The light refracted through the orbiting gem, casting varicoloured, constantly shifting slabs of illumination on the chamber walls. It was beautiful; intense and ever-shifting, beguiling.
‘At this point,’ Calvin said, ‘I think a little humility may be in order. You’re impressed, aren’t you?’
‘Of course.’ If he spoke, he did not hear his own words. But Calvin seemed to understand. ‘And this is enough, isn’t it? I mean, now you know what it was they had to conceal from us. Something so strange… God only knows what it is…’
‘Perhaps that’s just what it is. God.’
‘Staring into that light, I almost believe you.’
‘You feel it too, is that what you’re saying?’
‘I’m not sure what I feel. I’m not sure I like it, either.’
Sylveste said, ‘Do you think they made this, or was it something they happened to find?’
‘This is a first — you asking my opinion.’ Calvin seemed to deliberate, but his answer was hardly surprising when it came. ‘They never made this, Dan. They were clever — maybe even cleverer than us. But the Amarantin were never gods.’
‘Someone else, then.’
‘Someone I hope we never meet.’
‘Then hold your breath, because for all I know, we’re about to.’
Weightless, he jetted the suit into the chamber, towards the dancing jewel and the source of searingly beautiful light.
When Volyova came around, it was to the sound of the radar warning siren, which meant that the Infinity was preparing to re-aim its grasers. It would not take it more than a few seconds to do so, even allowing for her random-walk evasive manoeuvre. She glanced at the hull health indicator and saw that they were down to only a few remaining millimetres of sacrificial metal, that the chaff throwers were depleted, and that — realistically — they could withstand no more than one or two additional bursts of graser-strike.
‘Are we still here?’ Khouri asked, seemingly astonished that she was even capable of framing the question.
One more strike and the hull would start outgassing in a dozen places, if it did not spontaneously vaporise. It was hot now; noticeably. The heat of the first few sweeps had been efficiently dissipated, but the last one had not been so easily parried, and its lethal warming energies had seeped inwards.
‘Get to the spider-room,’ Volyova shouted, momentarily throttling down the thrust to permit locomotion around the ship. ‘The insulation will enable you to survive another few strikes.’
‘No!’ Khouri was shouting now. ‘We can’t! At least here we’ve got a chance!’
‘She’s right,’ Pascale said.
‘You’ll still have one in the spider-room,’ Volyova said. ‘Better, in fact. It’s a smaller target, for one. I’m guessing the ship will direct its weapons against the shuttle in preference, or it may not even realise that the spider-room is anything but wreckage.’
‘But what about you?’
She was angry now. ‘Do you think I’m the type to indulge in heroics, Khouri? I’m coming too; with or without you. But I have to program a flight pattern into the shuttle first — unless you think you can do it.’
Khouri hesitated, as if the idea was not totally absurd. Then she unbuckled from her couch, jabbed a thumb towards Pascale and began moving, as if her life depended on it.
Which, rationally, it probably did.
Volyova did what she had promised she would do, inputting the most hair-raising evasive pattern she could imagine, one that she was not even sure she or her companions would be capable of surviving, with peak bursts exceeding fifteen gees for whole seconds. But did it really matter now? Somehow, the idea of dying while already unconscious, in the warm, muggy torpor of gee-induced blackout, was preferable to being burned alive, in vacuum, in the invisible heat of gamma-rays.
Grabbing the helmet she had worn when she boarded the shuttle, she prepared to join the others, mentally counting down until the initiation of the evasive pattern.
Khouri was halfway across to the waiting spider-room when she felt the wave of heat slap across her face, followed by the dreadful sound of the hull giving up its final ghost. The illumination in the cargo bay was gone now, as the Melancholia’s energy grid collapsed under the onslaught of the attack. But the spider-room’s interior was still powered up, its implausibly plush decor visible through the observation windows.
‘Get in!’ she shouted to Pascale, and although the noise of the ship’s death-throes was now tremendous, like a concerto played on scrap metal, somehow Sylveste’s wife heard what she said and clambered into the spider-room, just as a tremendous shock wave slammed through the hull (or what remained of it), and the spider-room exploded free of the moorings in which it had been locked by Volyova’s servitors.
Now there was a terrible howl of escaping air from elsewhere in the shuttle, and suddenly Khouri felt it tug against her, resisting her forward progress. The spider-room twisted and turned, its legs thrashing wildly, randomly. She could see Pascale now, in the observation window, but there was nothing the woman could do to help; she understood the room’s controls even less comprehensively than Khouri.
She looked behind, hoping and praying that she would see Volyova there, having followed them, and that she would know what to do, but there was nothing except empty access corridor, and that awful sucking stream of escaping air.
‘Ilia…’
The damned fool had done just what they’d feared; stayed behind, for all that she had denied that she would.
