“What did the spiral culture do?” I asked.
“Burdock can tell you that. It’ll be better coming from him.”
“You were going to tell us how you ended up on his ship,” Purslane prompted.
Grisha looked at the recumbent figure, trapped within those trembling fields. “I’m here because Burdock saved me,” he said. “Our culture was murdered. Genocide machines took apart our solar system world by world. We made evacuation plans, of course; built ships so that some of us might cross space to another system. We still knew nothing of relativistic starflight, so those ships were necessarily slow and vulnerable. That was our one error. If there was one piece of knowledge we should have allowed ourselves, it was how to build faster ships. Then perhaps, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now. Too many of us would have reached other systems for there to be any need for this subterfuge. But as it is, I’m the only survivor.”
His ship had crawled away from the butchered system with tens of thousands of refugees aboard. They had stealthed the ship to the best of their ability, and for a little while it looked as if they might make it into interstellar space unmolested. Then an instability in their narrow, shielded fusion flame had sent a clarion across tens of light hours. The machines were soon on them.
Most had died immediately, but there had been enough warning for a handful of people to abandon the ship in smaller vehicles. Most of those had been picked off, as well. But Grisha had made it. He had fallen out of his system, engines dead, systems powered down to a trickle of life support. And still he hadn’t been dark or silent enough to avoid detection. But this time it wasn’t the machines that found him. It was another ship—a Gentian Line vessel that just happened to be passing by.
Burdock had pulled him out of the escape craft, warmed him from the emergency hibernation, and cracked the labyrinth of his ancient language. Then Burdock taught Grisha how to speak his own tongue.
“He saved my life,” Grisha said. “We fled the system at maximum thrust, outracing the machines. They tried to chase us, and for a little while it seemed that they had the edge. But eventually we made it.”
Even as I framed the question, I think I already had an inkling of the answer. “These machines… the ones that murdered your people?”
“Yes,” Grisha said.
“Who sent them?”
He looked at both of us and said, very quietly, “You did.”
We woke Burdock.
The assassination toxin was eating him at a measurable rate; cubic centimetres per hour at normal body temperatures. With Burdock cooled below consciousness, the consumption was retarded to a glacially slow attack. But he would have to be warmed to talk to us, and so his remaining allowance of conscious life could be defined in a window of minutes, with the quality of that consciousness degrading as the weapon gorged itself on his mind.
“I was hoping someone would make it this far,” Burdock said, opening his eyes. He didn’t turn his head to greet us—the consuming plaque would have made that all but impossible even if he had the will—but I assumed that he had some other means of identifying us. His lips barely moved, but something was amplifying his words, or his intention to speak. “I know how you broke into my ship,” he said, “and I presume Grisha’s told you something of his place in this whole mess.”
“A bit,” I said.
“That’s good—no need to go over that again.” The words had their own erratic rhythm, like slowly dripping water. “But what made you come out here in the first place?”
“There was a discrepancy in your strand,” Purslane said, approaching uncomfortably close to the bedside screen. “It conflicted with Campion’s version of events. One of you had to be lying.”
“You said you’d been somewhere you hadn’t,” I said. “I happened to be there at the same time, or else no one would ever have known.”
“Yes,” he said. “I lied; submitted a false strand. Most of it was true—you probably guessed that much—but I had to cover up my visit to Grisha’s system.”
I nodded. “Because you knew who had destroyed Grisha’s people?”
“The weapons were old: million-year-old relics from some ancient war. That should have made them untraceable. But I found one of the weapons, adrift and deactivated. New control systems had been grafted over the old machinery. These control systems used line protocols.”
“Gentian?”
“Gentian, or one of our allies. I had witnessed a terrible crime, a genocide worse than anything recorded in our history.”
“Why did you cover it up?” Purslane asked.
“The knowledge frightened me. But that wasn’t the reason I altered my strand. I did it because I needed time: time to identify those responsible, and protect Grisha from them until I had enough evidence to bring them to justice. If the perpetrators were among us—and I had reason to think they were—they would have killed Grisha to silence him. And if killing Grisha meant killing the rest of us, I don’t think they’d have blinked at that.” He managed a despairing laugh. “When you’ve just wiped out a two-million-year-old civilisation, what do a thousand clones matter?”
I tried not to sound too disbelieving. “The murder of an entire line? You think they’d go that far, just to cover up an earlier crime?”
“And more,” Burdock said gravely. “This is about more than our piddling little line, Campion.”
“The Great Work,” Purslane said, voicing my own thoughts. “A project bigger than any single line. That’s what they killed for, isn’t it. And that’s what they’ll kill for again.”
“You’re good,” Burdock said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better pair of amateur sleuths.”
“We still don’t know anything about the Great Work itself,” I told him. “Or why Grisha’s people had to die.”
“I’ll tell you about the Work in good time. First we need to talk about the people who want Grisha dead.”
Purslane looked at the other man, and then returned her attention to Burdock. “Do you know their names?”
“It was names I was after,” he said. “I had a suspicion—little more than a hunch—that the genocide had something to do with the Work.”
“Quite a hunch,” I commented.
“Not really. Whoever was behind this had murdered those people because of something big, and the only big thing I could think of was the Work. What else do the Advocates talk about, Campion—other than their own inflated sense of self-worth?”
“You have a point.”
“Anyway, the more I dug, the more it looked like I was right about that hunch. It did tie in with the Work. But I still didn’t have any names. I thought if I could at least isolate the line members who had the strongest ties to the Work, then I could start looking for flaws in their strands…”
“Flaws?” Purslane asked.
“Yes. At least one of them had to have been near Grisha’s system at the same time as me. They won’t have used intermediaries for that kind of thing.”
But it was only good luck that we had found the flaw in Burdock’s strand in the first place, I thought. Even if someone else had fabricated all or part of their strand, there was no reason to assume they had made the same kind of mistake.
“Did you narrow it down to anyone?” Purslane asked.
“A handful of plausible suspects… conspicuous Advocates, for the most part. I’m sure you could draw up the same shortlist with little effort.”