for coming to Resurgam, Sajaki addressed the ship, asking it to invoke Calvin and project his simulated image onto the Captain’s level. The seated figure appeared almost immediately. As usual Calvin subjected his witnesses to a brief pantomime of burgeoning awareness, stretching in his seat and looking around him, though without a glimmer of real interest.
‘Are we about to begin?’ he asked. ‘Am I about to enter you? Those machines I used on your eyes were like a tantalus, Dan — for the first time in years I remember what I’ve been missing.’
‘’Fraid not,’ Sylveste said. ‘This is just a — how should we call it? Exploratory dig?’
‘Then why bother invoking me?’
‘Because I’m in the unfortunate position of requiring your advice.’ As he spoke, a pair of servitors emerged from the darkness along the corridor. They were hulking machines which rode on tracks and whose upper torsos sprouted a glistening mass of specialised manipulators and sensors. They were antiseptically clean and highly polished, but they looked about a thousand years old, as if they had just trundled out of a museum. ‘There’s nothing in them that the plague can touch,’ Sylveste said. ‘No components small enough to be invisible to the naked eye; nothing replicating, self-repairing or shape-shifting. All the cybernetics are elsewhere — kilometres away upship, with only optical connections to the drones. We won’t hit him with anything replicating until we use Volyova’s retrovirus.’
‘Very thoughtful.’
‘Of course,’ Sajaki said, ‘for the delicate work, you’ll have to hold the scalpel yourself.’
Sylveste touched his brow. ‘My eyes aren’t so immune. You’ll have to be very careful, Cal. If the plague touches them…’
‘I’ll be more than careful, believe me.’ From the monolithic enclosure of his seat, Calvin threw back his head and laughed like a drunkard amused by his own drollery. ‘If your eyes go up, even I won’t get a chance to put my affairs in order.’
‘Just so long as you appreciate the risk.’
The servitors lurched forwards, approaching the shattered angel of the Captain. More than ever he looked like something which had not so much crept with glacial slowness from his reefer, but had burst with volcanic ferocity, only to be frozen in a strobe flash. He radiated in every direction parallel to the wall, extending far into the corridor on either side, for dozens of metres. Nearest to him, his growth consisted of trunk-thick cylinders, the colour of quicksilver, but with the texture of jewel-encrusted slurry, constantly shimmering and twinkling, hinting at phenomenally industrious buried activity. Further away, on his periphery, the branches subdivided into a bronchial- like mesh. At its very boundary, the mesh grew microscopically fine and blended seamlessly with the fabric of its substrate: the ship itself. It was glorious with diffraction patterns, like a membrane of oil on water.
The silver machines seemed to dissolve into the silver background of the Captain. They positioned themselves on either side of the wrecked shell of the reefer unit at his heart, no more than a metre from the violated carapace. It was still cold there — if Sylveste had touched any part of the Captain’s reefer, his flesh would have stayed there, soon to be incorporated into the chimeric mass of the plague. When the operation proper began, they would have to warm him just to work. He would quicken then — or rather, the plague would seize the opportunity to increase its rate of transformation — but there was no other way to work on him, for at the temperature he had reached now, all but the crudest of tools would themselves become inoperable.
The machines now extended booms tipped with sensors; magnetic resonance imagers to peer deep into the plague, differentiating between the machine, chimeric and organic strata which had once been a man. Sylveste had the drones pass what they saw to his eyes, appearing as a lilac-tinged overlay superimposed on the Captain. It was only with effort that he could make out the residual outline of the human instar which had become this; it was like a ghostly outline beneath the paint on a recycled canvas. But as the MRI sweep continued, the details grew progressively sharper, the man’s plague-distorted anatomy bleeding into clarity. That was when the horror of it could no longer be ignored. But Sylveste just stared.
‘Where are we — I mean you — going to begin?’ he asked, towards Calvin. ‘Are we healing a man or sterilising a machine?’
‘Neither,’ Calvin said drily. ‘We’re fixing the Captain, and I’m afraid he’s rather transcended both those categories.’
‘You understand magnificently,’ Sajaki said, standing back from the cold tableau to allow the Sylvestes an unimpeded view. ‘It’s no longer a matter of healing, or even repairing. I prefer to think of it as restoration.’
‘Warm him,’ Calvin said.
‘What?’
‘You heard. I want him warmed — just temporarily, I assure you. But long enough to take a few biopsies. I understand Volyova restricted her examinations to the plague periphery. That was diligent of her; she did well, and the samples she obtained are invaluable indices of the growth pattern, and of course she couldn’t have engineered her retrovirus without them. But now we need to reach into the core; to where there’s still living meat.’ He smiled, undoubtedly enjoying the revulsion which flickered across Sajaki’s face. So maybe there was some empathy there after all, Sylveste thought — or at least the atrophied stump of what it had once been. For an instant he felt kinship with the Triumvir.
‘What are you so interested in?’
‘His cells, of course.’ Calvin fingered the curlicued arm of his seat. ‘They say the Melding Plague corrupts our implants, blends them into the flesh, by subverting their replicating machinery. I think it goes beyond that. I think it tries to hybridise — tries to achieve some harmony between the living and the cybernetic. That’s what it’s doing here, after all — nothing more malign than trying to hybridise the Captain with his own cybernetics and the ship. It’s almost benign; almost artistic, almost purposeful.’
‘You wouldn’t be saying that if you were where he is now,’ Sajaki said.
‘Of course not. That’s why I want to help him. And why I need to see into his cells. I want to know if the plague has touched his DNA — whether it’s tried to hijack his own cellular machinery.’
Sajaki extended a hand towards the chill. ‘Go ahead, in that case. You’ve permission to warm him. But only for as long as it takes. Then I want him back under, until it’s time to operate. And I don’t want those samples leaving here.’
Sylveste noticed that the Triumvir’s outstretched hand was shaking.
‘All this has something to do with a war,’ Khouri said in the spider-room. ‘That much I’m clear about. The Dawn War, they called it. It was a long time ago. Millions of years back.’
‘How would you know?’
‘The Mademoiselle gave me a lesson in galactic history, just so I’d appreciate what was at stake. And it worked, too. Can’t you accept that going along with Sylveste is not a good idea?’
‘I was never remotely of the opinion it was.’
Pull the other one, Khouri thought. Volyova was still childishly curious about Cerberus/Hades, even now that she knew it contained something dangerous. More so, in fact. Before, the mystery had consisted of a single anomalous neutrino signature. Now she had seen the alien machinery for herself, via Alicia’s recording. No; in some respects Volyova was as fascinated by the place as Sylveste. The difference was, she could still be reasoned with. Volyova still had a residual core of sanity.
‘Do you think we’d stand a chance of persuading Sajaki of the risks?’
‘Not much. We’ve kept too much from him. He’d kill us just for that. I’m still worried about him trawling you. He mentioned it again just now, you know. I managed to deflect him, but…’ She sighed. ‘In any case, Sylveste is the one pulling the strings now. What Sajaki does or doesn’t want is almost irrelevant.’
‘Then we have to get to Sylveste.’
‘It won’t work, Khouri. No amount of rational argument is going to sway him now — and I’m afraid what you’ve told me doesn’t even qualify as that.’
‘But you believe it.’
Volyova raised a hand. ‘I believe some of it, Khouri — but that isn’t the same thing. I’ve witnessed some of the things you claim to understand, like the incident with the cache-weapon. And we know alien forces are involved on some level, which makes it difficult for me to dismiss your Dawn War story completely. But we still don’t have anything resembling the big picture.’ She paused. ‘Maybe when I’ve finished analysing that splinter…’
‘What splinter?’
