For what was on the eve of beginning.
“You won’t feel much,” Sajaki said.
The Triumvir was telling the truth, at least initially. Khouri felt no sensation when the trawl began, except for the slight pressure of the helmet, locking itself rigid against her scalp so that its scanning systems could be targeted with maximum accuracy. She heard faint clicks and whines, but that was all: not even the tingling sensation she had half expected.
“This isn’t necessary, Triumvir.”
Sajaki was finessing the trawl parameters, tapping commands into a grotesquely outdated console. Cross-sections of Khouri’s head—quick, low-resolution snapshots—were springing up around him. “Then you have nothing to fear, do you? Nothing to fear at all. It’s a procedure I should have run on you when you were recruited, Khouri. Of course, my colleague was against the idea. . . ”
“Why now? What have I done to make you do this?”
“We’re nearing a critical time, Khouri. I can’t afford not to be able to trust any of my crewmembers totally.”
“But if you fry my implants, I won’t be any use to you at all!”
“Oh; you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Volyova’s little scare stories. She only wanted to keep her little trade secrets from me, in case I decided I could do her job as well as she does.” Her implants were showing up on the scans now; little geometric islands of order amid the amorphous soup of neural structure. Sajaki tapped in commands and the scan image zoomed in on one of the implants. Khouri felt her scalp tingle. Layers of structure peeled away from the implant, exposing its increasingly intricate innards in a series of dizzying enlargements, like a spysat gazing at a city, resolving first districts, then streets and then the details of buildings. Somewhere in that intricacy, stored in some ultimately physical form, was the data from which the Mademoiselle’s simulation sprang.
It had been a long time since her last visitation. Then—in the midst of the storm on Resurgam—the Mademoiselle had told Khouri that she was dying; losing the war, against Sun Stealer. Had Sun Stealer won since then, or was the continued silence of the Mademoiselle simply evidence that she was putting all her energies into prolonging the war? Nagomy had gone mad as soon as Sun Stealer established tenancy in his head. Did that still lie ahead for Khouri, or was Sun Stealer’s residency in her going to be more stealthy? Perhaps—it was a disquieting thought—he had learnt from his mistakes with Nagorny. How much of this would be evident to Sajaki, after he had run the trawl?
He had taken her from her quarters; Hegazi there to add back-up. The other Triumvir was gone now, but even if Sajaki had come alone, Khouri would not have considered resisting him. Volyova had already warned her that Sajaki was stronger than he looked, and, adept at close-quarters combat as Khouri was, she had very little doubt that Sajaki would have been better than her.
The trawling room had the atmosphere of a torture chamber. There had been terror here, once—maybe not for decades, but it was not something that could ever be erased. The trawl equipment was ancient, as bulky and monstrous as anything Khouri had seen on the ship so far. Even if the gear had been subtly modified to work better than its original spec, it was never going to be as sophisticated as the kind of trawls her side’s intelligence wing had possessed on Sky’s Edge. Sajaki’s trawl was the kind that left a trail of neural damage behind as it scanned, like a frantic burglar ransacking a house. It was scarcely more advanced than the destructive scanning machines which Cal Sylveste had used during the Eighty . . . perhaps less so.
But he had her now. He was already learning things about her implants . . . unravelling their structures, reading out their data. Once he had those, he would adjust the trawl to resolve cortical patterns, pulling webs of neuronal connectivity from her skull. Khouri knew a lot about trawling just by knowing people in intelligence. Embedded in those topologies lay longterm memories and personality traits, tangled together in ways that were not easy to separate. But if Sajaki’s equipment was not the best, chances were good that he had excellent algorithms to distil memory traces. Over centuries, statistical models had studied patterns of memory storage in ten billion human minds, correlating structure against experience. Certain impressions tended to be reflected in similar neural structures—internal qualia—which were the functional blocks out of which more complex memories were assembled. Those qualia were never the same from mind to mind, except in very rare cases, but neither were they encoded in radically different ways, since nature would never deviate far from the minimum-energy route to a particular solution. The statistical models could identify those qualia patterns very efficiently, and then map the connections between them out of which memories were forged. All Sajaki had to do was identify enough qualia structures, map enough hierarchical linkages between them, and then let his algorithms chew through them, and there would be nothing about her that he could not in principle know. He could sift through her memories at leisure.
