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  Galiana felt some of her elation slipping away. She had hoped that the rumours would turn out to be exaggerations. ‘But we won, evidently,’ she said.

  ‘… No. Not as such. The war’s still happening, you see.’

  ‘But it’s been…’

  ‘Fifty-four years.’ Skade nodded. ‘Yes. I know. Of course, there’ve been lapses and lulls, ceasefires and brief interludes of detente. But they haven’t lasted. The old ideological schisms have opened up again, like raw wounds. At heart they’ve never trusted us, and we’ve always regarded them as reactionary Luddites, unwilling to face the next phase of human transcendence.’

  Galiana felt, for the first time since waking, an odd migrainous pressure somewhere behind her eyes. With the pressure came a squall of primal emotions, howling up from the oldest part of her mammalian brain. It was the awful fear of being pursued, of sensing a host of dark predators coming closer. Machines, said a memory.

  Machines like wolves, which came out of interstellar space and locked on to your exhaust flame.

  You called them wolves, Galiana.

  Them.

  Us.

  The odd moment abated.

  ‘But we worked together so well, for so long,’ Galiana said. ‘Surely we can find common ground again. There are more things to worry about than some petty power struggle over who gets to run a single system.’

  Skade shook her head. ‘It’s too late, I’m afraid. There have been too many deaths, too many broken promises, too many atrocities. The conflict has spread to other systems, wherever there are Conjoiners and Demarchists.’ She smiled, though the smile looked forced, as if her face would instantly spring back to its neutral state the moment she relaxed her muscles. ‘Things aren’t quite as desperate as you’d imagine. The war is turning in our favour, slowly but surely. Clavain returned twenty-two years ago, and immediately began to make a difference. Until his return we had been on the defensive, falling into the trap of acting like a true hive mind. That made our movements very easy for the enemy to predict. Clavain snapped us out of that prison.’

  Galiana tried to force the memory of the wolves from her mind, thinking back to the time she had first met Clavain. It had been on Mars, when he had been fighting against her, a soldier in the Coalition for Neural Purity. The Coalition opposed her mind-augmenting experiments and saw the utter annihilation of the Conjoiners as the only tolerable outcome.

  But Clavain had seen the larger picture. First, as her prisoner, he had made her realise how terrifying her experiments had seemed to the rest of the system. She had never really grasped that until Clavain patiently explained it to her, over many months of incarceration. Later, when he had been freed and terms of cease-fire were being negotiated, it was Clavain who had brought in the Demarchists to act as a neutral third party. The Demarchists had drawn up the cease-fire document and Clavain had pushed Galiana until she signed it. It had been a masterstroke, cementing an alliance between the Demarchists and the Conjoiners that would endure for centuries, until the Coalition for Neural Purity barely merited a footnote in history. Conjoiners continued with their neurological experiments, which were tolerated and even encouraged provided they made no attempts to absorb other cultures. Demarchists made use of their technologies, brokering them to other human factions.

  Everyone was happy.

  But at heart, Skade was right: the union had always been an uneasy one. A war, at some point, was almost inevitable — especially when something like the Melding Plague came along.

  But fifty-four damned years? Clavain would never have tolerated that, she thought. He would have seen the terrible waste in human effort that such a war entailed. He would either have found a way to end it decisively, or he would have sought a permanent cease-fire.

  The migrainelike pressure was still with her, now a little more intense than before. Galiana had the disturbing sense that something was peering through her eyes from inside her skull, as if she was not its only tenant.

  We narrowed the distance to your two ships, with the unhurried lope of ancient killers who had no racial memory of failure. You sensed our minds: bleak intellects poised on the dangerous verge of intelligence, as old and cold as the dust between the stars.

  You sensed our hunger.

  ‘But Clavain…’ she said.

  ‘What about Clavain?’

  ‘He would have found a way to end this, Skade, one way or another. Why hasn’t he?’

  Skade looked away for an instant, so that her crest was a narrow ridge turned edge-on. When she turned back she was attempting to shape a very odd expression on to her face.

  You saw us take your first ship, smothering it in a caulk of inquisitive black machines. The machines gnawed the ship apart. You saw it detonate: the explosion etched a pink swan-shape on to your retina, and you felt a net of minds being ripped away, like the loss of a thousand children.

  You tried to get further away, but by then it was too late.

  When we reached your ship we were more careful.

  This isn’t easy, Galiana.‘

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘It’s about Clavain.’

  ‘You said he returned.’

  ‘He did. And so did Felka. But I’m sorry to tell you that they both died.’ The words arrived one after another, slow as breaths. ‘It was eleven years ago. There was a Demarchist attack, a lucky strike against the Nest, and they both died.’

  There was only one rational response: denial. ‘No!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wish there was some other way…’ Skade’s crest flashed ultramarine. ‘I wish it had never happened. They were valuable assets to us…’

  ‘“Assets”?’

  Skade must have sensed Galiana’s fury. ‘I mean they were loved. We grieved their loss, Galiana. All of us.’

  ‘Then show me. Open your mind. Drop the barricades. I want to see into it.’

  Skade lingered near the side of the casket. ‘Why, Galiana?’

