‘What about the counteragent? Was it altered?’
‘It hadn’t been touched,’ she said. Then she turned down the curette’s yield and used it to scratch in tiny letters a quick message in the ship’s fabric, just ahead of the Captain’s encroachment. Long before Sajaki stood a chance of reading it, the Captain would have flowed over it like an erasing tide.
‘What are you doing?’ Sylveste said.
But before the man could ask anything else, she was gone.
‘You were right,’ Volyova said, when they were safely beyond the hull of the Nostalgia for Infinity, perched on its outer carapace like some adventurous steel parasite. ‘It was sabotage. But not in the way I first imagined.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Sylveste, who by now was grudgingly impressed by the existence of the spider-room. ‘I thought you cross-referenced the retrovirus against your earlier batches, those which worked against small samples of the plague.’
‘I did, and — as I said — there was no difference. Which only left one possibility.’
Silence hung in the air. Finally, it was Pascale Sylveste who broke it. ‘He — it — must have been inoculated. That’s what must have happened, isn’t it? Someone must have stolen a batch of your retrovirus and denatured it — removed its lethality, its urge to replicate — and then shown it to the Melding Plague.’
‘It’s the only thing which would explain it,’ Volyova said.
Khouri said, ‘You think Sajaki did it, don’t you?’ She was talking to Sylveste.
He nodded. ‘Calvin had as good as predicted that Sajaki would try and ruin the operation.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Khouri said. ‘You’re talking about the Captain being inoculated — isn’t that for the better?’
‘Not in this case — and it wasn’t the Captain who was inoculated, really, but the plague resident in him.’ It was Volyova speaking now. ‘We’ve always known that the Melding Plague is hyperadaptive. That’s always been the problem — every molecular weapon we throw at it ends up being co-opted, smothered and reprocessed into the plague’s own all-consuming offensive. But this time I hoped we’d steal an advantage. The retrovirus was extraordinarily potent — there was a chance it could outmanoeuvre the plague’s normal corruption pathways. But what happened was that the plague got a sneak look at the enemy before it ever encountered it in its active form. It got a chance to dismantle and know the counteragent before it ever posed a threat to it. And by the time Calvin administered it, the plague already knew all its tricks. It had worked out a way to disarm the virus and persuade it to join the plague without even expending any energy in the process. So the Captain grew faster.’
‘Who could have done this?’ Khouri asked. ‘I thought you were the only person on this ship who could do something like that.’
Sylveste nodded. ‘As much as I still think Sajaki’s trying to sabotage the operation… this doesn’t look like it could be his handiwork.’
‘I agree,’ Volyova said. ‘Sajaki just doesn’t have the expertise to have done this.’
‘What about the other man?’ Pascale asked. ‘The chimeric.’
‘Hegazi?’ Volyova shook her head. ‘You can ignore him. He might become a problem if any of us ever move against the Triumvirate, but this isn’t within his capabilities any more than Sajaki’s. No; the way I see it, there are only three people on this ship who could have done it, and I’m one of them.’
‘Who are the other two?’ Sylveste asked.
‘Calvin is one of them,’ she said. ‘Which rather removes him from suspicion as well.’
‘And the other?’
‘That’s the — problematic part,’ she said. ‘The only other person who could do this to a cybervirus is the one we’ve been trying to heal all this time.’
‘The Captain?’ Sylveste said.
‘He could have done it — from a theoretical standpoint, I mean.’ Volyova clucked. ‘Were he not already dead.’
Khouri wondered how Sylveste would react to that, but he seemed unimpressed. ‘It doesn’t matter who it was — if it wasn’t Sajaki himself, it was someone acting for him.’ Now she addressed Volyova. ‘I take it this convinces you.’
She graced him with a nod. ‘Regrettably, yes. What does it mean to you and Calvin?’
