Resurgam was not a beautiful planet, by anyone’s standards. Apart from the sullied white of the polar caps, the overall colour was a skullish grey, offset by scabs of rust and a few desultory chips of powder-blue near the equatorial zones. The larger oceanic water masses were still mostly cauled under ice, and those motes of exposed water were almost certainly being artificially warmed against freeze-over; either by thermal energy grids or carefully tailored metabolic processes. There were clouds, but they were wispy plumes rather than the great complex features Volyova knew one could usually expect from planetary weather systems. Here and there they thickened towards white opacity, but only in small gangliar knots near the settlements. Those were the places where the vapour factories were working, sublimating polar ice into water, oxygen and hydrogen. There were few patches of vegetation large enough to be seen without magnification down to kilometre-resolution, and by the same token no obvious visible evidence of human presence, save for a sprinkling of settlement lights when the planet’s nightside rolled around every ninety minutes. Even with the zoom, the settlements were elusive, since — with the exception of the capital — they tended to be sunk into the ground. Often, very little projected beyond the surface apart from antennae, landing pads and air-smoothed greenhouses. Of the capital…
Well, that was the disturbing part.
‘When does our window with Triumvir Sajaki open?’ she asked, snapping her gaze across the faces of the other crewmembers, whose seats were arranged in a loosely defined cluster, facing each other beneath the ashen light of the imaged planet.
‘Five minutes,’ Hegazi said. ‘Five tortuous minutes and then we’ll know what delights dear Sajaki has to share with us regarding our new colonist friends. Are you sure you can bear the agony of waiting?’
‘Why don’t you have a guess, svinoi.’
‘That wouldn’t be much of a challenge, would it?’ Hegazi was grinning, or at least trying very hard to approximate the gesture; no mean feat given the amount of chimeric accessories which encrusted his face. ‘Funny, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you weren’t exactly enthralled by any of this.’
‘If he hasn’t found Sylveste…’
Hegazi raised a gauntleted hand. ‘Sajaki hasn’t even made his report yet. No sense jumping the gun…’
‘You’re confident he’ll have found him, then?’
‘Well, no. I didn’t say that.’
‘If there’s one thing I hate,’ Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, ‘it’s mindless optimism.’
‘Oh, cheer up. Worse things happen.’
Yes, she had to admit, they did. And with an annoying regularity, they seemed to have decided to keep happening to her. What was astonishing about her recent run of misfortune was that it had managed to keep escalating with each new bout of bad luck. It had reached the point where she was beginning to look back nostalgically on the merely irksome problems she had encountered with Nagorny; when all she had to deal with was someone trying to kill her. It made her wonder — without a great deal of enthusiasm — if there would soon come a day when she would look back even on this period with longing.
The trouble with Nagorny had been the precursor, of course. It was obvious now; at the time she had regarded the whole thing as an isolated incident, but what it had really been was just the initial indications of something far worse in the future, like a heart murmur presaging an attack. She had killed Nagorny — but in doing so, she had not come to any understanding of the problem that had driven him psychotic. Then she had recruited Khouri, and the problems had not so much repeated themselves as reiterated a grander theme, like the second movement of a grim symphony. Khouri was not obviously mad — yet. But she had become a catalyst for a worse, less localised madness. There had been the storms in her head, beyond anything Volyova had ever seen. And then there had been the incident with the cache-weapon, which had almost killed Volyova, and might have gone on to kill all of them, and perhaps a significant number of the people on Resurgam as well.
‘It’s time for some answers, Khouri,’ she had said, before the others were revived.
‘Answers about what, Triumvir?’
‘Forget the charade of innocence,’ Volyova said. ‘I’m far too tired for it, and I assure you I will get to the truth one way or the other. During the crisis with the cache-weapon, you gave too much away. If you were hoping I would forget some of the things you said, you were mistaken.’
‘Like what?’ They were down in one of the rat-infested zones; it was, Volyova reckoned, as safe from Sajaki’s listening devices as any area of the ship save the spider-room itself.
She shoved Khouri against the wall, hard enough to knock some wind out of the woman; letting her know Volyova’s wiry strength should not be underestimated, nor her patience stretched too far. ‘Let me make something clear to you, Khouri. I killed Nagorny, your predecessor, because he failed me. I successfully concealed the truth of his death from the rest of the crew. Be under no illusions that I will do the same to you, if you give me sufficient justification.’
Khouri pushed herself back from the wall, regaining some colour. ‘What is it you want to know, exactly?’
‘You can start by telling me who you are. Begin with the assumption that I know you are an infiltrator.’
‘How can I be an infiltrator? You recruited me.’
‘Yes,’ Volyova said, for she had already thought this through. ‘That was the way it was made to seem, of course… but it was deception, wasn’t it? Whatever agency is behind you managed to manipulate my search procedure, making it seem as if I had selected you… whereas the choice was ultimately not mine at all.’ Volyova had to admit to herself that she had no direct evidence to support this, but it was the simplest hypothesis which fitted all the facts. ‘So, are you going to deny this?’
‘Why would you think I was an infiltrator?’