An alarm sounded. Sajaki glanced up at one of the displays, seeing how Khouri’s implants were now glowing red; red which was leaking into surrounding brain areas.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Inductive heat,” Sajaki said, unconcernedly. “Your implants are getting a little hot.”
“Shouldn’t you stop?”
“Oh; not yet. Volyova would have hardened them against EM pulse attack, I think. A little thermal overload won’t do any irreversible damage.”
“But my head hurts . . . it doesn’t feel right.”
“I’m sure you can take it, Khouri.”
The migrainous pressure had come from nowhere, but it was really quite unbearable now, as if Sajaki had her head in a vice and was screwing it tighter. The heat build-up in her skull must be a lot worse than the scans suggested. Doubtless Sajaki—who must seldom have had the best interests of his clients at heart—had calibrated the displays not to show lethal brain temperature until it was already much too late . . .
“No, Yuuji-san. She can’t take it. Get her out of that thing.”
The voice, miraculously, was Volyova’s. Sajaki looked to the door. He must have been aware of her entrance long before Khouri, but even now he only affected a look of bored indifference.
“What is it, Ilia?”
“You know exactly what it is. Stop the trawl before you kill her.” Volyova stepped into view now. Her tone of voice had been authoritative, but Khouri could see that she was unarmed.
“I haven’t learned anything useful yet,” Sajaki said. “I need a few more minutes . . . ”
“A few more minutes and she’ll be dead.” With typical pragmatism, she added: “And her implants will be damaged beyond repair.”
Perhaps the second thing worried Sajaki more than the first. He made a tiny adjustment to the trawl. The red hue faded to a less alarming pink. “I thought these implants would be adequately hardened.”
“They’re just prototypes, Yuuji-san.” Volyova stepped closer to the displays and surveyed them for herself. “Oh, no . . . you fool, Sajaki. You damned fool. I swear you may have already damaged them.” It was as if she were talking to herself.
Sajaki waited silently for a moment. Khouri wondered if he was going to lash out and kill Volyova in an eyeblink of furious motion. But then, scowling, the Triumvir snapped the trawl controls to their off settings, watched the displays pop out of existence, then hoisted the helmet off Khouri’s head.
“Your tone of voice—and choice of wording—was inappropriate there, Triumvir,” Sajaki said. Khouri saw his hand slip into his trouser pocket and finger something—something that, for an instant, looked like a hypodermic syringe.
“You nearly destroyed our Gunnery Officer,” Volyova said.
“I’m not finished with her. Or you, for that matter. You rigged something to this trawl, didn’t you, Ilia? Something to alert you when it was running? Very clever.”
“I did it to protect a shipboard resource.”
“Yes, of course . . . ” Sajaki left his answer hanging in the air, its threat implicit, and then quietly walked out of the trawl room.
TWENTY-THREE
Cerberus/Hades Orbit, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
It was, Sylveste thought, a situation of disturbing symmetry. In a matter of hours Volyova’s cache-weapons would begin to combat the buried immunological systems of Cerberus; virus against virus, tooth against tooth. And here, on the eve of that attack, Sylveste was preparing to go to war against the Melding Plague which was consuming—or, depending on one’s point of view, grotesquely enlarging—Volyova’s afflicted Captain. The symmetry seemed to hint at an underlying order to which he was only partly privy. It was not a feeling he enjoyed; like being a participant in a game and realising, halfway through, that the rules were far more complicated than he had so far imagined.
In order that Calvin’s beta-level simulation be allowed to work through him, Sylveste had to slip into a state of ambulatory semi-consciousness akin to sleepwalking. Calvin would puppet him, receiving sensory input directly through Sylveste’s own eyes and ears, tapping directly into his nervous system to achieve mobility. He would even speak through Sylveste. The neuro-inhibitor drugs had already kicked him into a queasy full-body paralysis; as unpleasant as he remembered from the last time.
