‘The weapon lacks the protocols for recognising its own obsolescence,’ she said, and then seemed to shiver, as if shaking off possession. ‘No… what I mean is… there are things the weapon can’t be allowed to know; except when it needs to know them —’ She paused, glancing anxiously around at her crewmates, unsure that she was making any sense. ‘It can’t be allowed to know how to evolve its own defences before the moment when that evolution has to be expedited; the timing of the upgrades is crucial —’
‘You were trying to starve it,’ Sylveste said. Hegazi, next to him, said nothing, but acknowledged his remark with a barely perceptible nod, like a despot casting judgement.
‘No, I…’
‘Don’t apologise,’ he said, with great insistence. ‘If I wanted what you want — to sabotage this whole operation — I’m sure I’d have done something similar. Your timing was impeccable, as well — you waited until you’d had the satisfaction of seeing it work; the satisfaction of knowing that your toy functioned.’
‘You prick,’ Khouri said, spitting in the process. ‘You narrowminded, egotistical prick.’
‘Congratulations,’ Sylveste said. ‘Now you can progress to words with six syllables. But in the meantime would you mind pointing that unpleasant piece of hardware somewhere other than my face?’
‘With pleasure,’ she said, not allowing the rifle to waver. ‘I’ve got just the anatomical region in mind.’
Hegazi turned to the other member of the Triumvirate present. ‘Would you mind explaining what’s going on?’
‘Sun Stealer must have control of the ship’s communications systems,’ Volyova said. ‘That’s the only possibility; the only way my command to stop the transmissions could have been rescinded.’ But even as she was speaking she was shaking her head.
‘Which isn’t possible. We know he’s confined to the gunnery, and there’s no physical link between the gunnery and comms.’
‘There must be now,’ Khouri said.
‘But if there is…’ The whites of her eyes were showing now; bright crescents against the gloom of the bridge. ‘There are no logical barriers between comms and the rest of the ship. If Sun Stealer really has got that far, there isn’t anything he can’t touch.’
It was a long time before anyone spoke; as if everyone — even Sylveste — needed time to adjust to the gravity of the situation. Khouri tried to read him, but there was no way to tell how much of this he accepted, even now. She still suspected that he viewed everything as a paranoiac fantasy that she had woven from her own subconscious; one that had somehow infected both Volyova and, latterly, Pascale.
Perhaps a part of him was still refusing to believe, despite all the evidence.
What evidence, though? Apart from the reinstated signal — and all that it implied — there was nothing to suggest that Sun Stealer had reached beyond the gunnery. But if he had…
‘You,’ Volyova said, breaking the silence. She was pointing her gun at Hegazi. ‘You, svinoi. You had to have a part in this, didn’t you? Sajaki’s out of the frame, and Sylveste doesn’t have the expertise — so it had to be you.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’
‘Helping Sun Stealer. You did it, didn’t you?’
‘Get a grip, Triumvir.’
Khouri wondered in which direction she should be pointing the plasma-rifle. Sylveste looked as shaken as Hegazi; as surprised at Volyova’s sudden line of enquiry.
‘Listen,’ Khouri said. ‘Just because he’s had his tongue up Sajaki’s arse ever since I came aboard, it doesn’t mean he’d do anything that stupid.’
‘Thanks,’ Hegazi said. ‘I think.’
‘You’re not off the hook,’ Volyova said. ‘Not by a long mark. Khouri’s right; doing what you did would have been an act of gross stupidity. But that hardly disqualifies you from having done it. You had enough expertise to do it. And you’re chimeric as well — maybe Sun Stealer’s in you too. In which case I’m afraid it’s just too dangerous to have you around.’
She nodded at Khouri. ‘Khouri; take him down to one of the airlocks.’
‘You’re going to kill me,’ Hegazi said, as she prodded him along the flooded corridor with the barrel of the plasma-rifle, watching janitor-rats scatter ahead of them. ‘That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? You’re going to space me.’
