Volyova shook her head. “Not possible. No one else knows about them.”
“That’s what you’d like to think. But you have used parts of the cache, right? There must have been survivors, witnesses, you never knew about. Gradually word got about that your ship was carrying some serious shit. Maybe no one knew the whole picture, but they knew enough of it to want to have their own slice of the cache.”
Volyova was silent. What Khouri was saying was shocking—like finding out that her most private of habits was public knowledge—but, she had to admit, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Conceivably there had been a leak. Crew had left the ship, after all—not always willingly—and while those who had done so were not supposed to have had access to anything sensitive—certainly nothing pertaining to the cache—there was always the chance that an error had been made. Or perhaps, as Khouri had said, someone had witnessed the cache being used and had lived to pass on that information.
“This other crew—you may not have known their names, but did you know what their ship was called?”
“. . . no. That would have been just as sloppy as letting me know who they were, wouldn’t it?”
“What
did
you know, in that case? How were they expecting to steal the cache from us?”
“That’s where Sun Stealer comes into it. Sun Stealer was a military virus they snuck aboard your ship when you were last in the Yellowstone system. A very smart, adaptive piece of infiltration software. It was designed to worm its way into enemy installations and wage psychological warfare on the occupants, driving them mad through subliminal suggestion.” Khouri paused, giving Volyova time to digest that. “But your own defences were too good. Sun Stealer was weakened, and the strategy never really worked. So they bided their time. They didn’t get another chance until you were back in the Yellowstone system, nearly a century later. I was the next line of attack: get a human infiltrator aboard.”
“How was the original viral attack made?”
“They got it in via Sylveste. They knew all about you bringing him aboard to fix up your Captain. They planted the software on him without him knowing, then let it infect your systems while he was hooked in to your medical suite, fixing the Captain.”
There was, Volyova thought, something deeply and worryingly plausible about that. It was just an example of another crew being as predatory as they were. It would be arrogance in the extreme to assume that only Sajaki’s Triumvirate were capable of such subterfuge.
“And what was your function?”
“To assess the state of Sun Stealer’s corruption of your gunnery systems. If possible, to gain control of the ship. Resurgam was a good destination for that—sufficiently out of the way not to be under any kind of system-wide police jurisdiction. If a takeover could be staged, there would be no one to observe it except maybe a few colonists.” Khouri sighed. “But believe me, that plan’s well and truly shit-canned. The Sun Stealer program was flawed; too dangerous and too adaptive. It drew too much attention to itself when it drove Nagorny mad—but on the other hand, he was the only one it could reach. Then it started screwing around with the cache itself . . . ”
“The rogue weapon.”
“Yeah. That scared me, as well.” Khouri shivered. “I knew Sun Stealer was too powerful by then. There was nothing I could do to control it.”
Over the next few days, Volyova would ask Khouri more questions, testing different aspects of her story against what passed for the known facts. Certainly, Sun Stealer could have been some kind of infiltration software . . . even if it was more subtle, more insidious, than anything she had heard of in all her years of experience. But did that mean she could dismiss it? No; of course not. After all, she knew the thing existed. Khouri’s story, in fact, was the first explanation she had encountered that made any kind of objective sense at all. It explained why her attempts to cure Nagorny had failed. He had not been sent mad by any subtle combination of effects stemming from her gunnery implants. He had been driven mad, purely and simply, by an entity that had been designed for just that purpose. No wonder it had been so hard to find any explanation for Nagorny’s problems. Of course, there remained the irksome question of why exactly Nagorny’s madness had expressed itself so forcefully in the manner it had—all those fevered sketches of nightmarish birds’ parts, and the designs on his coffin—but who was to say that Sun Stealer had not simply amplified some pre-existing psychosis, letting Nagorny’s subconscious work with whatever imagery suited it?
