And they knew what it would take to get it. ‘I am Triumvir Ilia Volyova of the lighthugger
Such niceties, Sylveste knew, were not exactly Ilia Volyova’s style. He had always thought of her as the quiet one; more concerned with housekeeping her hideous weapons than condescending to engage in anything resembling normal social intercourse. More than once he had heard the other crewmembers joke — and they hardly ever joked — about how Volyova preferred the company of the vessel’s indigenous rats over her human crewmates.
Perhaps they had not really been joking.
‘I am addressing you from orbit,’ was how she continued. ‘We have studied your state of technological advancement and concluded that you pose us no military threat.’ And then she paused, before continuing in what to Sylveste sounded like the tones of a schoolteacher warning pupils against committing an act of minor disobedience, like gazing out the window, or not keeping their compads well organised. ‘However, should any act be construed as a deliberate attempt at inflicting damage on us, we will retaliate in a massively disproportionate sense.’ She almost smiled at that point. ‘Not so much an eye for an eye, so to speak, as a city for an eye. We are fully capable of destroying any or all of your settlements from orbit.’
Volyova leant forwards, her leonine grey eyes seeming to fill the screen. ‘More importantly, we also have the resolve to do it, should the need arise.’ Volyova again allowed herself an over-dramatic pause, doubtless aware that she had a captive audience at this point. ‘If I chose, it could happen in a matter of minutes. Don’t imagine I’d lose much sleep over it.’
Sylveste could see where all this was heading.
‘But let us put aside such vulgarities, at least for the moment.’ She really smiled at that point, though as smiles went, it was near-cryogenic in its frostiness. ‘You’re doubtless wondering why we’re here.’
‘Not me,’ Sylveste said, loud enough that Pascale heard him.
‘There is a man amongst you we seek. Our desire to find him is so absolute, so pressing, that we have decided to bypass the usual…’ Volyova’s smile reappeared; an even colder phantom of itself. ‘… diplomatic channels. The man’s name is Sylveste; no further explanation should be necessary, if his reputation hasn’t waned since our last meeting.’
‘Tarnished, perhaps,’ Sluka commented. Then, to Sylveste, ‘You’re really going to have to tell me more about this prior meeting, you know. It can hardly do you any harm.’
‘And knowing the facts won’t do you a blind bit of good,’ Sylveste said, immediately returning his attention to the broadcast.
‘Ordinarily,’ Volyova said, ‘we’d establish lines of dialogue with the proper authorities and negotiate for Sylveste’s handover. Possibly that was our original intention. But a cursory scan of your planet’s main settlement from orbit — Cuvier — convinced us that such an approach would be doomed to failure. We surmised that there was no longer any power worth dealing with. And I’m afraid we don’t have the patience to bargain with squabbling planetary factions.’
Sylveste shook his head. ‘She’s lying. They never intended to negotiate, no matter what state we were in. I know these people; they’re vicious scum.’
‘So you keep telling us,’ Sluka said.
‘Our options are therefore rather limited,’ Volyova continued. ‘We want Sylveste, and our intelligence has confirmed that he is not… how shall I put it — at large?’
‘All that from orbit?’ Pascale asked. ‘That’s what I call good intelligence.’
‘Too good,’ Sylveste said.
‘This then,’ Volyova added, ‘is how things will proceed. Within twenty-four hours Sylveste will make his presence and location known to us via a radio-frequency broadcast. Either he emerges from hiding or those who are holding him set him free. We leave the details to you. If Sylveste is dead, then irrefutable evidence of his death must be offered in place of the man himself. Whether we accept it will be entirely at our discretion, of course.’
‘Good job I’m not dead, in that case. I doubt there’s anything you could do to convince Volyova.’
‘She’s that intransigent?’
‘Not just her; the whole crew.’
But Volyova was still speaking: ‘Twenty-four hours, then. We will be listening. And if we hear nothing, or suspect deception in any form, we will enact a punishment. Our ship has certain capabilities — ask Sylveste, if you doubt us. If we have not heard from him within the next day, we will use that capability against one of your planet’s smaller surface communities. We have already selected the target in question, and the nature of the attack will be such that no one in the community will survive. Is that clear? No one. Twenty-four hours after that, if we have still heard nothing of the elusive Dr Sylveste, we will escalate to a larger target. Twenty-four hours after that, we will destroy Cuvier.’ And Volyova proffered another brief smile at that point. ‘Though you seem to be doing an admirable job there yourselves.’
The message ended, then recommenced from the beginning, with Volyova’s blunt introduction. Sylveste listened to it in its entirety twice more before anyone dared interrupt his concentration.
‘They wouldn’t do it,’ Sluka said. ‘Surely not.’
‘It’s barbaric,’ Pascale added, eliciting a nod from their captor. ‘No matter how much they need you — they couldn’t possibly intend to do what she said. I mean, destroy a whole settlement?’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Sylveste said. ‘They’ve done it before. And I don’t doubt that they’ll do it again.’
There had been never been any real certainty in Volyova’s mind that Sylveste was alive — but on the other hand, the fact that he might not be present was something she had carefully avoided dwelling on, because the consequences of failure were too unpleasant to bring to mind. It mattered not that this was Sajaki’s quest, rather than her own. If it failed, he would punish her just as severely as if she had contrived the whole thing herself; as if it were Volyova who had brought them to this dispiriting place.
She had not really expected anything to happen in the first few hours. That was too optimistic; it presumed that Sylveste’s captors were awake and immediately aware of her warning. Realistically, it might be a fraction of a day before the news was passed along the chain of command to the right people; yet more time while it was verified. But as the hours became tens of hours, and then most of a day, she was forced to the conclusion that her threat would have to be enacted.
Of course, the colonists had not been entirely silent. Ten hours earlier, one unnamed group had come forward with what they claimed were Sylveste’s remains. They had left them on the top of a mesa, then retreated into caves through which the ship’s sensors could not peer. Volyova sent down a drone to examine the remains, but while they were a close genetic match, they did not agree precisely with the tissue samples retained since Sylveste’s last visit to the ship. It would have been tempting to punish the colonists for this, but on reflection she decided against such a course of action: they had acted solely out of fear, with no prospect of personal gain except their own — and everyone else’s — survival, and she did not want to deter any other parties coming forward. Likewise she had stilled her hand when two independently acting individuals announced themselves as Sylveste, since it was obvious that the people in question were not really lying, but genuinely believed themselves to be the man himself.
Now, however, there was not even time left for deception.
‘I’m actually rather surprised,’ she said. ‘I thought by now they would have given him over. But evidently one party in this arrangement is seriously underestimating the other.’
‘You can’t back down now,’ Hegazi said.
‘Of course not.’ Volyova said it with surprise, as if the thought of clemency had never once occurred to her.
‘No; you have to,’ Khouri said. ‘You can’t go through with this.’
This was almost the first thing she had said all day. Perhaps she was having trouble coming to terms with the monster for whom she now worked: this suddenly tyrannical incarnation of the previously fair Volyova. It was difficult not to sympathise. When she examined herself, what she saw was indeed something monstrous, even if it was not entirely the truth.
‘Once a threat’s made,’ Volyova said, ‘it’s in everyone’s interests to carry it through if the terms aren’t
