‘Where they found…’ Pascale nodded at the image of Hades and Cerberus. ‘This. Is that what you’re saying?’
Khouri nodded in agreement, and then began to explain the rest; what little there was to relate.
Sylveste fell and fell, and in his falling he hardly bothered to note the passing of time. Finally there came a point where more than two hundred kilometres of the shaft reached above his head; barely a few kilometres lay below his feet. Twinkling lights shone below, arranged into constellation-like patterns, and for an instant he entertained the idea that he had travelled much further than seemed possible, and these lights were actually stars, and that he was on the point of leaving Cerberus completely. But the thought died as soon as it had come to mind. There was something just a little too regular about the way the lights were aligned, just a little too purposeful; a little too pregnant with intelligent design.
He dropped out of the shaft into emptiness as, much earlier, he had passed out of the bridgehead. As then, he found himself falling through a tremendous unoccupied volume, but this chamber seemed very much larger than the one immediately below the crust. No gnarled tree-trunks rose up from a crystal floor to support the ceiling over his head, and he doubted that any lay beyond the immediate curvature of the horizon. Yet there was a floor below him, and it must have been that the ceiling was unsupported, thrown around the entire volume of the world-within-a-world below, suspended only by the preposterous counter-balancing of its own gravitational infall, or something beyond Sylveste’s imagination. Whatever; he was dropping now towards the starred floor tens of kilometres below.
It was not difficult, finding Sajaki’s suit; not once Sylveste had begun that lonely descent. His own still-functioning suit did all that was required, locking onto the signature of its fallen companion (something of which must therefore have survived) and then directing Sylveste’s fall towards it, bringing him down only tens of metres from the spot where Sajaki had fallen. The Triumvir had hit fast; that much was obvious. But then there were few other options if one had to accept an uncontrolled fall from two hundred kilometres up. He appeared to have partially buried himself in the metallic floor, before undergoing a bounce which had resulted in his final resting position being face down.
Sylveste had not been expecting to find Sajaki alive, but the mangled contours of his suit were still shocking; rather as if it were a china doll which had been subjected to some terrible temper tantrum by a malevolent child. The suit was gashed and scarred and discoloured, damage which had probably happened during the battle and Sajaki’s subsequent grazing fall, as the Coriolis force knocked him repeatedly against the shaft walls.
Sylveste moved him onto his back, using his own suit’s amplification to ease the process. He knew that what he would be confronted with would not be pleasant, but that it was nonetheless something he had to endure so he could press on; the closing of a mental chapter. He had seldom felt anything but antipathy towards Sajaki, alleviated by a forced respect for the man’s cleverness and the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness with which he had sought Sylveste across all the decades. It was nothing remotely resembling friendship; merely the craftsmanlike appreciation for a piece of equipment which did its job exceptionally well. That was Sajaki, Sylveste thought: a well-honed tool; shaped admirably towards one end and one end only.
The suit’s faceplate was riven by a thumb-wide crack. Something drew Sylveste forward, kneeling until his own head was next to that of the dead Triumvir.
‘I’m sorry it had to end like this,’ he said. ‘I can’t say we were ever friends, Yuuji — but I suppose in the end I wanted you to see what lay ahead as much as I did. I think you’d have appreciated it.’ And then he saw that the suit was empty; that all it had ever been was a shell.
This was what Khouri knew.
The Banished had reached the edge of the solar system, thousands of years after their exile from mainstream Amarantin culture. It was in the nature of things that they progressed slowly, since it was not simply technological limits against which they were pushing. They were also ramming against the constraints of their own psychology, barriers no less impervious.
The Banished, at first, still retained the flock instincts of their brethren. They had evolved into a society highly dependent on visual modes of communication; highly organised into large collectives, where the individual was of less importance than the whole. Displaced from its position in a flock, a single Amarantin underwent a kind of psychosis; the equivalent of massive sensory deprivation. Even small groupings were not enough to assuage that terror, which meant that Amarantin culture was extremely stable; extremely resilient against internal plots and treason. But it also meant that the Banished were, by their very isolation, consigned to a kind of insanity.
So they accepted this, and worked with it. They changed themselves; cultured sociopathy. In only a few hundred generations the Banished had stopped being a flock at all, but had fragmented into dozens of specialised clades, each tuned to a particular strain of madness. Or what would have been seen as madness by those who had stayed at home…
The ability to function in smaller groups enabled the Banished to probe further from Resurgam, out of the immediate volume of light-limited communication. The more psychotic individuals reached even further from the sun, until they found Hades and the odd, troubling planet which orbited it. By this time the Banished had gone through the same philosophical hoops which Volyova and Pascale had just summarised for Khouri’s benefit. How the galaxy should have been a busier place than it really was, if their ideas were correct — which, as a consequence, was probably not the case. They had listened in the radio, optical, gravitational and neutrino bands for the voices of other cultures, others like them, but had heard nothing. Some of the more adventurous among them — or the more deranged, depending on one’s point of view — had even left the system entirely, and had found nothing of great consequence to report back to home: a few ruins here and there (enigmatic) and a puzzling sludge-like organism which hinted at organisational sophistication, encountered on a handful of aquatic planets, as if it had been placed there.
