Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Read online

  My thoughts flicked to Weather. “Could it be Conjoiner?”

  “That was my first guess. But if it was Conjoiner, I don’t think I’d be seeing anything at all.”

  “So what are we dealing with?”

  She tapped the nail against the blue icon representing the new ship. “Another raider. Could be an ally of Voulage—we know he had friends—or could be some other ship that was hoping to pick over our carcass once Voulage was done with us, or maybe even steal us from him before he had his chance.”

  “Hyena tactics.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Range?”

  “Less than two light-hours. Even if they don’t increase their rate of closure, they’ll be on us within eight days.”

  “Unless we move.”

  Weps nodded sagely. “That would help. You’re on schedule to complete repairs within six days, aren’t you?”

  “On schedule, yes, but that doesn’t mean things can be moved any faster. We start cutting corners now, we’ll break like a twig when we put a real load on the ship.”

  “We wouldn’t want that.”

  “No, we wouldn’t.”

  “The captain just thought you should be aware of the situation, Inigo. It’s not to put you under pressure, or anything.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s just that…we really don’t want to be hanging around here a second longer than necessary.”

  I REMOVED WEATHER’S restraints and showed her how to help herself to food and water from the room’s dispenser. She stretched and purred, articulating and extending her limbs in the manner of a dancer rehearsing some difficult routine in extreme slow motion. She’d been “reading” when I arrived, which for Weather seemed to involve staring into the middle distance while her eyes flicked to and fro at manic speed, as if following the movements of an invisible wasp.

  “I can’t let you out of the room just yet,” I said, sitting on the fold-down stool next to the bed, upon which Weather now sat cross-legged. “I just hope this makes things a little more tolerable.”

  “So your captain’s finally realised I’m not about to suck out his brains?”

  “Not exactly. He’d still rather you weren’t aboard.”

  “Then you’re going against his orders.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I presume you could get into trouble for that.”

  “He’ll never find out.” I thought of the unknown ship that was creeping towards us. “He’s got other things on his mind now. It’s not as if he’s going to be paying you a courtesy call just to pass the time of day.”

  “But if he did find out…” She looked at me intently, lifting her chin. “Do you fear what he’d do to you?”

  “I probably should. But I don’t think he’d be very likely to throw me into an airlock. Not until we’re under way at full power, in any case.”

  “And then?”

  “He’d be angry. But I don’t think he’d kill me. He’s not a bad man, really.”

  “Perhaps I misheard, but didn’t you say his name was Van Ness?”

  “Captain Rafe Van Ness, yes.” I must have looked surprised. “Don’t tell me it means something to you.”

  “I heard Voulage mention him, that’s all. Now I know we’re talking about the same man.”

  “What did Voulage have to say?”

  “Nothing good. But I don’t think that necessarily reflects poorly on your captain. He must be a reasonable man. He’s at least allowed me aboard his ship, even if I haven’t been invited to dine in his quarters.”

  “Dining for Van Ness is a pretty messy business,” I said confidingly. “You’re better off eating alone.”

  “Do you like him, Inigo?”

  “He has his flaws, but next to someone like Voulage, he’s pretty close to being an angel.”

  “Doesn’t like Conjoiners, though.”

  “Most Ultras would have left you drifting. I think this is a point where you have to take what you’re given.”

  “Perhaps. I don’t understand his attitude, though. If your captain is like most Ultras, there’s at least as much of the machine about him as there is about me. More so, in all likelihood.”

  “It’s what you do with the machines that counts,” I said. “Ultras tend to leave their minds alone, if at all possible. Even if they do have implants, it’s usually to replace areas of brain function lost due to injury or old age. They’re not really interested in improving matters, if you get my drift. Maybe that’s why Conjoiners make them twitchy.”

  She unhooked her legs, dangling them over the edge of the bed. Her feet were bare and oddly elongated. She wore the same tight black outfit we’d found her in when we boarded the ship. It was cut low from her neck, in a rectangular shape. Her breasts were small. Though she was bony, with barely any spare muscle on her, she had the broad shoulders of a swimmer. Though Weather had sustained her share of injuries, the outfit showed no sign of damage at all. It appeared to be self-repairing, even self-cleaning.

  “You talk of Ultras as if you weren’t one,” she said.

  “Just an old habit breaking through. Though sometimes I don’t feel like quite the same breed as a man like Van Ness.”

  “Your implants must be very well shielded. I can’t sense them at all.”

  “That’s because there aren’t any.”

  “Squeamish? Or just too young and fortunate not to have needed them yet?”

  “It’s nothing to do with being squeamish. I’m not as young as I look, either.” I held up my mechanical hand. “Nor would I exactly call myself fortunate.”