Volyova paused to light up a cigarette; one of those she had bought from the Stoners in the carousel where Khouri had been recruited, or found. ‘Because you seem to know too much about the gunnery. You seem to know something about Sun Stealer… and that troubles me deeply.’
‘You mentioned Sun Stealer shortly after you brought me aboard, don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, but your knowledge goes deeper than can be explained by the information you could have gleaned from me. In fact there are times when you seem to know somewhat more about the whole situation than I do.’ She paused. ‘There’s more to it than that, of course. The neural activity in your brain, during reefersleep… I should have examined the implants you came aboard with more carefully. They obviously aren’t all that they seem. Do you want to have a stab at explaining any of this?’
‘All right…’ Khouri’s tone of voice was different now. It was clear that she had given up any hope of bluffing her way out of this one. ‘But listen carefully, Ilia. I know you’ve got your little secrets, too — things you really don’t want Sajaki and the others to find about. I’d already guessed about Nagorny, but there’s also the business with the cache-weapon. I know you don’t want that to become common knowledge, or you wouldn’t be going to such lengths to cover up the whole thing.’
Volyova nodded, knowing it would be fruitless to deny these things. Maybe Khouri even had an inkling of her relationship with the Captain. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying, whatever I say to you now, it had better stay between us. Isn’t that reasonable of me?’
‘I just said I could kill you, Khouri. You’re not exactly in a strong bargaining position.’
‘Yes, you could kill me — or at least have a go — but despite what you said, I doubt you’d manage to cover up my death as easily as you did Nagorny’s. Losing one Gunnery Officer is bad luck. Two begins to look like carelessness, doesn’t it?’
A rat scampered by, splashing them. Irritatedly, Volyova flicked her cigarette butt towards the animal, but it had already vanished through a duct in the wall. ‘So you’re saying I don??
?t even tell the others I know you’re an infiltrator?’
Khouri shrugged. ‘You do what you like. But how do you think Sajaki would take that? Whose fault would it have been that the infiltrator ever came aboard in the first place?’
Volyova took her time before answering. ‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’
‘I knew you’d want to ask me some questions sooner or later, Triumvir.’
‘So let’s start with the obvious one. Who are you, and who are you working for?’
Khouri sighed and spoke with resignation. ‘A lot of what you already know is the truth. I’m Ana Khouri and I was a soldier on Sky’s Edge… although about twenty years earlier than you thought. As for the rest…’ She paused. ‘You know, I could really use some coffee.’
‘There isn’t any, so get used to it.’
‘All right. I was in the pay of another crew. I don’t know their names — there was never any direct contact — but they’ve been trying to get their hands on your cache-weapons for some time.’ Volyova shook her head. ‘Not possible. No one else knows about them.’
‘That’s what you’d like to think. But you have used parts of the cache, right? There must have been survivors, witnesses, you never knew about. Gradually word got about that your ship was carrying some serious shit. Maybe no one knew the whole picture, but they knew enough of it to want to have their own slice of the cache.’
Volyova was silent. What Khouri was saying was shocking — like finding out that her most private of habits was public knowledge — but, she had to admit, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Conceivably there had been a leak. Crew had left the ship, after all — not always willingly — and while those who had done so were not supposed to have had access to anything sensitive — certainly nothing pertaining to the cache — there was always the chance that an error had been made. Or perhaps, as Khouri had said, someone had witnessed the cache being used and had lived to pass on that information.
‘This other crew — you may not have known their names, but did you know what their ship was called?’
‘… no. That would have been just as sloppy as letting me know who they were, wouldn’t it?’
‘What did you know, in that case? How were they expecting to steal the cache from us?’
‘That’s where Sun Stealer comes into it. Sun Stealer was a military virus they snuck aboard your ship when you were last in the Yellowstone system. A very smart, adaptive piece of infiltration software. It was designed to worm its way into enemy installations and wage psychological warfare on the occupants, driving them mad through subliminal suggestion.’ Khouri paused, giving Volyova time to digest that. ‘But your own defences were too good. Sun Stealer was weakened, and the strategy never really worked. So they bided their time. They didn’t get another chance until you were back in the Yellowstone system, nearly a century later. I was the next line of attack: get a human infiltrator aboard.’
‘How was the original viral attack made?’
‘They got it in via Sylveste. They knew all about you bringing him aboard to fix up your Captain. They planted the software on him without him knowing, then let it infect your systems while he was hooked in to your medical suite, fixing the Captain.’
There was, Volyova thought, something deeply and worryingly plausible about that. It was just an example of another crew being as predatory as they were. It would be arrogance in the extreme to assume that only Sajaki’s Triumvirate were capable of such subterfuge.
‘And what was your function?’
‘To assess the state of Sun Stealer’s corruption of your gunnery systems. If possible, to gain control of the ship. Resurgam was a good destination for that — sufficiently out of the way not to be under any kind of system-wide police jurisdiction. If a takeover could be staged, there would be no one to observe it except maybe a few colonists.’ Khouri sighed. ‘But believe me, that plan’s well and truly shit-canned. The Sun Stealer program was flawed; too dangerous and too adaptive. It drew too much attention to itself when it drove Nagorny mad — but on the other hand, he was the only one it could reach. Then it started screwing around with the cache itself…’
‘The rogue weapon.’
