‘Sudjic? Kjarval?’
Silence; not even her own voice properly audible, and certainly nothing resembling a reply. Intersuit comms were compromised, she saw now — a detail on the damage readout she had ignored until then. Bad, Khouri. Very bad.
Now she had no idea who the enemy was.
The ruined suit arm was fixing itself by the second, scorched parts sloughing to the ground, while the exterior skin crawled forwards to envelop the stump. It was faintly disgusting to watch, even though Khouri had seen it happen many times before, in other simulation scenarios on the Edge. What was really nauseating was knowing that no such immediate repair was possible for her own wounds; that they would have to wait until she was med-evacked out of the zone.
The other suit, the one less damaged, was moving now, raising itself to a standing position, just as she was doing. The other suit had a full complement of limbs, and many of its weapons were still deployed, jutting from various apertures. They were locking onto Khouri, like a dozen vipers poising for the strike.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked, before remembering that the comms were offline, probably for good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another two suits off to one side, emerging from banners of languid, charcoal-dark smoke. Who were they? Remnants of the original three which had come down with the wolfhounds, or her comrades?
The single suit with the weapons was approaching her, very slowly, as if she were a bomb which might go off at any moment. The suit stopped, motionless. Its skin was trying to mimic the combination of the background colour of the chamber wall and the smoke screens, with only moderate success. Khouri wondered how her own suit was doing. Was her faceplate opaque or transparent? It was impossible to tell from inside, and the minimalist readout told her nothing. If the one with the weapons saw a human face within, would that incite it to kill or hold fire? Khouri had locked her own usable weapons on the figure, but nothing she had seen told her whether she was pointed at the enemy or a mute comrade.
She moved to raise her good arm, to indicate her face, asking the other to make its faceplate transparent.
The other fired.
Khouri was blown back into the wall, an invisible piledriver ramming into her stomach. Her suit started screaming, all manner of gibberish scrolling across her vision. There was a roar of sound before she hit the wall, the compressed burst of a frantic return-fire from her own available weapons.
Fuck, Khouri thought. That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.
She struggled to her feet again, just as another charge from the attacker slammed past and the third caught her on the thigh. She started wheeling back, both arms flailing at the periphery of vision. There was something wrong with her arms; or more accurately, something not wrong where something should have been. They were completely intact; no sign that one of them had just been blasted off.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What the fuck is happening?’
The attack was continuing, each blast impacting her and driving her back.
‘This is Volyova,’ said a voice, not in any way calm and detached. ‘Listen to me carefully, all of you! Something’s going wrong with the scenario! I want you all to stop firing —’
Khouri had hit the deck again, this time with enough force that she felt it through the gel-air cushion, like a slap against her spine. Her thigh felt injured, and the suit was doing nothing to ameliorate the discomfort.
It’s gone live, she thought.
The weapons were for real now; or at least those which belonged to the suit attacking her. ‘Kjarval,’ Volyova said. ‘Kjarval! You have to stop firing! You’re killing Khouri!’
But Kjarval — Khouri guessed that she was the attacker — was not listening, or not capable of listening, or, more terrifyingly, not capable of stopping.
‘Kjarval,’ the Triumvir said again, ‘if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to disarm you!’
But Kjarval did not stop. She kept on firing, Khouri feeling each impact like a lash, writhing under the assault, desperate to claw her way through the tortured alloy of the chamber into the sanctuary beyond.
And then Volyova descended from the chamber’s middle, where she had apparently been all along, unseen. As she descended, she opened fire on Kjarval, at first with the lightest weapons she had, but with steadily mounting force. Kjarval countered by directing some portion of her fire upwards, towards the lowering Triumvir. The blasts hit Volyova, gouging black scars into her armour, chipping fragments from the flexible integument, slicing off weapons as her suit tried to extrude and deploy them. But Volyova maintained an edge on the trainee. Kjarval’s suit began to wilt, losing integrity. Its weapons went haywire, missing their targets and then shooting haphazardly around the chamber.