Sylveste thought of himself as a machine in which Calvin was about to become the ghost . . .
His hands worked the medical analysis tools, skirting the periphery of the growth. It was dangerous to stray too close to the heart; too high a risk of plague transmission into his own implants. At some point—this session, or perhaps the next—they would have to skirt the heart; that was inevitable, but Sylveste did not really want to think about that. For now, when they needed to work closer, Calvin used the simple, mindless drones which were slaved from elsewhere in the ship, but even those tools were susceptible. One drone had malfunctioned close to the Captain, and was even now being enmeshed in fine, fibrous plague tendrils. Even though the machine contained no molecular components, it still seemed that it was of use to the plague; still able to be digested into the Captain’s transformative matrix; fuel for his fever. Calvin was having to resort to cruder instruments now, but this was only a stopgap: at some point—soon now, undoubtedly—they would have to hit the plague with the only thing which could really work against it: something very like itself.
Sylveste could feel Calvin’s thought processes churning somewhere behind his own. It was nothing that could be called consciousness—the simulation which was running his body was no more than mimesis, but somewhere in the interfacing with his own nervous system . . . it was as if something had arisen, something which was riding that chaotic edge. The theories and his own prejudices denied that, of course—but what other explanation could there be for the sense of divided self Sylveste felt? He did not dare ask if Calvin experienced something similar, and would not necessarily have trusted any answer he received.
“Son,” Calvin said. “There’s something I’ve waited until now before discussing. I’m rather worried about it, but I didn’t want to discuss it in front of, well . . . our clients.”
Sylveste knew that only he could hear Calvin’s voice. He had to subvocalise to respond, Calvin momentarily relinquishing vocal control to his host. “This isn’t the time, either. In case you weren’t paying attention, we’re in the middle of an operation.”
“It’s the operation I want to talk about.”
“Make it quick, in that case.”
“I don’t think we’re meant to succeed.”
Sylveste observed that his hands—driven by Calvin—had not ceased working during this last exchange. He was conscious of Volyova, who was standing nearby, awaiting instructions. He subvocalised, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I think Sajaki is a very dangerous man.”
“Great—that makes two of us. But it hasn’t stopped you co-operating with him.”
“I was grateful to begin with,” Calvin admitted. “He saved me, after all. But then I started wondering how things must seem from his side. I began to wonder if he wasn’t just a touch insane. It struck me that any sane man would have left the Captain for dead years ago. The Sajaki I knew last time was fiercely loyal, but at least then there was some sense to his crusade. At least then there was a hope we could save the Captain.”
“And now there isn’t?”
“He’s been infected with a virus which the entire resources of the Yellowstone system couldn’t combat. Admittedly, the system itself was under attack from the same virus, but there were still isolated enclaves which survived for months—places where people with techniques as sophisticated as our own struggled to find a cure—and yet they never succeeded. Not only that, but we don’t even know which blind alleys they pursued, or which approaches might almost have worked, if they’d had more time.”
“I told Sajaki he needed a miracle worker. It’s his problem if he didn’t believe me.”
“The problem is, I think he did believe you. That’s what I mean when I said we weren’t meant to succeed.”
Sylveste happened to be looking at the Captain, Calvin having judiciously arranged the view. Confronted with the thing before his eyes, he experienced a moment of epiphany in which he knew that Calvin was absolutely right. They could go through the preliminary motions of healing the Captain—the rituals of establishing just how corrupted the man’s flesh was—but it could never progress beyond that. Whatever they tried, no matter how intelligent, no matter how conceptually brilliant, could not possibly succeed. Or, more significantly, could not be permitted to succeed. It was that latter realisation which was the most disturbing, because it had come from Calvin, rather than Sylveste. He had seen something which to Sylveste was still opaque, and now it seemed obvious; shatteringly so.
“You think he’ll hinder us?”