[You’re right, Clavain. We will need ships; new ones, incorporating the refinements built into Nightshade. But you don’t have to worry. We’ve already started making them. As a matter of fact, they’re coming on nicely.]
Clavain narrowed his eyes. New ships? Where?
[A little way from here, Clavain.]
He nodded. Good. Then it won’t hurt to take me to see them, will it? I’d like to have a look over them before it’s too late to change anything.
[Clavain… ]
That isn’t open to negotiation either, Skade. If I want to get the job done, I’ll need to see the tools of my trade.
Chapter 9
THE INQUISITOR RELAXED her seat restraints and sketched a window for herself in the opaque hull material of the Triumvir’s shuttle. The hull obligingly opened a transparent rectangle, offering the Inquisitor her first view of Resurgam from space in fifteen years.
Much had changed even in that relatively brief span of planetary time. Clouds which had previously been vapid streaks of high-altitude moisture now billowed in thick creamy masses, whipped into spiral patterns by the blind artistry of Coriolis force. Sunlight glared back at her from the enamelled surfaces of lakes and miniature seas. There were hard-edged expanses of green and gold stitched across the planet in geometric clusters, threaded by silver-blue irrigation channels deep enough to carry barges. There were the faint grey scratches of slev lines and highways. Cities and settlements were smears of crosshatched streets and buildings, barely resolved even when the Inquisitor asked the window to flex into magnification mode. Near the hubs of the oldest settlements, like Cuvier, were the remnants of the old habitat domes or their foundation rings. Now and then she saw the bright moving bead of a transport dirigible high in the stratosphere, or the much smaller speck of an aircraft on government duty. But on this scale most human activity was invisible. She might as well have been studying surface features on some hugely magnified virus.
The Inquisitor, who after years of suppressing that part of her personality was again beginning to think of herself as Ana Khouri, did not have any particularly strong feelings of attachment to Resurgam, even after all the years she had spent incognito on its surface. But what she saw from orbit was sobering. The planet was more than the temporary colony it had been when she had first arrived in the system. It was a home to many people, all they had known. In the course of her investigations she had met many of them and she knew that there were still good people on Resurgam. They could not all be blamed for the present government or the injustices of the past. They at least deserved the chance to live and die on the world they had come to call their home. And by dying she meant by natural causes. That, unfortunately, was the part that could no longer be guaranteed.
The shuttle was tiny and fast. The Triumvir, Ilia Volyova, was snoozing in the other seat, with the peak of a nondescript grey cap tugged down over her brow. It was the shuttle that had brought her down to Resurgam in the first place, before she contacted the Inquisitor. The shuttle’s avionics program knew how to dodge between the government radar sweeps, but it had always seemed prudent to keep such excursions to a minimum. If they were caught, if there was even a suspicion that a spacecraft was routinely entering and leaving Resurgam’s atmosphere, heads would roll at every level of government. Even if Inquisition House was not directly implicated, Khouri’s position would become extremely unsafe. The backgrounds of key government personnel would be subjected to a deep and probing scrutiny. Despite her precautions, her origins might be revealed.
The stealthy ascent had necessitated a shallow acceleration profile, but once it was clear of atmosphere and outside the effective range of the radar sweeps the shuttle’s engines revved up to three gees, pressing the two of them back into their seats. Khouri began to feel drowsy and realised, just as she slid into sleep, that the shuttle was pumping a perfumed narcotic into the air. She slept dreamlessly, and awoke with the same mild sense of objection.
They were somewhere else.
‘How long were we under?’ she asked Volyova, who was smoking.
‘Just under a day. I hope that alibi you cooked up was good, Ana; you’re going to need it when you get back to Cuvier.’
‘I said I had to go into the wilderness to interview a deep-cover agent. Don’t worry; I established the background for this a long time ago. I always knew I might have to be away for a while.’ Khouri undid her seat restraints — the shuttle was no longer accelerating — and attempted to scratch an itch somewhere near the small of her back. ‘Any chance of a shower, whenever we get where we’re going?’
