She could be with her beautiful weapons.
The transfigured Lorean had dropped to an even lower orbit without provoking a response from Cerberus — only ten thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. She had named the vast conic object the bridgehead, because that was its function. As far as the others were concerned, it was just Volyova’s weapon, if they bothered calling it anything. The thing was four thousand metres long; almost the same length as the lighthugger which had given birth to it. Very little of it was solid; even the walls were honeycombed with pores, in which lay clades of primed military cyberviruses, similar in structure to the counteragent about to be used against the Captain. Larger energy and projectile weapons were set inside caverns in the walls. The whole thing was sheathed in several metres of hyperdiamond which would be ablated sacrificially upon impact. Shock waves would rush up the length of the bridgehead as it hit the surface, but piezoelectric crystal boundaries would gradually bleed energy from the shock waves, energy which could be redirected into weapons systems. The impact speed would be relatively slow, in any case — less than a kilometre a second, since the bridgehead would decelerate massively just before puncturing the crust. And the crust would be softened up beforehand; apart from the bridgehead’s own frontal guns, Volyova would deploy as much of the cache armament as she dared.
She interrogated the weapon via her bracelet. It was not the most riveting of conversations. The device’s controlling personality was rudimentary; nothing more could be expected from something mere days old. In a sense that was good. Better that the thing be pigeon-minded, or it might start getting ideas above its station. And, as she reminded herself, the bridgehead might not have very long to enjoy its sentience in the first place.
Numerics dancing in the sphere told her of the bridgehead’s total readiness. She had to trust what the summarising systems told her, for the weapon was in many ways unknown to her. She had sketched out her basic requirements, but the dogwork had been done by autonomous design programs, and they had not deigned to inform her of every technical problem and solution encountered along the way. But as profound as her ignorance of the bridgehead might be, it was not so very different from the way a mother managed to create a child without knowing the precise location of every artery and nerve… or even the precise biochemistry of its metabolism. It was no less her creation for that — no less her child.
A child she was consigning to an early, ignominious death — but by no means a meaningless one.
Her bracelet chirped. She glanced down at it, expecting that it would be a technical squirt from the bridgehead; a brief update concerning some last-minute inflight redesign which had been put in place by the replicating systems still at work in its core.
But it was not that at all.
It was from the ship, and it had found a match for the splinter. It had needed to look back into technical files more than two centuries old, but it had found a match all the same. And apart from the stress patterning — which must have come after the shard’s manufacture — the agreement was absolute, within the errors of measurement.
She was still alone in the bridge.
‘Put it on the display,’ Volyova said.
A magnified, visible-light image of the splinter appeared in the sphere. A series of zoom-ins appeared, beginning with a grey-scale electron-microscopy view which showed the shard’s tortured crystalline structure, and ending with a gaudily hued atomic-scale resolution ATM image, individual atoms blurred together. X-ray crystallographic and mass spectrograph plots popped into separate windows, jostling for her attention with reams of technical summary data. Volyova paid no attention to these results; they were completely familiar to her for she had made most of the measurements herself.
Instead, she waited while the entire display shuffled to one side and a very similar set of graphics sprang into existence next to it, arrayed around a sliver of similar-looking material, identical at atomic resolution, but showing none of the stress patterning. The compositions, isotopic ratios and lattice properties were identical: lots of fullerenes, knitted into structural allotropes, threading a bafflingly complex matrix of sandwiched metal layers and odd alloys. Spikes of yttrium and scandium, with a whole slew of stable-island transuranic elements in trace quantities, presumably adding some arcane resilience to the shard’s bulk properties. Still, by Volyova’s reckoning, there were stranger substances aboard the ship, and she had synthesised a few of them herself. The splinter was unusual, but it was clearly human technology — the buckytube filaments, in fact, were a typical Demarchist signature, and stable-island transuranics had been in massive vogue in the twenty-fourth and —fifth centuries.
The shard, in fact, looked a lot like the kind of thing a spacecraft hull from that era might have been made of.
The ship seemed to think so too. What was Khouri doing with a piece of hull buried in her? What kind of message had Manoukhian intended by that? Perhaps she was wrong, and this was none of Manoukhian’s doing — just an accident. Unless this had been a very specific spacecraft…
It seemed that it was. The technology was typical for that era, but in every specific, the shard was unique — manufactured to tighter tolerances than would have been required even in a military application. In fact, as Volyova digested the results, it became clear that the shard could only have come from one kind of ship: a contact vessel owned by the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies.
Subtleties of isotopic ratio established that it had come from one ship in particular: the contact vessel that had carried Sylveste to the boundary of Lascaille’s Shroud. For a moment, that discovery was enough for Volyova. There was a circularity about it; confirmation that Khouri’s Mademoiselle really did have some connection with Sylveste. But Khouri already knew that… which meant that the message must be telling them something more profound. Of course, Volyova had already seen what it must be. But for an instant she flinched at the enormity of it. There was no way it could be her, could it? No way she could have survived what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud. But Manoukhian had always told Khouri that he had found his paymistress in space. And it was entirely possible that her disguise of a hermetic masked an injury more savage than anything the plague could have inflicted…
‘Show me Carine Lefevre,’ Volyova said, retrieving the name of the woman who should have died around the Shroud.
