‘I think it’s best for all of us if we adopt that line of thinking,’ Sylveste said. ‘And I assure you, scientist to scientist, it’s utterly true. Not just about my eyes, either.’
‘The planet.’
‘Cerberus. Yes. I presume they briefed you?’
‘You expect to find something there which may relate to the Amarantin extinction. Yes; that much I gleaned.’
‘You know about the Amarantin?’
‘Orthodox thinking, yes.’ She lifted the compad again, quickly scrolling to a cache of documents uplinked from Cuvier. ‘Of course, very little of this is your work. But I have the biography, as well. It conveys a great deal of your speculation.’
‘Framed from the point of view of a sceptic,’ Sylveste said, glancing towards Pascale — a visible shift in the angle of his head, for it was impossible to judge the direction of his gaze from his eyes.
‘Naturally. But the essence of your thinking comes through. Within that paradigm… I concur that Cerberus/Hades is of some interest.’
Sylveste nodded, clearly impressed that she had remembered the proper nomenclature for the planet/neutron-star binary system they were now approaching. ‘Something drew the Amarantin there, in their end days. I want to know what it was.’
‘And does it concern you that this something might have been related to the Event?’
‘It concerns me, yes.’ His answer was not quite what she was expecting. ‘But it would concern me more if we were to ignore it entirely. After all, the threat to our own safety might be just as present. At least if we learn something we have a chance of avoiding the same fate.’
Volyova tapped a finger against her lower lip, thoughtfully. ‘The Amarantin may have thought similarly.’
‘Better, then, to approach the situation from a standpoint of power.’ Sylveste looked to his wife again. ‘It was providential that you arrived, in all honesty. There was no way for Cuvier to finance an expedition out here, even if I had been able to persuade the colony of its importance. And even if they had, nothing they could have prepared would have equalled the offensive capabilities of this ship.’
‘That little demonstration of our fire-power was really rather ill-judged, wasn’t it?’
‘Perhaps — but without it, I might never have been released.’
She sighed. ‘That, unfortunately, is precisely my point.’
The better part of a week later — when the ship had arrived within twelve million kilometres of Cerberus/Hades, and had assumed orbit around the neutron star — Volyova convened a meeting of the entire crew, and their guests, in the ship’s bridge. Now, she thought, was the time to reveal that her deepest fears had indeed been justified. It was hard enough for her, but how would Sylveste take matters? What she was about to tell him not only confirmed that they were approaching something dangerous, but it also touched on something of deep personal significance for him. She was not an adept judge of character at the best of times — and Sylveste was entirely too complex a beast to submit to easy analysis — but she saw no way that her news could be anything other than painful.
‘I found something,’ she said, when she had everyone’s attention. ‘Quite some time ago, in fact: a source of neutrinos, near Cerberus.’
‘How long ago?’ Sajaki said.
‘Before we arrived around Resurgam.’ Watching his expression darken, she added: ‘There was nothing worth telling you, Triumvir. We did not even know we would be sent out here at that point. And the nature of the source was very unclear.’
‘And now?’ Sylveste said.
‘Now I have… a clearer idea. As we approached Hades, it became obvious that the emissions at source were pure tau-neutrinos of a particular energy spectrum; unique, in fact, amongst the signatures of any human technology.’
‘Then it’s something human that you’ve found out here?’ Pascale said.
‘That was my assumption.’
‘A Conjoiner drive,’ Hegazi said, and Volyova nodded slightly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Only Conjoiner drives produce tau-neutrino signatures which match the source around Cerberus.’
‘Then there’s another ship out here?’ Pascale said.
‘That was my first thought,’ Volyova said, sounding uneasy. ‘And, in fact, it isn’t entirely wrong, either.’ Then she whispered commands into her bracelet, causing the central display sphere to warm to life and begin running through a pre-programmed routine she had set up just before the meeting. ‘But it was important to wait until we were close enough for visual identification of the source.’
