What she did next was clever.
She whistled to the bloodhound until it came bounding towards her. Then she casually broke the thing’s neck, but not before she had flensed it open and examined its informational innards, working out just what it was that the dog had been sent to find. The gist was that the dog had been sent to retrieve supposedly secret information relating to individuals who had had slaver experience; exactly what one would have expected from a group of Ultras who were searching for a crewperson to fill a vacancy on their ship. But there was something else. Something a tiny bit strange, which pricked the Mademoiselle’s curiosity.
Why were they looking for someone with military activity in their backgrounds?
Perhaps they were disciplinarians: professional traders who were operating one level above the normal state of play of commerce, ruthless experts who used slippery constructs to glean the knowledge they wanted, and who were not averse to travelling to backwater colonies like Resurgam when they saw a chance of some massive reward, perhaps centuries hence. It was probable that their entire organisation was structured along military lines, rather than the quasi-anarchy which existed on most trade craft. So by searching for military experience in the backgrounds of their candidates, what they were doing was ensuring themselves that the candidate would fit into their crew.
That was it, naturally.
Things had gone well so far, even allowing for the strange way in which Volyova had not corrected Khouri when she made obvious her ignorance of the ship’s true destination. Khouri had known all along that the destination was Resurgam, of course — but if the Ultras knew this was where she really wanted to go to, she would have been forced to use one of several cover stories to explain her motivations for visiting the backwater colony. She had been ready to employ one of the stories as soon as Volyova corrected her — except she had failed to do so, seemingly willing to let her recruit keep on thinking they were really travelling to Sky’s Edge.
That was indeed odd, though understandable if one assumed they were now desperate to recruit anyone who came forward. It said little for their honesty, of course, but then again, it saved Khouri using a cover story. It was, she decided, nothing to worry about. It would, in fact, all have been roses, were it not for what the Mademoiselle had placed in her head while she was sleeping. The implant was tiny and would not elicit suspicion from the Ultras, designed to resemble — and function as — a standard entoptic splice. If they got too inquisitive and removed the damn thing, all its incriminating parts would self-erase or reorganise. But that was not the point. Khouri’s objection to the implant was not on the grounds that it was risky or unnecessary, but rather that the last person she wanted in her head on a daily basis was the Mademoiselle. Of course, it was just a beta-level simulation constructed to mimic her personality, projecting an image of the Mademoiselle into Khouri’s visual field and tickling her aural centre to allow her to hear what the ghost said. No one else would be privy to the woman’s apparitions, and Khouri would be able to communicate silently with her.
‘Call it need to know,’ the ghost had said. ‘As an ex-soldier, I’m certain you understand this principle.’
‘Yes, I understand it,’ Khouri said with sullen acceptance. ‘And it stinks, but I don’t suppose you’re about to take the damned thing out of my head just because I don’t like it.’
The Mademoiselle smiled. ‘To burden you with too much knowledge at this point would be to risk a momentary indiscretion in the presence of the Ultras.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Khouri said. ‘I already know you want me to kill Sylveste. What more could there possibly be to find out?’
The Mademoiselle repeated her smile, maddeningly. Like many beta-level sims, her compendium of facial expressions was small enough to make repetition inevitable, like a bad actor constantly falling into the same characterisations.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘that what you now know is not even a fragment of the whole story. Not even a splinter.’
When Pascale arrived, Sylveste made a point of studying her face, matching it against his memories of Nils Girardieau. As usual he rammed against the limitations of his vision. His eyes were poor at curves, tending to approximate the nuances of the human face as a series of stepped edges.
But what Calvin had said was not obviously untrue. Pascale’s hair was Bible-black and straight; Girardieau’s curly and red. But the bone structure had too many points of similarity for coincidence. If Calvin had not made the remark, perhaps Sylveste would never have guessed… but now that the idea was there, it explained far too much.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ he said.
She seemed genuinely taken aback. ‘About what?’
‘Everything. Starting with your father.’
‘My father?’ She was quiet now. ‘Ah. Then you know.’
He nodded, tight-lipped. Then, ‘That was one of the risks you ran by collaborating with Calvin. Calvin is very clever.’
‘He must have established some kind of data link with my compad; accessed private files. The bastard.’
‘Now you know how I feel. Why did you do it, Pascale?’
‘At first, because I had no choice. I wanted to study you. And the only way I could earn your trust was under another name. It was possible; few people even knew I existed, much less what I looked like.’ She paused. ‘And it worked, didn’t it? You did trust me. And I did nothing to betray that trust.’
‘Is that the truth? You never told Nils anything that might have helped him?’
She looked wounded. ‘You had forewarning of the coup, remember? If anyone was betrayed in all this, it was my father.’
He tried to find an angle that would prove her wrong, without really being sure he wanted to. Perhaps what she said was true. ‘And the biography?’
‘That was my father’s idea.’
‘A tool to discredit me?’
‘There’s nothing in the biography which isn’t truthful — unless you know otherwise.’ She paused. ‘It’s nearly ready for release, actually. Calvin’s been very helpful. It’ll be the first major work of indigenous art produced on Resurgam, do you realise? Since the Amarantin, of course.’
