Brightness flared down the corridor, followed by a series of bangs spaced so closely together that they almost merged into a solid roar. The noise and the light came closer. Rats were flying through the air now, propelled by the approaching explosions. The stench of cooked rodent was overpowering; worse than the smell which already pervaded the clinic. Gradually, the wave of rats began to thin and disperse.
Volyova stood in the doorway, her slug-gun belching smoke, its barrel the colour of lava. Behind them, Khouri’s ruined weapon grew suddenly and ominously silent.
‘Now would be a good time to leave,’ Volyova said.
They ran towards her, trampling over the dead rats and those still seeking shelter. Khouri felt something slam into her spine. There was a wind, hotter than any she had known. She felt herself lose contact with the floor, and then for a moment she was flying.
THIRTY-TWO
Approaching Cerberus Surface, 2566
This time the dislocation was briefer, even though the place in which he found himself was the most foreign he had known.
‘On descent towards Cerberus bridgehead,’ the suit informed him, voice pleasantly bland and drained of import, as if this were a perfectly natural destination. Graphics scrolled over the suit’s faceplate window, but his eyes could not focus on them properly, so he told the suit to drop the imagery straight into his brain. Then it was much better. The fake contours of the surface — huge now, filling half the sky — were lined in lilac, their sinuous mock-geology rendering the world more folded and brainlike than ever before. There was very little natural illumination here, save for the twin beacons of dim ruddiness of Hades and, much further way, Delta Pavonis itself. But the suit compensated by shifting near-infrared photons into the visible.
Now something jutted over the horizon, blinkered in green by the overlay.
‘The bridgehead,’ Sylveste said, as much to hear a human voice as anything else. ‘I see it.’
It was tiny, he saw now. It looked like the tip of an insignificant splinter blemishing the stone of God’s own statue. Cerberus was two thousand kilometres across; the bridgehead a mere four in length, and most of that was now buried beneath the crust. In a way, it was the device’s very tininess in relation to the world which best testified to Ilia Volyova’s skill. It might be small, but it was still a thorn in the side of Cerberus. That much was obvious even from here; the crust around the bridgehead looked inflamed, stressed to some point beyond its inbuilt tolerances. For several kilometres around the weapon, the crust had given up any pretence of looking realistic. Now it had reverted to what he assumed was its native state: a hexagonal grid which blurred into rock on its fringes.
They would be over the maw — the cone’s open end — in a few minutes. Sylveste could already feel gravity tugging at his viscera now, even though he was still immersed in the suit’s liquid air. It was admittedly weak; a quarter of Earth normal — but a fall from his present height would still be adequately fatal, with or without the suit to protect him.
Now, finally, something else shared his immediate volume of space. He called in enhancements and saw a suit exactly like his own, twinkling brightly against the night. It was a little ahead of him, but following the same trajectory, heading for the circular entrance into the bridgehead. Two morsels of drifting marine food, he thought, about to be sucked into the enormous waiting funnel of the bridgehead, digested into the heart of Cerberus.
No going back now, he thought.
The three women ran down a corridor carpeted in dead rats and the blackened, stiff shells of things that might possibly once have been rats, though they did not invite close scrutiny. The trio had one big gun between the three of them now; one gun capable of despatching any servitor which the ship sent against them. The small pistols they also had might do the same job, but only if used with expertise and a certain degree of luck.
Occasionally, the floor shifted under their feet, unnervingly.
‘What is it?’ asked Khouri, limping now, after the bruising she had taken when the clinic had exploded. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means Sun Stealer is experimenting,’ Volyova said, pausing between every two or three words to catch her breath, her side aflame with pain now; every injury which had been healed since Resurgam seemed on the point of unstitching. ‘So far he’s moved against us with the less critical systems; the robots and the rats, for instance. But he knows that if he can understand the drive properly — if he can learn how to operate it within its safety margins — he can crush us just by ramping up the thrust for a few seconds.’ She ran for a few more strides, wheezing. ‘It’s how I killed Nagorny. But Sun Stealer doesn’t know the ship so well, even though he controls it. He’s trying to adjust the drive very gradually; reaching an understanding of how it operates. When he has that —’
Pascale said, ‘Is there anywhere we can go where we can be safe? Somewhere the rats and the machines can’t reach?’
‘Yes, but nowhere that the acceleration can’t reach in and crush us.’
‘So we should get off the ship, is that what you’re saying?’
She stopped, audited the corridor they were in and decided it was not one of the ones in which the ship could hear their conversations. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Don’t be under any illusions. If we leave here, I doubt very much that we’ll ever find a way to return. But on the other hand, we also have an obligation to stop Sylveste, if there’s even a slim chance of doing so. Even if we kill ourselves in the process.’
‘How could we reach Dan?’ Pascale asked. Obviously, stopping Sylveste still amounted — in her mind — to catching him and talking him out of going further. Volyova decided not to disabuse her of that notion, not just yet; but it wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
‘I think your husband took one of our suits,’ she said. ‘According to my bracelet all the shuttles are still present. Besides, he could never have piloted one of them.’
