There was no answer.
“He’s in there,” Volyova said, consulting her bracelet again. “But maybe he can’t hear us through the armour.”
“I don’t like this,” Khouri said. “There was nothing wrong with that door when I left it. I think we should shoot the lock.” Without waiting for Volyova’s agreement, she said, “Hegazi? If you can hear this, we’re shooting our way in.”
In a flash she had the plasma-rifle in one hand, its weight drawing the muscles taut in her forearm. She was shielding her face with the other hand, looking away.
“Wait,” Volyova said. “We’re being too hasty. What if the outer door is open? The vacuum would trip the pressure-sensors and lock the inner door.”
“If that’s the case, Hegazi isn’t going to be causing us any more problems. Not unless he can hold his breath for a few hours.”
“Granted—but we still don’t want to put a hole in that door.”
Khouri moved closer.
If there was a panel showing the pressure status beyond the door, it was well-concealed behind the grime.
“I can set the beam to its narrowest collimation. Put a needle-hole in the door.”
“Do it,” Volyova said, after a moment’s hesitation.
“Change of plan, Hegazi. Gonna put a hole in the top of the door. If you’re standing up, now would be a good time to sit down, maybe think about putting your affairs in order.”
There was still no answer.
It was almost an insult to the plasma-rifle to ask it to do this, Volyova thought—too precise and dainty an operation by far, like using an industrial laser to cut a wedding cake. But Khouri did it anyway. There was a flash and a crack, as the gun spat a tiny elongated seed of ball-lightning into the door. For a moment smoke coiled from the woodworm-sized hole which she had cut.
But only for a second.
Then something spurted from the door, in a dark hissing arc.
She wasted no time putting a bigger hole in the door. By then, neither Khouri nor Volyova considered it very likely that there was going to be anyone living behind the airlock. Either Hegazi was dead—and there was no guessing how—or Hegazi had already left the lock, and this jetting stream of high-pressure fluid was his perplexing idea of a message to his former captors.
Khouri shot through, and the stream became an arm-thick eruption of the brackish fluid, ramming out with such explosive force that she was thrown backwards into the ship-sludge underfoot, plasma-rifle clattering into the same pool of ankle-deep effluent. The stuff hissed fiercely as it touched the gun’s hot maw. By the time she had struggled to her feet, however, the flow had dwindled to a dribble, slurping in noisy eructions through the punctured door. She picked up the gun and shook the muck off it, wondering if it would work again.
“It’s ship-slime,” Volyova said. “The same stuff we’re standing in. I’d recognise that stench anywhere.”
“The lock was full of ship-slime?”
“Don’t ask me how. Just open a bigger hole in the door.”
Khouri did so, until she could squeeze her arm through and work the lock’s interior controls without brushing against the plasma-heated edges of the cut metal. Volyova was right, she thought, it had been the pressure switches which had tripped the locking mechanism. The chamber must have been pumped to bursting with ship-slime.
The door opened, allowing a final slick of slime to ooze into the corridor.
Along with what remained of Hegazi. It was unclear whether this stemmed from the pressure he had been subjected to, or its explosive release, but his metal and flesh components seemed to have arrived at a less than amicable separation.
THIRTY-ONE
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
“I think this calls for a cigarette,” Volyova said, and for a moment she had to remember where she had last stowed the smokes. When she found them, in a little-visited pocket of her flying jacket, she did not rush either to open the pack or fish out one of the crumpled, yellowing tubes which resided within. She took her time, and when at last she was ready, she took an unhurried inhalation and allowed her nerves to settle, like a blizzard of feathers slowly returning to the ground.
“The ship killed him,” she said, staring down at the remnants of Hegazi, but doing her best not to think too hard about what she was looking at. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Killed him?” Khouri asked, still directing the barrel of her plasma-rifle at the elements of the Triumvir which floated in suspension in the slick of ship-slime around their feet, as if nervous that his disassociated remains might be on the verge of spontaneously reassembling. “You mean this wasn’t an accident?”
