want to try that, because even tampering with my eyes will detonate the pinhead, with a yield sufficient to turn the front kilometre of this ship into a very expensive and useless piece of glass sculpture. Kill me, or even harm me to the extent that certain bodily functions are compromised beyond a preset limit, and the device triggers. Clear on that?’
‘As crystal.’
‘Good. Harm Pascale and the same thing happens: I can trigger it deliberately, by executing a series of neural commands. Or I could of course simply kill myself — the result would be indistinguishable. ’ He clasped his hands together, beaming like a statue of Buddha. ‘So. How does a little negotiation sound to you?’
Sajaki said nothing for what seemed like an eternity; doubtless considering every ramification of what Sylveste had said. Finally he said, without having consulted Hegazi: ‘We can be… flexible.’
‘Good. Then I expect you’re keen to hear my terms.’
‘Burning with enthusiasm.’
‘Thanks to the recent unpleasantness,’ Sylveste said, ‘I have a reasonably good idea what this ship can do. And I suspect that little demonstration was very much at the timid end of things. Am I right?’
‘We have… capabilities, but you’d have to talk to Ilia. What did you have in mind?’
Sylveste smiled.
‘First you have to take me somewhere.’
NINETEEN
They retired to the bridge.
Sylveste had visited this room during his previous period aboard the ship and had spent hundreds of hours in it then, but it still impressed him. With the encircling ranks of empty seats rising towards the ceiling, it felt more like a court of law where some momentous case was about to be tried; the jurors about to take their places in the concentric seats. Judgement seemed to be waiting in the air, about to be voiced into being. Sylveste examined his state of mind and found nothing resembling guilt, so he did not place himself in the role of the accused. But he felt a weight. It was the weight that some legal functionary might feel; the burden of a task which had to be performed not only in public but to the highest possible standards of excellence. If he failed, more than his own dignity might be at stake. A long and elaborately connected chain of events leading to this point would be severed, a chain that stretched unimaginably far into the past.
He looked around and made out the holographic projection globe which jutted into the chamber’s geometric centre, but his eyes were barely able to make out the object which it was imaging, though there were enough ancillary clues to suggest it was a realtime representation of Resurgam.
‘Are we still in orbit?’ he asked.
‘Now that we’ve got you?’ Sajaki shook his head. ‘That would be pointless. We have no more business with Resurgam.’
‘You’re worried about the colonists trying something?’
‘They could inconvenience us, I admit.’
For a moment they were silent, before Sylveste said, ‘Resurgam never interested you, did it? You came all this way just for me. I find that singleminded to the point of monomania.’
‘It was only the work of a few months, if that.’ Sajaki smiled. ‘From our perspective, of course. Don’t flatter yourself that I’d have chased you for years.’
‘From my perspective, of course, that’s just what you did.’
‘Your perspective isn’t valid.’
‘And yours is? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s… longer. That has to count for something. Now; to answer your earlier question, we’ve left orbit. We’ve been accelerating away from the ecliptic ever since you came aboard.’
‘I haven’t told you where I want us to go.’
‘No, our plan was simply to put an AU or so between us and the colony, then lock into a constant-thrust holding pattern while we think things over.’ Sajaki clicked his fingers, causing a robotic seat to angle down beside him. He boarded it, then waited while another quartet of seats appeared for Sylveste and Pascale, Hegazi and Khouri. ‘During which time, of course, we anticipated that you’d assist with the Captain.’
‘Did I say I wouldn’t do it?’
‘No,’ Hegazi said. ‘But you sure as hell came with some unanticipated fine print.’
‘Don’t blame me for making the best of a bad situation.’
‘We’re not, we’re not,’ Sajaki said. ‘But it would help if you were a little clearer on your requirements. Isn’t that reasonable?’
Sylveste’s seat was hovering next to the one holding Pascale. She was looking at him now, as much in expectation as any of the crew who had captured him. Except that she knows so much more, he thought, almost everything there was to know, in fact — or at least as much as he knew, however insignificant a part of the truth that knowledge actually constituted.
‘Can I call up a map of the system from this position?’ Sylveste asked. ‘I mean, of course I can, in principle — but will you give me the freedom to do so and some instructions?’
‘The most recent maps were compiled during our approach,’ Hegazi said. ‘You can retrieve them from ship memory and project them into the display.’
‘Then show me how. I’m going to be more than just a passenger for some time to come — you might as well get used to it.’
It took a minute or so to find the right maps; another half a minute to project the right composite into the projection sphere in the form Sylveste desired, eclipsing the realtime image of Resurgam. The image had the form of an orrery, the orbits of the system’s eleven planets and largest minor planets and comets denoted by elegant coloured tracks, with the positions of the bodies themselves shown in their current relative positions. Because the scale adopted was large, the terrestrial planets — Resurgam included — were crammed into the middle; a tight scribble of concentric orbits banded around the star Delta Pavonis. The minor planets came next, followed by the gas giants and comets, occupying the system’s middle ground. Then came two smaller sub-Jovian gas worlds, hardly giants at all, then a Plutonian world — not much more than a captured cometary husk, with two attendant moons. The system’s Kuiper belt of primordial cometary matter was visible in infrared as a curiously distorted shoal, one nubby end pointing out from the star. And then there was nothing at all for twenty further AU, more than ten light-hours out from the star itself. Matter here — such as there was — was only weakly bound to the star; it felt its gravitational field, but orbits here were centuries long and easily disrupted by encounters with other bodies. The protective caul of the star’s magnetic field did not extend this far out, and objects here were buffeted by the ceaseless squall of the galactic magnetosphere; the great wind in which the magnetic fields of all stars were embedded, like tiny eddies within a vaster cyclone.
But that enormous volume of space was not completely empty. It appeared at first only as one body — but that was because the default magnification scale was too large to show its duplicity. It lay in the direction in which the Kuiper halo was pointing; its own gravitational drag had pulled the halo out of sphericity towards that bulged configuration, betraying its existence. The object itself would have been utterly invisible to the naked eye, unless one were within a million kilometres of it; at which point seeing the object would have been the least of one’s problems.
‘You’ll know of this,’ Sylveste said. ‘Even though you might not have paid it very much attention until now.’
‘It’s a neutron star,’ Hegazi said.
‘Good. Remember anything else?’
‘Only that it has a companion,’ Sajaki said. ‘Which doesn’t in itself make it unusual, of course.’
‘Not really, no. Neutron stars often have planets — they’re supposed to be the condensed remnants of evaporated binary stars. Either that or the planet somehow managed to avoid being destroyed when the pulsar was formed during the supernova explosion of a heavier star.’ Sylveste shook his head. ‘But not unusual, no. So — you
