On cue, the cache weapon loomed out of the darkness. It did not float free in the chamber, but was embraced by an elaborate arrangement of clamps and scaffolds, which were in turn connected to a complicated three-dimensional monorail system which plunged through the darkness, anchored to the chamber walls by enormous splayed pylons.
This was one of thirty-three weapons that remained from the original forty. Volyova and Khouri had destroyed one of them on the system’s edge after it went rogue, possessed by a splinter of the same software parasite that Khouri herself had carried aboard the ship. The other six weapons had been abandoned in space after the Hades episode. They were probably recoverable, but there was no guarantee they would work again, and by Volyova’s estimate they were considerably less potent than those that remained.
They fired their suit thrusters and came to a halt near the first weapon.
‘Weapon seventeen,’ Volyova said. ‘Ugly son of a svinoi, don’t you think? But I’ve had some success with this one — reached all the way down to its machine-language syntax layer.’
‘Meaning you can talk to it?’
‘Yes. Isn’t that just what I said?’
None of the cache weapons looked exactly alike, though they were all clearly the products of the same mentality. This one looked like a cross between a jet engine and a Victorian tunnelling machine: an axially symmetric sixty-metre-long cylinder faced with what could have been cutting teeth or turbine blades, but which were probably neither. The thing was sheathed in a dull, battered alloy that seemed either green or bronze, depending on the way their lights played across it. Cooling flanges and fins leant it a rakish art deco look.
‘If you can talk to it,’ Khouri said, ‘can’t we just tell it to leave the ship and then use it against the Inhibitors?’
‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ Volyova’s sarcasm could have etched holes in metal. The problem is that the Captain can control the weapons as well, and at the moment his commands will veto any I send, since his come in at root level.‘
‘Mm. And whose bright idea was that?’
‘Mine, now you come to mention it. Back when I wanted all the weapons to be controlled from the gunnery, it seemed quite a good idea.’
‘That’s the problem with good ideas. They can turn out to be a real fucking pain in the arse.’
‘So I’m learning. Now then.’ Volyova’s tone became hushed and businesslike. ‘I want you to follow me, and keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to check my control harness.’
‘Right behind you, Ilia.’
They orbited the weapon, steering their suits through the interstices of the monorail system.
The harness was a frame that Volyova had welded around the weapon, equipped with thrusters and control interfaces. She had achieved only very limited success in communicating with the weapons, and those that she had been most confident of controlling had been among those now lost. Once, she had attempted to interface all the weapons via a single controlling node: an implant-augmented human plugged into a gunnery seat. Though the concept had been sound, the gunnery had caused her no end of troubles. Indirectly, the whole mess they were in now could be traced back to those experiments.
‘Harness looks sound,’ Volyova said. ‘I think I’ll try to run through a low-level systems check.’
‘Wake the weapon up, you mean?’
‘No, no… just whisper a few sweet nothings to it, that’s all.’ She tapped commands into the thick bracelet encircling her spacesuited forearm, watching the diagnostic traces as they scrolled over her faceplate. ‘I’m going to be preoccupied while I do this, so it’s down to you to keep an eye out for any trouble. Understood?’
‘Understood. Um, Ilia?’
‘What.’
‘We have to make a decision on Thorn.’
Volyova did not like to be distracted, most especially not during an operation as dangerous as this. ‘Thorn?’
‘You heard what the man said. He wants to come aboard.’
‘And I said he can’t. It’s out of the question.’
‘Then I don’t think we’ll be able to count on his help, Ilia.’
‘He’ll help us. We’ll make the bastard help us.’
She heard Khouri sigh. ‘Ilia, he isn’t some piece of machinery we can poke or prod until we get a certain response. He doesn’t have a root level. He’s a thinking human being, fully capable of entertaining doubts and fears. He cares desperately about his cause and he won’t risk jeopardising it if he thinks we’re holding anything back from him. Now, if we were telling the truth, there’d be no good reason for refusing him the visit he asked for. He knows we have a means to reach the ship, after all. It’s only reasonable that he’d want to see the Promised Land he’s leading his people into, and the reason why Resurgam has to be evacuated.’
Volyova was through the first layer of weapons protocols, burrowing through her own software shell into the machine’s native operating system. So far nothing she had done had incurred any hostile response from either the weapon or the ship. She bit her tongue. It all got trickier from hereon in.
‘I don’t think it’s in the least bit reasonable,’ Volyova replied.
‘Then you don’t understand human nature. Look, trust me on this. He has to see the ship or he won’t work with us.’
‘If he saw this ship, Khouri, he’d do what any sane person would do under the same circumstances: run a mile.’
‘But if we kept him away from the worst parts, the areas which have undergone the most severe transformations, I think he might still help us.’
Volyova sighed, while keeping her attention on the work at hand. She had the horrible, overfamiliar feeling that Khouri had already given this matter some consideration — enough to deflect her obvious objections.
‘He’d still suspect something,’ she countered.
‘Not if we played our cards right. We could disguise the transformations in a small area of the ship and then keep him to that. Just enough so that we can appear to give him a guided tour, without seeming to be holding anything back.’
‘And the Inhibitors?’
