She was right—almost without Khouri noticing, whole blocks of potentially available armament had safed themselves, since she was now requesting them to point dangerously close to critical ship components. What remained were the lightest armaments, almost by definition incapable of doing any serious damage.
Perhaps sensing this, something relented.
The weapons were suddenly more under Khouri’s control than not, and—she realised—the fact that the remaining systems were limited in their firepower was actually to her advantage. Her plan had changed. What she needed now was surgical precision, not brute force.
In the hiatus, before the weapons were regained by the Mademoiselle, Khouri ditched the prior target pattern and issued re-aiming orders. Her instructions were specific in the extreme. Now, oozing into position as if immersed in toffee, the weapons aligned themselves on the impact points she had selected. Not the cache-weapon now, but something else entirely . . .
“Khouri,” the Mademoiselle began, “I really think you should consider this . . . ”
But by then Khouri had already fired.
Gouts of plasma streamed out towards the cache-weapon connecting—not with the weapon itself, but with the spider-room, neatly severing all eight of its legs, and then all four of its grapple-lines. The room flung itself away from the lancing spear of the drive, its legs truncated abruptly at the knees.
The cache-weapon drifted into the beam, like a moth brushing into an incandescent lamp.
What happened thereafter took place in an inhumanly brief series of instants; almost too rapid for Khouri to comprehend until afterwards. The physical exterior of the cache-weapon evaporated in a millisecond, boiling away in a gasp of predominantly metallic vapour. It was impossible to tell whether it was the touching of the beam which led to what followed, or whether, at the instant of its destruction, the cache-weapon was already committed to the act of turning itself inside out.
Either way, things did not proceed quite as its builders had intended.
Simultaneously—or as near as mattered—what was left of the cache-weapon beneath its eviscerated hide emitted a prolonged gravitational eruction, a burp of shearing spacetime. Something very horrible was happening to the fabric of reality in the immediate vicinity of the weapon, but not in the way which had been planned. A rainbow of bent starlight flickered around the curdling mass of plasma-energy. For a millisecond the rainbow was approximately spherical and stable, but then it began to wobble, oscillating unevenly like a soap-bubble on the point of bursting. A fraction of a millisecond later, it collapsed inwards, and accelerating exponentially, vanished.
For another moment there was nothing left, not even debris, just the normal star-speckled backdrop of space.
Then a glint of light appeared, shading to ultraviolet. The glint magnified and swelled, bloating into an intense, malignant sphere. The wave of expanding plasma hit the ship, juddering it so violently that Khouri felt the impact even with the cushioning gimbals of the gunnery. Data rushed in, telling her—not that she was particularly keen on knowing—that the blast had not seriously compromised any hull-based systems, and that the brief spike of background radiation from the flash was within tolerable norms. Gravimetric scans had abruptly returned to normal.
Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies present in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low-mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.
The cache-weapon had malfunctioned, badly.
“Oh, very good,” the Mademoiselle said, sounding more disappointed than anything. “I hope you’re proud of what you’ve done.”
But what had Khouri’s attention now was the absence streaking towards her, rushing through gunspace. She tried to back out in time; tried to disengage the link—
But she was not quite fast enough.
THIRTEEN
Resurgam Orbit, 2566
“Seat,” Volyova said, entering the bridge.
A chair craned eagerly towards her. She buckled herself in and then gunned the seat away from the bridge’s tiered walls, until she was orbiting the enormous holographic projection sphere which occupied the room’s middle.
The sphere was showing a view of Resurgam, although one might have easily concluded that it was really the desiccated eyeball of an ancient and mummified corpse, magnified several hundred times. But Volyova knew that the image was more than just an accurate portrayal of Resurgam dredged from the ship’s database. It was being imaged in realtime; captured by the cameras which were even now pointing down from the lighthugger’s hull.
Resurgam was not a beautiful planet, by anyone’s standards. Apart from the sullied white of the polar caps, the overall colour was a skullish grey, offset by scabs of rust and a few desultory chips of powder-blue near the equatorial zones. The larger oceanic water masses were still mostly cauled under ice, and those motes of exposed water were almost certainly being artificially warmed against freeze-over; either by thermal energy grids or carefully tailored metabolic processes. There were clouds, but they were wispy plumes rather than the great complex features Volyova knew one could usually expect from planetary weather systems. Here and there they thickened towards white opacity, but only in small gangliar knots near the settlements. Those were the places where the vapour factories were working, sublimating polar ice into water, oxygen and hydrogen. There were few patches of vegetation large enough to be seen without magnification down to kilometre-resolution, and by the same token no obvious visible evidence of human presence, save for a sprinkling of settlement lights when the planet’s nightside rolled around every ninety minutes. Even with the zoom, the settlements were elusive, since—with the exception of the capital—they tended to be sunk into the ground. Often, very little projected beyond the surface apart from antennae, landing pads and air-smoothed greenhouses. Of the capital . . .
Well, that was the disturbing part.
“When does our window with Triumvir Sajaki open?” she asked, snapping her gaze across the faces of the other crewmembers, whose seats were arranged in a loosely defined cluster, facing each other beneath the ashen light of the imaged planet.
“Five minutes,” Hegazi said. “Five tortuous minutes and then we’ll know what delights dear Sajaki has to share with us regarding our new colonist friends. Are you sure you can bear the agony of waiting?”
“Why don’t you have a guess,
svinoi.
”
“That wouldn’t be much of a challenge, would it?” Hegazi was grinning, or at least trying very hard to approximate the gesture; no mean feat given the amount of chimeric accessories which encrusted his face. “Funny, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you weren’t exactly enthralled by any of this.”
