‘Svinoi. Lying pig bastard. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
I assumed you were already aware of the signal, Ilia. Didn’t you pick it up as your shuttle approached me?‘
Ah, she thought. So it was a signal now, not just a meaningless blast of laser light. What else did he know?
‘Of course I didn’t. I was asleep until the very last moment, and the shuttle wasn’t programmed to watch for anything other than in-system transmissions. Interstellar communications are blue-shifted out of the usual frequency bands. What was the blue shift, Captain?‘
‘Modest, Ilia… ten per cent of light. Just enough to shift it out of the expected frequency band.’
She did the sums. Ten per cent of light… a lighthugger couldn’t slow down from that kind of speed in much less than thirty days. Even if a starship was breaking into the system, she still had half a month before it would arrive. It wasn’t much of a breathing space, but it was a lot better than finding out they were mere days away.
‘Captain? The signal must be an automated transmission locked on repeat, or they wouldn’t have kept up it up for so long. Patch it through to my suit. Immediately.’
‘Yes, Ilia. And the cache weapons? Shall I abandon the deployment?’
‘Yes…’ she started saying, before correcting herself. ‘No. No! Nothing changes. Keep deploying the fucking things — it’ll still take hours to get all eight of them outside. You heard what I said before, didn’t you? I want your mass screening them from the Inhibitors.’
‘What about the source of the signal, Ilia?’
Had the option been available to her, she would have kicked part of him then. But she was floating far from anything kickable. ‘Just play the fucking thing.’
Her faceplate opaqued, blanking out the view of the cache chamber. For a moment she stared into a dimensionless sea of white. Then a scene formed, a slow dissolve into an interior. She appeared to be standing at one end of a long austerely furnished room, with a black table between her and the three people at the table’s far end. The table was a wedge of pure darkness.
‘Hello,’ said the only human male among the three. ‘My name is Nevil Clavain, and I believe you have something I want.’
At first glance he appeared to be an extension of the table. His clothes were the same unreflective black, so that only his hands and head loomed out of the shadows. His fingers were laced neatly in front of him. Ropelike veins curled across the backs of his hands. His beard and hair were white, his face notched here and there by crevasses of extreme shadow.
‘He means the devices inside your ship,’ said the person sitting next to Clavain. She was a very young-looking woman who wore a similarly black quasi-uniform. Volyova struggled with her accent, thinking it sounded like one of the local Yellowstone dialects. ‘We know you have thirty-three of them. We have a permanent fix on their diagnostic signatures, so don’t even think of bluffing.’
‘It won’t work,’ said the third speaker, who was a pig. ‘We are very determined, you see. We captured this ship, when they said it couldn’t be done. We’ve even given the Conjoiners a bloody nose. We’ve come a long way to get what we want and we won’t be going home empty-handed.’ As he spoke he reinforced his points with downward swipes of one trotterlike hand.
Clavain, the first speaker, leaned forward. ‘Scorpio’s right. We have the technical means to repossess the weapons. The question is, do you have the good sense to hand them over without a fight?’
Volyova felt as if Clavain was waiting for her to answer. The urge to say something even though she knew this was not a real-time message was almost overwhelming. She began to speak, knowing that the suit could capture whatever she was saying and uplink it back to the intruding ship. There would be a hell of a turnaround on the signal, though: three days out, at the very least, which meant she could not expect a reply for a week.
But Clavain was speaking again. ‘Let’s not be too dogmatic, however., I appreciate you have local difficulties. We’ve seen the activity in your system, and we understand how it might give cause for concern. But that doesn’t change our immediate objective. We want those weapons ready to be handed over as soon as we break into circumstellar space. No tricks, no delays. That isn’t negotiable. But we can discuss the details, and the benefits of mutual cooperation.’
‘Not when you’re half a month out, you can’t,’ Volyova whispered.
