beginning of prolonged deceleration which would eventually bring it to a halt. It was passing through the second set of cryogenic storage decks, two hundred and fifty levels capable of holding one hundred and twenty thousand, though of course there was currently only one sleeper, if one was so generously inclined as to describe the Captain’s state as sleep. The elevator was slowing now. Midway through the cryo levels it stopped, cordially announcing that it had reached her destination.
‘Passenger cryogenic sleep level concierge,’ said the elevator. ‘For your in-flight reefersleep requirements. Thank you for using this service.’
The door opened and she stepped across the threshold, glancing down at the converging, illuminated walls of the shaft framed by the gap. She had travelled almost the entire length of the ship (or height — it was difficult not to think of the ship as a tremendously tall building) and yet the shaft seemed to drop down to infinite depths below. The ship was so large — so stupidly large — that even its extremities beggared the mind.
‘Yes, yes. Now kindly piss off.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Go away.’
Not that the elevator would, of course — at least not for any real purpose other than placating her. It had nothing else to do but wait for her. Being the sole person awake, Volyova was the only one who had any cause to use the elevators at all.
It was a long hike from the spinal shaft to the place where they kept the Captain. She could not take the most direct route either, since whole sections of the ship were inaccessible, riddled with viruses which were causing widespread malfunction. Some districts were flooded with coolant, while others were infested with rogue janitor-rats. Others were patrolled by defence drogues which had gone berserk and so were best avoided, unless Volyova felt in the mood for sport. Others were filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad, or were rumoured to be haunted.
Volyova did not believe in hauntings, (though of course she had her own ghosts, accessed via the spider- room), but the rest she took very seriously indeed. Some parts of the ship she would not enter unless armed. But she knew the Captain’s surroundings well enough not to take excessive precautions. It was cold, though, and she hiked up the collar of her jacket, tugged the bill of her cap tighter down, its mesh fabric crunching against her scalp stubble. She lit another cigarette, hard sucks perishing the vacuum in her head, replacing it with a frosty military alertness. Being alone suited her. She looked forward to human company, but not with any great fervour. And certainly not if that company also entailed dealing with the Nagorny situation. Perhaps when they reached the Yellowstone system she would consider locating a new Gunnery Officer.
Now, how had that worry escaped from her mental partitioning?
It was not Nagorny that concerned her now, but the Captain. And here he was, or at least the outermost extent of what he had now become. Volyova composed herself. That composure was necessary. What she had to examine always made her sick. It was worse for her than for the others; her repulsion stronger. She was
The miracle was that the reefersleep unit which cased Brannigan was still functional. It was a very old model, Volyova knew — sturdily built. It was still striving to hold the cells of his body in stasis, even though the shell of the reefer had ruptured in great Palaeolithic cracks, fibrous metallic growth spilling out. The growth came from within the reefer, like a fungal invasion. Whatever remained of Brannigan remained at its heart.
It was bitterly cold near the reefer, and Volyova soon found herself shivering. But there was work to do. She fished a curette from her jacket and used it to burn off slivers of the growth for analysis. Back in her lab she would attack them with various viral weapons, hoping to find one which had an edge on the growth. She knew from experience that the routine was largely futile — the growth had a fantastic capacity for corrupting the molecular tools with which she probed it. Not that there was any pressing hurry: the reefer kept Brannigan at only a few hundred millikelvin above absolute zero, and that cold did appear to offer some hindrance to the spread. On the negative side, Volyova knew that no human being had ever survived revival from such a cold, but that seemed oddly irrelevant against the Captain’s condition.
She spoke into her bracelet, voice hushed. ‘Open my log file on the Captain and append this entry.’
The bracelet chirped to indicate readiness.
‘Third check on Captain Brannigan since my revival. Extent of spread of the…’
She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.
‘… of the illness, seems unchanged since last entry. No more than a few millimetres of encroachment. Cryogenic functions are still green, miraculously. But I think we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the unit’s failure at some point in the future…’ Thinking to herself, that when it did fail, if they were not speedy in transferring the Captain to a new reefer (exactly how was an unanswered question), then he would certainly be one less problem for them to worry about. His own problems would be over as well — she sincerely hoped.
She told the bracelet: ‘Close log file.’ And then added, wishing devoutly that she had spared herself one smoke for this moment: ‘Warm Captain’s brain core by fifty millikelvins.’
Experience had told her that this was the minimum necessary temperature increase. Short of it, his brain would remain locked in glacial stasis. Above, the plague would begin to transform him too rapidly for her tastes.
‘Captain?’ she said. ‘Can you hear me? It’s Ilia.’
Sylveste stepped down from the crawler and walked back towards the grid. During his meeting with Calvin the wind had increased appreciably; he could feel it stinging his cheeks, the scouring dust a witch’s caress.
‘I hope that little conversation was beneficial,’ Pascale said, snatching away her mask to bellow into the wind. She knew all about Calvin, even though she had never spoken to him directly. ‘Have you agreed to see sense now?’
‘Get Sluka for me.’
Ordinarily she might have rejected an order like that; now she just accepted his mood and returned to the other crawler, emerging shortly afterwards with Sluka and a handful of other workers.
‘You’re ready to listen to us, I take it?’ Sluka stood before him, the wind whipping a loose strand of hair across her goggles. She took periodic inhalations from her mask, cupped in one hand, while the other hand rested on her hip. ‘If so, I think you’ll find we can be reasonable. We all have your reputation in mind. None of us will speak of this matter once we return to Mantell. We’ll say you gave the order to withdraw once the advisory came in. The credit will be yours.’
‘And you think any of that matters in the long term?’
Sluka snarled: ‘What’s so damned important about one obelisk? For that matter, what’s so damned important about the Amarantin? ’
‘You never really saw the big picture, did you?’
Discreetly — but not so discreetly that he missed her doing it — Pascale had begun taping the exchange, standing to one side with her compad’s detachable camera in one hand. ‘Some people might say there never was one to see,’ Sluka said. ‘That you inflated the significance of the Amarantin just to keep the archaeologists in business.’
‘You’d say that, wouldn’t you, Sluka? But then again, you were never exactly one of us to begin with.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that if Girardieau had wanted to plant a dissenter in our midst, you’d have made an excellent candidate.’
Sluka turned back to what Sylveste was increasingly thinking of as her mob. ‘Listen to the poor bastard — sinking into conspiracy theories already. Now we’re getting a taste of what the rest of the colony has seen for years.’ Then her attention snapped back to him. ‘There’s no point talking to you. We’re leaving as soon as we have the equipment packed — sooner, if the storm intensifies. You can come with us.’ She caught her breath from the mask, colour returning to her cheeks. ‘Or you can take your chances out here. The choice is entirely yours.’
He looked beyond her, to the mob. ‘Go on, then. Leave. Don’t allow anything as trivial as loyalty to get in your way. Unless one of you has the guts to stay here and finish the job they came to do.’ He looked from face to face, meeting only awkwardly averted gazes. He barely knew any of their names. He recognised them, but only from
