Khouri heard only the faintest of scuffling sounds as the open suit shuffled towards her. She felt its gently insistent pressure against her spine and the backs of her legs, arms and head. In her peripheral vision she observed the wet-looking side-parts of the head fold around her, and then felt the legs and arms of the suit meld around her limbs. The chest cavity sealed, with a sound like someone taking the last slurp from a pudding bowl.
Her vision was restricted now, but she could see enough to watch the suit’s limbs closing up along their dissection-lines. The seals lingered for a second or so before becoming invisible, lost in the bland whiteness of the rest of the suit’s hide. Then the head formed over her own, and for a moment there was darkness before a transparent oval appeared ahead of her. Smoothly, the darkness around the oval lit up with numerous readouts and status displays. Later the suit would flood itself with gel-air, to protect its occupant against the gee-loads of flight, but for now Khouri was breathing mintily fresh oxygen/nitrogen air at shipboard pressure.
“I have now run through my safety and functionality tests,” the suit informed her. “Please confirm that you wish to accept full control of this unit.”
“Yes, I’m ready,” Khouri said.
“I have now disabled the majority of my autonomous control routines. This persona will remain online in an advisory capacity, unless you request otherwise. Full suit-autonomous control can be reinstated by—”
“I get the deal, thanks. How are the others doing?”
“All other units report readiness.”
Volyova’s voice cut in: “We’re set, Khouri. I’ll lead the team; triangular descent formation. I shout, you jump. And don’t make a move unless I authorise it.”
“Don’t worry; I had no plans to.”
“I see you have her well under your thumb,” Sudjic said, on the open channel. “Does she shit to order as well?”
“Shut it, Sudjic. You’re only along because you know worlds. One step out of line . . . ” Volyova paused. “Well, put it this way; Sajaki won’t be around to intercede if I lose my temper, and I’ve got a lot of firepower with which to lose it.”
“Talking of firepower,” Khouri said, “I’m not seeing any weapons data on my readout.”
“That’s because you’re not authorised,” Sudjic said. “Ilia doesn’t trust you not to shoot at the first thing that moves. Do you, Ilia?”
“If we run into trouble,” Ilia said, “I’ll let you have weps usage, trust me.”
“Why not now?”
“Because you don’t need it now, that’s why. You’re along for the ride; to assist if things deviate from the plan. Which of course they won’t . . . ” She drew breath audibly. “But if they do, you get your precious weapons. Just try and be discreet if you have to use them, that’s all.”
Once outside, the shipboard air was purged and replaced by gel-air: breathable fluid. For a moment it felt like drowning, but Khouri had made the transition enough times on Sky’s Edge not to feel much discomfort. Normal speech was impossible now, but the suit helmets contained trawls which were able to interpret subvocal commands. Speakers in the helmets shifted incoming sounds by the appropriate frequency to compensate for the gel-air-induced distortions, which ensured that the voices she heard sounded perfectly normal. Although it was a harder and heavier descent than any shuttle insertion, it felt easier, apart from an occasional pressure above Khouri’s eyeballs. It was only by reference to the suit’s readouts that she knew they were routinely exceeding six gees of acceleration, impelled by the tiny antilithium-fed thrusters buried in the suit’s spine and heels. With Volyova leading the descent, the suits formed a deltoid pattern, the two inhabited suits following her and the three slaved empty suits trailing behind. For the first part of the descent, the suits remained in the configuration they had assumed aboard the lighthugger, making a rough concession to human anatomy. But by the time the first traces of Resurgam’s upper atmosphere began to glow around them, the suits had silently transformed their exteriors. Now—although none of this was obvious from within—the membrane linking the arms to the body had thickened, until the arms and body were no longer easily divisible. The angle of the arms had altered as well; now they were held rigid but slightly bent, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the body. Since the head had retracted and flattened, there was now a smooth arc running from the tip of each arm, over the head and down again. The columnar legs had fused into a single flared tail, and any transparent patches defined by the user had been forcibly re-opaqued, to protect against the glare of re-entry. The suits met the atmosphere chest-on, with the tail hanging slightly lower than the head: complex shockwave patterns being tamed and exploited by the morphing geometry of the suit hide. While direct vision was no longer possible, the suits were continuing to perceive their surroundings in other EM bands, and were perfectly capable of adapting this data for human senses. Looking around and below, Khouri saw the other suits, each seemingly immersed in a radiant teardrop of pinkish plasma.
