politicians; the man whose regime had taken power after Sylveste was deposed for his beliefs.
‘I didn’t know her that well. She’s dead now. Well, sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘This isn’t going to be easy, Thorn. You’ll just have to accept what I say, understand? No matter how insane or unlikely it sounds. Although given what’s just happened, I have a feeling you’ll be more receptive than before.’
He touched a finger to his lip. ‘Try me.’
‘Sylveste and his wife entered Hades.’
‘You mean the other object, surely? Cerberus?’
‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘I mean Hades. They entered the neutron star, although it turned out that it’s a lot more than just a neutron star. It’s not really a neutron star at all, actually; more a kind of giant computer, left behind by aliens.’
He shrugged. ‘Like you say, it’s not as if I haven’t seen some strange things today. And? What happened next?’
‘Sylveste and his wife are inside the computer, running like programs. Like alpha-levels, I guess.’ She raised a finger, anticipating his point. ‘I know this, Thorn, because I took a stroll inside it myself. I encountered Sylveste, after he’d been mapped into Hades. Pascale too. As a matter of fact, there’s probably a copy of me in there as well. But I — this me — didn’t stay. I came back out here into the real universe, and I haven’t been back since. Matter of fact, I’m not planning on ever going back. There’s no easy way into Hades, not unless you count dying by being ripped apart by gravitational tidal stresses.’
‘But you think the mind we met was Sylveste’s?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sighing. ‘Sylveste’s been inside Hades for subjective centuries, Thorn — subjective aeons, probably. What happened to us all sixty years ago must just be a dim, distant memory from the dawn of time for him. He’s had time to evolve beyond anything our imaginations can deal with. And he’s immortal, since nothing within Hades has to die. I can’t guess how he’d act now, whether we’d even recognise his mind. But it sure as hell felt like Sylveste to me. Maybe he was able to recreate himself the way he used to be, just so I’d know what it was that saved us.’
‘He’d take an interest in us?’
‘He’s never shown any sign of it before. But then again, nothing very much has happened in the outside world since he was mapped into Hades. But now, all of a sudden, the Inhibitors have arrived and they’ve started ripping the place up. Information must still be reaching him inside Hades, even if it’s only on an emergency basis. But think about it, Thorn. There is some serious shit going down here. It might even affect Sylveste. We can’t know that, but we can’t say for sure it isn’t true either.’
‘So what was that thing?’
‘An envoy, I suppose. A chunk of Hades, sent out to gather information. And Sylveste sent a copy of himself along with it. The envoy learned what it could, buzzed around the machinery, shadowed us, and then headed back to Hades. Presumably when it gets there it’ll merge back into the matrix. Maybe it was never totally disconnected — there could have been a filament of nuclear matter a single quark wide stretching all the way from the marble back to the edge of the system, and we’d never have known it.’
‘Go back a bit. What happened after you left Hades? Did Ilia come with you?’
‘No. She was never mapped into the matrix. But she survived and we met up again in orbit around Hades, inside
‘Hm.’ Thorn had his chin propped on his knuckle. ‘This gets better, it really does. The odd thing is, I actually think you might be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you’d at least come up with something that made sense.’
‘It does make sense, you’ll see.’
She told him the rest of it, Thorn listening quietly and patiently, nodding occasionally and asking her to clarify certain aspects of her story. She told him that everything they had already told him about the Inhibitors was the truth in so far as they knew it, and that the threat was as real as they had claimed.
‘That much I think you’ve convinced me of,’ Thorn said.
‘Sylveste brought them down, unless they were already on their way here. That’s why he might still feel some obligation to protect us, or at least take a passing interest in the external universe. The thing around Hades was a kind of trigger, we think. Sylveste knew there was risk in what he did, but he didn’t care.’ Khouri scowled, feeling a surge of anger. ‘Fucking arrogant scientist. I was supposed to kill him, you know. That’s why I was on that ship in the first place.’
‘Another delicious complication.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘Who sent you?’
‘A woman from Chasm City. Called herself the Mademoiselle. She and Sylveste went years back. She knew what he was up to, and that he had to be stopped. That was my job. Trouble was, I fucked up.’
‘You don’t look like the sort to commit cold-blooded murder.’
‘You don’t know me, Thorn. Not at all.’
‘Not yet, perhaps.’ He looked at her long and hard until, with some reluctance, she turned away from his gaze. He was a man she felt attracted to and she knew that he was a man who believed in something. He was strong and brave — she had seen that for herself, in Inquisition House. And it was true, even if she did not necessarily want to admit it, that she had engineered this situation with some inkling of how it might play out, from the moment she had insisted that they bring Thorn aboard. But there was no escaping the single painful truth that continued to define her life, even after so much had happened. She was a married woman.
Thorn added, ‘But there’s always time, as they say.’
‘Thorn…’
‘Keep talking, Ana. Keep talking.’ Thorn’s voice was very soft. ‘I want to hear it all.’
Later, when they had put a light-minute between themselves and the gas giant, the console signalled an incoming tight-beam transmission relayed from
‘I see you are on your way home,’ she said, intense displeasure etched into every word. ‘I see also that you went much closer to the heart of their activity than we agreed. That is not good. Not good at all.’
‘She doesn’t sound happy,’ Thorn whispered.
‘What you did was exceptionally dangerous. I just hope you learned something for your efforts. I demand that you make all haste back to the starship. We mustn’t detain Thorn from his urgent work on Resurgam… nor the Inquisitor from her duties in Cuvier. I will have more to say on this matter when you return.’ She paused before adding, ‘Irina out.’
‘She still doesn’t know that I know,’ Thorn said.
‘I’d better tell her.’
‘That doesn’t sound terribly wise to me, Ana.’
She looked at him. ‘No?’
‘Not just yet. We don’t know how she’d take it. Probably better that we act as if I still think… et cetera.’ He made a spiralling gesture with his forefinger. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘I kept something from Ilia once before. It was a serious mistake.’
‘This time you’ll have me on your side. We can break it to her gently once we’re safe and sound aboard the ship.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
Thorn narrowed his eyes playfully. ‘It will work out in the end, I promise you that. All you have to do is trust me. That isn’t so hard, is it? After all, it’s no more than you asked of me.’
‘The trouble was we were lying.’
He touched her arm, a contact that might have seemed accidental had he not prolonged it for several artful
