The only way to get them in or out was with a bone-saw, scalpel and a lot of mopping up afterwards. It had been doubly awkward because of the routine implants already resting in Khouri’s skull, but after giving them a cursory examination Volyova had seen no reason to remove them. Had she done so, she would sooner or later have had to re-implant very similar devices just so Khouri could function normally beyond the gunnery. The implants had grafted well, and within a day — with Khouri unconscious — Volyova had placed her in the gunnery seat and verified that the ship was able to talk to her implants and vice versa. Further testing had to wait until the loyalty therapies were complete. That would mainly be done while the rest of the crew were asleep.
Caution: that was Volyova’s current watchword. It was incaution that had resulted in the whole unpleasantness with Nagorny.
She would not make that mistake again.
‘Why do I get the idea this is some kind of test?’ Khouri said.
‘It isn’t. It’s just—’ Volyova waved a hand dismissively. ‘Indulge me, will you? It’s not much to ask.’
‘How do I oblige — by claiming to see ghosts?’
‘Not by seeing them, Khouri, no. By hearing them.’
A light was visible now, beyond the black walls of the moving room. Of course, the walls were nothing but glass, and until that moment they had been surrounded only by the unlit metal of the shaft in which the room rested. But now illumination was shining from the shaft’s approaching end. The rest of the short journey took place in silence. The room pushed itself towards the light, until the chill blue luminance was flooding in from all angles. Then the room pushed itself beyond the hull.
Khouri upped from her seat and went to the glass, edging towards it with trepidation. The glass was, of course, hyperdiamond, and there was no danger that it would shatter or that Khouri would stumble and plunge through it. But it looked ridiculously thin and brittle, and the human mind was able to take only so many things on trust. Looking laterally, she would have seen the articulated spider-legs, eight of them, anchoring the room to the exterior hull of the ship. She would have understood why Volyova called this place the spider-room.
‘I don’t know who or what built it,’ Volyova said. ‘My guess is that they installed it when the ship itself was constructed, or when it was due to change hands, assuming anyone could ever afford to buy it. I think this room was a very elaborate ploy for impressing potential clients — hence the general level of luxury.’
‘Someone used it to make a sales pitch?’
‘It makes a kind of sense — assuming one has any need in the first place to actually be outside a vessel like this. If the ship’s under thrust, then any observation pod sent outside also has to match that level of thrust, or else it gets left behind. No problem if that pod’s just a camera system, but as soon as you put people aboard it it gets a lot more complicated; someone actually has to fly the damned thing, or at the very least know how to program the autopilot to do what you want. The spider-room avoids that difficulty by physically attaching itself to the ship. It’s child’s play to operate; just like crawling around on all-eights.’
‘What happens if…’
‘It loses its grip? Well, it’s never happened — even if it did, the room has various magnetic and hull-piercing grapples it can deploy; and even if those failed — which they wouldn’t, I assure you — the room can propel itself independently; certainly for long enough to catch up with the ship. And even if that failed…’ Volyova paused. ‘Well, if that failed, I’d consider having a word with my deity-of-choice.’
Although Volyova had never taken the room more than a few hundred metres from its exit point on the hull, it would have been possible to crawl all around the ship. Not necessarily wise, however, for at relativistic speed the ship pushed through a blizzard of radiation which was normally screened by the hull insulation. The spider-room’s thin walls only shielded a fraction of the flux, lending the whole exercise of being outside an odd and hazardous glamour.
The spider-room was her little secret; it was absent from the major blueprints, and to the best of her knowledge none of the others knew anything about it at all. In an ideal world, she would have kept it that way, but the problems with the gunnery had forced her into some necessary indiscretions. Even given the state of the ship’s decay, Sajaki’s network of surveillance devices was extensive, leaving the spider-room as one of the few places where Volyova could guarantee absolute privacy when she needed to discuss something sensitive with one of her recruits; something that she did not want the other Triumvirs to know about. She had been forced to reveal the spider-room to Nagorny so that she could talk with him frankly about the Sun Stealer problem, and for months — as his condition deteriorated — she had regretted that decision, always fearful that he would reveal the room’s existence to Sajaki. But she need not have worried. By the end, Nagorny had been far too occupied with his nightmares to indulge in any subtleties of shipboard politick. Now he had taken the secret to his grave and for the time being Volyova had been able to sleep easy, safe in the knowledge that her sanctuary was not about to be betrayed. Perhaps what she was doing now was an error she would later regret — she had certainly sworn to herself not to violate the room’s secrecy again — but as always, current circumstances had forced her to amend an earlier decision. There was something she needed to discuss with Khouri; the ghosts were merely a pretext so that Khouri would not become overly suspicious of Volyova’s deeper motives.
‘I’m not seeing any ghosts yet,’ the recruit said.
‘You’ll see, or rather hear them, shortly,’ Volyova said.
The Triumvir was acting oddly, Khouri thought. More than once she had hinted that this room was her private retreat aboard the ship, and that the others — Sajaki, Hegazi, and the other two women — were not even aware that it existed. It seemed strange indeed that Volyova was prepared to reveal the room to Khouri so soon in their working relationship. Volyova was a solitary, obsessive figure, even aboard a ship crewed by militaristic chimerics — not someone with a natural instinct for trustfulness, Khouri would have thought. Volyova was going through the motions of friendliness towards her, but there was something artificial about all her efforts… they were too planned, too lacking in anything resembling spontaneity. When Volyova made some kind of friendly overture to Khouri — a piece of smalltalk, shipboard gossip or a joke — there was always the feeling that Volyova had spent hours rehearsing, hoping she would sound off-the-cuff. Khouri had known people like that in the military; they seemed genuine at first, but they were usually the ones who turned out to be foreign spies or intelligence-gathering stooges from high command. Volyova was doing her best to act casually about the whole spider-room business, but it was obvious to Khouri that the ghost thing was not all that it appeared. A number of disquieting thoughts struck Khouri, prime among them the idea that perhaps Volyova had brought her to this room with no intention of her ever leaving… alive, anyway.
But that turned out not to be the case.
‘Oh, something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Volyova said, breezily. ‘Does the phrase Sun Stealer mean anything to you yet?’
‘No,’ Khouri said. ‘Should it?’
‘Oh; there’s no reason it should — just a question, that’s all. Too tedious to explain why, of course — don’t worry about it, will you?’
She was about as convincing as a Mulch fortune-teller.
‘No,’ Khouri said. ‘I won’t worry, no…’ And then added: ‘Why did you say “yet”?’
Volyova cursed inwardly: had she blown it? Perhaps not; she had delivered the question as blithely as she dared, and there was nothing in Khouri’s demeanour to suggest that she had taken it as anything other than a casual enquiry… and yet… now was emphatically
‘Did I say that?’ she said, hoping to inject the right degree of surprise-mingled-with-indifference into her voice. ‘Slip of the tongue, that’s all.’ Volyova groped for a change of subject, quickly. ‘See that star, the faint red one?’
Now that their eyes had adjusted to the ambient light-levels of interstellar space, with even the blue radiance of the engine exhausts no longer seeming to blot out everything, a few stars were visible.
‘That’s Yellowstone’s sun?’
‘Epsilon Eridani, yes. We’re three weeks beyond the system. Pretty soon you wouldn’t have such an easy time finding it. We’re not moving relativistically now — only a few per cent of light — but we’re accelerating all the time. Soon the visible stars will move, the constellations warping, until all the stars in the sky are bunched ahead and behind us. It’ll be as if we’re poised midway down a tunnel, with light streaming in from either end. The stars
