‘She won’t believe you.’
‘She might if you back me up. You’ll do it, won’t you?’ Khouri looked at Volyova. The Triumvir stared back for a long moment, and might have been on the verge of answering when her bracelet began chirping. She pulled back the cuff of her sleeve and looked at the readout. She was wanted upship.
The bridge, as always, seemed too large for the few people in it, dispersed sparsely throughout the chamber’s enormous and redundant volume. Pathetic, Volyova thought — and for a moment considered calling up some of her beloved dead, to at least fill out the place a bit and add a sense of ceremony to the occasion. But that would be demeaning, and in any case — despite the amount of thought she had expended on this project — she was not feeling remotely elated. Her recent discussions with Khouri had killed any lingering positive feelings she might have had for this whole enterprise. Khouri was right, of course — they really were taking an unthinkable risk just by being near to Cerberus/Hades — but there was nothing she could do about that. It was not simply that they ran the risk of the ship being destroyed. According to Khouri, that might actually be preferable to having Sylveste succeed in getting inside Cerberus. The ship and its crew might just survive that… but their short-term good fortune would be only a prelude to something much, much worse. If what Khouri had told her about the Dawn War was halfway to being the truth, it would be very bad indeed, not just for Resurgam — not just for this system — but for humanity as a whole.
She was about to make what might be the worst mistake of her career, and it was not even properly a mistake, since she had no choice in the matter.
‘Well,’ Triumvir Hegazi said, lording over her from his seat, ‘I hope this is worth it, Ilia.’
So did she — but the last thing she was going to do was concede any of her feelings of unease to Hegazi. ‘Bear in mind,’ she said, addressing them all, ‘that as soon as this is done, there won’t be any going back. This is going to look like bad news in anyone’s book. We might elicit an immediate response from the planet.’
‘Or we might not,’ Sylveste said. ‘I’ve told you repeatedly, Cerberus won’t do anything to draw unwarranted attention to itself.’
‘Then we’d better hope your theories are right.’
‘I think we can trust the good doctor,’ Sajaki said from Sylveste’s flank. ‘He’s just as vulnerable as the rest of us.’
Volyova felt an urge to get things over with. She illuminated the previously dark holo, filling it with a realtime image of the Lorean. The wreck showed no sign of having changed in any way since they had first found it — the hull was still peppered with awful wounds, inflicted, as they now knew, immediately after Cerberus had attacked and destroyed the probes. But within the ship, Volyova’s machines had been busy. There had been only a tiny swarm of them at first, spawned by the robot she had sent to find Alicia’s log entries. But the swarm had grown swiftly, consuming metal in the ship to fuel expansion, interfacing with the ship’s own self-replicating repair and redesign systems, most of which had failed to reboot after the Cerberus attack. Other populations would have followed — and then, a day or so after the first impregnation, the work proper would commence: transformation of the ship’s interior and skin. To a casual observer, none of this activity would have been apparent, but any kind of industry produced heat, and the outer layer of the wrecked ship had grown slightly warmer over the last few days, betraying the furious activity inside.
Volyova stroked her bracelet, doublechecking that all the indications were nominal. In a moment it would begin; there was now nothing that she could do to arrest the process.
‘My God,’ Hegazi said.
The Lorean was changing: shedding its skin. Sections of the damaged outer hull were flaking away in great acres, the ship enveloping itself in a slowly expanding cocoon of shards. What was revealed underneath still had the same form as the wreck, but it was smoothly carapaced, like a snake’s new skin. The transformations had been really rather easy to impose — the Lorean, unlike the Infinity, did not fight back with replicating viruses of its own; did not resist her sculpting hand. If reshaping the Infinity was like trying to carve fire, the other ship had been clay in her hands.
