“Open it,” Sluka said.
He pressed the key—it was the obvious thing to do—and the cylinder split open like a Russian doll, the top half rising on four metal supports which surrounded a slightly smaller cylinder hidden until now. Then the inner cylinder split open similarly, revealing another nested layer, and the process continued until six or seven shells had been revealed.
Inside was a thin silver column. There was a tiny window set into the column’s side, showing an illuminated cavity. Cradled in the cavity was what looked like a bulbous-headed pin.
“I assume by now you understand what this is,” Sluka said.
“I can guess it wasn’t manufactured here,” Sylveste said. “And I know nothing like this was brought with us from Yellowstone. Which leaves our excellent benefactor Remilliod. He sold this to you?”
“This and nine others,” she said. “Eight now, since we used the tenth against Cuvier.”
“It’s a weapon?”
“Remilliod’s people called it hot-dust,” she said. “Antimatter. The pinhead contains only a twentieth of a gramme of antilithium, but that’s more than sufficient for our purposes.”
“I didn’t realise such a weapon was possible,” he said. “Something so small, I mean.”
“That’s understandable. The technology’s been outlawed for so long almost nobody remembers how to actually make one.”
“What yield does this have?”
“About two kilotonnes. Enough to put a hole in Cuvier.”
Sylveste nodded, absorbing the implication of what she had said. In his mind’s eye he tried to imagine what it must have been like, for those who had either died in or had been blinded by the pinhead True Path had used against the capital. The slight pressure differential between the domes and the outside air would have led to ferocious winds combing through the ordered municipal spaces. He imagined the trees and plants of the arboreta uprooted and shredded by the force of it, the birds and other animals carried aloft on the hurricane. Those people who survived the initial breach—no guessing how many—would have had to seek shelter underground, quickly, before the choking outside air replaced the leaking dome air. Admittedly the air was closer to being breathable now than it had been twenty years ago, but it took skill to learn how to do it, even for a few minutes only. Most of the inhabitants of the capital had never left it. He did not greatly value their chances.
“Why?” he asked.
“It was a. . . ” She paused. “I was going to call it a mistake, but you could argue that there are no mistakes in war, only fortunate and less fortunate events. The intention, at least, was not to use the pinhead. Girardieau’s loyals were to surrender the city once they knew we possessed the weapon. But it didn’t work like that. Girardieau himself had known of the existence of the pinheads, but he hadn’t communicated that knowledge to his subordinates. No one would believe we had it.”
It was not necessary for her to tell him the rest; what had taken place was clear enough. Frustrated by the fact that their weapon was not taken seriously, the brigands had used it anyway. Yet the capital was still inhabited; Sluka had made that clear early on. Girardieau’s loyals still held it. He imagined them running things from subsurface bunkers, while overhead dust storms fingered through the open latticework of the ruined domes.
“So you see,” the woman said, “no one should underestimate us, much less anyone who retains any lingering attachment to Girardieau’s rule.”
“What do you plan to use the others for?”
“Infiltration. Remove the shrouding, and the pinhead itself is tiny enough to be implanted in a tooth. You’d never find it, except with the most detailed medical scan.”
“Is that your plan?” he asked. “To find eight volunteers, and have those things surgically implanted? Then have your eight infiltrate the capital again? This time they’d believe you, I think.”
“Except we don’t even need volunteers,” Sluka said. “They might be preferable, but they’re not necessary.”
Ignoring his own better judgement, Sylveste said, “Gillian, I think I liked you better fifteen years ago.”
“You can take him back to his cell,” she said to Falkender. “I’m bored with him for now.”
He felt the surgeon tug at his sleeve.
“May I spend more time with his eyes, Gillian? There was more I could do, but at the expense of greater discomfort.”
“Do you what you like,” Sluka said. “But don’t feel any obligation. Now that I have him, I have to confess I’m a little disappointed. I think I liked him better in the past as well, before Girardieau turned him into a martyr.” She shrugged. “He’s too valuable to throw away, but in the absence of anything better, I might just have him frozen, until I find a use for him. That might be a year from now, or it might be five years. All I’m saying is, it would be a shame to invest very much time in something we might soon tire of, Doctor Falkender.”
