‘No,’ Volyova said, hissing her answer. ‘He wanted to kill himself, not me. But I had to be there to see it. Had to be a witness.’
‘Why?’
‘To understand his remorse. To understand that it was deliberate, and not an accident.’
Thorn joined them. He too had removed his helmet, tucking it respectfully under one arm. ‘But the ship’s still here. What happened, Ilia?’
Again that weary half-smile. ‘I drove my shuttle into the beam. I thought it might make him stop.’
‘Seems as if it did.’
‘I didn’t expect to survive. But my aim wasn’t quite right.’
The servitor strode towards the bed. Unclothed of Clavain’s image, its motions appeared automatically more machinelike and threatening.
‘They know that I injected medichines into your head,’ it said, its voice no longer humanoid. ‘And now they know that you know.’
‘Clavain… the beta-level… had no choice,’ Volyova said before either of her two human visitors could speak. ‘Without the medichines I’d be dead now. Do they horrify me? Yes. Utterly, to the absolute core of my being. I am racked with revulsion at the thought of them crawling inside my skull like so many spiders and snakes. At the same time, I accept the necessity of them. They are the tools I have always worked with, after all. And I am fully aware that they cannot work miracles. Too much damage has been done. I am not amenable to repair.’
‘We’ll find a way, Ilia,’ Khouri said. ‘Your injuries can’t be…’
Volyova’s whisper of a voice cut her off. ‘Forget me. I don’t matter. Only the weapons matter now. They are my children, spiteful and wicked as they may be, and I won’t have them falling into the wrong hands.’
‘Now we seem to be getting to the crux of things,’ Thorn said.
‘Clavain — the real Clavain — wants the weapons,’ Volyova said. ‘By his own estimation he has the means to take them from us.’ Her voice grew louder. ‘Isn’t that so, Clavain?’
The servitor bowed. ‘I’d much rather negotiate their handover, Ilia, as you know, especially now that I’ve invested time in your welfare. But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.’
‘Why are you telling us that?’ Khouri said.
‘It’s in his — our — best interests,’ the servitor said amiably. ‘I’d far rather convince you to give up the weapons without a fight. At the very least we’d avoid any risk of damaging the damned things.’
‘You don’t seem like a monster to me,’ Khouri said.
‘I’m not,’ the servitor replied. ‘And nor is my counterpart. He’ll always choose the path of least bloodshed. But if some bloodshed is required… well, my counterpart won’t flinch from a little surgical butchery. Especially not now.’
The servitor said the last with such emphasis that Thorn asked, ‘Why not now?’
‘Because of what he has had to do to get this far.’ The servitor paused, its openwork head scanning each of them. ‘He betrayed everything that he had believed in for four hundred years. That wasn’t done lightly, I assure you. He lied to his friends and left behind his loved ones, knowing that it was the only way to get this done. And lately he took a terrible decision. He destroyed something that he loved very much. It cost him a great deal of pain. In that sense, I am not an accurate copy of the real Clavain. My personality was shaped before that dreadful act.’
Volyova’s voice rasped out again, instantly commanding their attention. ‘The real Clavain isn’t like you?’
‘I’m a sketch taken before a terrible darkness fell across his life, Ilia. I can only speculate on the extent to which we differ. But I would not like to trifle with my counterpart in his current state of mind.’
‘Psychological warfare,’ she hissed.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That is why you’ve come, isn’t it? Not to help us negotiate a sensible settlement, but to put the fear of God into us.’
The servitor bowed again, with something of the same mechanical modesty. ‘If I were to achieve that,’ Clavain said, ‘I would consider my work well done. The path of least bloodshed, remember?’
‘You want bloodshed,’ Ilia Volyova said, ‘you’ve come to the right woman.’
Shortly afterwards she fell into a different state of consciousness, something perhaps not too far from sleep. The displays relaxed, sine waves and Fourier harmonic histograms reflecting a seismic shift in major neural activity. Her visitors observed her in that state for several minutes, wondering to themselves whether she was dreaming or scheming, or if the distinction even mattered.