The angle of the view shifted, as the sloughing debris caused the Lorean to turn about its long axis. The Conjoiner engines were still attached and working — and now she had control of them, delegated to her bracelet. They would probably never have reached sufficient functionality to push the ship to the edge of light, but that was not Volyova’s intention. The journey it had to make — the last journey it would ever make — was almost insultingly small for such a ship. And now the ship was mostly hollow, the interior volume compressed into the thickened walls of the conic hull. The cone was open at the base; the ship was like a huge pointed thimble.
‘Dan,’ she said. ‘My machines found Alicia’s body, and the other crew, of course. Most of the mutineers had been in reefersleep… but even they didn’t survive the attack.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I can have them returned here, if you wish. There’ll be a delay, of course — we’d have to send a shuttle over to retrieve them.’
Sylveste’s answer, when it came, was swifter than she had expected. She had assumed he would want to dwell on it for anything up to an hour or so. Instead, he said: ‘No. There can’t be any delay now. You’re right — Cerberus will have witnessed this activity.’
‘Then the bodies?’
When he spoke, it was as if his answer were the only reasonable course of action. ‘They’ll have to go down with it.’
TWENTY-TWO
Cerberus/Hades Orbit, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
It was beginning.
Sylveste sat with steepled fingers before a luminous entoptic projection which occupied a good fraction of the volume of his quarters. Pascale, half consumed by shadow, was a series of abstract sculptural curves on their bed; he was cross-legged on a tatami mat, reeling in the delicious reprisals from a few millimetres of ship-distilled vodka he had downed minutes earlier. After years of forced abstinence, his tolerance for alcohol was abysmally low, which in this instance was a distinct advantage, hastening the process by which he negated the outside world. The vodka did not quell his inner voices, and, if anything, the withdrawal served only to create an echo-chamber, in which the voices took on an additional insistence. One in particular rose above the clamour. It was the voice which dared ask exactly what it was he expected to find in Cerberus; what it was that would make any kind of objective sense. And he had no idea. Not having an answer to that question was like descending a staircase in darkness and miscounting the number of steps; expecting floor and feeling sudden, heart-stopping vertigo.
Like a shaman shaping air-spirits with his fingers, Sylveste made the orrery which was projected ahead of him tick to life. The entoptic was a schematic of the little pocket of space englobing Hades, encompassing the orbit of Cerberus and — at its very limit — the approaching human machines, no longer cloaked by an asteroid. At the geometric centre was Hades itself, burning foul, abscessive red. The tiny neutron star was only a few kilometres wide, yet it dominated all around it; its gravitational field was whirlpool-fierce.
Objects which were two hundred and twenty thousand kilometres from the neutron star orbited twice an hour. Now that they had more thoroughly investigated Alicia’s testimony, they knew that another of the surveyor probes had been destroyed near that point, so Sylveste marked the radius with a red death-line. Cerberus had killed it, just as if the little world were as intent on protecting the secrets of Hades as its own felicities. Another mystery — what possible advantage lay in that? Sylveste had grasped for an answer and failed. But it had told him one thing: nothing here was predictable, or even logical. If he kept those two truths foremost, he might stand a chance where the dumb machines — and his wife — had failed.
Cerberus orbited further out; nine hundred thousand kilometres from Hades, in an orbit w
hich whipped it around once every four hours and six minutes. He had marked its orbit in cool emerald — it seemed safe, at least until one strayed too close to the planet itself.
Now Volyova’s weapon — what had once been the Lorean — had moved under its own power to a lower orbit; it had not so far triggered a response from Cerberus. But Sylveste did not doubt for one moment that something down there knew they were here; that something had its eye on the waiting weapon. It was just waiting to see what would happen next.
He made the orrery contract, until the lighthugger hove into proper view. It was two million kilometres from the neutron star; a mere six light seconds, which was within the conceivable strike range of energy weapons, although they would have to be very large indeed to do their job: the targeting arrays alone would have to be kilometres wide just to resolve the ship. No material weapons could touch them at this range, save for a brute-force swarm attack by relativistic weapons, but that again was unlikely — the lesson of the Lorean was that the planet acted swiftly and discreetly, rather than in some gauche display of firepower which would betray the careful camouflaging of the crust.
