‘The most recent maps were compiled during our approach,’ Hegazi said. ‘You can retrieve them from ship memory and project them into the display.’
‘Then show me how. I’m going to be more than just a passenger for some time to come — you might as well get used to it.’
It took a minute or so to find the right maps; another half a minute to project the right composite into the projection sphere in the form Sylveste desired, eclipsing the realtime image of Resurgam. The image had the form of an orrery, the orbits of the system’s eleven planets and largest minor planets and comets denoted by elegant coloured tracks, with the positions of the bodies themselves shown in their current relative positions. Because the scale adopted was large, the terrestrial planets — Resurgam included — were crammed into the middle; a tight scribble of concentric orbits banded around the star Delta Pavonis. The minor planets came next, followed by the gas giants and comets, occupying the system’s middle ground. Then came two smaller sub-Jovian gas worlds, hardly giants at all, then a Plutonian world — not much more than a captured cometary husk, with two attendant moons. The system’s Kuiper belt of primordial cometary matter was visible in infrared as a curiously distorted shoal, one nubby end pointing out from the star. And then there was nothing at all for twenty further AU, more than ten light-hours out from the star itself. Matter here — such as there was — was only weakly bound to the star; it felt its gravitational field, but orbits here were centuries long and easily disrupted by encounters with other bodies. The protective caul of the star’s magnetic field did not extend this far out, and objects here were buffeted by the ceaseless squall of the galactic magnetosphere; the great wind in which the magnetic fields of all stars were embedded, like tiny eddies within a vaster cyclone.
But that enormous volume of space was not completely empty. It appeared at first only as one body — but that was because the default magnification scale was too large to show its duplicity. It lay in the direction in which the Kuiper halo was pointing; its own gravitational drag had pulled the halo out of sphericity towards that bulged configuration, betraying its existence. The object itself would have been utterly invisible to the naked eye, unless one were within a million kilometres of it; at which point seeing the object would have been the least of one’s problems.
‘You’ll know of this,’ Sylveste said. ‘Even though you might not have paid it very much attention until now.’
‘It’s a neutron star,’ Hegazi said.
‘Good. Remember anything else?’
‘Only that it has a companion,’ Sajaki said. ‘Which doesn’t in itself make it unusual, of course.’
‘Not really, no. Neutron stars often have planets — they’re supposed to be the condensed remnants of evaporated binary stars. Either that or the planet somehow managed to avoid being destroyed when the pulsar was formed during the supernova explosion of a heavier star.’ Sylveste shook his head. ‘But not unusual, no. So — you may be asking — why am I interested in it?’
‘That’s a reasonable question,’ Hegazi said.
‘Because there’s something strange about it.’ Sylveste enlarged the image, until the planet was clearly visible, streaking around the neutron star in its ludicrously rapid orbit.
‘The planet was of extraordinary significance to the Amarantin. It appears in their late-phase artefacts with increasing frequency as one approaches the Event — the stellar flare which wiped them out.’
He knew he had their attention now. If the threat to destroy their ship had appealed to them on the level of self-preservation, now he had fully snared their intellects. He had never doubted that this part would be simpler than with the colonists, for Sajaki’s crew already had the advantage of a cosmic perspective.
‘So what is it?’ Sajaki said.
‘I don’t know. That’s what you’re going to help me find out.’
Hegazi said, ‘You think there might be something on the planet?’
‘Or inside it. We won’t know for sure until we get a lot closer, will we?’
‘It could be a trap,’ Pascale said. ‘I don’t think we should dismiss that possibility — especially if Dan’s right about the timing.’
‘What timing?’ Sajaki said.
Sylveste steepled his fingers. ‘It’s my suspicion — no; not a suspicion, my conclusion — that the Amarantin eventually progressed to the point where they could achieve space travel.’
‘From what I gathered on the surface,’ Sajaki said, ‘there’s very little in the fossil record to substantiate that.’
‘But there wouldn’t be, would there? Technological artefacts are inherently less durable than more primitive items. Pottery endures. Microcircuits crumble to dust. Besides, it took a technology comparable to our own to bury the city under the obelisk. If they were capable of that, we’ve no grounds for presuming they weren’t also capable of reaching the edge of their solar system — perhaps even interstellar space.’
‘You don’t think the Amarantin reached other systems?’
‘I don’t rule it out, no.’
Sajaki smiled. ‘Then where are they now? I can accept one technological civilisation being wiped out without a trace, but not one spread across many worlds. They would have left something behind.’
‘Perhaps they did.’
‘The world around the neutron star? You think that’s where you’ll find the answers to your questions?’
‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to go there. All I’m asking is that you let me find out, which means taking me there.’ Sylveste rested his chin on his steepled fingers. ‘You’ll get me as close to the planet as possible, and ensure my safety at the same time. If that means putting the nastier capabilities of this vessel at my disposal, so be it.’
Hegazi looked fascinated and fearful. ‘Do you think we’ll encounter something when we get there — something we need the weapons for?’
‘There’s no harm in taking precautions, is there?’
