She reached the bridge unhindered, although that did not stop her checking every shadow for a lurking machine, or — worse, now — rat. She did not know what the rats could do to her, but she was less than minded to find out.
The bridge was empty, much as when she had left it. The damage Khouri had wrought on it was still there; even the staining of Sajaki’s blood on the floor of the vast spherical meeting place. The holodisplay was still aglow, looming over her with its constantly updating progress report on the establishment of the Cerberus bridgehead. For a moment she could not help but take a proprietorial interest in her creation, which was still gamely holding its own against the antibiotic forces deployed by the alien world. Yet even as she experienced a flush of pride, she willed it to fail, so that Sylveste would be denied entry. Assuming that he had not already arrived.
‘What have you come for?’ asked a voice.
She whipped around, and there was a figure, looking down at her from one of the curved levels of the bridge. It was no one she recognised; just a darkly cloaked male with clasped hands and a sunken skull of a face. She blasted it, but the figure remained, even after the slug-gun’s discharges had ripped through it, ion trails lingering in the air like banners.
Another figure, differently dressed, had appeared next to it. ‘Your tenancy here has expired,’ it said, in the oldest variant of Norte, Volyova’s processing of it so tardy that she did not immediately understand his words.
‘You must understand, Triumvir, that this domain is no longer yours,’ said another, shivering to life on the chamber’s opposite side, clad in the body section of a fantastically ancient spacesuit, ribbed with cooling lines and boxy attachments. The language he spoke was the oldest strain of Russish she could parse.
‘What do you hope to achieve here?’ asked the first figure, even as another appeared next to it, and began talking to her, and another; figures from the past hectoring her from all sides. ‘This is outrageous…’ But the voice blurred into that of another ghost, speaking to her from her right.
‘… lack a mandate here, Triumvir. I have to tell you…’
‘… gravely exceeded your authority and must now submit to…’
‘… bitterly disappointed, Ilia, and must politely request that you…’
‘… rescind… privileges…’
‘… completely unacceptable…’
She screamed as the welter of voices became a constant wordless roar, the congregation of the dead filling the chamber totally, until all she could see in any direction was a mass of ancient faces, their mouths moving as if each one were the only one speaking; as if each imagined that he had her absolute attention. It was as if they were praying to her; as if they thought she was omniscient. Praying, but at the same time complaining; carpingly at first, as if disappointed, but — with every second — with more hate and scorn, as if she had not only let them down in the bitterest way possible, but that she had also committed some atrocity so dire it was unspeakable even now, but could only be acknowledged in the curved revulsion of their lips and the naked shame in their eyes.
She hefted the gun. The temptation to empty a slug-clip into the ghosts was overwhelming. She could not kill them, of course, but she could seriously disable their projection systems. But she needed to conserve her ammo now that the warchive was inaccessible.
‘Go away!’ she shouted. ‘Get away from me!’
One by one, the dead grew silent and vanished. As each departed, each shook its head disappointedly, as if ashamed of staying in her presence a moment longer. Finally, she had the room to herself. She was breathing in hard rasps and needed to calm down. She lit another cigarette and smoked it slowly, trying to give her mind a few minutes’ rest. She palmed the gun, glad she had not wasted the clip, for all the transient pleasure it would have given her to destroy the bridge. Khouri had chosen well. Emblazoned along the gun’s flanks were silver and gold Chinese dragon motifs.
A voice spoke from the display.
Volyova looked up into the face of Sun Stealer.
It was as she had known it must be, after Pascale had first told her the significance of the creature’s name. As she had known it must be, and yet also much worse. Because she was not simply seeing how the alien looked. She was seeing how the alien looked to itself — and there was evidently something very wrong with Sun Stealer’s mind. She thought back to Nagorny, and understood how the man had been driven mad. She could hardly blame him, now — not if he had lived with this thing in his head all that time, and yet had lacked an inkling of where it came from or what it wanted from him. No; she sympathised with the dead Gunnery Officer, the poor, poor bastard. Perhaps she too would have sunk into psychosis when faced with this apparition, looming behind every dream, every waking thought.
Once Sun Stealer might have been Amarantin. But he had changed, perhaps deliberately, through the selective pressure of genetic engineering, sculpting himself and his Banished brethren into a new species entirely. They had reshaped their anatomy for flight in zero-gravity; grown immense wings. She could see those wings now; looming behind the curved, sleek head which seemed to thrust down towards her.
The head was a skull. The eye sockets were not exactly vacant; not exactly hollow, but seemed abrim with reservoirs of something infinitely black and infinitely deep, as dark and depthless as she imagined the membrane of a Shroud. The bones of Sun Stealer shone with colourless lustre.
‘Despite what I said earlier,’ she said, when the initial shock of what she was seeing had passed, or at least subdued to a point where she could tolerate it, ‘I think you could have found a way to kill me by now. If that was what you wanted.’
‘You cannot guess what I want.’
When he spoke there was just a wordless absence which somehow made sense, as if carved from silence. The creature’s complex jawbones did not move at all. Speech, she remembered of the Amarantin, had never been an important mode of communication. Their society had been based around visual display. Something so basic would surely have been preserved, even after Sun Stealer’s flock had departed Resurgam and commenced their transformations; transformations so radical that when they later returned to the world they would be mistaken for winged gods.