The mysterious other crew could also not be dismissed too easily. Shipboard records revealed that another lighthugger—the
Galatea
—had been present in Yellowstone on both occasions when they had last visited the system. Could they have been the crew responsible for sending Khouri aboard?
For now, it was as good an explanation as any. And one thing was absolutely clear. Khouri was quite right in saying that none of this information could be presented to the rest of the Triumvirate. Sajaki would indeed’blame Volyova totally for what was a grievous lapse in security. He would punish Khouri, of course . . . but Volyova could also expect some kind of retribution. The way their relationship had been strained of late, it was entirely possible that Sajaki would try and kill her. He might succeed, too—he was at least as strong as Volyova. It would not greatly trouble him that he would be losing his chief weapons expert and the only person who had any real insight into the cache. His argument would no doubt be that she had already demonstrated her incompetence in that regard. But there was something else, too: something Volyova could not entirely dismiss. No matter what had really transpired with the cache-weapon, the unavoidable truth was that Khouri had saved Volyova’s life.
Hateful though the thought was, she owed the infiltrator.
Her only option, when she considered the situation dispassionately, was to proceed as if nothing had happened. Khouri’s mission was in any case no longer viable; there would be no attempted takeover now. The woman’s hidden reason for being aboard the ship had no impact on the upcoming attempt to bring Sylveste aboard again, and in many respects Khouri would be needed simply as a crewmember. Now that Volyova knew the truth, and now that the original purpose of Khouri’s mission had been abandoned, Khouri would surely do everything in her power to fit into her preassigned position. It hardly mattered whether the loyalty treatments were working or not: Khouri would have to behave as if they were, and gradually the act would become indistinguishable from the truth. She might not even want to leave the ship when the opportunity arose to do so. After all, there were worse places to be. Over months or years of subjective time, she would become one of the crew, and her past duplicity could remain a secret shared only by her and Volyova. In time, it might even be something Volyova almost forgot.
Eventually, Volyova managed to convince herself that the infiltration question had been settled. Sun Stealer would remain a problem, of course—but now Khouri would be working with her to conceal it from Sajaki. And in the meantime, there ‘were other things that needed to be concealed from the Triumvir. Volyova had set herself the task of eradicating every shred of evidence that the cache-weapon incident had ever happened. She intended to do this before Sajaki and the others were revived, but it had not proved easy. Her first task had been to repair the damage to the lighthugger itself, patching the areas of the hull which had been hurt by the weapon’s detonation. Largely this consisted of coaxing the auto-repair routines to work faster, but she also had to ensure that all pre-existing scars, impact-craters, or areas of imperfect repair were precisely duplicated. She then had to hack into the auto-repair memory and erase the knowledge that the repairs had been orchestrated at all. She had to repair the spider-room, even though Sajaki and the others were not meant to know it even existed. Better to be safe than sorry, though, and that had been by far the simplest of the repairs. Next, she had to erase all evidence that the Palsy routine had been run; at least a week’s work.
The loss of the shuttle was much harder to hide. For a while, she considered making a new one: harvesting tiny amounts of raw materials from all over the ship, until she had what she needed. She would only have to use one ninety-thousandth of the entire mass of the ship. But it was too risky, and she doubted her ability to weather the shuttle authentically; to make it look as old as it should have been. Instead, she took the simpler option of editing the ship’s database so that it would always look as if there had been one shuttle fewer aboard. Sajaki might notice—all the crew might notice—but there would be absolutely nothing that anyone could prove. Finally, of course, she remade the cache-weapon. It was only a façade; a replica designed to lurk in the cache chamber and look threatening on the rare occasions when Sajaki paid a visit to her domain. Covering her tracks took six days of manic work. On the seventh day she rested, and endeavoured to compose herself, so that none of the others would guess what labours she had been through. On the eighth day Sajaki had awakened and asked her what she had been up to in the years he had been in reefersleep.
“Oh,” she had said. “Nothing to write home about.”