Sajaki turned to his fellow Triumvir. For a moment it was as if none of the others were present at all as something flickered between them, perhaps on the level of machine thought. When they spoke, it might only have been to repeat the discussion for Sylveste’s benefit. ‘What he said about the device in his eyes — is that possible? I mean, assuming what we know of the technical expertise on Resurgam, could they have installed such an implant in the time we gave them?’
Hegazi took his time before answering. ‘I think, Yuuj i-san, that we should seriously consider the possibility.’
Most of Volyova woke up in the recovery suite of the medical bay. She did not need to be told that she had been unconscious for more than a few hours. She had only to examine her state of mind, the feeling that she had been dreaming, deeply so — for centuries — to know that her injuries, and her recuperation, had not been trivial. Sometimes one could feel like one had been dreaming for a lifetime in the shortest of catnaps. But not now, for these dreams were as long, and as saturated with event, as the most turgid of pretechnological fables. She felt that she had lived through dusty, deathless volumes of her own wanderings.
Yet she remembered very little. She had been aboard this ship, yes, and then not aboard it — somewhere else, though where, she was not yet clear — and then something dreadful had happened. All she really remembered was the sound and the fury — but what did they signify? Where had she been?
Dimly — at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream — she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as a landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past. They did not even have the decency to return in anything like chronological order. But when she ordered things to her own satisfaction, she remembered the delivering of ultimata, in her voice, oddly enough, announced from orbit to the waiting world below. And then waiting in the storm, and feeling at first a terrible hotness and then an equally terrible coolness in her stomach, and seeing Sudjic standin
g over her, dispensing pain.
The room’s door opened; Ana Khouri entered, alone.
‘You’re awake,’ she said. ‘Thought so. I had the system advise me when your neural activity passed a certain level consistent with conscious thought. It’s good to have you back, Ilia. We could use some sanity around here.’
‘How long…’ Volyova swallowed her words — they sounded broken and slurred – before beginning again. ‘How long have I been here? And where are we now?’
‘Ten days since the attack, Ilia. We’re — well, I’ll come to that. It’s a long story. How do you feel?’
‘I’ve felt worse.’ Then she wondered why she had said it, because she could not think of an occasion when she had felt this bad, ever. But it seemed to be what one said under the circumstances. ‘What attack?’
‘I don’t think you remember much, do you?’
‘I did just ask that question, Khouri.’
She had joined Volyova, the room extruding a blocky chair by the bedside for her comfort. ‘Sudjic,’ she said. ‘She tried to kill you when we were on Resurgam — you remember, don’t you?’
‘Not really.’
‘We’d gone down to escort Sylveste up to the ship.’
Volyova was silent for a moment, the man’s name ringing in her head with a peculiarly metallic quality, as if a scalpel had just crashed to the floor. ‘Sylveste, yes. I remember that we were about to bring him in. Did it work, then? Did Sajaki get what he wanted?’
‘Yes and no,’ Khouri said, after deliberation.
‘And Sudjic?’
‘She wanted to kill you because of Nagorny.’
‘No pleasing some people, is there?’
‘I think she’d have found some excuse, whatever happened. She thought I’d join with her, as well.’
‘And?’
‘I killed her.’
‘Then I’d hazard a guess that you saved my life.’ For the first time Volyova lifted her head from the pillow; it felt as if it were attached to the bed by elastic cables. ‘You really ought to cut down on it, Khouri, before it becomes a habit. But if there was another death… you can probably expect Sajaki to start asking questions.’ That was as much as she would risk saying now; the warning she had just given was exactly what any senior crewperson might give to an understudy; it did not necessarily mean — to anyone listening in — that Volyova knew anything more about Khouri than the other Triumvirs.
But the warning was sincere enough. First the killing in the training chamber… then another on Resurgam. In neither situation had Khouri exactly instigated the trouble, but if her proximity to both happenings was enough to trouble Volyova, it would certainly give Sajaki pause for thought. Asking questions was probably at the milder end of the Triumvir’s likely interrogative process, if it came to that. Sajaki might opt for torture… perhaps even a dangerous deep-memory trawl. Then — if he did not fry Khouri’s mind in the process — he might learn her identity as infiltrator, put aboard to steal the cache. His next question would almost certainly be: how much of this did Volyova know? And if he deemed it worthwhile to trawl Volyova as well…
It must not come to that, she thought.
As soon as she was well enough, she would have to get Khouri to the spider-room where they could talk more freely. For now, it was senseless to dwell on things beyond her control. ‘What happened afterwards?’ she asked.
‘After Sudjic bought it? Everything continued according to plan, believe it or not. Sylveste still had to be escorted aboard the ship, and Sajaki and I hadn’t been injured.’
She thought of Sylveste, somewhere in the ship now. ‘Then Sajaki really did get what he wanted.’
‘No,’ Khouri said, guardedly. ‘That’s only what he thought he’d got. But the truth was a bit different.’