‘Not unless he had help from Sun Stealer,’ Khouri said. ‘Listen, can we keep moving? I know we don’t have any particular direction in mind, but I’d feel a hell of a lot happier than standing around.’
‘He’d have taken a suit,’ Pascale said. ‘That would have been his style. But he wouldn’t have done so alone.’
‘Is it possible he would have accepted Sun Stealer’s help?’
She shook her head. ‘Forget it. He didn’t even believe in Sun Stealer. If he’d had an inkling that he was being led — pushed into something — no; he wouldn’t have accepted it.’
‘Maybe he didn’t have any choice,’ Khouri said. ‘But anyway; assuming he took a suit, is there any way we can catch him?’
‘Not before he reaches Cerberus.’ There was no need to think about that. She knew just how quickly a million kilometres of space could be traversed if one could tolerate a constant ten gees of acceleration. ‘It’s too risky to take suits ourselves; not the kind your husband used. We’ll have to get there in one of the shuttles. It’ll be a lot slower, but there’s less chance Sun Stealer will have infiltrated its control matrix.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Claustrophobia. The shuttles are about three centuries less advanced than the suits.’
‘And that’s supposed to help us?’
‘Believe me, when you’re dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best.’ Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared stray into the corridor.
‘I remember this place,’ Pascale said. ‘This is where you brought us when —’
Khouri made the door open; the one marked with a barely legible spider.
‘Get in,’ she said. ‘Make yourself at home. And start praying that I remember how Ilia worked this thing.’
‘Where is she going to meet us?’
‘Outside,’ Khouri said. ‘I sincerely hope.’
By which time she was already closing the spider-room’s door
; already looking at the brass and bronze controls and hoping for some spark of recognition.
THIRTY-THREE
Cerberus/Hades Orbit, 2566
Volyova slipped out the needier, approaching the Captain.
She knew that she had to get to the hangar chamber as quickly as possible; that any delay might give Sun Stealer the time he needed to find a way to kill her. But there was something she had to do first. There was no logic to it, no rationality — but she knew she had to do it anyway. So she took the stairwells to the Captain’s level, into the deadening cold, her breath seeming to solidify in her throat. There were no rats down here: too cold. And servitors would not be able to reach him without running the risk of becoming part of him, subsumed by the plague.
‘Can you hear me, you bastard?’ She told her bracelet to warm him enough for conscious thought processes. ‘If so, pay attention. The ship’s been taken over.’
‘Are we still around Bloater?’
‘No… no, we’re not still around Bloater. That was some time ago.’
After a few moments the Captain said, ‘Taken over, did you say? Who by?’
‘Something alien, with some unpleasant ambitions. Most of us are dead now — Sajaki, Hegazi; all the other crew you ever knew — and the few of us left are getting out while we can. I don’t expect to ever come back aboard, which is why what I’m about to do might strike you as slightly drastic.’
She aimed the needler now; directing it towards the cracked, misshaped husk of the reefer encasing the Captain.
‘I’m going to let you warm, do you understand? For the last few decades it’s been all we can do to keep you as cool as possible — but it hasn’t worked, so maybe it was never the right approach. Maybe what we need to do now is let you take over the damned ship, in whatever way you see fit.’
‘I don’t think —’
‘I don’t care what you think, captain. I’m doing it anyway.’
Her finger grew tight against the needler’s trigger; already she was mentally calculating how his rate of spread would increase as he warmed, and the numbers she was coming up with were not quite believable… but then, they had never considered doing this before.
‘Please, Ilia.’
‘Listen, svinoi,’ she said, finally. ‘Maybe it works; maybe it doesn’t. But if I’ve ever shown any loyalty to you — if you even remember me — all I’m asking is that you do what you can for us.’
She was about to fire; about to unload the needler into the reefer, but then something made her hesitate.
‘There’s one other thing I have to say to you. Which is that I think I know who the hell you are, or rather who the hell you became.’
She was acutely conscious of the dryness of her mouth, and of the time she was wasting, but something made her continue.
‘What do you have to say to me?’
‘You travelled with Sajaki to the Pattern Jugglers, didn’t you? I know. The crew spoke of it often enough — even Sajaki himself. What no one discussed was what happened down there: what the Jugglers did to the two of you. Oh, I know there were rumours — but that’s all they were; engineered by Sajaki to throw me off the scent.’
‘Nothing happened there.’
‘No; what happened was this. You killed Sajaki, all those years ago.’
His answer came back, amused, as if he had misheard her. ‘I killed Sajaki?’
‘You had the Jugglers do it; had them erase his neural patterns and overlay your own on his mind. You became him.’
Now she had to catch her breath, although she was almost done.
‘One existence wasn’t enough for you — and maybe by then you’d sensed that this body wasn’t going to last too long; not with so many viruses flying around. So you colonised your adjutant, and the Jugglers did what you wished because they’re so alien they couldn’t even grasp the concept of murder. But that’s the truth, isn’t it?’
