‘I didn’t have anything to do with…’ Then her voice lost conviction. ‘Sudjic had her own vendetta against you; that was none of my doing.’
‘But I had already disabled your suit’s weapons. Only I could have undone that order, and I was too busy being killed to do so. How did you manage to override the lock in order to kill Sudjic?’
‘Someone else did it.’ Khouri paused before continuing. ‘Something else, I should say. It was the same something that got into Kjarval’s suit and made her turn against me in the training session.’
‘That wasn’t Kjarval’s doing?’
‘No… not really. I don’t think I was her favourite person in the universe… but I’m fairly sure that she wasn’t planning to kill me in the training chamber.’
This was a lot to take in, even if it did finally feel like the truth. ‘So what happened, exactly?’
‘The thing inside my suit had to arrange matters so I’d be on the team to recover Sylveste. Getting Kjarval out of the picture was the only option.’
Yes; she could almost see the logic in that. She had never once questioned the manner in which Kjarval had died. It had seemed so predictable that one of the crew would turn against Khouri – especially Kjarval or Sudjic. Equally, one or other would surely have turned against Volyova before too long. Both things had happened, but now she saw them as part of something else… ripples of something she did not pretend to understand, but which moved with sharklike stealth beneath the surface of events.
‘What was so important about being in on the Sylveste recovery?’
‘I…’ Khouri had been on the verge of saying something, but now she faltered. ‘I’m not sure this is the best time, Ilia — not when we’re so close to whatever destroyed the Lorean.’
‘I didn’t bring you here just to admire the view, in case you thought otherwise. Remember what I said about Sajaki? It’s either me, now — the closest thing on this ship you have to either an ally or a friend — or it’s Sajaki, later, with some hardware you probably don’t want to even think about.’ That was no great exaggeration, either. Sajaki’s trawl techniques were not exactly state-of-the-art in their subtlety.
‘I’ll start at the beginning, then.’ What Volyova had just said seemed to have done the trick. That was good — or else she would have to think about dusting off her own coercion methods. ‘The part about being a soldier… all that was true. How I got to Yellowstone is… complicated. Even now I’m not sure how much of it was an accident; how much of it was her doing. All I know is, she singled me out early on for this mission.’
‘Who was she?’
‘I don’t really know. Someone with a lot of power in Chasm City; maybe the whole planet. She called herself the Mademoiselle. She was careful never to use a real name.’
‘Describe her. She may be someone we know; someone we’ve had dealings with in the past.’
‘I doubt it. She wasn’t…’ Khouri paused. ‘She wasn’t one of you. Maybe once, but not now. I got the impression she’d been in Chasm City for a long time. But it wasn’t until after the Melding Plague that she came to power.’
‘She came to power and I haven’t heard of her?’
‘That was the whole point of her power. It wasn’t blatant, and she didn’t have to make her presence known to get something done. She just made shit happen. She wasn’t even rich — but she controlled more resources than anyone else on the planet, by sleight of hand. Not enough to conjure up a ship, though — which is why she needed you.’
Volyova nodded. ‘You said she might have been one of us, once. What did you mean by that?’
Khouri hesitated. ‘It wasn’t anything obvious. But the man working for her — Manoukhian, he called himself — definitely used to be an Ultra. He dropped enough clues to suggest that he’d found her in space.’
‘Found — as in rescued?’
‘That was how it sounded to me. She had these jagged metal sculptures, too — at least I thought they were sculptures to start with. Later, they began to look like parts of a wrecked spaceship. Like she was keeping them around her as a reminder of something.’
Something tugged at Volyova’s memory, but for the moment she allowed the thought process to remain below the level of consciousness. ‘Did you get a good look at her?’
‘No. I saw a projection, but it needn’t have been accurate. She lived inside a palanquin, like the other hermetics.’
Volyova knew a little about the hermetics. ‘She needn’t have been one at all. A palanquin could simply have been a way of masking her identity. If we knew more about her origin… Did this Manoukhian tell you anything else?’
‘No; he wanted to — I could tell that much — but he managed not to give anything useful anyway.’ Volyova leaned closer. ‘Why do you say he wanted to tell you?’
‘Because that was his style. The guy never stopped mouthing off. The whole time I was being driven around by him, he never stopped telling me stories about all the things he’d done; all the famous people he’d known. Except for anything to do with the Mademoiselle. That was a closed subject; maybe because he was still working for her. But you could tell he was just itching to tell me stuff.’
Volyova drummed her fingers on the fascia. ‘Maybe he found a way.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No; I wouldn’t expect you to. It was nothing he told you, either… but I think he did find a way to tell you the truth.’ The memory process she had suppressed a moment earlier had indeed dredged something. She thought back to the time of Khouri’s recruitment; to the examination she had given the woman after she had been brought aboard. ‘I can’t be sure yet, of course…’
Khouri looked at her. ‘You found something on me, didn’t you? Something Manoukhian planted?’
