‘It never happened,’ Pascale said. ‘Trust me on that.’
‘Like we’ve got a choice,’ Khouri said. They had arrived at an elevator; the door opened and they had to step up to reach the elevator’s floor. Khouri kicked the slime from her boots, hammered the wall and said, ‘Ilia, you have to stop that thing. If it reaches Cerberus, we’re all dead. That’s what the Mademoiselle knew all along; that’s why she wanted to kill Sylveste. Because she knew that, one way or another, he was going to try and get there. Now, I haven’t got all of this straight in my head, but I do know one thing. The Mademoiselle knew it was going to be really bad news for all of us if he ever succeeded. And I mean
The elevator was rising now, but Volyova had not stated their destination.
‘It’s like Sun Stealer was pushing him on,’ Pascale said. ‘Putting ideas in his head, shaping his destiny.’
‘Ideas?’ Khouri asked.
‘Like coming here in the first place — to this system.’ Volyova was animated now. ‘Khouri; don’t you remember how we retrieved that recording of Sylveste from ship’s memory, from when he was last aboard?’ Khouri nodded; she remembered it well enough: how she had looked into the eyes of the recorded Sylveste and imagined killing the real man. ‘And how he dropped hints that he was already thinking of the Resurgam expedition? And that bothered us because there was no logical way he could know about the Amarantin? Well, now it makes perfect sense. Pascale’s right. It was Sun Stealer, already in his head, pushing him here. I don’t think he even knew it was happening himself, but Sun Stealer was in control, all that time.’
Khouri said, ‘It’s like Sun Stealer and the Mademoiselle are fighting each other, but they need to use us to wage their war. Sun Stealer’s some kind of software entity, and she’s confined to Yellowstone, in her palanquin… so they’ve been pulling our strings, puppeting us against each other.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Volyova said. ‘Sun Stealer has me worried. Deeply worried. We haven’t heard from him since the cache-weapon went up.’
Khouri said nothing. What she knew was that Sun Stealer had entered her head during her last session in the gunnery. Later, during her final visitation, the Mademoiselle had appeared to tell her that Sun Stealer was consuming her; that he would inevitably overwhelm her in hours or — at most — days. Yet that had been weeks earlier. According to her estimated rate of losses, the Mademoiselle should by now be dead, and Sun Stealer victorious. Yet nothing had changed. If anything, her head had been quieter than at any time since she had been revived around Yellowstone. No damn Shadowplay proximity implant; no damn midnight apparitions from the Mademoiselle. It was as if Sun Stealer had died just as he triumphed. Not that Khouri believed that, and his utter absence was all the more stressing; heightening the waiting until — as she was sure would happen — he appeared. And somehow she sensed he would be even less pleasant company than her previous lodger.
‘Why should he show his face?’ Pascale said. ‘He’s almost won, in any case.’
‘Almost won,’ Volyova agreed. ‘But what we’re about to do might make him intervene. I think we should be ready for that — you especially, Khouri. You know he found his way into Boris Nagorny, and you can take it from me, it wasn’t nice knowing either of them.’
‘Maybe you should lock me up now, before it’s too late.’ Khouri hadn’t given the statement much thought, but she said it with deadly seriousness. ‘I mean it, Ilia — I’d rather you did that than be forced into shooting me later.’
‘I’d love to do that,’ said her mentor. ‘But it isn’t as if we’re already vastly outnumbering the others. At the moment it’s the three of us against Sajaki and Hegazi — and God only knows whose side Sylveste will choose, if it comes to that.’
Pascale said nothing.
They reached the warchive, the destination Volyova had always had in mind, though she had said nothing until they arrived. Khouri had never been to this sector of the ship, but she did not need to have it identified to her. She had been in plenty of armouries before and there was a smell to them.
‘This is some heavy shit we’re getting ourselves into,’ she said. ‘Right?’
The vast oblong room constituted the display and dispensary section of the warchive, with somewhere in the region of a thousand weapons racked for immediate use. Tens of thousands more could be manufactured in short order, assembled according to blueprints distributed holographically through the mass of the ship.
‘Yes,’ Volyova said, with something worryingly close to relish. ‘In which case we’d better have some obnoxiously effective firepower at our disposal. So, use your skill and discretion, Khouri, and kit us up. And be quick about it — we don’t want Sajaki locking us out before we’ve got what we came for.’
‘You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. And you know why? Suicidal or not, we’re finally doing something. It might get us killed — and it might not do any good — but at least we’ll go out with a fight, if it comes to that.’
Khouri nodded slowly. Now that Volyova put it like that, she was right. It was a soldier’s prerogative not to let events take their course without some kind of intervention, no matter how futile. Quickly Volyova showed her how to use the warchive’s lower-level functions — luckily, it was almost intuitive — then took Pascale by the arm and turned to leave.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The bridge. Sajaki will want me there for the softening-up operation.’
TWENTY-SIX
Sylveste had not seen his wife for hours, and now it seemed as if she would not even be present for the culmination of all that he had striven for. Only ten hours remained until Volyova’s weapon was due to impact Cerberus, and in less than an hour from now, the first wave of her softening-up assault was scheduled to commence. This in itself was momentous — yet it appeared that he would have to witness it without Pascale’s company.
The ship’s cameras had never lost sight of the weapon, and even now it hovered in the bridge’s display, as if only a few kilometres away, rather than more than a million. They were seeing it side-on, since it had begun its approach from the Trojan point, whereas the ship remained in a holding pattern ninety degrees clockwise, along the line which threaded Hades and its furtive planetary companion. Neither machine was in a true orbit, but the weak gravitational field of Cerberus meant that these artificial trajectories could be maintained with minimal expenditure of correcting thrust.
Sajaki and Hegazi were with him, bathed in the reddish light which spilled from the display. Everything was red now; Hades close enough that it was a perceptible prick of scarlet, and Delta Pavonis — faint as it was — also casting ruddy light on all that orbited it. And because the display was the only source of light in the room, some of that redness leaked into the bridge.
‘Where the hell is that
Had the woman actually done the unspeakable, Sylveste thought? Had she actually decided to ruin the attack, even though she had masterminded the whole thing? If that was the case, he had misread her badly. She had inflicted her misgivings on him, fuelled by the delusions of the woman Khouri, but surely she hadn’t taken any of that seriously? Surely she had been playing devil’s advocate; testing the limits of his own confidence?
‘You’d better hope that’s the case, son,’ Calvin said.
‘You’re reading my thoughts now?’ Sylveste said, aloud, nothing to conceal from the partial Triumvirate convened around him. ‘That’s quite a trick, Calvin.’
‘Call it a progressive adaptation to neural congruency,’ the voice said. ‘All the theories said that if you allowed me to stay in your head for long enough, something like this would occur. Really all that’s happening is that I’m constructing a steadily more realistic model of your neural processes. To begin with I could only correlate what I read against your responses. But now I don’t even have to wait for the responses to guess what they’ll be.’
So read this, Sylveste thought.
‘If you want rid of me,’ Calvin said, ‘you could have done so hours ago. But I think you’re beginning to rather like having me where I am.’