‘He has to know about them eventually — everyone will. So what’s the problem with Thorn finding out now rather than later?’
‘He’ll ask too many questions. Before long he’ll put two and two together and figure out who he’s working for.’
‘Ilia, you know we have to be more open with him…’
‘Do we?’ She was angry now, and it was not merely because the weapon had refused to parse her most recent command. ‘Or do we just want to have him around because we like him? Think very carefully before you answer, Khouri. Our friendship might depend on it.’
‘Thorn means nothing to me. He’s just convenient.’
Volyova tried a new syntax combination, holding her breath until the weapon responded. Previous experience had taught her that she could only make so many mistakes when talking to a weapon. Too many and the weapon would either clam up or start acting defensively. But now she was through. In the side of the weapon, what had appeared to be seamless alloy slid open to reveal a deep machine-lined inspection well, glowing with insipid green light.
‘I’m going in. Watch my back.’
Volyova steered her suit along the weapon’s flanged length until she reached the hatch, braked and then inserted herself with a single cough of thrust. She arrested her movement with her feet, coming to a halt inside the well. It was large enough for her to rotate and translate without any part of her suit coming into contact with the machinery.
Not for the first time, she found herself wondering about the dark ancestry of these thirty-three horrors. The weapons were of human manufacture, certainly, but they were far in advance of the destructive potential of anything else that had ever been invented. Centuries ago, long before she had joined the ship, Nostalgia for Infinity had found the cache tucked away inside a fortified asteroid, a nameless lump of rock circling an equally nameless star. Perhaps a thorough fo
rensic examination of the asteroid might have revealed some clue as to who had made the weapons, or who had owned them up to that point, but the crew had been in no position to linger. The weapons had been spirited aboard the ship, which had then left the scene of the crime with all haste before the asteroid’s stunned defences woke up again.
Volyova, of course, had theories. Perhaps the most likely was that the weapons were of Conjoiner manufacture. The spiders had been around long enough. But if these weapons belonged to them, why had they ever allowed them to slip out of their hands? And why had they never made an effort to reclaim what was rightfully theirs?
It was immaterial. The cache had been aboard the ship for centuries. No one was going to come and ask for it back now.
She looked around, inspecting the well. Naked machinery surrounded her: control panels, read-outs, circuits, relays and devices of less obvious function. Already there was an apprehensive feeling in the back of her mind. The weapon was focusing a magnetic field on part of her brain, instilling a sense of phobic dread.
She had been here before. She was used to it.
She unhooked various modules stationed around her suit’s thruster frame, attaching them to the interior of the well via epoxy-coated pads. From these modules, which were of her own design, she extended several dozen colour-coded cables that she connected or spliced into the exposed machinery.
‘Ilia…’ Khouri said. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Fine. It doesn’t like me being in here very much, but it can’t kick me out — I’ve given it all the right authorisation codes.’
‘Has it started doing the fear thing?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact it has.’ She experienced a moment of absolute screaming terror, as if someone was poking her brain with an electrode, stirring her most primal fears and anxieties into daylight. ‘Do you mind if we have this conversation later, Khouri? I’d like to get this… over… as soon as possible.’
‘We’re still going to have to decide about Thorn.’
‘Fine. Later, all right?’
‘He has to come here.’
‘Khouri, do me a favour: shut up about Thorn and keep your eye on the job, understand?’
Volyova paused and forced herself to focus. So far, despite the fear, it had gone as well as she had hoped it would. She had only once before gone this deep into the weapon’s control architecture, and that was when she had prioritised the commands coming in from the ship. Since she was at the same level now she could theoretically, by issuing the right command syntax, lock out the Captain for good. This was only one weapon; there were thirty-two others, and some of those were utterly unknown to her. But she would surely not need the whole cache to make a difference. If she could gain control of a dozen or so weapons, it would hopefully be enough to throw a spanner into the Inhibitor’s plans…
And she would not succeed by prevarication.
‘Khouri, listen to me. Minor change of plan.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘I’m going to go ahead and see if I can get this weapon to submit entirely to my control.’
‘You call that a minor change of plan?’
‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’
Before she could stop herself, before the fear became overwhelming, she connected the remaining lines. Status lights winked and pulsed; displays rippled with alphanumeric hash. The fear sharpened. The weapon really did not want her to tamper with it on this level.
‘Tough luck,’ she said. ‘Now let’s see…’ And with a few discreet taps on her bracelet she released webs of mind-numbingly complicated command syntax. The three-valued logic that the weapon’s operating system ran on was characteristic of Conjoiner programming, but it was also devilishly hard to debug.
She sat still and waited.
Deep inside the weapon, the legality of her command would be thrashed out and scrutinised by dozens of parsing modules. Only when it had satisfied all criteria would it be executed. If that happened, and the command did what she thought it would, the weapon would immediately delete the Captain from the list of authenticated users. There would then only be one valid way to work the weapon, which was through her control harness, a piece of hardware disconnected from the ship’s Captain-controlled infrastructure.
It was a very sound theory.