The sphere showed Cerberus. The moon-sized world was like a less inviting version of Resurgam: monotonously grey, densely cratered. It was dark, too: Delta Pavonis was ten light-hours away, and the other nearby star — Hades — offered almost no light at all. Although it had been born furiously hot in a supernova explosion, the tiny neutron star had long since cooled into the infrared, and to the naked eye it was only visible when its gravitational field tricked background stars into arcs of lensed light. But even if Cerberus had been bathed in light, there was no suggestion of anything which might have lured the Amarantin. Even the best of Volyova’s scans, however, had only mapped the surface at a resolution of kilometres, so very little could be ruled out at this stage. But she had studied the object orbiting Cerberus in considerably greater detail.
She zoomed in on it now. At first it was just a slightly elongated whitish-grey smudge, backdropped by stars, with one edge of Cerberus visible to one side. That was how it had looked to her days ago, before the ship had deployed all its long-baseline eyes. But even then she had found it hard to ignore her suspicions. As more details appeared, it became harder still.
The smudge took on definite attributes of solidity and form now. It was a vaguely conic shape, like a splinter of glass. Volyova made a dimensional grid envelop the object, showing its approximate size. It was clearly several kilometres from end to end: three or four, easily.
‘At this resolution,’ Volyova said, ‘the neutrino emission resolved into two distinct sources.’ She showed them: grey-green blurs spaced either side of the thickened end of the conic shape. As more details phased in, the blurs could be seen to be attached to the body of the splinter by elegant, back-swept spars.
‘A lighthugger,’ Hegazi said. He was right; even at this relatively crude resolution, there was no doubt about it. What they were looking at was another ship, much like their own. The two individual sources of neutrino emission originated from the two Conjoiner engines mounted either side of the hull.
‘The engines are dormant,’ Volyova said. ‘But they still give off a stable flux of neutrinos even when the ship’s not under thrust.’
‘Can you identify the ship?’ Sajaki said.
‘It isn’t necessary,’ Sylveste said, the deep calm in his voice surprising them all. ‘I know which ship it is.’
On the display, the final wave of detail shimmered across the ship, and the view enlarged until the craft filled almost the entire sphere. It was obvious now, even if it had not been completely so before. The ship was damaged; gutted: pocked by great spherical indentations, acres of the hull flensed open to reveal an intricate and queasy complexity of sub-layers which ought never to have been exposed to vacuum.
‘Well?’ Sajaki said.
‘It’s the wreck of the Lorean,’ Sylveste said.
TWENTY
Approaching Cerberus/Hades, 2566
Calvin assumed existence in the lighthugger’s medical suite, still incongruously posed in his enormous hooded chair.
‘Where are we?’ he asked, rummaging in the corner of one eye with his finger, as if he had just awoken from a satisfactorily deep sleep. ‘Still around that shithole of a planet?’
‘We’ve left Resurgam,’ said Pascale, who sat in the seat next to Sylveste, who in turn was reclining on the operation couch, fully clothed and conscious. ‘We’re on the edge of Delta Pavonis’s heliosphere, near the Cerberus/Hades system. They’ve found the Lorean.’
‘Sorry; I think I misheard you.’
‘No; you heard me perfectly well. Volyova showed it to us — it’s definitely the same ship.’ Calvin frowned. Like Pascale — like Sylveste — he had assumed that the Lorean was no longer anywhere near the Resurgam system. Not since Alicia and the other mutineers had stolen it to return to Yellowstone back in the early days of the Resurgam colony. ‘How can it be the Lorean?’
‘We don’t know,’ Sylveste said. ‘All we know is what we’ve told you. You’re as much in the dark as the rest of us.’ At such a point in their conversation, he normally inserted a barb against Calvin, but for once something made him hold his tongue.
‘Is it intact?’
‘Something must have attacked it.’
‘Survivors?’
‘I doubt it. The ship was heavily damaged… whatever it was came suddenly, or they would have tried moving out of range.’
Calvin was silent for a few moments before answering. ‘Alicia must have died, then. I’m sorry.’
‘We don’t know what it was, or how the attack came about,’ Sylveste said. ‘But we may learn something shortly.’
‘Volyova’s launched a probe,’ Pascale said. ‘A robot — capable of crossing over to the Lorean very quickly. It should have arrived by now. She said it will enter the ship and find whatever electronic records have survived.’
