As she moved in, the room sensed her presence and notched up its illumination. She had visited Volyova here after the Triumvir had been injured; she felt she knew the approximate geometry of the place.
She looked to the bed where she was sure Sajaki ought to have been. Above the bed floated an elaborate array of gimballed and hinged servo-mechanical medical tools, radiating down from a central point like a mutated steel hand with far too many fingers, all of which seemed tipped with talons.
There was not a single inch of metal which was not covered in blood; thickly congealed, like candle-wax.
“Pascale, I don’t think—”
But she too had seen what lay on the bed below the machinery; the thing that might once have been Sajaki. There was also not a single inch of the bed which was not adorned in red. It was difficult to see where Sajaki ended and where his eviscerated remains began. He reminded her of the Captain; except here the Captain’s silver borderlessness had been transfigured into scarlet; like an artist’s reworking of the same basic theme in a different and more carnal medium. Two halves of the same morbid diptych.
His chest was bloated, raised above the bed, as if a stream of galvanising current were still slamming through him. His chest was also hollow; the gore pooled in a deep excavated crater which ran from his sternum to his abdomen, like a terrible steel fist had reached down and ripped half of him out. Perhaps that was the way it had happened. Perhaps he had not even been awake when it did. For confirmation of this theory she scrutinised his face, the little of his expression she could decipher beneath the veil of red.
No; Triumvir Sajaki had almost certainly been awake.
She felt Pascale’s presence not far behind. “You shouldn’t forget I’ve seen death,” she said. “I saw my father assassinated.”
“You’ve never seen this.”
“No,” she said. “You’re right. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
His chest exploded. Something burst out of it, at first so efficiently concealed by the fountain of blood that it had disturbed that it was not obvious what it was—until it landed on the blood-slicked floor of the room and scampered away, wormlike tail lashing behind it. Then three more rats elevated their snouts out of Sajaki, sniffing the air, regarding Khouri and Pascale with matched pairs of black eyes. Then they too pulled themselves over the caldera which had been his rib-cage, landing on the floor, following the one who had just left. They vanished into the room’s darker recesses.
“Let’s get out of here,” Khouri said. But even as she was speaking it moved; the fist of steel fingers, activating with blinding speed, reaching out to her with a pair of its clawed, diamond-tipped digits, so quickly that she could only begin to scream. The claws snagged her jacket, ripping into it, and then she began to pull away, with all the strength she had.
She wrenched free, but not before it had located a purchase around her gun, dragging it with brutal force from her fingers. Khouri fell back into the mess on the floor; noticing how her jacket was soiled with Sajaki’s blood; how at least some of the brighter red pooling from the rips must have been her own.
The surgical machine elevated the gun, cradling it for them to see, as if gloating at its acquisition of a hunting trophy. Now two of its more dextrous manipulators snaked into place and began to examine the gun’s controls, stroking the leather casing in eerie fascination. Slowly, ever so slowly, the manipulators began to point the gun in Khouri’s direction.
Pascale raised the beamer and blasted the whole assembly, blood-caked metallic chunks splattering over Sajaki’s remains. The plasma-rifle crashed down, blackened and gushing smoke, blueish sparks dancing from its shattered casing.
Khouri picked herself up, oblivious to the filth in which she was liberally covered.
Her ruined plasma-rifle was now buzzing angrily, the sparks dancing with increased ferocity.
“It’s going to blow,” Khouri said. “We have to get away from here.”
They turned to the door, and then had a second to adjust to what was now blocking their exit. There had to be a thousand of them; piled three deep in the ship-slime, each individual careless of its own life, but acting for the greater good of the whole senseless mass. Behind, more rats; hundreds and then thousands more, piling back along the corridor; a vast rodent tidal wave, brimming at the aperture of the clinic, ready to surge forwards in one consuming
tsunami
of appetite.
