Weather fell silent, her expression respectful. It was not necessary for her to tell us that the message was over.
“How do I know this is true?” Van Ness asked quietly.
“I can’t give you any guarantees,” Weather said, “but there was one word I was also meant to say to you. Your wife believed it would have some significance to you, something nobody else could possibly know.”
“And the word?”
“The word is ‘mezereon.’ I think it is a type of plant. Does the word mean something to you?”
I looked at Van Ness. He appeared frozen, unable to respond. His eye softened and sparkled. He nodded, and said simply, “Yes, it does.”
“Good,” Weather answered. “I’m glad that’s done: it’s been weighing on all of our minds for quite some time. And now I’m going to help you get home.”
Whatever “mezereon” meant to Van Ness, whatever it revealed to him concerning the truth of Weather’s message, I never asked.
Nor did Van Ness ever speak of the matter again.
SHE STOOD BEFORE the hexagonal arrangement of input dials, as I had done a thousand times before. “You must give me authorisation to make adjustments,” she said.
My mouth was dry. “Do what you will. I’ll be watching you very carefully.”
Weather looked amused. “You’re still concerned that I might want to kill us all?”
“I can’t ignore my duty to this ship.”
“Then this will be difficult for you. I must turn the dials to a setting you would consider highly dangerous, even suicidal. You’ll just have to trust me that I know what I’m doing.”
I glanced back at Van Ness.
“Do it,” he mouthed.
“Go ahead,” I told Weather. “Whatever you need to do—”
“In the course of this, you will learn more about our engines. There is something inside here that you will find disturbing. It is not the deepest secret, but it is a secret nonetheless, and shortly you will know it. Afterwards, when we reach port, you must not speak of this matter. Should you do so, Conjoiner security would detect the leak and act swiftly. The consequences would be brutal, for you and anyone you might have spoken to.”
“Then maybe you’re better off not letting us see whatever you’re so keen to keep hidden.”
“There’s something I’m going to have to do. If you want to understand, you need to see everything.”
She reached up and planted her hands on two of the dials. With surprising strength, she twisted them until their quadrants shone ruby red. Then she moved to another pair of dials and moved them until they were showing a warning amber. She adjusted one of the remaining dials to a lower setting, into the blue, and then returned to the first two dials she had touched, quickly dragging them back to green. While all this was happening, I felt the engine surge in response, the deck plates pushing harder against my feet. But the burst was soon over. When Weather had made her last adjustment, the engine had throttled back even further than before. I judged that we were only experiencing a tenth of a gee.
“What have you just done?” I asked.
“This,” she said.
Weather took a nimble, light-footed step back from the input controls. At the same moment a chunk of wall, including the entire hexagonal array, pushed itself out from the surrounding metallic-blue material in which it had appeared to have been seamlessly incorporated. The chunk was as thick as a bank-vault door. I watched in astonishment as the chunk slid in silence to one side, exposing a bulkhead-sized hole in the side of the engine wall.
Soft red light bathed us. We were looking into the hidden heart of a Conjoiner drive.
“Follow me,” Weather said.
“Are you serious?”
“You want to get home, don’t you? You want to escape that raider? This is how it will happen.” Then she looked back to Van Ness. “With all due respect…I wouldn’t recommend it. Captain. You wouldn’t do any damage to the engine, but the engine might damage you.”
“I’m fine right here,” Van Ness said.
I followed Weather into the engine. At first my eyes had difficulty making out our surroundings. The red light inside seemed to emanate from every surface, rather than from any concentrated source, so that there were only hints of edges and corners. I had to reach out and touch things more than once to establish their shape and proximity. Weather watched me guardedly, but said nothing.
She led me along a winding, restrictive path that squeezed its way between huge intrusions of Conjoiner machinery, like the course etched by some meandering, indecisive underground river. The machinery emitted a low humming sound, and sometimes when I touched it I felt a rapid but erratic vibration. I couldn’t make out our surroundings with any clarity for more than a few metres in any direction, but as Weather pushed on I sometimes had the impression that the machinery was moving out of her way to open up the path, and sealing itself behind us. She led me up steep ramps, assisted me as we negotiated near-impassable chicanes, helped me as we climbed down vertical shafts that would be perilous even under one-tenth of a gee. My sense of direction was soon hopelessly confounded, and I had no idea whether we had travelled hundreds of metres into the engine, or merely wormed our way in and around a relatively localised region close to our entry point.
“I’m glad you know the way,” I said, with mock cheerfulness. “I wouldn’t be able to get out of here without you.”
“Yes, you will,” Weather said, looking back over her shoulder. “The engine will guide you out, don’t you worry.”
“You’re coming with me, though.”
“No, Inigo, I’m not. I have to stay here from now on. It’s the only way that any of us will be getting home.”
“I don’t understand. Once you’ve fixed the engine—”
“It isn’t like that. The engine can’t be fixed. What I can do is help it, relieve it of some of the computational burden. But to do that I need to be close to it. Inside it.”
While we were talking, Weather had brought us to a box-like space that was more open than anywhere we’d passed through so far. The room, or chamber, was empty of machinery, save for a waist-high cylinder rising from the floor. The cylinder had a flattened top and widened base that suggested the stump of a tree. It shone the same arterial red as everything else around us.
“We’ve reached the heart of the engine-control assembly now,” Weather said, kneeling by the stump. “The reaction core is somewhere else—we couldn’t survive anywhere near that—but this is where the reaction computations are made, for both the starboard and port drives. I’m going to show you something now. I think it will make it easier for you to understand what is to happen to me. I hope you’re ready.”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Weather planted a hand on either side of the stump and closed her eyes momentarily. I heard a click and the whirr of a buried mechanism. The upper fifth of the stump opened, irising wide. A blue light rammed from its innards. I felt a chill rising from whatever was inside, a coldness that seemed to reach fingers down my throat.
Something emerged from inside the stump, rising on a pedestal. It was a glass container pierced by many silver cables, each of which was plugged into the folded cortex of a single massively swollen brain. The brain had split open along fracture lines, like a cake that had ruptured in the baking. The blue light spilled from the fissures. When I looked into one—peering down into the geological strata of brain anatomy—I had to blink against the glare. A seething mass of tiny bright things lay nestled at the base of the cleft, twinkling with the light of the sun.