Free Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for ten minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to their legs to maintain bloodflow to their brains. Even so, it was difficult to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.
    They were moving at ten kilometres a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trap door. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them . . . but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.
    In half a minute, they were in true space.
    “The Interdiction’s sensor web can’t track us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spysats directly over the nest. That was a mistake, Clavain—even though we did our best to reinforce your thinking with the shuttle launches. But now we’re well outside your sensor footprint.”
    Clavain nodded. “But that won’t help us once we’re far from the surface. Then we’ll just look like another ship trying to reach deep space. The web may be late locking on to us, but it’ll still get us in the end.”
    “It would,” Galiana said, “if deep space was where we were going.”
    Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain thought, she would fall for ever. If that was the case, he had only postponed her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had in flicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess—even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years . . .
    “Where are you taking us?” he asked.
    Galiana issued some neural command that made the bullet’s skin become transparent.
    “There,” she said.
    Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in until the object was much clearer.
    Dark—misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.
    “Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”
    “Yes,” Galiana said.
    “But the worms—”
    “Don’t exist any more.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed, but that was only what we wanted you to think.”
    For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”
    “Ever since the ceasefire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”
    Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device that lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something that had never existed before in the whole of human experience.
    He was looking at a starship.
    “We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try to stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface of Mars, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces