Sluka faced him again. ‘And you?’
‘I’ll stay here — finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.’
She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other — the one containing his stateroom — for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.
He looked around to see who was still with him.
There was Pascale — but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.
Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. ‘Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.’ He addressed another pair. ‘Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.’
‘What are you planning now?’ Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.
‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ Sylveste said. ‘I’m going to see what it says on that obelisk.’
Chasm City, Yellowstone, Epsilon Eridani system, 2524
The suite console chimed as Ana Khouri was brushing her teeth. She came out of the bathroom, foam on her lips.
‘Morning, Case.’
The hermetic glided into the apartment, his travelling palanquin decorated in ornate scrollwork, with a tiny, dark window in the front side. When the light was right she could just make out K. C. Ng’s deathly pale face bobbing behind an inch of green glass.
‘Hey, you look great,’ he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. ‘Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?’
‘It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.’
‘I was joking,’ Ng said. ‘You look like shit warmed over.’
She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. ‘I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.’
‘Excuses.’ Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.
The voice rasped again, ‘Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.’
‘Off my back, Case.’
‘Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?’
Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
‘I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Then let us discuss matters of a terminal nature, at least where Taraschi is concerned.’
Ng began to hit her with the final details for the kill. Most of it was already in the plan, or stuff that she had guessed for herself, based on her experience of previous kills. Taraschi was to be her fifth consecutive assassination, so she was beginning to grasp the wider scope of the game. Though they were not always obvious, the game had its own rules, subtly reiterated in the grand movements of each kill. The media attention was even picking up, her name being bandied around Shadowplay circles with increasing frequency, and Case was apparently setting up some juicy, high-profile targets for her next few hunts. She was, she felt, on the way to becoming one of the top hundred or so assassins on the planet; elite company indeed.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Under the Monument, plaza level eight, west annex, one hour. Couldn’t be easier.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting one thing?’
‘Right. Where’s the kill weapon, Case?’
Ng’s form nodded behind her. ‘Where the tooth fairy left it, dear girl.’
And then he turned his box and retreated from the room, leaving only a faint whiff of lubricant. Khouri, frowning, reached a hand slowly beneath the pillow on her bed. There was something, just as Case had said. There had been nothing there when she went to sleep, but this sort of thing hardly bothered her these days. The company always had moved in mysterious ways.
Soon, she was ready.
She called a cable-car from the roof, the kill weapon snuggling under her coat. The car detected the weapon and the presence of implants in her head, and would have refused to carry her had she not shown it her Omega Point ident, grafted beneath the nail of her right index finger, making a tiny holographic target symbol seem to dance beneath the keratin. ‘Monument to the Eighty,’ Khouri said.
Sylveste stepped off the ladder and walked across the stepped base of the pit until he reached the pool of light around the obelisk’s exposed tip. Sluka and one of the other archaeologists had deserted him, but the one remaining worker — assisted by the servitor — had managed to uncover nearly a metre of the object, peeling away the nested layers of the stone sarcophagi to reach the massive block of obsidian, skilfully carved, on which Amarantin graphicforms had been engraved in precise lines. Most of it was textual: rows of ideopicts. The archaeologists understood the basics of Amarantin language, though there had been no Rosetta stone to aid them. The Amarantin were the eighth dead alien culture discovered by humanity within fifty light years of Earth, but there was no evidence that any of those eight species had come into contact with each other. Nor could the Pattern Jugglers or the Shrouders offer assistance: neither had revealed anything remotely resembling a written language. Sylveste, who had come into contact with both the Jugglers and the Shrouders — or at least the latter’s technology — appreciated that as well as anyone.
Instead, computers had cracked the Amarantin language. It had taken thirty years — correlating millions of artefacts — but finally a consistent model had been evolved which could determine the broad meaning of most inscriptions. It helped that, at least towards the end of their reign, there had only been one Amarantin tongue, and that it had changed very slowly, so that the same model could interpret inscriptions which had been made tens of thousands of years apart. Of course, nuances of meaning were another thing entirely. That was where human intuition — and theory — came in.
Amarantin writing was not, however, like anything in human experience. All Amarantin texts were stereoscopic — consisting of interlaced lines which had to be merged in the reader’s visual cortex. Their ancestors had once been something like birds — flying dinosaurs, but with the intelligence of lemurs. At some point in their past their eyes had been situated on opposite sides of their skull
s, leading to a highly bicameral mind, each hemisphere synthesising its own mental model of the world. Later, they had become hunters and evolved binocular vision, but their mental wiring still owed something to that earlier phase of development. Most Amarantin artefacts mirrored their mental duality, with a pronounced symmetry about the vertical axis.
The obelisk was no exception.
Sylveste had no need for the special goggles his co-workers needed to read Amarantin graphicforms: the stereoscopic merging was easily accommodated within his own eyes, employing one of Calvin’s more useful algorithms. But the act of reading was still tortuous, requiring strenuous concentration.
‘Give me some light here,’ he said, and the student unclipped one of the portable floods and held it by hand over the side of the obelisk. From somewhere above lightning strobed: electricity coursing between dust planes in the storm.
‘Can you read it, sir?’
‘I’m trying,’ Sylveste said. ‘It isn’t the easiest thing in the world, you know. Especially if you don’t keep that light steady.’
‘Sorry sir. Doing my best. But it is getting windy here.’
He was right: vortices were forming, even in the pit. It would soon get very much windier, and then the dust would begin to thicken, until it formed sheets of grey opacity in the air. They would not be able to work for very long in those conditions.
‘I apologise,’ Sylveste said. ‘I appreciate your help.’ Feeling that something more was called for, he added: ‘And I’m grateful that you chose to stay with me, rather than Sluka.’
‘It wasn’t difficult, sir. Not all of us are ready to dismiss your ideas.’
Sylveste looked up from the obelisk. ‘All of them?’
‘We at least accept they should be investigated. After all, it’s in the colony’s best interests to understand what happened.’
‘The Event, you mean?’
The student nodded. ‘If it really was something the Amarantin caused to happen… and if it really did coincide with them achieving spaceflight — then it might be of more than academic interest.’
‘I despise that phrase. Academic interest — as if any other kind were automatically more worthy. But you’re right. We have to know.’
Pascale came closer. ‘Know what, exactly?’
‘What it was they did that made their sun kill them.’ Sylveste turned to face her, pinning her down with the oversized silvery facets of his artificial eyes. ‘So that we don’t end up making the same mistake.’
‘You mean it was an accident?’
‘I very much doubt that they did it deliberately, Pascale.’
‘I realise that.’ He had condescended to her, and she hated that, he knew. He also hated himself for doing it. ‘I also know that stone-age aliens just don’t have the means to influence the behaviour of their star, accidentally or otherwise.’
‘We know they were more advanced than that,’ Sylveste said. ‘We know they had the wheel and gunpowder; a rudimentary science of optics and an interest in astronomy for agrarian purposes. Humanity went from that level to spaceflight in no more than five centuries. It would be prejudiced to assume another species was not capable of the same, wouldn’t it?’
‘But where’s the evidence?’ Pascale stood to shake rivulets of settled dust from her greatcoat. ‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say — none of the high-tech artefacts survived, because they were intrinsically less durable than earlier ones. But even if there was evidence — how does that change things? Even the Conjoiners don’t go around tinkering with stars, and they’re a lot more advanced than the rest of humanity, us included.’
‘I know. That’s precisely what bothers me.’
‘Then what does the writing say?’
Sylveste sighed and looked back at it again. He had hoped that the distraction would allow his subconscious to work at the piece, and that now the meaning of the inscription would snap into clarity, like the answer to one of the psychological problems they had been posed before the Shrouder mission. But the moment of revelation stubbornly refused to come; the graphicforms were still not yielding meaning. Or perhaps, he thought, it was his expectations that were at fault. He had been hoping for something momentous; something that would confirm his ideas, terrifying as they were.
But instead, the writing seemed only to commemorate something that had happened here — something that might have been of great importance in Amarantin history, but which — set against his expectations — was bound to be parochial in the extreme. It would take a full computer analysis to be sure, and he had only been able to read the top metre or so of the text — but already he could feel the crush of disappointment. Whatever this obelisk represented, it was no longer of interest to him.
‘Something happened here,’ Sylveste said. ‘Maybe a battle, or the appearance of a god. That’s all it is — a marker stone. We’ll know more when we unearth it and date the context layer. We can run a TE measurement on the artefact itself, too.’
‘It’s not what you were looking for, is it?’
‘I thought it might be, for a while.’ Then Sylveste looked down, towards the lowest exposed part of the obelisk. The text ended a few inches above the highest layer of cladding, and something else began, extending downwards out of sight. It was a diagram, of some sort — he could see the topmost arcs of several concentric circles, and that was all. What was it?
Sylveste could not — would not — begin to guess. The storm was growing stronger. No stars at all were visible now, only a single occluding sheet of dust, roaring overhead like a great bat’s wing. It would be a kind of hell when they left the pit.
‘Give me something to dig with,’ he said. And then started scraping away at the permafrost around the topmost layer of the sarcophagus, like a prisoner who had until dawn to tunnel from his cell. Only a few moments passed before Pascale and the student joined him in the work, while the storm howled above.
‘I don’t remember much,’ the Captain said. ‘Are we still around Bloater?’
‘No,’ Volyova said, trying not to make it seem as if she had already explained this to him a dozen times, each time she had warmed his mind. ‘We left Kruger 60A some years ago, once Hegazi negotiated us the shield ice we needed.’
‘Oh. Then where are we?’
‘Heading towards Yellowstone.’
‘Why?’ The Captain’s basso voice rumbled out of speakers arranged some distance from his corpse. Complex algorithms scanned his brain patterns and translated the results into speech, fleshing out the responses when required. He had no real right to be conscious at all, really — all neural activity should have ended when his core temperature had dropped below freezing. But his brain was webbed by tiny machines, and in a way it was the machines which were thinking now, even though they were doing so at less than half a Kelvin above absolute zero.
‘That’s a good question,’ she said. Something was bothering her now and it was more than just this conversation. ‘The reason we’re going to Yellowstone is…’
‘Yes?’
‘Sajaki thinks there’s a man there who can help you.’
The Captain pondered this. On her bracelet she had a map of his brain: she could see colours squirming across it like armies merging on a battlefield. ‘That man must be Calvin Sylveste,’ the Captain said.
‘Calvin Sylveste is dead.’
‘The other one, then. Dan Sylveste. Is that the man Sajaki seeks?’
‘I can’t imagine it’s anyone else.’
‘He won’t come willingly. He didn’t last time.’ There was a moment of silence; quantum temperature fluctuations pushing the Captain back below consciousness. ‘Sajaki must be aware of that,’ he said, returning.
‘I’m sure Sajaki has considered all the possibilities,’ Volyova said, in a manner which made it clear she was sure of anything but that. But she would be careful of speaking against the other Triumvir. Sajaki had always been the Captain’s closest adjutant — the two of them went back a long way; tim
es long before Volyova had joined the crew. To the best of her knowledge, no one else — including Sajaki — ever spoke to the Captain, or even knew that there was a way to do so. But there was no point taking stupid risks — even given the Captain’s erratic memory.
‘Something’s troubling you, Ilia. You’ve always been able to confide in me. Is it Sylveste?’
‘It’s more local than that.’
‘Something aboard the ship, then?’
It was not something to which she was ever going to become totally accustomed, Volyova knew, but in recent weeks visiting the Captain had begun to take on definite tones of normality. As if visiting a cryogenically cooled corpse infected with a retarded but potentially all-consuming plague was merely one of life’s unpleasant but necessary elements; something that, now and again, everyone had to do. Now, though, she was taking their relationship a step further — about to ignore the same risk which had stopped her expressing her misgivings about Sajaki.
‘It’s about the gunnery,’ she said. ‘You remember that, don’t you? The room from which the cache-weapons can be controlled?’
‘I think so, yes. What about it?’
‘I’ve been training a recruit to become Gunnery Officer; to assume the gunnery seat and interface with the cache-weapons through neural implants.’
‘Who was this recruit?’
‘Someone called Boris Nagorny. No; you never met him — he came aboard only recently, and I tended to keep him away from the others when I could help it. I would never have brought him down here, for obvious reasons.’ Namely that the Captain’s contagion might have reached Nagorny’s implants if she had allowed the two of them to get too close. Volyova sighed. She was getting to the crux of her confession now. ‘Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane — at least, I thought so at the time. But I underestimated the degree of Nagorny’s psychosis.’
‘He got worse?’
‘It started not long after I put the implants in and allowed him to tap into the gunnery. He began to complain of nightmares. Very bad ones.’