Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

ward on Deimos. What made him shiver even more was the realisation that some of the injured—some of the dead—were barely older than the children he had visited only hours ago. Perhaps some of them were those children, conscripted from the nursery since his visit, uploaded with fighting reflexes through their new implants.
    “What are you going to do? You know you can’t win. Warren lost only a tiny fraction of his available force in those waves. You look as if you’ve lost half your nest.”
    “It’s much worse than that,” Galiana said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’re not quite ready yet. But I can show you in a moment. ”
    He felt colder than ever now. “What do you mean, ‘not quite ready’?”
    Galiana looked deeply into his eyes now. “You suffered a serious head injury, Clavain. The entry wound was small, but the internal bleeding . . . it would have killed you, had we not intervened.” Before he could ask the inevitable question she answered it for him. “We injected a small cluster of medichines into your head. They undid the damage very easily. But it seemed provident to allow them to grow.”
    “You’ve put replicators in my head?”
    “You needn’t sound so horrified. They’re already growing—spreading out and interfacing with your existing neural circuitry—but the total volume of glial mass they will consume is tiny: only a few cubic millimetres in total, across your entire brain.”
    He wondered if she was calling his bluff. “I don’t feel anything.”
    “You won’t—not for a minute or so.” Now she pointed into the empty pit in the middle of the room. “Stand here and look into the air.”
    “There’s nothing there.”
    But as soon as he had spoken, he knew he was wrong. There was something in the pit. He blinked and directed his attention somewhere else, but when he returned his gaze to the pit, the thing he imagined he had seen—milky, spectral—was still there, and becoming sharper and brighter by the second. It was a three-dimensional structure, as complex as an exercise in protein-folding. A tangle of loops and connecting branches and nodes and tunnels, embedded in a ghostly red matrix.
    Suddenly he saw it for what it was: a map of the nest, dug into Mars. Just as the Coalition had suspected, the base was far more extensive than the original structure, reaching deeper and further out than anyone had imagined. Clavain made a mental effort to retain some of what he was seeing in his mind, the intelligence-gathering reflex stronger than the conscious knowledge that he would never see Deimos again.
    “The medichines in your brain have interfaced with your visual cortex,” Galiana said. “That’s the first step on the road to Transenlightenment. Now you’re privy to the machine-generated imagery encoded by the fields through which we move—most of it, anyway.”
    “Tell me this wasn’t planned, Galiana. Tell me you weren’t intending to put machines in me at the first opportunity. ”
    “No, I wasn’t planning it. But nor was I going to let your phobias prevent me from saving your life.”
    The image grew in complexity. Glowing nodes of light appeared in the tunnels, some moving slowly through the network.
    “What are they?”
    “You’re seeing the locations of the Conjoiners,” Galiana said. “Are there as many as you imagined?”
    Clavain judged that there were no more than seventy lights in the whole complex now. He searched for a cluster that would identify the room in which he stood. There: twenty-odd bright lights, accompanied by one much fainter than the rest. Himself, of course. There were few people near the top of the nest—the attack must have collapsed half the tunnels, or maybe Galiana had deliberately sealed entrances herself.
    “Where is everyone? Where are the children?”
    “Most of the children are gone now.” She paused. “You were right to guess that we were rushing them to Transenlightenment, Clavain.”
    “Why?”
    “Because