‘She just wants you somewhere where you can’t do any harm,’ Khouri said, not especially in the mood for a protracted conversation with her prisoner.
‘Whatever it was she thinks, I didn’t do it. Sorry to admit it, but I haven’t got the expertise. Does that satisfy you?’
Now he was annoying her, but she sensed that he would only shut up if she talked back to him.
‘I’m not sure you did do it,’ she said. ‘After all, you’d have had to make the arrangements before you had any idea that Volyova was going to sabotage her weapon. You can’t have done it since; you’ve been on the bridge the whole time.’
They had reached the nearest airlock. It was a small unit, just large enough to take a suited human. Like virtually everything else in this part of the ship, the controls on the door were caked in grime and corrosion and odd fungal growth. Yet it still functioned, miraculously.
‘So why are you doing this?’ Hegazi asked, as the door hummed open and she poked him into the cramped, sullenly lit interior. ‘If you don’t think I was capable of doing it?’
‘It’s because I don’t like you,’ she said, and closed the door on him.
THIRTY
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
When they were at last alone in their quarters, Pascale said, ‘You can’t go through with this, Dan. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
He was tired; they all were, but with his mind racing, the last thing he felt like now was sleep. Still, if the bridgehead survived long enough for his entry into Cerberus to proceed as planned, now might be the last opportunity he had for proper sleep for tens of hours; perhaps even days. He would need to be functioning as keenly as he ever had in his life when he descended beneath the alien world. Yet now, obviously, Pascale was going to do her best to talk him out of it.
‘It’s far too late now,’ he said, wearily. ‘We’ve already announced ourselves; done harm to Cerberus. The world knows of our presence; already knows something of our nature. My entering it won’t make much difference now, except that I’ll learn much more than Volyova’s clunking spy robots will ever tell me.’
‘You can’t know what’s waiting for you down there, Dan.’
‘Yes, I can. An answer to what happened to the Amarantin. Can’t you see that humanity needs to have that information?’
He could see that she did, if only on some theoretical level. But she said, ‘What if it was the same kind of curiosity you’re showing now that brought extinction upon them? You saw what happened to the Lorean.’
Once again he thought of Alicia, dying in that attack. What exactly was it that had made him so unwilling to spare the time that would have been needed to recover her body from the wreck? Even now, the way he had ordered that she go down with the bridgehead struck him as chillingly impersonal, as if — for a fleeting instant — it had not been him giving that order; not even Calvin, but something hiding behind both of them. The thought made him flinch, so he crushed it beneath conscious concern, the way one crushed an insect.
‘Then we’ll know, won’t we?’ he said. ‘Finally, we’ll know. And even if it kills us, someone else will know what happened — someone on Resurgam, or even in another system. You have to understand, Pascale, that I think it’s worth that kind of risk.’
‘There’s more to it than just curiosity, isn’t there?’ She looked at him, obviously expecting some kind of answer. He just looked back at her, knowing how intimidating the lack of focus of his gaze could be, until she continued speaking. ‘Khouri was put aboard to kill you. She even admitted as much. Volyova said she was sent here by someone who might have been Carine L
efevre.’
‘That’s not only impossible, it’s insulting.’
‘But it still might be the truth. And there might be more to it than just a personal vendetta, too. Maybe Lefevre did die, after all, but something assumed her shape, inherited her body, or whatever — something that knows the danger you’re playing with. Can’t you at least accept that as a remote possibility?’
‘Nothing that happened around Lascaille’s Shroud can have any bearing on what happened to the Amarantin.’
‘How can you be so damned sure?’
Angry now, he said, ‘Because I was there! Because I went where Lascaille went, into Revelation Space, and what they’d shown Lascaille, they showed to me.’ He tried to calm his voice, taking both of Pascale’s hands in his own. ‘They were ancient; so alien they made me shiver. They touched my mind. I saw them… and they were nothing like the Amarantin.’