The next six hours went by quickly. Thorn and Khouri returned to the transfer shuttle and conferred with their immediate underlings. They were gratified to hear that no crises had occurred while they were visiting Volyova. There had been some minor flare-ups, but for the most part the two thousand passengers had accepted the cover story about a problem with the atmospheric compatibility of the two ships. Now the passengers were assured that the technical difficulty had been resolved — it had been a sensor malfunction all along — and that disembarkation could commence in the orderly fashion that had already been agreed. A large holding area had been prepared a few hundred metres from the parking bay, just into the spun part of the ship. It was a region that was relatively unafflicted by the Captain’s plague transformations, and Khouri and Volyova had worked hard to disguise the most overtly disturbing parts of the area that the plague had affected.
The holding area was cold and dank, and though they had done their best to make it comfortable, it still had the atmosphere of a crypt. Interior partitions had been put up to divide the space into smaller chambers which were each capable of containing a hundred passengers, and those chambers were in turn equipped with partitions to allow some privacy for family units. The holding area could accommodate ten thousand passengers — four further arrivals of the transfer shuttle — but by the time the sixth flight arrived, they would have to begin dispersing passengers into the main body of the ship. And then, inevitably, the truth would dawn: that they had been brought not only aboard a ship which was carrying the feared Melding Plague, but aboard a ship which had been subsumed and reshaped by its own Captain; that they were, in every sense that mattered, now inside that selfsame Captain.
Khouri expected panic and terror to accompany that realisation. Very likely it would be necessary to enforce a state of martial emergency even more stringent than that now operating on Resurgam. There would be deaths, and there would probably have to be more executions, to make a point.
And yet none of that would matter a damn when the real truth got out, which was that Ilia Volyova, the hated Triumvir, was still alive, and that she had orchestrated this very evacuation.
Only then would the real trouble start.
Khouri watched the transfer shuttle undock and begin its return trip to
Resurgam. Thirty hours of flight time, she calculated, plus — if they were lucky — no more than half that in turnaround at the other end. In two days Thorn would be back. If she could hold things together until then, she would already feel as if she had climbed a mountain.
But there would still be ninety-eight further flights to bring aboard after that…
One step at a time, she thought. That was what they had taught her in her soldiering days: break a problem down into doable units. Then, no matter how stupendous the problem seemed, you could tackle it piece by piece. Focus on the details and worry about the bigger picture later.
Outside, the distant space battle continued to rage. The flashes resembled the random firing of synapses in a splayed-out brain. She was certain that Volyova knew something about what was going on, and perhaps Clavain’s beta-level did, too. But Volyova was sleeping and Khouri did not trust the servitor to tell her anything except subtle lies. That left the
Captain, who probably knew something as well.
Khouri made her way through the ship alone. She took the dilapidated elevator system down to the cache chamber, just as she had done hundreds of times before in Volyova’s company. She felt an odd sense of mischief to be making the journey unaccompanied.
The chamber was as weightless and dark as it had been on their recent visits. Khouri halted the elevator on the lock level, and then shrugged on a spacesuit and propulsion pack. In a few breathless moments she was inside the chamber, floating into darkness. She jetted from the wall, doing her best to ignore the sense of unease she always felt in the presence of the cache weapons. She keyed on the suit’s navigation system and waited for it to align itself with the chamber’s transponder beacons. Annotated grey-green forms hoved on to her faceplate, at distances ranging from tens to hundreds of metres. The spidery lattice of the monorail system was a series of harder lines transecting the chamber at various angles. There were still weapons in the chamber. But not as many as she had expected.
