One by one, as the Worldbreaker swarms reached them, the planets winked out.
‘They need two things,’ Keldra said. ‘Raw material and energy. Energy they get from the sun. That’s why they get so close to it. Raw material they get from the planets. They blew them up, and then they started scooping up the debris.’
‘What do they need it for?’
‘To keep running. They’re self-sustaining; they make more of themselves. My point is, they’re not magic. They’re technological artefacts. Machines.’
‘They don’t look like any machines I’ve seen,’ Jonas said.
‘That’s because they weren’t made by us. They’re much more advanced, maybe by millions of years.’ She brought back the Worldbreaker diagram. ‘I think they’ve learned to manipulate gravity somehow. They use that for both their weapon and their reactionless drive. I don’t know how it works, but I don’t think it breaks any physical laws. They can’t create something out of nothing; they still need energy and raw materials.’
‘All right. Supposing that’s true, why would anyone want to build these machines?’
‘To destroy us,’ Keldra said. The image on the screen changed again, this time filling with stars scattered through three-dimensional space. ‘Someone else out there must have spotted us. We were broadcasting from Earth for hundreds of years before the Worldbreakers arrived; maybe they heard us. Or maybe it was longer ago, and they just spotted a planet with life on it in our system. I think they saw us as a threat. As competition. They wanted to wipe us out before we became too powerful.’
‘Or maybe they had a reason we can’t imagine,’ Jonas said.
‘However alien your mindset, kill or be killed will always apply.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe. Maybe. What do you think?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ve got the implant in my head. I’ll think whatever you tell me to think.’
She glared at him but didn’t seem to have anything to say to that. Behind her, the stars on the screen vanished.
‘Why did you tell me all this, Keldra?’ he asked.
‘I want you to know what we’re up against,’ she said. ‘This is the enemy: the Worldbreakers and whoever made them. This is what we’re fighting.’
‘You don’t need me to know anything about that,’ Jonas said. ‘It won’t make me help you run this ship more efficiently. You’re not telling me what we’re doing in Santesteban, which might be more useful.’
Her sarcastic laugh was weaker than usual. ‘You’ll find out when we get there.’
‘You told me your theories about the Worldbreakers because you wanted an audience. You’ve been working on these theories on your own for years, and now you want the validation of someone saying they agree with you. Well, you won’t get it from me, not while I’m your slave. While you’ve got the implant in my head, I’ll believe whatever you tell me to believe.’ He tilted his head forward and pulled the back of his shirt collar down with one hand, exposing the back of his neck. ‘Deactivate your triggers and then I can tell you what I really think.’
Keldra stood scowling at him for a moment, as if she were considering it, but then strode back out of the bridge. ‘Get back to work.’
A few hours out from Santesteban, Keldra walked into Jonas’s cabin and tossed another bundle of clothes at him: a grey business suit from his wardrobe on the Coriolis Dancer, along with some jewellery suitable for a formal true-born gathering. ‘You wear that tomorrow.’
‘You’re letting me off the ship at Santesteban, then?’
‘You’re a true-born business owner,’ Keldra said. ‘You ran the LN-411 mining operation. When the Worldbreaker showed up you packed up and ran like the coward you are.’
‘Should have fought, yeah. We’ve been through this.’
‘Shut up. You didn’t have your hauler ship with you when the Worldbreaker arrived. It was off making a delivery. You only had your private escape shuttle, so you had to abandon most of your operation. You had space to take your free-willed employees and the most valuable bits of equipment. The hab system core, some other things. Here’s a list.’
Jonas glanced at the data pad she handed to him. Miscellaneous bits of technology, the valuable and portable stuff: it was what he would have chosen to save if her story were true. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’s this going?’
‘During the journey, you decided you didn’t want to pay your employees, so you slave-spiked them all. They struggled, and the shuttle took some damage.’
‘Is that something you think I’d do?’
‘Yes, it is. But that doesn’t matter. It has to be part of the story.’ She snapped her fingers and a belt chart appeared on the pad in Jonas’s hand, with a line picking out his imaginary course. ‘You got as far as the Kellman trading post. Kellman didn’t have the parts to repair the shuttle, so you sold it for scrap. You couldn’t sell the servitors there because they were illegal; no paperwork. So you bought passage on the Remembrance of Clouds, a perfectly innocent freighter, which was heading to Santesteban. If you look at the ship’s logs you’ll find it was at Kellman at the right time.’
‘I’m sure I will. So what’s the plan? I take it you’re not letting me go with some servitors and a hab core.’
‘You’re going to meet the owner of the city.’ Another click of Keldra’s fingers, and a man’s face appeared on the pad. He looked somewhere in his fifties, completely hairless, with flabby, unhealthy looking features. ‘You can get in to see him because you’re a true-born and you have things that he’ll want. You’re going to him because you want to offload the servitors: you don’t have the black market connections to sell them, but you know that he won’t care that they’re illegal. The reason he’ll talk to you is because of the hab core. Santesteban’s life support is in a poor state because the owner doesn’t like paying full price for anything. Your used hab core is exactly the sort of deal he’d want, but it’s legally yours so you’re not in so much of a hurry to get rid of it, as you are the servitors. You could take it to another city if you thought you could get a better deal.’
Jonas paused as he took all this in. ‘So what’s the job? I’m guessing we’re pulling off some kind of con. What do I do when I get in?’
‘You sell the servitors. You sell the hab core if you can get a good price. Then you spend a few hours hobnobbing with true-borns, drinking champagne out of real glass glasses, or whatever. Then you come back here. If you try to leave…’ She tapped the back of her neck.
‘Come on, Keldra. You need me for something more than just getting better prices for your stolen goods. Tell me the plan and maybe I can help.’
‘When did you think I started trusting you? I’ve told you all you need to know.’
‘All right.’ As she turned to leave he called after her. ‘Who’s the mark, anyway? I mean, the city owner. What’s his name?’
‘Wendell Taylor Glass.’
Santesteban was a dark grey lozenge thirty kilometres long, once a droplet of iron that had spilled out of a planet’s molten core, now swarming with the signs of habitation. The city’s