“Surgery has its own rewards,” the man said.
“I can see well enough now,” Sylveste said.
“Oh no,” Falkender answered. “There’s much more I can do for you, Dr. Sylveste. Very much more. I’ve barely begun.”
Volyova was down with Captain Brannigan when a janitor-rat informed her that the pebbles had sent back their reports. She was gathering fresh samples from the Captain’s periphery, encouraged by recent successes of one of her retrovirus strains against the plague. Her virus was adapted from one of the military cyberviruses which had struck the ship, suitably modifed for Plague-compatibility. Amazingly, it actually seemed to be working—at least against the tiny samples she had so far tried it against. How irritating to be snatched from this by something she had set in motion nine months earlier, and had in the meantime all but forgotten. For a moment she refused to believe that so much time could possibly have passed. Yet she was excited by what she might learn.
She took the lift upship. Nine months, yes. It hardly seemed possible—but that was what happened when you were working. And she should have been expecting it. Rationally she had known that so much time had passed—but the information had managed not to tunnel into the part of her mind where she actually acknowledged such things and began to deal with them. But the clues had been there all along. The ship was now cruising at only one quarter of lightspeed. In about a hundred days they would be making final insertion into Resurgam orbit, and they would need a strategy when they got there. That was where the pebbles came in.
Snapshots of Resurgam and near-Resurgam space were assembling in the bridge, in various EM and exotic-particle bands. It was the first recent glimpse of a possible enemy. Volyova let the salient facts mole deep into her consciousness, so that she could recall them with instinctive ease during a crisis. The pebbles had whipped past either side of Resurgam so that there was data from both its day and night sides. Additionally, the pebble cloud had elongated itself in the line of flight until fifteen hours spaced the passage of its first and last unit through the system, enabling the entire surface of Resurgam to be glimpsed under both illumination and darkness. The dayside pebbles were looking away from Delta Pavonis, so they snooped for neutrino leakage from fusion and antimatter power units on the surface. The nightside pebbles snooped for the heat signatures of population centres and orbital facilities. Other sensors sniffed the atmosphere, measuring oxygen, ozone and nitrogen levels; sensing the extent to which the colonists had tampered with the native biome.
Given that the colonists had been here for more than half a century, it was striking how much they had managed to live without. There were no large structures in orbit; no evidence of local spaceflight within the system. Only a few comsats girdled the planet, and given the lack of large-scale industrialisation on the surface, it was doubtful whether they could be repaired or replaced if any were damaged. It would be a simple matter to disable or confuse those that remained, if that fitted in with the as-yet unformulated plan.
Yet they had not been entirely idle; the atmosphere showed signs of extensive modification, with free oxygen now well above what Volyova would have expected. The infrared sensors revealed geothermal taps aligned along what were certainly continental subduction zones. Neutrino leakage from the polar zones hinted at oxygen factories; fusion-powered units which would crack open water-ice molecules to extract oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen would be bled into the atmosphere—or pumped to domed-over communities—while the hydrogen was cycled back into the fusors. Volyova identified upwards of fifty communities, but most were small affairs, and none approximated the size of the main settlement. She assumed there were other, tinier outposts—family-tended stations and homesteads—but the pebbles would miss these.
So what did she have to report? No orbital defences, almost certainly no capability for spaceflight, and most of the planet’s inhabitants still crammed into one community. At least from a standpoint of relative strengths, persuading the Resurgamites to give up Sylveste ought to be the simplest of matters.
But there was something else.
The Resurgam system was a wide binary. Delta Pavonis was the life-giving star, but—as she had known—it possessed a dead twin. The dark companion was a neutron star, separated by ten light hours from Pavonis, far enough for stable planetary orbits to be possible around both stars. And indeed, the neutron star had claimed a planet of its own. The fact of the planet’s existence was known to her in advance of the information from the pebbles. All it warranted in the ship’s database was a line of comment and a scrawl of terse numerics. These worlds were invariably chemically dull, atmosphereless and biologically inert, flensed sterile by the wind that the neutron star had blown when it was a pulsar. Little more, Volyova thought, than lumps of stellar slag-iron, and about as interesting.
