Redemption Ark

There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.

Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.

And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness.

Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction—no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause—was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.

This gets better, it really does. The odd thing is, I actually think you might be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you’d at least come up with something that made sense.

It was a numbers game, not a guaranteed method of avoiding being killed, but Clavain had been a soldier long enough to know that this was, ultimately, what most combat situations boiled down to.

Either you are a man of unusual ability, Thorn, or a man with a rather inadequate grasp of human nature. I just hope it’s the former.

They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart.

“I’m not a bad man, Ilia. I’m just someone who knows exactly what needs to be done.”

“Like you said, always the most dangerous sort.”

She would worry, just as you worry. It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.

Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.

“What happened?”

“Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?” She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.

He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.

I don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.

Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle.

The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.

Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.

“Can I still wish you good luck?”

“You can wish me what the hell you like. It won’t make any difference. If it did, it would mean I hadn’t prepared well enough.

“How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?”

“Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,” Khouri said.

It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely.

“You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.”

“It does give one pause for thought.”

It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure.

In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.