“I’m sorry the news isn’t better. You’ll just have to resign yourselves to a longer trip than you were expecting.”
“It’s worse than that. There’s another ship closing in on us, probably another raider like Voulage. It’s very close now. If we don’t start running soon, they’ll be on us.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me this sooner?”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“To the trust between us, possibly.”
“I’m sorry, Weather. I didn’t want to distract you. I thought things were bad enough as they were.”
“And you thought I’d be able to work a miracle if I wasn’t distracted?”
I nodded hopelessly. I realised that, as naive as it might seem, I’d been expecting Weather to wave a hand over the broken engine and restore it to full, glittering functionality. But knowing something of the interior workings of the drive was not the same as being able to fix it.
“Are we really out of options?” I asked.
“The engine is already doing all it can to provide maximum power, given the damage it has taken. There really is no scope to make things better.”
Desperate for some source of optimism, I thought back to what Weather had said a few moments before. “When you talked about the computations, you seemed to be saying that the engine needed to do some number-crunching to make itself work.”
Weather looked conflicted. “I’ve already said too much, Inigo.”
“But if we’re going to die out here, it doesn’t matter what you tell me, does it? Failing that, I’ll swear a vow of silence. How does that sound?”
“No one has ever come close to working out how our engines function,” Weather said. “We’ve played our hand in that, of course: putting out more than our share of misinformation over the years. And it’s worked, too. We’ve kept careful tabs on the collective thinking concerning our secrets. We’ve always had contingencies in place to disrupt any research that might be headed in the right direction. So far we’ve never had cause to use a single one of them. If I were to reveal key information to you, I would have more to worry about than just being an outcast. My people would come after me. They’d hunt me down, and then they’d hunt you down as well. Conjoiners will consider any necessary act, up to and including local genocide, to protect the secrets of the C-drive.” She paused for a moment, letting me think she was finished, before continuing on the same grave note, “But having said that, there are layers to our secrets. I can’t reveal the detailed physical principles upon which the drive depends, but I can tell you that the conditions in the drive, when it is at full functionality, are enormously complex and chaotic. Your ship may ride a smooth thrust beam, but the reactions going on inside the drive are anything but smooth. There is a small mouth into hell inside every engine: bubbling, frothing, subject to vicious and unpredictable state-changes.”
“Which the engine needs to smooth out.”
“Yes. And to do so, the engine needs to think through some enormously complex, parallel computational problems. When all is well, when the engine is intact and running inside its normal operational envelope, the burden is manageable. But if you ask too much of the engine, or damage it in some way, that burden becomes heavier. Eventually it exceeds the means of the engine, and the reactions become uncontrolled.”
“Nova.”
“Quite,” Weather said, favouring my response with a tiny nod.
“Then let me get this straight,” I said. “The engine’s damaged, but it could still work if the computations weren’t so complicated.”
Weather answered me guardedly. “Yes, but don’t underestimate how difficult those computations have now become. I can feel the strain this engine is under, just holding things together as they are.”
“I’m not underestimating it. I’m just wondering if we couldn’t help it do better. Couldn’t we load in some new software, or assist the engine by hooking in the Petronel’s own computers?”
“I really wish it was that simple.”
“I’m sorry. My questions must seem quite simple-minded. But I’m just trying to make sure we aren’t missing anything obvious.”
“We aren’t,” she said. “Take my word on it.”
I RETURNED WEATHER to her quarters and removed the collar. Where it had been squeezing her neck, the skin was marked with a raw pink band, spotted with blood. I threw the hateful thing into the corner of the room and returned with a medical kit.
“You should have said something,” I told her as I dabbed at the abrasions with a disinfectant swab. “I didn’t realise it was cutting into you all that time. You seemed so cool, so focused. But that must have been hurting all the while.”
“I told you I could turn off pain.”
“Are you turning it off now?”
“Why?”
“Because you keep flinching.”
Weather reached up suddenly and took my wrist, almost making me drop the swab. The movement was as swift as a snakebite, but although she held me firmly, I sensed no aggressive intentions. “Now it’s my turn not to understand,” she said. “You were hoping I might be able to do something for you. I couldn’t. That means you’re in as much trouble as you ever were. Worse, if anything, because now you’ve heard it from me. But you’re still treating me with kindness.”
“Would you rather we didn’t?”
“I assumed that as soon as my usefulness to you had come to an end—”
“You assumed wrongly. We’re not that kind of crew.”
“And your captain?”
“He’ll keep his word. Killing you would never have been Van Ness’s style.” I finished disinfecting her neck and began to rummage through the medical kit for a strip of bandage. “We’re all just going to have to make do as best we can, you included. Van Ness reckoned we should send out a distress call and wait for rescue. I wasn’t so keen on that idea before, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t so bad after all.” She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking of exactly the same objections I’d voiced to Van Ness, when he raised the idea. “We still have a ship, that’s the main thing. Just because we aren’t moving as fast as we’d like—”
“I’d like to see Van Ness,” Weather said.
“I’m not sure he’d agree.”
“Tell him it’s about his wife. Tell him he can trust me, with or without that silly collar.”
I WENT TO fetch the captain. He took some persuading before he even agreed to look at Weather, and even then he wouldn’t come within twenty metres of her. I told her to wait at the door to her room, which faced a long service corridor.
“I’m not going to touch you, Captain,” she called, her voice echoing from the corridor’s ribbed metal walls. “You can come as close as you like. I can barely smell you at this distance, let alone sense your neural emissions.”
“This’ll do nicely,” Van Ness said. “Inigo told me you had something you wanted to say to me. That right, or was it just a ruse to get me near to you, so you could reach into my head and make me see and think whatever you like?”
She appeared not to hear him. “I take it Inigo’s told you about the engine.”
“Told me you had a good old look at it and decided there was nothing you could do. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t had that collar on, though, eh?”
“You mean I might have sabotaged the engine, to destroy myself and the ship? No, Captain, I don’t think I would have. If I had any intention of killing myself, you’d already made it easy enough with that collar.” She glanced at me. “I could have reached Inigo and pressed that control box while the nervous impulse from his brain was still working its way down his forearm. All he’d have seen was a grey blur, followed by a lot of arterial blood.”