‘So it got hit by shrapnel or something.’
‘Not very likely…’
‘Thorn, something sure as fuck happened.’
There was a shiver of activity from the console displays. Neither of them had done anything. Khouri leaned over and queried the shuttle, biting her lip.
‘What is it?’ Thorn asked.
‘We’re being invited to dock,’ she told him. ‘Normal approach vector. It’s as if nothing unusual’s happened. But if that’s the case, why isn’t Ilia speaking to us?’
‘We’ve got two thousand people in our care. We’d better be sure we’re not walking into a trap.’
I do realise that.‘ She skated a finger across the console, skipping through commands and queries, occasionally tapping a response into the system.
‘So what are you doing?’ Thorn asked.
‘Landing us. If the ship wanted to do something nasty, it’s had enough chances.’
Thorn pulled a face but offered no counter-argument. There was a tug of microgravity as the transfer shuttle inserted itself into the docking approach, moving under direct control of the larger ship. The hull loomed and then opened to reveal the docking bay. Khouri closed her eyes — the transfer shuttle only just appeared to fit through the aperture — but there was no collision, and then they were inside. The shuttle wheeled and then nudged itself into a berthing cradle. There was a tiny shove of thrust at the last moment, then a faint, faint tremor of contact. And then the console altered again, signifying that the shuttle had established umbilical linkage with the bay. Everything was absolutely normal.
‘I don’t like it,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s not like Ilia.’
‘She wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood the last time we met. Maybe she’s just having a very long sulk.’
‘Not her style,’ Khouri said, snapping her response and then immediately regretting it. ‘Something’s wrong. I just don’t know what.’
‘What about the passengers?’ he asked.
‘We keep ’em here until we know what’s going on. After fifteen hours, they can stand one or two more.‘
‘They won’t like it.’
‘They’ll have to. One of your people can cook up an excuse, can’t they?’
‘I suppose one more lie at this point won’t make much difference, will it? I’ll think of something — an atmospheric pressure mismatch, maybe.’
‘That’ll do. It doesn’t have to be a show stopper. Just a plausible reason to keep them aboard for a few hours.’
Thorn went back to arrange matters with his aides. It would not be too difficult, Khouri thought: the majority of the passengers would not expect to be unloaded for several hours anyway, and so would not instantly realise anything was amiss. Provided word did not spread around the ship that no one was being let out, a riot could be held off for a while.
She waited for Thorn to return.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘We can’t leave by the main airlock or people will get suspicious if we don’t come back.’
‘There’s a secondary lock here,’ Khouri said, nodding at an armoured door set in one wall of the flight deck. ‘I’ve requested a connecting tube to be fed across from the bay. We can get on and off the ship without anyone knowing we’re away.’
The tube clanged against the side of the hull. So far, the larger ship was being very obliging. Khouri and Thorn donned spacesuits from the emergency locker even though the indications were that the air in the connecting tube was normal in mix and pressure. They propelled themselves to the door, opened it and crammed into the chamber on the other side. The outer door opened almost immediately since there was no pressure imbalance to be adjusted.
Something waited in the tunnel.
Khouri flinched and sensed Thorn do likewise. Her soldiering years had given her a deep-seated dislike for robots. On Sky’s Edge a robot was often the last thing you saw. She had learned to suppress that phobia since moving in other cultures, but she still retained the capacity to be startled when she encountered one unexpectedly.
Yet the servitor was not one she recognised. It was human-shaped, but at the same time utterly non-human in form. It was largely hollow, a lacy scaffold of wire-thin joints and struts containing almost no solid parts. Alloyed mechanisms, whirring sensors and arterial feedlines hovered within the skeletal form. The servitor spanned the corridor with limbs outstretched, waiting for them.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ Khouri said.
‘Hello,’ the servitor said, barking at them with a crudely synthesised voice.
‘Where’s Ilia?’ Khouri asked.
‘Indisposed. Would you mind authorising your suits to interpret the ambient data field, full visual and audio realisation? It will make matters a great deal easier.’
‘What’s it talking about?’ Thorn asked.
‘It wants us to let it manipulate what we see through our suits.’
‘Can it do that?’
‘Anything on the ship can, if we let it. Most of the Ultras have implants to achieve the same effect.’
‘And you?’
‘I had mine removed before I came down to Resurgam. Didn’t want anyone to be able to trace me back here in a hurry.’
‘Sensible,’ Thorn said.
The servitor spoke again. I assure you that there won’t be any trickery. As you can see, I’m actually rather harmless. Ilia chose this body for me intentionally, so that I wouldn’t be able to do any damage.‘
‘Ilia chose it?’
The servitor nodded its wire-frame approximation of a skull. Something bobbed within the openwork cage: a stub of white wedged between two wires. It almost looked like a cigarette.
‘Yes. She invited me aboard. I am a beta-level simulation of Nevil Clavain. Now, I’m no oil painting, but I’m reasonably certain that I don’t look like this. If you want to see me as I really am, however…’ The servitor gestured invitingly with one hand.