‘Yeah. That scared me, as well.’ Khouri shivered. ‘I knew Sun Stealer was too powerful by then. There was nothing I could do to control it.’
Over the next few days, Volyova would ask Khouri more questions, testing different aspects of her story against what passed for the known facts. Certainly, Sun Stealer could have been some kind of infiltration software… even if it was more subtle, more insidious, than anything she had heard of in all her years of experience. But did that mean she could dismiss it? No; of course not. After all, she knew the thing existed. Khouri’s story, in fact, was the first explanation she had encountered that made any kind of objective sense at all. It explained why her attempts to cure Nagorny had failed. He had not been sent mad by any subtle combination of effects stemming from her gunnery implants. He had been driven mad, purely and simply, by an entity that had been designed for just that purpose. No wonder it had been so hard to find any explanation for Nagorny’s problems. Of course, there remained the irksome question of why exactly Nagorny’s madness had expressed itself so forcefully in the manner it had — all those fevered sketches of nightmarish birds’ parts, and the designs on his coffin — but who was to say that Sun Stealer had not simply amplified some pre-existing psychosis, letting Nagorny’s subconscious work with whatever imagery suited it?
The mysterious other crew could also not be dismissed too easily. Shipboard records revealed that another lighthugger — the Galatea — had been present in Yellowstone on both occasions when they had last visited the system. Could they have been the crew responsible for sending Khouri aboard?
For now, it was as good an explanation as any. And one thing was absolutely clear. Khouri was quite right in saying that none of this information could be presented to the rest of the Triumvirate. Sajaki would indeed blame Volyova totally for what was a grievous lapse in security. He would punish Khouri, of course… but Volyova could also expect some kind of retribution. The way their relationship had been strained of late, it was entirely possible that Sajaki would try and kill her. He might succeed, too — he was at least as strong as Volyova. It would not greatly trouble him that he would be losing his chief weapons expert and the only person who had any real insight into the cache. His argument would no doubt be that she had already demonstrated her incompetence in that regard. But there was something else, too; something Volyova could not entirely dismiss. No matter what had really transpired with the cache-weapon, the unavoidable truth was that Khouri had saved Volyova’s life.
Hateful though the thought was, she owed the infiltrator.
Her only option, when she considered the situation dispassionately, was to proceed as if nothing had happened. Khouri’s mission was in any case no longer viable; there would be no attempted takeover now. The woman’s hidden reason for being aboard the ship had no impact on the upcoming attempt to bring Sylveste aboard again, and in many respects Khouri would be needed simply as a crewmember. Now that Volyova knew the truth, and now that the original purpose of Khouri’s mission had been abandoned, Khouri would surely do everything in her power to fit into her pre-assigned position. It hardly mattered whether the loyalty treatments were working or not; Khouri would have to behave as if they were, and gradually the act would become indistinguishable from the truth. She might not even want to leave the ship when the opportunity arose to do so. After all, there were worse places to be. Over months or years of subjective time, she would become one of the crew, and her past duplicity could remain a secret shared only by her and Volyova. In time, it might even be something Volyova almost forgot.
Eventually, Volyova managed to convince herself that the infiltration question had been settled. Sun Stealer would remain a problem, of course — but now Khouri would be working with her to conceal it from Sajaki. And in the meantime, there were
other things that needed to be concealed from the Triumvir. Volyova had set herself the task of eradicating every shred of evidence that the cache-weapon incident had ever happened. She had intended to do this before Sajaki and the others were revived, but it had not proved easy. Her first task had been to repair the damage to the lighthugger itself, patching the areas of the hull which had been hurt by the weapon’s detonation. Largely this consisted of coaxing the auto-repair routines to work faster, but she also had to ensure that all pre-existing scars, impact-craters, or areas of imperfect repair were precisely duplicated. She then had to hack into the auto-repair memory and erase the knowledge that the repairs had been orchestrated at all. She had to repair the spider-room, even though Sajaki and the others were not meant to know it even existed. Better to be safe than sorry, though, and that had been by far the simplest of the repairs. Next, she had to erase all evidence that the Palsy routine had been run; at least a week’s work.
The loss of the shuttle was much harder to hide. For a while, she considered making a new one: harvesting tiny amounts of raw materials from all over the ship, until she had what she needed. She would only have to use one ninety-thousandth of the entire mass of the ship. But it was too risky, and she doubted her ability to weather the shuttle authentically; to make it look as old as it should have been. Instead, she took the simpler option of editing the ship’s database so that it would always look as if there had been one shuttle fewer aboard. Sajaki might notice — all the crew might notice — but there would be absolutely nothing that anyone could prove. Finally, of course, she remade the cache-weapon. It was only a facade; a replica designed to lurk in the cache chamber and look threatening on the rare occasions when Sajaki paid a visit to her domain. Covering her tracks took six days of manic work. On the seventh day she rested, and endeavoured to compose herself, so that none of the others would guess what labours she had been through. On the eighth day Sajaki had awakened and asked her what she had been up to in the years he had been in reefersleep.