‘We will arrive shortly,’ Clavain said. ‘Perhaps sooner than you expect. But for now we’re outside efficient communications range. We will continue transmitting this message until we arrive. In the meantime, to facilitate negotiations I have prepared a beta-level copy of myself. I am sure you are familiar with the necessary simulation protocols. If not, we can also supply technical documentation. Otherwise, you can proceed to a full and immediate installation. By the time this message has cycled one thousand times, you will have all the data you need to implement my beta-level.’ Clavain smiled reasonably, spreading his hands in a gesture of openness. ‘Please, will you consider it? We will of course make any reciprocal arrangements for your own beta-level, should you wish to uplink a negotiating proxy. We await your reaction with interest. This is Nevil Clavain, for Zodiacal Light, signing off.’
Ilia Volyova swore to herself. ‘Of course we’re familiar with the fucking protocols, you patronising git.’
The message had cycled more than a thousand times, which meant that the necessary data to implement the beta-level had already been recorded.
‘Did you get that, Captain?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Ilia.’
‘Scrub the beta-level, will you? Check it for any nasties. Then find a way to implement it.’
‘Even if it contained some kind of military virus, Ilia, I doubt very much that it would harm me in my present state. It would be a little like a man with advanced leprosy worrying about a mild skin complaint, or the captain of a sinking ship concerning himself with a minor incident of woodworm, or…’
‘Yes, I get the point, thank you. But do it anyway. I want to talk to Clavain. Face to face.’
She reached up and de-opaqued her faceplate just in time to see the next cache weapon commence its crawl towards space. She was furious beyond words. It was not simply the fact that the newcomers had arrived so unexpectedly, or made such awkward and specific demands. It was the way the Captain appeared to have gone out of his way to conceal the whole business from her.
She did not know what he was playing at, but she did not like it at all.
Volyova took a step back from the servitor.
‘Start,’ she said, not without a little wariness.
The beta-level had conformed to the usual protocols, backwardly compatible with all major simulation systems since the mid Belle Époque. It also revealed itself to be free of any contaminating viruses, either deliberate or accidental. Volyova still did not trust it, so she spent another half-day verifying the fact that the simulation had not, in some exceedingly devious way, managed to infiltrate and modify her virus filters. It appeared that it had not, but she still did her best to make sure it was isolated from as much of the ship’s control network as possible.
The Captain, of course, was entirely correct: he was, in all major respects, now the ship. What attacked the ship attacked him. And since he had become the ship thanks to his own takeover by a super-adapted alien plague, it appeared highly unlikely that anything of merely human origin would be able to piggyback its way into him. He had already been stormed and corrupted by an expert invader.
Abruptly, the servitor moved. It took a step back from her, almost toppling before it righted itself. Dual camera-eyes looked in different directions and then snapped into binocular mode, locking on to her. Mechanical irises snicked open and shut. The machine took another step, towards her this time.
She raised a hand. ‘Halt.’
She had installed the beta-level into one of the ship’s few fully androform machines. The servitor was a skeletal assemblage of part
s, all spindly openwork. She felt no sense of threat in its vicinity, or at least no rational sense of threat, since she was physically stronger and more robust than the machine.
‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Are you properly installed?’
The machine’s voice box buzzed like a trapped fly. I am a beta-level simulation of Nevil Clavain.‘
‘Good. Who am I?’
I don’t know. You haven’t introduced yourself.‘
I am Triumvir Ilia Volyova,‘ she said. ’This is my ship, Nostalgia for Infinity. I’ve installed you in one of our general-mech servitors. It’s a frail machine, deliberately so, so don’t think of trying any monkey business. You’re wired for self-destruct, but even if that wasn’t the case I could rip you apart with my fingers.‘
‘Monkey business is the last thing on my mind, Triumvir. Or Ilia. What shall I call you?’
‘Sir. This is my turf now.’
It appeared not have heard her. ‘Did you arrange for your own beta-level to be transmitted to Zodiacal Light, Ilia?’
