“Concerning my own actions, my first task, of course, was to order the suit to dismantle itself. It would have been tempting to use it to make the journey overland to Cuvier, but the risk would have been excessive. Yet the journey was easier than I had feared, and on the outskirts I hitched a ride with a gang of pipeline technicians returning from the north, using them as cover to enter Cuvier. They were suspicious at first, but the vodka soon persuaded them to take me aboard their vehicle. I told them we distilled it in Phoenix, the settlement where I said I’d come from. They’d never heard of Phoenix, but they were more than happy to drink to it.”
Volyova nodded. The vodka—along with a satchel-full of trinkets—had been manufactured aboard ship shortly before Sajaki’s departure.
“People mostly live underground now, in catacombs which were dug fifty or sixty years ago. Of course, the air is tolerably adapted for breathing, but you have my assurance that the procedure is not exactly comfortable, and one is never far away from the onset of hypoxia. The exertion which was required to reach this mesa was considerable.”
Volyova smiled to herself. If Sajaki even admitted such a thing, his ascent of the mesa must have been close to torture.
“They say that the True Pathers have access to Martian genetic technology,” he continued, “which facilitates easier breathing, though I’ve seen nothing to prove this. My pipeline friends helped me find a room in a hostel used by miners from beyond the city, which of course fitted in perfectly with my cover story. I wouldn’t describe the accommodation as salubrious, but it suited my purpose well enough, which was of course to gather data. In the course of my enquiries,” Sajaki added, “I learnt much that was contradictory, or at best vague.”
Sajaki had now turned almost from horizon to horizon. The sun was now beyond his right shoulder, making his image increasingly difficult to interpret. The ship, of course, would simply switch to infrared, reading Sajaki’s speech in the shifting blood-patterns of his face.
“Eyewitnesses say Sylveste and his wife managed to escape the assassination attempt which killed Girardieau, but they have not resurfaced since. That was eight months ago. The people I have spoken to, and the covert data sources I have intercepted, lead me to one conclusion. Sylveste is someone’s prisoner again, except this time he is being held outside the city, probably by one of the True Path cells.”
Volyova was tense now. She could see where all this was leading: there had always been a kind of inevitability to it. The only difference was that in this case it stemmed from what she knew about Sajaki, rather than the man he sought.
“It would be futile to negotiate with the official powers here—whoever they are,” Sajaki said. “I doubt that they could give us Sylveste even if they wanted to hand him over, which of course they wouldn’t. Which unfortunately leaves us only one option.”
Volyova bridled. Here it was.
“We must arrange things so that it is in the best interests of the colony as a whole to give us Sylveste.” Sajaki smiled again, teeth flashing against the shadow of his face. “Needless to say, I have already begun laying the necessary groundwork.” And now he really was addressing her directly, no doubt about it. “Volyova; you may make the necessary formal overtures at your discretion.”
Ordinarily she might have felt some consolatory pleasure at having judged Sajaki’s intentions so accurately. Not now. All she felt was a slow-burning horror, the realisation that, after all this time, he was going to ask her to do it again. And the worst component of her horror stemmed from the realisation that she would probably do what he wanted.
“Go on,” Volyova said. “It won’t bite.”
“I do know suits, Triumvir.” Khouri paused, and took a step into the room’s whiteness. “It’s just I didn’t think I’d see one again. Let alone get to actually wear the bastard.”
The four waiting suits rested against the wall in the oppressively white storage room, six hundred levels below the bridge, adjacent to Chamber Two, where the training session would take place.
“Listen to her,” one of the two other women present said. “Talking as if she’s going to do more than just wear the damn thing for a few minutes. It’s not like you’re going down with us, Khouri, so don’t wet yourself.”
“Thanks for the advice, Sudjic—I’ll bear it in mind.”
Sudjic shrugged—a sneer would have been too much of an emotional expenditure, Khouri figured—and stepped towards her designated suit, followed by her companion, Sula Kjarval. Preparing to welcome their occupants, the suits resembled frogs which had been exsanguinated, eviscerated, dissected, stretched and pinned out on a vertical table. In their current configurations the suits were at their most androform, with well-defined legs and outstretched arms. There were no fingers on the “hands”—for that matter, no obvious hands at all, simply streamlined flippers—although at the user’s wish the suits could extrude the necessary manipulators and digits.