She had the first indication that the command syntax had been bad an instant before the hatch slid shut on her. Her bracelet flashed red; she started assembling a particularly poetic sequence of Russish swearwords and then the weapon had locked her in. Next, the lights went out, but the fear remained. The fear, in fact, had grown very much stronger — but perhaps that was partly her own response to the situation.
‘Damn…’ Volyova said. ‘Khouri… can you hear me?’
But there was no reply.
Without warning machinery shifted around her. The chamber had become larger, revealing dimly glowing vaults plunging deeper into the weapon. Enormous fluidly shaped mechanisms floated in blood-red light. Cold blue lights flickered on the shapes or traced the flow lines of writhing intestinal power lines. The entire interior of the weapon appeared to be reorganising itself.
And then she nearly died of fright. She sensed something else inside the weapon, a presence that was coming closer, creeping through the shifting components with phantom slowness.
Volyova hammered on the hatch above her. ‘Khouri…!’
But the presence had reached her. She had not seen it arrive but she sensed its sudden proximity. It was shapeless, crouched behind her. She thought she could almost see it in her peripheral vision, but even as she wrenched her head around the presence flowed into her blind spot.
Suddenly her head hurt, the blinding pain making her squeal aloud.
Remontoire squeezed his lean frame into one of Nightshade’s viewing blisters, establishing by visual means that the engines had actually shut off. He had issued the correct sequence of neural commands, instantly feeling the shift to weightlessness as the ship ceased accelerating, but still he felt the need for additional confirmation that his order had been followed. Given what had happened already, he would not have been entirely surprised to see that the blue glow of scattered light was still present.
But he saw only darkness. The engines really had shut down; the ship was drifting at constant velocity, still falling towards Epsilon Eridani but far too slowly ever to catch Clavain.
‘What now?’ Felka asked quietly. She floated next to him, one hand hooked into a soft hoop that the ship had obligingly provided.
‘We wait,’ he said. ‘If I’m right, Skade won’t be long.’
‘She won’t be pleased.’
He nodded. ‘And I’ll reinstate thrust as soon as she tells me what’s going on. But before that I’d like some answers.’
The crab arrived a few moments later, easing through a fist-sized hole in the wall. ‘This is unacceptable. Why have you…’
‘The engines are my responsibility,’ Remontoire said pleasantly, for he had rehearsed exactly what he would say. ‘They’re a highly delicate and dangerous technology, all the more so given the experimental nature of the new designs. Any deviation from the expected performance might indicate a serious, possibly catastrophic, problem.’
The crab waggled its manipulators. ‘You know perfectly well that there was nothing at all wrong with the engines. I demand that you restart them immediately. Every second we spend drifting is to Clavain’s advantage.’
‘Really?’ Felka said.
‘Only in the very loosest sense. If we’re delayed any further our only realistic option will be a remote kill, rather than a live capture.’
‘Not that that’s ever been under serious consideration, has it?’ Felka asked.
‘You’ll never know if Remontoire persists with this… insubordination.’
‘Insubordination?’ Felka hooted. ‘Now you almost sound like a Demarchist.’
‘Don’t play games, either of you.’ The crab pivoted around on its suc
kered feet. ‘Reinstate the engines, Remontoire, or I’ll find a way to do it without you.’
It sounded like a bluff, but Remontoire was prepared to believe that overriding his commands was within the capabilities of an Inner Sanctum member. It might not be easy, certainly less easy than having him do what she wanted, but he did not doubt that Skade was capable of it.
‘I will… once you show me what your machinery does.’
‘My machinery?’
Remontoire reached over and prised the crab from the wall, each suckered foot detaching with a soft, faintly comical slurp. He held the crab at eye-level, looking into its tight assemblage of sensors and variegated weapons, daring Skade to hurt him. The little legs thrashed pathetically.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ he said. I want to know what it is, Skade. I want to know what you’ve learned to do.‘
They followed the proxy through Nightshade, navigating twisting grey corridors and vertical interdeck shafts, moving steadily away from the prow of the ship — ‘down’ as far as Remontoire’s inner ear was concerned. The acceleration was now one and three-quarter gees, Remontoire having agreed to reinstate the engines at a low level of thrust. His mental map of the other occupants showed that they were all still crammed into the volume of the ship immediately aft of the prow, and that Felka and he were the only people this far downship. He had yet to discover where Skade’s actual body was; she still had not spoken to him through any other medium than the crab’s voice box, and his usual omniscient knowledge of the ship’s layout had been replaced by a mental map riddled with precisely edited gaps, like the blocked-out text in a classified document.
‘This machinery… whatever it is…’
Skade cut him off. ‘You’d have found out about it sooner or later. As would all of the Mother Nest.’
‘Was it something you learned from Exordium?’
‘Exordium showed us the direction to follow, that’s all. Nothing was handed to us on a plate.’ The crab skittered ahead of them and reached a sealed bulkhead, one of the mechanical doors that had closed before the increase in acceleration. ‘We have to go through here, into the part of the ship I sealed off. I should warn you that things will feel a little different on the other side. Not immediately, but this barricade more or less marks the point at which the effects of the machinery rise above the threshold of human sensitivity. You may find it disturbing. Are you certain that you wish to continue?’