before.
While Khouri went to find Pascale Sylveste, Volyova made her way back up to the bridge. Now she dared not take the elevators, but thankfully there were fewer than twenty levels to climb; an exertion, but bearable. It was also relatively safe: the ship could not send drones into the stairwells, she knew; not even the floating machines which rode through the normal corridors on superconducting magnetic fields. All the same, she kept the slug-gun at readiness, sweeping it ahead of her as she endlessly rounded the ascending spiral, occasionally stopping and holding her breath, listening for the sounds of things following her, or lurking some distance ahead.
On the way up, she tried to think of the myriad ways in which the ship could kill her. It was an interesting intellectual challenge; testing her knowledge of the vessel in a way she had not previously considered. It made her look at things in a new light. Once — not so very long ago — she had been in much the same position as the ship was now. She had wanted to kill Nagorny, or at the very least prevent him from becoming a threat to her, which practically amounted to the same thing. In the end she had killed him because he first tried to kill her — but it was the manner of his execution that preyed on her mind now. She had killed Nagorny by accelerating and decelerating the ship so fiercely that he had been pulped alive. Sooner or later — and she could think of no pressing reason why it should not be the case — the ship would surely think of that for itself. When that happened, it would be a very good idea not to be in the ship any more.
She reached the bridge unhindered, although that did not stop her checking every shadow for a lurking machine, or — worse, now — rat. She did not know what the rats could do to her, but she was less than minded to find out.
The bridge was empty, much as when she had left it. The damage Khouri had wrought on it was still there; even the staining of Sajaki’s blood on the floor of the vast spherical meeting place. The holo-display was still aglow, looming over her with its constantly updating progress report on the establishment of the Cerberus bridgehead. For a moment she could not help but take a proprietorial interest in her creation, which was still gamely holding its own against the antibiotic forces deployed by the alien world. Yet even as she experienced a flush of pride, she willed it to fail, so that Sylveste would be denied entry. Assuming that he had not already arrived.
‘What have you come for?’ asked a voice.
She whipped around, and there was a figure, looking down at her from one of the curved levels of the bridge. It was no one she recognised; just a darkly cloaked male with clasped hands and a sunken skull of a face. She blasted it, but the figure remained, even after the slug-gun’s discharges had ripped through it, ion trails lingering in the air like banners.
Another figure, differently dressed, had appeared next to it. ‘Your tenancy here has expired,’ it said, in the oldest variant of Norte, Volyova’s processing of it so tardy that she did not immediately understand his words.
‘You must understand, Triumvir, that this domain is no longer yours,’ said another, shivering to life on the chamber’s opposite side, clad in the body section of a fantastically ancient spacesuit, ribbed with cooling lines and boxy attachments. The language he spoke was the oldest strain of Russish she could parse.
‘What do you hope to achieve here?’ asked the first figure, even as another appeared next to it, and began talking to her, and another; figures from the past hectoring her from all sides. ‘This is outrageous…’ But the voice blurred into that of another ghost, speaking to her from her right.
‘… lack a mandate here, Triumvir. I have to tell you…’
‘… gravely exceeded your authority and must now submit to…’
‘… bitterly disappointed, Ilia, and must politely request that you…’
‘… rescind… privileges…’
‘… completely unacceptable…’
She screamed as the welter of voices became a constant wordless roar, the congregation of the dead filling the chamber totally, until all she could see in any direction was a mass of ancient faces, their mouths moving as if each one were the only one speaking; as if each imagined that he had her absolute attention. It was as if they were praying to her; as if they thought she was omniscient. Praying, but at the same time complaining; carpingly at first, as if disappointed, but — with every second — with more hate and scorn, as if she had not only let them down in the bitterest way possible, but that she had also committed some atrocity so dire it was unspeakable even now, but could only be acknowledged in the curved revulsion of their lips and the naked shame in their eyes.
She hefted the gun. The temptation to empty a slug-clip into the ghosts was overwhelming. She could not kill them, of course, but she could seriously disable their projection systems. But she needed to conserve her ammo now that the warchive was inaccessible.
‘Go away!’ she shouted. ‘Get away from me!’
One by one, the dead grew silent and vanished. As each departed, each shook its head disappointedly, as if ashamed of staying in her presence a moment longer. Finally, she had the room to herself. She was breathing in hard rasps and needed to calm down. She lit another cigarette and smoked it slowly, trying to give her mind a few minutes’ rest. She palmed the gun, glad she had not wasted the clip, for all the transient pleasure it would have given her to destroy the bridge. Khouri had chosen well. Emblazoned along the gun’s flanks were silver and gold Chinese dragon motifs.
A voice spoke from the display.
Volyova looked up into the face of Sun Stealer.
It was as she had known it must be, after Pascale had first told her the significance of the creature’s name. As she had known it must be, and yet also much worse. Because she was not simply seeing how the alien looked. She was seeing how the alien looked to itself — and there was evidently something very wrong with Sun Stealer’s mind. She thought back to Nagorny, and understood how the man had been driven mad. She could hardly blame him, now — not if he had lived with this thing in his head all that time, and yet had lacked an inkling of where it came from or what it wanted from him. No; she sympathised with the dead Gunnery Officer, the poor, poor bastard. Perhaps she too would have sunk into psychosis when faced with this apparition, looming behind every dream, every waking thought.
Once Sun Stealer might have been Amarantin. But he had changed, perhaps deliberately, through the selective pressure of genetic engineering, sculpting himself and his banished brethren into a new species entirely. They had reshaped their anatomy for flight in zero-gravity; grown immense wings. She could see those wings now; looming behind the curved, sleek head which seemed to thrust down towards her.
The head was a skull. The eye sockets were not exactly vacant; not exactly hollow, but seemed abrim with reservoirs of something infinitely black and infinitely deep, as dark and depthless as she imagined the membrane of a Shroud. The bones of Sun Stealer shone with colourless lustre.
‘Despite what I said earlier,’ she said, when the initial shock of what she was seeing had passed, or at least subdued to a point where she could tolerate it, ‘I think you could have found a way to kill me by now. If that was what you wanted.’
‘You cannot guess what I want.’
When he spoke there was just a wordless absence which somehow made sense, as if carved from silence. The creature’s complex jaw-bones did not move at all. Speech, she remembered of the Amarantin, had never been an important mode of communication. Their society had been based around visual display. Something so basic would surely have been preserved, even after Sun Stealer’s flock had departed Resurgam and commenced their transformations; transformations so radical that when they later returned to the world they would be mistaken for winged gods.
‘I know what you don’t want,’ Volyova said. ‘You don’t want anything to stop Sylveste reaching Cerberus. That’s why we have to die now; in case we find a way to stop him.’
‘His mission is of great importance to me,’ Sun Stealer said, then seemed to reconsider. ‘To us. To us who survived.’
‘Survived what?’ Maybe this would be her one and only chance to come to any understanding. ‘No; wait — what else could you have survived, but the death of the Amarantin? Is that what it was? Did you somehow find a way not to die?’
‘You know by now the place where I entered Sylveste.’ It was less a question, more a flat statement. Volyova wondered to how much of their discourse Sun Stealer had been privy.
‘It had to be Lascaille’s Shroud,’ she said. ‘That was the only thing that made sense — although not much, I admit.’