‘What’s it to you if I did?’
‘I’m curious, that’s all. There’d be a pleasing symmetry if we were both represented by our respective beta-levels, wouldn’t there?’
I don’t trust beta-levels. And I don’t see the point, either.‘
Clavain’s servitor looked around, its dual eyes clicking and whirring. She had activated it in a relatively normal part of the ship — the Captain’s transformations were very mild here — but she supposed she had become accustomed to surroundings that were still quite odd by the usual criteria. Arcs of hardened, glistening plague-matter spanned the chamber like whale ribs. They were slick with chemical secretions. Her booted feet sloshed through inches of foul black effluent.
‘You were saying?’ she prompted.
The machine snapped its attention back on to her. ‘Using beta-levels makes perfect sense, Ilia. Our two ships are out of effective communication range now, but they’re getting closer. The beta-levels can speed up the whole negotiation process, establishing the ground rules, if you like. When the ships are closer the betas can download their experiences. Our flesh progenitors can review what has been discussed and take appropriate decisions much more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.’
‘You sound plausible, but all I’m talking to is a set of algorithmic responses; a predictive model for how the real Clavain would respond in a similar situation.’
The servitor made itself shrug. ‘And your point is?’
‘I’ve no guarantee that this is exactly how Clavain really would respond, were he standing here.’
‘All, that old fallacy. You sound like Galiana. The fact is, the real Clavain might respond differently in any number of instances where he was presented with the same stimuli. So you lose nothing by dealing with a beta-level.’ The machine lifted up one of its skeletal arms, peering at her through the hollow spaces between the arm’s struts and wires. ‘You realise this won’t help matters, though?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Putting me in a body like this, something so obviously mechanical. And this voice… it’s not me, not me at all. You saw the transmission. This just doesn’t do me justice, does it? I actually have a slight lisp. Even play it up sometimes. I suppose you could say it’s part of my character.’
‘I told you already…’
‘Here’s what I suggest, Ilia. Allow the machine to access your implants, will you, so that it can map a perceptual ghost into your visual/auditory field.’
She felt oddly defensive. I have no implants, Clavain.‘
The buzzing voice sounded astonished. ’But you’re an Ultra.‘
‘Yes, but I’m also brezgatnik. I’ve never had implants, not even before the plague.’
‘I thought I understood Ultras,’ Clavain’s beta-level said thoughtfully. ‘You surprise me, I admit. But you must have some way of viewing projected information, surely, when a hologram won’t work?’
‘I have goggles,’ she admitted.
‘Fetch them. It will make life a lot easier, I assure you.’
She did not like being told what to do by the beta-level, but she was prepared to admit that its suggestion made sense. She had another servitor bring her the goggles and an earpiece. She slipped the ensemble on, and then allowed the beta-level to modify the view she saw through the goggles. The spindly robot was edited out of her visual field and replaced by an image of Clavain, much as she had seen him during the transmission. The illusion was not perfect, which was a useful reminder that she was not dealing with a flesh-and-blood human. But on the whole it was a great improvement on the servitor.
‘There,’ Clavain’s real voice said in her ear. ‘Now we can do business. I’ve asked already, but will you consider uplinking a beta-level of yourself to Zodiacal Light!’
He had her in a spot. She did not want to admit that she had no provision for such a thing; that would really have made her look odd.
‘I’ll consider it. In the meantime, Clavain, let’s get this little chat over with, shall we?’ Volyova smiled. ‘You caught me in the middle of something.’
Clavain’s image smiled back. ‘Nothing too serious, I hope.’
Even while she busied herself with the servitor, she continued the operation to deploy the cache weapons. She had told the Captain that she did not want him to make his presence known while the servitor was on, so his only means of speaking to her was through the same earpiece. He, in turn, was able to read her subvocal communications.
‘I don’t want Clavain learning any more than he has to,’ she had told the Captain. ‘Especially about you, and what’s happened to this ship.’
