‘Had I known…’ she said, finally. ‘I don’t know. But I didn’t, so what does it matter?’
‘If you’d listened to me,’ Khouri said, ‘I told you we had to stop this madness. But my word wasn’t good enough; you had to let it come to this.’
‘I was hardly going to confront Sajaki on the basis of a vision you had in the gunnery. He’d have killed both of us, I’m sure of it.’ Although now, she thought, they might have to move against Sajaki anyway — they could only do so much from the spider-room, and soon that might not be nearly enough.
‘You could have decided to trust me,’ Khouri said.
If circumstances had been any different, Volyova thought, she might have hit Khouri at the point. Instead, mildly, she answered, ‘You can talk to me about trust when you haven’t lied and cheated your way aboard my ship, but not before.’
‘What did you expect me to do? The Mademoiselle had my husband.’
‘Did she?’ Volyova leant forward now. ‘Do you know that for sure, Khouri? I mean, did you ever meet him, or was that another of the Mademoiselle’s little deceptions? Memories can be implanted easily enough, can’t they?’
Khouri’s voice was soft now; as if there had never been an angry word between the two of them. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean maybe he never made it, Khouri. Did you ever consider that? Maybe he never left Yellowstone; the way you always believed it had happened.’
Pascale pushed her face between the two of them. ‘Look, stop arguing, will you? If something awful is going to happen here, the last thing we need is division amongst ourselves. In case it has escaped your attention, I’m the only person on this ship who didn’t ask or want to come aboard.’
‘Yeah, well that’s just tough luck,’ Khouri said.
Pascale glared at her. ‘Well maybe what I just said wasn’t all true. I am after something. I’ve got a husband as well, and I don’t want him to hurt himself — or anyone around him — just because of something he wants so bad. And that’s why I need you now — both of you, because you seem to be the only two around here who feel the same way I do.’
‘How do you feel?’ Volyova asked.
‘That none of this is right,’ she said. ‘Not from the moment you mentioned that name.’
Volyova didn’t have to ask what name Pascale meant. ‘You acted as if you recognised it.’
‘We did — both of us. Sun Stealer’s an Amarantin name; one of their gods, or mythic figures — maybe even a real historical individual. But Dan was too pigheaded — or perhaps too scared — to admit it.’
Volyova checked her bracelet again, but there was still no news. Then she waited while Pascale told her story. She told it well; there was no preamble, no scene-setting, and with the few carefully chosen facts which Pascale deployed, Volyova found herself visualising all that was necessary; events sketched with artful economy. She could see now why Pascale had helmed Sylveste’s biography. What she had to say concerned the Amarantin, the extinct avian-descended creatures who had lived on Resurgam. By now the crew had absorbed enough knowledge from Sylveste to place this story in its proper context, but it was still disturbing to find a connection to the Amarantin. After all, Volyova had found it troubling enough to think that her problems were in some way associated with the Shrouders. At least there the causality was clear enough. But how did the Amarantin fit into everything? How could there be a link between two radically different alien species, both now long since vanished from galactic affairs? Even the timescales were in radical disagreement: according to what Lascaille had told Sylveste, the Shrouders had vanished — perhaps by retreating into their spheres of restructured spacetime — millions of years before the Amarantin had ever evolved, taking with them artefacts and techniques too hazardous to be left within the reach of less experienced species. That, after all, was what had driven Sylveste and Lefevre to the Shroud boundary: the lure of that stored knowledge. The Shrouders were as alien in form as anything in human experience — carapacial, multi-limbed things brewed from nightmares. The Amarantin, by contrast, with their avian ancestry and four-limbed, bipedal body-plan, were less shatteringly alien.
Yet Sun Stealer showed a link. The ship had never before visited Resurgam; had never had aboard it anyone openly familiar with any aspect of the Amarantin — and yet Sun Stealer had been part of Volyova’s life for subjective years, and several decades of planetary time. Sylveste was clearly the key — but any kind of logical connection steadfastly refused to reveal itself to Volyova.