Vast as a goddess, the face of the woman stared down at her. She was young, and from the little of her that was visible below her face, it could be seen that she was dressed in the fashions of the Yellowstone Belle Epoque, the glittering golden age before the Melding Plague. And her face was familiar — not shatteringly so, but enough for Volyova to know she had seen this woman before. She had seen this woman’s face in a dozen historical documentaries, and in every one of them the assumption had been made that she was long dead; murdered by alien forces beyond human comprehension.
Of course. Now it was obvious what caused that stress patterning. The gravitational riptides around Lascaille’s Shroud had squeezed matter until it bled.
Everyone thought Carine Lefevre had died the same way.
‘Svinoi,’ said Triumvir Ilia Volyova, because now there could be no doubt.
Ever since she was a child, Khouri had noticed that something happened when she touched something that was too hot, like the barrel of a projectile rifle which had just discharged its clip. There would be a flash of premonitory pain, but so brief that it was hardly pain at all; more a warning of true pain which was about to come. And then the premonitory pain would subside, and there would be an instant when there was no sensation at all, and in that instant she would snatch back her hand, away from whatever it was that was too hot. But it would be too late; the true pain was already coming, and there was nothing she could do about it except ready herself for its arrival, like a housekeeper forewarned about the imminent arrival of a guest. Of course, the pain was never so bad, and she had usually withdrawn her hand from whatever was its source, a
nd there would usually not even be a scar afterwards. But it always made her wonder. If the premonitory pain was enough to persuade her to remove the hand — and it always was — what was the purpose of the tsunami of true pain which lagged behind it? Why did it have to come at all, if she had already received the message and removed her hand from harm? When, later, she found out that there was a sound physiological reason for the delay between the two warnings, it still seemed almost spiteful.
That was how she felt now, sitting in the spider-room with Volyova, who had just told her who she thought the face belonged to. Carine Lefevre; that was what she had said. And there had been a flash of premonitory shock, like an echo from the future of what the real shock of it was going to be like. A very faint echo indeed, and then — for an instant — nothing.
And then the true force of it.
‘How can it be her?’ Khouri said, afterwards, when the shock had not so much subsided as become a normal component of her emotional background noise. ‘It isn’t possible. It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I think it makes too much sense,’ Volyova said. ‘I think it fits the facts too well. I think it’s something we can’t ignore.’
‘But we all know she died! And not just on Yellowstone, but halfway across colonised space. Ilia, she died, violently. There’s no way it can be her.’
‘I think it can. Manoukhian said he found her in space. So perhaps he did. Perhaps he found Carine Lefevre drifting near Lascaille’s Shroud — he might have been looking to salvage something from the wreckage of the SISS facility — and then rescued her and took her back to Yellowstone.’ Volyova stopped, but before Khouri could speak, or even think about speaking, the Triumvir was on a roll again. ‘That would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’d at least have a connection to Sylveste — and maybe even a reason for her wanting him dead.’
‘Ilia, I’ve read what happened to her. She was shredded by the gravitational stresses around the Shroud. There wouldn’t have been anything left for Manoukhian to bring home.’
‘No… of course not. Unless Sylveste was lying. Remember that we have only Sylveste’s word that any of it happened the way he said it did — none of the recording systems survived the encounter.’
‘She didn’t die, is that what you’re saying?’
Volyova raised a hand, the way she always did when Khouri failed to read her mind perfectly. ‘No… not necessarily. Perhaps she did die — just not in the way Sylveste had it. And maybe she didn’t die in the way we understand, and perhaps she isn’t really alive, even now — despite what you saw.’
‘I didn’t see much of her, did I? Just the box she used to move around in.’
‘You assumed she was a hermetic, because she rode something like a hermetic’s palanquin. But that might have been a piece of misdirection on her behalf.’
‘She’d have been shredded. Nothing changes that.’
‘Perhaps the Shroud didn’t kill her, Khouri. Perhaps something dreadful happened to her, but something kept her alive afterwards. Perhaps something actually saved her.’
‘Sylveste would know.’
‘Even if he doesn’t admit it to himself. We have to talk to him, I think — here, where we won’t be bothered by Sajaki.’ Volyova had hardly finished speaking when her bracelet chirped and filled with a human face, eyes lost behind blank globes. ‘Speak of the devil,’ Volyova murmured. ‘What is it, Calvin? You are Calvin, aren’t you?’
‘For now,’ the man said. ‘Though I fear my usefulness to Sajaki may be coming to an ignominious end.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Quickly she added: ‘There’s something I have to discuss with Dan; it’s rather on the urgent side, if you’d oblige.’
‘I think what I have to say is more urgent,’ Calvin said. ‘It’s your counteragent, Volyova. The retrovirus you fabricated.’
‘What about it?’
‘It doesn’t seem to be working quite as intended.’ He took a step backwards; Khouri glimpsed part of the Captain behind him, silvery and muculent, like a statue covered with a palimpsest of snail tracks.
