bursting into flame. The thing he noticed now was the bluer tone of the sky; no longer crimson. That was because megatonnes of dust had been removed from the winds; replaced with water vapour. Or maybe it was a trick of his impaired colour perception.
Fingering the glass, he said, ‘Remilliod would never return so quickly. He’s among the shrewdest of traders, with very few exceptions.’
‘Then who is it?’
‘It’s the exceptions I’m bothered about.’
Sluka called an aide to remove the coffee. With the table bare, she invited Sylveste back to his seat. Then she printed a document from the table and offered it to him.
‘The information you’re about to see reached us three weeks ago, from a contact in the East Nekhebet flare-watch station.’
Sylveste nodded. He knew about the flare-watches. He had pushed to set them up himself; small observatories dotted around Resurgam, monitoring the star for evidence of abnormal emission.
Reading was too much like trying to decipher Amarantin script: creeping letter by letter along a word until the meaning snapped into his mind. Cal had known that much of reading boiled down to mechanics — the physiology of eye movement along the line. He had built routines into Sylveste’s eyes to accommodate this need, but it had not been within Falkender’s gift to restore everything.
Still, this much was clear:
The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system.
Analysis of the spectral pattern of the gamma-ray flash indicated that it was subject to a small but measurable Doppler shift; a few per cent of the speed of light. The conclusion was inescapable: the flash originated from a ship, on the final phase of deceleration from interstellar cruising speed.
‘Something happened,’ Sylveste said, absorbing the news of the ship’s demise with calm neutrality. ‘Some kind of malfunction in the drive.’
‘That was our guess as well.’ Sluka tapped the paper with her fingernail. ‘A few days later we knew it couldn’t possibly be the case. The thing was still there — faint, but unmistakable.’
‘The ship survived the blast?’
‘Whatever it was. By then we were getting a detectable blueshift off the drive flame. Deceleration was continuing normally, as if the explosion had never happened.’
‘You’ve got a theory for this, I presume.’
‘Half of one. We think the blast originated from a weapon. What kind, we haven’t a clue. But nothing else could have liberated so much energy.’
‘A weapon?’ Sylveste tried to keep his voice completely calm, allowing only natural curiosity to show, purging it of the emotions he really felt, which were largely variations on pure dread.
‘Odd, don’t you think?’
Sylveste leant forwards, a damp chill along his spine.
‘These visitors — whoever they are, I presume they understand the situation here.’
‘The political picture, you mean? Unlikely.’
‘But they’d have attempted contact with Cuvier.’
‘That’s the funny thing. Nothing from them. Not a squeak.’
‘Who knows this?’
His voice by now was almost inaudible, even to himself, as if someone were standing on his windpipe.
‘About twenty people on the colony. People with access to the observatories, a dozen or so of us here; somewhat fewer in Resurgam City… Cuvier.’
‘It isn’t Remilliod.’
Sluka let the paper be reabsorbed by the table, its sensitive content digested away.
‘Then do you have any suggestions as to who it might be?’
Sylveste wondered how close to hysteria his laugh sounded. ‘If I’m right about this — and I’m not often wrong — this isn’t just bad news for me, Sluka. This is bad news for all of us.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s a long story.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. Nor are you.’
‘Not for now, certainly.’
‘What?’
‘Just a suspicion of my own.’
‘Stop playing games, Sylveste.’
He nodded, knowing there was no real point in holding back. He had shared the deepest of his fears with Pascale already, and for Sluka it would now be just a case of filling in the gaps; things which were unobvious from her eavesdropping. If he resisted, he knew, she would find a way to learn what she wished, either from him or — worse — Pascale.
‘It goes back a long way,’ he said. ‘Way back, to the time when I’d just returned to Yellowstone from the Shrouders. You recall that I disappeared back then, don’t you?’
‘You always denied anything had happened.’
‘I was kidnapped by Ultras,’ Sylveste said, not waiting to observe her reaction. ‘Taken aboard a lighthugger in orbit around Yellowstone. One of their number was injured, and they wanted me to… “repair” him, I suppose.’ ‘Repair him?’
‘The Captain was an extreme chimeric.’
Sluka shivered. It was clear that — like most colonialists — her experience with the radically altered fringes of Ultra society had been confined largely to lurid holo-dramas.
‘They were not ordinary Ultras,’ Sylveste said, seeing no reason not to play on Sluka’s phobias. ‘They’d been out there too long; too long away from what we’d think of as normal human existence. They were isolated even by normal Ultra standards; paranoid; militaristic…’
‘But even so…’
‘I know what you’re thinking — that, even if these were some outlandish offshoot culture, how bad could they be?’ Sylveste deployed a supercilious smile and shook his head. ‘That’s exactly what I thought, at first. Then I found out more about them.’
‘Such as?’
‘You mentioned a weapon? Well, they have them. They have weapons which could comfortably dismantle this planet, should they wish.’
‘But they wouldn’t use them without reason.’
Sylveste smiled. ‘We’ll find out when they reach Resurgam, I think.’
‘Yes…’ Sluka said this last word on a falling note. ‘Actually, they’re already here. The explosion happened three weeks ago, but the — um — significance of it was not immediately clear. In the meantime they’ve decelerated and assumed orbit around Resurgam. ’
Sylveste took a moment to regulate his breathing, wondering just how deliberate Sluka’s piecewise revelation was. Had she really neglected to mention this detail — or had she spared it, disclosing the facts in a manner calculated to keep him permanently disorientated?
If so, she was succeeding admirably.
‘Wait a minute,’ Sylveste said. ‘Just now you said only a few people knew about this. But how easy would it be to miss a lighthugger orbiting a planet?’
‘Easier than you imagine. Their ship’s the darkest object in the system. It radiates in the infrared, of course — it must do — but it seems able to tune its emissions to the frequencies of our atmospheric vapour bands; the frequencies which don’t penetrate down to the surface. If we hadn’t spent the last twenty years putting so much water into the atmosphere…’ Sluka shook her head ruefully. ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter. Right now, no one’s paying much attention to the sky. They could have arrived lit up in neon and no one would have noticed.’
