beyond the hull, entering naked space. By now it would be locking on target — Resurgam — going to final power-up, preparing to unleash a pulse of gravitational death.
Above, the noise stopped.
All was still, the light steady. The chair hung motionless within its gimbals, a throne imprisoned within an elegantly curved cage.
Volyova shouted, ‘Khouri, there’s a secondary power-source. The gunnery can tap it, if it senses a drain from the main feed. Means you might not have much time to reach the chair…’
Khouri sprang into the gunnery, heaving her body weight out of the hole in the floor. The slender alloy gimbals now looked sharper than before. She moved fast, monkeying through the feed lines, hopping under or above the gimbals. The chair was still static, but the closer she got, the less room she would have if the apparatus swung into motion again. If it happened now, she thought, the walls would be rapidly redecorated in sticky, coagulating red.
And then she was in. Khouri buckled, and the instant she closed the clasp, the chair whined and shot forwards. The gimbals rolled about her, swerving the chair backwards and forwards, upside down and sideways, until all sense of orientation was lost. The motion was neck-breaking, and Khouri felt her eyeballs bulging out of their sockets with each hairpin reversal — but the motion was surely less vicious than before.
She wants to deter me, Khouri thought, but not kill me… yet.
‘Don’t attempt to hook in,’ the Mademoiselle said.
‘Because it might screw up your little plan?’
‘Not at all. Might I remind you of Sun Stealer? He’s waiting in there.’
The chair was still bucking, but not so violently as to hinder conscious thought.
‘Maybe he doesn’t exist,’ Khouri said, subvocalising. ‘Maybe you invented him to have more leverage over me.’
‘Go ahead then.’
Khouri made the helmet lower itself down over her head, masking the whirling motion of the chamber. Her palm rested on the interface control. All it would take was slight pressure to initiate the link; to close the circuit which would result in her psyche being sucked into the military data-abstraction known as gunspace.
‘You can’t do it, can you? Because you believe me. Once you open that connection, there’s no going back.’
She increased the pressure, feeling the slight give as the control threatened to close. Then — either via some unconscious neuromuscular twitch, or because part of her knew it had to be done, she closed the connection. The gunnery environment enfolded around her, as it had done in a thousand tactical simulations. Spatial data came first: her own body-image become nebulous, replaced by the lighthugger and its immediate surroundings, and then a series of hierarchical overlays conveying the tactical/strategic situation, constantly updating, self-checking its own assumptions, running frantic realtime-extrapolated simulations.
She assimilated.
The cache-weapon was holding station, several hundred metres away from the hull. Its prong was pointed in the direction of flight, straight towards Resurgam — allowing, Khouri knew, for the tiny relativistic light-bending effects caused by their moderate velocity. Near the space-door from which the weapon had emerged, the shuttle had left a black smear along the side of the hull. There were damage-points there; Khouri felt them as little pricks of discomfort, numbing as auto-repair systems phased in. Gravity sensors felt ripples emanating from the weapon; Khouri felt periodic — and quickening — breezes wash over her. The black holes in the weapon must be spinning up, orbiting quicker and quicker around the torus.
A presence sniffed her, not from outside, but from within the gunnery itself.
‘Sun Stealer’s detected your entry,’ the Mademoiselle said.
‘No problem.’ Khouri reached out into gunspace, slipping abstract hands into cybernetically realised gauntlets. ‘I’m accessing ship’s defences. A few seconds is all I need.’
But something was wrong. The weapons felt differently from the way they had in simulation; unwilling to budge to her whims. Quickly she intuited: they were being fought over, and she was merely joining in the struggle.
The Mademoiselle — or rather, her avatar — was trying to block the hull defences, prevent them from being turned on the cache-weapon. The weapon itself was firmly out of Khouri’s reach, veiled by numerous firewalls. But who — or what — was resisting the Mademoiselle, trying to bring those weapons to bear? Sun Stealer, of course. She could sense him now. Vast, powerful, but also intent on invisibility and slyness, careful to camouflage his actions behind routine data movements. For years that had worked, and Volyova had known nothing of his presence. But now Sun Stealer was driven to recklessness, like a crab forced to scuttle from one hideaway to another by the retreating tide. Nothing remotely human; no sense that this third presence in the gunnery was anything so mundane as another downloaded personality simulation; what Sun Stealer felt like was pure mentality, as if this data-representation was all that he had ever been; all that he ever would be.
It felt like absolutely nothing — but a locus of nothingness which had somehow achieved a terrifying degree of organisation.
Was she seriously contemplating joining forces with this thing?
Maybe. If that was what it took to stop the Mademoiselle.
‘You can still back out,’ the woman said. ‘He’s busy at the moment — can’t spare his energies to invade you. But in a moment that won’t be the case.’
Now the aiming systems were at least under her control, although they operated sluggishly. She bracketed the cache-weapon, encasing the whole bulk in a potential sphere of annihilation. Now all that had to happen was for the Mademoiselle to surrender control of the weapons, if only for the microsecond necessary for them to slew, target and fire.
She felt them loosen. She — or rather, she and Sun Stealer — seemed to be winning.
‘Don’t do this, Khouri. You don’t know what’s at stake…’
‘Then clue me in, bitch. Tell me what’s so important.’
The cache-weapon was moving away from the hull, surely a sign that the Mademoiselle was worried about its safety. But the pulses of gravitational radiation were quickening, now coming almost too rapidly to separate. No guessing how long it would be before the cache-weapon fired, but Khouri suspected it could only be seconds away.
‘Listen,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘You want the truth, Khouri?’
‘Damn right I do.’
‘Then you’d better brace yourself. You’re about to get the whole thing.’
And then — as soon as she had adjusted to being sucked into gunspace — she felt herself being sucked somewhere else entirely. The odd thing was that it seemed to be a part of herself she had until that moment completely overlooked.
They were on a battlefield, surrounded by the chameleoflaged bubbletents, the temporary enclosures of some hospital or forward command post. The sky above the compound was azure, cloud-streaked, but littered with dirty, intermingling vapour trails. It was as if some world-spanning squid were spilling its viscera into the stratosphere. Sowing the trails, and darting between them, were numerous arrow-winged jet aircraft. Lower, there were drone-dirigibles and, lower still, bulbous-bodied transport helicopters, tilt-wings and veetols, skimming the periphery of the compound, occasionally dropping to disgorge armoured personnel carriers or walking troops, ambulances or armed servitors. There was a scorched, grass-covered apron to one side of the compound, where six delta-winged, windowless aircraft were parked on skids, their upper surfaces precisely mimicking the sun-bleached hue of the ground, their VTOL irises open for inspection.
Khouri felt herself stumbling, falling towards the grass at her feet. She wore chameleoflage fatigues, currently emitting in dappled khaki. There was a lightweight projectile weapon in her hands, its alloy grip contour- moulded to match her palm. She was helmeted, a two-d readout monocle dangling down from the helmet’s rim, showing a false-colour heat-map of the battlezone, telemetered from one of the dirigibles.
‘This way, please.’
A whitehat was directing her into one of the bubbletents. Inside, an aide took her gun, ident-chipped it and racked it with eight other weapons, varying in firepower from projectile units like her own to medium-yield party-
