“You sure you can handle this?” Sudjic said, as the door locked shut behind them. “You wouldn’t want to damage that suit. You break it, you bought it, you know?”
“Concentrate on not damaging your own,” Khouri said. Then she switched to the private channel, addressing Sudjic alone. “Maybe it’s just my imagination, but do I get the impression you don’t like me very much?”
“Now why would you think that?”
“I think it might have something to do with Nagorny.” Khouri paused. It had occured to her that the private channels might not be private at all, but then again, nothing she was about to say would not already be completely obvious to anyone listening in; most especially not to Volyova. “I don’t know exactly what happened with him, except that you were close.”
“Close isn’t the word for it, Khouri.”
“Lovers, then. I wasn’t going to say that in case I offended you.”
“Don’t worry about offending me, kid. It’s way too late for that.”
Volyova’s voice interrupted them. “Kick off and descend to the chamber wall, you three.”
They obeyed her, using their suits on mild amplification to jump away from the plate which capped the end of the cylinder. They had been in freefall from the moment they entered the place, but now, as they descended towards the wall/floor, and picked up circumferential speed, their sense of weight mounted. The change was small, cushioned within the gel-air, but it gave enough small cues to engender a sense of up and down.
“I understand why you resent me,” Khouri said.
“Bet you do.”
“I took his position. Filled his role. After . . . whatever happened to him, you suddenly had me to deal with.” Khouri did her best to sound reasonable, as if she was taking none of this personally. “If I was in your shoes, I think I’d feel the same. In fact I’m sure of it. But that doesn’t make it right, either. I’m not your enemy, Sudjic.”
“Don’t delude yourself.”
“About what?”
“That you understand one tenth of what this is about.” Sudjic had positioned her suit close to Khouri’s now: seamless white armour stark against the damaged wall of the chamber. Khouri had seen images of ghostly white whales which lived-or used to live; she wasn’t sure-in Earth’s seas. Belugas, they were called, and they came to mind now. “Listen,” Sudjic said. “Do you think I’m simplistic enough that I’d hate you just because you fill the space Boris left? Don’t insult me, Khouri.”
“Not my intention, believe me.”
“If I hate you, Khouri, it’s for a perfectly good reason. It’s because you belong to her.” She emitted the last word as a gasp of pure animosity. “Volyova. You’re her trinket. I hate her, so naturally I hate her possessions. Especially those whom she values. And of course-if I found a way to harm one of her possessions-do you imagine I wouldn’t do it?”
“I’m nobody’s possession,” Khouri said. “Not Volyova’s; not anyone’s.” She immediately hated herself for protesting so vigorously, and then began to hate Sudjic for pushing her to the cusp of this defensiveness. “Not that it’s any of your business. You know what, Sudjic?”
“I’m dying to hear.”
“From what I heard, Boris wasn’t the sanest individual who ever lived. From what I hear, Volyova didn’t so much drive him mad as try and use his madness for something constructive.” She felt her suit decelerate, softly depositing her feet-first on the crumpled wall. “So it didn’t work. Big deal. Maybe you two deserved each other.”
“Yeah, maybe we did.”
“What?”
“I don’t necessarily like anything that you just said, Khouri. Fact is, if we didn’t have company, and if we weren’t suited up, I might take a few moments to teach you how easily I could break your neck. Might still do it, one of these days. But I’ve got to admit. You’ve got spite. Most of her puppets usually lose that straight away; if she doesn’t fry them first.”
“You’re saying you misjudged me? Excuse me if I don’t sound grateful.”
“I’m saying maybe you aren’t as much her possession as she imagines.” Sudjic laughed. “It’s not a compliment, kid—just an observation. It might be worse for you once she realises. It doesn’t mean you’re off my shit-list, either.”
Khouri might have replied, but anything she intended to say was drowned out by Volyova, who was again speaking over the general suit channel, addressing the three of them from her vantage point high above, near the chamber’s middle. “There is no structure to this exercise,” she said. “At least none that you need know about. Your sole obligation is to stay alive until the scenario is over. That’s all there is to it. The exercise begins in ten seconds. I won’t be available for questions during the course of it.”