‘As a matter of fact, it seems to be killing him faster.’
TWENTY-FOUR
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
Sylveste did not have long to wait. When Volyova arrived, she was accompanied by Khouri; the woman who had saved Volyova’s life on the surface. If Volyova was something of a rogue variable in his plans then Khouri was worse, because he had not so far ascertained where her loyalties lay; whether to Volyova or Sajaki, or somewhere else entirely. But for now he suppressed his concerns, sharing Calvin’s urgency.
‘What do you mean, it’s killing him faster?’
‘I mean just that,’ Calvin made him say, before either of the two women had drawn breath. ‘We administered it according to your instructions. But it’s as if we’ve given the plague a massive shot in the arm. It’s spreading faster than ever. If I didn’t know better I’d say your retrovirus has actually helped it.’
‘Damn,’ Volyova said. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a wearying few hours.’
‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
‘I tested the counteragent against small samples of isolated plague,’ she said defensively. ‘It worked against them. I couldn’t promise it would work against the main body of the plague so effectively… but at the very least, in the worst possible scenario… I assumed it would have some effect, however limited. The plague has to expend some of its resources against the counteragent; there’s no getting around that. It has to direct some of the energy it would ordinarily use for expansion into resisting the agent. I hoped it would kill it — subvert it, I mean, into a form we could manipulate — but even when I was being pessimistic, I assumed the plague would catch a cold; that it would slow down perceptibly.’
‘That’s not what we’re seeing,’ Calvin said.
‘But she has a point,’ Khouri said, and Sylveste felt himself glare at her, as if questioning the very reason for her existence.
‘What are you seeing?’ Volyova asked. ‘You understand, I’m more than a little curious.’
‘We’ve stopped administering,’ Calvin said. ‘So for now the growth has stabilised. But when we gave the Captain the counteragent, he spread faster. It was as if he were incorporating the mass of the counteragent into his matrix more rapidly than he could convert the substrate of the ship.’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Volyova said. ‘The ship doesn’t even resist the plague. For him to spread faster… that would mean that the counteragent was giving itself over to him; converting itself faster than the plague could subvert it.’
‘Like frontline soldiers defecting before they’ve even heard any propaganda,’ Khouri said.
‘Exactly like that,’ Volyova said, and for the first time, Sylveste sensed something between the two women, something suspiciously like mutual respect. ‘But that just isn’t possible. For that to happen, the plague would have to have hijacked the replication routines almost without trying — almost as if they were willingly hijacked. I’m telling you, it isn’t possible.’
‘Well, try it for yourself.’
‘No thanks. It isn’t that I don’t believe you, but you have to see it from my side. From my point of view — and I engineered the damn thing — it doesn’t make much sense.’
‘There is something,’ Calvin said.
‘What?’
‘Could sabotage have done this? I told you already that we think someone doesn’t want this operation to succeed. You know who I’m talking about.’ He was being circumspect now, unwilling to say too much in Khouri’s presence, or within range of Sajaki’s listening systems. ‘Could your counteragent have been tampered with?’
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said.
Sylveste had not administered all of the vial Volyova had given him, so she was able to run a check on the molecular structure of that sample and the other batches which remained in her l
aboratory, using the same tools she had employed on Khouri’s splinter. When she compared the sample against her lab batches, they were identical, within the normal boundaries of quantum accuracy. The sample Calvin had given to the Captain was exactly as she had intended it to be, down to the humblest chemical bond linking the least significant atoms in the smallest and least essential molecular component…
Volyova checked the counteragent’s structure against her records, and observed that it had not deviated from the blueprint she had held in her head for subjective years. It was exactly as she had planned it. Her virus had not been tampered with; its teeth had not been pulled. So much for Calvin’s sabotage theory. She felt a surge of relief — she had not really wanted to believe that Sajaki was actually hampering the whole process; the notion that he might be consciously prolonging the Captain’s illness was too hideous, and she was glad when examination of the counteragent gave her a justification for flushing the idea of sabotage from her mind. She still had misgivings about Sajaki, of course; but there was at least no evidence that he had become something as monstrous as that.
But there was another possibility.
Volyova left the lab and returned to the Captain, cursing herself for not thinking of this earlier and sparing herself the runaround. Sylveste asked what she was doing now. She looked at him for long moments before speaking. Yes, there was a connection with Lascaille’s Shroud; she was sure of that. Was it purely revenge on the Mademoiselle’s part — in payment for his cowardice, or treachery, or whatever it was that had almost killed her in the Shroud boundary? Or did it go beyond that, connected in some way with the aliens themselves; the ancient, protective minds Lascaille had touched during his own flyby? Was it human spite they were dealing with here, or some imperative as alien and old as the Shrouders themselves? There was much she needed to discuss with Sylveste — but it would have to be in the sanctuary of the spider-room.
‘I need another sample,’ she said. ‘From the infection boundary, where you administered the counteragent.’ And she fished out her laser-curette, made the deft light-guided incisions and popped the sample — it felt like a metallic scab — into a waiting autoclave.