She unsheathed the only weapon she now had left, the tiny, ineffectual needler she carried only because of the precision it allowed. She began to squirt it at the mass of rats while Pascale doused them with the beamer, which was hardly more suited to the task. Rats exploded and burned wherever they pointed their guns, but there were always more of them, and now the first rank of rats was beginning to creep into the clinic.
Brightness flared down the corridor, followed by a series of bangs spaced so closely together that they almost merged into a solid roar. The noise and the light came closer. Rats were flying through the air now, propelled by the approaching explosions. The stench of cooked rodent was overpowering; worse than the smell which already pervaded the clinic. Gradually, the wave of rats began to thin and disperse.
Volyova stood in the doorway, her slug-gun belching smoke, its barrel the colour of lava. Behind them, Khouri’s ruined weapon grew suddenly and ominously silent.
“Now would be a good time to leave,” Volyova said.
They ran towards her, trampling over the dead rats and those still seeking shelter. Khouri felt something slam into her spine. There was a wind, hotter than any she had known. She felt herself lose contact with the floor, and then for a moment she was flying.
THIRTY-TWO
Approaching Cerberus Surface, 2566
This time the dislocation was briefer, even though the place in which he found himself was the most foreign he had known.
“On descent towards Cerberus bridgehead,” the suit informed him, voice pleasantly bland and drained of import, as if this were a perfectly natural destination. Graphics scrolled over the suit’s faceplate window, but his eyes could not focus on them properly, so he told the suit to drop the imagery straight into his brain. Then it was much better. The fake contours of the surface—huge now, filling half the sky—were lined in lilac, their sinuous mock-geology rendering the world more folded and brainlike than ever before. There was very little natural illumination here, save for the twin beacons of dim ruddiness of Hades and, much further way, Delta Pavonis itself. But the suit compensated by shifting near-infrared photons into the visible.
Now something jutted over the horizon, blinkered in green by the overlay.
“The bridgehead,” Sylveste said, as much to hear a human voice as anything else. “I see it.”
It was tiny, he saw now. It looked like the tip of an insignificant splinter blemishing the stone of God’s own statue. Cerberus was two thousand kilometres across; the bridgehead a mere four in length, and most of that was now buried beneath the crust. In a way, it was the device’s very tininess in relation to the world which best testified to Ilia Volyova’s skill. It might be small, but it was still a thorn in the side of Cerberus. That much was obvious even from here; the crust around the bridgehead looked inflamed, stressed to some point beyond its inbuilt tolerances. For several kilometres around the weapon, the crust had given up any pretence of looking realistic. Now it had reverted to what he assumed was its native state: a hexagonal grid which blurred into rock on its fringes.
They would be over the maw—the cone’s open end—in a few minutes. Sylveste could already feel gravity tugging at his viscera now, even though he was still immersed in the suit’s liquid air. It was admittedly weak; a quarter of Earth normal—but a fall from his present height would still be adequately fatal, with or without the suit to protect him.
Now, finally, something else shared his immediate volume of space. He called in enhancements and saw a suit exactly like his own, twinkling brightly against the night. It was a little ahead of him, but following the same trajectory, heading for the circular entrance into the bridgehead. Two morsels of drifting marine food, he thought, about to be sucked into the enormous waiting funnel of the bridgehead, digested into the heart of Cerberus.
No going back now, he thought.
The three women ran down a corridor carpeted in dead rats and the blackened, stiff shells of things that might possibly once have been rats, though they did not invite close scrutiny. The trio had one big gun between the three of them now; one gun capable of despatching any servitor which the ship sent against them. The small pistols they also had might do the same job, but only if used with expertise and a certain degree of luck.
Occasionally, the floor shifted under their feet, unnervingly.
“What is it?” asked Khouri, limping now, after the brusing she had taken when the clinic had exploded. “What does it mean?”