Eventually — it could not have been more than a minute after she had first started firing on Khouri — Kjarval dropped to the ground. Her suit, where it was not blackened by the hits it had sustained, was a quilt of mismatched psychedelic colours and rapidly morphing hyper-geometric textures, sprouting half-realised weapons and devices. Her limbs were thrashing crazily. The ends of the limbs had gone berserk, extruding — and then budding off — various manipulators and rough, baby-sized approximations of human hands.
Khouri got to her feet, stifling a scream of pain as her thigh protested against the movement. Her suit was a stiffening deadweight around her, but somehow she managed to walk, or at least totter, to the place where Kjarval lay.
Volyova and another suited figure — she had to be Sudjic — were already there, leaning over what remained of the suit, trying to make some sense of its medical diagnostic readouts.
‘She’s dead,’ Volyova said.
FOURTEEN
Mantell, North Nekhebet, Resurgam, 2566
On the day that the newcomers announced their presence, Sylveste was woken by a stab of unforgiving white light. He held his arm up in supplication while he waited for his eyes to cycle through their initialisation routines. It was almost useless speaking to him in those moments; Sluka evidently realised this. With so many of their original functions gone, the eyes took longer than ever now to reach functionality. Sylveste experienced a slow rote of errors and warnings, little spectral prickles of pain as the eyes investigated critically impaired modes.
He was half aware of Pascale sitting up in bed next to him, lifting the sheets around her chest.
‘You’d better wake up,’ Sluka said. ‘Both of you. I’ll wait outside while you dress.’
The two of them struggled into clothes. Beyond the room, Sluka stood patiently with two guards, neither conspicuously armed. Sylveste and his wife were escorted towards Mantell’s commons, where the morning shift of True Path Inundationists were gathered around an oblong wallscreen. Flasks of coffee and breakfast rations lay undisturbed on the commons table. Whatever was going on, Sylveste surmised, was enough to kill any normal appetite. And the screen evidently held the key. He could hear a voice speaking, amplified and harsh, as if from a loudspeaker. There was so much background conversation taking place that he could do no more than snatch the odd word from the narrative. Unfortunately, that odd word tended to be his own name, spoken at too-frequent intervals by whoever was booming from the screen.
He pushed to the front, aware that the watchers deferred to him with more respect than he’d felt for several decades. But was it possibly only pity being afforded to a condemned man? Pascale joined him at his side. ‘Do you recognise that woman?’ she asked.
‘What woman?’
‘On the screen. The one you’re standing in front of.’
What Sylveste saw was only an oblong of pointillist silver-grey pixels.
‘My eyes don’t read video too well,’ he said, addressing Sluka as much as Pascale. ‘And I can’t hear a damned thing. Maybe you’d better tell me what I’m missing.’
Falkender had appeared out of the crowd. ‘I’ll patch you in neurally, if you wish. It’ll only take a moment.’ He shunte
d Sylveste away from the watchers, towards a private alcove in one corner of the commons, Pascale and Sluka following. There, he opened his toolkit and removed a few glistening instruments.
‘Now you’re going to tell me this won’t hurt at all,’ Sylveste said.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Falkender said. ‘After all, it wouldn’t be the complete truth, would it?’ Then he clicked his fingers, either at an aide or Pascale; Sylveste was unsure, and his visual field was now too restricted to discriminate. ‘Get the man a mug of coffee; that’ll take his mind off it. In any case, when he’s able to read that screen, I think he’ll need something stronger.’
‘That bad?’
‘I’m afraid Falkender isn’t joking,’ Sluka said.
‘My, aren’t you all enjoying yourselves.’ Sylveste bit his lip at the first cascade of pain from Falkender’s probings, although, as the minor operation proceeded, the pain never worsened. ‘Are you going to put me out of my misery? After all, it seemed important enough to wake me.’
‘The Ultras have announced themselves,’ Sluka said.
