“The more time I spend amongst you, the better I know you.”
The suit was de-opaquing as she spoke. “Better than you did with Nagorny, at least.”
“I did not intend to give him nightmares.” Sun Stealer’s voice was still the same absence as before; like a whisper heard against the white-noise of static.
“No, I doubt that you did.” She clucked. “You don’t want to kill me, do you? The others, perhaps—but not me; not just yet. Not while the bridgehead might still need my expertise.”
“That time has passed,” Sun Stealer said. “Sylveste has now entered Cerberus.”
Not good news; not good news at all—although, rationally, she had known for some hours that it was probably the case.
“Then there must be another reason,” she said. “Another reason why you need the bridgehead to stay open. It can’t be that you care about Sylveste making it back. But if the bridgehead fails, you wouldn’t necessarily know that he had progressed any deeper into the structure. You need to know, don’t you? You need to know how deeply he gets; whether he achieves whatever it is you have in mind for him.”
She took Sun Stealer’s lack of response as a tacit acknowledgement that she was not far from the truth. Perhaps the alien had not yet learnt all the ways of subterfuge, arts which might be uniquely human and therefore new to him.
“Let me take the shuttle,” she said.
“A vessel of this configuration is too large to enter Cerberus, even if you intend to reach Sylveste.”
Did it honestly imagine she had not thought of that herself? For a moment she felt pity that Sun Stealer was so singularly ill-equipped to grasp the way the human mind functioned. On one level he worked well enough; when he could lay lures of fear or reward; lures which depended on the emotions. It was not that his logic was faulty, either—more that he had an overestimation of how important it was in human affairs: as if pointing out to Volyova the essentially suicidal nature of her intended mission was going to suddenly deter her; turn her willingly to his side. Oh, you poor, pitiful monster, she thought.
“I’ve got one word for you,” she said, moving towards the airlock, daring the drone to intercept her. And then she said that word, having already recited the preliminary incantations which were required before the word itself could have any effect. It was a word she had not really expected that she would ever have to use in this context. But it had been enough of a surprise that she had been forced to use it once already; almost as surprising as the fact that she remembered it at all. Volyova had decided that the time to rely on expectation was long gone.
That word was
Palsy.
It had an interesting effect on the servitor. The machine did not try and obstruct her as she reached the airlock and helped herself into the
Melancholia.
Instead, it hovered aimlessly for a few seconds and then darted towards one wall, suddenly out of contact with the ship and now relying on its limited reservoir of independent behaviour-modes. Nothing had happened to the servitor itself, since execution of the Palsy command only affected ship systems. But one of the first systems to crash would have been the radio/optical command net serving all the drones. Only the autonomous drones would continue functioning unaffected—and those machines had never come under Sun Stealer’s influence. Now the thousands of supervised drones all over the ship would be scurrying to access terminals where they could tap into the controlling system directly. Even the rats would feel confused, since the aerosols dispersing their biochemical instructions would be among the affected systems. Unshackled from relentless machine control, the rodents would begin to revert to an archetype more characteristic of their feral ancestors.
Volyova closed the airlock and was gratified to feel the shuttle warming to readiness as soon as it sensed her. She tugged herself along to the cabin, already aglow with navigation readouts, already reconfiguring itself to match the kind of interface she preferred: surfaces flowing liquidly towards a new ideal.
Now all she had to do was get out.
“Did you just feel that?” Khouri asked from the metal and plush opulence of the spider-room. “The whole ship just shuddered, like an earth tremor.”
“You think it was Ilia?”
“She said we should cast loose when we got a signal. And she said it’d be obvious as hell. That was pretty obvious, wasn’t it?”
She knew if she waited any longer she would begin to doubt the evidence of her own senses; start wondering if there really had been a shudder, and then it would be too late, because if Volyova had been clear about anything it was that when the signal came, Khouri had to move quickly. There would not be very much time, she said.
So she cast off.
She twisted two of the matched brass controls to their extremities; not as she had seen Volyova do, but in the simple hope that something so drastic, random, and quite possibly stupid must surely result in something as normally undesirable as the spider-room losing its purchase on the hull, which was now all that she wanted.
