Sudjic was moving more rapidly now, moving more swiftly towards Volyova than Sylveste. It was then that Khouri noticed something odd about the suit Sudjic was wearing. There was something projecting from one end of her clawed arm, something small and metallic. It looked like a weapon, a light hand-held boser-pistol. She was raising her arm with unhurried calm, the way a professional would have done. For an instant Khouri experienced a shocking sense of dislocation. It was as if she were seeing herself from beyond her own body; watching herself raise a weapon in readiness to kill Sylveste.
But something was wrong.
Sudjic was pointing the weapon at Volyova.
‘I take it you have a plan here—’ Sylveste said.
‘Ilia!’ Khouri shouted. ‘Get down, she’s going to—’
Sudjic’s weapon was more powerful than it looked. There was a flash of horizontal light — the containment laser for the coherent matter-beam — streaking laterally across Khouri’s field of view, knifing into Volyova’s suit. Various warning alarms went haywire, signifying an excessive energy-discharge in the vicinity. Khouri’s suit automatically jumped to a higher, more hair-trigger level of battle readiness, indices on the display changing to indicate that their respective subordinated weapons systems were set to go off without her conscious say-so if her suit were similarly threatened.
Volyova’s suit was badly hit; a significant acreage of the chest was gone, revealing densely laminated hypodermal armour layers and outspilling cabling and power lines.
Sudjic took aim again, fired.
This time the blast went deeper, cutting into the wound it had already opened. Volyova’s voice cut across the channel, but it sounded weak and distant. All Khouri could make out was a kind of questioning groan; more of shock than pain.
‘That was for Boris,’ Sudjic said, her own voice obscenely clear. ‘That was for what you did to him in your experiments.’ She levelled the gun again, no less calmly than if she were an artist about to put the finishing dab of paint on a masterpiece. ‘And this is for killing him.’
‘Sudjic,’ Khouri said, ‘stop it.’
The woman’s suit did not turn to look at her. ‘Why stop, Khouri? Didn’t I make it clear I had a grudge against her?’
‘Sajaki’ll be here in minute or so.’
‘By which time I’ll have made it look like Sylveste fired at her.’ Sudjic snorted derisively. ‘Shit; didn’t it occur to you I’d have thought of that? I wasn’t going to let myself get stuffed just to get revenge on the old hag. She isn’t worth the expense.’
‘I can’t let you kill her.’
‘Can’t let me? Oh, that’s funny, Khouri. What are you going to stop me with? I don’t recall her reinstating your weapons privilege, and right now I don’t think she’s in much of a state to do it.’
Sudjic was right.
Volyova was slumped over now, her suit having lost integrity. Maybe the wound reached into her by now. If she were making any sound, her suit was too damaged to amplify it.
Sudjic relevelled the boser, aiming low now. ‘One shot to finish you off, Volyova — then I plant the gun on Sylveste. He’ll deny everything, of course — but there’ll only be Khouri as a witness, and I don’t think she’s going to go out of her way to back up his story. I’m right, aren’t I? Admit it, Khouri, I’m about to do you a favour. You’d kill the bitch if you had the means.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Khouri said. ‘On two counts.’
‘What?’
‘I wouldn’t kill her, despite everything she’s done. And I do have the means.’ She took a moment — not even a fraction of second — to target the laser. ‘Goodbye, Sudjic. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure.’
And fired.
By the time Sajaki arrived, not much more than a minute later, what was left of Sudjic was not worth burying.
Her suit had retaliated, of course, escalating to a higher level of response, directed plasma bolts emitting from projectors which had popped up on either side of her head. But Khouri’s suit had been expecting something like that. In addition to changing the exterior state of its armour to maximally avert the plasma (retexturing itself and applying massive plasma-deflective electric currents to its own hide), it was already returning fire at a yet higher level of aggression, dispensing with childish weapons like plasma and particle-beams and opting for the more decisive deployment of ack-am pulses, releasing tiny nano-pellets from its own antilithium reservoir; each pellet caulked in a shield of ablative normal-matter, and the whole thing accelerated up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Khouri had not even had time to gasp. After issuing the initial fire-order, her suit had done all the rest on its own.
‘There’s been… trouble,’ she said, as the Triumvir descended and made touch-down.
‘You don’t say,’ he said, surveying the carnage: the wounded husk of a suit containing Volyova; the liberally strewn and now radioactive residual pieces of what had once been Sudjic, and — in the middle of it — unharmed by the blast, but seemingly too stunned to speak or try to evade capture, Sylveste and his wife.
SEVENTEEN
Sylveste had rehearsed the meeting in his head many times.
He had done his best to consider every possible eventuality; even those that — based on his understanding of the situation — seemed fantastically unlikely to actually occur. But he had considered nothing like this, and with good reason. Even as it happened around him, he could not begin to make sense of what was going on; let alone why it deviated so far from the path of sanity.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Sajaki said, his voice booming above the wind, amplified from the head of his monstrous suit, ‘I don’t understand much of this either.’
‘That consoles me no end,’ Sylveste said, speaking on the same radio frequency channel he had used for all his negotiations with the crew, even though their representatives — or what remained of them — were now standing within shouting distance. In the unrelenting howl of the razorstorm, shouting was not much of an option. ‘Call me naive but at this point I was hoping you’d have taken things over with your usual ruthless efficiency, Sajaki. All I can say is that you appear to be slacking.’
‘I don’t like it any more than you do,’ the Ultra said. ‘But you’d better believe me — for your sakes — that things are now very much under control. Now, I’m about to divert my attention to my wounded colleague. At this point I strongly recommend that you resist the temptation to do anything foolhardy. Not that the thought ever crossed your mind, eh, Dan?’
‘You know me better than that.’
‘The problem, Dan, is that I know you only too well. But let’s not dwell on the past.’
‘Let’s not.’
Sajaki moved over to the wounded one. Sylveste had known he was dealing with Triumvir Yuuji Sajaki even before the man had spoken. As soon as his suit hove into view, emerging from the storm, his faceplate had been rendered transparent, the man’s over-familiar features peering intently at the damage he surveyed. Although it was hard to tell, Sajaki looked largely unchanged from their last meeting. For him, only a few years of subjective time would have elapsed. Sylveste by contrast had squeezed the equivalent of two or three old-style human lives into that space. It was a dizzying moment.
But Sylveste could not establish the identities of the other two crew. There had been a third, of course… but he or she was now past the point at which he could ever hope to make acquaintance. And of the two who were not obviously dead, one was perhaps perilously close — this was the one now receiving Sajaki’s ministrations — and one was standing in what looked like shocked silence off to one side. Oddly, the uninjured one was keeping some
