with something hard.
Each tap was a small nova of pain behind his temples.
‘Fix them when I say,’ said a voice which, beyond any doubt, he knew. It was female, but with a throaty quality which rendered it almost masculine. ‘For now keep him blind.’
Footsteps left; the speaker must have dismissed the escort with a silent gesture. Alone now, with no reference points, Sylveste felt his balance go. No matter how he moved, the grey matrix remained in front of him. His legs felt weak, but there was nothing with which to support himself. For all he knew he was standing on a plank of wood ten storeys above the floor.
He began to topple, arms flailing pathetically.
Something snatched at his forearm and stabilised him. He heard a pulsing rasp, like someone sawing through timber.
His breathing.
He heard a moist click, and knew that she had opened her mouth to speak again. Now she must be smiling, contemplating.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘You hopeless bastard. You don’t even remember my voice.’
Her fingers gouged his forearm, expertly locating nerves and pinching them in the appropriate place. He let out a doglike yelp; it was the first stimulus which had made him forget the pain in his eyes. ‘I swear,’ Sylveste said, ‘I don’t know you.’
She released the pressure. As his nerves and tendons sprang back into place there was more pain, subsiding into a numb discomfort which gloved his entire arm and shoulder.
‘You should,’ said the wrecked voice. ‘I’m someone you think died a long time ago, Dan, buried under a landslide.’
‘Sluka,’ he said.
Volyova was on her way to the Captain when the disturbing thing happened. Now that the rest of the crew were sleeping out the journey to Resurgam — including Khouri — Volyova had again fallen into her old habit of conversing with the slightly warmed Captain; elevating his brain temperature by the fraction of a kelvin necessary to allow him some kind of consciousness, however fragmentary. This had been her routine now for the better part of two years, and would continue for another two and half, until the ship arrived around Resurgam and the others came out of reefersleep. Of course, the conversations were infrequent — she could not risk warming the Captain too often, for with each warming the plague claimed a little more of both him and the surrounding matter — but they were little oases of human interaction in weeks otherwise filled only with the contemplating of viruses, weapons and the general matter of the ship’s ailing fabric.
So, in her own way, Volyova looked forward to their talks, even though the Captain seldom showed much sign of remembering what they had talked about previously. Worse, a certain frostiness had entered their relationship of late. Partly this was due to Sajaki’s lack of fortune in locating Sylveste in the Yellowstone system, condemning the Captain to another half-decade of torment at the very least — or longer, if Sylveste could not be found on Resurgam either, which struck Volyova as an at least theoretical possibility. What made matters difficult was that the Captain kept asking her how the search for Sylveste was going, and she kept having to break the news to him that it was not going as auspiciously as one might wish. The Captain would become sullen at that point — she could hardly blame him for that — and the tone of the conversation would darken, often to the point where the Captain became completely incommunicative. When, days or weeks later, she tried to speak to him again, he would have forgotten what she had told him before and they would go through the same process again, except this time Volyova would do her best to break the bad news more gently, or put some kind of optimistic spin on it.
The other thing that was casting a shadow over their talks stemmed from Volyova’s side, which was her nagging insistence on probing the Captain about the visit he and Sajaki had made to the Pattern Jugglers. It was only in the last few years that Volyova had become interested in the details of the visit, for it now seemed to her that Sajaki’s change of personality had occurred around the same time. Of course, having one’s mind altered was the whole point of visiting the Jugglers — but why would Sajaki have allowed the aliens to change him for the worse? He was crueller than he had been before; despotic and single-minded where once he had been a firm but fair leader; a valued member of the Triumvirate. Now she hardly trusted him at all. And yet — instead of casting some light on the change — the Captain deflected her questions aggressively, and left her even more obsessed with what had happened.
She was on her way to speak to him, then, with these things foremost in her mind; wondering how she would deal with the inevitable question about Sylveste, and what new approach she would take when probing the Captain about the Jugglers. And, because she was taking her usual route, she was obliged to pass through the cache-chamber.
And she saw that one of the weapons — one of the most feared, as it happened — appeared to have moved.
‘There have been developments,’ said the Mademoiselle. ‘Both fortuitous and otherwise.’
It was a surprise to be conscious at all; let alone to hear the Mademoiselle. The very last thing Khouri remembered was climbing into a reefersleep casket with Volyova looking down on her, tapping commands into her bracelet. Now she could neither see nor feel anything, not even a sense of cold, yet she knew she was still — somehow — in the reefer, and still by some measure asleep.
‘Where — when — am I?’
‘Still aboard the ship; about halfway to Resurgam. We are moving very quickly now; less than one per cent slower than light. I have raised your neural temperature slightly — enough for conversation.’
‘Won’t Volyova notice?’
‘Her noticing may be the least of our problems, I am afraid. Do you remember the cache, how I found something hiding in the gunnery architecture?’ The Mademoiselle did not wait for an answer. ‘The message that the bloodhounds brought back was not easy to decipher. Over the subsequent three years… their auguries have become clearer, now.’
Khouri had a vision of the Mademoiselle disembowelling her dogs, studying the topology of the outspilled entrails.
‘So is the stowaway real?’
‘Oh yes. And hostile too, though we’ll come to that in a moment.’
‘Any idea what it is?’
‘No,’ she said, though the answer was guarded. ‘But what I have learnt is almost as interesting.’
What the Mademoiselle had to say related to the gunnery’s topology. The gunnery was an enormously complex assemblage of computers: layers accreted over decades of shiptime. It was doubtful that any one mind — even Volyova’s — could have grasped more than the very basics of that topology; how the various layers interpenetrated each other and folded back on themselves. But in one sense the gunnery was easy to visualise, since it was almost totally disconnected from the rest of the ship, which was why most of the higher cache-weapon functions could only be accessed by someone physically present in the gunnery seat. The gunnery was surrounded by a firewall, and data could only pass from the rest of the ship to the gunnery. The reasons for this were tactical; since the gunnery’s weapons (and not just those in the cache) would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship’s dataspace by a one-way trapdoor. The door only allowed data to enter the gunnery from the rest of the ship; nothing within the gunnery could traverse it.
‘Now,’ said the Mademoiselle, ‘given that we have discovered something in the gunnery, I invite you to draw the logical conclusion.’
‘Whatever it was got there by mistake.’
‘Yes.’ The Mademoiselle sounded pleased, almost as if the thought had not struck her. ‘I suppose we must consider the possibility that the entity found its way into the gunnery via the weapons, but I think it is far more likely it entered via the trapdoor. I also happen to know when the door was last traversed.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Eighteen years ago.’ Before Khouri could interject, the Mademoiselle added, ‘Shiptime, that is. In worldtime,