With what little light remained, she saw the hull quiver, like a sounding-board. And then suddenly the gale that was pulling her away from the spider-room lost its strength; counter-balanced by an equally fierce decompression halfway across the cargo bay. She looked towards it, eyes already veiling over as the cold hit them, and then she was falling towards the gap where only a second earlier there had been metal-
‘Where the —’
But almost as soon as she had opened her mouth, Khouri knew where she was, which was inside the spider-room. There was no mistaking the place; not after all the time she had spent in it. And it felt comfortable; warm and safe and silent; a universe away from where she had been up to the point when she could not remember anything more. Her hands hurt; hurt rather a lot, in fact — but apart from that, she felt better than she imagined she had any right to feel; not when her last memory had been of falling towards naked space, from the womb of a dying ship…
‘We made it,’ Pascale said, although something in her voice sounded anything but triumphant, ‘Don’t try to move; not just yet — you’ve burnt your hands rather badly.’
‘Burnt them?’ Khouri was lying on one of the velvet couches which stretched along either wall of the room, head against the curved cushioned-brass end-piece. ‘What happened?’
‘You hit the spider-room; the draught pulled you towards it. I don’t know how, but you managed to climb around the outside to the airlock. You were breathing vacuum for five or six seconds at least. The metal cooled so quickly that you got frost-burns where your hands touched it.’
‘I don’t remember any of that.’ But she only had to look at the evidence of her palms to see that it must have been true.
‘You blacked out as soon as you came aboard. I don’t blame you.’
There was still that utterly uncelebratory tone in her voice, as if all that Khouri had done had been pointless. And Khouri thought: she was probably right. The best that could happen to them was that they would somehow find a way to land the spider-room on Cerberus, and then see how long they could take their chances against the crustal defences. It would be interesting, if nothing else. And if not that, she supposed, then a slow wait until either the lighthugger found them and picked them off, or they died of cold or asphyxia, when their reserves expired. She racked her memory, trying to recall how long Volyova had said the spider-room was capable of surviving on its own.
‘Ilia…’
‘She didn’t make it i
n time,’ Pascale said. ‘She died. I saw it happen. The second you were aboard, the shuttle just exploded.’
‘You think Volyova made it happen deliberately, so that we’d at least have a chance? So we’d be mistaken for wreckage, as she said?’
‘If so, I suppose we owe her thanks.’
Khouri slipped off her jacket, removed her shirt, slipped her jacket back on again and then tore the shirt into narrow strips with which she then bound her black, blistered palms. They hurt like hell, but it was nothing worse than the kind of pain she had known during training, from rope burns or carrying heavy artillery. She gritted her teeth and, while acknowledging it, put the pain somewhere beyond her immediate concerns.
Which, now she had to focus on them, made the prospect of submerging herself in the pain somewhat more tempting. But she resisted. She had to at least acknowledge her predicament, even if there was nothing obvious she could do about it. She had to know how it was going to happen, as it surely would.
‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’
Pascale Sylveste nodded. ‘But not the way you’re thinking, I’m willing to bet.’
‘You mean we don’t land on Cerberus?’
‘No; not even if we knew how to operate this thing. We’re not going to hit it either, and I think our velocity’s too high for us to go into any kind of orbit around it.’
Now that Pascale mentioned it, the hemisphere of Cerberus through the observation windows looked further away than it had appeared prior to the attack against the shuttle. They must have slammed past the world with the velocity which had not been negated from the shuttle’s approach pattern, hundreds of kilometres a second.
‘So what happens now?’
‘I’m only guessing,’ Pascale said, ‘but I think we’re falling towards Hades.’ She nodded at the forward observation window, at the pinprick of red light ahead of them. ‘It seems to be in roughly the right direction, doesn’t it?’
Khouri did not need to be told that Hades was a neutron star, any more than she needed to be told that there was no such thing as a safe close encounter with one. You either kept well away or you died; those were the rules, and there was no force in the universe capable of negating them. Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height. It was not even necessary to get close to suffer those crushing forces.
A few hundred thousand kilometres would be more than sufficient.
‘Yes,’ Khouri said. ‘I think you’re right. And that’s not good.’
‘No,’ Pascale said. ‘I rather imagined it wasn’t.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Cerberus Interior, 2567
Sylveste thought of it as the chamber of miracles.
It seemed appropriate: he had been here less than an hour (he assumed, though he had long since ceased paying much attention to time) and in that period he had seen nothing that was less than miraculous, and much for which the term itself seemed mildly insufficient. Somehow he knew that a lifetime would not be sufficient to encompass a fraction of what this place contained; what it was. He had felt like this before, on glimpsing some vista of tremendous potential knowledge not yet learnt, not yet codified and shaped into theory. But he knew that those previous occasions had been pale foreshadowings of what he felt now.
He had no more than hours here, before any chance of return was dashed. What could he do in a matter of hours? Very little, rationally, but he did have the recording systems of the suit, and his eyes, and he knew he had to try. History would not forgive him if he did anything less. More importantly, he would never forgive himself.