‘That depends. Where exactly do you think we’re headed?’
‘Let’s just say I have a horrible feeling I’ve already been there.’
Volyova stubbed out her cigarette and made the front of the hull turn glassy. They were in deep interplanetary space, still in the ecliptic, but good light-minutes from any world, yet something was blocking the view of the starfield ahead of them.
‘There she is, Ana. The good ship Nostalgia for Infinity. Still very much as you left her.’
‘Thanks. Any other cheering sentiments, while you’re at it?’
‘The last time I checked the showers were out of order.’
‘The last time you checked?’
Volyova paused and made a clucking sound with her tongue. ‘Buckle up. I’m taking us in.’
They swooped in close to the dark misshapen mass of the lighthugger. Khouri remembered her first approach to this same ship, back when she had been tricked aboard it in the Epsilon Eridani system. It had looked just about normal then, about what one would expect of a large, moderately old trade lighthugger. There had been a distinct absence of odd excrescences and protuberances, a marked lack of daggerlike jutting appendages or elbowed turretlike growths. The hull had been more or less smooth — worn and weathered here and there, interrupted by machines, sensor-pods and entry bays in other places — but there had been nothing about it that would have invited particular comment or disquiet. There had been no acres of lizardskin texturing or dried-mudplain expanses of interlocked platelets; no suggestion that buried biological imperatives had finally erupted to the surface in an orgy of biomechanical transformation.
But now the ship did not look much like a ship at all. What it did resemble, if Khouri had to associate it with anything, was a fairytale palace gone sick, a once-glittering assemblage of towers and oubliettes and spires that had been perverted by the vilest of magics. The basic shape of the starship was still evident: she could pick out the main hull and its two jutting engine nacelles, each larger than a freight-dirigible hangar; but that functional core was almost lost under the baroque growth layers that had lately stormed the ship. Various organising principles had been at work, ensuring that the growths, which had been mediated by the ship’s repair and redesign subsystems, had a mad artistry about them, a foul flamboyance which both awed and revolted. There were spirals like the growth patterns in ammonites. There were whorls and knots like vastly magnified wood grain. There were spars and filaments and netlike meshes, bristling hairlike spines and blocky chancrous masses of interlocked crystals. There were places where some major structure had been echoed and re-echoed in a fractal diminuendo, vanishing down to the limit of vision. The crawling intricacies of the transformations operated on all scales. If one looked for too long, one started seeing faces or parts of faces in the juxtapositions of warped armour. Look longer and one started seeing one’s own horrified reflection. But under all that, Khouri thought, it was still a ship.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I see it hasn’t got a fuck of a lot better since I was away.’
Volyova smiled beneath the brim of her cap. ‘I’m encouraged. That sounds a lot less like the Inquisitor and a lot more like the old Ana Khouri.’
‘Yeah? Pity it took a fucking nightmare like that to bring me back.’
‘Oh, this is nothing,’ Volyova said cheerfully. ‘Wait until we’re inside.’
The shuttle
had to swerve through a wrinkled eyelike gap in the hull growth to reach the docking bay. But the interior of the bay was still more or less rectangular, and the major servicing systems, which had never much depended on nanotechnology, were still in place and recognisable. An assortment of other in-system craft was packed into the chamber, ranging from blunt-nosed vacuum tugs to major shuttles.
They docked. This part of the ship was not spun for gravity, so they disembarked under weightless conditions, pulling themselves along via grab rails. Khouri was more than willing to let Volyova go ahead of her. Both of them carried torches and emergency oxygen masks, and Khouri was very tempted to start using her supply. The air in the ship was horribly warm and humid, with a rotten taste to it. It was like breathing someone else’s stomach gas.
Khouri covered her mouth with her sleeve, fighting the urge to retch. Ilia…‘
‘You’ll get used to it. It isn’t harmful.’ She extracted something from her pocket. ‘Cigarette?’