‘It’s a piece of art all right. Are you going to release it under your real name?’
‘That was always the idea. I was hoping you wouldn’t find out until then, of course.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. None of this will change our working relationship, believe me. After all, I always knew Nils was the real author behind it.’
‘That makes it easier for you, doesn’t? To write me off as an irrelevance?’
‘Do you have the TE dates you promised me?’
‘Yes.’ She passed a card to him. ‘I don’t break my promises, Doctor. But I’m afraid the little respect I have for you is in serious danger of vanishing altogether.’
Sylveste glanced at the trapped-electron summary scrolling down the card as he flexed it between thumb and forefinger. Some part of his mind was entirely unable to detach itself from what the numbers represented, even as he spoke to Pascale. ‘When your father told me about the biography, he said the woman who would be authoring it was someone whose illusions were on the point of being shattered.’
She stood up. ‘I think we should leave this until another time.’
‘No; wait.’ Sylveste reached out and held her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I need to talk to you about this, do you understand?’
She flinched at the contact, then slowly relaxed. Her expression was still watchful. ‘About what?’
‘This.’ He tapped his thumb against the TE summary. ‘It’s very interesting.’
Volyova’s shuttle was approaching a shipyard; up near the Lagrange point between Yellowstone and its moon, Marco’s Eye. About a dozen lighthuggers were parked in the yard; more ships than Khouri had ever seen in her life. At the yard’s hub was a major carousel, smaller in-system vessels attached to the wheel’s rim like suckling pigs. A few of the lighthuggers were
encased in skeletal support structures for major ice-shield or Conjoiner-drive overhauls (Conjoiner ships were here, too: sleek and black, as if chiselled from space itself); but the rest of the starships were basically drifting, following lazy and slow orbits around the Lagrange point’s centre of gravity. Khouri guessed that there must be complex rules of etiquette governing the way those ships were parked; who had to move out the way of whom to avoid a collision which a computer might predict days in advance. The expenditure of fuel which might have to be burned to nudge a ship off a collision course would be tiny against the profit margin of a typical trade stopover… but the loss of face would be much harder to amortise. There had never been as many ships as this parked around Sky’s Edge, but even then she had heard of skirmishes between crews over issues of parking priority and trade rights. It was a common groundsider’s misapprehension that Ultras were a homogeneous splinter of humanity. In truth, they were as factional, and as paranoid about one another, as any other human strain.
Now they were approaching Volyova’s ship.
The thing, like all the other lighthuggers, was improbably streamlined. Space only approximated a vacuum at slow speeds. Up near lightspeed — which was where these ships spent most of their time — it was like cutting through a howling gale of atmosphere. That was why they looked like daggers: conic hull tapering to a needle-sharp prow to punch the interstellar medium, with two Conjoiner engines braced at the back on spars like an ornate hilt. The ship was sheathed in ice, so glisteningly pure that it looked like diamond. The shuttle swooped in low over Volyova’s ship, and for a moment Khouri apprehended the ship’s vastness. It was like flying over a city, not another vessel. Then a door irised open in the hull, revealing a glowing docking bay. Volyova guided the shuttle home with expert taps on her thruster controls, latching onto a berthing cradle. Khouri heard thumps as umbilicals and docking connectors thudded home.
Volyova was first out of her seat restraints. ‘Shall we step aboard?’ she asked, with something that was not quite the politeness Khouri had been expecting.
They propelled themselves through the shuttle and out into the spacious environment of the ship.
They were still in free-fall, but at the end of the corridor they were facing Khouri could see a complex arrangement where the stationary and rotating sections were joined together.
She was beginning to feel nauseous, but she was damned if she was going to let Volyova see this. ‘Before we go ahead,’ the Ultra woman said, ‘there’s someone you have to meet.’
She was looking over Khouri’s shoulder, back towards the corridor that led to the shuttle which had brought them aboard. Khouri heard the shuffling sound of someone working hand-over-hand along the rails which ribbed the passage. But that could only mean that there had been another person aboard the shuttle.
Something was wrong here.
Volyova’s attitude was not that of someone who was trying to impress a potential recruit. It was more as if she cared little what Khouri thought; as if it was of no consequence at all. Khouri looked around, in time to see the Komuso who had come with them in the elevator. His face was lost under the expressionless wicker helmet they all wore. He carried his shakuhachi in the crook of his arm.
Khouri started to speak, but Volyova silenced her. ‘Welcome aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, Ana Khouri. You’ve just become our new Gunnery Officer.’ Then she nodded towards the Komuso. ‘Do me a favour, will you, Triumvir?’
‘Anything particular?’
‘Knock her out before she tries to kill either one of us.’
The last thing Khouri saw was a golden blur of bamboo.
Sylveste thought he smelt Pascale’s perfume before his eyes separated her from the crowd outside the prison building. He made a reflex move towards her, but the two burly militiamen who had escorted him from his room quickly restrained him. Catcalls and muffled insults came from the cordoned-off crowd, but Sylveste barely noticed them.
Pascale kissed him diplomatically, half hiding the conjunction of their mouths behind her lace-gloved hand.