For the first time since leaving Resurgam, he thought back to that instant of screaming comprehension, as his damaged contact module had skirted the Shroud. Old as fossils, the Shrouders’ minds had crawled into his; a moment of abyssal knowing. What Lascaille had said was true. They might have been alien in their biology, inspiring a kind of visceral revulsion simply because they were so far from what the human mind considered the right and proper form for sentience, but in the dynamics of their thought, they were a lot closer to people than their shapes would ever have implied. For a moment, the strangeness of that dichotomy troubled him… but it could not have been otherwise, for how else could the Pattern Jugglers have wired his mind to think like a Shrouder, if the basic modes of thought were not similar? Then he remembered the festering queasiness of their communion — and a spillage of memory crashing over him, a glimpse of the vastness of Shrouder history. Across millions of years, they had scoured a younger galaxy than the present one, hunting down and collecting the discarded and dangerous playthings of other, even older, civilisations. Now those fabulous things were almost within reach; behind the membrane of the Shroud… and he had almost tricked his way inside. And then something else…
Something parting, momentarily, like a curtain, or a gap in clouds — something so fleeting, he had almost forgotten it until the present moment. Something revealed to him that should have remained hidden — hidden behind layers of identity. The identity and memories of a long-dead race… worn as camouflage…
And something else entirely within the Shroud; and another reason entirely for its existence… But the recollection itself seemed elusive, seemed to slip out of mental reach, until he was left again with Pascale, and only the aftertaste of doubt.
‘Promise me you won’t go,’ she said.
‘We’ll talk about it in the morning,’ Sylveste said.
He woke in his quarters, the little sleep he had snatched insufficient to purge fatigue from his blood.
Something had stirred him awake, but for a moment he could not see or hear any disturbance. Then Sylveste noticed that the bedside holo screen was glowing palely, like a mirror turned to moonlight.
He moved to activate the link, taking care not to wake Pascale. Not that there seemed any danger of that; she was sleeping soundly. The discussion they had shared before sleeping seemed to have given her the mental calm she needed for that.
Sajaki’s face appeared on the holo, backdropped by the apparatus of the clinic. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked, softly.
‘My wife is here,’ Sylveste said, whispering. ‘She’s sleeping.’
‘Then I’ll be brief.’ He held up his damaged hand for inspection, revealing how the glistening caul had now filled out, returning his wrist to its normal profile, although the caul still glowed with subcutaneous industry. ‘I am well enough to leave here. But I have no intention of duplicating Hegazi’s current predicament.’
‘Then you’ve got a problem. Volyova and Khouri have all the weapons, and they’ve made sure we won’t get our hands on any more.’ He lowered his voice even further. ‘I don’t think it would take much to persuade her to lock me up as well. My threats against the ship don’t seem to have impressed her.’
‘She’s assuming you’d never go that far.’
‘What if she’s right?’
Sajaki shook his head.
‘None of this matters any more. In a matter of days — five at the most — her weapon will begin to fail. You have that window in which to get inside. And don’t pretend that her little robots will teach you anything.’
‘I know that much already.’
Next to him Pascale stirred.
‘Then accept this proposition,’ Sajaki said. ‘I will lead you inside. The two of us; no one else. We can take two suits, of the same type that brought you here from Resurgam. We don’t even need a ship. We’ll reach Cerberus in less than a day. That gives you two days to get in, a day to look around and then a day to leave the way you came in. By which time of course you will know the route.’
‘What about you?’
‘I accompany you. I told you already how I believe we should proceed with the Captain.’ Sylveste nodded. ‘You think you’ll find something inside Cerberus; something that can heal him.’
‘I have to start somewhere.’