His reaction—like much else about Sajaki these days—had been difficult to judge. Even if she had succeeded this time, she thought, she could not risk another mistake. Yet, already—though they had not even made contact with the colonists—things were drifting beyond the arena of her understanding. Her thoughts returned to the neutrino signature she had detected around the system’s neutron star, and of the feeling of unease which had been with her ever since. The source was still there, and while it remained weak, she had now studied it well enough to know that it was in orbit not just around the neutron star, but also around the moon-sized rocky world which attended the star. It had certainly not been present when the system had been surveyed decades earlier, immediately suggesting that it was something to do with the colony on Resurgam. But how could they have sent it? The colonists did not even seem capable of reaching orbit, let alone sending some kind of probe to the edge of their system. Even the ship which should have brought them here was missing; she had expected to find the
Lorean
in orbit around Resurgam, but there was no sign of it. Now, no matter what the evidence said, she kept in the back of her mind the possibility that the colonists might be capable of something completely unexpected. It was another burden to add to her mounting stockpile of worries.
“Ilia?” said Hegazi. “We’re almost ready now. The capital’s about to emerge from nightside.”
She nodded. The ship’s high-magnification cameras, dotted around the hull, would be zooming in on a very specific site several kilometres beyond the city boundary, focusing on a spot which had been identified and agreed upon before Sajaki’s departure. If no misfortune had befallen him, he should now be waiting at that spot, standing on the upper surface of an unshielded mesa, looking directly towards the rising sun. Timing was critical here, but Volyova did not doubt that Sajaki would be on the mark.
“Got him,” Hegazi said. “Image stabilisers phasing in . . . ”
“Show us.”
A window opened in the globe near the capital, rapidly swelling. At first what lay within the window was unclear; a blurred smear that might have been a man standing on a rock. But the image quickly sharpened, until the figure was recognisably Sajaki. In place of the bulky adaptive armour which Volyova had last seen him wearing, Sajaki wore an ash-coloured overcoat, its long tails flapping around his booted legs, evidencing the mild wind playing over the mesa’s topside. The suit’s collar was drawn up around his ears, but his face was unobstructed.
It was not quite his own. Prior to leaving the ship, Sajaki’s features had been subtly remoulded, according to an averaged ideal derived from the genetic profiles of the original expedition members who had travelled to Resurgam from Yellowstone, in turn reflecting the Franco-Sino genes of the Yellowstone settlers. Sajaki would arouse nothing more than a curious glance if he chose to walk through the capital’s streets at midday. There was nothing to betray him as a newcomer, not even his accent. Linguistic software had analysed the dozen or so Stoner dialects carried by the expedition members, applying complex lexicostatistic models to merge these modes of speech into a new, planetwide dialect for Resurgam as a whole. If Sajaki chose to communicate with any of the settlers, his look, cover-story and manner of speaking would convince them that he was merely from one of the remoter planetary settlements, not an offworlder.
That at least was the idea.
Sajaki carried no technological implements which would give him away, save the implants beneath his skin. A conventional surface-to-orbit communication system would have been too susceptible to detection, and far too difficult to explain had he been captured for some reason or other. Yet now he was speaking; reciting a phrase repeatedly, while the ship’s infrared sensors examined the bloodflow around Sajaki’s mouth region, assembling a model of his underlying muscular and jaw movements. By correlating these movements against the extensive archives of actual conversation already recorded, the ship could begin to guess the sounds he was making. The final step was to include grammatical, syntactical and semantic models for the words Sajaki was likely to be saying. It sounded complex—it was—but to Volyova’s ears there was no perceptible timelag between his lip movements and the simulated voice she was hearing, eerily clear and precise.
“I must presume you can now hear me,” he said. “For the record, let this be my first report from the surface of Resurgam after landing. You will forgive me if I occasionally digress from the point, or express myself with a certain inelegance. I did not write this report down beforehand; it would have constituted too great a security risk if I were found with it while leaving the capital. Things are very different than we expected.”