But all of this became incidental when they found the thing around Hades.
It was, beyond any possible doubt, artefactual. It had been placed there by another civilisation, uncountable millions of years in the past. It seemed to actively invite them to enter its mysteries. So they began to explore it.
And that was when their problems began.
‘It was an Inhibitor device,’ Pascale said. ‘That was what they found, wasn’t it?’
‘It had been waiting there for millions of years,’ Khouri said. ‘All the time they were evolving from what we’d think of as dinosaurs, or birds. All the time they spent reaching towards intelligence; learning to use tools; discovering fire…’
‘Just waiting,’ Volyova echoed. Behind her, the tactical display had been pulsing red for many minutes now, indicating that the shuttle had now fallen within the theoretical maximum range of the lighthugger’s beam weapons. A kill at this distance would be difficult but not impossible, and neither would it be swift. She continued, ‘Waiting for something recognisably intelligent to enter its vicinity — at which point it doesn’t strike out mindlessly; doesn’t destroy them. Because that would defeat the point. What it does is encourage them in, so it can learn as much about them as possible. Where they come from. What kind of technology they have, how they think, how they co-operate and communicate.’
‘Gathering intelligence.’
‘Yes.’ Volyova’s voice was as dolorous as a church bell. ‘It’s patient, you see. But sooner or later there comes a point when it decides that it has all the intelligence it needs. And then — only then — it acts.’
Now the three of them were on common ground. ‘Which is why the Amarantin died out,’ Pascale said, wonderingly. ‘It did something to their sun; tampered with it, triggered something like a vast coronal mass ejection; just enough to scour Resurgam clean of life, and cause a phase of cometa
ry-infall for a few hundred thousand years.’
‘Ordinarily the Inhibitors wouldn’t go to such drastic lengths,’ Volyova said. ‘But in this case they’d left it far too late for anything less. And even that wasn’t sufficient, of course; the Banished were already spaceborn. They had to be hunted down; across tens of lightyears, if necessary.’
Again there was a chime from the hull sensors, warning of a directed radar scan. Another chime followed soon after; evidence that the pursuing ship was narrowing its focus.
‘The Inhibitor device around Hades must have alerted others, elsewhere,’ Khouri said, trying to ignore the mechanised prophecies of imminent doom. ‘Transmitted the intelligence it had gathered, warning them to be on the lookout for the Banished.’
‘It can’t have simply been a case of sitting around waiting for them to show up,’ Volyova said. ‘The machines must have switched over from passivity to something more active — replicating hunting machines, for instance, programmed with the templates of the Banished. No matter which direction the Banished turned to flee, light would have outraced them, and Inhibitor systems would always be one step ahead, alert and waiting.’
‘They wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
‘But it can’t have been instantaneous extinction,’ Pascale said. ‘The Banished had time to return to Resurgam; time to preserve what they could of the old culture. Even if they knew they were being hunted down, and that the sun was in the process of destroying their homeworld.’
‘Maybe it took ten years; maybe a century.’ The way Volyova spoke, it was obvious she didn’t think it made a great deal of difference. ‘All we know is that some managed to get further than others.’
‘But none survived,’ Pascale said. ‘Did they?’
‘Some did,’ Khouri said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Behind Volyova, the tactical display began to shriek.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Cerberus Interior, 2567
The final shell was hollow.
It had taken him three days to reach it; a day since he had left Sajaki’s bodyless suit on the floor of the third shell, more than five hundred kilometres above him now. If he stopped to think about those distances, he knew, he would go quietly mad, so he carefully quarantined them from his thoughts. Simply being in an entirely alien environment was troubling enough; he did not wish to compound his fear with an additional dose of claustrophobia. Yet his quarantining was not complete, so that behind every thought there was a nagging background of crushing fright, the thought that at any instant some action he did would cause the delicate equilibria of this place to shift catastrophically, bringing down that vast, impossible ceiling.
With each inward layer he seemed to pass through a subtly different phase of Amarantin construction methodology. History, too, he supposed — but nothing was ever that simple. The levels did not seem to get systematically more or less advanced as he penetrated deeper, but rather evinced different philosophies; different approaches. It was as if the first Amarantin to arrive here had found something (what, he had not yet begun to guess) and had taken the decision to englobe it in an artificial shell armoured and capable of defending itself. Then another group must have arrived and elected to englobe that, perhaps because they believed their fortifications were more secure. The last of all had taken the process one logical step further, by camouflaging their fortifications so that they did not resemble anything artificial at all. It was impossible to guess over what timescales this layering had taken place, so he studiously avoided doing so. Maybe the different layers had been emplaced almost simultaneously — or perhaps the process had been drawn out over the thousands of years between Sun Stealer’s departure with the Banished Ones, and his godlike return.
Naturally, he had been less than comforted by what he found in Sajaki’s suit.
‘He was never there,’ Calvin said, filling in his thoughts. ‘All the while you thought he was in the suit, he wasn’t. The suit was empty. No wonder he never let you get too close.’
‘Sneaky bastard.’