‘Why should Clavain learn anything? If the beta-level discovers something we don’t want it to know, we’ll just kill it.’
‘Clavain will ask questions later.’
‘If there is a later,’ the Captain had said.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning… we aren’t intending to negotiate, are we?’
She escorted the servitor through the ship to the bridge, doing her best to pick a route that took her through the least strange parts of the interior. She observed the beta-level taking in its surroundings, obviously aware that something peculiar had happened to the ship. Yet it did not ask her any questions directly related to the plague transformations. It was, frankly, a lost battle in any case. The approaching ship would soon have the necessary resolution to glimpse Infinity for itself, and then it would learn of the baroque external transformations.
‘Ilia,’ Clavain’s voice said. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush. We want the thirty-three items now in your possession, and we want them very badly. Do you admit knowledge of the items in question?’
‘It would be a tiny bit implausible to deny it, I think.’
‘Good.’ Clavain’s image nodded emphatically. ‘That’s progress. At least we’re clear that the items exist.’
Volyova shrugged. ‘So if we’re not going to beat about the bush, why don’t we call them what they are? They’re weapons, Clavain. You know it. I know it. They know it, in all likelihood.’
She slipped her goggles off for a moment. Clavain’s servitor strode around the room, its movements almost but not quite fluidly human. She replaced the goggles, and the overlaid image moved with the same puppetlike strides.
‘I like you better already, Ilia. Yes, they’re weapons. Very old weapons, of rather obscure origin.’
‘Don’t bullshit me, Clavain. If you know about the weapons, you probably have just as much idea as me about who made them, maybe more. Well, here’s my guess: I think the Conjoiners made them. What do you say to that?’
‘You’re warm, I’ll give you that.’
‘Warm?’
‘Hot. Very hot, as it happens.’
‘Start telling me what the hell this is all about, Clavain. If they’re Conjoiner weapons, how have you only just found out about them?’
‘They emit tracer signals, Ilia. We ho
med in on them.’
‘But you’re not Conjoiners.’
‘No…’ Clavain conceded this point with a sweep of one arm, neatly synchronised with the servitor. ‘But I’ll be honest with you, if only because it might help swing the negotiations in my favour. The Conjoiners do want those weapons back. And they’re on their way here as well. As a matter of fact, there’s a whole fleet of heavily armed Conjoiner vessels immediately behind Zodiacal Light’
She remembered what the pig, Scorpio, had said about Clavain’s crew bloodying the noses of the spiders. ‘Why tell me this?’ Volyova said.
‘It alarms you, I see. I don’t blame you for that. I’d be alarmed, too.’ The image scratched its beard. ‘That’s why you should consider negotiating with me first. Let me take the weapons off your hands. I’ll deal with the Conjoiners.’
‘Why do you think you’d have any more luck than me, Clavain?’
‘Couple of reasons, Ilia. One, I’ve already outsmarted them on a few occasions. Two, and perhaps more pertinent, until very recently I was one.’
The Captain whispered in her ear. ‘I’ve done a check, Ilia. There was a Nevil Clavain with Conjoiner connections.’
Volyova addressed Clavain. ‘And you think that would make a difference, Clavain?’
He nodded. ‘The Conjoiners aren’t vindictive. They’ll leave you alone if you have nothing to offer them. If you still have the weapons, however, they’ll take you apart.’
‘There’s a small flaw in your thinking,’ Volyova said. ‘If I had the weapons, wouldn’t I be the one doing the taking apart?’
Clavain winked at her. ‘Know how to use them that well, do you?’
‘I have some experience.’
‘No, you don’t. You’ve barely switched the bloody things on, Ilia. If you had, we’d have detected them centuries ago. Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that, won’t I?’
Clavain — she had to stop thinking of it as Clavain — scratched his beard again. ‘I didn’t mean to offend. But the weapons are dangerous. I’m quite sincere in my suggestion that you hand them over now and let me worry about them.’