  She looked at the hand with narrowed, critical eyes. I remembered how she’d flinched back when I reached for her aboard the Cockatrice, and wondered what maltreatment she had suffered at the iron hands of her former masters.

  “You don’t like it?” she asked.

  “I liked the old one better.”

  Weather reached out and gingerly held my hand in hers. They looked small and doll-like as they stroked and examined my mechanical counterpart.

  “This is the only part of you that isn’t organic?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Doesn’t that limit you? Don’t you feel handicapped around the rest of the crew?”

  “Sometimes. But not always. My job means I have to squeeze into places where a man like Van Ness could never fit. It also means I have to be able to tolerate magnetic fields that would rip half the crew to shreds, if they didn’t boil alive first.” I opened and closed my metal fist. “I have to unscrew this, sometimes. I have a plastic replacement if I just need to hook hold of things.”

  “You don’t like it very much.”

  “It does what I ask of it.”

  Weather made to let go of my hand, but her fingers remained in contact with mine for an instant longer than necessary. “I’m sorry that you don’t like it.”

  “I could have got it fixed at one of the orbital clinics, I suppose,” I said, “but there’s always something else that needs fixing first. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the hand, some people might not believe I’m an Ultra at all.”

  “Do you plan on being an Ultra all your life?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say I ever had my mind set on being a shipmaster. It just sort of happened, and now here I am.”

  “I had my mind set on something once,” Weather said. “I thought it was within my grasp, too. Then it slipped out of reach.” She looked at me and then did something wonderful and unexpected, which was to smile. It was not the most genuine-looking smile I’d ever seen, but I sensed the genuine intent behind it. Suddenly I knew there was a human being in the room with me, damaged and dangerous though she might have been. “Now here I am, too. It’s not quite what I expected…but thank you for rescuing me.”

  “I was beginning to wonder if we’d made a mistake. You seemed so reluctant to leave that ship.”

  “I was,” she said, distantly. “But that’s over now. You did
what you thought was the right thing.”

  “Was it?”

  “For me, yes. For the ship…maybe not.” Then she stopped and cocked her head to one side, frowning. Her eyes flashed olive. “What are you looking at, Inigo?”

  “Nothing,” I said, looking sharply away.

  KEEPING OUT OF Van Ness’s way, as he’d advised, was not the hard part of what followed. The Petronel was a big ship and our paths didn’t need to cross in the course of day-to-day duties. The difficulty was finding as much time to visit Weather as I would have liked. My original repair plan had been tight, but the unknown ship forced me to accelerate the schedule even further, despite what I’d told Weps. The burden of work began to take its toll on me, draining my concentration. I was still confident that once that work was done, we’d be able to continue our journey as if nothing had happened, save for the loss of those crew who had died in the engagement and our gaining one new passenger. The other ship would probably abandon us once we pushed the engines up to cruise thrust, looking for easier pickings elsewhere. If it had the swiftness of the Cockatrice, it wouldn’t have been skulking in the shadows letting the other ship take first prize.

  But my optimism was misplaced. When the repair work was done, I once more made my way along the access shaft to the starboard engine and confronted the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. As expected, all six dials were now showing deep blue, which meant they were operating well inside the safety envelope. But when I consulted my log book and made the tiny adjustments that should have taken all the dials into the blue-green—still nicely within the safety envelope—I got a nasty surprise. I only had to nudge two of the dials by a fraction of a millimetre before they shone a hard and threatening orange.

  Something was wrong.

  I checked my settings, of course, making sure none of the other dials were out of position. But there’d been no mistake. I thumbed through the log with increasing haste, a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, looking for an entry where something similar had happened; something that would point me to the obvious mistake I must have made. But none of the previous entries were the slightest help. I’d made no error with the settings, and that left only one possibility: something had happened to the engine. It was not working properly.

  “This isn’t right,” I said to myself. “They don’t fail. They don’t break down. Not like this.”

  But what did I know? My entire experience of working with C-drives was confined to routine operations, under normal conditions. Yet we’d just been through a battle against another ship, one in which we were already known to have sustained structural damage. As shipmaster, I’d been diligent in attending to the hull and the drive spar, but it had never crossed my mind that something might have happened to one or other of the engines.

  Why not?

  There’s a good reason. It’s because even if something had happened, there would never have been anything I could have done about it. Worrying about the breakdown of a Conjoiner drive was like worrying about the one piece of debris you won’t have time to steer around or shoot out of the sky. You can’t do anything about it, ergo you forget about it until it happens. No shipmaster ever loses sleep over the failure of a C-drive.

  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 difficulty 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.