again.’
Manoukhian, if that was indeed his name, nodded and applied pressure to the ivory-handled control sticks. ‘Get the guest strapped down, Zebra. You too.’
The striped woman nodded. ‘Twins? Help me secure Mr Clavain.’
The two men shifted Clavain’s suited form into a contoured acceleration couch. He let them do whatever they wanted; he was too weak to offer more than token resistance. His mind probed the immediate cybernetic environment of the spacecraft, and while his implants sensed something of the data traffic through the control networks, there was nothing he could influence. The people were also beyond his reach. He did not even think any of them had implants.
‘Are you the banshees?’ Clavain asked.
‘Sort of, but not exactly. The banshees are a bunch of thuggish pirates. We do things with a little more finesse. But their existence gives us the cover we need for our own activities. And you?’ The stripes on her face bunched as she smiled. ‘Are you really Nevil Clavain, the Butcher of Tharsis?’
‘You didn’t hear that from me.’
‘That’s what you told the Demarchists. And those kids in Copenhagen. We have spies everywhere, you see. There’s not a lot that escapes us.’
‘I can’t prove I’m Clavain. But then why should I bother?’
‘I think you are,’ Zebra said. ‘I
‘Your boss?’
‘The man we’re on our way to meet,’ Zebra said.
TWENTY-ONE
When they were safely clear of the atmosphere and the carnelian-red marble had vanished from the extreme range of her ship’s radar, Khouri found the courage to take hold of one of the black cubes that had been left behind when the main mass of Inhibitor machinery had fragmented. The cube was shockingly cold to the touch, and when she let go of it she left behind two thin films of detached flesh on opposite faces of the cube, like pink fingerprints. Her fingertips were now red-raw and smooth. For a moment she thought the removed skin would stay adhered to the smooth black sides, but after a few seconds the two sheets of flesh peeled away of their own accord, forming delicate translucent flakes like insects’ discarded wings. The cube’s cold black sides were as pitilessly dark and unmarred as before. But she noticed that the cube was shrinking, the contraction so odd and unexpected that her mind interpreted it as the cube receding into an impossible distance. All around her, the other cubes were echoing the contraction, their size diminishing by a half with every second that passed.
Within a minute there was nothing left in the cabin but films of grey-black ash. She even felt ash accumulate at the corners of her eyes, like a sudden attack of sleepy dust, and was reminded that the cubes had reached into her head before the marble had arrived.
‘Well, you got your demonstration,’ she said to Thorn. ‘Was it worth it, just to make a point?’
‘I had to know. But I couldn’t know
Khouri rubbed circulation back into her hands where they had grown numb. It was good to be out of the restraint webbing that Thorn had put her in. He apologised for that, without very much in the way of conviction. She had to admit that she would never have confessed to the truth without such extreme coercion.
‘What did happen, by the way?’ Thorn added.
‘I don’t know. Not all of it anyway. We provoked a response, and I’m pretty sure we were about to die, or at least to be swallowed up by that machinery.’
‘I know. I had that feeling as well.’
They looked at each other, conscious that the period of union in the Inhibitor data-gathering network had permitted them a level of intimacy neither had expected. They had shared very little other than fear, but Thorn at least had been shown that her fear was every bit as intense as his own, and that the Inhibitor attack had not been something she had arranged for his benefit. But there had been something more than fear, hadn’t there? There had been concern for each other’s welfare. And when the third mind had arrived, there had also been something very close to remorse.
‘Thorn… did you feel the other mind?’ Khouri asked.
‘I felt something. Something other than you, and something other than the machinery.’
‘I know who it was,’ she said, knowing that it was far too late for lies and evasion now, and that Thorn needed to be told as much of the truth as she understood. ‘At least, I think I recognised him. The mind was Sylveste’s.’
‘Dan Sylveste?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I knew him, Thorn. Not well, and not for long, but enough to recognise him again. And I know what happened to him.’
‘Start at the beginning, Ana.’
She rubbed the grit from the edge of her eye, hoping that the machinery was truly inert and not simply sleeping. Thorn was right. Her admission had been the first crack in an otherwise perfect facade. But the crack could not be unmade. It would spread, extending fracturing fingers. All she could offer now was damage limitation.
‘Everything you think you know about the Triumvir is wrong. She isn’t the maniacal tyrant that the populace thinks. The government built up her image. It needed a demon, a hate figure. If the people hadn’t had the Triumvir to hate, they would have directed their anger, their sense of frustration, at the government itself. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.’
‘She murdered a whole settlement.’
‘No…’ She was suddenly weary. ‘No. It didn’t happen like that. She just made it seem that way, don’t you understand? Nobody actually died.’
‘And you can be sure of that, can you?’
‘I was there.’
The hull creaked and reconfigured itself again. Shortly they would be outside the electromagnetic influence of the gas giant. The Inhibitor processes continued unabated: the slow laying of the sub-atmospheric tubes, the building of the great orbital arc. What had just happened within Roc had made no difference to that grander scheme.
‘Tell me about it, Ana. Is that really your name, or is it another layer of untruth that I need to peel back?’
‘It is my name,’ she said. ‘But Vuilleumier isn’t. That was a cover. It was a colonist name. We created a history for me, the necessary past that enabled me to infiltrate the government. My true name is Khouri. And yes, I was part of the Triumvir’s crew. I came here aboard
Thorn folded his arms. ‘Well, now we’re finally getting somewhere. ’
‘The crew wanted Sylveste, that’s all. They had no grudge against the colony. They used misinformation to make you think that they were more willing to use force than was really the case. But Sylveste double-crossed us. He needed a way to explore the neutron star and the thing in orbit around it, the Cerberus/Hades pair. He persuaded the Ultras to help him with their ship.’
‘And afterwards? What happened then? Why did the two of you come back to Resurgam if you had a starship to yourselves?’
‘There was trouble on the ship, as you guessed. Serious fucking trouble.’
‘A mutiny?’
Khouri bit her lip and nodded. ‘Three of us, I suppose, turned against the rest. Ilia and myself, and Sylveste’s wife, Pascale. We didn’t want Sylveste to explore the Hades pair.’
‘Pascale? As in Pascale Girardieau, you mean?’
Khouri remembered that Sylveste’s wife had been the daughter of one of the most powerful colonial