‘Mean to us?’ Sylveste seemed surprised by the question. ‘It means absolutely nothing. I never promised we could heal the Captain in the first place. I told Sajaki I considered the task impossible, and I wasn’t exaggerating. Calvin agreed with me as well. In all honesty, I’m not even sure Sajaki had to sabotage the operation. Even if your retrovirus hadn’t been denatured, I doubt that it would have given the plague much trouble. So what has changed? Calvin and I will continue with the pretence of healing the Captain, and at some point it will be clear that we can’t succeed. We won’t let Sajaki know that we’re aware of his sabotage. We don’t want a confrontation with the man – especially not now, with the attack against Cerberus about to happen.’ Sylveste smiled placidly. ‘And I don’t think Sajaki will be particularly disappointed to hear that our efforts have been in vain.’
‘You’re saying that nothing changes, is that it?’ Khouri looked around at the others for support, but their expressions were inscrutable. ‘I don’t believe this.’
‘The Captain doesn’t matter to him,’ said Pascale Sylveste. ‘Isn’t that obvious to you? He’s only doing this to keep his side of the bargain with Sajaki. Cerberus is all that matters to him. It’s been like a magnet to Dan.’ She was talking as if her husband were somewhere else entirely.
‘Yes,’ Volyova said. ‘Well, I’m glad you raised that subject, because there’s something Khouri and I need to discuss with all of you. It concerns Cerberus.’
Sylveste looked scornful. ‘What do you know about Cerberus?’
‘Too much,’ Khouri said. ‘Too damned much.’
She began where it made sense to begin, at the beginning, with her revival on Yellowstone, her work as an assassin in Shadowplay, and how the Mademoiselle had recruited her and made it very difficult for her not to accept the woman’s offer.
‘Who was she?’ Sylveste asked, when the preliminaries had been dispensed with. ‘And what did she want you to do?’
‘We’ll come to that,’ Volyova said. ‘Just be patient.’
Khouri continued; repeating to Sylveste the story that she had not long ago told Volyova, though it felt that an eternity spaced the two recitations. How she had infiltrated the ship, and how – simultaneously — she had been tricked by Volyova, who needed a new Gunnery Officer, irrespective of whether anyone volunteered for that role. How the Mademoiselle had been in her head all this time, revealing only as much information as Khouri needed at any moment. How Volyova had interfaced Khouri into the gunnery, and how the Mademoiselle had detected something lurking in the gunnery, something — a software entity — that called itself Sun Stealer.
Pascale looked at Sylveste. ‘That name,’ she said. ‘It… means something. I’ve heard it before; I’d swear it. Don’t you remember?’
Sylveste looked at her, but said nothing.
‘This thing,’ Khouri said. ‘Whatever it was — it had already tried to get out of the gunnery into the head of the last poor sucker Volyova recruited. Drove him insane.’
‘I don’t see where this concerns me,’ Sylveste said.
So Khouri told him. ‘The Mademoiselle worked out that this thing had to have entered the gunnery at a certain time.’
‘Very good; continue.’
‘Which was when you were last aboard this ship.’
She had wondered what it would take to shut Sylveste up, or at the very least wipe the look of smug superiority off his face. Now she knew, and realised that in the midst of everything, this achievement had been one of life’s small and unexpected pleasures. Breaking the spell, with admirable self-control, Sylveste said: ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means what you think it means, but don’t want to consider.’
The words had tumbled out of her mouth. ‘Whatever it was, you brought it with you.’
‘Some kind of neural parasite,’ Volyova said, taking the burden of explication from Khouri. ‘It came aboard with you and then hopped into the ship. It could have ridden your implants, or perhaps your mind itself, independent of any hardware.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ But something in his tone of voice failed to convince.
‘If you weren’t aware of it,’ Volyova said, ‘then you could have been carrying it around for years. Maybe even since you came back.’
‘Came back from where?’
‘Lascaille’s Shroud,’ Khouri said, and, for the second time, her words seemed to lash against Sylveste like squalls of wintery rain. ‘We checked the chronology; it fits. Whatever it was, it got into you around the Shroud, and stayed with you until you came here. Maybe it didn’t even leave you; just split off part of itself into the ship, hedging its bets.’
