‘That was where we sought sanctuary; for nine hundred and ninety thousand years.’
The coincidence was too great not to mean something. ‘Ever since life ended on Resurgam.’
‘Yes.’ The word trailed off into a hiss of sibilance. ‘The Shrouds were of our designing; the last desperate enterprise of our Flock, even after those who stayed behind on the surface were incinerated. ’
‘I don’t understand. What Lascaille said, and Sylveste himself found out…’
‘They were not shown the truth. Lascaille was shown a fiction — our identity replaced by that of a much older culture, utterly unlike ourselves. The true purpose of the Shrouds was not revealed to him. He was shown a lie which would encourage others to come.’
Volyova could see how that lie would have worked, now. Lascaille had been told that the Shrouds were repositories for harmful technologies — things humanity secretly craved, such as methods of faster-than-light travel. When Lascaille had revealed this to Sylveste, it had only increased Sylveste’s desire to break into the Shroud. He had been able to muster the support of the entire Demarchist society around Yellowstone towards that goal, for the rewards would be dazzling beyond comprehension for the first faction to unlock such alien mysteries.
‘But if it was a lie,’ she said, ‘what was the true function of the Shrouds?’
‘We built them to hide inside, Triumvir Volyova.’ It seemed to be playing with her, enjoying her confusion. ‘They were places of sanctuary. Zones of restructured spacetime, within which we could shelter.’
‘Shelter from whom?’
‘The ones who survived the Dawn War. The ones who were given the name of the Inhibitors.’
She nodded. There was much she did not understand, but one thing was now clear to her. What Khouri had told her — the fragments that the woman remembered from the strange dream she had been vouchsafed in the gunnery — had been something like the truth. Khouri had not remembered everything, and the parts had not always been related to Volyova in the right order, but it was obvious now that this was only because Khouri had been expected to grasp something too huge, too alien — too apocalyptic — for her mind to comfortably hold. She had done her best, but her best had not been good enough. But now Volyova was being accorded disclosure of parts of the same picture, although from an oddly different perspective.
Khouri had been told about the Dawn War by the Mademoiselle, who had not wanted Sylveste to succeed. Yet Sun Stealer desired that outcome more than anything else.
‘What is it about?’ she asked. ‘I know what you’re doing here; you’re delaying me; keeping me waiting because you know I’ll do anything to hear the answers you have. And you’re right, in a way. I have to know. I have to know everything.’
Sun Stealer waited, silently, and then continued to answer all the questions she had for it.
When she was done, Volyova decided that she could profitably use one of the slugs in her clip. She shot the display; the great glass globe shattered into a billion icy shards, Sun Stealer’s face disrupting in the same explosion.
Khouri and Pascale took the circuitous route to the clinic, avoiding elevators and the kind of well-repaired corridors through which drones could easily travel. They kept their guns drawn at all times, and preferred to blast anything that looked even vaguely suspicious, even if it later turned out to be nothing more than a chance alignment of shadows or a disturbingly shaped accretion of corrosion on a wall or bulkhead.
‘Did he give you any kind of warning he was going to leave so soon?’ Khouri asked.
‘No; not this soon. I mean, I thought he would try it at some point, but I tried talking him out of it.’
‘How do you feel about him?’
‘What do you expect me to say? He was my husband. We were in love.’ Pascale seemed to collapse then; Khouri reached out to catch her. The woman wiped tears from her eyes, rubbing them red. ‘I hate him for what he’s done — you would as well. I don’t understand him, either. But I still love him despite it. I keep thinking… maybe he’s dead already. It’s possible, isn’t it? And even if he isn’t, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever see him again.’
‘It can’t be a very safe place he’s going to,’ Khouri said, and then wondered if Cerberus was any more dangerous than the ship, now.
‘No, I know. I don’t think even he realises how much danger he’s in — or the rest of us.’
‘Still, your husband isn’t just anyone. It’s Sylveste we’re talking about here.’ Khouri reminded Pascale that Sylveste’s life had been shot through with a core of rare luck, and that it would be strange if that fortune should desert him now, when the thing that he had always reached for was almost within his grasp. ‘He’s a slippery bastard, and I think there’s still a good chance he’ll find a way out of this.’
That seemed to calm Pascale, fractionally.
Then Khouri told her that Hegazi was dead and that the ship appeared to be trying to murder everyone else left aboard it.
‘Sajaki can’t be here,’ Pascale said. ‘I mean, he can’t, can he? Dan wouldn’t know how to find his own way to Cerberus. He’d need one of you to go with him.’
‘That’s what Volyova thought.’
‘Then why are we here?’
‘I guess Ilia didn’t trust her convictions.’
Khouri pushed open the door which led into the clinic from the partially flooded access corridor, kicking a janitor-rat out of the way as she did so. The clinic smelt wrong. She knew it instantly.
‘Pascale, something bad has happened here.’
‘I’ll… what is it I’m supposed to say at this point? Cover you?’ Pascale had her low-yield beam gun out, without looking like she had much idea what to do with it.
‘Yes,’ Khouri said. ‘You cover me. That’s a very good idea.’
She entered the clinic, pushing the barrel of the plasma-rifle ahead of her.
As she moved in, the room sensed her presence and notched up its illumination. She had visited Volyova here after the Triumvir had been injured; she felt she knew the approximate geometry of the place.
She looked to the bed where she was sure Sajaki ought to have been. Above the bed floated an elaborate array of gimballed and hinged servo-mechanical medical tools, radiating down from a central point like a mutated steel hand with far too many fingers, all of which seemed tipped with talons.
There was not a single inch of metal which was not covered in blood; thickly congealed, like candle- wax.
‘Pascale, I don’t think—’
But she too had seen what lay on the bed below the machinery; the thing that might once have been Sajaki. There was also not a single inch of the bed which was not adorned in red. It was difficult to see where Sajaki ended and where his eviscerated remains began. He reminded her of the Captain; except here the Captain’s silver borderlessness had been transfigured into scarlet; like an artist’s reworking of the same basic theme in a different and more carnal medium. Two halves of the same morbid diptych.
His chest was bloated, raised above the bed, as if a stream of galvanising current were still slamming through him. His chest was also hollow; the gore pooled in a deep excavated crater which ran from his sternum to his abdomen, like a terrible steel fist had reached down and ripped half of him out. Perhaps that was the way it had happened. Perhaps he had not even been awake when it did. For confirmation of this theory she scrutinised his face, the little of his expression she could decipher beneath the veil of red.
No; Triumvir Sajaki had almost certainly been awake.
She felt Pascale’s presence not far behind. ‘You shouldn’t forget I’ve seen death,’ she said. ‘I saw my father assassinated.’
‘You’ve never seen this.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’ve never seen anything like this.’
His chest exploded. Something burst out of it, at first so efficiently concealed by the fountain of blood that it had disturbed that it was not obvious what it was — until it landed on the blood-slicked floor of the room and scampered away, wormlike tail lashing behind it. Then three more rats elevated their snouts out of Sajaki, sniffing the air, regarding Khouri and Pascale with matched pairs of black eyes. Then they too pulled themselves over the caldera which had been his rib-cage, landing on the floor, following the one who had just left. They vanished into the room’s darker recesses.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Khouri said. But even as she was speaking it moved; the fist of steel fingers,