‘I know what you don’t want,’ Volyova said. ‘You don’t want anything to stop Sylveste reaching Cerberus. That’s why we have to die now; in case we find a way to stop him.’
‘His mission is of great importance to me,’ Sun Stealer said, then seemed to reconsider. ‘To us. To us who survived.’
‘Survived what?’ Maybe this would be her one and only chance to come to any understanding. ‘No; wait — what else could you have survived, but the death of the Amarantin? Is that what it was? Did you somehow find a way not to die?’
‘You know by now the place where I entered Sylveste.’ It was less a question, more a flat statement. Volyova wondered to how much of their discourse Sun Stealer had been privy?
‘It had to be Lascaille’s Shroud,’ she said. ‘That was the only thing that made sense — although not much, I admit.’
‘That was where we sought sanctuary; for nine hundred and ninety thousand years.’
The coincidence was too great not to mean something. ‘Ever since life ended on Resurgam.’
‘Yes.’ The word trailed off into a hiss of sibilance. ‘The Shrouds were of our designing; the last desperate enterprise of our Flock, even after those who stayed behind on the surface were incinerated.’
‘I don’t understand. What Lascaille said, and Sylveste himself found out…’
‘They were not shown the truth. Lascaille was shown a fiction — our identity replaced by that of a much older culture, utterly unlike ourselves. The true purpose of the Shrouds was not revealed to him. He was shown a lie which would encourage others to come.’
Volyova could see how that lie would have worked, now. Lascaille had been told that the Shrouds were repositories for harmful technologies — things humanity secretly craved, such as me
thods of faster-than-light travel. When Lascaille had revealed this to Sylveste, it had only increased Sylveste’s desire to break into the Shroud. He had been able to muster the support of the entire Demarchist society around Yellowstone towards’ that goal, for the rewards would be dazzling beyond comprehension for the first faction to unlock such alien mysteries.
‘But if it was a lie,’ she said, ‘what was the true function of the Shrouds?’
‘We built them to hide inside, Triumvir Volyova.’ It seemed to be playing with her, enjoying her confusion. ‘They were places of sanctuary. Zones of restructured spacetime, within which we could shelter.’
‘Shelter from whom?’
‘The ones who survived the Dawn War. The ones who were given the name of the Inhibitors.’
She nodded. There was much she did not understand, but one thing was now clear to her. What Khouri had told her — the fragments that the woman remembered from the strange dream she had been vouchsafed in the gunnery — had been something like the truth. Khouri had not remembered everything, and the parts had not always been related to Volyova in the right order, but it was obvious now that this was only because Khouri had been expected to grasp something too huge, too alien — too apocalyptic — for her mind to comfortably hold. She had done her best, but her best had not been good enough. But now Volyova was being accorded disclosure of parts of the same picture, although from an oddly different perspective.
Khouri had been told about the Dawn War by the Mademoiselle, who had not wanted Sylveste to succeed. Yet Sun Stealer desired that outcome more than anything else.
‘What is it about?’ she asked. ‘I know what you’re doing here; you’re delaying me; keeping me waiting because you know I’ll do anything to hear the answers you have. And you’re right, in a way. I have to know. I have to know everything.’
Sun Stealer waited, silently, and then continued to answer all the questions she had for it.
When she was done, Volyova decided that she could profitably use one of the slugs in her clip. She shot the display; the great glass globe shattered into a billion icy shards, Sun Stealer’s face disrupting in the same explosion.
Khouri and Pascale took the circuitous route to the clinic, avoiding elevators and the kind of well-repaired corridors through which drones could easily travel. They kept their guns drawn at all times, and preferred to blast anything that looked even vaguely suspicious, even if it later turned out to be nothing more than a chance alignment of shadows or a disturbingly shaped accretion of corrosion on a wall or bulkhead.
‘Did he give you any kind of warning he was going to leave so soon?’ Khouri asked.
‘No; not this soon. I mean, I thought he would try it at some point, but I tried talking him out of it.’
‘How do you feel about him?’
‘What do you expect me to say? He was my husband. We were in love.’ Pascale seemed to collapse then; Khouri reached out to catch her. The woman wiped tears from her eyes, rubbing them red. ‘I hate him for what he’s done — you would as well. I don’t understand him, either. But I still love him despite it. I keep thinking… maybe he’s dead already. It’s possible, isn’t it? And even if he isn’t, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever see him again.’
‘It can’t be a very safe place he’s going to,’ Khouri said, and then wondered if Cerberus was any more dangerous than the ship, now.
‘No, I know. I don’t think even he realises how much danger he’s in — or the rest of us.’
‘Still, your husband isn’t just anyone. It’s Sylveste we’re talking about here.’ Khouri reminded Pascale that Sylveste’s life had been shot through with a core of rare luck, and that it would be strange if that fortune should desert him now, when the thing that he had always reached for was almost within his grasp. ‘He’s a slippery bastard, and I think there’s still a good chance he’ll find a way out of this.’