Over the next hour she told Volyova everything that had happened since Sylveste had been brought back aboard the lighthugger. It was all general ship-knowledge; nothing that Sajaki would not expect her to tell Volyova. But all the while, Volyova reminded herself that she was being told events as filtered by Khouri’s perception of things, which might not necessarily be complete, or even reliable. There were nuances of shipboard politics which would elude Khouri; would, indeed, elude anyone who had not been aboard for years. But at the end it seemed unlikely that any large portion of the truth had not been related, whether Khouri knew it or not. And what Volyova had been told was not good; not good at all.
‘You think he lied?’ Khouri asked.
‘About the hot-dust?’ Volyova approximated a shrug. ‘It’s certainly possible. Granted, Remilliod did sell hot-dust to the colony — we’ve seen the evidence of that already — but manipulating it isn’t child’s play. And they wouldn’t have had long to install it in his eyes, assuming they waited until the strike against Phoenix had already taken place, which seems likely. On the other hand… the risk’s just too great to assume he was lying. No remote-scan could detect hot-dust without risking a trigger… it puts Sajaki in a double-bind. He can’t not assume Sylveste was telling the truth. He has to take Sylveste at his word, or risk everything. At least this way the risk’s marginally quantifiable.’
‘You call Sylveste’s request a quantifiable risk?’
Volyova clucked, thinking of his demands. In all her life, she had never been near anything potentially alien; anything so potentially outside of her experience. There would surely be much there that could teach her… many lessons she could absorb. Sylveste need hardly have bothered with his threat…
‘He should have known better than to offer us such a tantalising lure,’ she said. ‘I’ve been intrigued by that neutron star ever since we entered the system, do you know? I found something near it on our approach — a weak neutrino source. It seems to be orbiting the planet, which itself orbits the neutron star.’
‘What could produce neutrinos?’
‘Many things — but of this energy? I can only think of machinery. Advanced machinery.’
‘Left there by the Amarantin?’
‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’ Volyova smiled, with effort. That was exactly what she was thinking, but there was no sense in stating her desires so blatantly. ‘I suppose we will find out when we get there.’
Neutrinos are fundamental particles; spin-half leptons. They come in three forms, or flavours: electron, mu-or tau-neutrinos, depending on the nuclear reactions which have birthed them. But because they have mass — because they move fractionally slower than the speed of light — neutrinos oscillate between flavours as they fly. By the time the ship’s sensors intercepted these neutrinos, they were a blend of the three possible flavour states, difficult to untangle. But as the distance to the neutron star decreased — and with it the time available for the neutrinos to oscillate away from their creation state — the blend of flavours became increasingly dominated by one type of neutrino. The energy spectrum became easier to read, too, and the time-dependent variations in the source strength were now much simpler to follow and interpret. By the time the distance between the ship and the neutron star had narrowed to one-fifth of one AU — about twenty million kilometres —Volyova had a much clearer idea about what was causing the steady flux of particles, dominated by the heaviest of the neutrino flavours, tau-neutrinos.
And what she learned disturbed her enormously.
But she decided to wait until they were closer before announcing her fears to the rest of the crew. Sylveste was, after all, still controlling them; it seemed unlikely that her worries would greatly dissuade him from his current course of action.
Khouri was getting used to dying.
One of the niggling aspects of Volyova’s simulations was the way they routinely carried on beyond the point where any real observer would have been killed, or at the very least so gravely injured as to be incapable of perceiving any subsequent events, let alone capable of having any influence over them. Like this time. Something had lanced out from Cerberus — an unspecified weapon of arbitrary destructive
ness — and casually shredded the entire lighthugger. Nothing could have survived that attack, but Khouri’s disembodied consciousness was still stubbornly present, watching the riven shards drift lazily apart in a pinkish halo of their own ionised guts. It was, she supposed, Volyova’s way of rubbing it in.
‘Haven’t you ever heard of morale-building?’ Khouri had asked.
‘Heard of it,’ Volyova said. ‘Don’t happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?’
‘But I keep dying anyway. Why are you so convinced we’re going to run into trouble when we get there?’
‘I’m only assuming the worst,’ Volyova said, depressingly.
The next day Volyova felt strong enough to talk to Sylveste and his wife. She was sitting up in bed when they came into the medical bay, a compad propped on her lap, scrolling through a plethora of attack scenarios which she would later test against Khouri. She hastily closed the display and replaced it with something less ominous, though she doubted that the cryptic code of her simulations would have made much sense to Sylveste anyway; even to herself, her scribbles some-times resembled a private language in which she had only passing fluency.
‘You’re healed now,’ Sylveste said, sitting next to her, flanked by Pascale. ‘That’s good.’
‘Because you care about my well-being, or because you need my expertise?’
‘The latter, obviously. There’s no love lost between us, Ilia, so why pretend otherwise?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ She put the compad aside. ‘Khouri and I had a discussion about you. I — or we — concluded that it was better to give you the benefit of the doubt. So for the time being, assume that I assume that everything you’ve told us,’ she touched a finger against her brow, ‘is completely true. Of course, I reserve the right to alter this judgement at any point in the future.’