of a demented maggot which preferred the part of the apple immediately under the skin. Eventually, however, they crossed what seemed to be a regular fissure in the fabric of the object. Girardieau explained that the thing was structured in a series of concentric shells. They continued to worm their way through another confusing tunnel system while Girardieau regaled them with dubious stories about the initial exploration of the object.
They had known about it for two years — ever since Sylveste had drawn Pascale’s attention to the oddity of the obelisk’s burial sequence. Excavating the chamber had taken most of that time, detailed study of the object’s warrenlike interior only happening in the last few months. There had been a few deaths in those early days. Nothing mysterious, it eventually transpired — just teams getting lost in unmapped sections of the labyrinth and stumbling into vertical shafts in the tunnel system where the safety flooring had not yet been fixed. One worker had starved to death when she ventured too far without laying a breadcrumb trail behind her — servitors found her two weeks after she went missing. She had been wandering in a series of doodle-like circles, at times only a few minutes from the safe zones.
Progress through the final concentric shell was slower and more deliberate than the four they traversed before it. They worked downwards, eventually reaching a gratifyingly horizontal stretch of tunnel, the far end of which was milky with light.
Girardieau spoke to his sleeve and the light dimmed.
They moved on in semi-darkness. Gradually their breathing ceased to echo from the walls as the confining space opened out. The only sound came from the laboured purring of nearby air pumps.
‘Hold on,’ Girardieau said. ‘Here it comes.’
Sylveste steeled himself for the inevitable disorientation when the lights returned. For once he did not mind Girardieau’s theatrics. It permitted him a sense of discovery, albeit at second hand. Of course, he alone understood this surrogacy for what it was. But he did not begrudge the others the moment. That would have been churlish, for after all, they would never know what true discovery felt like. He almost pitied them, though in that moment the sight revealed in the lights purged all normal thought.
It was an alien city.
SIX
‘I expect,’ Volyova said, ‘that you’re one of those otherwise rational people who pride themselves on not believing in ghosts.’
Khouri looked at her, frowning slightly. Volyova had known from the outset that the woman was no fool, but it was still interesting to see how she reacted to the question.
‘Ghosts, Triumvir? You can’t be serious.’
‘One thing you’ll quickly learn about me,’ Volyova said, ‘is that I’m very seldom anything other than completely serious.’ And then she indicated the door at which they had arrived, set unobtrusively into one rusty-red interior wall of the ship. The door was of heavy construction, a stylised drawing of a spider discernible through layers of corrosion and staining. ‘Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.’
Khouri did as she was told without hesitation. Volyova was satisfied. In the three weeks since the woman had been snared — or recruited, if one wanted to be polite about it — Volyova had administered a complex regimen of loyalty-altering therapies. The treatment was almost complete, apart from the top-up doses which would continue indefinitely. Soon the woman’s loyalty would be so strongly instilled that it would transcend mere obedience and become an animating compulsion, a principle to which she could no more fail to adhere than a fish could choose to stop breathing water. Taken to an extreme which Volyova hoped would prove unnecessary, Khouri could be made not only to desire to do the crew’s will, but to love them for giving her the chance. But Volyova would relent before she programmed the woman that deeply. After her less than fruitful experiences with Nagorny, she was wary of creating another unquestioning guinea pig. It would not displease her if Khouri retained a trace of resentment.
Volyova did as she had promised, following Khouri into the door. The recruit had halted a few metres beyond the threshold, realising that there was no way to go further.
Volyova sealed the great iron iris of a door behind them.
‘Where are we, Triumvir?’
‘In a little private retreat of my own,’ Volyova said. She spoke into her bracelet and made a light come on, but the interior remained shadowy. The room was shaped like a fat torpedo, twice as long as it was wide. The interior was sumptuously outfitted, with four scarlet-cushioned seats installed on the floor, next to each other, and space for another two behind, though nothing remained but their anchor-points. Where they were not upholstered in cushioned velvet, the room’s brass-ribbed walls were curved and glossily dark, as if made of obsidian or black marble. There was a console of black ebony, attached to the armrest of the front seat in which Volyova now sat. She folded down the console, familiarising herself with the inset dials and controls, all of which were tooled in brass or copper, with elaborately inscribed labels, offset by flowered curlicues of differently inlaid woods and ivories. Not that it took much familiarising, since she visited the spider-room with reasonable regularity, but she enjoyed the tactile pleasure of stroking her fingertips across the board.
‘I suggest you sit down,’ she said. ‘We’re about to move.’
Khouri obeyed, sitting next to Volyova, who threw a number of ivory-handled switches, watching some of the dials on the panel light up with roseate glows, their needles quivering as power entered the spider-room’s circuits. She extracted a certain sadistic pleasure in observing Khouri’s disorientation, for the woman clearly had no idea where she was in the ship, nor what was about to happen. There were clunking sounds, and a sudden shifting, as if the room were a lifeboat which had just come adrift from a mother vessel.
‘We’re moving,’ Khouri diagnosed. ‘What is this — some kind of luxury elevator for the Triumvirate?’
‘Nothing so decadent. We’re in an old shaft which leads to the outer hull.’
‘You need a room just to take you to the hull?’ Some of Khouri’s scornful disregard for the niceties of Ultra life was coming to the fore again. Volyova liked that, perversely. It convinced her that the loyalty therapies had not destroyed the woman’s personality, only redirected it.
‘We’re not just going to the hull,’ Volyova said. ‘Otherwise we’d walk.’
The motion was smooth now, but there were still occasional clunks as airlocks and traction systems assisted their passage. The shaft walls remained utterly black, but — Volyova knew — all that was about to change. Meanwhile, she watched Khouri, trying to guess whether the woman was scared or merely curious. If she had sense she would have realised by now that Volyova had invested too much time in her simply to kill her — but on the other hand, the woman’s military training on Sky’s Edge must have taught her to take absolutely nothing for granted.
Her appearance had changed considerably since her recruitment, but little of that was due to the therapies. Her hair had always been short, but now it was absent entirely. Only up close was the peachy fuzz of regrowth visible. Her skull was quilted with fine, salmon-coloured scars. Those were the incision marks where Volyova had opened her head in order to emplace the implants which had formerly resided in Boris Nagorny.
There had been other surgical procedures, too. Khouri’s body was peppered with shrapnel from her soldiering days, in addition to the almost invisibly healed scars of beam-weapon or projectile impact points. Some of the shrapnel shards lay deep — too deep, it seemed, for the Sky’s Edge medics to retrieve. And for the most part they would have caused her no harm, for they were biologically-inert composites not situated close to any vital organs. But the medics had been sloppy, too. Near the surface, dotted under Khouri’s skin, Volyova found a few shards they really should have removed. She did it for them, examining each in turn before placing it in her lab. All but one of the shards would have caused no problems to her systems; non-metallic composites which could not interfere with the sensitive induction fields of the gunnery’s interface machinery. But she catalogued and stored them anyway. The metal shard she frowned at, cursing the medics’ procedures, and then laid it next to the rest.
That had been messy work, but not nearly as bad as the neural work. For centuries, the commonest forms of implant had either been grown
