‘What happened,’ Sylveste said, ‘is seventy-nine innocent people died. There’s no mystery to it. But I don’t hold you responsible. It would be like accusing a tyrant’s photograph of war crimes.’
‘I gave you sight, you ungrateful little sod.’ The seat swivelled so that its high solid back was facing Sylveste. ‘I admit your eyes are hardly state of the art, but what could you expect?’ The seat spun round. Calvin was dressed like Sylveste now, his hair similarly styled and his face possessing the same smooth cast. ‘Tell me about the Shrouders,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your guilty secrets, son. Tell me what really happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and not the pack of lies you’ve been spinning since you got back.’
Sylveste moved to the escritoire, ready to flip out the cartridge. ‘Wait,’ Calvin said, holding up his hands suddenly. ‘You want my advice?’
‘Finally, we’re getting somewhere.’
‘You can’t let Girardieau win. If a coup’s imminent, you need to be back in Cuvier. There you can muster what little support you may have left.’
Sylveste looked through the crawler’s window, towards the box grid. Shadows were crossing the baulks — workers deserting the dig, moving silently towards the sanctuary of the other crawler. ‘This could be the most important find since we arrived.’
‘And you may have to sacrifice it. If you keep Girardieau at bay, you’ll at least have the luxury of returning here and looking for it again. But if Girardieau wins, nothing you’ve found here will matter a damn.’
‘I know,’ Sylveste said. For a moment there was no animosity between them. Calvin’s reasoning was flawless, and it would have been churlish to pretend otherwise.
‘Then will you be following my advice?’
He moved his hand to the escritoire, ready to eject the cartridge. ‘I’ll think about it.’
TWO
The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.
She had just boarded the elevator from the bridge, weary after eighteen hours in consultation with various simulations of once-living figures from the ship’s distant past. She had been trying to catch them out, hoping one or more of them would disclose some revealing fact about the origins of the cache. It had been gruelling work, not least because some of the older beta-level personae could not even speak modern Norte, and for some reason the software which ran them was unwilling to do any translating. Volyova had been chain-smoking for the entire session, trying to get her head around the grammatical peculiarities of middle Norte, and she was not about to stop filling her lungs now. In fact, back stiff from the nervous tension of the exchanges, she needed it more than ever. The elevator’s air-conditioning was functioning imperfectly, so it took only a few seconds for her to veil the interior with smoke.
Volyova hoisted the cuff of her fleece-lined leather jacket and spoke into the bracelet which wrapped around her bony wrist. ‘The Captain’s level,’ she said, addressing the
‘Do you wish musical accompaniment for this transit?’
‘No, and as I’ve had to remind you on approximately one thousand previous occasions, what I wish is silence. Shut up and let me think.’
She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator’s internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them. Below the forests, she ghosted through the high eight hundreds; vast realms of the ship which had once been at the disposal of the crew, when the crew numbered thousands. Below 800 the elevator passed through the vast and now immobile armature which spaced the ship’s rotatable habitat and nonrotatable utility sections, and then dropped through two hundred levels of cryogenic storage bays; sufficient capacity for one hundred thousand sleepers — had there been any.
Volyova was now more than a kilometre below her starting point, but the ship’s ambient pressure remained constant, life-support one of the rare systems which still functioned as intended. Nonetheless some residual instinct told her that ears should be popping with the rush of descent.
‘Atrium levels,’ said the elevator, accessing a long-redundant record of the ship’s prior layout. ‘For your enjoyment and recreation needs.’
‘Very droll.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I mean, you’d need a pretty odd definition of recreation. Unless your idea of relaxation happened to be suiting-up in full vacuum-rated armour and dosing on a bowel-loosening regimen of anti-radiation therapies. Which doesn’t strike me as being particularly pleasurable.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Forget it,’ Volyova said, sighing.
For another kilometre she passed through only sparsely pressurised districts. Volyova felt her weight lessen and knew she was passing the engines — braced beyond the hull on elegant, swept-back spars. Gape-mouthed, they sucked in tiny amounts of interstellar hydrogen and subjected the harvest to some frankly unimaginable physics. No one, not even Volyova, pretended to know how the Conjoiner engines worked. What mattered was that they functioned. What also mattered was that they gave off a steady warm glow of exotic particle radiation, and while most would have been mopped up by the ship’s hull shielding, some of it would get through. That was why the elevator sped up momentarily as it dropped past the engines, and then slowed down to its normal descent speed once it had passed out of danger.
Now she was two-thirds of the way down the ship. She knew this district better than any of the other crew members: Sajaki, Hegazi and the others seldom came down this far unless they had excellent reason. And who could blame them? The further down they went, the closer they got to the Captain. She was the only one who was not terrified by the very idea of his proximity.
No; far from fearing this realm of the ship, she had made an empire of it. At level 612 she could have disembarked, navigated to the spider-room and taken it outside the hull, where she could listen to the ghosts which haunted the spaces between the stars. Tempting — always so. But she had work to do — she was on a specific errand — and the ghosts would still be there another time. At level 500, she passed the floor which contained the gunnery, and thought of all the problems which it represented, and had to resist stopping to carry out a few new investigations. Then the gunnery was gone and she was falling through the cache chamber — one of several huge, non-pressurised inclusions within the ship.
The chamber was enormous; the best part of half a kilometre from end to end, but it was dark now and Volyova had to imagine for herself the forty things which it contained. That was never hard. While there were many unanswered questions relating to the functions and origins of the things, Volyova knew their shapes and relative positions perfectly, as if they were the carefully positioned furnishings of a blind person’s bedroom. Even in the elevator she felt she could reach out and stroke the alloy husk of the nearest of them, just to reassure herself that it was still there. She had been learning what she could of the things for most of the time since she had joined the Triumvirate, but she would not have claimed to have been at ease with any of them. She approached them with the nervousness of a new lover, knowing that the knowledge she had gleaned to date was entirely skin-deep, and that what lay below might shatter every illusion she had.
She was never entirely sorry to exit the cache.
At 450 she shot through another armature, spacing the utility section from the ship’s tapering conic tail, which extended below for another kilometre. Again a surge as the elevator rode through a rad-zone, then the