“It means Sun Stealer is experimenting,” Volyova said, pausing between every two or three words to catch her breath, her side aflame with pain now; every injury which had been healed since Resurgam seemed on the point of unstitching. “So far he’s moved against us with the less critical systems; the robots and the rats, for instance. But he knows that if he can understand the drive properly—if he can learn how to operate it within its safety margins—he can crush us just by ramping up the thrust for a few seconds.” She ran for a few more strides, wheezing. “It’s how I killed Nagorny. But Sun Stealer doesn’t know the ship so well, even though he controls it. He’s trying to adjust the drive very gradually; reaching an understanding of how it operates. When he has that—”
Pascale said, “Is there anywhere we can go where we can be safe? Somewhere the rats and the machines can’t reach?”
“Yes, but nowhere that the acceleration can’t reach in and crush us.”
“So we should get off the ship, is that what you’re saying?”
She stopped, audited the corridor they were in and decided it was not one of the ones in which the ship could hear their conversations. “Listen,” she said. “Don’t be under any illusions. If we leave here, I doubt very much that we’ll ever find a way to return. But on the other hand, we also have an obligation to stop Sylveste, if there’s even a slim chance of doing so. Even if we kill ourselves in the process.”
“How could we reach Dan?” Pascale asked. Obviously, stopping Sylveste still amounted—in her mind—to catching him and talking him out of going further. Volyova decided not to disabuse her of that notion, not just yet; but it wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
“I think your husband took one of our suits,” she said. “According to my bracelet all the shuttles are still present. Besides, he could never have piloted one of them.”
“Not unless he had help from Sun Stealer,” Khouri said. “Listen, can we keep moving? I know we don’t have any particular direction in mind, but I’d feel a hell of a lot happier than standing around.”
“He’d have taken a suit,” Pascale said. “That would have been his style. But he wouldn’t have done so alone.”
“Is it possible he would have accepted Sun Stealer’s help?”
She shook her head. “Forget it. He didn’t even believe in Sun Stealer. If he’d had an inkling that he was being led—pushed into something—no; he wouldn’t have accepted it.”
“Maybe he didn’t have any choice,” Khouri said. “But anyway; assuming he took a suit, is there any way we can catch him?”
“Not before he reaches Cerberus.” There was no need to think about that. She knew just how quickly a million kilometres of space could be traversed if one could tolerate a constant ten gees of acceleration. “It’s too risky to take suits ourselves; not the kind your husband used. We’ll have to get there in one of the shuttles. It’ll be a lot slower, but there’s less chance Sun Stealer will have infiltrated its control matrix.”
“Why’s that?”
“Claustrophobia. The shuttles are about three centuries less advanced than the suits.”
“And that’s supposed to help us?”
“Believe me, when you’re dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best.” Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared stray into the corridor.
“I remember this place,” Pascale said. “This is where you brought us when—”
Khouri made the door open; the one marked with a barely legible spider.
“Get in,” she said. “Make yourself at home. And start praying that I remember how Ilia worked this thing.”
“Where is she going to meet us?”
“Outside,” Khouri said. “I sincerely hope.”
By which time she was already closing the spider-room’s door; already looking at the brass and bronze controls and hoping for some spark of recognition.
THIRTY-THREE
Cerberus/Hades Orbit, 2566
Volyova slipped out the needler, approaching the Captain.
She knew that she had to get to the hangar chamber as quickly as possible; that any delay might give Sun Stealer the time he needed to find a way to kill her. But there was something she had to do first. There was no logic to it, no rationality—but she knew she had to do it anyway. So she took the stairwells to the Captain’s level, into the deadening cold, her breath seeming to solidify in her throat. There were no rats down here: too cold. And servitors would not be able to reach him without running the risk of becoming part of him, subsumed by the plague.
“Can you hear me, you bastard?” She told her bracelet to warm him enough for conscious thought processes. “If so, pay attention. The ship’s been taken over.”
“Are we still around Bloater?”
“No . . . no, we’re not still around Bloater. That was some time ago.”