He jetted his suit towards the centre of the chamber, towards the two objects which snared his attention; the gash of transcendent light and the jewel-like thing which rotated around it. As he approached, the walls of the chamber began to move, as if he were being sucked into the rotational frame of the objects; as if space itself were being drawn into an eddy; as if the nature of space were in flux. His suit told him as much, chirruping with detailed analyses of the way the substrate was altering; quantum indices ticking towards unexplored new realms. He remembered something similar on the way in to Lascaille’s Shroud. As then, he felt normal enough, as if his whole being were in the process of being transcribed, transliterated, the closer he came to the jewel and its radiant partner.
It took hours to reach it, and he began to doubt that his initial estimate of the diameter of the chamber had been accurate. But, inexorably, the apparent rate of revolution of the jewel dropped to zero, until the chamber walls were spinning dizzily. He knew then that he had to be close, although the jewel did not seem very much larger than when he had first glimpsed it. Still it was in constant motion, reminding him of a child’s kaleidoscope, the ever-shifting symmetric patterns revealed by coloured glints of light, but extended to three (and possibly more) dimensions. Occasionally the thing threw out spires or spikes which reached threateningly towards him, causing him to flinch, but he held his ground and even allowed himself to drift closer in the moments when it seemed to shift into a phase of relatively low-level transformation. He sensed that his survival did not depend on closely watching the readouts of his suit. He was beyond such simplicities.
‘What do you think it is?’ Calvin asked, his voice so low that it almost merged with Sylveste’s own thoughts, almost was one of Sylveste’s own thoughts.
‘I was hoping you’d have some suggestions.’
‘Sorry; all out of shattering insights. Too many for one lifetime.’
Volyova drifted in space.
She had not died when the Melancholia went up, though she had not managed to make it to the spider-room in time. What she had done was don her helmet just before the hull whispered away, like a moth’s wing against a candle. Falling away from the wreckage, she had not been targeted by the lighthugger. It had ignored her; just as it ignored the spider-room.
She could not simply die. That was emphatically not her style. And though she knew that her chances of survival were statistically negligible, and that what she was doing was entirely bereft of logic, she had to prolong the hours she had left. She scanned her air and power reserves and saw that they were not good; not good at all. She had taken the suit hastily, thinking that the only use she would have for it was to reach the shuttle across the hangar. She had not even had the presence of mind to hook it up to one of the recharging modules aboard the shuttle during their flight. That at least would have bought her a few days, rather than the fraction of a day she now faced. Yet, perversely, she did not simply arrange to end things immediately. She knew she could make the reserves last longer if she slept when consciousness was not required (assuming, of course, that she ever had any further use for it).
So she programmed the suit to drift, telling it to alert her only if something interesting — or, more probably, threatening — happened. And now, because she had woken, something evidently had. She asked the suit what it was.
The suit told her.
‘Shit,’ Ilia Volyova said.
The Infinity’s radar had just swept across her; the same radar which it had used against the shuttle, just before deploying its gamma-ray weapon. And it had done so with an intensity which suggested that the ship was in her immediate neighbourhood; no more than a few tens of thousands of kilometres away; not even spitting distance when it came to picking off a target as large, defenceless, static and conspicuous as she now was.
She hoped the ship would have the good grace to finish her off with something swift. After all, there was a very high likelihood that whatever it chose to use against her would be a system she had designed herself.
Not for the first time, she cursed her ingenuity.
Volyova enabled the suit’s binocular overlay and began swee
ping the starfield from which the targeting radar had projected. At first she saw only blackness and stars — and then the ship, tiny as a chip of coal, but edging closer with every second.
‘It’s not Amarantin, is it? We agree on that.’
‘The jewel, you mean?’
‘Whatever it is. And I don’t think they were responsible for the light, whatever that is.’
‘No. That’s not their handiwork either.’ Sylveste realised now that he was deeply grateful for Calvin’s presence, no matter how illusory it was; no matter how much it was a deception. ‘Whatever these things are — whatever their relationship to each other — the Amarantin just found them.’
‘I think you’re right.’
‘Maybe they didn’t even understand what they had found — not properly, anyway. But for one reason or another they had to enclose it; had to hide it from the rest of the universe.’
‘Jealousy?’
‘Perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain the warnings we got coming here. Perhaps they enclosed them as a favour to the rest of Creation, because they couldn’t destroy them, or move them elsewhere.’
Sylveste thought. ‘Whoever put them here originally — around a neutron star — must have meant for them to attract someone’s attention. Don’t you think?’
‘Like a lure?’
‘Neutron stars are common enough, but they’re still exotic; especially from the point of view of a culture just achieving the capability for starflight. It was guaranteed that the Amarantin would be drawn here through sheer curiosity.’
‘They weren’t the last, were they?’
‘No, I don’t suppose they were.’ Sylveste drew a breath. ‘Do you think we should go back, while we still can?’
‘Rationally, yes. Is that enough of an answer for you?’
They pushed forward.
‘Take us towards the light first,’ Calvin said, minutes later. ‘I want to see it closer. It seems — this is going to sound stupid — but it seems somehow stranger than the other thing. If there’s one thing I’d choose to die having seen up close, I think it’s that light.’