‘Be careful,’ Thorn whispered.
Khouri issued the subvocal commands that told her suit to accept and interpret ambient data fields. The change was subtle. The servitor faded away, processed out of her visual field. Her suit was filling in the gaps where it would have been, using educated guesswork and its own thorough knowledge of the three-dimensional environment. All the safeguards remained in place. If the servitor moved quickly or did anything that the suit decided was suspicious, it would be edited back into Khouri’s visual field.
Now the solid figure of a man appeared where the servitor had been. There was a slight mismatch between the man and his surroundings — he was too sharply in focus, too bright, and the shadows did not fall upon him quite as they should have done — but those errors were deliberate. The suit could have made the man appear absolutely realistic, but it was considered wise to degrade the image slightly. That way the viewer could never lapse into forgetting that they were dealing with a machine.
That’s better,‘ the figure said.
Khouri saw an old man, frail, white-bearded and white-haired. ‘Are you Nevil… what did you say your name was?’
‘Nevil Clavain. You’d be Ana Khouri, I think.’ His voice was nearly human now. Only a tiny edge of artificiality remained, again quite deliberately.
‘I’ve never heard of you.’ She looked at Thorn.
‘Me neither,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t have,’ Clavain said. ‘I’ve just arrived, you see. Or rather I’m in the process of arriving.’
Khouri could hear the details later. ‘What’s happened to Ilia?’
His face tightened. ‘It isn’t good news, I’m afraid. You’d best come with me.’ Clavain turned around with only a modicum of stiffness. He began to make his way back down the tunnel, clearly expecting to be followed.
Khouri looked at Thorn. Her companion nodded, without saying a word.
They set off after Clavain.
He led them through the catacombs of Nostalgia for Infinity. Khouri kept telling herself that the servitor could do n
othing to harm her, nothing at least that Ilia had not already sanctioned. If Ilia had installed a beta-level, she would only have given it a limited set of permissions, its possible actions tightly constrained. The beta-level was only driving the servitor, anyway; the software itself — and that was all it was, she reminded herself, very clever software — was executing on one of the ship’s remaining networks.
‘Tell me what happened, Clavain,’ she said. ‘You said you were arriving. What did you mean by that?’
‘My ship’s on its final deceleration phase,’ he said. ‘She’s called Zodiacal Light. She’ll be in this system shortly, braking to a stop near this vessel. My physical counterpart is aboard it. I invited Ilia to install this beta-level, since light-lag prohibited us from having anything resembling meaningful negotiations. Ilia obliged… and so here I am.’
‘So where is Ilia?’
I can tell you where she is,‘ Clavain said. ’But I’m not totally sure what happened. She turned me off, you see.‘
’She must have turned you on again,‘ Thorn said.
They were walking — or rather wading — through knee-deep ship slime the colour of bile. Ever since leaving the ship bay they had moved through portions of the vessel that were spun for gravity, although the effect varied depending on the exact route they followed.
‘Actually, she didn’t switch me on,’ Clavain said.‘ That’s the unusual thing. I came around, I suppose you’d say, and found… well, I’m getting ahead of myself.’
‘Is she dead, Clavain?’
‘No,’ he said, answering Khouri with a degree of emphasis. ‘No, she isn’t dead. But she isn’t well, either. It’s good that you came now. I take it you have passengers on that shuttle?’
There seemed little point in lying. ‘Two thousand of them,’ Khouri said.
‘Ilia said that you’d need to make around a hundred trips in total. This is just the first round-trip, isn’t it?’
‘Give us time and we’ll manage all hundred,’ Thorn said.
‘Time may well be the one thing you no longer have,’ Clavain replied. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.’
‘You mentioned negotiations,’ Khouri said. ‘What the fuck is there to negotiate?’
A sympathetic smile creased Clavain’s aged face. ‘Quite a lot, I fear. You have something that my counterpart wants very badly, you see.’
The servitor knew its way around the ship. Clavain led them through a labyrinth of corridors and shafts, ramps and ducts, chambers and antechambers, traversing many districts of which Khouri had only sketchy knowledge. There were regions of the ship that had not been visited for decades of worldtime, places into which even Ilia had shown a marked reluctance to stray. The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.
And yet now it was subtly different. It was entirely possible that the ship still retained all its old hauntings, all its places of menace. Now, however, there was a single encompassing spirit, a sentient presence that permeated every cubic inch of the vessel and could not be meaningfully localised to any specific point within the ship. Wherever they walked, they were surrounded by the Captain. He sensed them and they sensed him, even if it was only a tingling of the neck hairs, a keen sense of being scrutinised. It made the entire ship seem both more and less threatening than it had before. It all depended on whose side the Captain was on.
Khouri didn’t know. She didn’t even think Ilia had ever been entirely sure.
Gradually, Khouri began to recognise a district. It was one of the regions of the ship that had changed only slightly since the Captain’s transformation. The walls were the sepia of old manuscripts, the corridors pervaded by a cloisterlike gloom relieved only by ochre lights flickering within sconces, like candles. Clavain was leading them to the medical bay.