Pascale continued, while an unsupervised part of Volyova’s mind raced ahead and tried to fit things into some kind of order. Pascale was talking about the buried city; a vast Amarantin structure discovered during Sylveste’s imprisonment. About how the city’s central feature, a huge spire, had been surmounted by an entity which was not quite Amarantin, but looked like the Amarantin analog of an angel — except that this was an angel designed by someone with a scrupulous attention to the limits of anatomy. An angel that almost looked like it could fly.
‘And that was Sun Stealer?’ Khouri asked, awed.
‘I don’t know,’ Pascale said. ‘All we know is that the original Sun Stealer was just an ordinary Amarantin, but one who formed a renegade flock — a renegade social clade, if you like. We think they were experimentalists, studying the nature of the world; questioners of myth. Dan had this theory that Sun Stealer was interested in optics; that he made mirrors and lenses; literally, that he stole the sun. He may also have experimented with flight; simple machines and gliders. Whatever it was, it was heresy.’
‘So what was the statue?’
Pascale told them the rest; how the renegade flock became known as the Banished Ones; how they effectively disappeared from Amarantin history for thousands of years.
‘If I can interject a theory at this point,’ Volyova said, ‘is it possible that the Banished Ones went away to a quiet corner of the planet and invented technology?’
‘Dan thought so. He thought they went the whole way — until they had the power to leave Resurgam entirely. And then one day — not long before the Event — they came back, but by then they were like gods compared to those who had stayed behind. And that was what the statue was — something raised in honour of the new gods.’
‘Gods who became angels?’ Khouri asked.
‘Genetic engineering,’ Pascale said, with conviction. ‘They could never have flown, even with those wings they gave themselves, but then again, they’d already left gravity behind; become spacefaring.’
‘What happened?’
‘Much later — centuries afterwards, or even thousands of years — Sun Stealer’s people returned to Resurgam. It was almost the end. We can’t resolve the archaeological timescale, it’s so short. But it’s as if they brought it with them.’
‘Brought what?’ Khouri said.
‘The Event. Whatever it was that ended life on Resurgam.’
As they trudged through the effluent which lay ankle-deep along the corridor floor, Khouri said, ‘Is there a way to stop your weapon reaching Cerberus? I mean, you still have control of it, don’t you?’
‘Be quiet!’ Volyova hissed. ‘Anything we say down here…’ She trailed off, pointing to the walls, presumably indicating all manner of concealed spy devices; part of the surveillance web she believed Sajaki controlled.
‘Might get back to the rest of the Triumvirate. So what?’ Khouri kept her voice low — no point in taking needless risks, but she spoke anyway. ‘The way things are going, we’re going to be openly resisting them before too long. My guess is Sajaki’s listening network isn’t as comprehensive as you think, anyway — that’s what Sudjic said. Even if it is, he’s likely to be preoccupied right now.’
‘Dangerous, very dangerous.’ But perhaps recognising the sense in what Khouri had said — that at some very imminent time subterfuge would have to become rebellion — she elevated the cuff of her jacket to reveal her bracelet, glowing with schematics and slowly upda
ting numerics. ‘I can control almost everything with this. But what good does it do me? Sajaki’ll kill me if he thinks I’m trying to sabotage the operation — and he’ll know the instant the weapon deviates from its intended course. And let’s not forget that Sylveste is holding all of us to ransom — I don’t know how he’d react.’
‘Badly, I suspect — but that doesn’t change anything.’
Now Pascale spoke. ‘He won’t do what he’s been threatening. There’s nothing in his eyes; he told me. But because Sajaki could never be sure — because it was possible — Dan said he was sure it would work.’
‘And you’re absolutely certain he wasn’t lying to you?’
‘What kind of a question is that?’
‘A perfectly legitimate one, under the circumstances. I fear Sajaki, but I can confront him with force if the need arises. But not your husband.’