‘And then?’
‘We’ll know what killed them.’
‘But that won’t be enough, will it? No matter what you learn from the Lorean, it won’t be enough to make you turn back, Dan. I know you better than that.’
‘You only think you do,’ Sylveste said.
Pascale stood up, coughing. ‘Can we save this for later? If you can’t work together, Sajaki’s not going to have much use for either of you two.’
‘Irrelevant what he thinks about me,’ Sylveste said. ‘Sajaki still has to do whatever I say.’
‘He has a point,’ Calvin said.
Pascale asked the room to extrude an escritoire, with controls and readouts in the Resurgam style. She made a seat and sat herself beneath the escritoire’s curved ivory fascia. Then she called up a map of the data connections in the suite, and set about establishing the necessary links between Calvin’s module and the suite’s medical systems. She looked like she was spinning an elaborate cat’s cradle in thin air. As the connections were created, Calvin acknowledged them, and told her whether to increase or decrease bandwidth along certain pathways, or whether additional topologies were needed. The procedure lasted only a few minutes, and when it was complete Calvin was able to operate the medical suite’s servo-mechanical equipment, causing a mass of tipped alloy arms to descend from the ceiling, like the sculpture of a medusa.
‘You have no idea how this feels,’ Calvin said. ‘It’s the first time in years I’ve been able to act on a part of the physical universe — not since I first repaired your eyes.’ And as he spoke, the multi-jointed arms executed a shimmering dance, blades, lasers, claws, molecular-manipulators and sensors scything the air in a whirl of vicious silver.
‘Very impressive,’ Sylveste said, feeling the breeze on his face. ‘Just be careful.’
‘I could rebuild your eyes in a day,’ Calvin said. ‘I could make them better than they ever were. I could make them look human — hell; with the technology here I could implant biological eyes just as easily.’
‘I don’t want you to rebuild them,’ Sylveste said. ‘Right now they’re all I have on Sajaki. Just repair Falkender’s work.’
‘Ah, yes — I’d forgotten about that.’ Calvin, who remained essentially immobile, raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure this procedure is wise?’
‘Just be careful what you poke.’
Alicia Keller Sylveste had been his last wife before Pascale. They had married on Yellowstone, during the long years when the Resurgam expedition had been planned in excruciating detail. They had been together at the founding of Cuvier and had worked in harmony during the earliest years of the digs. She had been brilliant; too much so, perhaps, to stay comfortably within his orbit. Independently minded, she had begun to draw away from him — both personally and professionally — as their time on Resurgam entered its third decade. Alicia was not alone in her conviction that enough had been learned of the Amarantin; that it was time for the expedition — never meant to be permanent — to return to Epsilon Eridani. After all, if they had not learned anything shattering in thirty years, there was no promise that the next thirty years, or the next century, would bring anything more overwhelming. Alicia and her sympathisers believed that the Amarantin did not merit further detailed study; that the Event had only been an unfortunate accident of no actual cosmic significance. It was not hard to see the sense in this. The Amarantin, after all, were not the only dead species known to humankind. Out in the ever-expanding bubble of explored space, it was entirely possible that other cultures were about to be discovered, potent with archaeological treasures waiting to be unearthed. Alicia’s faction felt that Resurgam should be abandoned; that the colony’s finest minds should return to Yellowstone and select new targets of study.
Sylveste’s faction, of course, disagreed in the strongest terms. By then Alicia and Sylveste were estranged, but even in the depths of their enmity they preserved a cool respect of each other’s abilities. If love had withered, detached admiration remained.
Then came the mutiny. Alicia’s faction had done just what they always threatened to do: abandoned Resurgam. Unable to convince the rest of the colony to travel with them, they had stolen the Lorean from its parking orbit. The mutiny had been quite bloodless, but in their theft of the ship, Alicia’s faction had inflicted a much more insidious harm upon the colony. The Lorean had contained all the intra-system vessels and shuttles, meaning that the colonists were confined to Resurgam’s surface. They had no means to repair or upgrade the comsat girdle until Remilliod’s arrival, decades later. Servitors, replicating technology and implants had all been in excruciatingly short supply after Alicia’s departure.