Oh yes, he thought — all so neatly predictable. And there was the trap.
‘Dan,’ said Pascale, who had stirred awake. ‘It’s late. You need to rest before tomorrow.’
‘Was I talking aloud?’
‘Like a true madman.’ Her eyes moved nervously around the room, alighting on the entoptic map. ‘Is it really going to happen? It all feels so unreal.’
‘Are you talking about this or the Captain?’
‘Both, I suppose. It’s not like we can separate them any more. The one depends on the other.’ She stopped speaking and he moved from the mat to her bedside, stroking her face, old buried memories stirring, those he had held sacrosanct during all the years of imprisonment on Resurgam. She reciprocated his caress and in minutes they were making love, with all the efficiency of those on the eve of something epochal — knowing that there might never be another moment like this, and that every second was therefore heightened in its preciousness. ‘The Amarantin have waited long enough,’ Pascale said. ‘And that poor man they want you to help. Can’t we leave both of them alone?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Because I don’t like what it’s doing to you. Don’t you feel you’ve been driven here, Dan? Don’t you feel that none of this was really of your own doing?’
‘It’s too late to stop now.’
‘No! It isn’t, and you know it. Tell Sajaki to turn back now. Offer to do what you can for his Captain if you wish, but I’m sure he’s sufficiently scared of you now that he’ll accede to any terms you propose. Abandon Cerberus/Hades before it does to us what it did to Alicia.’
‘They weren’t prepared for the attack. We will be, and that will make all the difference in the world. In fact, we’ll be attacking first.’
‘Whatever you’re hoping to find in there, it just isn’t worth this kind of risk.’ She held his face in her hands now. ‘Don’t you understand, Dan? You’ve won. You’ve been vindicated. You’ve got what you always wanted.’
‘It isn’t enough.’
She was cold, but she stayed beside him as he passed in and out of shallow dreams. It was never anything that felt like true sleep. She was almost correct. The Amarantin did not have to flock through his mind; not for one night. She wanted him to forget them for eternity. No; that had never been remotely an option — more so now. But even willing them away for a few hours took more strength than he had. His dreams were Amarantin dreams. And whenever he woke, which was often, beyond the curved silhouette of his wife, the walls were alive with interlocking wings, balefully regarding wings, waiting.
For what was on the eve of beginning.
‘You won’t feel much,’ Sajaki said.
The Triumvir was telling the truth, at least initially. Khouri felt no sensation when the trawl began, except for the slight pressure of the helmet, locking itself rigid against her scalp so that its scanning systems could be targeted with maximum accuracy. She heard faint clicks and whines, but that was all: not even the tingling sensation she had half expected.
‘This isn’t necessary, Triumvir.’
Sajaki was finessing the trawl parameters, tapping commands into a grotesquely outdated console. Cross-sections of Khouri’s head — quick, low-resolution snapshots — were springing up around him. ‘Then you have nothing to fear, do you? Nothing to fear at all. It’s a procedure I should have run on you when you were recruited, Khouri. Of course, my colleague was against the idea…’
‘Why now? What have I done to make you do this?’
‘We’re nearing a critical time, Khouri. I can’t afford not to be able to trust any of my crewmembers totally.’
‘But if you fry my implants, I won’t be any use to you at all!’
‘Oh; you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Volyova’s little scare stories. She only wanted to keep her little trade secrets from me, in case I decided I could do her job as well as she does.’ Her implants were showing up on the scans now; little geometric islands of order amid the amorphous soup of neural structure. Sajaki tapped in commands and the scan image zoomed in on one of the implants. Khouri felt her scalp tingle. Layers of structure peeled away from the implant, exposing its increasingly intricate innards in a series of dizzying enlargements, like a spysat gazing at a city, resolving first districts, then streets and then the details of buildings. Somewhere in that intricacy, stored in some ultimately physical form, was the data from which the Mademoiselle’s simulation sprang.