“If he hasn’t found Sylveste . . . ”
Hegazi raised a gauntleted hand. “Sajaki hasn’t even made his report yet. No sense jumping the gun . . . ”
“You’re confident he’ll have found him, then?”
“Well, no. I didn’t say that.”
“If there’s one thing I hate,” Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, “it’s mindless optimism.”
“Oh, cheer up. Worse things happen.”
Yes, she had to admit, they did. And with an annoying regularity, they seemed to have decided to keep happening to her. What was astonishing about her recent run of misfortune was that it had managed to keep escalating with each new bout of bad luck. It had reached the point where she was beginning to look back nostalgically on the merely irksome problems she had encountered with Nagorny; when all she had to deal with was someone trying to kill her. It made her wonder—without a great deal of enthusiasm—if there would soon come a day when she would look back even on this period with longing.
The trouble with Nagorny had been the precursor, of course. It was obvious now; at the time she had regarded the whole thing as an isolated incident, but what it had really been was just the initial indications of something far worse in the future, like a heart murmur presaging an attack. She had killed Nagorny—but in doing so, she had not come to any understanding of the problem that had driven him psychotic. Then she had recruited Khouri, and the problems had not so much repeated themselves as reiterated a grander theme, like the second movement of a grim symphony. Khouri was not obviously mad—yet. But she had become a catalyst for a worse, less localised madness. There had been the storms in her head, beyond anything Volyova had ever seen. And then there had been the incident with the cache-weapon, which had almost killed Volyova, and might have gone on to kill all of them, and perhaps a significant number of the people on Resurgam as well.
“It’s time for some answers, Khouri,” she had said, before the others were revived.
“Answers about what, Triumvir?”
“Forget the charade of innocence,” Volyova said. “I’m far too tired for it, and I assure you I will get to the truth one way or the other. During the crisis with the cache-weapon, you gave too much away. If you were hoping I would forget some of the things you said, you were mistaken.”
“Like what?” They were down in one of the rat-infested zones; it was, Volyova reckoned, as safe from Sajakj’s listening devices as any area of the ship save the spider-room itself.
She shoved Khouri against the wall, hard enough to knock some wind out of the woman; letting her know Volyova’s wiry strength should not be underestimated, nor her patience stretched too far. “Let me make something clear to you, Khouri. I killed Nagorny, your predecessor, because he failed me. I successfully concealed the truth of his death from the rest of the crew. Be under no illusions that I will do the same to you, if you give me sufficient justification.”
Khouri pushed herself back from the wall, regaining some colour. “What is it you want to know, exactly?”
“You can start by telling me who you are. Begin with the assumption that I know you are an infiltrator.”
“How can I be an infiltrator? You recruited me.”
“Yes,” Volyova said, for she had already thought this through. “That was the way it was made to seem, of course. . . but it was deception, wasn’t it? Whatever agency is behind you managed to manipulate my search procedure, making it seem as if I had selected you . . . whereas the choice was ultimately not mine at all.” Volyova had to admit to herself that she had no direct evidence to support this, but it was the simplest hypothesis which fitted all the facts. “So, are you going to deny this?”
“Why would you think I was an infiltrator?”
Volyova paused to light up a cigarette; one of those she had bought from the Stoners in the carousel where Khouri had been recruited, or found. “Because you seem to know too much about the gunnery. You seem to know something about Sun Stealer . . . and that troubles me deeply.”
“You mentioned Sun Stealer shortly after you brought me aboard, don’t you remember?”
“Yes, but your knowledge goes deeper than can be explained by the information you could have gleaned from me. In fact there are times when you seem to know somewhat more about the whole situation than I do.” She paused. “There’s more to it than that, of course. The neural activity in your brain, during reefersleep . . . I should have examined the implants you came aboard with more carefully. They obviously aren’t all that they seem. Do you want to have a stab at explaining any of this?”
“All right . . . ” Khouri’s tone of voice was different now. It was clear that she had given up any hope of bluffing her way out of this one. “But listen carefully, Ilia. I know you’ve got your little secrets, too—things you really don’t want Sajaki and the others to find about. I’d already guessed about Nagorny, but there’s also the business with the cache-weapon. I know you don’t want that to become common knowledge, or you wouldn’t be going to such lengths to cover up the whole thing.”
Volyova nodded, knowing it would be fruitless to deny these things. Maybe Khouri even had an inkling of her relationship with the Captain. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, whatever I say to you now, it had better stay between us. Isn’t that reasonable of me?”
“I just said I could kill you, Khouri. You’re not exactly in a strong bargaining position.”
“Yes, you could kill me—or at least have a go—but despite what you said, I doubt you’d manage to cover up my death as easily as you did Nagorny’s. Losing one Gunnery Officer is bad luck. Two begins to look like carelessness, doesn’t it?”
A rat scampered by, splashing them. Irritatedly, Volyova flicked her cigarette butt towards the animal, but it had already vanished through a duct in the wall. “So you’re saying I don’t even tell the others I know you’re an infiltrator?”
Khouri shrugged. “You do what you like. But how do you think Sajaki would take that? Whose fault would it have been that the infiltrator ever came aboard in the first place?”
Volyova took her time before answering. “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”
“I knew you’d want to ask me some questions sooner or later, Triumvir.”
“So let’s start with the obvious one. Who are you, and who are you working for?”
Khouri sighed and spoke with resignation. “A lot of what you already know is the truth. I’m Ana Khouri and I was a soldier on Sky’s Edge . . . although about twenty years earlier than you thought. As for the rest . . . ” She paused. “You know, I could really use some coffee.”
“There isn’t any, so get used to it.”
“All right. I was in the pay of another crew. I don’t know their names—there was never any direct contact—but they’ve been trying to get their hands on your cache-weapons for some time.”