The spider-room fell away from the hull.
“In the next few seconds,” Khouri said, stomach squirming in the sudden transition to freefall, “we either live or die. If that was the signal Ilia meant to give, it’s safe to leave the hull. But if it wasn’t, we’re going to be in range of the ship’s own weapons in a few seconds.”
Khouri watched the ship recede, slowly falling up and away, until she had to squint to avoid the glare of the Conjoiner engines; barely ticking over, yet still sun-bright. Somewhere in the spider-room there was a way to close the shutters on its windows, but that was one detail Khouri had not committed to memory.
“Why won’t it shoot us immediately?”
“Too much risk of damaging itself. Ilia said those limits were hardwired—nothing Sun Stealer can do about it except live with them. Guess we’re about coming up on the mark now.”
“What do you think it was, that signal?” It seemed that Pascale preferred to talk.
“A program,” Khouri said. “Buried deep in the ship, where Sun Stealer would never find it. Wired up to thousands of circuit breaks all around the ship. When she ran it—if she ran it—it would have killed thousands of systems simultaneously. One big crunch. That was the shudder, I think.”
“And it takes out the weapons?”
“No . . . not exactly. Not if I remember what she told me. Some of the sensors, and maybe some of the targeting systems, but the gunnery isn’t affected; I remember that much. But I think the rest of the ship is so screwed up it’ll take Sun Stealer a while to put himself back together again; a while to coordinate himself and get his bearings. Then he can start shooting again.”
“But the weapons could be online any time soon?”
“That’s why we have to hurry.”
“We seem to be still having a conversation. Does that mean . . . ?”
“I think so.” Khouri forced a manic grin. “I think I interpreted the signal right, and I think we’re safe—for the time being, at least.”
Pascale let out a loud sigh. “What now?”
“We have to find Ilia.”
“It shouldn’t be hard. She said there wasn’t anything we’d have to do; just wait for that signal. Then she’d be right . . . ” Khouri trailed off. She was looking back at the lighthugger, hanging over them like a levitating cathedral spire. And something was wrong with it.
Something was disturbing its symmetry.
Something was breaking out of it.
It had begun with the smallest of excisions; as a chick might force the tip of its mandible through the shell of its egg. White light, and then a series of explosions. Shards of disrupted hull mushroomed away, quickly seized by the hand of gravity, so that the veil of destruction was whipped away to reveal the underlying damage. It was a tiny hole punched through the hull. Tiny, but because the ship was so large, the hole must really have been the best part of a hundred metres across.
And now Volyova’s shuttle burst through the aperture she had opened, loitering momentarily next to the great trunk of the ship before pirouetting and diving towards the spider-room.
THIRTY-FOUR
Cerberus/Hades Orbit, 2566
Khouri let Volyova do all the hard work of getting the spider-room safely ensconced in the
Melancholia.
The operation was trickier than it seemed; not because the body of the spider-room was too large to fit the available volume, but because the room’s dangling legs refused to fold themselves neatly away, inhibiting closure of the cargo doors. In the end—and it could not have been more than a minute or so after the operation had commenced—Volyova had to send out a squad of servitors to wrestle the legs into position. To an external observer—not that there was one, of course, except the brooding, semi-paralysed mass of the lighthugger—the procedure must have resembled a team of pixies trying to cram an insect into a jewel-box.
Finally Volyova was able to close the doors, blocking out the last narrowing rectangle of twisting starfield from view. Interior lights came on, followed by the rapid, loudening howl of pressurisation, transmitted through the spider-room’s metallic hull. The servitors reappeared, quickly clamping the room against drift, and then, not more than a minute later, Volyova showed up, unsuited.
“Follow me,” she shouted, her voice ringing. “The sooner we’re out of weapons range the better.”
“How far, exactly, is weapons range?” Khouri said.
“I’m not sure.”
“You hit him with your program,” Khouri said, as the three of them pulled themselves hand-over-hand up to the shuttle’s cabin. “Good work, Ilia. We felt it out there—one mother of a shutdown.”