‘No…’
‘Shut up. That’s why Sajaki never wanted you healed — because by then he was you, and he didn’t need healing. And that’s why Sajaki was able to denature my treatment for the plague — because he had all your expertise. I should let you die for this, svinoi — except of course you already are, because what’s left of Sajaki is now redecorating the medical centre.’
‘Sajaki — dead?’ It was as if her news of the others’ deaths had not reached him at all.
‘Is that justice for you? You’re alone now. All on your own. So the only thing you can do is protect your own existence against Sun Stealer by growing. By letting the plague have its way with you.’
‘No… please.’
‘Did you kill Sajaki, Captain?’
‘It was… such a long time ago…’ But there was something in his voice which was not quite denial. Volyova delivered the needler rounds into the reefer. Watched the few remaining indices on its shell flicker and die, and then felt the chill fading, by the second, ice on the shell already beginning to glisten with its own warming.
‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to get to the truth. I suppose I should wish you good luck, Captain.’
And then she was running, afraid of what might be happening behind her.
Sajaki’s suit stayed tantalisingly ahead of Sylveste as they commenced the descent into the funnel of the bridgehead. The half-submerged, inverted cone of the device had seemed tiny only minutes ago, but now it was all he could see, its steep grey sides blocking the horizon in all directions. Occasionally the bridgehead shuddered, and Sylveste was reminded that it was fighting a constant battle with the crustal defences of Cerberus, and that he should not count blindly on its protection. If it failed, he knew, it would be consumed in hours; the wound in the crust would close, and with it his escape route.
‘It is necessary to replenish reaction mass,’ the suit said.
‘What?’
Sajaki spoke for the first time since they had left the ship. ‘We used a lot of mass getting here, Dan. We need to top up before we enter hostile territory.’
‘Where from?’
‘Look around you. There’s an awful lot of reaction mass waiting to be used.’
Of course; there was nothing to stop them drawing resources from the bridgehead itself. He agreed, doing nothing while Sajaki took control of his suit. One of the steep, incurving walls loomed nearer, dense with ornate extrusions and random clusters of machinery. The scale of the thing was overwhelming now; like a dam wall which curved round until its ends met. Somewhere in that wall, he thought, were the bodies of Alicia and her fellow mutineers…
There was enough sense of gravity to engender a strong sense of vertigo, not aided by the way the bridgehead narrowed below, which made it seem like an infinitely deep shaft. The best part of a kilometre away, the star-shaped speck of Sajaki’s suit had made contact with the precipitous wall on the far side. A few moments later Sylveste touched a narrow ledge, one that jutted no more than a metre beyond the wall. His feet made soft contact and suddenly he was poised there, ready to topple back into the nothingness behind him.
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Nothing,’ Sajaki said. ‘Your suit knows exactly what to do. I suggest you start trusting it: it’s all that’s keeping you alive.’
‘Is that meant to reassure me?’
‘Do you think reassurance would be especially appropriate at this point? You’re about to enter one of the most alien environments that any human has ever known. I think the last thing you need is reassurance.’
While Sylveste watched, a trunk extruded from the suit’s chest until it made contact with a section of the bridgehead’s wall material. A few seconds later it began to pulse, bulges squirming along its length, back into the suit.
‘Vile,’ Sylveste said.
‘It’s digesting heavy elements from the bridgehead,’ Sajaki said. ‘The bridgehead gives of itself freely, since it recognises the suit as being friendly.’
‘What if we run out of power inside Cerberus???
?
‘You’ll be dead long before running out of power becomes a problem to your suit. But it needs to replenish reaction mass for its thrusters. It has all the energy it needs, but it still requires atoms to accelerate.’
‘I’m not sure I like that last bit; about being dead.’
‘It isn’t too late to return.’
Testing me, Sylveste thought. For a moment he considered it rationally, but only for a moment. He was scared, yes — more so than he could comfortably remember; even if he went back to Lascaille’s Shroud. But, as then, he knew that the only way to punch through his fear was to push on. To confront whatever it was that led to that fear. But, when the refuelling process was complete, it took all the nerve in the world to step off the ledge and continue the descent into the emptiness enclosed by the bridgehead.
They sank lower, dropping for long seconds before checking their fall with brief squirts of thrust. Sajaki was beginning to allow Sylveste some voluntary control of his suit now; slowly decreasing the suit’s autonomic dominance until Sylveste was controlling most of it himself; the transition was barely noticeable. They were descending now at a rate of thirty metres per second, but it seemed to quicken as the walls of the funnel came closer together. Now Sajaki was only a few hundred metres away, but the facelessness of his suit offered little sense of human presence, no sense of companionship. Sylveste still felt dreadfully alone. And with good reason, he thought — it was possible that no thinking creature had been this close to Cerberus since it was last visited by the Amarantin. What ghosts had festered here in the intervening thousand centuries?
‘Approaching the final injection tube,’ Sajaki said.