activating with blinding speed, reaching out to her with a pair of its clawed, diamond-tipped digits, so quickly that she could only begin to scream. The claws snagged her jacket, ripping into it, and then she began to pull away, with all the strength she had.
She wrenched free, but not before it had located a purchase around her gun, dragging it with brutal force from her fingers. Khouri fell back into the mess on the floor; noticing how her jacket was soiled with Sajaki’s blood; how at least some of the brighter red pooling from the rips must have been her own.
The surgical machine elevated the gun, cradling it for them to see, as if gloating at its acquisition of a hunting trophy. Now two of its more dextrous manipulators snaked into place and began to examine the gun’s controls, stroking the leather casing in eerie fascination. Slowly, ever so slowly, the manipulators began to point the gun in Khouri’s direction.
Pascale raised the beamer and blasted the whole assembly, blood-caked metallic chunks splattering over Sajaki’s remains. The plasma-rifle crashed down, blackened and gushing smoke, bluish sparks dancing from its shattered casing.
Khouri picked herself up, oblivious to the filth in which she was liberally covered.
Her ruined plasma-rifle was now buzzing angrily, the sparks dancing with increased ferocity.
‘It’s going to blow,’ Khouri said. ‘We have to get away from here.’
They turned to the door, and then had a second to adjust to what was now blocking their exit. There had to be a thousand of them; piled three deep in the ship-slime, each individual careless of its own life, but acting for the greater good of the whole senseless mass. Behind, more rats; hundreds and then thousands more, piling back along the corridor; a vast rodent tidal wave, brimming at the aperture of the clinic, ready to surge forwards in one consuming
She unsheathed the only weapon she now had left, the tiny, ineffectual needler she carried only because of the precision it allowed. She began to squirt it at the mass of rats while Pascale doused them with the beamer, which was hardly more suited to the task. Rats exploded and burned wherever they pointed their guns, but there were always more of them, and now the first rank of rats was beginning to creep into the clinic.
Brightness flared down the corridor, followed by a series of bangs spaced so closely together that they almost merged into a solid roar. The noise and the light came closer. Rats were flying through the air now, propelled by the approaching explosions. The stench of cooked rodent was overpowering; worse than the smell which already pervaded the clinic. Gradually, the wave of rats began to thin and disperse.
Volyova stood in the doorway, her slug-gun belching smoke, its barrel the colour of lava. Behind them, Khouri’s ruined weapon grew suddenly and ominously silent.
‘Now would be a good time to leave,’ Volyova said.
They ran towards her, trampling over the dead rats and those still seeking shelter. Khouri felt something slam into her spine. There was a wind, hotter than any she had known. She felt herself lose contact with the floor, and then for a moment she was flying.
THIRTY-TWO
This time the dislocation was briefer, even though the place in which he found himself was the most foreign he had known.
‘On descent towards Cerberus bridgehead,’ the suit informed him, voice pleasantly bland and drained of import, as if this were a perfectly natural destination. Graphics scrolled over the suit’s faceplate window, but his eyes could not focus on them properly, so he told the suit to drop the imagery straight into his brain. Then it was much better. The fake contours of the surface — huge now, filling half the sky — were lined in lilac, their sinuous mock-geology rendering the world more folded and brainlike than ever before. There was very little natural illumination here, save for the twin beacons of dim ruddiness of Hades and, much further way, Delta Pavonis itself. But the suit compensated by shifting near-infrared photons into the visible.
Now something jutted over the horizon, blinkered in green by the overlay.
‘The bridgehead,’ Sylveste said, as much to hear a human voice as anything else. ‘I see it.’
It was tiny, he saw now. It looked like the tip of an insignificant splinter blemishing the stone of God’s own statue. Cerberus was two thousand kilometres across; the bridgehead a mere four in length, and most of that was now buried beneath the crust. In a way, it was the device’s very tininess in relation to the world which best testified to Ilia Volyova’s skill. It might be small, but it was still a thorn in the side of Cerberus. That much was obvious even from here; the crust around the bridgehead looked inflamed, stressed to some point beyond its inbuilt tolerances. For several kilometres around the weapon, the crust had given up any pretence of looking realistic. Now it had reverted to what he assumed was its native state: a hexagonal grid which blurred into rock on its fringes.
They would be over the maw — the cone’s open end — in a few minutes. Sylveste could already feel gravity tugging at his viscera now, even though he was still immersed in the suit’s liquid air. It was admittedly weak; a quarter of Earth normal — but a fall from his present height would still be adequately fatal, with or without the suit to protect him.
Now, finally, something else shared his immediate volume of space. He called in enhancements and saw a suit exactly like his own, twinkling brightly against the night. It was a little ahead of him, but following the same trajectory, heading for the circular entrance into the bridgehead. Two morsels of drifting marine food, he thought, about to be sucked into the enormous waiting funnel of the bridgehead, digested into the heart of Cerberus.
No going back now, he thought.
The three women ran down a corridor carpeted in dead rats and the blackened, stiff shells of things that might possibly once have been rats, though they did not invite close scrutiny. The trio had one big gun between the three of them now; one gun capable of despatching any servitor which the ship sent against them. The small pistols they also had might do the same job, but only if used with expertise and a certain degree of luck.
Occasionally, the floor shifted under their feet, unnervingly.
‘What is it?’ asked Khouri, limping now, after the bruising she had taken when the clinic had exploded. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means Sun Stealer is experimenting,’ Volyova said, pausing between every two or three words to catch her breath, her side aflame with pain now; every injury which had been healed since Resurgam seemed on the point of unstitching. ‘So far he’s moved against us with the less critical systems; the robots and the rats, for instance. But he knows that if he can understand the drive properly — if he can learn how to operate it within its safety margins — he can crush us just by ramping up the thrust for a few seconds.’ She ran for a few more strides, wheezing. ‘It’s how I killed Nagorny. But Sun Stealer doesn’t know the ship so well, even though he controls it. He’s trying to adjust the drive very gradually; reaching an understanding of how it operates. When he has that—’
Pascale said, ‘Is there anywhere we can go where we can be safe? Somewhere the rats and the machines can’t reach?’
‘Yes, but nowhere that the acceleration can’t reach in and crush us.’
‘So we should get off the ship, is that what you’re saying?’
She stopped, audited the corridor they were in and decided it was not one of the ones in which the ship could hear their conversations. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Don’t be under any illusions. If we leave here, I doubt very much that we’ll ever find a way to return. But on the other hand, we also have an obligation to stop Sylveste, if there’s even a slim chance of doing so. Even if we kill ourselves in the process.’
‘How could we reach Dan?’ Pascale asked. Obviously, stopping Sylveste still amounted — in her mind — to catching him and talking him out of going further. Volyova decided not to disabuse her of that notion, not just yet; but it wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
‘I think your husband took one of our suits,’ she said. ‘According to my bracelet all the shuttles are still present. Besides, he could never have piloted one of them.’
‘Not unless he had help from Sun Stealer,’ Khouri said. ‘Listen, can we keep moving? I know we don’t have any particular direction in mind, but I’d feel a hell of a lot happier than standing around.’
‘He’d have taken a suit,’ Pascale said. ‘That would have been his style. But he wouldn’t have done so
