'Right. Then we'd better make damn sure we've got that gun by then, right?'
She carried him most of the way, his heels scuffing the ground in a half-hearted attempt at locomotion. But he remained lucid, and Sora began to hope that the wound really had been cauterised by the beam-weapon.
'You knew the Husker would be human, didn't you?' she said, to keep him talking.
'Told you: rumours. The alien cyborg story was just that - a fiction our own side invented. I told you it wouldn't be xenocide.'
'Not good enough, Merlin.' She was about to tell him about the symbiote in her head, then drew back, fearful that it would destroy what trust he had in her. 'I know you've been lying. I hacked your ship's log.'
They had reached the shadow of the pyramid, descending the last hillock towards the access ports spaced around the rim.
'Thought you trusted me.'
'I had to know if there was a reason
not
to. And I think I was right.'
She told him what she had learned: he'd been travelling for longer than he had told her - whole decades longer, by shiptime - and that he had grown old during that journey, and perhaps a little insane. And then how he had seemed to find the Brittlestar. 'Problem is, Merlin, we -
I
- don't know what happened to you in that thing, except that it had something to do with finding the gun, and you came out of it younger than when you went in.'
'You really want to know?'
'Take a guess.'
He started telling her some of it, while she dragged him towards their destination.
The pyramid was surrounded by tens of metres of self-repairing armour, white as bone. If the designers had not allowed deliberate entrances around its rim, Sora doubted that she and Merlin would ever have found a way to get inside.
'Should have been sentries here, once,' Merlin said, while leaning against her shoulder. 'It's lucky for us that everything falls apart, eventually. '
'Except your fabled gun.' They were moving down a sloping corridor, the walls and ceiling unblemished, the floor strewn with icy debris from the moon's surface. 'Anyway, stop changing the subject.'
Merlin coughed and resumed his narrative. 'I was getting very old and very disillusioned. I hadn't found the gun and I was about ready to give up. That, or go insane. Then I found the Brittlestar. I came out of the Waynet and there it was, sitting there pulsing gravity waves at me.'
'It would take a pair of neutron stars,' the familiar said, 'orbiting around each other, to generate that kind of signature.'
'What happened next?' Sora asked.
'Don't really remember. Not properly. I went - or was taken - inside it - and there I met . . .' He paused, and for a moment she thought it was because he needed to catch his breath. But that wasn't the reason. 'I met
entities
, I suppose you'd call them. I quickly realised that they were just highly advanced projections of a maintenance programme left behind by the Waymakers.'
'They made you young, didn't they?'
'I don't think it was stretching their capabilities overmuch, put it like that.'
The corridor flattened out, branching in several different directions. Merlin leaned toward one of the routes.
'Why?'
'So I could finish the job. Find the gun.'
The corridor opened out into a chamber: a bowl-ceilinged control room, unpressurised and lit only by the wavering light of their helmets. Seats and consoles were arrayed around a single spherical projection device, cradled in ash-coloured gimbals. Corpses slumped over some of the consoles, but nothing remained except skeletons draped in colourless rags. Presumably they had rotted away for centuries before the chamber was finally opened to vacuum, and even that would have been more than twenty thousand years ago.
'They must have been attacked by a bioweapon,' Merlin said, easing himself into one of the seats, which - after exhaling a cloud of dust - seemed able to take his weight. 'Something that left the machines intact.'
Sora walked around, examining the consoles, all of which betrayed a technology beyond anything the Cohort had known for millennia. Some of the symbols on them were recognisable antecedents of those used in Main, but there was nothing she could actually read.
Merlin made a noise that might have been a grunt of suppressed pain, and when Sora looked at him, she saw that he was spooling the optical cable from his suit sleeve, just as he had when they had first met on the cometary shard. He lifted back an access panel on the top of the console, exposing an intestinal mass of silvery circuits. He seemed to know exactly where to place the end of the cable, allowing its microscopic cilia to tap into the ancient system.
The projection chamber was warming to life now: amber light swelling from its heart, solidifying into abstract shapes, neutral test representations. For a moment, the chamber showed a schematic of the ringed gas giant and its moons, with the locations of the approaching Husker ships marked with complex ideograms. The familiar was right: their place of sanctuary must have been the moon with the liquid ocean. Then the shapes moved fluidly, zooming in on the gas giant.
'You wanted to know where the gun was,' Merlin said. 'Well, I'm about to show you.'
The view enlarged on a cyclonic storm near the planet's equator, a great swirling red eye in the atmosphere.
'It's a metastable storm,' Sora said. 'Common feature of gas giants. You're not telling me--'
Merlin's gauntleted fingers were at work now, flying across an array of keys marked with symbols of unguessable meaning. 'The storm's natural, of course, or at least it was before these people hid the gun inside it, exploiting the pressure differentials to hold the gun at a fixed point in the atmosphere, for safekeeping. There's just one small problem.'
'Go ahead . . .'
'The gun isn't a gun. It functions as a weapon, but that's mostly accidental. It certainly wasn't the intention of the Waymakers.'
'You're losing me, Merlin.'
'Maybe I should tell you about the ring.'
Something was happening to the surface of the gas giant now. The cyclone was not behaving in the manner of other metastable storms Sora had seen. It was spinning perceptibly, throwing off eddies from its curlicued edge like the tails of seahorses. It was growing a bloodier red by the second.
'Yes,' Sora said. 'Tell me about the ring.'