‘I’ll say. But it wasn’t actually Sajaki being a sneaky bastard, was it?’
Sylveste was desperately trying to find another way to explain this paradox, but was failing at every attempt. ‘But if not Sajaki…’ He trailed off, remembering how he had not actually seen the Triumvir in person before they departed the ship. Sajaki had called him from the clinic, but he had no reason to believe that had really been Sajaki.
‘Listen, something was driving that suit until it crashed.’ Calvin was doing his favourite trick of sounding absurdly calm, despite the situation. But he lacked the usual bravado. ‘I’d say there’s only one logical culprit.’
‘Sun Stealer.’ Sylveste said the words experimentally, testing the idea for its repulsiveness. It was no less bitter than he had imagined it would be. ‘It was him, wasn’t it? Khouri had it right all along.’
‘I’d say that at this juncture we’d be staggeringly foolish to reject that hypothesis. Do you want me to continue?’
‘No,’ Sylveste said. ‘Not just yet. Give me a moment to think things through, then you can inflict all the pious wisdom on me you see fit.’
‘What’s there to think through?’
‘I’d have thought it was obvious. Whether we go on or not.’
The decision had not been one of the simpler ones in his life. Now he knew that, for all or part of this, he had been manipulated. How deep had that manipulation gone? Had it extended to his very powers of reason? Had his thought processes been subjugated towards this one end for most of his life in fact, since returning from Lascaille’s Shroud? Had he really died out there, and returned to Yellowstone as some kind of automaton, acting and feeling like his old self, but really directed towards one goal only, which was now on the point of being achieved? And did it honestly matter?
After all, no matter which way he cut it, no matter how false these feelings were, no matter how irrational the logic, this was the place he had always wanted to be.
He could not go back; not yet.
Not until he knew.
‘Svinoi pig-dog,’ Volyova said.
The first graser burst had hit the nose of the shuttle thirty seconds after the tactical attack siren had begun to shriek; barely enough time to throw off a cloud of ablative chaff, designed to dissipate the initial energies of the incoming gamma-ray photons. Just before the flightdeck windows rendered themselves opaque, Volyova saw a silver flash, as sacrificial hull armour vanished in a gasp of excited metal ions. The structural shock rammed through the fuselage like a concussion charge. More sirens joined in the threnody, and a vast acreage of the tactical display switched over to offensive mode, graphing up weapons readiness data.
Useless; all of it useless. The Melancholia’s defences were simply too small-scale, too short-range, to have any chance against the pursuing megatonnage of the lighthugger. Hardly surprising; some of the Infinity’s guns were larger than the shuttle, and those were probably the ones that it had not yet bothered deploying.
Cerberus was a grey immensity, filling a third of the sky from the shuttle’s perspective. By now they should be decelerating, yet they were busy wasting precious seconds being fried. Even if they fought off the attack, they would be moving uncomfortably fast…
More of the hull vaporised.
She let her fingers do the talking, typing in a programmed evasive pattern that would undoubtedly get them out of the immediate focus of the graser onslaught. The only trouble was, it depended on sustaining thrust at ten gees.
She executed the routine, and almost immediately blacked out.
The chamber was hollow, but not empty.
Three hundred kilometres wide, Sylveste guessed it to be, though that was sheer guesswork, because his suit radar stubbornly refused to come up with a consistent distance for the diameter of the chamber, no matter how many readings he asked it to make. No doubt what was in the middle of the chamber was causing his suit difficulty. He could understand
that. The thing was causing him difficulty as well, though in perhaps not quite the same way. It was giving him a headache.
In fact, there were two of them, and he wasn’t sure which was the stranger. They were moving, or rather one of them was, locked in orbit around the other. The one that moved was like a gem, but it was a gem so complicated, and so constantly in flux, that it was impossible to describe its shape, or even its colour and lustre from moment to moment. All he knew was that it was large — tens of kilometres wide, it seemed — but again, when he asked the suit to confirm this, it was unable to give him a coherent reply. He might as well have asked the suit to comment on the subtext of a piece of free-form haiku, for all the sense it gave him.
He tried to enlarge it with his eyes’ zoom faculty, but it seemed to defy enlargement, if anything growing smaller when he examined it under magnification. Something seriously strange had happened to spacetime in the vicinity of that jewel.
Next, he tried to record a snapshot of it using his eyes’ image capture facility, but that failed as well, and what the image showed was something paradoxically more blurred than what he appeared to see in realtime, as if the object were changing more rapidly on small timescales — more thoroughly — than on timescales of seconds or longer. He tried to hold this concept in his head and for a moment thought he might have succeeded, but the illusion of understanding was only fleeting.
And the other thing…
The other thing, the stationary thing… if anything, this was worse.
It was like a gash in reality, a gaping hole from which erupted white light from the mouth of infinity. The light was intense, more intense and pure than any he had known or dreamt of — like the light which the near-dead spoke of, beckoning them to the afterlife. He too felt the light was beckoning. It was so bright he should have been blinded. But the more he looked into its fulgent depths, the less it seemed to glare; the more it became only a tranquil, fathomless whiteness.