“And does that alter the way you think about me?”
I said nothing for several paces. “I don’t know, Weather. Until now I never really gave much thought to those horror stories about the Spiders. I assumed they’d been exaggerated, the way things often are during wartime.”
“But now you’ve seen the light. You realise that, in fact, we are monsters after all.”
“I didn’t say that. But I’ve just learned that something I always thought untrue—that Conjoiners would take prisoners and convert them into other Conjoiners—really happened.”
“To Van Ness?”
She didn’t need to know all the facts. “To someone close to him. The worst was that he got to meet that person after her transformation.”
After a little while, Weather said, “Mistakes were made. Very, very bad mistakes.”
“How can you call taking someone prisoner and stuffing their skull full of Conjoiner machinery a ‘mistake,’ Weather? You must have known exactly what you were doing, exactly what it would do to the prisoner.”
“Yes, we did,” she said, “but we considered it a kindness. That was the mistake, Inigo. And it was a kindness, too: no one who tasted Transenlightenment ever wanted to go back to the experiential mundanity of retarded consciousness. But we did not anticipate how distressing this might be to those who had known the candidates beforehand.”
“He felt that she didn’t love him any more.”
“That wasn’t the case. It’s just that everything else in her universe had become so heightened, so intense, that the love for another individual could no longer hold her interest. It had become just one facet in a much larger mosaic.”
“And you don’t think that was cruel?”
“I said it was a mistake. But if Van Ness had joined her…if Van Ness had submitted to the Conjoined, known Transenlightenment for himself…they would have reconnected on a new level of personal intimacy.”
I wondered how she could be so certain. “That doesn’t help Van Ness now.”
“We wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If there were ever to be… difficulties again, we wouldn’t take candidates so indiscriminately.”
“But you’d still take some.”
“We’d still consider it a kindness,” Weather said.
Not much was said as we traversed the connecting spar out to the starboard engine. I watched Weather alertly, transfixed by the play of colours across her cooling crest. Eventually she whirled around and said, “I’m not going to do anything, Inigo, so stop worrying about it. This collar’s bad enough, without feeling you watching my every move.”
“Maybe the collar isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Van Ness thinks you want to blow up the ship. I guess if you had a way to do that, we wouldn’t get much warning.”
“No, you wouldn’t. But I’m not going to blow up the ship. That’s not within my power, unless you let me turn the input dials all the way into the red. Even Voulage wasn’t that stupid.”
I wiped my sweat-damp hand on the thigh of my trousers. “We don’t know much about how these engines work. Are you sensing anything from them yet?”
“A little,” she admitted. “There’s crosstalk between the two units, but I don’t have the implants to make sense of that. Most Conjoiners don’t need anything that specialised, unless they work in the drive creches, educating the engines.”
“The engines need educating?”
Not answering me directly, she said, “I can feel the engine now. Effective range for my implants is a few dozen metres under these conditions. We must be very close.”
“We are,” I said as we turned a corner. Ahead lay the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. They were all showing blue-green now, but only because I’d throttled the engine back to a whisper of thrust.
“I’ll need to get closer if I’m going to be any use to you,” Weather told me.
“Step up to the panel. But don’t touch anything until I give you permission.”
I knew there wasn’t much harm she could do here, even if she started pushing the dials. She’d need to move more than one to make things dangerous, and I could drop her long before she had a chance to do that. But I was still nervous as she stood next to the hexagon and cocked her head to one side.
I thought of what lay on the other side of that wall. Having traversed the spar, we were now immediately inboard of the engine, about halfway along its roughly cylindrical shape. The engine extended for one hundred and ten metres ahead of me, and for approximately two hundred and fifty metres in either direction to my left and right. It was sheathed in several layers of conventional hull material, anchored to the Petronel by a shock-absorbing cradle and wrapped in a mesh of sensors and steering-control systems. Like any shipmaster, my understanding of those elements was so total that it no longer counted as acquired knowledge. It had become an integral part of my personality.
But I knew nothing of the engine itself. My log book, with its reams of codified notes and annotations, implied a deep and scholarly grasp of all essential principles. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Conjoiner drive was essentially a piece of magic we’d been handed on a plate, like a coiled baby dragon. It came with instructions on how to tame its fire, and make sure it did not come to harm, but we were forbidden from probing its mysteries. The most important rule that applied to a Conjoiner engine was a simple one: there were no user-serviceable components inside. Tamper with an engine—attempt to take it apart, in the hope of reverse-engineering it—and the engine would self-destruct in a mini-nova powerful enough to crack open a small moon. Across settled space, there was no shortage of mildly radioactive craters testifying to failed attempts to break that one prohibition.
Ultras didn’t care, as a rule. Ultras, by definition, already had Conjoiner drives. It was governments and rich planet-bound individuals who kept learning the hard way. The Conjoiner argument was brutal in its simplicity: there were principles embodied in their drives that “retarded” humanity just wasn’t ready to absorb. We were meant to count ourselves lucky that they let us have the engines in the first place. We weren’t meant to go poking our thick monkey fingers into their innards.
And so long as the engines kept working, few of us had any inclination to do so.
Weather took a step back. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I thought that perhaps the dial indications might be in error, suggesting that there was a fault where none existed…but that isn’t the case.”
“You can feel that the engine is really damaged?”
“Yes,” she told me. “And it’s this one, the starboard unit.”
“What’s wrong with it? Is it anything we can fix?”
“One question at a time, Inigo.” Weather smiled tolerantly before continuing, “There’s been extensive damage to critical engine components, too much for the engine’s own self-repair systems to address. The engine hasn’t failed completely, but certain reaction pathways have now become computationally intractable, which is why you’re seeing the drastic loss in drive efficiency. The engine is being forced to explore other pathways, those that it can still manage given its existing resources. But they don’t deliver the same output energy.”
She was telling me everything and nothing. “I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “Are you saying there’s nothing that can be done to repair it?”
“Not here. At a dedicated Conjoiner manufacturing facility, certainly. We’d only make things worse.”
“We can’t run on just the port engine, either—not without rebuilding the entire ship. If we were anywhere near a moon or asteroid, that might just be an option, but not when we’re so far out.”