“No, it wasn’t an accident. I know he was in league with Sajaki, and therefore Sylveste. Yet Sun Stealer still killed him. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it does.”
Perhaps Khouri had already worked it out for herself, but Volyova decided to spell it out anyway. “Sylveste is gone. He’s on his way to Cerberus, and because I didn’t manage to sabotage the weapon, there’ll be very little to stop him getting inside. Do you understand? It means Sun Stealer has won. Nothing remains for him to achieve. The rest is only a question of time, and of maintaining the status quo. And what threatens that?”
“We do,” Khouri said, hesitantly, like a clever pupil who wanted to impress teacher but not draw the derision of her classmates.
“More than that. Not just you and I; not even when we include Pascale. Hegazi was also a threat, as far as Sun Stealer was concerned. And for no other reason than that he was human.” She was guessing, of course, but it seemed to make complete sense to her. “To something like Sun Stealer, human loyalty is fluid and chaotic—maybe not even properly comprehensible. He’d turned Hegazi—or at the very least those to whom Hegazi was already loyal. But did he understand the dynamics which governed that loyalty? I doubt it. Hegazi was a component which had served its usefulness, and which might malfunction at some point in the future.” She felt the icy calm which came from contemplating her own oblivion, knowing that there were few times when she had ever been so close to it. “So he had to die. And now that his objective is almost achieved, I think Sun Stealer will want to do the same to all of us.”
“If he wanted to kill us . . . ”
“He’d already have done so? He may well have already tried, Khouri. Whole parts of the ship are no longer under any central control, which means that Sun Stealer is limited in what he can do. He’s taken possession of a body already half-paralysed; already half-leprous and half-afflicted with the palsy.”
“Very poetic, but what does it mean to us, then?”
Volyova lit another cigarette; she had thoroughly seen off the first of them. “It means he will try and kill us, but that his options are difficult to predict. He can’t simply depressurise the whole ship, since there are no command channels which allow for that—even I couldn’t do it, other than by physically opening all the locks, and to do that I’d have to disable thousands of electromechanical safeties. He would probably find it difficult to flood an area larger than the airlock. But he will think of something; I’m sure of it.”
Suddenly, and it was almost without thinking, she had the slug-gun in her hands and she was pointing it down the dark lengths of the flooded corridor which led to the lock.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Volyova said. “I’m just scared. Remarkably so. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions, Khouri?”
She did, as a matter of fact.
“We’d better find Pascale. She doesn’t know her way around as well as we do. And if it gets nasty. . . ”
Volyova stubbed out what was left of her cigarette, mashing it against the barrel of the slug-gun.
“You’re right; we should stay together. And we will. Just as soon as . . . ”
Something emerged noisily from the gloom and halted ten metres from them.
Volyova had the gun on it immediately, but she did not fire; some instinct was telling her that the thing had not come to kill them, or at least not yet. It was one of the tracked servitors which she had seen Sylveste using in the aborted operation to heal the Captain; one of the units lacking any great internal sophistication. One of those, in short, which was primarily controlled by the ship, rather than its own brain.
Its chunkily mounted sensor eyes locked onto them.
“It’s not armed,” Volyova breathed, realising as she did so that whispering was useless. “I think it’s just been sent to scout us out. This is one of the parts of the ship which the ship can’t see into; one of its blind spots.”
The servitor’s sensors made little swivelling motions from side to side, as if triangulating their exact positions. Then it began to reverse back into the gloom.
Khouri shot it.
“Why did you do that?” Volyova asked, when the concussive echoes of the blast had died down and she no longer had to squint against the glare of the machine’s demise. “Whatever it saw was already transmitted back to the ship. Shooting it was pointless.”
“I didn’t like the way it was looking at me,” Khouri said. Then she frowned. “And besides—it’s one less we have to worry to about.”
“Yes,” Volyova said. “And given the speed at which the ship can manufacture a drone that simple, it may be ten or twenty seconds before it’s replaced.”