'The Waymakers gave it to me, when they made me young. It's a reminder of what I have to do. You see, if I fail, it will be very bad for every thinking creature in this part of the galaxy. What did you see when you looked at the ring, Sora?'
'A red gem, with two lights orbiting inside it.'
'Would you be surprised if I told you that the lights represent two neutron stars, two of the densest objects in the universe? And that they're in orbit about each other, spinning around their mutual centre of gravity?'
'Inside the Brittlestar.'
She caught his glance, directed quizzically toward her. 'Yes,' Merlin said slowly. 'A pair of neutron stars, born in supernovae, bound together by gravity, slowly spiralling closer and closer to each other.'
The cyclonic storm was whirling insanely now, sparks of subatmospheric lightning flickering around its boundary. Sora had the feeling that titanic - and quite inhuman - energies were being unleashed, as if something very close to magic was being deployed beneath the clouds. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen.
'I hope you know how to fire this when the time comes, Merlin.'
'All the knowledge I need is carried by the ring. It taps into my bloodstream and builds structures in my head that tell me exactly what I need to know, on a level so deep that I hardly know it myself.'
'Husker swarm will be within range in ninety minutes,' the familiar said, 'assuming attack profiles for the usual swarm boser and charm-torp weapon configurations. Of course, if they have any refinements, they might be in attack range a little sooner than that--'
'Merlin: tell me about the neutron stars, will you? I need something to keep my mind occupied.'
'The troublesome part is what happens when they
stop
spiralling around each other and
collide
. Mercifully, it's a fairly rare event even by galactic standards - it doesn't happen more than once in a million years, and when it does it's usually far enough away not to be a problem.'
'But if it isn't far away - how troublesome would it be?'
'Imagine the release of more energy in a second than a typical star emits in ten billion years: one vast, photo-leptonic fireball. An unimaginably bright pulse of gamma rays. Instant sterilisation for thousands of light-years in any direction.'
The cyclone had grown a central bulge now, a perfectly circular bruise rising above the surface of the planet. As it rose, towering thousands of kilometres above the cloud layer, it elongated like a waterspout. Soon, Sora could see it backdropped against space. And there was something rising within it.
'The Waymakers tried to stop it, didn't they?'
Merlin nodded. 'They found the neutron star binary when they extended the Waynet deeper into the galaxy. They realised that the two stars were only a few thousand years from colliding - and that there was almost nothing they could do about it.'
She could see what she thought was the weapon, now, encased in the waterspout like a seed. It was huge - larger perhaps than this moon. It looked fragile, nonetheless, like an impossibly ornate candelabrum, or a species of deep-sea medusa glowing with its own bioluminescence. Sloughing atmosphere, the thing came to a watchful halt, and the waterspout slowly retracted back towards the cyclone, which was now slowing, like a monstrous flywheel grinding down.
'Nothing?'
'Well - almost nothing.'
'They built the Brittlestar around it,' Sora said. 'A kind of shield, right? So that when the stars collided, the flash would be contained?'
'Not even Waymaker science could contain that much energy.' Merlin looked to the projection, seeming to pay attention to the weapon for the first time. If he felt any elation on seeing his gun for the first time, none of it was visible on his face. He looked, instead, ashen - as if the years had suddenly reclaimed what the Waymakers had given him. 'All they could do was keep the stars in check, keep them from spiralling any closer. So they built the Brittlestar, a vast machine with only one function: to constantly nudge the orbits of the neutron stars at its heart. For every angstrom that the stars fell towards each other, the Brittlestar pushed them an angstrom apart. And it was designed to keep doing that for a million years, until the Waymakers found a way to shift the entire binary beyond the galaxy. You want to know how they kept pushing them apart?'
Sora nodded, though she thought she half-knew the answer already.
'Tiny black holes,' Merlin said. 'Accelerated close to the speed of light, each black hole interacting gravitationally with the binary before evaporating in a puff of pair-production radiation.'
'Just the same way the gun functions. That's no coincidence, is it?'
'The gun - what we call the gun - was just a component in the Brittlestar: the source of relativistic black holes needed to keep the neutron stars from colliding.'
Sora looked around the room. 'And these people stole it?'
'Like I said, they were closer to the Waymakers than us. They knew enough about them to dismantle part of the Brittlestar, to override its defences and remove the mechanism they needed to win their war.'
'But the Brittlestar--'
'Hasn't been working properly ever since. Its capability to regenerate itself was harmed when the subsystem was stolen, and the remaining black-hole generating mechanisms can't do all the work required. The neutron stars have continued to spiral closer together - slowly but surely.'
'But you said they were only a few thousand years from collision . . .'
Merlin had not stopped working the controls in all this time. The gun had come closer, seemingly oblivious to the ordinary laws of celestial mechanics. Down below, the planetary surface had returned to normality, except for a ruddier hue to the storm.
'Maybe now,' Merlin said, 'you're beginning to understand why I want the gun so badly.'
'You want to return it, don't you? You never really wanted to find a weapon.'
'I did, once.' Merlin seemed to tap some final reserve of energy, his voice growing momentarily stronger. 'But now I'm older and wiser. In less than four thousand years the stars meet, and it suddenly won't matter who wins this war. We're like ignorant armies fighting over a patch of land beneath a rumbling volcano!'
Four thousand years
, Sora thought. More time had passed since she had been born.
'If we don't have the gun,' she said, 'we die anyway - wiped out by the Huskers. Not much of a choice, is it?'
'At least
something
would survive. Something that might even still think of itself as human.'