Free Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds Page A

upon us.”
    “What about the Demarchists?”
    “They won’t stop us.” She spoke with total assurance— implying . . . what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumoured that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.
    Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”
    “That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny—we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one-tenth of a millimetre per second—but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “Think about it. The tube in Mars was a thousand kilometres long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over ten minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”
    Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”
    “Complete deceleration in one-fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”
    “I can’t survive that.”
    “No, you can’t. Not the way you are right now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be any damage they can’t fix in Phobos.”
    “It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”
    “You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”
    “And you still tell me none of this was planned?”
    “It wasn’t, but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though . . . you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind . . . at the back of our mind—”
    “You always hoped it might come to this?”
    Galiana smiled.
    He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.
    Clavain nodded assent, preparing for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.
    He was ready to defect.

GLACIAL
    Nevil Clavain picked his way across a mosaic of shattered ice. The field stretched away in all directions, gouged by sleek-sided crevasses. They had mapped the largest cracks before landing, but he was still wary of surprises; his breath caught every time his booted foot cracked through a layer of ice. He was aware of how dangerous it would be to wander from the red path his implants were painting across the glacier field.
    He only had to remind himself of what had happened to Martin Setterholm.
    They had found his body a month ago, shortly after their arrival on the planet. It had been near the main American base; a stroll from the perimeter of the huge, deserted complex of stilted domes and ice-walled caverns. Clavain’s friends had found dozens of dead within the buildings, and most of them had been easily identified against the lists of base personnel that the expedition had pieced together. But Clavain had been troubled by the gaps, and had wondered if any further dead might be found