There had been thirty-three before she had left for Resurgam. Volyova had deployed eight of them before the Captain tried to destroy himself. But just from the paucity of hovering shapes, Khouri could see that there were a lot fewer than twenty-five weapons left here. She counted the hovering shapes and then counted again, steering her suit deeper into the chamber just in case there was a problem with the transponder. But her first suspicion had been correct. There were only thirteen weapons left aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. Twenty of the damned things were unaccounted for.
Except she knew exactly where they were, didn’t she? Eight were outside somewhere, and so — presumably — were the other twelve that had gone missing. And, very probably, they were halfway across the system, responsible for at least some of the glints and flashes she had seen from the shuttle.
Volyova — or someone, anyway — had thrown twenty cache weapons into battle against the Inhibitors.
And it was anyone’s guess who was winning.
Know thine enemy, Clavain thought.
Except he didn’t know his enemy at all.
He was alone on the bridge of Zodiacal Light, sitting in rapt concentration. With his eyes nearly closed and his forehead creased by habitual worry lines, he resembled a chess master about to make the most vital move of his career. Beyond the steeple of his fingers hung a projected form: a deeply nested composite view of the lighthugger that held the long-lost weapons.
He recalled what Skade had told him, back in the Mother Nest. The evidence trail pointed to this ship being Nostalgia for Infinity; her commander most likely a woman named Ilia Volyova. He could even remember the picture of the woman that Skade had shown him. But even if that evidence trail was correct, and he really would be dealing with Volyova, it told him almost nothing. The only thing he could trust was what he learned with his own extended senses, in the present.
The image before him composited all salient tactical knowledge of the enemy craft. Its details were constantly shifting and re-layering as Zodiacal Lights intelligence-gathering systems improved their guesswork. Long baseline inter-ferometry teased out the electromagnetic profile of the ship across the entire spectrum from soft gamma rays to low-frequency radio. At all wavelengths the backscatter of radiation was perplexing, making the interpretive software crash or come up with nonsensical guesses. Clavain had to intervene every time the software threw up another absurd interpretation. For some reason the software kept insisting that the vessel resembled some weird fusion of ship, cathedral and sea urchin. Clavain could see the underlying form of a plausible spacecraft, and had to constantly nudge the software away from its more outlandish solution minima. He could only imagine that the lighthugger had cloaked itself in a shell of confusing material, like the obfuscatory clouds that Rust Belt habitats occasionally employed.
The alternative — that the software was correct, and that he was merely enforcing his own expectations on it — was too unnerving to consider.
There was a knock against the frame of the door.
He turned around with a stiff whirr of his exoskeleton. ‘Yes?’
Antoinette Bax stalked into the room, followed by Xavier. They both wore exoskeletons as well, though they had ornamented theirs with swirls of luminous paint and welded-on baroquework. Clavain had observed a lot of that amongst his crew, especially amongst Scorpio’s army, and had seen no reason to enforce a more disciplined regime. Privately, he welcomed anything that instilled a sense of camaraderie and purpose.
‘What is it, Antoinette?’ Clavain asked.
‘There’s something we wanted to discuss, Clavain.’
‘It’s about the attack,’ Xavier Liu added.
Clavain nodded and made the effort of a smile. ‘If we are very lucky, there won’t be one. The crew will see reason and hand over the weapons, and we can go home without firing a shot.’
Of course, that outcome was looking less likely by the hour. He had already learned from the weapon traces that twenty of them had been dispersed from the ship, leaving only thirteen aboard. Worse than that, the specific diagnostic patterns suggested that some of the weapons had actually been activated. Three of the patterns had even vanished in the last eight hours of shiptime. He didn’t know what to make of that, but he had a nasty feeling that he knew exactly what it meant.
‘And if they don’t hand them over?’ Antoinette asked, easing into a seat.
‘Then some force may be in order,’ Clavain said.
Xavier nodded. ‘That’s what we figured.’
‘I hope it will be brief and decisive,’ Clavain said. ‘And I have every expectation that it will be. Scorpio’s preparations have been thorough. Remontoire’s technical assistance has been invaluable. We have a well-trained assault force and the weapons to back them up.’