“I think it hurt him,” she said. “After my experience with the cache-weapon, I put Palsy back into place with a few additional interrupts. This time the paralysis would have reached much more than skin-deep. But I wish I’d installed destructive devices around the Conjoiner drives. Then we could torch the ship and run.”
“Wouldn’t that make it a bit difficult to get home?”
“Very probably. But it would certainly put an end to Sun Stealer.” As an afterthought she added, “More than that, too. Without the ship, the bridgehead would begin to fail, since there would be no more updates from the warchive. We’d have won.”
“Is that the most optimistic outcome you can think of?”
Volyova didn’t answer.
They had reached the flightdeck, which Khouri saw was as gratifyingly modern as any she had seen: all white and sterile, like a dentist’s operating room.
“Listen,” Volyova said, looking at Pascale. “I don’t know how much of this has sunk in yet, but if the bridgehead should fail now—which is what we want—it wouldn’t necessarily be good for your husband.”
“Assuming he’s reached it yet.”
“Oh, I think we can assume that.”
“On the other hand,” Khouri said, “if he’s already inside, having it fail now wouldn’t change anything, except to prevent us reaching him.” She paused, added, “That is what we’re planning, isn’t it? I mean, we have to at least try.”
“Somebody has to,” Volyova said, already buckling herself into one of the control chairs, reaching across to interface her fingers with the archaic touch-sensitive control board she affected. “Now, I strongly suggest you find yourselves somewhere to sit. We’re about to put a lot of space between ourselves and the lighthugger, in not a great deal of time.”
She had barely finished speaking when the engines came online, howling to readiness, and the previously indeterminately defined walls and floors and ceilings suddenly assumed very concrete reality.
When the shaft vanished and they were dropping through emptiness, the sense of vertical speed suddenly ceasing was so great that Sylveste felt his body tense in expectation of imaginary stress. But it was illusion: they were still falling, faster now than ever, but the points of reference were so much more distant that there was little impression of motion.
He was inside Cerberus.
“Well,” Calvin said, speaking for what seemed like the first time in days, “is this all you expected?”
“This is nothing,” Sylveste said. “Just a prelude.”
But it was still the strangest artificial structure he had ever seen; the oddest place in which he had ever been confined. The crust curved over him: a world-englobing roof pierced by the narrow end of the bridgehead. The place was aglow with its own wan luminescence, seemingly generated by the immense snakes which lay in coiled complexity across what he now thought of as the floor. The huge tree-trunk buttresses reached all the way to the ceiling, gnarled and organic. Now that the view was an improvement on that gained from the robotic probes, he could see that the buttresses looked more as if they had grown out of the ceiling into the floor than the other way around. Their roots blended into the floor. The firmament looked less alive; more crystalline. In a flash of insight he saw that the floor was older than the ceiling; that the ceiling had been constructed around the world after the floor was already finished. It was almost as if they stemmed from different phases of Amarantin science.
“Check your fall,” Sajaki said. “We don’t want to hit the floor too quickly. Nor do we want to stray into some defence system which the bridgehead hasn’t neutralised.”
“You think there might still be hostile elements?”
“Perhaps not on this level,” the Triumvir said. “But lower—I believe we can count on it. Such defences may not however have seen much use in the last million years, so they may be rather . . . ” He seemed to have to search for the word. “Rusty.”
“On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t count on that either.”
“No, perhaps not.”
Suit thrust increased, and with it the feeling of gravity. Only a quarter of a gee, yet the vaulted ceiling was still an artefact of terrifying size. There was a kilometre of it between him and open space; a kilometre he would have to get through again if he ever wanted to leave. Of course, there were another thousand kilometres of planet below his feet, but he had no idea how far into those depths he would have to tunnel before he found what he was looking for. He hoped it would not be far: the nominal five days he had allotted himself for the journey and return now seemed to be cutting it dangerously close to the mark. Seen from outside, it was easy to accept Volyova’s equations of gain and loss and believe that they had some connection to reality. Here, when the forces represented by her equations had crystallised into vast and threatening structures, he had much less confidence in their predictive power.