But, in fact, Sylveste’s faction had been the fortunate ones.
‘Log entry,’ said Alicia’s ghost, floating disembodied in the bridge. ‘Twenty-five days out from Resurgam. We’ve decided — against my better judgement — to approach the neutron star on our way out. The alignment’s propitious; it doesn’t take us very far from our planned heading for Eridani, and the net delay to our journey will be tiny compared with the years of flight that are ahead of us in any case.’
She was not quite what Sylveste remembered. It had been a long time, in any case. She no longer seemed hateful to him; merely errant. She wore dark green clothes of a kind no one had worn in Cuvier since the mutiny itself, and her hairstyle seemed almost theatrical in its antiquity.
‘Dan was convinced there was something important out here, but the evidence was always lacking.’
That surprised him. She was speaking from a time long before the unearthing of the obelisk with its curious orrery-like inscriptions. Had his obsession been that strong, even then? It was entirely possible, but the realisation was not a comfortable one. Alicia was right in what she said. The evidence had been lacking.
‘We saw something strange,’ Alicia said. ‘A cometary impact on Cerberus, the planet orbiting the neutron star. Such impacts must be quite rare, this far out from the main Kuiper swarm. It naturally drew our attention. But when we were close enough to examine the surface of Cerberus, there was no sign of a new impact crater.’
Sylveste felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. ‘And?’ he found himself mouthing, almost silently, as if Alicia were standing before them in the bridge, and not a projection dredged from the memory banks of the wrecked ship.
‘It was not something we could ignore,’ she said. ‘Even if it seemed to lend tacit support to Dan’s theory that there was something strange about the Hades/Cerberus system. So we altered our course to come in closer.’ She paused. ‘If we find something significant… s
omething we can’t explain… I don’t think we’ll have any ethical choice but to inform Cuvier. Otherwise we could never again hold our heads high as scientists. We will know better tomorrow, anyway. We’ll be within probe range by then.’
‘How much more of this is there?’ Sylveste asked Volyova. ‘How much longer did she continue with log entries?’
‘About a day,’ Volyova said.
Now they were in the spider-room, safe — or so Volyova wished to believe — from the prying eyes of Sajaki and the others. They had still not listened to everything Alicia had to say, for the very act of sifting through the spoken records was time-consuming and emotionally draining. Yet the basic shape of the truth was emerging, and it was far from encouraging. Alicia’s crew had been attacked by something near Cerberus, suddenly and decisively. Shortly Volyova and her crewmates would know a great deal more about the danger they were being impelled towards.
‘You realise,’ Volyova said, ‘that if we encounter trouble, you may have to enter the gunnery.’
‘I don’t think that would necessarily be for the best,’ Khouri said. Justifying herself, she added, ‘We both know there have been some worrying events related to the gunnery recently.’
‘Yes. As a matter of fact… during my convalescence, I convinced myself that you know more than you admit.’ Volyova relaxed back into the maroon plush of her seat, toying with the brass controls in front of her. ‘I think you told me the truth when you said you were an infiltrator. But I think that was as far as it went. The rest was a lie, designed to satisfy my curiosity and yet stop me taking the matter to the rest of the Triumvirate… which worked, of course. But there were too many things you didn’t explain to my satisfaction. Take the cache-weapon, for instance. When it malfunctioned, why did it point itself at Resurgam?’
‘It was the closest target.’
‘Sorry; too glib. It was something about Resurgam, wasn’t it? And the fact that you infiltrated this ship only when you knew our destination… yes; an out-of-the-way place would have made a good venue for staging an attempted take-over of the cache — but that was never on the cards anyway. You may have been resourceful, Khouri, but there was no way you were ever going to wrest control of those weapons from either myself or the rest of the Triumvirate.’ She put her hand beneath her chin now. ‘So — the obvious question. If your initial story was untrue, what exactly are you doing aboard this ship?’ She looked at Khouri, awaiting an answer. ‘You may as well tell me now, because I swear the next person to ask you will be Sajaki. It can’t have escaped your notice that Sajaki has his suspicions, Khouri — especially since Kjarval and Sudjic died.’