‘It never happened,’ Pascale said. ‘Trust me on that.’
‘Like we’ve got a choice,’ Khouri said. They had arrived at an elevator; the door opened and they had to step up to reach the elevator’s floor. Khouri kicked the slime from her boots, hammered the wall and said, ‘Ilia, you have to stop that thing. If it reaches Cerberus, we’re all dead. That’s what the Mademoiselle knew all along; that’s why she wanted to kill Sylveste. Because she knew that, one way or another, he was going to try and get there. Now, I haven’t got all of this straight in my head, but I do know one thing. The Mademoiselle knew it was going to be really bad news for all of us if he ever succeeded. And I mean really bad news.’
The elevator was rising now, but Volyova had not stated their destination.
‘It’s like Sun Stealer was pushing him on,’ Pascale said. ‘Putting ideas in his head, shaping his destiny.’
‘Ideas?’ Khouri asked.
‘Like coming here in the first place — to this system.’ Volyova was animated now. ‘Khouri; don’t you remember how we retrieved that recording of Sylveste from ship’s memory, from when he was last aboard?’ Khouri nodded; she remembered it well enough: how she had looked into the eyes of the recorded Sylveste and imagined killing the real man. ‘And how he dropped hints that he was already thinking of the Resurgam expedition? And that bothered us because there was no logical way he could know about the Amarantin? Well, now it makes perfect sense. Pascale’s right. It was Sun Stealer, already in his head, pushing him here. I don’t think he even knew it was happening himself, but Sun Stealer was in control, all that time.’
Khouri said, ‘It’s like Sun Stealer and the Mademoiselle are fighting each other, but they need to use us to wage their war. Sun Stealer’s some kind of software entity, and she’s confined to Yellowstone, in her palanquin… so they’ve been pulling our strings, puppeting us against each other.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Volyova said. ‘Sun Stealer has me worried. Deeply worried. We haven’t heard from him since the cache-weapon went up.’
Khouri said nothing. What she knew was that Sun Stealer had entered her head during her last session in the gunnery. Later, during her final visitation, the Mademoiselle had appeared to tell her that Sun Stealer was consuming her; that he would inevitably overwhelm her in hours or — at most — days. Yet that had been weeks earlier. According to her estimated rate of losses, the Mademoiselle should be now be dead, and Sun Stealer victorious. Yet nothing had changed. If anything, her head had been quieter than at any time since she had been revived around Yellowstone. No damn Shadowplay proximity implant; no damn midnight apparitions from the Mademoiselle. It was as if Sun Stealer had died just as he triumphed. Not that Khouri believed that, and his utter absence was all the more stressing; heightening the waiting until — as she was sure would happen — he appeared. And somehow she sensed he would be even less pleasant company than her previous lodger.
‘Why should he show his face?’ Pascale said. ‘He’s almost won, in any case.’
‘Almost won,’ Volyova agreed. ‘But what we’re about to do might make him intervene. I think we should be ready for that — you especially, Khouri. You know he found his way into Boris Nagorny, and you can take it from me, it wasn’t nice knowing either of them.’
‘Maybe you should lock me up now, before it’s too late.’ Khouri hadn’t given the statement much thought, but she said it with deadly seriousness. ‘I mean it, Ilia — I’d rather you did that than be forced into shooting me later.’
‘I’d love to do that,’ said her mentor. ‘But it isn’t as if we’re already vastly outnumbering the others. At the moment it’s the three of us against Sajaki and Hegazi — and God only knows whose side Sylveste will choose, if it comes to that.’
Pascale said nothing.
They reached the warchive, the destination Volyova had always had in mind, though she had said nothing until they arrived. Khouri had never been to this sector of the ship, but she did not need to have it identified to her. She had been in plenty of armouries before and there was a smell to them.
‘This is some heavy shit we’re getting ourselves into,’ she said. ‘Right?’