‘Before you ask,’ she said, her voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd, ‘I have no more idea what this is about than you.’
‘Is Nils behind it?’
‘Who else? Only he’s got the clout to get you out of that place for more than a day.’
‘Pity he’s not so keen to prevent me returning.’
‘Oh, he might — if he didn’t have to placate his own people, and the opposition. It’s about time you stopped thinking of him as your worst enemy, you know.’ They stepped into the sterile hush of the waiting car. The vehicle was adapted from one of the smaller surface exploration buggies, four balloon wheels at the extremities of its air-smoothed body, comms gear stowed in a matt-black hump on the roof. It was painted Inundationist purple, with Hokusai wave pendants mounted on the front.
‘If it wasn’t for my father,’ Pascale continued, ‘you’d have died during the coup. He protected you from your worst enemies.’
‘That doesn’t make him a very competent revolutionary.’
‘And what does that say about the regime he managed to overthrow?’
Sylveste shrugged. ‘Fair point, I suppose.’
A guard climbed into the front seat, behind a partition of armoured glass, and then they were moving, rushing through the crowd, speeding towards the edge of the city. They passed through one of the arboreta, then descended down one of the ramps which passed beneath the perimeter. Two other government cars accompanied them, also modified from surface buggies, but painted black and with masked militia riding postilion, holding rifles to their shoulders. After travelling for a kilometre along an unlit tunnel, the convoy arrived in an airlock and halted while the breathable city air was exchanged for Resurgam’s atmosphere. The guards remained at their posts, pausing only to adjust their breather masks and goggles. Then the vehicles moved on, ascending back towards the surface. They arrived in greyish daylight, surrounded by concrete blast walls, driving across a surface patterned in red and green lights.
An aircraft was waiting for them, parked on the apron on a tripod of skids, the undersides of its wings already uncomfortably bright to look at, already beginning to ionise the boundary layer of air below them. The driver reached into a dashboard compartment and removed breather masks, passing them back through the security grill, motioning for them to place them over their faces.
‘Not that you have to,’ he said. ‘Oxygen’s up two hundred per cent since you were last outside Resurgam City, Doctor Sylveste. Some people have breathed naked atmosphere for tens of minutes with no longterm effects.’
‘Those must be the dissidents I keep hearing about,’ Sylveste said. ‘The renegades Girardieau betrayed during the coup. The ones that are supposed to be communicating with True Path’s leaders in Cuvier. I don’t envy them. The dust must clog their lungs almost as much as it clogs their minds.’
The escort looked unimpressed. ‘Scavenger enzymes process the dust particles. It’s old Martian biotech. Anyway; dust levels are down. All the moisture we pumped into the atmosphere allowed the dust particles to bind into bigger grains which aren’t so easily transported by the wind.’
‘Very good,’ Sylveste applauded. ‘Pity it’s still such a miserable hellhole.’
He palmed the mask to his face and waited for the door to open. A moderate wind was blowing, no more than a stinging abrasion.
They dashed across the ground.
The aircraft was a welcome oasis of space and quiet, its sumptuous interior outfitted in governmental purple. The occupants of the other two cars boarded by a different door, Sylveste catching a glimpse of Nils Girardieau crossing the apron. Girardieau walked with a swaying motion that began somewhere near his shoulders, like a pair of architect’s dividers being walked across a drawing board point to point. There was a momentum to him, like a glacier compressed into a man’s volume. The leader vanished out of sight and then a few minutes later the visible edge of the
closest wing turned violet, enveloped in a nimbus of excited ions, and the aircraft climbed from the apron.
Sylveste sketched a window for himself and watched Cuvier — or Resurgam City, as they now called it — grow small beneath him. It was the first time he had seen the place in its entirety since the coup, back before the statue of the French naturalist had been toppled. The old simplicity of the colony was gone. A froth of human habitation extended messily beyond the dome perimeters; air-sealed structures linked by covered roads and walkways. There were many smaller outlying domes, emerald-green with plantations. Even a few undomed strips of trial organisms laid out in eye-hurting geometric patterns, waiting to be unleashed far beyond the city.
They circled the city and then took off on a northerly course. Lacework canyons furled below. Occasionally they overflew a small settlement, usually just an opaque dome or streamlined shack, the glare from the wings momentarily illuminating whatever they overflew. Mostly it was wilderness, uncrossed by road, pipe or power line.
Sylveste catnapped intermittently, waking to see tropical deserts of ice and imported tundra washing below. Presently a settlement came over the horizon and the aircraft made loitering spirals towards the ground. Sylveste moved his window to get a better look.
‘I recognise this area. It’s where we found the obelisk.’
‘Yes,’ Pascale said.
The landscape was craggy and mostly unvegetated, the horizon ruined by uprearing broken arches and improbable rock pillars, all of which looked on the point of imminent collapse. There was little flat ground, just deep fissures, like a calcified unmade bed. They came in over a solidified lava stream then landed on a flat hexagonal pad surrounded by armoured surface buildings. It was only midday, yet the dust in the air attenuated the sunlight so severely that it was necessary to bathe the pad in floodlights. Militia dashed across the ground to meet the flight, hiding their eyes against the light from the aircraft’s underside.