when he raised the idea. “We still have a ship, that’s the main thing. Just because we aren’t moving as fast as we’d like—”