  ‘Because until I can see into it, I won’t know whether you’re telling the truth.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ Skade said softly. ‘But I can’t allow our minds to talk. There is something inside your head, you see. Something we don’t understand, other than that it is probably alien and probably hostile.’

  I don’t believe…‘

  But the pressure behind her eyes suddenly became acute. Galiana experienced a vile sense of being shoved aside, usurped, crushed into a small ineffectual corner of her own skull. Something inexpressibly sinister and ancient now had immediate tenancy, squatting behind her eyes.

  She heard herself speak again.

  ‘Me, do you mean?’

  Skade seemed only mildly taken aback. Galiana admired the other Conjoiner her nerve.

  ‘Perhaps. Who would you be, exactly?’

  I don’t have a name other than the one she gave me.‘

  ‘“She”?’ Skade asked amusedly. But her crest was flickering with nervous pale greens, showing terror even though her voice was calm.

  ‘Galiana,’ the entity replied. ‘Before I took her over. She called us — my mind — the wolves. We reached and infiltrated her ship, after we had destroyed the other. We didn’t understand much of what they were at first. But then we opened their skulls and absorbed their central nervous systems. We learned much more then. How they thought; how they communicated; what they had done to their minds.’

  Galiana tried to move, even though Skade had already placed her in a state of paralysis. She tried to scream, but the Wolf — for that was exactly what she had called it — had complete control of her voice.

  It was all coming back now.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill her?’ Skade said.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ the Wolf chided. ‘The question you should be asking is a different one: why didn’t she kill herself before it came to this? She could have, you know; it was within her power to destroy her entire ship and everyone inside it simply by willing it.’

  ‘So why didn�
�t she?’

  ‘We came to an arrangement, after we had killed her crew and left her alone. She would not kill herself provided we allowed her to return home. She knew what it meant: I would invade her skull, rummage through her memories.’

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘She was your queen, Skade. As soon as we read the minds of her crew, we knew she was the one we really needed.’

  Skade was silent. Aquamarines and jades chased each other in slow waves from brow to nape. ‘She would never have risked leading you here.’

  ‘She would, provided she thought the risk was outweighed by the benefit of an early warning. It was an accommodation, you see. She gave us time to learn, and the hope of learning more. Which we have, Skade.’

  Skade touched a finger to her upper lip and then held it before her as if testing the direction of the wind. ‘If you truly are a superior alien intelligence, and you knew where we were, you’d already have come to us.’

  ‘Very good, Skade. And you’re right, in a sense. We don’t know exactly where Galiana has brought us. I know, but I can’t communicate that knowledge to my fellows. But that won’t matter. You are a starfaring culture — fragmented into different factions, it is true — but from our perspective those distinctions do not matter. From the memories we drank, and the memories in which we still swim, we know the approximate locus of space that you inhabit. You are expanding, and the surface area of your expansion envelope grows geometrically, always increasing the likelihood of an encounter between us. It has already happened once, and it may have happened elsewhere, at other points on the sphere’s boundary.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Skade asked.

  ‘To frighten you. Why else?’

  But Skade was too clever for that. ‘No. There’s got to be another reason. You want to make me think you might be useful, don’t you?’

  ‘How so?’ the voice of the Wolf purred amusedly.

  ‘I could kill you here and now. After all, the warning has already been delivered.’

  Had Galiana been able to move, or even just blink, she would have signalled an emphatic ‘yes’. She did want to die. What else had she to live for, now? Clavain was gone. Felka was gone. She was sure of that, as sure as she was that no amount of Conjoiner ingenuity would ever free her of the thing inside her head.

  Skade was right. She had served her purpose, performed her final duty to the Mother Nest. It knew that the wolves were out there, were, in all likelihood, creeping closer, scenting human blood.

  There was no reason to keep her alive a moment longer. The Wolf would always be looking for a chance to escape her head, no matter how vigilant Skade was. The Mother Nest might learn something from it, some marginal hint of a motive or a weakness, but against that had to be set the awful consequences of its escape.

  Galiana knew. Just as the Wolf had access to her memories, so, by some faint and perhaps deliberate process of back-contamination, she sensed some of its own history. There was nothing concrete; almost nothing that she could actually put into words. But what she sensed was an aeons-old litany of surgical xenocide; of a dreadful process of cleansing waged upon emergent sentient species. The memories had been preserved with grim bureaucratic exactitude across hundreds of millions of years of Galactic time, each new extinction merely an entry in the ledger. She sensed the occasional frenzied cleansing — a cull that had been initiated later than was desirable. She even sensed the rare instance of brutal intercession where an earlier cull had not been performe satisfactorily.

  But what she did not sense, ever, was ultimate failure.

  Suddenly, shockingly, the Wolf eased aside. It was letting her speak.

  ‘Skade,’ Galiana said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Kill me, please. Kill me now.’

  Chapter 1

  ANTOINETTE BAX WATCHED the police proxy unfold itself from the airlock. The machine was all planar black armour and sharp articulated limbs, like a sculpture made from many pairs of scissors. It was deathly cold, for it had been clamped to the outside of one of the three police cutters which now pinned her ship. A rime of urine-coloured propellant frost boiled off it in pretty little whorls and helices.