Khouri did indeed know suits, just as she had claimed. The suits on Sky’s Edge had been rare imports, purchased from Ultra traders who made stopovers around the war-torn planet. No one on the Edge had the expertise to actually duplicate them, which meant that those units which her side had bought were fabulously valuable: powerful totems dispensed from gods.
The suit scanned her, assessing her bodily dimensions before adjusting its own interior to precisely match her contours. Khouri then allowed it to step forward and surround her, suppressing the tinge of claustrophobia that accompanied the process. Within a few seconds the suit had locked tight and filled itself with gel-air, enabling manoeuvres which would otherwise have crushed its occupant. The suit’s persona interrogated Khouri regarding small details she might wish changed, allowing her to customise her weapons suite and adjust its autonomous routines. Of course, none but the lightest weapons would actually be deployed in Chamber Two; the combat scenarios which were to be enacted would be a seamless mixture of real, physical action and simulated weapons-usage, but it was the point that counted. One had to treat every aspect of the enterprise with the utmost seriousness, including the limitless choices which the suit offered for the convenience of despatching any enemies who might have the misfortune to stray into its sphere of superiority.
There were three of them, apart from Khouri herself, but she was the only one who was not in serious contention for the surface operation. Volyova took the lead. Although her conversations with Khouri suggested that she had been born in space, she had visited planets on more than one occasion, and had acquired the appropriate, near-instinctive reflexes which bettered the chances of surviving a planetary excursion; not least amongst these being a profound respect for the law of gravitation. The same went for Sudjic; she had been born in a habitat, or possibly a lighthugger, but had visited enough worlds to gain the right moves. Her bladelike thinness, which made it look as if she could not possibly have taken a footstep on a large planet without breaking every bone in her body, did not fool Khouri for a moment; Sudjic was like a building designed by a master architect, who knew the precise stresses which had to be obeyed by every articulation and strut, and took an aesthetic pride in allowing for no additional tolerances. Kjarval, the woman who was always with Sudjic, was different again. Unlike her friend, she exhibited no extreme chimeric traits; all her limbs her own. But she resembled no human Khouri had ever known. Her face was sleek, as if optimised for some unspecified aquatic environment. Her catlike eyes were gridded red orbs with no pupils. Her nostrils and ears were rilled apertures, and her mouth was a largely expressionless slot; one that barely moved when the woman spoke, but was permanently curved in an expression of mild exaltation. She wore no clothes; not even in the relative cool of the suit storage room, yet to Khouri’s eyes she did not seem truly naked. Rather, she looked like a naked woman who had been dipped in some infinitely flexible, quick-drying polymer. A true Ultra, in other words, of uncertain and almost certainly non-Darwinian provenance. Khouri had heard tales of bioengineered human splinter-species cultured under the ice of worlds like Europa, or of merpeople, bio-adapted for life in totally flooded spacecraft. Sula seemed to be the living, freakishly hybrid embodiment of these myths. Alternatively, she might be something else entirely. Maybe she had wrought these transformations on herself for a whim. Maybe they were purposeless, or served only the deeper purpose of masking another identity entirely. Whatever; she knew worlds, and that—seemingly—was all that mattered.
Sajaki knew worlds as well, of course, but he was already on Resurgam, and it was not clear what role he would play in the recovery of Sylveste, if and when it happened. Of Triumvir Hegazi Khouri knew little, but through chance remarks, she had gleaned enough to know that the man had never set foot on anything which had not been manufactured. It was no wonder that Sajaki and Volyova had relegated Triumvir Hegazi to the more clerical aspects of their profession. He would not be allowed—nor did he even wish—to make the journey to Resurgam’s surface, when the time came.
