He watched the ragged shell of the migration wave increase in size, becoming a little less spherical as the distances between the ships increased. And then, one by one, the ships began to disappear. Their icons flashed red and vanished, leaving nothing behind.
Urton was speaking now, her hands folded across her chest. “The Inhibitors had already locked on to those escaping ships,” she said. “From the moment the attack began, they didn’t have a hope. The Inhibitors caught up, smothered them, stripped the ships down to make more Inhibitors.”
“We can even track them mathematically,” Vasko elaborated, “with models based on the mass of raw material in each ship. Each captured vessel becomes the seed for a new wolf expansion sphere.”
The shell was breaking up. There had been hundreds of ships to begin with; now there could not be more than three dozen left. Even some of these last remaining sparks were vanishing from the display.
“No,” he said.
“There was nothing we could do,” Vasko said. “It’s the end of the world, Scorp. That’s all it was ever going to be.”
“Run it forwards, to the end.”
Vasko complied. The numerals blurred, the scale of the display lurching wider. There were still some ships left: maybe twenty. Scorpio didn’t have the heart to count them. At least a third of them had been the ones that had been approaching Yellowstone when the crisis started. Of the ships in the evacuation wave, not many more than a dozen had made it out this far.
“I’m sorry,” Vasko said.
“You woke me for this?” Scorpio said. “Just to rub my snout in it? Just to show me the utter fucking futility of coming all this way?”
“Scorpio,” Aura said chidingly. “Please. I’m only six.”
“We woke you because you ordered us to wake you when we got here,” Vasko said.
“We never got anywhere,” Scorpio said. “You said it yourself. We’re turning around, just like those other fortunate sons of bitches. I’ll ask you again: why did you wake me, if it wasn’t to show me this?”
“Show him,” Khouri said.
“There was another reason,” Vasko said.
The image in the tank wobbled and stabilised. Something new appeared. It was fuzzy, even after the enhancement filters had been applied. The computers were guessing details into existence, constantly testing their assumptions against the faint signal rising above the crackle of background noise. The best that the high-magnification cameras could offer was a rectangular shape with vague suggestions of engine modules and comms blisters.
“It’s a ship,” Vasko said. “Not a lighthugger. Something smaller, like an in-system shuttle or freighter. It’s the only human spacecraft within two light-months of Epsilon Eridani.”
“What the hell is it doing out there?” Scorpio asked.
“What everyone else was doing,” Khouri said. “Trying to get away from there as quickly as possible. It’s sustaining five gees, but it won’t be able to keep that up for very long.” She added, “If it’s really what it looks like.”
“What do you mean?”
“She means that we backtracked its point of origin,” Vasko said. “Of course, there’s some guesswork, but we think this is more or less what happened.”
He cut back to the main display showing the shell of expanding lighthuggers. Now the numerals tumbled in reverse. The icon of the shuttle zoomed back into the heart of the expansion, coinciding with a lighthugger that had just popped into existence. Vasko ran the scenario back a little more, then let it run forwards in accelerated time. Now the lighthugger was moving away from Yellowstone, following its own escape trajectory. Scorpio read the ship’s name: Wild Pallas.
The icon winked out. At that same moment the separate emblem of the shuttle raced away from the point where the lighthugger had been.
“Someone got out,” Scorpio said, marvelling. “Used the shuttle as a lifeboat before the wolves got them.”
“Not many, if that lighthugger was carrying hundreds of thousands of sleepers,” Vasko said.
“If we save a dozen we’ve justified our visit. And that shuttle could easily be carrying thousands.”
“We don’t know that, Scorp,” Khouri said. “It isn’t transmitting, or at least not along a line of sight we can intercept No distress codes, nothing.”
“They wouldn’t be transmitting if they thought the space around them was swarming with wolves,” Scorpio said, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save the poor bastards. That is why you woke me, isn’t it? To decide whether we rescue them or not?”
“Actually,” Vasko said, “the reason we woke you was to let you know that the ship’s within range of the hypometric weapons. We think it may be safer to destroy it.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Scorpio toured the ship. It distracted his mind from dwelling on what had happened to Yellowstone. He kept hoping all this would turn out to be a bad dream, one of those plausible nightmares that sometimes happened during a slow revival from reefersleep. Any moment now this layer of reality was going to peel back and they would be pulling him out of the casket again. The news would be bad: the wolves would still be on their way, but they would not yet have reached Yellowstone There would still be time to warn the planet—still time to make a difference. If the system had just one more month, millions might be saved. The wolves would still be out there, of course, but any prolongation of life was better than immediate extinction. He had to believe that, or else everything was futile.
But he kept not waking up. This nightmare into which he had woken had the stubborn texture of reality.
He was going to have to get used to it.
Aboard the ship, a great many things had changed while he had been sleeping. Time dilation had compressed the twenty-three-year journey between Ararat and the Yellowstone system into six years of shiptime, with many of the crew staying awake for a significant portion of that time. Some had spent the entire trip warm, unwilling to submit to reefersleep when the future was so uncertain. They had coaxed and nursed the new technologies into life—not just the hypometric weapons, but the other gifts that Remontoire had left. When Scorpio’s companions took him beyond the hull in the observation capsule, they traversed a landscape darker and colder than space itself. Nested in the outer layer of the hull, the cryo-arithmetic engines conjured heat out of existence by a sleight of quantum computation. A technician had tried to explain how the cryo-arithmetic engines worked, but some crucial twist had lost him halfway through. In Chasm City he had once hired an accountant to make his finances disappear from the official scrutiny of the Canopy financial regulators. He had experienced a similar feeling when his accountant explained the devious little principle that underpinned his patented credit-laundering technique: some detail that made his head hurt. Scorpio just couldn’t grasp it. Similarly, he simply couldn’t grasp the paradox of quantum computation that allowed the engines to launder heat away from under the noses of the universe’s thermal regulators.
Just as long as they kept working, just as long they didn’t spiral out of control like they had on Skade’s ship: that was all he cared about.