“Nor did I,” I whispered.
“It was vital that the Conjoiners be eliminated. Their cooperation was required for the existence and operation of this ship, but they could not be party to the discovery and exploration of the object.”
“What about the rest of us?” I asked. “We were all part of it. We’d have spoken, when we got back home.”
“You would have accepted Struma’s account of the Conjoiner takeover, as you very nearly did. As I did. But it was a mistake to put her under armed guard, and another mistake to allow me a close look at that auto-surgeon. I suppose we can’t blame Struma for a few slips. He had enough to be concentrating on.”
“You were worried about war,” Magadis said evenly. “Now it may still happen. But the terms of provocation will be different. A faction inside one of your own planetary governments engineered this takeover bid.” She held her silence for a few moments. “But I do not want war. Do you believe in clemency, Rauma Bernsdottir?”
“I hope so.”
“Good.” And Magadis stood from her chair, her bindings falling away where they had clearly never been properly fastened. She took a step nearer to me, and in a single whiplash motion brought her arm up to my chin. Her hand closed around my jaw. She held me with a vicelike force, squeezing so hard that I felt my bones would shatter. “I believe in clemency as well. But it takes two to make it work. You struck me, when you thought I was your prisoner.”
I stumbled back, crashing against the useless grid of the electrostatic cage. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you, Captain?”
“Yes.” It was hard to speak, hard to think, with the pain she was inflicting. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“In your defence,” Magadis said, “you only did it the once. And although I was under the control of the device, I saw something in your eyes. Doubt. Shame.” She relinquished her hold on me. I drew quick breaths, fully aware of how easily she could still break me. “I’m minded to think you regretted your impulse.”
“I did.”
“Good. Because someone has to live, and it may as well be you.”
I reached up and nursed the skin around my jaw. “No. We’re finished—all of us. All that’s left is reefersleep. We’ll die, but at least we’ll be under when it happens.”
“The ship can be saved,” Magadis answered. “And a small number of its passengers. This will happen. Now that knowledge of the object has been gathered, it must reach civilisation. You will be the vector of that knowledge.”
“The ship can’t be saved. There just isn’t time.”
Magadis turned to Doctor Grellet. “Perhaps we should show her, Doctor. Then she would understand.”
They took me to one of the forward viewports. Since the ship was still aimed at the object all that was presently visible was a wall of darkness, stretching to the limit of vision in all directions. I stared into that nothingness, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of the Conjoiner wreck, now that we were so much closer. They had asked me very little of what happened to Struma, as if my safe return was answer enough.
Then something flashed. It was a brief, bright scintillation, there and gone almost before it had time to register on my retinae. Wondering if it might have been a trick of the imagination, I stayed at the port until I saw another of the flashes. A little later came a third. They were not happening in the same spot, but clustered near enough to each other not to be accidental.
“You saved us,” Doctor Grellet said, speaking quietly, as if he might break some sacred spell. “Or at least, showed us the way. When you and Struma used the cargo launcher to accelerate your pods, there was an effect on the rest of the ship. A tiny but measurable recoil, reducing some of her speed.”
“It’s no help to us,” I said, taking a certain bleak pleasure in pointing out the error in his thinking. “If we had a full cargo manifest, tens of thousands of tonnes, then maybe we could shoot enough of it ahead of the ship to reverse the drift. But we haven’t. We’re barely carrying any cargo at all.”
Another flash twinkled against the surface.
“It’s not cargo,” Magadis said.
I suppose I understood even then. Some part of me, at least. But not the part that was willing to face the truth.
“What, then?”
“Caskets,” Doctor Grellet said. “Reefersleep caskets. Each about as large and heavy as your inspection pod, each still containing a sleeping passenger.”
“No.” My answer was one of flat denial, even as I knew there was no reason for either of them to lie.
“There are uncertainties,” Magadis said. “The launcher is under strain, and its efficiency may not remain optimal. But it seems likely that the ship can be saved with the loss of only half the passenger manifest.” Some distant, alien sympathy glimmered in her eyes. “I understand that this is difficult for you, Rauma. But there is no other way to save the ship. Some must die, so that some must live. And you in particular must be one of the living.”
The flashes continued. Now that I was attuned to their rhythm, I picked up an almost subliminal nudge in the fabric of the ship, happening at about the same frequency as the impacts. Each nudge was the cargo launcher firing another casket away, the ship’s motion reducing by a tiny value. It produced a negligibly small effect. But put several thousand negligibly small things together and they can add up to something useful.
“I won’t sanction this,” I said. “Not for the sake of the ship. Not murder, not suicide, not self-sacrifice. Nothing’s worth this.”
“Everything is worth it,” Magadis said. “Firstly, knowledge of the artefact—the object—must reach civilisation, and it must then be disseminated. It cannot remain the secretive preserve of one faction or arm of government. It must be universal knowledge. Perhaps there are more of these objects. If there are, they must be mapped and investigated, their natures probed. Secondly, you must speak of peace. If this ship were lost, if no trace of it were ever to return home, there would always be speculation. You must guard against that.”
“But you…”
She carried on speaking. “They would accept your testimony more readily than mine. But do not think this is suicide, for any of us. It has been agreed, Rauma—by a quorum of the living, both baseline and Conjoiner. A larger subset of the sleeping passengers was brought to the edge of consciousness, so that they could be polled, their opinions weighed. I will not say that the verdict was unanimous … but it carried, and with a healthy majority. We each take our chances. The automated systems of the ship will continue ejecting caskets until the drift has been safely reversed, with a comfortable margin of error. Perhaps it will take ten thousand sleepers, or fifteen thousand. Until that point has been reached, the selection is entirely random. We return to reefersleep knowing only that we have a better than zero chance of surviving.”
“It’s enough,” Doctor Grellet said. “As Magadis says, better that one of us survives than none of us.”
“It would have suited Struma if you butchered us all,” Magadis said. “But you didn’t. And even when there was a hope that the repairs could be completed, you risked your life to investigate the wreck. The crew and passengers evaluated this action. They found it meritorious.”