‘Have you ever known me to say yes to one of those damned things before?’
‘There’s always a first time.’
Khouri waited while Volyova lit the cigarette for her and then drew on it experimentally. It was bad, but still a marked improvement on unfiltered ship air.
‘Filthy habit, really,’ Volyova said, with a smile. ‘But then filthy times call for filthy habits. Feeling better now?’
Khouri nodded, but without any great conviction.
They moved through gulletlike tunnels whose walls glistened with damp secretions or beguilingly regular crystal patterns. Khouri brushed herself along with gloved hands. Now and then she recognised some old aspect of the ship — a conduit, bulkhead or inspection box — but typically it would be half-melted into its surroundings or surreally distorted. Hard surfaces had become fuzzily fractal, extending blurred grey boundaries into thin air. Varicoloured slimes and unguents threw back their torchlights in queasy diffraction patterns. Amoebalike blobs drifted through the air, following — or at times swimming against, it seemed — the prevailing shipboard air-currents.
Via grinding locks and wheels they transferred to the part of the ship that was still rotating. Khouri was grateful for the gravity, but with it came an unanticipated unpleasantness. Now there was somewhere for the fluids and secretions to run to. They dripped and dribbled from the walls in miniature cataracts, congealing on the floor before finding their way to a drainage aperture or hole. Certain secretions had formed stalagmites and stalactites, amber and snot-green prongs fingering between floor and ceiling. Khouri did her best not to brush against them, but it was not the easiest of tasks. She noticed that Volyova had no such inhibitions. Within minutes her jacket was smeared and swabbed with several varieties of shipboard effluent.
‘Relax,’ Volyova said, noticing her discomfort. ‘It’s perfectly safe. There’s nothing on the ship that can harm either of us. You — um — have had those gunnery implants taken out, haven’t you?’
‘You should remember. You did it.’
‘Just checking.’
‘Ha. You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve learned to take my pleasures where I can find them, Ana. Especially in times of deep existential crisis…’ Ilya Volyova flicked a cigarette butt into the shadows and lit herself another.
They continued in silence. Eventually they reached one of the elevator shafts that threaded the ship lengthwise, like the main elevator shaft in a skyscraper. With the ship rotating rather than being under thrust it was much easier to move along its lateral axis. But it was still four kilometres from the tip of the ship to its tail, so it made sense to use the shafts wherever possible. To Khouri’s surprise, a car was waiting for them in the shaft. She followed Volyova into it with moderate trepidation, but the car looked normal inside and accelerated smoothly enough.
‘The elevators are still working?’ Khouri asked.
‘They’re a key shipboard system,’ Volyova said. ‘Remember, I’ve got tools for containing the plague. They don’t work perfectly, but I can at least steer the disease clear of anything I don’t want to become too corrupted. And the Captain himself is occasionally willing to assist. The transformations aren’t totally out of his control, it seems.’
Volyova had finally raised the matter of the Captain. Until that moment Khouri had been clinging to the hope that it might all turn out to be a bad dream she had confused with reality. But there it was. The Captain was very much alive.
‘What about the engines?’
‘Still functionally intact, as far as I can tell. But only the Captain has control of them.’
‘Have you been talking with him?’
‘I’m not sure talking is quite the word I’d use. Communicating, possibly… but even that might be stretching things.’
The elevator veered, switching between shafts. The shaft tubes were mostly transparent, but the elevator spent much of its time whisking between densely packed decks or boring through furlongs of solid hull material. Now and then, through the window, Khouri saw dank chambers zoom by. Mostly they were too large for her to see the other side in the weakly reflected light of the elevator. There were five chambers which were the largest of all, huge enough to hold cathedrals. She thought of the one Volyova had shown her during her first tour of Infinity, the one that held the forty horrors. There were fewer than forty of them now, but that was surely still enough to make a difference. Even, perhaps, against an enemy like the Inhibitors. Provided that the Captain could be persuaded.
