Redemption Ark

Skade arrived at the bridge of Nightshade, conscious that her crest was pulsing livid shades of rose and scarlet. The bridge was a windowless spherical room deep inside the ship, large enough to contain five or six Conjoiners without seeming cramped. But for now only Clavain and Remontoire were present, just as they had been when she left. They were both lying in acceleration hammocks, suspended in the middle of the sphere, their eyes closed as they tapped into the wider sensory environment of Nightshade. They looked absurdly restful, with their arms neatly folded across their chests.

Skade waited while the room threw a separate hammock around her, wrapping her in a protective mesh of lianalike vines. Idly, she skimmed their minds. Remontoire’s was fully open to her, even his Closed Council partitions appearing as mere demarcations rather than absolute barriers. His mind was like a city made of glass, smoked here and there, but never entirely opaque. Seeing through Closed Council screens had been one of the first tricks that the Night Council had taught her, and it had proven useful even after she had joined the Closed Council. Not all Closed Council members were privy to exactly the same secrets — there was the Inner Sanctum, for a start — but nothing was hidden from Skade.

Clavain was frustratingly harder to read, which was why he both fascinated and disturbed her. His neural implants were of a much older configuration than anyone else’s, and Clavain had never allowed them to be upgraded. Large parts of his brain were not subsumed by the loom at all, and the neural bondings between these regions and the Conjoiner parts were sparse and inefficiently distributed. Skade’s search-and-retrieve algorithms could extract neural patterns from any part of Clavain’s brain that had been subsumed by the loom, but even that was a lot easier said than done. Searching Clavain’s mind was like being given the keys to a fabulous library that had just been swept through by a whirlwind. By the time she located what she was looking for, it was usually no longer relevant.

Nonetheless, Skade had learned a great deal about Clavain. It was ten years since Galiana’s return, but if her reading of his mind was accurate — and she had no reason to doubt that it was otherwise — Clavain still had no real idea about what had happened.

In common with the whole of the Mother Nest, Clavain knew that Galiana’s ship had encountered hostile alien entities in deep space, machines that had come to be called the wolves. The wolves had infiltrated the ship, ripping open the minds of her crew. Clavain knew that Galiana had been spared and that her body was still preserved; he knew also that there was a structure of evident wolf origin lodged in her skull. What he did not know, and to the best of Skade’s knowledge had never suspected, was that Galiana had returned to consciousness; that there had been a brief window of lucidity before the Wolf had spoken through her. More than one, in fact.

Skade recalled lying to Galiana, telling her that Clavain and Felka were already dead. It had not been easy at first. Like any Conjoiner, Skade viewed Galiana with awe. She was the mother of them all, the queen of the Conjoined faction. Equally, the Night Council had reminded Skade that she had a duty to the Mother Nest that superseded her reverence towards Galiana. It was her duty to make maximum use of the windows of lucidity to learn what could be learned of the wolves, and that meant unburdening Galiana of any superfluous concerns. Hurtful as it had felt at the time, the Night Council had assured her it was better in the long run.

And gradually Skade had come to see the sense of it. It was not really Galiana she was lying to, after all, but a shadow of what Galiana had been. And one lie naturally demanded another, which was why Clavain and Felka had never learned of the conversations.

Skade withdrew her mental probes, settling for a routine level of intimacy. She allowed Clavain access to her surface memories, sensory modalities and emotions, or rather to a subtly doctored version of them. At the same time Remontoire saw precisely as much as he expected to see — but again, doctored and modified to suit Skade’s purposes.

The acceleration hammock tugged Skade into the centre of the sphere, next to the other two. Skade folded her arms under her breasts, settling them over the curved plate of the compad, which was still whispering its findings into her long-term memory.

Clavain’s presence asserted itself. [Skade. Nice of you to join us.]

sensed a change in our attack readiness, Clavain. I imagine it has something to do with the Demarchist ship?

[Actually, it’s a little more interesting than that. Take a look.]