Sylveste looked around. Sajaki’s voice had been like the wind stirring trees, and the room seemed preternaturally still; more like a tableau glimpsed through a magic lantern than anything real. He thought of the fury taking place on Cerberus at that very moment; the fury of clashing machines, even if they were, for the most part, smaller than bacteria; and the din of their conflict inaudible to any human senses. But it was happening and Sajaki was right: they had only days before the numberless machines owing allegiance to Cerberus would begin to erode Volyova’s mighty siege engine. Every second he delayed entering that place was a second less he would have to spend inside it, and a second which would make his eventual return take place that much closer to the end; that much more hazardous, since by then the bridge would be closing. Pascale stirred again, but he sensed that she was still deep in dream. She seemed no more present than the interlocked birds which mosaicked the room’s walls; no more capable of being quickened to wakefulness.
‘It’s all very sudden,’ he said.
‘But you’ve waited for this moment all your life,’ Sajaki said, his voice rising. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not ready to seize it. Don’t tell me you’re scared of what you might find.’
Sylveste knew he had to make a decision before the true alienness of the moment had registered. ‘Where do I meet you?’
‘We’ll meet outside the ship,’ Sajaki said, and then explained why it had to be that way; why it was too risky for them to meet, because then Sajaki would run the risk of meeting Volyova or Khouri, or even Sylveste’s wife. ‘They still think I’m ill,’ Sajaki added, rubbing the membrane casing his wounded wrist. ‘But if they find me outside the clinic, they’ll do to me what they did to Hegazi. But from here, I can reach a suit in a few minutes, without entering any areas of the ship still capable of registering my presence.’
‘And me?’
‘Go to the nearest elevator. I’ll arrange for it to take you to a suit nearer to you. You don’t have to do anything. The suit will take care of everything.’
‘Sajaki, I…’
‘Just be outside in ten minutes. Your suit will bring you to me.’ Sajaki smiled before signing off. ‘And I strongly advise that you don’t wake your wife.’
Sajaki was true to his word: the elevator and the suit both seemed to know exactly where it was that Sylveste had to go. He met no one during his journey, and no one troubled him as the suit measured him, adjusted itself and then folded affectionately around him.
There was no indication that the ship even noticed as the airlock opened; still less as he reached space.
Volyova was startled awake, interrupted from monochromatic dreams of raging insect armies.
Khouri was banging on her door, shouting something, though Volyova was too bleary to make it out. When she opened th
e door she was looking down the barrel of the leatherclad plasma-rifle. Khouri hesitated for a fraction of a second before lowering it, as if unsure just what she had been expecting beyond the door.
‘What is it?’ Volyova asked.
‘It’s Pascale,’ Khouri said, sweat beading her forehead, shining in slick patches around the gun’s grips. ‘She woke up and Sylveste wasn’t there.’
‘Wasn’t there?’
‘He’d left this. She’s pretty cut up about it, but she wanted me to show it to you.’ Khouri let the gun drop in its sling and fished out a sheet of paper from her pocket.
Volyova rubbed her eyes and took the paper. Tactile contact activated its stored message; Sylveste’s face appeared on it, sketched darkly against a background of interlocking birds.
‘I’m afraid I’ve lied to you,’ he said, his voice buzzing from the paper. ‘Pascale, I’m sorry — you’re entitled to hate me for this, but I hope you won’t; not after what we went through.’ His voice was very low now. ‘You asked me to promise I wouldn’t go into Cerberus. But I’m going, and by the time you read this I’ll be well on my way, far too late to stop. There’s no justification I can give for this, except it’s something I have to do, and I think it’s something you’ve always known I would do, if we ever got this close.’ He paused, either to draw breath or think what he would say next. ‘Pascale, you were the only one who guessed what really happened around Lascaille’s Shroud. I admired you for that, you know. That was why I wasn’t afraid to admit the truth to you. I swear, what I told you was the way I thought it happened; not just another lie. But now this woman – Khouri — says that she has been sent by someone who might have been Carine Lefevre, and that she’s been sent to kill me because of what I might do.’
Again the paper was silent for a moment.
‘I acted as if I didn’t believe a word of it, Pascale, and maybe that was how I thought at the time. But I have to put those ghosts to rest; finally convince myself that none of this has any connection to what happened back around the Shroud.