At twenty kilometres’ altitude the suits used their thrusters to drop to merely supersonic speeds. Now they remoulded themselves to adapt to the thickening atmosphere, transforming into human-sized aircraft. The suits grew stabilising fins along their backs, and the face parts again returned to transparency. Snug in the suit’s embrace, Khouri barely felt these changes, only a slight pressure from the surrounding suit material which nudged her limbs from one position to another.
At fifteen kilometres, the sixth suit broke formation and went hypersonic, configuring itself into an aerodynamically optimum shape into which no human could have fitted without drastic surgery. It disappeared over the horizon in a few seconds, probably moving faster than any artificial object which had ever entered Resurgam’s atmosphere, exerting upward thrust to keep itself from escaping from the planet entirely. Khouri knew that the suit was heading to pick up Sajaki—it would meet with him near the designated site where he had last communicated with the ship, now that his work on Resurgam was complete.
At ten kilometres—maintaining silence, even though the com-laser links between the suits were totally secure—they hit the first traces of the razorstorm Volyova had stirred to life. From space it had looked black and impenetrable, like a plateau of ash. Inside, there was more illumination than Khouri had expected. The light was gritty and sepia, like a bad afternoon in Chasm City. A muddyish rainbow haloed the sun, and then that too vanished as they sank deeper into the storm. Now light did not so much stream down to them as stumble haphazardly, navigating layer upon layer of elevated dust like a drunkard descending stairs. Since there was no feeling of weight in the gel-air, Khouri rapidly lost all sensation of up and down, but she instinctively trusted the suit’s own inertial systems to figure things out. Now and again—even though the thrusters were trying to smooth out the ride—she felt lurches as the suit hit a pressure cell. As the speed of the ensemble dropped below that of sound, the suits reconfigured again, becoming more statuesque. The ground was only a few kilometres below, and the highest peaks of the mesa system were only hundreds of metres under them, though they remained unseen. It was increasingly hard now to make out the other four suits in the formation; they kept fading in and out of the dust.
Khouri began to get a little concerned. She had never used a suit in conditions anything like this. “Suit,” she asked. “Are you quite sure you can handle this stuff? I wouldn’t want you dropping out of the sky on me.”
“Wearer,” it said, managing to sound sniffy. “When the dust becomes a problem I shall immediately inform you of that fact.”
“All right; just asking.”
Now there was hardly anything to see. It was like swimming through mud. There were occasional rents in the storm which afforded glimpses of towering canyon and mesa-walls, but most of the time the dust was completely featureless. “Can’t see anything,” she said.
“Is this an improvement?”
It was. The storm had casually blinked out of existence. She could see around her for tens of kilometres; all the way to the relatively near horizon, where it was unobstructed by closer rock walls. It was just like flying on a dazzlingly clear day, except that the entire scene was rendered in sickly variations of pale green. “A montage,” the suit said. “Constructed from ambient infrared, interpolated random-pulse/ snapshot sonar and gravimetric data.”
“Very nice, but don’t get cocky about it. When I get annoyed with machines, even very sophisticated ones, I have a nasty habit of abusing them.”
“Duly noted,” the suit said, shutting up.
She called up an overlay which gave her some idea where she was on a larger scale. The suit knew exactly where to go—homing in on the coordinates where Sylveste had called from—but it made her feel more professional to actually take an active interest in things. Three and a half hours had passed now since Volyova and Sylveste had spoken, which, assuming he was on foot, would not allow Sylveste to get seriously far from the agreed rendezvous point. Even if, for some reason, he now tried to evade the pick-up, the suit’s sensors would have no trouble locating him, unless he had found a conveniently deep cave in which to ensconce himself: but then the suit’s detector systems would do their level best to track him down, using the thermal and biochemical evidence he would have unavoidably left behind on his route.