‘Yes. It seemed quite innocent, at first. Fortunately, I have an odd character defect, common amongst those of us who indulge in the sciences… I never, ever throw anything away.’ It was true; disposing of the thing she had found would have demanded a greater expenditure of effort than simply leaving it in her lab. It had seemed pointless at the time — the thing was just a shard, after all — but now she could run a compositional analysis on the metal splinter she had pulled from Khouri. ‘If I’m right, and this was Manoukhian’s doing, it may tell us something about the Mademoiselle. Perhaps even her identity. But you still need to tell me what exactly she wanted you to do for her. We already know it involves Sylveste in some way or another.’
Khouri nodded. ‘It does. And I’m afraid this is the part you’re really not going to like.’
‘We’ve completed a more detailed inspection of the surface of Cerberus from our present orbit,’ Alicia’s projection said. ‘And there’s still no evidence of the cometary impact point. Plenty of cratering, yes — but none of it recent. Which just doesn’t make any sense.’ She elaborated the one plausible theory they had, which was that the comet had been destroyed just before impact. Even that explanation implied the use of some form of defensive technology, but at least it avoided the paradox of the unchanged surface features. ‘But we saw no sign of anything like that, and there’s certainly no evidence of any technological structures on the surface. We’ve decided to launch a squadron of probes down to the surface. They’ll be able to hunt for anything we might have missed — machines buried in caves, or sunk in canyons below our viewing angle — and they might provoke some kind of response, if there are automated systems down there.’
Yes, Sylveste thought acidly. They had indeed provoked some kind of response. But it was almost certainly not the kind Alicia had anticipated.
Volyova located the next segment in Alicia’s narrative. The probes had been deployed; tiny automated spacecraft as fragile and nimble as dragonflies. They had fallen towards the surface of Cerberus — there was no atmosphere to retard them — only arresting their descent at the last moment, with quick spurts of fusion flame. For a while, seen from the vantage point of the Lorean, they had been sparks of brightnes
s against the unremitting grey of Cerberus. But as the sparks had become tiny, they were a reminder that even this tiny, dead world was orders of magnitude larger than most human creations.
‘Log entry,’ said Alicia, after a gap in the narrative. ‘The probes are reporting something unusual — it’s just coming in now.’ She looked to one side, consulting a display beyond the projection volume. ‘Seismic activity on the surface. We were expecting to see it already, but until now the crust hasn’t moved at all, even though the planet’s orbit isn’t quite circularised and there should be tidal stresses. It’s almost as if the probes have triggered it, but that’s quite ridiculous.’
‘No more so than a planet that erases all evidence of a cometary impact on its surface,’ Pascale said. Then she looked at Sylveste. ‘I didn’t mean that as a criticism of Alicia, by the way.’
‘Perhaps you didn’t,’ he said. ‘But it would have been valid.’ Then he turned to Volyova. ‘Did you recover anything other than Alicia’s log entries? There must have been telemetered data from her probes…’
‘We have it,’ Volyova said cautiously. ‘I haven’t cleaned it up. It’s a little on the raw side.’
‘Patch me in.’
Volyova breathed a string of commands into the bracelet she always wore and the bridge burned away, a barrage of synaesthesia jumbling Sylveste’s senses. He was being immersed in the data from one of Alicia’s probes — the surveyor’s sensorium fully as raw as Volyova had warned. But Sylveste had known more or less what to expect; the transition was merely jarring rather than — as could easily have been the case — agonising.
He floated above a landscape. Altitude was difficult to judge, since the fractal surface features — craters, clefts and rivers of frozen grey lava — would have looked very similar at any distance. But the surveyor told it he was only half a kilometre above Cerberus. He looked down at the plain, hunting for some sign of the seismic activity Alicia had mentioned. Cerberus looked eternally old and unchanging, as if nothing had happened to it for billions of years. The only hint of motion came from the fusion jets, casting radial shadows away from his position as the machine loitered.
What had the drones seen? Certainly nothing in the visual band. Feeling his way into the sensorium — it was like slipping on an unfamiliar glove — Sylveste found the neural commands which accessed different data channels. He turned to thermal sensors, but the plain’s temperature showed no signs of variation. Across the complete EM spectrum there was nothing anomalous. Neutrino and exotic particle fluxes remained steadfastly within expectation. Yet when he switched to the gravitational imagers, he knew that something was very wrong with Cerberus. His visual field was overlaid with coloured, translucent contours of gravitational force. The contours were moving.
Things — huge enough to register via the mass sensors — were travelling underground, converging in a pincer movement directly below the point where he was hovering. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe that these moving forms were only vast, buried flows of lava — but that comforting delusion lasted no more than a second.
This was nothing natural.
Lines appeared on the plain, forming a starlike mandala centred on the same focus. Dimly, on the limits of his perception, he was aware that similar starlike patterns were opening below the other probes. The cracks widened, opening into monstrous black fissures. Through the fissures, Sylveste had a glimpse into what seemed to be kilometres of luminous depth. Coiled mechanical shapes writhed, sliding blue-grey tendrils wider than canyons. The motion was busy; orchestrated, purposeful, machinelike. He felt a special kind of revulsion. It was the feeling of biting an apple and exposing a colony of wrigglingly industrious maggots. He knew now. Cerberus was not a planet.
