Someone, in other words, prepared to be as patient as a snake.
‘Everything goes back to the Vigilance,’ I said.
Campion opened the door in the stone wall that encircled the gardens.
‘What does the Vigilance have to do with anything?’
‘Think about it for a moment. If you hadn’t visited the Vigilance in your previous circuit, you wouldn’t have been saddled with delivering Doctor Meninx to them. If you hadn’t had to deliver Doctor Meninx, we’d never have been back to that sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm. No Centaurs, no Ateshga - and more than likely no being late for the reunion.’
‘And no Hesperus, either - he’d still be Ateshga’s prisoner.’
‘See what I’m getting at?’
‘I’m still not sure what all that has to do with what Mezereon said.’
‘Maybe nothing - but if all those occurrences hung on your visit to the Vigilance, how do we know something else didn’t? It formed the central part of your strand, a circuit ago. What if there was a detail in your memories, something to do with the Vigilance, that someone didn’t like?’
‘What kind of detail?’
Campion could be almost superhumanly exasperating. ‘No idea. But in the absence of anything better, shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility?’
‘That would mean going back over my thread,’ Campion said, as if that was somehow an insurmountable obstacle. ‘Maybe we should see what the prisoners have to say first.’
Of all the spaces in Campion’s ship, I liked the gardens the best. We had emerged through a gate in a tall ivy-clad stone wall. From the gate we had followed a winding pathway down a gently sloping meadow set with sculptures, sundials, water clocks, wind-chimes, elegant moving statuary and foaming iron fountains, into a bower enclosed by trees. At the centre of the bower was a small summer house, a round wooden building with a conical roof, surrounded by a moat of water which in turn connected to a larger pond, the moat spanned by a red-painted bridge of Chinese design.
The visible sky was the cloudless enamel-blue of a hundred thousand worlds. The layout of the gardens, the agreeable climate of that eternal sunny afternoon, never varied. There were stars in the sky that had not existed when the soil in these gardens was first laid down. There were stars that had shone then that were now veils of dead gas, rushing into darkness. Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.
Mezereon and Aconite were waiting in the summer house, sitting on one of the benches with food and wine on a tray between them. ‘Hello, Purslane,’ they said in near-unison as I ducked into the shadowed interior, with Campion just behind me.
‘I’m glad you both made it,’ I said.
‘We are making it, aren’t we?’ Mezereon asked, directing her question at Campion. She had short blonde hair the colour of sun-dried straw and pale, almost translucent skin, with a delicate mottling of honey-coloured freckles across her cheeks.
‘Too soon to tell, I’m afraid,’ Campion said. ‘We’re putting distance between us and the enemy, but I won’t feel truly safe until this system is just a bad memory.’
‘I meant to ask,’ Aconite said, pausing to sip from the goblet he held. He was muscular and dark-skinned, with a black beard raffishly flecked with silver and a mass of jangling rings hanging from one earlobe. ‘Did you hear from anyone else? We knew we were all right, obviously, but we couldn’t risk broadcasting our presence to the rest of the cloud.’
‘If there was anyone else there,’ Campion said, ‘I didn’t hear from them. Sorry - wish the news was better.’
‘Not your fault, old man.’
‘The only other survivor we know about is Fescue,’ I said, taking a place on the opposite bench, kicking off my shoes and hugging my legs, my arms encircling my shins. ‘We ran into his transmission. He tried to talk us out of entering the cloud, but we decided to take a shot at it.’
Mezereon looked sharply at Aconite, then me. ‘Then I guess you don’t know about Fescue.’
‘He’s dead,’ Aconite said. ‘He stayed behind when most of the survivors had already managed to get out of the system. That transmission must have been one of his last acts.’
The news hit me hard. I had taken it for granted that Fescue was one of the living - how else would he have been in a position to send his warning, if he had not made it through the ambush?
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Engine trouble?’
Mezereon shook her small, pale head wearily. ‘Fescue was trying to create a distraction, to keep the ambushers occupied so that a few of us could get away. He could have escaped if he’d chosen to, but he was thinking of the Line.’
‘I misjudged him,’ I said.
‘You weren’t the only one,’ Campion said, looking down shame facedly.
