“This isn’t right,” I said to myself. “They don’t fail. They don’t break down. Not like this.”
But what did I know? My entire experience of working with C-drives was confined to routine operations, under normal conditions. Yet we’d just been through a battle against another ship, one in which we were already known to have sustained structural damage. As shipmaster, I’d been diligent in attending to the hull and the drive spar, but it had never crossed my mind that something might have happened to one or other of the engines.
Why not?
There’s a good reason. It’s because even if something had happened, there would never have been anything I could have done about it. Worrying about the breakdown of a Conjoiner drive was like worrying about the one piece of debris you won’t have time to steer around or shoot out of the sky. You can’t do anything about it, ergo you forget about it until it happens. No shipmaster ever loses sleep over the failure of a C-drive.
It looked as if I was going to lose a lot more than sleep.
Even if we didn’t have another ship to worry about, we were in more than enough trouble. We were too far out from Shiva-Parvati to get back again, and yet we were moving too slowly to make it to another system. Even if the engines kept working as they were now, we’d take far too long to reach relativistic speed, where time dilation became appreciable. At twenty-five per cent of the speed of light, what would have been a twenty-year hop before became an eighty-year crawl now…and that was an eighty-year crawl in which almost all that time would be experienced aboard ship. Across that stretch of time, reefersleep was a lottery. Our caskets were designed to keep people frozen for five to ten years, not four-fifths of a century.
I was scared. I’d gone from feeling calmly in control to feeling total devastation in about five minutes.
I didn’t want to let the rest of the crew know that we had a potential crisis on our hands, at least not until I’d spoken to Weather. I’d already crossed swords with Van Ness, but he was still my captain, and I wanted to spare him the difficulty of a frightened crew, at least until I knew all the facts.
Weather was awake when I arrived. In all my visits, I’d never found her sleeping. In the normal course of events Conjoiners had no need of sleep: at worst, they’d switch off certain areas of brain function for a few hours.
She read my face like a book. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
So much for the notion that Conjoiners were not able to interpret facial expressions. Just because they didn’t make many of them didn’t mean they’d forgotten the rules.
I sat down on the fold-out stool.
“I’ve tried to push the engines back up to normal cruise thrust. I’m already seeing red on two dials, and we haven’t even exceeded point-two gees.”
She thought about this for several moments: what for Weather must have been hours of subjective contemplation. “You didn’t appear to be pushing your engines dangerously during the chase.”
“I wasn’t. Everything looked normal up until now. I think we must have taken some damage to one of the drives, during Voulage’s softening-up assault. I didn’t see any external evidence, but—”
“You wouldn’t, not necessarily. The interior architecture of one of our drives is a lot more complicated, a lot more delicate, than is normally appreciated. It’s at least possible that a shock-wave did some harm to one of your engines, especially if your coupling gear—the shock-dampening assembly—was already compromised.”
“It probably was,” I said. “The spar was already stressed.”
“Then you have your explanation. Something inside your engine has broken, or is considered by the engine itself to be dangerously close to failure. Either way, it would be suicide to increase the thrust beyond the present level.”
“Weather, we need both those engines to get anywhere, and we need them at normal efficiency.”
“It hadn’t escaped me.”
“Is there anything you can do to help us?”
“Very little, I expect.”
“But you must know something about the engines, or you wouldn’t have been able to help Voulage.”
“Voulage’s engines weren’t damaged,” she explained patiently.
“I know that. But you were still able to make them work better. Isn’t there something you can do for us?”
“From here, nothing at all.”
“But if you were allowed to get closer to the engines…might that make a difference?”
“Until I’m there, I couldn’t possibly say. It’s irrelevant though, isn’t it? Your captain will never allow me out of this room.”
“Would you do it for us if he did?”
“I’d do it for me.”
“Is that the best you can offer?”
“All right, then maybe I’d for it for you.” Just saying this caused Weather visible discomfort, as if the utterance violated some deep personal code that had remained intact until now. “You’ve been kind to me. I know you risked trouble with Van Ness to make things easier in my cell. But you need to understand something very important. You may care for me. You may even think you like me. But I can’t give you back any of that. What I feel for you is…” Weather hesitated, her mouth half-open. “You know we call you the retarded. There’s a reason for that. The emotions I feel…the things that go on in my head…simply don’t map onto anything you’d recognise as love, or affection, or even friendship. Reducing them to those terms would be like…” And then she stalled, unable to finish.
“Like making a sacrifice?”
“You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me.”
“There’s more to love than fascination. And you said it yourself: you’re halfway back to being human again.”
“I said I wasn’t a Conjoiner any more. But that doesn’t mean I could ever be like you.”
“You could try.”
“You don’t understand us.”
“I want to!”
Weather jammed her olive eyes tight shut. “Let’s…not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? I only wanted to spare you any unnecessary emotional pain. But if we don’t get this ship moving properly, that’ll be the least of your worries.”
“I know.”
“So perhaps we should return to the matter of the engines. Again: none of this will matter if Van Ness refuses to trust me.”
My cheeks were smarting as if I’d been slapped hard in the face. Part of me knew she was only being kind, in the harshest of ways. That part was almost prepared to accept her rejection. The other part of me only wanted her more, as if her bluntness had succeeded only in sharpening my desire. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I was insane to think a Conjoiner could ever feel something in return. But I remembered the gentle way she’d stroked my fingers, and I wanted her even more.
“I’ll deal with Van Ness,” I said. “I think there’s a little something that will convince him to take a risk. You start thinking about what you can do for us.”
“Is that an order, Inigo?”
“No,” I said. “Nobody’s going to order you to do anything. I gave you my word on that, and I’m not about to break it. Nothing you’ve just said changes that.”
She sat tight-lipped, staring at me as if I was some kind of byzantine logic puzzle she needed to unscramble. I could almost feel the furious computation of her mind, as if I was standing next to a humming turbine. Then she lifted her little pointed chin minutely, saying nothing, but letting me know that if I convinced Van Ness, she would do what she could, however ineffectual that might prove.