‘That much I extrapolated for myself. What have they done? Landed a shuttle in the middle of Cuvier?’
‘Nothing so obtrusive. Yet. There may be worse to come.’
Someone pushed a mug of coffee into his hands; Falkender relented in his ministrations long enough for Sylveste to sip a mouthful. It was acrid and not entirely warm, but sufficed to propel him fractionally closer towards alertness. He heard Sluka say, ‘What we’re showing on the screen is a repeating audiovisual message, one that’s been transmitting continuously now for about thirty minutes.’
‘Transmitted from the ship?’
‘No, seems they’ve managed to tap straight into our comsat girdle, piggybacking their message on our routine transmissions.’
Sylveste nodded, then regretted the movement. ‘Then they’re still edgy about being detected.’ Or else, he thought, they merely want to reaffirm their absolute technological superiority over us; their ability to tap into and manipulate our existing data systems. That seemed more likely: it smacked not only of the arrogant Ultra way of doing things, but of one Ultra crew in particular. Why announce your presence in a mundane way, when you can do a full burning bush and impress the natives? But he hardly needed confirmation that he knew these people. He had known ever since the ship had entered the system.
‘Next question,’ he said. ‘Who was the message directed to? Do they still think there’s some kind of planetary authority with whom they can deal?’
‘No,’ Sluka said. ‘The message was addressed to the citizens of Resurgam, irrespective of political or cultural affiliation.’
‘Very democratic,’ Pascale said.
‘Actually,’ Sylveste said, ‘I rather doubt that democracy comes into it. Not if I know who we’re dealing with.’
‘Regarding that,’ Sluka said, ‘you never did quite explain to my total satisfaction why these people might…’
Sylveste cut her off. ‘Before we go into any detailed analysis, do you think I could see the message for myself? Particularly as I seem to hold something of a personal stake in the matter.’
‘There.’ Falkender retreated and closed his toolkit with a decisive snap. ‘I told you it wouldn’t take a moment. Now you can jack straight into the screen.’ The surgeon smiled. ‘Now, do me a favour and be sure not to kill the messenger, won’t you?’
‘Let me see the message,’ Sylveste said. ‘Then I’ll decide.’
It was far worse than he had feared.
He pushed to the front again, though by now the watchers had thinned out, dispersed reluctantly to duties elsewhere in Mantell. It was much easier to hear the speaker now, and he recognised cadences in the woman’s speech as she repeated phrases which had cycled around a few minutes earlier. The message was not a long one, then. Which was ominous in itself. Who crossed light-years of interstellar space, only to announce their arrival around a colony in terms which were, frankly, curt? Only those who had no interest whatsoever in ingratiating themselves, and whose demands were supremely clear. And again that suspicion accorded well with what he already knew of the crew he believed had come for him. They had never been talkative.
He could not yet see the face, although the voice was already whispering across the years to him. When vision came — when Falkender completed the neural interface — he remembered. ‘Who is she?’ Sluka asked.
‘Her name — when last we met — was Ilia Volyova.’ Sylveste shrugged. ‘It may or may not have been real. All I do know is that whatever threats she goes on to make, she’s fully capable of backing them up.’
‘And she’s — what? The Captain?’
‘No,’ Sylveste said, distracted. ‘No, she’s not.’
The woman’s face was unremarkable. Almost monochromatically pale of complexion, short dark hair, and a facial structure somewhere between elfin and skeletal, framing deepset, narrow, slanted eyes which dispensed little compassion. She had hardly changed at all. But then, that was the point of Ultras. If subjective decades had passed for Sylveste since their last meeting, then for Volyova it might only have been a handful of years; a tenth or a twentieth of the time. For her, their last meeting would be a thing of the relatively recent past, whereas for Sylveste it felt like an event consigned to the dusty annals of history. It placed him at a disadvantage, of course. For Volyova, his mannerisms — the more predictable aspects of his behaviour — would still be fresh in her mind; he would be an adversary not long met. But Sylveste had barely recognised Volyova’s voice until now, and when he tried to recall whether she had been more or less sympathetic to him on their previous meeting, his memory failed him. Of course, it would all come back, but it was that very slowness of recall which gave Volyova her undoubted edge.
