‘Messily, probably. He’s probably hoping now that I can work with the damaged copy without channelling; just relying on my knowledge of Cal’s instincts and methodologies.’
Pascale nodded. She was shrewd enough not to ask the obvious question: what kind of plan would Sajaki have if his own copy was too damaged even for that? Instead, she said, ‘Do you have any idea what happened down there?’
‘No — and I think Sajaki was telling the truth when he said the same thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to plan. Maybe some kind of power-struggle within the crew, acted out on the surface because whoever was involved never got a chance aboard.’ But while the idea sounded halfway plausible to him, that was as far as his thinking took him. Too much time had gone by, even within Sajaki’s reference frame, for Sylveste to trust his usually infallible processes of insight.
He would have to play things very carefully indeed until he understood the dynamics of the current crew. Assuming they gave him the luxury of time…
Pascale knelt down next to her husband. They had both removed their masks now, but only Pascale had removed her dust-goggles. ‘We’re in a lot of danger, aren’t we? If Sajaki decides he can’t use you…’
‘He’ll return us to the surface unharmed.’ Sylveste took Pascale’s hands. Ranks of empty suits towered around them, as if the two of them were unwanted despoilers in an Egyptian tomb and the suits were mummies. ‘Sajaki can’t ever rule out my being useful to him again, in the future.’
‘I hope you’re right… because that was quite a risk you took.’ She looked at him now with an expression he had rarely seen before. It was one of quiet, calm warning. ‘With my life as well.’
‘Sajaki isn’t my master. I just had to remind him of that; to let him know no matter how clever he gets, I’ll always be ahead of him.’
‘But he is your master now, don’t you understand? He may not have the sim, but he’s got you. That still puts him ahead in my book.’
Sylveste smiled and reached for an answer that was both true and exactly what Sajaki would expect of him. ‘But not as far as he thinks.’
Sajaki and the other woman came back less than an hour later, accompanied by a huge chimeric. Sylveste recognised the man from his previous trip aboard as Triumvir Hegazi, but only just. Hegazi had always been an extreme example of his kind — almost as comprehensively cyborgised as his Captain — but in the intervening time, Hegazi had further submerged his core humanity in machine supplements, exchanging various prosthetic parts for newer or more elegant substitutes, and had gained a whole new entourage of entoptics, most of which were designed to interact with the motion of his body parts, creating an off-spilling cascade of rainbow-coloured ghost limbs which lingered in the air for a second or so before fading. Sajaki wore unassuming shipboard clothes devoid of rank or ornamentation, emphasising the lightness of his build. But Sylveste was wise enough not to judge the man by his lack of bulk and absence of obvious weapons prosthetics. Machines undoubtedly seethed beneath his skin, giving him inhuman speed and strength. He was at least as dangerous as Hegazi and a good deal quicker, Sylveste knew.
‘I can’t exactly say it’s entirely a pleasure,’ Sylveste said, addressing Hegazi. ‘But I admit to experiencing a mild
‘I suggest you take that as a compliment,’ Sajaki said to the other Triumvir. ‘It’s the closest you’ll get from Sylveste.’
Hegazi fingered the moustache which he still cultivated, despite the encroaching prosthetics which cased his skull.
‘Let’s see how witty he sounds when you’ve shown him the Captain, Sajaki-san. That’ll wipe the smile off his face.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Sajaki said. ‘And talking of faces, why don’t you show us a little more of yours, Dan?’ Sajaki fingered the haft of a gun resting in a hip-holster.
‘Gladly,’ Sylveste said. He reached up and pulled away the dust-goggles. He let them clatter to the floor, watching the expressions — or what passed for expressions — on the faces of the people who had taken him prisoner. For the first time they were seeing what had become of his eyes. Perhaps they knew already, but the shock of seeing Calvin’s handiwork could never be underestimated. His eyes were not sleek improvements on the originals, but brutalist substitutes which only approximated the functionality of the human eye. There were more sophisticated things in ancient medical textbooks… not far removed from wooden legs. ‘You knew that I lost my sight, of course?’ he said, examining each of them in turn with his blank, eyeless gaze. ‘It’s common knowledge on Resurgam… hardly even worth mentioning.’
‘What kind of resolution do you get out of those?’ Hegazi said, with what sounded like genuine interest. ‘I know they’re not completely state-of-the-art, but I bet you’ve got full EM sensitivity from the IR into the UV, right? Maybe even acoustic imaging? Got a zoom capability?’
Sylveste looked at Hegazi long and hard before answering. ‘You need to understand one thing, Triumvir. In the right light, when she’s not standing too far away, I can just about recognise my wife.’
‘That good…’ Hegazi kept looking at him, fascinated.
They were escorted deeper into the ship. The last time he had been aboard, they had taken him straight to the medical centre. The Captain had been more or less capable of walking then, at least for short distances. But they were not taking him anywhere he recognised now. Which was not necessarily to say that he was far from the medical centre, for the ship was as intricate as a small city and as difficult to memorise, even though he had once spent nearly a month aboard it. But he sensed that this was entirely new territory; that he was passing through regions of the ship — what Sajaki and the crew called districts — which he had never been shown before. If his reckoning was good, the elevator was carrying them away from the ship’s sleek prow, down to where the conic hull broadened to its maximum width.
‘Minor technical defects in your eyes don’t concern me,’ Sajaki said. ‘We can repair them easily enough.’
‘Without a working version of Calvin? I don’t think so.’
‘Then we rip out your eyes and replace them with something better.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. Besides… you still wouldn’t have Calvin, so what good would it do you?’
Sajaki said something beneath his breath and the elevator crawled to a halt. ‘So you never believed me when I said we had a back-up? Well, you’re right, of course. Our copy had some strange flaws in it. Became quite useless long before we asked anything of it.’
‘That’s software for you.’
‘Yes… perhaps I may kill you after all.’ With one smooth movement he drew the gun from his holster, giving Sylveste time enough to notice the bronze snake which spiralled around the barrel. The weapon’s mode of killing was not at all obvious; it might have been a beam or projectile gun, but he had no doubts that he was comfortably within its lethal range.
‘You wouldn’t kill me now; not after all the time you spent looking for me.’
Sajaki’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘You underestimate my propensity for acting on a whim, Dan. I might kill you just for the sheer cosmic perversity of the act.’
‘Then you’d have to find someone else to heal the Captain.’
‘What would I have lost?’ Under the snake’s jaw, a status light flicked from green to red. Sajaki’s finger whitened.
‘Wait,’ Sylveste said. ‘You don’t have to kill me. Do you honestly think I’d have destroyed the only copy of Cal left in existence?’
Sajaki’s relief was evident. ‘There’s another?’
‘Yes.’ Sylveste nodded towards his wife. ‘And she knows where to find it. Don’t you, Pascale?’
Some hours later Cal said, ‘I always knew you were a cold, calculating bastard, son.’
They were near the Captain. Sajaki had taken Pascale away, but now she was back again — along with all the other crew-members Sylveste knew about, and the apparition he had hoped never to see again. ‘An insufferable, treacherous… nonentity.’ The apparition was speaking quite calmly, like an actor running through lines purely to judge the timing, without imparting any actual emotion. ‘You unthinking rat.’