The vast oblong room constituted the display and dispensary section of the warchive, with somewhere in the region of a thousand weapons racked for immediate use. Tens of thousands more could be manufactured in short order, assembled according to blueprints distributed holographically through the mass of the ship.
‘Yes,’ Volyova said, with something worryingly close to relish. ‘In which case we’d better have some obnoxiously effective firepower at our disposal. So, use your skill and discretion, Khouri, and kit us up. And be quick about it — we don’t want Sajaki locking us out before we’ve got what we came for.’
‘You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. And you know why? Suicidal or not, we’re finally doing something. It might get us killed — and it might not do any good — but at least we’ll go out with a fight, if it comes to that.’
Khouri nodded slowly. Now that Volyova put it like that, she was right. It was a soldier’s prerogative not to let events take their course without some kind of intervention, no matter how futile. Quickly Volyova showed her how to use the warchive’s lower-level functions — luckily, it was almost intuitive — then took Pascale by the arm and turned to leave.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The bridge. Sajaki will want me there for the softening-up operation.’
TWENTY-SIX
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
Sylveste had not seen his wife for hours, and now it seemed as if she would not even be present for the culmination of all that he had striven for. Only ten hours remained until Volyova’s weapon was due to impact Cerberus, and in less than an hour from now, the first wave of her softening-up assault was scheduled to commence. This in itself was momentous — yet it appeared that he would have to witness it without Pascale’s company.
The ship’s cameras had never lost sight of the weapon, and even now it hovered in the bridge’s display, as if only a few kilometres away, rather than more than a million. They were seeing it side-on, since it had begun its approach from the Trojan point, whereas the ship remained in a holding pattern ninety degrees clockwise, along the line which threaded Hades and its furtive planetary companion. Neither machine was in a true orbit, but the weak gravitational field of Cerberus meant that these artificial trajectories could be maintained with minimal expenditure of correcting thrust.
Sajaki and Hegazi were with him, bathed in the reddish light which spilled from the display. Everything was red now; Hades close enough that it was a perceptible prick of scarlet, and Delta Pavonis — faint as it was — also casting ruddy light on all that orbited it. And because the display was the only source of light in the room, some of that redness leaked into the bridge.
‘Where the hell is that brezgatnik cow Volyova?’ Hegazi said. ‘I thought she was meant to be showing us her chamber of horrors in action by now.’
Had the woman actually done the unspeakable, Sylveste t
hought? Had she actually decided to ruin the attack, even though she had masterminded the whole thing? If that was the case, he had misread her badly. She had inflicted her misgivings on him, fuelled by the delusions of the woman Khouri, but surely she hadn’t taken any of that seriously? Surely she had been playing devil’s advocate; testing the limits of his own confidence?
‘You’d better hope that’s the case, son,’ Calvin said.
‘You’re reading my thoughts now?’ Sylveste said, aloud, nothing to conceal from the partial Triumvirate convened around him. ‘That’s quite a trick, Calvin.’
‘Call it a progressive adaptation to neural congruency,’ the voice said. ‘All the theories said that if you allowed me to stay in your head for long enough, something like this would occur. Really all that’s happening is that I’m constructing a steadily more realistic model of your neural processes. To begin with I could only correlate what I read against your responses. But now I don’t even have to wait for the responses to guess what they’ll be.’
So read this, Sylveste thought. Piss of.
‘If you want rid of me,’ Calvin said, ‘you could have done so hours ago. But I think you’re beginning to rather like having me where I am.’
‘For the time being,’ Sylveste said. ‘But don’t get used to it, Calvin. Because I’m not planning on having you around on a permanent basis.’
‘This wife of yours worries me.’
Sylveste looked at the Triumvirs. Suddenly he did not want his half of the conversation to be public knowledge, so he switched to mentalising what he would say.
‘I worry about her too, but that doesn’t happen to be any of your business.’
‘I saw the way she responded when Volyova and Khouri tried to turn her.’