Sylveste stood up, motioning for his wife to do likewise. ‘I’m not staying to hear any more of this madness.’
‘I think you should,’ Khouri said. ‘We still haven’t told you about the Mademoiselle, or what she wanted me to do.’
He just looked at her, poised on the verge of leaving, his face a study in disgust. Then — perhaps a minute later — he returned to his seat and waited for her to continue.
TWENTY-FIVE
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
‘I’m sorry,’ Sylveste said. ‘But I don’t think this man can be cured.’
His only companions, save the Captain himself, were the two members of the Triumvirate other than Volyova.
The closest, Sajaki, stood with his arms folded in front of the Captain, as if inspecting a challengingly modern fresco, his head tilted just so. Hegazi maintained a respectful distance from the plague, refusing to approach within three or four metres of the outer extent of the Captain’s recently invigorated growth. He was doing his best to look nonchalant, but, despite the relatively sparse acreage of his face which was actually visible, fear was written across it like a tattoo.
‘He’s dead?’ Sajaki asked.
‘No, no,’ said Sylveste hastily. ‘Not at all. It’s just that all our therapies have failed, and our one best shot turned out to hurt him more than to heal him.’
‘Your one best shot?’ Hegazi parroted, his voice echoing from the walls.
‘Ilia Volyova’s counteragent.’ Sylveste knew he had to be very careful now; that it would not do for Sajaki to realise that his sabotage had come to light. ‘For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the way she thought it would. I don’t blame Volyova for that — how could she predict how the main body of the plague would behave, when all she had to work on was tiny samples?’
‘How indeed,’ Sajaki said, and in that short declamation, Sylveste decided that he hated the man, with a hatred as irrevocable as death. But he also knew that Sajaki was a man he could work with, and that — as much as he despised him — nothing that had occurred here would make any difference to the attack against Cerberus. It was better than that, in fact: much better. Now that he was certain that Sajaki had no desire to see the Captain healed — quite the opposite — there was nothing to prevent Sylveste from turning his full attention to the matter of the imminent attack. Perhaps he would have to endure Calvin’s presence in his head for a little while longer, until this charade had run its course, but that was a small price to pay, and he felt up to the task. Besides: now he rather welcomed Calvin’s intrusion. There was too much going on; too much to be assimilated, and for the time being it was good to have a second mind parasitising his own, gleaning patterns and forging inferences.
‘He’s a lying bastard,’ Calvin whispered. ‘I had my doubts before, but now I know for sure. I hope the plague consumes every atom of the ship and takes him with it. It’s all he deserves.’
Sylveste said to Sajaki, ‘It doesn’t mean we’ve given up hope. With your permission Cal and I will continue trying…’
‘Do what you can,’ Sajaki said.
‘You want to let them continue?’ Hegazi said. ‘After what they’ve almost done to him?’
‘You’ve got a problem with that?’ said Sylveste, feeling that the conversation was as ritualised as a play; its conclusion just as preordained. ‘If we don’t take risks…’
‘Sylveste is right,’ Sajaki said. ‘Who’s to say how the Captain would respond to the most innocent of interventions? The plague is a living thing — it isn’t necessarily obedient to any set of logical rules, so every act we make carries some risk, even something as seemingly harmless — as sweeping it with a magnetic field. The plague might interpret it as a stimulus to shift to a new phase of growth, or it might cause the plague to turn to dust in seconds. I doubt that the Captain would survive either scenario.’
‘In which case,’ Hegazi said, ‘we might as well give up now.’
‘No,’ Sajaki said, so calmly that Sylveste feared for the other man’s well-being. ‘It doesn’t mean that we give up. It means that we need a new paradigm — something beyond surgical intervention. Here we have the finest cyberneticist born since the Transenlightenment, and no one has a finer grasp of molecular weapons than Ilia Volyova. The medical systems we have aboard this ship are as advanced as any in existence. And yet we’ve failed; for the simple reason that we’re dealing with something stronger, faster and more adaptable than anything we can imagine. What we’ve always suspected is true: the Melding Plague is of alien origin. And that’s why it will always beat us. Provided, that is, we continue to wage war against it on our terms, rather than on its own.’