Khouri absorbed this without any undue worry. There had been many unstructured exercises on the Edge, and many more in the gunnery. All it meant was that the deeper purpose of the scenario was masked, or that it was-literally-an exercise in disorientation intended to represent the chaos which might follow an operation which had gone badly wrong.
They began with warm-up exercises. Volyova watched them from on high while a variety of drone-targets emerged from previously concealed trapdoors in the wall of the chamber. The targets were not much of a challenge; at least, not at first. At the beginning the suits retained enough autonomy to detect and react to the targets before the wearer had even noticed them, so that all the wearer needed to do was issue consent for the kill. But it became harder. The targets stopped being passive and began to shoot back-usually indiscriminately, but with steadily mounting firepower, so that even wide-shots posed a threat. The targets also got smaller and faster, popping out of the trapdoors with increasing frequency. And-keeping pace with the increasing danger posed by the enemy-the suits suffered progressive losses of functionality. By the sixth or seventh round most of the suit autonomy had been eroded, and the sensor webs which each suit draped around itself were breaking up, so that the wearers had to rely increasingly on their own visual cues. Yet though the exercise had increased in difficulty, Khouri had worked through similar scenarios so often that she did not begin to lose her cool. One had to remember how much of the suit functionality remained: one still had the weapons, the suit power and flight-capability.
The three of them did not communicate during the initial exercises; they were too intent on finding their own mental edges. Eventually it was like getting a second wind; a state of stability which lay beyond what at first seemed like the limits of normal performance. Getting there was a little like entering a trance state. There were certain tricks of concentration one could call into play: rote mantras which mediated the transition. It was never just a matter of wishing it and being there; it was more like climbing onto some awkward ledge. But as one did it-and did it over again-one found that the move became more fluid, and the ledge no longer seemed quite so high or inaccessible. But it was never reached simply, or without some expenditure of mental effort.
It was during the ascension to that state that Khouri half thought she had seen the Mademoiselle.
It was not even a glimpse, just a peripheral awareness that-momentarily-there had been another body out there in the chamber, and that its shape might have been that of the Mademoiselle. But the sensation vanished as quickly as it had come.
Could it have been her?
Khouri had not seen or heard from the Mademoiselle since the incident in the gunnery room. The Mademoiselle’s last communique to her had been more pique than anything else; delivered after Khouri had helped Volyova finish off the cache-weapon. She had warned her that by remaining in the gunnery so long she had brought Sun Stealer on herself. And-indeed-the moment that Khouri tried to leave guns-pace, she had felt something rushing towards her. It had come at her like a largening shadow, but she had not felt anything when the shadow seemed to engulf her. It was if a hole had opened in the shadow and she had passed unscathed through it, but she doubted that that had really been the case. The truth was almost certainly less palatable. Khouri did not want to consider the possibility that the shadow might have been Sun Stealer, but it was a conclusion she could not ignore. And in accepting that, she also had to accept the likelihood that Sun Stealer had now managed to ensconce a much larger part of himself in her skull.
It had been bad enough knowing that a small part of that thing had come back with the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds. But that at least had been contained; it had been within the Mademoiselle’s powers to hold him at bay. Now Khouri had to accept that a more substantial fragment of Sun Stealer had reached her. And the Mademoiselle had been curiously absent ever since—until this voiceless half-glimpse, which might have been nothing at all; less than a figment of her imagination; something which any sane person would have dismissed as a trick of the light at the edge of vision.
If it had been her. . . what did it mean, after all this time?
Eventually the initial phase of exercises finished; and some of the suit functionality was reinstated. Not everything, but enough to let the three of them know that a certain slate had been wiped clean, and that from now the rules would be different.
“All right,” Volyova said. “I’ve seen worse.”