Odd, really. He had assumed — stupidly, perhaps — that it would be Sajaki who was making this announcement. Not the true Captain, of course, or else why would they have come for him? The Captain had to be ill again.
But then where was Sajaki?
He forced his mind to disregard these questions and concentrate on what Volyova had to say.
After two or three repetitions, he had the whole of her monologue assembled in his head, and was almost certain he could have regurgitated it word for word. It was indeed curt. They knew what they wanted, these Ultras. And they knew what it would take to get it. ‘I am Triumvir Ilia Volyova of the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity’ was how she introduced herself. No helloes; not even a perfunctory admission of gratitude for the fates having allowed them to cross space to Resurgam.
Such niceties, Sylveste knew, were not exactly Ilia Volyova’s style. He had always thought of her as the quiet one; more concerned with housekeeping her hideous weapons than condescending to engage in anything resembling normal social intercourse. More than once he had heard the other crewmembers joke — and they hardly ever joked — about how Volyova preferred the company of the vessel’s indigenous rats over her human crewmates.
Perhaps they had not really been joking.
‘I am addressing you from orbit,’ was how she continued. ‘We have studied your state of technological advancement and concluded that you pose us no military threat.’ And then she paused, before continuing in what to Sylveste sounded like the tones of a schoolteacher warning pupils against committing an act of minor disobedience, like gazing out the window, or not keeping their compads well organised. ‘However, should any act be construed as a deliberate attempt at inflicting damage on us, we will retaliate in a massively disproportionate sense.’ She almost smiled at that point. ‘Not so much an eye for an eye, so to speak, as a city for an eye. We are fully capable of destroying any or all of your settlements from orbit.’
Volyova leant forwards, her leonine grey eyes seeming to fill the screen. ‘More importantly, we also have the resolve to do it, should the need arise.’ Volyova again allowed herself an over-dramatic pause, doubtless aware that she had a captive audience at this point.
‘If I chose, it could happen in a matter of minutes. Don’t imagine I’d lose much sleep over it.’
Sylveste could see where all this was heading.
‘But let us put aside such vulgarities, at least for the moment.’ She really smiled at that point, though as smiles went, it was near-cryogenic in its frostiness. ‘You’re doubtless wondering why we’re here.’
‘Not me,’ Sylveste said, loud enough that Pascale heard him.
‘There is a man amongst you we seek. Our desire to find him is so absolute, so pressing, that we have decided to bypass the usual…’ Volyova’s smile reappeared; an even colder phantom of itself. ‘… diplomatic channels. The man’s name is Sylveste; no further explanation should be necessary, if his reputation hasn’t waned since our last meeting.’
‘Tarnished, perhaps,’ Sluka commented. Then, to Sylveste, ‘You’re really going to have to tell me more about this prior meeting, you know. It can hardly do you any harm.’
‘And knowing the facts won’t do you a blind bit of good,’ Sylveste said, immediately returning his attention to the broadcast.
‘Ordinarily,’ Volyova said, ‘we’d establish lines of dialogue with the proper authorities and negotiate for Sylveste’s handover. Possibly that was our original intention. But a cursory scan of your planet’s main settlement from orbit — Cuvier — convinced us that such an approach would be doomed to failure. We surmised that there was no longer any power worth dealing with. And I’m afraid we don’t have the patience to bargain with squabbling planetary factions.’
Sylveste shook his head. ‘She’s lying. They never intended to negotiate, no matter what state we were in. I know these people; they’re vicious scum.’
‘So you keep telling us,’ Sluka said.
‘Our options are therefore rather limited,’ Volyova continued. ‘We want Sylveste, and our intelligence has confirmed that he is not… how shall I put it — at large?’