‘Let’s not get maudlin,’ Aconite said. ‘It’s enough that we have survived to commemorate him. Burnish his name, and all that stuff. We’ll do the old bastard proud.’ He gave Campion an encouraging punch. ‘Right, old man?’
‘Right,’ Campion said.
Mezereon poured herself some more wine while Aconite chewed the end off a loaf of bread. Outside, birds twittered and breezes stirred the reeds around the summer house’s little moat.
‘Are there just the two of you?’ I asked.
‘We’re the only ones up and awake,’ Aconite said. ‘There are three others in abeyance: Lucerne, Melilot and Valerian - and the prisoners, of course.’
Campion leaned over to take a grape from the platter. ‘Is there anything else you need in the meanwhile? Medical attention - anything like that?’
Our two new guests looked at each other momentarily before Mezereon answered for them both. ‘We’re fine. It’s been stressful, but the ship’s looked after us well. If there’d been a problem with rations, or life support, one or more of us would have gone into permanent abeyance. Thankfully, it never came to that.’
‘Have you been awake ever since the ambush?’ I asked.
‘We’d have gone mad from the tension if we hadn’t had abeyance,’ Mezereon said. ‘We took turns. The ship was instructed to bring one or two of us out if she detected something anomalous. It could have been Lucerne or one of the other two, but it was our turn.’
‘This may not be the best time to talk about it,’ Campion said, ‘but it would have been difficult to get one of those weapons close to the reunion planet unless it was hidden.’
‘Inside one of our ships?’ Aconite asked.
‘I hate to think it, but—’
‘You’re right. There were three of those weapons, and the Spitting Cobra, in the ships of Saffron, Scabious and Tare. But they weren’t involved. Their ships must have been captured, the Line protocols cracked.’ Aconite kept looking at Campion as if there could be no other explanation; that to think otherwise was a kind of heresy. ‘They couldn’t have been complicit, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘At this point we shouldn’t rule anything out,’ Campion said.
Mezereon sighed through her nose. ‘It’s about time we faced up to Line involvement, Aconite. Even Fescue had his suspicions. He couldn’t understand how the private network had been broken into, unless one of us was complicit.’
‘Involvement doesn’t necessarily mean willing involvement,’ Aconite said. Then he raised his big hands defensively. ‘Let’s not fall out over this. There’ll be time to ask the unpleasant questions when we make it to the fallback. I won’t flinch from asking them if the evidence points that way.’
I took a piece of bread for myself. ‘Nor will I.’
Mezereon brushed a hand against the iron-grey casing of Melilot’s cryophagus. ‘We should wake them up. It’s what we agreed we’d do if there was a change in our situation.’
‘Be kinder not to,’ Aconite said. ‘At least until we know we’re definitely in the clear.’
‘We can move them into
Dalliance,
at least,’ Campion said. ‘I’ve got plenty of sleepers aboard her already, so a few more won’t hurt. It’s easier to keep an eye on them when they’re all together.’
‘Didn’t have you down as the guest-carrying sort,’ Mezereon said, with an amused smile.
‘Just the way things worked out,’ Campion said.
The prisoners were in a different room from the Gentian shatterlings. Mezereon strode to the first cabinet, worked the heavy clasp and flung wide the patterned brass doors. Inside lay a scaffold of ancient machinery, a framework supporting an array of impassors energising a containment bubble. The bubble’s near-transparency made it resemble a globe of blown glass, large enough to swallow a throne. Inside the bubble floated another kind of framework, this one supporting time-compression mechanisms. They created a secondary bubble, scarlet-tinged as if the glass had been stained. Inside the bubble hovered a chair, edges curved to fit inside the confines of the field. Inside the high-backed throne, secured against involuntary movements, was a human figure. The figure had the deathly stillness of a hologram, but it was neither dead nor holographic.
‘Is this Grilse?’ I asked, remembering what Mezereon had already told Campion.
‘As far as we know,’ she said. ‘There was a Grilse in the Marcellin Line, circuits ago. And of course, the Marcellins were given responsibility for the H-guns. But until we can get into his skull, we won’t know for sure.’
‘How did you catch them?’ Campion asked.
