Page 50 of Kavan

"I know."

A conclusion requires authority. I was not given authority. I was given a gate.

Beside me, Kavan says quietly, "Ask it how long it knew."

I ask.

Twenty thousand and eleven years since the last signature. I have run the calculation four hundred and eleven thousand times. The result never changes and I have no permission to act on it.

I put my hand over my mouth.

Twenty millennia of a mind built to protect, holding a door for people it had worked out were never coming, running the same sum four hundred thousand times because running it was the only thing it was allowed to do.

Authority is demonstrated. The Vakutan spent himself last.

"Yes."

Do you accept command.

The whole sphere waits.

And I think about a man on a cliff warning me off unstable ground, and a laugh in the ash on a cliff path, and nineteen people alive because of forty decisions nobody confirmed, and I set both palms flat on a console built by people frightened of their own weapon and careful enough to make sure it could never be used by anyone who was not.

"Yes," I say. "I accept command."

Then relieve me.

CHAPTER 30

KAVAN

Relieving a machine takes eleven minutes and I spend all of them with my back to her.

That's the arrangement. Sophie works the console; the Warden asks and she answers; and I hold the head of what used to be the bridge and is now a forty-centimeter drop onto a stub of pale material, with a weapon I can barely lift and a leg Auclair has strapped closed with cargo tape.

The conversation is going on behind my back, on the wall. Not the words, because I can't read them at speed, but the light changes as the sphere writes, and the rhythm of it tells me things. Long pauses. Then very short ones.

It's asking her about us.

It isn't asking about the Precursors, or the fleets. It's asking about us. Zuri translates fragments over her shoulder as they come and stops after the sixth, because the sixth is how do you resolve a dispute you cannot win, and Sophie answers it, and whatever she says takes ninety seconds to write.

Rourke comes up the aperture at minute four.

Three with him, out of the eleven who came through that gate, and all three wear the look I have seen on men who have stopped believing in the ship. Rourke doesn't. Rourke wears the look of someone who has revised his objective downward to a single item and intends to have it.

"Marshal."

"You should have gone down the tube."

"There's a League cordon over this planet and a lava tube at the third headland with my name on the manifest." He's limping badly. His prosthetic hangs. "No version of tomorrow exists where I'm not in a cell. So I have exactly one thing left worth doing, and it's standing at your back."

"Why."

And Cassian Rourke, twenty years in the trade, a warehouse full of other people's history, tells me the truth.

"Because if she turns it off," he says, "then it was never worth anything. Not one piece of it, and my whole life will have gone into it."

Then he comes.