The room that he led them into was low ceilinged and windowless. Medical servitors were crouched hunks of machinery backed well into the corners, as if they were unlikely to be needed. A single bed was positioned near the room’s centre, attended by a small huddle of squat monitoring devices. A woman was lying on her back in the bed, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes shut. Biomedical traces rippled above her like aurorae.
Khouri stepped closer to the bed. It was Volyova; there was no doubt about that. But she looked like a version of her friend who had been subjected to some appalling experiment in accelerated ageing, something involving drugs to suck the flesh back to the bone and more drugs to reduce the skin to the merest glaze. She looked astonishingly delicate, as if liable to splinter into dust at any moment. It was not the first time Khouri had seen Volyova here, in the medical bay. There had been the time after the gunfight on the surface of Resurgam, when they were capturing Sylveste. Volyova had been injured then, but there had never been any question of her dying. Now it took close examination to tell that she was not already dead. Volyova looked desiccated.
Khouri turned to the beta-level, horrified. ‘What happened?’
‘I still don’t really know. Before she put me to sleep there was nothing the matter with her. Then I came back around and found myself here, in this room. She was in the bed. The machines had stabilised her, but that was about the best they could do. In the long term, she was still dying.’ Clavain nodded at the displays looming above Volyova. ‘I’ve seen these kinds of injuries before, during wartime. She breathed vacuum without any kind of protection against internal moisture loss. Decompression must have been rapid, but not quite quick enough to kill her instantly. Most of the damage is in her lungs — scarring of the alveoli, where ice crystals formed. She’s blind in both eyes, and there is some damage to brain function. I don’t think it’s cognitive. There’s tracheal damage as well, which makes it difficult for her to speak.’
‘She’s an Ultra,’ Thorn said with a touch of desperation. ‘Ultras don’t die just because they swallow a little vacuum.’
‘She isn’t much like the other Ultras I’ve met,’ Clavain said.‘ There were no implants in her. If there had been, she might have walked it off. At the very least, the medichines could have buffered her brain. But she had none. I understand she was repulsed by the idea of anything invading her.’
Khouri looked at the beta-level. ‘What have you done, Clavain?’
‘What it took. It was requested that I do what I could. The obvious thing was to inject a dose of medichines.’
‘Wait.’ Khouri raised a hand. ‘Who requested what?’
Clavain scratched his beard. ‘I’m not sure. I just felt an obligation to do it. You have to understand that I’m just software. I wouldn’t claim otherwise. It’s entirely possible that something booted me up and intervened in my execution, forcing me to act in a certain manner.’
Khouri and Thorn exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing, Khouri knew. The only agency that could have switched Clavain back on and made him help Volyova was the Captain.
Khouri felt cold, intensely aware that she was being observed. ‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Listen to me. I don’t know what you are, really. But you have to understand: she would sooner have died than have you do what you’ve just done.’
‘I know,’ Clavain said, extending his palms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘But I had to do it. It’s what I would have done had I been here.’
‘Ignored her deepest wish, is that what you mean?’
‘Yes, if you want to put it like that. Because someone once did the same for me. I was in the same position as her, you see. Injured — dying, in fact. I’d been wounded, but I definitely didn’t want any stinking machines in my skull. I’d have rather died than that. But someone put them in there anyway. And now I’m grateful. She gave me four hundr
ed years of life I wouldn’t have had any other way.’
Khouri looked at the bed, at the woman lying in it, and then back to the man who had, if not saved her life, at the very least postponed her moment of death.
‘Clavain…’ she said. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Clavain is a Conjoiner,’ said a voice as thin as smoke. ‘You should listen to him very carefully, because he means what he says.’
Volyova had spoken, yet there had been no movement from the figure on the bed. The only indication that she was now conscious, which had not been the case when they arrived, was a shift in the biomedical traces hovering above her.
Khouri wrenched her helmet off. Clavain’s apparition vanished, replaced by the skeletal machine. She placed the helmet on the floor and knelt by the bed. ‘Ilia?’
‘Yes, it’s me.’ The voice was like sandpaper. Khouri observed the tiniest movement of Volyova’s lips as she formed the words, but the sound came from above her.
‘What happened?’
‘There was an incident.’
‘We saw the damage to the hull when we arrived. Is…’
‘Yes. It was my fault, really. Like everything. Always my fault. Always my damned fault.’
Khouri glanced back at Thorn. ‘Your fault?’
‘I was tricked.’ The lips parted in what might almost have been a smile. ‘By the Captain. I thought he had finally come around to my way of thinking. That we should use the cache weapons against the Inhibitors.’
Khouri could almost imagine what must have happened. ‘How did he trick…’
‘I deployed eight of the weapons beyond the hull. There was a malfunction. I thought it was genuine, but it was really just a way to get me outside the ship.’
Khouri lowered her voice. It was an absurd gesture — there was nothing that could be hidden from the Captain now — but she could not help it. ‘He wanted to kill you?’