Redemption Ark

The changes were not at all apparent from within; it was only from the outside — seen from an inspection shuttle — that they became manifest. The changes had happened during the slow-down phase as the great ship was decelerating into the new system. With the inching speed of land erosion, the rear of the ship’s conic hull, normally a smaller inverted cone in its own right, had become flattened, like the base of a chess piece. No control over this transformation had been possible, and indeed, much of it had already taken place before anyone had noticed. There were vaults of the great ship that were only visited by humans once or twice a century, and much of the rear of the hull fell into that category. The machinery that lurked there had been surreptitiously dismantled or relocated further up the hull, in other disused spaces. Ilia Volyova might have noticed sooner than anyone — not much had ever escaped Ilia Volyova — but she was gone now, and the ship had new tenants who were not yet as devoutly familiar with its territory.

The changes were neither life-threatening nor injurious to the ship’s performance, but they remained puzzling, and further evidence — if any were needed — that the Captain’s psyche had not completely vanished, and could be expected to surprise them still further at times in the future. There appeared little doubt that the Captain had played some role in the reshaping of the ship he had become. The question of whether the reshaping had been consciously driven, or had merely sprung from some irrational dreamlike whim, was much harder to answer.

So for the time being, because there were other things to worry about, they ignored it. Nostalgia for Infinity fell into tight orbit around the watery world and probes were sent arcing into the atmosphere and the vast turquoise oceans that nearly enclosed the world from pole to pole. Creamy cloud patterns had been dabbed on it in messy, exuberant swirls. There were no large landmasses; the visible ocean was unmarred except for a few carelessly tossed archipelagos of islands, splashes of ochre paint against corneal blue-green. The closer they had come, the more nearly certain it became that this was a Juggler World, and the indications turned out to be correct. Continental rafts of living biomass stained swathes of the ocean grey-green. The atmosphere could be breathed by humans, and there were enough trace elements in the soils and bedrocks of the islands to support self-sustaining colonies.

It wasn’t perfect, by any means. Islands on Juggler worlds had a habit of vanishing under tsunamis mediated by the great semi-sentient biomass of the oceans themselves. But for twenty years, it would suffice. If the colonists wanted to stay, they’d have time to build pontoon cities floating on the sea itself.

A chain of islands — northerly, cold, but predicted to be tectonically stable — was selected.

‘Why there, in particular?’ Clavain asked. ‘There are other islands at the same latitude, and they can’t be any less stable.’

‘There’s something down there,’ Scorpio told him. ‘We keep getting a faint signal from it.’

Clavain frowned. ‘A signal? But no one’s ever supposed to have been here.’

‘It’s just a radio pulse, very weak,’ Felka said. ‘But the modulation is interesting. It’s Conjoiner code.’

‘We put a beacon down here?’

‘We must have, at some point. But there’s no record of any Conjoiner ship ever coming here. Except…’ She paused, unwilling to say what had to be said.

‘Well?’

‘It probably doesn’t mean anything, Clavain. But Galiana could have come here. It’s not impossible, and we know she would have investigated any Juggler worlds she came across. Of course, we don’t know where her ship went before the wolves found her, and by the time she made it back to the Mother Nest all on-board records were lost or corrupted. But who else could have left a Conjoiner beacon?’

‘Anyone who was operating covertly. We don’t know everything that the Closed Council got up to, even now.’

‘I thought it was worth mentioning, that’s all.’

He nodded. He had felt a great crescendo of hope, and then a wave of sadness that was made all the deeper by what had preceded it. Of course she had not been here. It was stupid of him even to entertain the thought. But there was something down below that merited investigation, and it was sensible to locate their settlement near the item of interest. He had no problem with that.

Detailed plans for settlement were quickly drawn up. Tentative surface camps were established a month after their arrival.