But near this world was a neutrino source. It was weak—almost at the limit of detectability—but nothing she could ignore. Volyova digested this knowledge for a few moments before regurgitating it as a tiny, troublesome cud of certainty. Only a machine could create such a signature.
And that worried her.
“You’ve really been awake all this time?” Khouri asked, shortly after waking herself, as she and Volyova journeyed down to see the Captain.
“Not literally,” Volyova said. “Even my body needs sleep occasionally. I tried dispensing with it once; there are drugs you can take. And implants which can be put into the RAS . . . that’s the reticular activating system, the region of the brain which mediates sleep—but you still need to clean out those fatigue poisons.” She winced. It was evident to Khouri that Volyova found the topic of implants about as pleasant as a toothache.
“Much happen?” Khouri asked.
“Nothing you need concern yourself with,” Volyova said, taking a drag on a cigarette. Khouri assumed that would be the end of it, but then her tutor fixed her with an uneasy expression. “Well, now you mention it, there was something. Two things, in fact, though I’m not sure to which I should attach the greater significance. The first need not concern you immediately. As for the second . . . ”
Khouri searched Volyova’s face for concrete evidence of the seven additional years the woman had aged since their last meeting. There was nothing; not a hint of it, which meant that she had balanced the seven years with infusions of anti-senescence drugs. She looked different, but only because she had permitted her hair to grow out from her usual crop. It was still short, but the extra volume served to ameliorate the sharp lines of her jaw and cheekbones. If anything, Khouri thought, Volyova looked seven years younger, rather than older. Not for the first time, she attempted to assess the woman’s actual physiological age, and failed miserably.
“What was it?”
“There was something unusual about your neural activity while you were in reefersleep. There shouldn’t have been any. But what I saw didn’t even look normal for someone awake. It looked like a small war going on in your head.”
The elevator had arrived at the Captain’s level. “That’s an interesting analogy,” Khouri said, stepping into the chill of the corridor.
“Assuming it is one. I doubted that you’d have been aware of much, of course.”
“I don’t remember anything,” Khouri said.
Volyova was silent until they reached the human nebula which was the Captain. Glittering and uncomfortably mucoid, he less resembled a human being than an angel which had dropped from the sky onto a hard, splattering surface. The antiquated reefer which had until recently cased him was now shattered and fissured. It still functioned, but only barely, and the cold it offered was no longer adequate to stifle the plague’s relentless encroachment. Captain Brannigan had sunk dozens of tendril-like roots into the ship now, roots which Volyova tracked but was powerless to prevent spreading. She could sever them, but what effect would that have on the Captain? For all she knew, the roots were all that was keeping him alive, if she dared dignify his state with the word. Eventually, Volyova said, the roots would permeate the whole vessel, and by then it would probably be unwise to make much of a distinction between the ship and the Captain. Of course, she could arrest that spread if she wished, by the simple expedient of ejecting this portion of the ship; cutting it entirely free from the rest of the vessel, the way an oldtime surgeon might have dealt with a particularly voracious tumour. The volume Brannigan had subsumed was tiny now, and the ship would certainly not miss it. Undoubtedly his transformations would continue, but lacking sustaining material they would be turned incestuously inwards, until entropy drove the life from what he had become.
“You’d consider doing that?” Khouri asked.
“Consider it, yes,” Volyova replied. “But I’m hoping it won’t come to that. All these samples I’ve been taking—I think I’m actually getting somewhere. I’ve found a counter-agent—a retrovirus which seems stronger than the plague. It subverts the plague machinery faster than the plague subverts it. Only tested it on tiny pieces so far—and there’s really no way I can do any better than that, because testing it on the Captain would be a medical matter, and I’m not qualified to do that.”