TWENTY-TWO
It was beginning.
Sylveste sat with steepled fingers before a luminous entoptic projection which occupied a good fraction of the volume of his quarters. Pascale, half consumed by shadow, was a series of abstract sculptural curves on their bed; he was cross-legged on a tatami mat, reeling in the delicious reprisals from a few millimetres of ship-distilled vodka he had downed minutes earlier. After years of forced abstinence, his tolerance for alcohol was abysmally low, which in this instance was a distinct advantage, hastening the process by which he negated the outside world. The vodka did not quell his inner voices, and, if anything, the withdrawal served only to create an echo-chamber, in which the voices took on an additional insistence. One in particular rose above the clamour. It was the voice which dared ask exactly what it was he expected to find in Cerberus; what it was that would make any kind of objective sense. And he had no idea. Not having an answer to that question was like descending a staircase in darkness and miscounting the number of steps; expecting floor and feeling sudden, heart-stopping vertigo.
Like a shaman shaping air-spirits with his fingers, Sylveste made the orrery which was projected ahead of him tick to life. The entoptic was a schematic of the little pocket of space englobing Hades, encompassing the orbit of Cerberus and — at its very limit — the approaching human machines, no longer cloaked by an asteroid. At the geometric centre was Hades itself, burning foul, abscessive red. The tiny neutron star was only a few kilometres wide, yet it dominated all around it; its gravitational field was whirlpool-fierce.
Objects which were two hundred and twenty thousand kilometres from the neutron star orbited twice an hour. Now that they had more thoroughly investigated Alicia’s testimony, they knew that another of the surveyor probes had been destroyed near that point, so Sylveste marked the radius with a red death-line. Cerberus had killed it, just as if the little world were as intent on protecting the secrets of Hades as its own felicities. Another mystery — what possible advantage lay in that? Sylveste had grasped for an answer and failed. But it had told him one thing: nothing here was predictable, or even logical. If he kept those two truths foremost, he might stand a chance where the dumb machines — and his wife — had failed.
Cerberus orbited further out; nine hundred thousand kilometres from Hades, in an orbit which whipped it around once every four hours and six minutes. He had marked its orbit in cool emerald — it seemed safe, at least until one strayed too close to the planet itself.
Now Volyova’s weapon — what had once been the
He made the orrery contract, until the lighthugger hove into proper view. It was two million kilometres from the neutron star; a mere six light-seconds, which was within the conceivable strike range of energy weapons, although they would have to be very large indeed to do their job: the targeting arrays alone would have to be kilometres wide just to resolve the ship. No material weapons could touch them at this range, save for a brute-force swarm attack by relativistic weapons, but that again was unlikely — the lesson of the
Oh yes, he thought — all so neatly predictable. And there was the trap.
‘Dan,’ said Pascale, who had stirred awake. ‘It’s late. You need to rest before tomorrow.’
‘Was I talking aloud?’
‘Like a true madman.’ Her eyes moved nervously around the room, alighting on the entoptic map. ‘Is it really going to happen? It all feels so unreal.’
‘Are you talking about this or the Captain?’
‘Both, I suppose. It’s not like we can separate them any more. The one depends on the other.’ She stopped speaking and he moved from the mat to her bedside, stroking her face, old buried memories stirring, those he had held sacrosanct during all the years of imprisonment on Resurgam. She reciprocated his caress and in minutes they were making love, with all the efficiency of those on the eve of something epochal — knowing that there might never be another moment like this, and that every second was therefore heightened in its preciousness. ‘The Amarantin have waited long enough,’ Pascale said. ‘And that poor man they want you to help. Can’t we leave both of them alone?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Because I don’t like what it’s doing to you. Don’t you feel you’ve been driven here, Dan? Don’t you feel that none of this was really of your own doing?’
‘It’s too late to stop now.’
‘No! It isn’t, and you know it. Tell Sajaki to turn back now. Offer to do what you can for his Captain if you wish, but I’m sure he’s sufficiently scared of you now that he’ll accede to any terms you propose. Abandon Cerberus/Hades before it does to us what it did to Alicia.’
‘They weren’t prepared for the attack. We will be, and that will make all the difference in the world. In fact, we’ll be attacking first.’
‘Whatever you’re hoping to find in there, it just isn’t worth this kind of risk.’ She held his face in her hands now. ‘Don’t you understand, Dan? You’ve won. You’ve been vindicated. You’ve got what you always wanted.’
‘It isn’t enough.’
She was cold, but she stayed beside him as he passed in and out of shallow dreams. It was never anything that felt like true sleep. She was almost correct. The Amarantin did not have to flock through his mind; not for one night. She wanted him to forget them for eternity. No; that had never been remotely an option — more so now. But even willing them away for a few hours took more strength than he had. His dreams were Amarantin dreams. And whenever he woke, which was often, beyond the curved silhouette of his wife, the walls were alive with interlocking wings, balefully regarding wings, waiting.
For what was on the eve of beginning.
‘You won’t feel much,’ Sajaki said.
The Triumvir was telling the truth, at least initially. Khouri felt no sensation when the trawl began, except for the slight pressure of the helmet, locking itself rigid against her scalp so that its scanning systems could be targeted with maximum accuracy. She heard faint clicks and whines, but that was all: not even the tingling sensation she had half expected.
‘This isn’t necessary, Triumvir.’
Sajaki was finessing the trawl parameters, tapping commands into a grotesquely outdated console. Cross- sections of Khouri’s head — quick, low-resolution snapshots — were springing up around him. ‘Then you have nothing to fear, do you? Nothing to fear at all. It’s a procedure I should have run on you when you were recruited, Khouri. Of course, my colleague was against the idea…’
‘Why now? What have I done to make you do this?’
‘We’re nearing a critical time, Khouri. I can’t afford not to be able to trust any of my crewmembers totally.’
‘But if you fry my implants, I won’t be any use to you at all!’
‘Oh; you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Volyova’s little scare stories. She only wanted to keep her little trade secrets from me, in case I decided I could do her job as well as she does.’ Her implants were showing up on the scans now; little geometric islands of order amid the amorphous soup of neural structure. Sajaki tapped in commands and the scan image zoomed in on one of the implants. Khouri felt her scalp tingle. Layers of structure peeled away from the implant, exposing its increasingly intricate innards in a series of dizzying enlargements, like a spysat gazing at a city, resolving first districts, then streets and then the details of buildings. Somewhere in that intricacy, stored in some ultimately physical form, was the data from which the Mademoiselle’s simulation sprang.
It had been a long time since her last visitation. Then — in the midst of the storm on Resurgam — the