“I’d take that as a compliment,” Khouri said, hoping to elicit some vague camaraderie from her compatriots. “But the trouble with Ilia is she means it literally.”
“At least one of you gets it,” Volyova said. “But don’t let it go to your head, Khouri. Especially as it’s about to get serious.”
At the far end of the chamber another clamshell door was easing open. Because of the constantly shifting light, Khouri saw what happened more as a series of frozen, glare-saturated images than actual motion. Things were spilling out: an expanding mass of ellipsoidal objects, each perhaps half a metre long, metallic-white in colour, with various protrusions, gun-nozzles, manipulators and apertures interrupting its surface.
Sentry drones. She knew them-or something similar-from the Edge. They had called them wolfhounds, because of the ferocity of their attack, and the fact they always moved in packs. Although their main military use was as an instrument of demoralisation, Khouri knew what they could do, and she knew that wearing a suit was no guarantee of safety. Wolfhounds were built for viciousness, not intelligence. They carried relatively light weapons-but they did so in large numbers, and, more to the point, they acted in unison. A pack of wolfhounds could collectively target their fire against a single individual, if their pooled-processors deemed that the action was strategically useful. It was that single-mindedness which made them terrifying.
But there was more. Embedded in the mass of erupting drones were several larger objects, also metallic-white in colour, but lacking the spherical symmetry of the wolfhounds. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the intermittent bursts of illumination, but Khouri thought she knew what they were. They were other suits, and they were very unlikely to be friendly.
The wolfhounds and the enemy suits were dropping away from the central axis now, vectoring towards the three waiting trainees. Perhaps two seconds had elapsed since the other door had opened, but it had seemed much longer as Khouri’s mind easily switched to the mode of rapid consciousness which combat demanded. Many of the suit’s higher autonomous functions were disabled, but its target-acquisition routines were still operable, so she ordered the suit to lock onto the wolfhounds, not actually firing, but keeping a bead on each one. She knew that her suit would confer with its two partners; between them devising a moment-by-moment strategy and allocating targets to each other, but that process was largely invisible to the wearer.
Where the hell was Volyova?
Was it possible she could have moved from one end of the chamber to the other, in time to appear in the pack? Yes, probably-motion in a suit, at least on a scale this compressed, could be so rapid that a person might seem to disappear from one point and appear hundreds of metres further away an eyeblink later. But the enemy suits Khouri had seen had definitely come through the other door, which would have necessitated Volyova leaving the chamber and making her way to the other end through normal ship corridors and accessways. Even in a suit, even with the route keyed in beforehand, Khouri doubted that anyone could do that so quickly; not without becoming liquid en route. But maybe Volyova had a short-cut; a clear shaft through which she could move much more rapidly . . .
Shit.
Khouri was being shot at.
The wolfhounds were firing, lancing her with small-grade laser fire, emerging in twin beams from malignant, closely spaced eyes in the upper hemisphere of their ellipsoid shells. By now their chameleoflage had adapted to the floor metal, turning them into purple lozenges which seemed to dance in and out of clarity. Her suit skin had silvered to an optically perfect mirror, deflecting most of the energy, but some of the initial blasts had done real damage to the suit integrity. She would lose points for that-she had been too busy cogitating on Volyova’s vanishing act to pay attention to the attack. That diversion, of course, had almost certainly been Volyova’s intention. She looked around, confirming what the suit readouts were telling her, which was that her compatriots had all survived. Flanking her, Sudjic and Kjarval resembled androform blobs of mercury, but they were not hurt and were returning fire.
Khouri set her escalation protocols to stay one offensive step ahead of the enemy, but not to obliterate them. Her suit sprouted low-yield lasers, popping up on both shoulders, pivoting on turrets. She watched the beams converge ahead of her, knifing forwards, each burst leaving a lilac contrail of ionised air. When hit, the shining, flying purple wolfhounds tended to crash out of the sky, bouncing to the ground or just exploding in hot blossoms. It would have been unwise in the extreme to be out in the chamber without a suit.