Now, Sylveste thought, this play had arrived at an unwritten epilogue all of its own.
‘What kind of new paradigm do you have in mind?’
‘The only logical answer,’ Sajaki said, as if what he was about to reveal had always been blindingly obvious. ‘The only effective medicine against an alien illness would be an alien medicine. And that’s what we have to seek now, no matter how long it takes us, or how far.’
‘Alien medicine,’ Hegazi said, as if trying on the phrase for size. Perhaps he imagined that he would be hearing it rather frequently in the future. ‘And just what kind of alien medicine did you have in mind?’
‘We’ll try the Pattern Jugglers first,’ Sajaki said, absently, as if no one else were present, merely toying with the notion. ‘And if they can’t heal him, we’ll look further.’ Suddenly his attention snapped back onto Sylveste. ‘We visited them once, you know, the Captain and I. You aren’t the only one to have tasted the brine of their ocean.’
‘Let’s not spend a second longer in the company of this madman than absolutely necessary,’ Calvin said, and Sylveste nodded silent assent.
Volyova checked her bracelet again, for the sixth or seventh time in the last hour, even though what it had to tell her had barely changed. What it told her — and what she already knew — was that the calamitous marriage of bridgehead and Cerberus was due to happen in just under half a day, and that no one looked likely to voice any objections, let alone make any attempt to avert the union.
‘You looking at that thing every other second isn’t going to change anything,’ said Khouri, who, together with Volyova and Pascale, remained in the spider-room. For most of the last few hours they had been beyond the outer hull, venturing inside only to return Sylveste into the ship so that he could meet the other Triumvirs. Sajaki had not queried Volyova’s absence: doubtless he assumed she was busy in her quarters, putting the finishing touches to her attack strategy. But in an hour or two she would need to show her face if she wished to avoid suspicion. Not long after that, she would need to begin the softening-up procedure, deploying elements of the cache against the point on Cerberus where the bridgehead was scheduled to arrive. As she glanced at the bracelet again — involuntarily, this time — Khouri said, ‘What are you hoping for?’
‘Something unexpected from the weapon — a fatal malfunction would do very n
icely.’
‘Then you really don’t want this to succeed, do you?’ Pascale said. ‘A few days ago you were gloating over that thing like it was your finest hour. This is quite some turnaround.’
‘That was before I knew who the Mademoiselle was. If I’d had any idea earlier…’ Volyova found herself running out of anything to say. It was obvious now that using the weapon was an act of almost staggering recklessness — but would knowing that have altered a thing? Would she have felt compelled to make the weapon just because she could; just because it was elegant and she wanted her peers to see what fabulous creatures could spring forth from her mind; what Byzantine engines of war? The thought that she might have done so was sickening, but — in its own way — entirely plausible. She would have given birth to the bridgehead and hoped that she could prevent it completing its mission at some later point. She would, in short, have been in exactly the position in which she now found herself.
The bridgehead — the converted Lorean — was nearing Cerberus now, slowing as it did so. By the time it touched Cerberus it would be moving no faster than a bullet, but it would be a bullet massing millions of tonnes. If the bridgehead hit an ordinary planetary surface at that speed, its kinetic energy would be converted into heat rather efficiently: there would be a colossal explosion and her toy would be destroyed in a flash. But Cerberus was not a normal planet. Her assumption — backed up by endless simulations — was that the sheer grinding bulk of the weapon would be sufficient to push it through the thin layer of artificial crust overlaying the world’s interior. Once it had thrust below that, once it had impaled the world, she had no real idea what it would encounter.
And now that scared her beyond words. Intellectual vanity had brought Sylveste to this point — and something else, perhaps — but she was not unguilty of obeying the same unquestioning drive. She wished she had taken the project less seriously; made the bridgehead less likely to succeed. It terrified her to think what would happen if her child did not disappoint her.