‘But you haven’t asked for our help,’ Xavier said.
Clavain turned back to the image of the ship, examining it to see if there had been any changes in the last few minutes. To his annoyance, the software had started building up scablike accretions and spirelike spines along one flank of the hull. He swore under his breath. The ship looked like nothing so much as one of the plague-stricken buildings in Chasm City. The thought hovered in his mind, worryingly.
‘You were saying?’ he said, his attention drifting back to the youngsters.
‘We want to help,’ Antoinette said.
‘You’ve already helped,’ Clavain told her. ‘Without you we probably wouldn’t have seized this ship in the first place. Not to mention the fact that you helped me to defect.’
‘That was then. Now we’re talking about helping in the attack,’ Xavier said.
‘Ah.’ Clavain scratched his beard. ‘You mean really help, in a military sense?’
‘Storm Bird’s hull can take more weapons,’ Antoinette said. ‘And she’s fast and manoeuvrable. Had to be, to make a profit back home.’
‘She’s armoured, too,’ Xavier said. ‘You saw the damage she did when we busted out of Carousel New Copenhagen. And there’s a lot of room inside her. She could probably carry half of Scorpio’s army, with space to spare.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Then what’s your objection?’ Antoinette asked.
‘This isn’t your fight. You helped me, and I’m grateful for that. But if I know Ultras, and I think I do, they won’t give up anything without some trouble. There’s been enough bloodshed already, Antoinette. Let me handle the rest of it.’
The two youngsters — he wondered if they had really seemed so young to him before — exchanged coded looks. He had the sense that they were privy to a script he had not been shown.
‘You’d be making a mistake, Clavain,’ Xavier said.
Clavain looked into his eyes. ‘Thought this through, have you, Xavier?’
‘Of course…’
‘I really don’t think you have.’ Clavain returned his attention to the hovering image of the lighthugger. ‘Now, if you don’t mind… I’m a little on
the busy side.’
Chapter 33
‘Ilia. Wake up.’
Khouri stood by Ilia’s bedside, watching the neural diagnostics for a sign that Volyova was returning to consciousness. The possibility that she might have died could not be dismissed — there was certainly very little visual indication that she was alive — but the diagnostics looked very much as they had before Khouri had taken her trip to the cache chamber.
‘May I help?’
Khouri turned around, startled and ashamed at the same time. The skeletal servitor had just spoken to her again.
‘Clavain…’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you were still switched on.’
I wasn’t until a moment ago.‘ The servitor advanced out of the shadows, coming to a halt on the opposite side of the bed from Khouri. It moved to one of the squat hunks of machinery attending the bed and made a series of adjustments to the controls.
‘What are you doing?’ Khouri asked.
‘Elevating her to consciousness. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘I… I’m not sure if I should trust you or smash you apart,’ she said.
The servitor stepped back from its handiwork. ‘You should certainly not trust me, Ana. My primary goal is to convince you to turn over the weapons. I can’t use force, but I can use persuasion and disinformation.’ Then it reached down beneath the bed and tossed something to her with a lithe sweep of one limb.
Khouri caught a pair of goggles equipped with an earpiece. They appeared to be perfectly normal shipboard issue, scuffed and discoloured. She slipped them on and watched Clavain’s human form cloak itself over the skeletal frame of the servitor. His voice came through the earpiece with human timbre and inflection.
‘That’s better,’ he said,
‘Who’s running you, Clavain?’
‘Ilia told me a little about your Captain,’ the servitor said. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from him, but I think he must be using me. He switched me on when Ilia was injured, and I was able to help her. But I’m just a beta-level simulation. I have Clavain’s expertise, and Clavain has detailed medical training, but then I imagine the Captain must be able to draw on many other sources for that kind of thing, including his own memories. My only conclusion is that the Captain does not wish to intervene directly, so he has elected to use me as an intermediary. I’m his puppet, more or less.’