“Listen up,” Volyova said, using the intersuit com for the first time since they had entered the atmosphere. “We’ll be at the reception point in two minutes. I’ve just had a signal from orbit. Triumvir Sajaki’s suit has located him and made successful pick-up. He’s currently en route to meet us, but because his suit can’t move so quickly now he won’t make it for another ten minutes.”
“He’s meeting us?” Khouri asked. “Why doesn’t he just return to the ship? Doesn’t he believe we can do the job without him breathing down our necks?”
“Are you kidding?” Sudjic asked. “Sajaki’s waited years—decades—for this. He wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Sylveste won’t put up a struggle, will he?”
“Not unless he’s feeling incredibly lucky,” Volyova said. “But don’t take anything for granted. I’ve dealt with this bastard before; you two haven’t.”
Khouri felt her suit slither to a configuration very similar to the one it had first had aboard the ship. The wing membrane had vanished entirely now, and her limbs were properly defined and articulated, rather than just being flattened winglike appendages. The tips of the arms had bifurcated into mittenlike claws, but a more developed hand could be formed, if she needed to do delicate manipulations. Now she was tipping back into a near-vertical posture, while still moving forwards. The suit was now maintaining altitude solely by thrust, utterly impervious to the dust.
“One minute,” Volyova said. “Altitude two hundred metres. Expect visual acquisition of Sylveste any moment now. And remember we’ll also be looking for his wife; I doubt they’ll be far apart.”
Tiring of the pale-green false image, Khouri reverted to normal vision. She could hardly make out the other suits. They were now a long way from the canyon walls of any major rock features or crevasses. The terrain was flat for thousands of metres in any direction, apart from the odd boulder or gully. But even when pockets opened in the storm, calm ventricles in the chaos, it was impossible to see more than a few tens of metres, and the ground was ceaselessly aswirl in dust eddies. Yet in the suit it was totally cool and silent, lending the whole situation a dangerous air of unreality. If she had wished it, the suit could have relayed the ambient sound to her, but it would have told her nothing except that it was hellishly windy out there.
She returned to the pale-green.
“Ilia,” she said. “I’m still weaponless here. Starting to feel a bit itchy.”
“Give her something to play with,” Sudjic said. “It can’t hurt, can it? She can go away and shoot some rocks while we take care of Sylveste.”
“Fuck you.”
“In spades, Khouri. Didn’t it occur to you I might be trying to do you a favour? Or do you think you can persuade Ilia all on your lonesome?”
“All right Khouri,” Volyova said. “I’m enabling your minimal-volition defence protocols. That suit you?”
Not exactly, no. While Khouri’s suit had now been given the autonomous privileges to defend itself against external threats—even, to some extent, to act proactively towards that goal—Khouri still did not have her finger on the trigger. And that might prove to be a problem if she wanted to kill Sylveste, which was an objective she had not entirely jettisoned.
“Yeah, thanks,” she said. “Excuse me if I don’t whoop for joy.”
“My pleasure . . . ”
A second or so later they landed, soft as five feathers. Khouri felt a shiver as her suit depowered its thrusters, then made a further series of minute readjustments to its anatomy. The status readouts had now flicked over from flight to ambulatory mode, signifying that she could, if she wished, walk around normally. At this point she could even ditch the suit entirely, but without protective gear she would not have lasted long in the razorstorm. She was more than happy to remain encased in the suit’s silence, even if it meant that she did not feel entirely participatory.
“We split,” Volyova said, “Khouri; I’m assigning control of the two empty suits to your own; they’ll shadow you when you move. The three of us move apart for one hundred paces; initiate active sensor sweep in all EM and supplemental bands. If Sylveste is anywhere nearby we’ll find the svinoi.”
The two empty suits had shuffled next to Khouri already, latching onto her like stray dogs. This was, she knew, definitely the short straw choice; Volyova was letting her look after the empty units as a consolation prize for not being better armed. But there was no point whining. Her only reasonable argument for being properly armed was so that she could use those defences to kill Sylveste. It was probably not an argument which would prove entirely effective against Volyova. Still, it was worth bearing in mind that the suits could be deadly even without their armaments. In training on Sky’s Edge, she had been shown how someone wearing a suit could inflict damage on an enemy by the exertion of sheer brute force, literally tearing an opponent apart.