‘I’m sorry,’ Sylveste said. ‘But I don’t think this man can be cured.’
His only companions, save the Captain himself, were the two members of the Triumvirate other than Volyova.
The closest, Sajaki, stood with his arms folded in front of the Captain, as if inspecting a challengingly modern fresco, his head tilted just so. Hegazi maintained a respectful distance from the plague, refusing to approach within three or four metres of the outer extent of the Captain’s recently invigorated growth. He was doing his best to look nonchalant, but, despite the relatively sparse acreage of his face which was actually visible, fear was written across it like a tattoo.
‘He’s dead?’ Sajaki asked.
‘No, no,’ said Sylveste hastily. ‘Not at all. It’s just that all our therapies have failed, and our one best shot turned out to hurt him more than to heal him.’
‘Your one best shot?’ Hegazi parroted, his voice echoing from the walls.
‘Ilia Volyova’s counteragent.’ Sylveste knew he had to be very careful now; that it would not do for Sajaki to realise that his sabotage had come to light. ‘For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the way she thought it would. I don’t blame Volyova for that — how could she predict how the main body of the plague would behave, when all she had to work on was tiny samples?’
‘How indeed?’ Sajaki said, and in that short declamation, Sylveste decided that he hated the man, with a hatred as irrevocable as death. But he also knew that Sajaki was a man he could work with, and that — as much as he despised him — nothing that had occurred here would make any difference to the attack against Cerberus. It was better than that, in fact: much better. Now that he was certain that Sajaki had no desire to see the Captain healed — quite the opposite — there was nothing to prevent Sylveste from turning his full attention to the matter of the imminent attack. Perhaps he would have to endure Calvin’s presence in his head for a little while longer, until this charade had run its course, but that was a small price to pay, and he felt up to the task. Besides: now he rather welcomed Calvin’s intrusion. There was too much going on; too much to be assimilated, and for the time being it was good to have a second mind parasitising his own, gleaning patterns and forging inferences.
‘He’s a lying bastard,’ Calvin whispered. ‘I had my doubts before, but now I know for sure. I hope the plague consumes every atom of the ship and takes him with it. It’s all he deserves.’
Sylveste said to Sajaki, ‘It doesn’t mean we’ve given up hope. With your permission Cal and I will continue trying…’
‘Do what you can,’ Sajaki said.
‘You want to let them continue?’ Hegazi said. ‘After what they’ve almost done to him?’
‘You’ve got a problem with that?’ said Sylveste, feeling that the conversation was as ritualised as a play; its conclusion just as preordained. ‘If we don’t take risks…’
‘Sylveste is right,’ Sajaki said. ‘Who’s to say how the Captain would respond to the most innocent of interventions? The plague is a living thing — it isn’t necessarily obedient to any set of logical rules, so every act we make carries some risk, even something as seemingly harmless as sweeping it with a magnetic field. The plague might interpret it as a stimulus to shift to a new phase of growth, or it might cause the plague to turn to dust in seconds. I doubt that the Captain would survive either scenario.’
‘In which case,’ Hegazi said, ‘we might as well give up now.’
‘No,’ Sajaki said, so calmly that Sylveste feared for the other man’s well-being. ‘It doesn’t mean that we give up. It means that we need a new paradigm — something beyond surgical intervention. Here we have the finest cyberneticist born since the Transenlightenment, and no one has a finer grasp of molecular weapons than Ilia Volyova. The medical systems we have aboard this ship are as advanced as any in existence. And yet we’ve failed; for the simple reason that we’re dealing with something stronger, faster and more adaptable than anything we can imagine. What we’ve always suspected is true: the Melding Plague is of alien origin. And that’s why it will always beat us. Provided, that is, we continue to wage war against it on our terms, rather than on its own.’
Now, Sylveste thought, this play had arrived at an unwritten epilogue all of its own.
‘What kind of new paradigm do you have in mind?’
‘The only logical answer,’ Sajaki said, as if what he was about to reveal had always been blindingly obvious. ‘The only effective medicine against an alien illness would be an alien medicine. And that’s what we have to seek now, no matter how long it takes us, or how far.’
‘Alien medicine,’ Hegazi said, as if trying on the phrase for size. Perhaps he imagined that he would be hearing it rather frequently in the future. ‘And just what kind of alien medicine did you have in mind?’
‘We’ll try the Pattern Jugglers first,’ Sajaki said, absently, as if no one else were present, merely toying with the notion. ‘And if they can’t heal him, we’ll look further.’ Suddenly his attention snapped back onto Sylveste. ‘We visited them once, you know, the Captain and I. You aren’t the only one to have tasted the brine of their ocean.’
‘Let’s not spend a second longer in the company of this madman than absolutely necessary,’ Calvin said, and Sylveste nodded silent assent.
Volyova checked her bracelet again, for the sixth or seventh time in the last hour, even though what it had to tell her had barely changed. What it told her — and what she already knew — was that the calamitous marriage of bridgehead and Cerberus was due to happen in just under half a day, and that no one looked likely to voice any objections, let alone make any attempt to avert the union.
‘You looking at that thing every other second isn’t going to change anything,’ said Khouri, who, together with Volyova and Pascale, remained in the spider-room. For most of the last few hours they had been beyond the outer hull, venturing inside only to return Sylveste into the ship so that he could meet the other Triumvirs. Sajaki had not queried Volyova’s absence: doubtless he assumed she was busy in her quarters, putting the finishing touches to her attack strategy. But in an hour or two she would need to show her face if she wished to avoid suspicion. Not long after that, she would need to begin the softening-up procedure, deploying elements of the cache against the point on Cerberus where the bridgehead was scheduled to arrive. As she glanced at the bracelet again — involuntarily, this time — Khouri said, ‘What are you hoping for?’
‘Something unexpected from the weapon — a fatal malfunction would do very nicely.’
‘Then you really don’t want this to succeed, do you?’ Pascale said. ‘A few days ago you were gloating over that thing like it was your finest hour. This is quite some turnaround.’
‘That was before I knew who the Mademoiselle was. If I’d had any idea earlier…’ Volyova found herself running out of anything to say. It was obvious now that using the weapon was an act of almost staggering recklessness — but would knowing that have altered a thing? Would she have felt compelled to make the weapon just because she could; just because it was elegant and she wanted her peers to see what fabulous creatures could spring forth from her mind; what Byzantine engines of war? The thought that she might have done so was sickening, but — in its own way — entirely plausible. She would have given birth to the bridgehead and hoped that she could prevent it completing its mission at some later point. She would, in short, have been in exactly the position in which she now found herself.
The bridgehead — the converted
And now that scared her beyond words. Intellectual vanity had brought Sylveste to this point — and something else, perhaps — but she was not unguilty of obeying the same unquestioning drive. She wished she had taken the project less seriously; made the bridgehead less likely to succeed. It terrified her to think what would happen if her child did not disappoint her.
‘Had I known…’ she said, finally. ‘I don’t know. But I didn’t, so what does it matter?’
‘If you’d listened to me,’ Khouri said, ‘I told you we had to stop this madness. But my word wasn’t good enough; you had to let it come to this.’
‘I was hardly going to confront Sajaki on the basis of a vision you had in the gunnery. He’d have killed both of