That seemed to calm Pascale, fractionally.
Then Khouri told her that Hegazi was dead and that the ship appeared to be trying to murder everyone else left aboard it.
‘Sajaki can’t be here,’ Pascale said. ‘I mean, he can’t, can he? Dan wouldn’t know how to find his own way to Cerberus. He’d need one of you to go with him.’
‘That’s what Volyova thought.’
‘Then why are we here?’
‘I guess Ilia didn’t trust her convictions.’
Khouri pushed open the door which led into the clinic from the partially flooded access corridor, kicking a janitor-rat out of the way as she did so. The clinic smelt wrong. She knew it instantly. ‘Pascale, something bad has happened here.’
‘I’ll… what is it I’m supposed to say at this point? Cover you?’ Pascale had her low-yield beam gun out, without looking like she had much idea what to do with it.
‘Yes,’ Khouri said. ‘You cover me. That’s a very good idea.’
She entered the clinic, pushing the barrel of the plasma-rifle ahead of her.
As she moved in, the room sensed her presence and notched up its illumination. She had visited Volyova here after the Triumvir had been injured; she felt she knew the approximate geometry of the place.
She looked to the bed where she was sure Sajaki ought to have been. Above the bed floated an elaborate array of gimballed and hinged servo-mechanical medical tools, radiating down from a central point like a mutated steel hand with far too many fingers, all of which seemed tipped with talons.
There was not a single inch of metal which was not covered in blood; thickly congealed, like candle-wax.
‘Pascale, I don’t think —’
But she too had seen what lay on the bed below the machinery; the thing that might once have been Sajaki. There was also not a single inch of the bed which was not adorned in red. It was difficult to see where Sajaki ended and where his eviscerated remains began. He reminded her of the Captain; except here the Captain’s silver borderlessness had been transfigured into scarlet; like an artist’s reworking of the same basic theme in a different and more carnal medium. Two halves of the same morbid diptych.
His chest was bloated, raised above the bed, as if a stream of galvanising current were still slamming through him. His chest was also hollow; the gore pooled in a deep excavated crater which ran from his sternum to his abdomen, like a terrible steel fist had reached down and ripped half of him out. Perhaps that was the way it had happened. Perhaps he had not even been awake when it did. For confirmation of this theory she scrutinised his face, the little of his expression she could decipher beneath the veil of red.
No; Triumvir Sajaki had almost certainly been awake.
She felt Pascale’s presence not far behind. ‘You shouldn’t forget I’ve seen death,’ she said. ‘I saw my father assassinated.’
‘You’ve never seen this.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’ve never seen anything like this.’
His chest exploded. Something burst out of it, at first so efficiently concealed by the fountain of blood that it had disturbed that it was not obvious what it was — until it landed on the blood-slicked floor of the room and scampered away, wormlike tail lashing behind it. Then three more rats elevated their snouts out of Sajaki, sniffing the air, regarding Khouri and Pascale with matched pairs of black eyes. Then they too pulled themselves over the caldera which had been his ribcage, landing on the floor, following the one who had just left. They vanished into the room’s darker recesses.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Khouri said. But even as she was speaking it moved; the fist of steel fingers, activating with blinding speed, reaching out to her with a pair of its clawed, diamond-tipped digits, so quickly that she could only begin to scream. The claws snagged her jacket, ripping into it, and then she began to pull away, with all the strength she had.
She wrenched free, but not before it had located a purchase around her gun, dragging it with brutal force from her fingers. Khouri fell back into the mess on the floor; noticing how her jacket was soiled with Sajaki??
?s blood; how at least some of the brighter red pooling from the rips must have been her own.
The surgical machine elevated the gun, cradling it for them to see, as if gloating at its acquisition of a hunting trophy. Now two of its more dextrous manipulators snaked into place and began to examine the gun’s controls, stroking the leather casing in eerie fascination. Slowly, ever so slowly, the manipulators began to point the gun in Khouri’s direction.
Pascale raised the beamer and blasted the whole assembly, blood-caked metallic chunks splattering over Sajaki’s remains. The plasma-rifle crashed down, blackened and gushing smoke, bluish sparks dancing from its shattered casing.
Khouri picked herself up, oblivious to the filth in which she was liberally covered.
Her ruined plasma-rifle was now buzzing angrily, the sparks dancing with increased ferocity. ‘It’s going to blow,’ Khouri said. ‘We have to get away from here.’
They turned to the door, and then had a second to adjust to what was now blocking their exit. There had to be a thousand of them; piled three deep in the ship-slime, each individual careless of its own life, but acting for the greater good of the whole senseless mass. Behind, more rats; hundreds and then thousands more, piling back along the corridor; a vast rodent tidal wave, brimming at the aperture of the clinic, ready to surge forwards in one consuming tsunami of appetite.
She unsheathed the only weapon she now had left, the tiny, ineffectual needler she carried only because of the precision it allowed. She began to squirt it at the mass of rats while Pascale doused them with the beamer, which was hardly more suited to the task. Rats exploded and burned wherever they pointed their guns, but there were always more of them, and now the first rank of rats was beginning to creep into the clinic.