Khouri looked at her as if she’d just said a joke with an impenetrable punchline. But Volyova was serious. What she had just noticed had chilled her far more deeply than the appearance of the servitor. It was, after all, logical that the ship would soon resort to the drones for its sense-gathering operations; logical too that it would explore ways to outfit the machines for the murder of the remaining human crew and passengers. It was something she would have predicted herself, sooner or later. But not this. Not what had just poked itself above the ooze of the ship-slime; for the instant it took its black rodent eyes to spot her, before turning tail and swimming into the darkness.
Ship controlled the janitor-rats, she remembered.
When consciousness returned—and for a moment Sylveste did not remember precisely when it had left—he was surrounded by an audience of blurred stars. They were doing a very complex dance, and if he had not already felt nauseous, he felt sure that sight alone would have been sickening. What was he doing here? And why did he feel so strange; so much as if cotton-wool had been pressed into every cell in his body? Because he was in a suit, that was why. One of the special suits which the crew owned; of the sort which had carried him and Pascale up from the surface of Resurgam. The suit had forced his lungs to accept the fluid it filled itself with instead of air.
“What’s happening?” he subvocalised, in the way he knew that the suit would be able to read, via the simple speech-centre trawl built into its helmet.
“I’m reversing,” the suit informed him. “Midpoint thrust inversion.”
“Where the hell are we?” Picking through his memories was still arduous, like finding the end of a tangled rope. He had no idea where to begin.
“More than a million kilometres from the ship; somewhat less than that distance from Cerberus.”
“We’ve come all that way so—” He stopped. “No, wait. I’ve no idea how long it’s been.”
“We departed seventy-four minutes ago.” Hardly more than an hour, Sylveste thought. Yet if the suit had told him it had been a day he would have accepted it unquestioningly. “Our average acceleration was ten gees. I was instructed to make all haste by Triumvir Sajaki.”
Yes, now he remembered more. Sajaki’s midnight call, and the hurried rush to the suits. He remembered leaving a message for Pascale, though not the details. That had been his only concession; the one luxury he permitted himself. Yet even if there had been days to prepare for the entry, there would have been very little that he could have changed. He had no requirements for extra documentation or recording apparatus, since he had access to the suit’s libraries and integral sensors. The suits were armed, he knew, and capable of defending themselves autonomously, against much the same modes of attack which Volyova’s weapon was now experiencing. They were also able to extrude scientific analysis tools, or create compartments in themselves for the storing of samples. Quite apart from that, they were as independent as any spacecraft. He realised with a snap that he was thinking wrongly; the suits
were
actually spacecraft; just very flexible spacecraft with room inside for only one occupant; spacecraft which became their own atmospheric shuttles, and—if needed—their own surface rovers. Rationally, there was no other way he would rather be entering Cerberus.
“I’m glad I slept through that acceleration,” Sylveste said.
“You had no choice,” the suit said, evincing a complete lack of interest. “Consciousness was suppressed. Now please ready yourself for the deceleration phase. When you resume wakefulness, we will have arrived in the vicinity of our destination.”
Sylveste began to frame a question in his head; intending to ask the suit why Sajaki had not yet shown himself, despite his assurance that he would accompany Sylveste. Yet, before he had even begun to concretise his thoughts into the unspoken state which the trawl could read, the suit made him sleep again, as dreamlessly as before.
While Khouri went to find Pascale Sylveste, Volyova made her way back up to the bridge. Now she dared not take the elevators, but thankfully there were fewer than twenty levels to climb; an exertion, but bearable. It was also relatively safe: the ship could not send drones into the stairwells, she knew; not even the floating machines which rode through the normal corridors on superconducting magnetic fields. All the same, she kept the slug-gun at readiness, sweeping it ahead of her as she endlessly rounded the ascending spiral, occasionally stopping and holding her breath, listening for the sounds of things following her, or lurking some distance ahead.