Which left Khouri. There was no arguing with her experience; unlike any of the crew, she had demonstrably been born and raised on a planet, and—vitally—had seen action on one. It was probable—nothing she had heard led her to doubt the fact—that the Sky’s Edge war had placed her in situations far graver than any the crew had experienced beyond their ship. Their excursions had been shopping trips, trade missions or simple tourism; coming down to gloat at the compressed lives of ephemerals. Khouri had been in situations where, at times, it had seemed very unlikely that she would survive. Yet-because she had never been anything less than a competent soldier, and she was also lucky—she had come through relatively unscathed.
No one aboard the ship actually argued with this.
“It’s not that we wouldn’t want you along,” Volyova had said, not long after the incident with the cache-weapon. “Far from it. I’ve no doubt that you’d handle a suit as well as any of us, and you wouldn’t be likely to freeze under fire.”
“Well, then . . .”
“But I can’t risk losing my Gunnery Officer again.” They had been having the discussion in the spider-room, but Volyova had lowered her voice all the same. “Only three people need to go down to Resurgam, and that means we don’t have to use you. Apart from me, Sudjic and Kjarval can handle the suits. In fact we’ve already begun training up.”
“Then at least let me join in the sessions.”
Volyova had raised an arm, apparently to dimiss this suggestion. But as soon as she had done so she relented. “All right, Khouri. You get to train with us. But it doesn’t mean anything, understand?”
Oh yes, she understood. Things were different between Khouri and Volyova now-they had been ever since Khouri had told Volyova the lie about being an infiltrator for another crew. The Mademoiselle had long ago primed her for that particular little chat and it seemed to have worked perfectly, even down to the sly way the
Galatea-completely
innocent, of course-had deliberately not been mentioned, leaving Volyova to make that deduction herself, and thereby allowing her to feel some quiet satisfaction in the process. It was a red herring, but it mattered only that Volyova found it a plausible one. Volyova had also accepted the story about Sun Stealer being a piece of human-designed infiltration software, and for now her curiosity seemed satisfied. Now they were almost equals, both having something to hide from the rest of the crew, even if what Volyova thought she had on Khouri was not even close to the truth.
“I understand,” Khouri said.
“Still, it’s a shame, though.” Volyova smiled. “I get the impression you always wanted to meet Sylveste. You’ll get your chance, of course, once we bring him aboard . . . ”
Khouri smiled. “That’ll have to do then, won’t it?”
Chamber Two was an empty twin of the chamber where the cache-weapons were kept.
Unlike the weapon-filled chamber, it had been pressurised up to one standard atmosphere. This was no mere extravagance; it constituted the largest single pocket of breathable air aboard the lighthugger, and was therefore used as a reservoir for supplying normally vacuum-filled regions of the ship with air when they needed to be entered by unsuited humans.
Usually the drive would have supplied an illusory one-gee of gravity, acting along the long axis of the ship, which was also the long axis of the roughly cylindrical chamber. But now that the drive had been quenched—now that the ship was in orbit around Resurgam—the illusion of gravity came from rotating the whole chamber, which meant that gravity acted at ninety degrees to the long axis, pushing radially outwards from the chamber’s middle. Near the middle, there was almost no gravity at all; objects could free-float there for minutes before their inevitable small initial drift slowly pushed them away from the middle. Thereafter, the increasing wind-pressure of the co-rotating air would tug them faster and lower. But nothing “fell” in straight lines in the chamber, at least not from the point of view of someone standing on the rotating wall.
They entered at one end of the cylinder, via an armoured clamshell door whose inner face was pitted with blast-marks and projectile impact-craters. Every visible surface of the chamber was similarly weathered; as far as Khouri could see (and the suit’s vision-augmentation routines meant she could see as far as she wished) there was no square metre of the chamber’s skin which had not been harried, scarred, gouged, buckled, assaulted, melted or corroded by some kind of weapon. It might once have been silver; now it was purple, like an all-enveloping metallic bruise. Illumination was supplied not from a stationary light source, but from dozens of free-noating drones, each of which picked out a spot on the chamber’s wall with a floodlight of actinic brilliance. The drones were constantly moving around, like a swarm of agitated glow-worms. The result was that no shadow in the chamber stayed still for more than a second or so, and it was impossible to look in any direction for more than a second before a blinding light-source entered it, washing everything else out.