It was a mechanism.
Then the coiled things erupted through the star-shaped hole in the plain, rushing dreamily towards him, as if reaching to snatch him out of the sky. There was a horrible moment of whiteness — a whiteness in every sense he had — before Volyova’s sensorium-feed ended with screaming suddenness, Sylveste almost shrieking with existential shock as his sense of self crashed back into his body in the bridge.
He had time enough, after he had gathered his faculties, to observe Alicia mouthing something soundlessly, her face carved in what might have been fear, and what might equally have been the dismay at learning — in the instant prior to her death — that she had been wrong all along.
Then her image dissolved into static.
‘Now at least we know he’s mad,’ Khouri said, hours later. ‘If that didn’t persuade him against going any closer to Cerberus, I don’t think anything will.’
‘It may well have had the opposite effect,’ Volyova said, voice low despite the relative security furnished by the spider-room. ‘Now Sylveste knows there is something worth investigating, rather than merely suspecting so.’
‘Alien machinery?’
‘Evidently. And perhaps we can even guess at the purpose, too. Cerberus clearly isn’t a real world. At the very least, it’s a real world surrounded by a shell of machines, with an artificial crust. That explains why the cometary impact-point was never found — the crust, presumably, repaired itself before Alicia’s crew could get close enough.’
‘Some kind of camouflage?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘So why draw attention by attacking those probes?’
Volyova had evidently given the matter some prior thought. ‘The illusion of verisimilitude obviously can’t be foolproof at distances less than a kilometre or so. My guess is the probes were about to learn the truth just before they were destroyed, so the world lost nothing and gained some additional raw material in the bargain.’
‘Why, though? Why surround a planet with a false crust?’
‘I have no idea, and neither, I suspect, does Sylveste. That’s why he’s now even more likely to insist on going closer.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’s already asked me to devise a strategy, in fact.’
‘A strategy for what?’
‘For getting him inside Cerberus.’ She paused. ‘He knows about the cache-weapons, of course. He presumes they’ll be sufficient to achieve his aims, by weakening the crustal machinery in one area of the planet. More than that will be needed, of course…’ Her tone of voice shifted. ‘Do you think this Mademoiselle of yours always knew this would be his objective?’
‘She was pretty damn clear he shouldn’t be allowed aboard the ship.’
‘The Mademoiselle told you that before you joined us?’
‘No; afterwards.’ She told Volyova about the implant in her head; how the Mademoiselle had downloaded an aspect of herself into Khouri’s skull for the purposes of the mission. ‘She was a pain,’ she said. ‘But she made me immune to your loyalty therapies, which I suppose was something to be grateful for.’
‘The therapies worked as intended,’ Volyova said.
‘No, I just pretended. The Mademoiselle told me what to say and when, and I guess she didn’t do too bad a job, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion.’
‘She can’t rule out the possibility that the therapies worked partially, can she?’
Khouri shrugged again. ‘Does it matter? What kind of loyalty would make any sense now? You’ve as good as told me you’re waiting for Sajaki to make the wrong move. The only thing holding this crew together is Sylveste’s threat to kill us all if we don’t do what he wants. Sajaki’s a megalomaniac — maybe he should have double-checked the therapies he was running on you.’
‘You resisted Sudjic when she tried to kill me.’
‘Yeah, I did. But if she’d told me she was going after Sajaki — or even that prick Hegazi — I don’t know what I would have said.’
Volyova spent a moment in consultation with herself.
‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I suppose the loyalty issue is moot. What else did the implant do for you?’
‘When you hooked me into the weapons,’ Khouri said, ‘she used the interface
to inject herself — or a copy of herself — into the gunnery. To begin with I think she just wanted to assume control of as much of the ship as possible, and the gunnery was her only point of entry.’
‘The architecture wouldn’t have allowed her to reach beyond it.’
‘It didn’t. To the best of my knowledge, she never gained control of any part of the ship other than the weapons.’
‘You mean the cache?’
‘She was controlling the rogue weapon, Ilia. I couldn’t tell you at the time, but I knew what was happening. She wanted to use the weapon to kill Sylveste at long-range, before we’d ever arrived at Resurgam.’
‘I suppose,’ Volyova said, heavy with resignation, ‘that it makes a kind of twisted sense. But to use that weapon just to kill a man… I told you, you’re going to have to tell me why she wanted him dead so badly.’
‘You won’t like it. Especially not now, with what Sylveste wants to do.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘I will, I will,’ Khouri said. ‘But there’s one other thing — one other complicating factor. It’s called Sun Stealer, and I think you may already be acquainted with it.’
Volyova looked as if some recently healed internal injury had just relapsed; as if some painful seam had opened in her like ripping cloth.
‘Ah,’ she said eventually. ‘That name again.’