‘I blacked out for a moment. I’m tired.’
Keldra seemed to believe him. She gave him an unsympathetic sneer. ‘You can sleep when we’re done with the tour. Try to keep up.’
The tour confirmed what Jonas had suspected: the Remembrance of Clouds was the same ship as the Thousand Names, the ship from Olzan’s memory. Keldra had modified it, added the armaments he’d seen earlier, and done a decent job of repairing several years of wear, but underneath it was still the same ageing tramp freighter, held together by duct tape and bloody-mindedness.
The tour Olzan had given Keldra had been about meeting the crew. There was no free-willed crew on the ship, but Jonas suspected that, even if there had been, they would have been a side-point, at best, on Keldra’s tour. She took him through the ship section by section, from nose to tail, pointing out her modifications and explaining its technical specifications in more detail than he understood. He couldn’t see much use in giving such a detailed tour to a non-engineer, especially an untrustworthy prisoner, but he suspected that it wasn’t entirely for his benefit. Now that she’d decided to keep him around, it seemed that she was enjoying having someone to talk at. A few times, when pointing out some particularly clever modification, she forgot to be aggressive and Jonas detected some honest pride entering her voice.
The tour began in the ship’s nose, a bulbous structure consisting of the forward observation blister, the docking airlock and umbilicals, and the extendible gantry that housed the sail bud. Right now the sail was unfurled, and the kilometres-wide plane of ultra-thin nanomaterial dwarfed the rest of the ship. The sail was perfectly flat, possessing an eerie mathematical beauty, as if it were an intruder into normal space from a universe of pure geometry. From inside the observation blister Jonas could see his gold-tinted reflection looking down at him, at the nose of a vertiginous duplicate of the Remembrance of Clouds.
From a distance, a sail clipper looked like an insect, or a jewel, suspended from its sail by hundreds of gossamer nanotech threads. The sail was Earth-tech, of course; a forgotten technology, invented in the last flush of learning of the Planetary Age. The belt-dwellers could produce it in semi-automated factories, and even maintain it in a rote way, but could never have invented it.
Behind the nose were the two grav-rings, rotating in opposite directions for stability. Keldra ran them faster than Olzan had, fast enough to provide one gee of centrifugal pseudo-gravity. Jonas wondered why, before he remembered where the ancient measurement had come from: one gee had been the surface gravity of Earth.
Looking down from the blister he could see the inner surface of the first ring as it rotated around him. The repairs were more extensive than they had looked from the Coriolis Dancer; he could see a great swathe of the ring where the surface had been replaced with mismatched sheets of scrap metal.
Keldra dragged Jonas around the orbital corridors of each ring, showing him each room. Besides modifying the bridge to suit her one-person control, it looked as if she had changed little from Jonas’s second-hand memory of the Thousand Names. She had also painted murals on various walls and ceilings: images of the Earth from space, or scenes of its surface as she imagined it to have looked, in big, messy brush-strokes of green and blue. Every image included the white scrawls of clouds across the sky.
It looked as if Keldra had made more changes to the second ring. The engineering workshops were still there, but the rest of the ring was packed with servitors and all the support machinery needed to sustain so many of them, as well as the prison cells where Jonas had been kept. Now that the ship was underway the servitors shambled through a simple daily routine, feeding and exercising themselves. A few performed maintenance tasks, replacing worn-out pipes or cleaning the graphite from the air scrubbers. Besides generally being physically fit, there was no pattern to the servitors’ appearance, and Keldra hadn’t given them the uniforms or liveries that most servitor-owners used.
The door of one of the store rooms in the second ring was locked with a heavy bar, linked to an iris-recognition lock screwed to the wall next to it. It looked as though the lock had been installed recently, while Keldra had left Jonas locked in his cabin. She hauled him up to the door, seemingly just to point it out.
‘That’s off-limits,’ she said. ‘If I catch you so much as looking at that door, you’re wiped. Understand?’
‘I’ve already seen your stolen goods and illegal servitors. What could be worse than…oww!’
Keldra jabbed the nerve gun into his side and sent a shock running through his body. ‘It’s off-limits. Do you understand?’
‘All right! I understand.’
Aft of the grav-rings was the cargo bay. Keldra didn’t take Jonas into it, but she showed it to him through the grimy windows of the docking control room that looked out on the interior of the bay, turning on the floodlights to bathe the brightly-coloured shipping containers in a sterile white light. Like the Dancer’s, the bay was non-rotating and without air, little more than a radiation shield wrapped around a volume of vacuum, with the ship’s spine running down the centre. Half of the outer surface was a door that could open to space, and it was on this that Keldra had painted the huge Earth-and-clouds mural that Jonas had seen on the Coriolis Dancer’s bridge screen.
Beyond the cargo bay were the main heat radiation fins, although, Keldra explained proudly, most of the ship’s surface could act as a radiation system in an emergency. Behind the fins was the reaction drive and its fuel tanks. Despite its size, this was a secondary drive, intended for close city approaches where a sail couldn’t be used, and as a backup, in case the sail failed. It could provide more acceleration than the sail, but not for long before the fuel tanks were exhausted.
To Jonas’s relief, Keldra didn’t take him into the unpressurized maintenance crawl-spaces that ran through it, but she described it to him in the loading control room. Most of the technical details washed past him, but he didn’t think she was showing off, as such, she just wasn’t used to translating her Engineer-caste language for the benefit of a layperson.
Keldra didn’t go into detail about the ship’s weapons, but Jonas didn’t think there was more to them than he’d seen. The main armaments were a dozen missile turrets, spaced around the ship’s hull to provide a near-complete firing sphere, but unable to concentrate much fire on any one target. There were also the Worldbreaker-killing nukes, but each one was a massive investment of time and money, and he didn’t think she would want to use one except against a Worldbreaker. The small missile turrets might be used to shoot down incoming missiles, but the Remembrance had almost no armour. It could hold unescorted mining haulers to ransom, but it wouldn’t last long against a city patrol boat, still less a Solar Authority cruiser.
After the tour they rode the transit module back to the first ring. Keldra fell silent, but she looked at him as if expecting him to say something.
Jonas decided to fill the silence. ‘So, where are we going?’
‘Columbia. The civil war there means lots of unprotected refugee ships. We need to start building another nuke.’
‘How noble.’
‘Fuck you.’
He licked his lips, thinking back to Olzan’s memory. Keldra was emotionally vulnerable, open to manipulation, he was sure; he just had to find the right key. It was worth a try.
‘You know, when you told me about your crusade against the Worldbreakers, I thought you were an idealist. I thought you believed in a perfect world.’ He pronounced the last two words deliberately, hoping that they’d strike a nerve.
Keldra’s face went pale. She broke eye contact and turned away.
‘You’re right that we ought to fight the Worldbreakers,’ he went on. ‘We’ve given up, collectively, as a species. We all just climb over one another to get to the top of the heap, while the Worldbreakers make the heap smaller and smaller. There ought to be more people living in a perfect world.’
The words made her flinch. Jonas suppressed