  ‘Please stand back,’ the proxy said. ‘Physical contact is not advised.’

  The propellant cloud smelt toxic. She slammed down her visor as the proxy scuttled by.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re hoping to find,’ she said, following at a discreet distance.

  I won’t know until I find it,‘ the proxy said. It had already identified the frequency for her suit radio.

  ‘Hey, look. I’m not into smuggling. I like not being dead too much.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘Why would anyone smuggle something to Hospice Idlewild? They’re a bunch of ascetic religious nuts, not contraband fiends.’

  ‘Know a thing or two about contraband, do you?’

  ‘I never said…’

  ‘Never mind. The point is, Miss Bax, this is war. I’d say nothing’s ruled out.’

  The proxy halted and flexed, large flakes of yellow ice cracking away from its articulation points. The machine’s body was a flanged black egg from which sprouted numerous limbs, manipulators and weapons. There was no room for the pilot in there, just enough space for the machinery needed to keep the proxy in contact with the pilot. The pilot was still inside one of the three cutters, stripped of nonessential organs and jammed into a life-support canister.

  ‘You can check with the Hospice, if you like,’ she said.

  I’ve already queried the Hospice. But in matters such as this, one likes to be absolutely certain that things are above board — wouldn’t you agree?‘

  ‘I’ll agree to anything you like if it gets you off my ship.’

  ‘Mm. And why would you be in such a hurry?’

  ‘Because I’ve got a slush… sorry, a cryogenic passenger. One I don’t want thawing on me.’

  ‘I’d like to see this passenger very much. Is that possible?’

  ‘I’m hardly likely to refuse, am I?’ She had expected as much, and had already donned her vacuum suit while waiting for the proxy to arrive.

  ‘Good. It won’t take a minute, and then you can be on your way.’ The machine paused a moment before adding, ‘Provided, of course, that there aren’t any irregularities.’

  ‘It’s this way’

  Antoinette thumbed back a panel next to her, exposing a crawlway that led back to Storm Bird’s main freight bay. She let the proxy take the lead, determined to say little and volunteer even less. Her attitude might have struck some as obstinate, but she would have engendered far more suspicion had she started to be helpful. The Ferrisville Convention’s militia were not well liked, a fact which they had long since factored into their dealings with civilians.

  ‘This is quite a ship you have, Antoinette.’

  ‘That’s Miss Bax to you. I don’t remember us being on first-name terms.’

  ‘Miss Bax, then. But my point stands: your ship is outwardly unremarkable, but betrays all the signs of being mechanically sound and spaceworthy. A ship with such a capacity could run at a profit on any number of perfectly legal trade routes, even in these benighted times.’

  ‘Then I’d have no incentive to take up smuggling, would I?’

  ‘No, but it makes me wonder why you’d waste such an opportunity by running a peculiar errand for the Hospice. They have influence, but not, so far as we can gather, very much in the way of actual wealth.’ The machine halted again. ‘You have to admit, it’s a bit of a puzzler. The usual route is for the frozen to come down from the Hospice, not go up to it. And even moving a frozen body around is unusual — most are thawed before they ever leave Idlewild.’

  ‘It’s not my job to ask questions.’

  ‘Well, it does rather happen to be mine. Are we nearly there yet?’

  The freight bay was not currently pressurised, so they had to cycle through an internal airlock to reach it. Antoinett
e turned the lights on. The enormous space was empty of cargo but filled with a storage lattice, a three-dimensional framework into which cargo pallets and pods were normally latched. They began to clamber their way through it, the proxy picking its way with the fastidious care of a tarantula.

  ‘It’s true, then. You are flying with an empty hold. There’s not a single container in here.’

  ‘It’s not a crime.’

  I never said it was. It is, however, exceedingly odd. The Mendicants must be paying you extremely good money if you can justify a trip like this.‘

  ‘They set the terms, not me.’

  ‘Curioser and curioser.’

  The proxy was right, of course. Everyone knew that the Hospice cared for the frozen who had just been off-loaded from recently arrived starships: the poor, the injured, the terminally amnesiac. They would be thawed, revived and rehabilitated in the Hospice’s surroundings, tended by the Mendicants until they were well enough to leave, or at least able to complete a minimum set of basic human functions. Some, never regaining their memories, decided to stay on in the Hospice, training to become Mendicants themselves. But the one thing the Hospice did not routinely do was take in frozen who had not arrived on an interstellar ship.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What they told me was this: there was a mistake. The man’s documentation was mixed up during the off-loading process. He was confused with another puppy who was only meant to be checked over by the Hospice, not actually revived. The other man was supposed to be kept cold until he was in Chasm City, then warmed up.’

  ‘Unusual,’ the proxy said.

  ‘Seems the guy didn’t like space travel. Well, there was a fuck-up. By the time the error was discovered, the wrong frozen body was halfway to CC. A serious screw-up and one that the Hospice wanted to get sorted out before the mess got worse. So they called me in. I picked up the body in the Rust Belt and now I’m rushing it back to Idlewild.’

  ‘But why the hurry? If the body’s frozen, surely…’