‘Have you and him patched up your differences?’ Khouri asked.
I think the fact that he didn’t kill us when he had the chance more or less answers that question.‘
‘And he doesn’t blame you for what you did to him?’
For the first time there was a sign of annoyance from Volyova. ‘Did to him? Ana, what I “did to him” was an act of extreme mercy. I didn’t punish him at all. I merely… stated the facts and then administered the cure.’
‘Which by some definitions was worse than the disease.’
Now Volyova shrugged. ‘He was going to die. I gave him a new lease on life.’
Khouri gasped as another chamber ghosted by, filled with fused metamorphic shapes. ‘If you call this living.’
‘Word of advice.’ Volyova leant closer, lowering her voice. ‘There’s a very good chance he can hear this conversation. Just keep that in mind, will you? There’s a good girl.’
If anyone else had spoken to her like that they would have been nursing at least one interesting dislocation about two seconds later. But Khouri had long since learned to make allowances for Volyova.
‘Where is he? Still on the same level as before?’
‘Depends what you mean by “him”. I suppose you could say his epicentre is still there, yes. But there’s really very little point in distinguishing between him and the ship nowadays.’
‘Then he’s everywhere? All around us?’
‘All-seeing. All-knowing.’
I don’t like this, Ilia.‘
‘If it’s any consolation, I very much doubt that he does either.’
After many delays, reversals and diversions the elevator finally brought them to the bridge of Nostalgia for Infinity. To Khouri’s considerable relief a consultation with the Captain did not seem to be imminent.
The bridge was much as she remembered it. The chamber was damaged and careworn, but most of the vandalism had been inflicted before the Captain changed. Khouri had even done some of it herself. Seeing the impact craters where her weapons discharges had fallen gave her a faint and mischievous sense of pride. She remembered the tense power-struggle that had taken place aboard the lighthugger when it was in orbit around the neutron star Hades, on the very edge of the present system.
It had been touch and go at times, but because they had survived she had dared to believe that a greater victory had been won. But the arrival of the Inhibitor machines suggested otherwise. The battle, in all likelihood, h
ad already been lost before the first shots were fired. But they had at least bought themselves a little time. Now they had to do something with it.
Khouri settled into one of the seats facing the bridge’s projection sphere. It had been repaired since the mutiny and now showed a real-time display of the Resurgam system. There were eleven major planets, but the display also showed their moons and the larger asteroids and comets — all were of potential importance. Their precise orbital positions were indicated, along with vectors showing the motion, prograde or retrograde, of the body in question. Pale cones radiating from the lighthugger showed the extent of the ship’s instantaneous deep-sensor coverage, corrected for light-travel time. Volyova had strewn a handful of monitor drones on other orbits so that they could peer into blind spots and increase the interferometric baseline, but she used them cautiously.
‘Ready for a recent-history lesson?’ Volyova asked.
‘You know I am, Ilia. I just hope this little jaunt turns out to be worth it, because I’m still going to have to answer some tricky questions when I get back to Cuvier.’
‘They may not seem so massively pressing when you’ve seen what I have to show you.’ She made the display zoom in, enlarging one of the moons spinning around the system’s second-largest gas giant.
‘This is where the Inhibitors have set up camp?’ Khouri asked.
‘Here and on two other worlds of comparable size. Their activities on each seem broadly the same.’
Now dark shapes fluttered into view around the moon. They swarmed and scattered like agitated crows, their numbers and shapes in constant flux. In an instant they settled on to the surface of the moon, linking together in purposeful formations. The playback was evidently accelerated — hours compressed into seconds, perhaps — for transformations blistered across the moon’s surface in a quick black inundation. Zoom-in showed a tendency for the structures to be formed of cubic subelements of widely differing sizes. Vast lasers pumped heat back into space as the transformations raged. Grotesque black machines the size of mountains clotted the landscape, ramping down the moon’s albedo until only infra-red could tease out significant patterns.