It had been a long time since her last visitation. Then — in the midst of the storm on Resurgam — the Mademoiselle had told Khouri that she was dying; losing the war against Sun Stealer. Had Sun Stealer won since then, or was the continued silence of the Mademoiselle simply evidence that she was putting all her energies into prolonging the war? Nagorny had gone mad as soon as Sun Stealer established tenancy in his head. Did that still lie ahead for Khouri, or was Sun Stealer’s residency in her going to be more stealthy? Perhaps — it was a disquieting thought — he had learnt from his mistakes with Nagorny. How much of this would be evident to Sajaki, after he had run the trawl?
He had taken her from her quarters; Hegazi there to add back-up. The other Triumvir was gone now, but even if Sajaki had come alone, Khouri would not have considered resisting him. Volyova had already warned her that Sajaki was stronger than he looked, and, adept at close-quarters combat as Khouri was, she had very little doubt that Sajaki would have been better than her.
The trawling room had the atmosphere of a torture chamber. There had been terror here, once — maybe not for decades, but it was not something that could ever be erased. The trawl equipment was ancient, as bulky and monstrous as anything Khouri had seen on the ship so far. Even if the gear had been subtly modified to work better than its original spec, it was never going to be as sophisticated as the kind of trawls her side’s intelligence wing had possessed on Sky’s Edge. Sajaki’s trawl was the kind that left a trail of neural damage behind as it scanned, like a frantic burglar ransacking a house. It was scarcely more advanced than the destructive scanning machines which Cal Sylveste had used during the Eighty… perhaps less so.
But he had her now. He was already learning things about her implants… unravelling their structures, reading out their data. Once he had those, he would adjust the trawl to resolve cortical patterns, pulling webs of neuronal connectivity from her skull. Khouri knew a lot about trawling just by knowing people in intelligence. Embedded in those topologies lay longterm memories and personality traits, tangled together in ways that were not easy to separate. But if Sajaki’s equipment was not the best, chances were good that he had excellent algorithms to distil memory traces. Over centuries, statistical models had studied patterns of memory storage in ten billion human minds, correlating structure against experience. Certain impressions tended to be reflected in similar neural structures — internal qualia
— which were the functional blocks out of which more complex memories were assembled. Those qualia were never the same from mind to mind, except in very rare cases, but neither were they encoded in radically different ways, since nature would never deviate far from the minimum-energy route to a particular solution. The statistical models could identify those qualia patterns very efficiently, and then map the connections between them out of which memories were forged. All Sajaki had to do was identify enough qualia structures, map enough hierarchical linkages between them, and then let his algorithms chew through them, and there would be nothing about her that he could not in principle know. He could sift through her memories at leisure.
An alarm sounded. Sajaki glanced up at one of the displays, seeing how Khouri’s implants were now glowing red; red which was leaking into surrounding brain areas.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
‘Inductive heat,’ Sajaki said, unconcernedly. ‘Your implants are getting a little hot.’
‘Shouldn’t you stop?’
‘Oh; not yet. Volyova would have hardened them against EM pulse attack, I think. A little thermal overload won’t do any irreversible damage.’
‘But my head hurts… it doesn’t feel right.’
‘I’m sure you can take it, Khouri.’
The migrainous pressure had come from nowhere, but it was really quite unbearable now, as if Sajaki had her head in a vice and was screwing it tighter. The heat build-up in her skull must be a lot worse than the scans suggested. Doubtless Sajaki — who must seldom have had the best interests of his clients at heart — had calibrated the displays not to show lethal brain temperature until it was already much too late…
‘No, Yuuji-san. She can’t take it. Get her out of that thing.’
The voice, miraculously, was Volyova’s. Sajaki looked to the door. He must have been aware of her entrance long before Khouri, but even now he only affected a look of bored indifference. ‘What is it, Ilia?’