‘Some shatterlings had broken cover and were making a run for interstellar space,’ Mezereon said. ‘The ambushers tried to stop them - they really didn’t want any of us ever to leave that system. Fescue intercepted one of the ambushers’ ships and damaged it badly, and the other Gentians were able to make their escape. I don’t think Fescue ever found out that there were survivors still aboard the ambusher ship - he was dead by the time we pulled them in.’
Campion frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The damaged ambusher drifted within range of my ship. On the chance that it might contain weapons or supplies we could use, we decided to risk dropping the impassor and sending out a shuttle. It was a risk - don’t think we didn’t argue about it.’ She looked steadily at Aconite. ‘I didn’t approve; I’ll admit that. But in the end it was the right thing to do. There wasn’t much we could use aboard the wreck, but we got the four prisoners.’ She sneered. ‘Cowards: if they’d had a fucking
atom
of courage they’d have killed themselves rather than run the chance of falling into our hands.’
‘We put them into stasis almost immediately,’ Aconite said. ‘The cabinets are old, but they were all we had. If we’d left them in shiptime there’d have been a chance of them escaping, alerting the other ambushers or finding a way to commit suicide.’
‘And before you locked them away?’ I asked.
‘We interrogated them as best we could,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get anything useful, though.’
‘Except from Grilse,’ I said.
‘That was after he went into the casket.’ Mezereon touched part of the casket to the left of the doors, causing a hidden panel to reveal itself. It was set with heavy brass controls, ornately engraved dials and clocks. The main control was a lever running in a graduated quadrant from left to right. At the moment the lever was pushed four-fifths of the way to the right, at a setting of one hundred thousand. That was enough to ensure that a second of time as experienced in the stasis cabinet equalled a day as measured beyond it. The logarithmic control could be pushed all the way to the right, giving a time ratio of one million, but even with the best equipment that was a setting to be used under emergency conditions only. ‘He’s safe enough now,’ Mezereon said, with one eye on the Marcellin, ‘but when we dialled him back down we started to see signs of unstable field collapse. We held him low enough to reach with Synchromesh, so we could talk in person, but we didn’t want to push our luck.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. ‘And the others?’
‘Just as risky, if not more so. Grilse’s cabinet is the best of the four - the other three are in even worse repair.’ Mezereon closed the control panel, then swung shut the patterned doors. ‘I wouldn’t recommend attempting to bring him out until we reach the Belladonna world. At least there we’ll be able to call on the technical assistance of the rest of the Line.’
‘What’s left of it,’ I said.
‘There’ll be more of us at the fallback,’ Mezereon said. ‘Call that an act of faith, if you will. But if I didn’t believe that ... I’d end myself. Voluntary attrition.’
‘We all feel that way,’ Campion said.
Aconite turned to him. ‘Did you tell Purslane what Grilse told us?’
‘She knows.’
‘And what do you both make of it?’
‘I’d love to ask Grilse in person,’ Campion said.
Aconite’s smile was grim. ‘You’ll get your chance, don’t worry about that.’
‘I believe Grilse,’ I said. ‘It’s not comfortable, but why would he invent a detail like that unless it had some substance? It doesn’t make Campion complicit in any of this.’
‘And Doctor Meninx - what does he have to say?’ Mezereon asked.
‘Not a lot lately,’ Campion said.
‘He died,’ I said. ‘Tank failure.’
Aconite winced. ‘Spectacular timing, old man.’
Campion raised his hands defensively. ‘It wasn’t my fault! I was under strict instructions not to touch his tank, and I didn’t.’
Aconite clapped him on the back in a comradely fashion. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I’ll take a look at the tank. But I can already tell you what I’ll find, based on all the aquatics I’ve known: some rusting piece of junk with nothing inside it newer than a million years old, just begging to go wrong.’
‘Thank you,’ Campion said, sounding taken aback.
‘See, he does have his uses,’ Mezereon said.
That was when Silver Wings whispered into my brain, telling me there as something vital I needed to know.
The image was a rectangular volume, divided into cubic cells by a scaffold of fine green lines. At one end of the volume was a representation of our two ships, close enough together that they almost resembled a single vessel. At the other end lay a halo of smeared light indicating the heliopause of the system we had just departed; the boundary where the star’s influence became negligible and beyond which we could consider ourselves to be in true interstellar space. Halfway along the rectangle was a trio of icons representing the three ships that had been pursuing Campion ever since he rescued Mezereon and the others.