physical evidence to corroborate what the implant records. I want remains, and more than just ashes. Preserve what you can in vacuum. Keep the remains sealed and isolated from the ship. Bury them in rock if that suits you, but just bring them back to me. I must have proof.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, Ana Khouri, I will give you your husband.’
Sylveste did not stop to catch his breath until he and Pascale had reached and passed the ebony shell encasing the Amarantin city, taking several hundred footsteps into the tangled maze which wormholed through it. He chose his directions as randomly as was humanly possible, ignoring the signs added by the archaeologists, desperately trying to avoid following a predictable path.
‘Not so quickly,’ Pascale said. ‘I’m worried about getting lost.’
Sylveste put a hand to her mouth, even though he knew that her need to talk was only a way to obliterate the fact of her father’s assassination.
‘We have to be quiet. There must be True Path units in the shell, waiting to mop up escapees. We don’t want to draw them down on us.’
‘But we’re lost,’ she said, her voice now hushed. ‘Dan, people died in this place because they couldn’t find their way out before they starved.’
Sylveste pushed Pascale down a constricting bolthole into steadily thickening darkness. The walls were slippery here; no friction flooring had been installed. ‘The one thing that isn’t going to happen,’ he said, more calmly than he felt, ‘is that we get lost.’ He tapped his eyes, though it was already much too gloomy for Pascale to notice the gesture. Like a seeing person among the blind, he had trouble remembering that much of his nonverbal communication was wasted. ‘I can replay every step we take. And the walls reflect infrared from our bodies reasonably well. We’re safer here than back in the city.’
She panted along behind him, saying nothing for long minutes. Finally she mumbled, ‘I hope this isn’t one of the rare occasions when you’re wrong. That would be a particularly inauspicious start to our marriage, don’t you think?’
He did not much feel like laughing; the hall’s carnage was still garishly fresh in his mind. He laughed all the same, and the gesture seemed to lessen the reality of it all. Which was all for the better, because when he thought about it rationally, Pascale’s doubts were perfectly justified. Even if he knew the precise way out of the maze, that knowledge might be unusable, if the tunnels were too slippery to climb, or if, as rumour had it, the labyrinth occasionally changed its own configuration. Then, magic eyes or no, they would starve along with all the other poor fools who had wandered away from the marked path.
They worked deeper into the Amarantin structure, feeling the lazy curve of the tunnel as it wound its way maggottishly through the inner shell. Panic was as much an enemy as disorientation, of course. But forcing oneself to stay calm was never easy.
‘How long do you think we should stay here?’
‘A day,’ Sylveste said. ‘Then we leave after them. By then, reinforcements will have arrived from Cuvier.’
‘Working for whom?’
Sylveste shouldered into a wasp-waist in the tunnel. Beyond, it bottled out into a triple-junction; he made a mental coin-flip and took the left way. ‘Good question,’ he said, too softly for his wife to hear him.
But what if the incident had merely been part of a colony-wide coup, rather than an isolated act of publicly visible terrorism? What if Cuvier was now out of Girardieau government control, fallen to True Path? Girardieau’s death left behind a lumbering party machine, but many of its cogs had been removed in the wedding hall. In this moment of weakness, blitzkrieg revolutionaries might accomplish much. Perhaps it was already over, Sylveste’s former enemies dethroned, strange new faces assuming power. In which case, waiting in the labyrinth might be completely futile. Would True Path regard him as an enemy, or as something infinitely more ambiguous; an enemy’s enemy?
Not that Girardieau and he had even been enemies, at the end.
Finally, they came to a wide, flat-bottomed throat where a number of tunnels converged. There was room to sit down, and the air was fresh and breezy; pumped air currents reached this far. In infrared, Sylveste watched Pascale slump cautiously down, hands scrabbling the frictionless floor for rats, sharp stones or grinning skulls.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’re safe here.’ As if by the very act of saying as much, he made it more likely. ‘If anyone comes, we can pick our escape routes. We’ll lie low and see what happens.’
Of course, now that the immediate flight was over, she would begin thinking about her father again. He did not want that; not now.
‘Stupid dumb Janequin,’ he said, hoping to steer her thoughts at least tangentially away from what had happened. ‘They must have blackmailed him. Isn’t that the way it always happens?’
‘What?’ Pascale asked labouredly. ‘Isn’t that the way what always happens?’
‘The pure becomes corrupted.’ His voice was so low it threatened to crack into a whisper. The gas used in the auditorium attack had not properly reached his lungs, but he could still feel its effect on his larynx. ‘Janequin was working on those birds for years; all the time I knew him in Mantell. They started as innocent living sculptures. He said any colony orbiting a star named Pavonis ought to have a few peacocks around the place. Then someone thought of a better use for them.’
‘Perhaps they were all poisonous,’ Pascale said, stretching the final word into a long slither of sibilant esses. ‘Primed like little walking bombs.’
‘Somehow I doubt he tampered with more than a few of them.’ Maybe it was the air, but Sylveste felt suddenly weary, needful of immediate sleep. He knew they were safe for now. If the killers had been following them — and the killers might not even realise they were not among the dead — they would have reached this part of the shell already.
‘I never believed he had real enemies,’ Pascale said, her sentence seeming to writhe unattached in the confined space. He imagined her fear: without vision, with only his assurances, this dark place must be exquisitely frightening. ‘I never thought anyone would kill him for what they wanted. I didn’t think anything was worth that much.’
Along with the rest of the crew, Khouri would eventually enter reefersleep for the bulk of the time that the ship took to reach Resurgam. But before then she spent much of her waking time in the gunnery, being subjected to endless simulations.
After a while it began to invade her dreams, to the point where boredom was no longer an adequate term to encompass the repetitiousness of the exercises Volyova had conceived for her. Yet losing herself in the gunnery environment was something she began to welcome, since it offered temporary respite from her worries. In the gunnery, the whole Sylveste problem became a small anxious itch, nothing more. She remained aware that she was in an impossible situation, but that fact no longer seemed critical. The gunnery was all, and that was why she no longer feared it. She was still herself after the sessions, and she began to think that the gunnery hardly mattered at all; that it would not ultimately make any difference to the outcome of her mission.
All that changed when the dogs came home.
They were the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds: cybernetic agents she had unleashed into the gunnery during one of Khouri’s sessions. The dogs had clawed their way into the system itself via the neural interface, exploiting the system’s one forgivable weakness. Volyova had hardened it against software attack, but had obviously never imagined that the attack might come from the brain of the person hooked into the gunnery. The dogs barked back safe assurances that they had entered the gunnery’s core. They had not returned to Khouri during the session in which they were unleashed, since it would take more than a few hours for them to sniff every nook and cranny of the gunnery’s Byzantine architecture. So they had stayed in the system for more than a day, until Volyova once again hooked Khouri in.
Then the dogs returned to the Mademoiselle, and she decrypted them and unravelled the prey they had located.
‘She has a stowaway,’ the Mademoiselle said when she and Khouri were alone after a session. ‘Something has hidden itself in the gunnery system, and I’m prepared to bet she knows nothing about it at all.’
Which was when Khouri stopped regarding the gunnery chamber with such total equanimity. ‘Go on,’ she
