‘He’s still in my head?’
‘He may not have even needed the dogs,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘He might have entered Volyova’s implants as soon as she placed you in the gunnery for the first time. But he certainly found the dogs advantageous. If he hadn’t tried to invade me with them, I might not have sensed his presence in your other implants.’
‘I feel the same.’
‘Good. It means my countermeasures are effective. You recall how I used countermeasures against Volyova’s loyalty therapies?’
‘Yes,’ Khouri said, gloomily uncertain that those had worked quite as well as the Mademoiselle liked to imagine.
‘Well, these are much the same. The only difference is, I’m using them against those sites in your mind which Sun Stealer has occupied. For the last two years, we’ve been waging a kind of…’ She paused, and then seemed to experience a moment of epiphany. ‘I suppose you could call it a cold war.’
‘It would have to be cold.’
‘And slow,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘The cold robbed us of the energies for anything more. And, of course, we had to be careful that we did not harm you. Your being injured was no use to either myself or Sun Stealer.’
Khouri remembered why this conversation was possible in the first place.
‘But now that I’m warmed…’
‘You understand well. Our campaign has intensified since the warming. I think Volyova may even suspect something. A trawl is reading your brain even now, you see. It may have detected the neural war Sun Stealer and I are waging. I would have relented — but Sun Stealer would have used the moment to overwhelm my counter- measures.’
‘But you can hold him at bay…’
‘I believe so. But should I not succeed in holding Sun Stealer at bay, I felt you needed to know what happened.’
That much was reasonable: better to know that Sun Stealer was in her than to suffer the delusion that she was clean.
‘I also wished to warn you. The bulk of him remains in the gunnery. I’ve no doubt that he will try to enter you fully, or as fully as is possible, when he finds the chance.’
‘You mean, next time I’m in the gunnery?’
‘I admit the options are limited,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘But I thought it best that you knew the entirety of the situation.’
Khouri was, she thought, still a long way from anything that approximated that. But what the ghost said was correct. Better to appreciate the danger than ignore it.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘if Sylveste really was responsible for this thing, killing him won’t pose too many problems for me.’
‘Good. And the news is not unremittingly bad, I assure you. When I sent those dogs into the gunnery I also sent in an avatar of myself. And I know from the reports that the dogs returned that my avatar remained undetected by Volyova, at least during those early days. That was, of course, more than two years ago… but I’ve no reason to suspect that the avatar has been found since.’
‘Assuming it hasn’t been destroyed by Sun Stealer.’
‘A reasonable point,’ she conceded. ‘But if Sun Stealer is as intelligent as I suspect, he won’t do anything that might draw attention to himself. He can’t know for certain that this avatar isn’t something Volyova has sent into the system. She has enough doubts of her own, after all.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘So that, if necessary, I might gain control of the gunnery.’
If Calvin had had any grave, Sylveste thought, then his father would be spinning in it faster than Cerberus spun around the neutron star Hades, aggrieved at the abuse of his own handiwork. Except Calvin had already been dead, or at least non-corporeal, long before his simulation had engineered Sylveste’s vision. Such thought-games held the pain at bay, at least part of the time. And, in truth, there had never really been a time since his capture when he had not been in pain. Falkender was flattering himself if he imagined his surgery was exacerbating Sylveste’s agony to any significant degree.
Eventually — miraculously — it began to abate.
It was like a vacuum opening in his mind, a cold, void-filled ventricle which had not been there before. Taking the pain away was like taking away some inner buttress. He felt himself collapsing, whole eavestones of his psyche grinding loose under their suddenly unsupported weight. It took an effort to restore some of his own internal equilibrium.
And now there were colourless, evanescent ghosts in his vision. By the second they hardened into distinct shapes. The walls of a room — as bland and unfurnished as he had imagined — and a masked figure crouched low over him. Falkender’s hand was immersed in a kind of chrome glove which ended not in fingers but in a crayfish-like explosion of tiny glistening manipulators. One of the man’s eyes was monocled by a lens system, connected to the glove by a segmented steel cable. His skin had the pallor of a lizard’s underbelly: his one visible eye was unfocused and cyanotic. Dried specks of blood sprinkled his brow. The blood was grey-green, but Sylveste knew well enough what it was.
In fact, now that he noticed, everything was grey-green.
The glove retracted, and Falkender pulled it from his wrist with the other hand. A caul of lubricant sheened the hand which had been under the glove.
He began to pack his kit away. ‘Well, I never promised miracles,’ he said. ‘And you shouldn’t have been expecting any.’
When he moved, it was jerkily, and it took moments for Sylveste to grasp that his eyes were only perceiving three of four images a second. The world moved with the stuttering motion of the pencil cartoons children made in the corners of books, flicked into life between thumb and forefinger. Every few seconds there were upsetting inversions of depth, when Falkender would appear to be a man-shaped recess carved into the cell’s wall, and sometimes part of his visual field would jam, not changing for ten or more seconds, even if he looked to another part of the room.
Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.
‘Thank you,’ Sylveste said. ‘It’s… an improvement.’
‘I think we’d better move,’ said Falkender. ‘We’re five minutes behind schedule as it is.’
Sylveste nodded, and just the action of tipping his head was enough to spark pulsing migraines. Still, they were nothing compared with what he had endured until Falkender’s work.
He helped himself from the couch and stepped towards the door. Maybe it was because he now moved to the door with a purpose — because, for the first time, he actually expected to step through it — but the action suddenly seemed perverse and alien. He felt as if he were casually stepping off a precipice. He now had no balance. It was as if his inner equilibrium had become accustomed to no vision, and was now thrown by its return. The dizziness faded, though, just as two True Path heavies emerged from the outer corridor and took him by the elbows.
Falkender trailed behind. ‘Be careful. There may be perceptual glitches…’
But though Sylveste heard his words, they meant nothing to him. He knew where he was now, and that knowledge was momentarily too overpowering. He was back home, after more than twenty years of exile.
His prison was Mantell, a place he had not seen — and barely even visited in his memory — since the coup.
TEN
Volyova sat alone in the huge sphere of the bridge, under the holographic display of the Resurgam system. Her seat, like the other vacant ones around her, was mounted on a long, telescopic, highly articulated arm, so that
