‘No,’ Volyova said. ‘Not as such.’
She was telling him too much, she thought. But Clavain was so persuasive that she could almost not help herself. Before very long, if she were not careful, she would have told him everything about what had happened around Hades: how Khouri had been given a glimpse into the galaxy’s dark prehuman history, endless chapters of extinction and war stretching back to the dawn of sentient life itself…
There were things she was prepared to discuss with Clavain, and there were things she would rather keep to herself, for now.
‘You’re a woman of mystery, Ilia Volyova.’
‘I’m also a woman with a lot of work to do, Clavain.’ She made the sphere zoom in on the burgeoning machine. ‘The Inhibitors are building a weapon. I have strong suspicions that it will be used to trigger some kind of cataclysmic stellar event. They triggered a flare to wipe out the Amarantin, but I think this will be different — much larger and probably more terminal. And I simply cannot allow it to happen. There are two hundred thousand people on Resurgam, and they will all die if that weapon is used.’
‘I sympathise, believe me.’
‘Then you’ll understand that I won’t be handing over any weapons, now or at any point in the future.’
For the first time Clavain appeared exasperated. He rubbed a hand through his shock of hair, bristling it into a mess of jagged white spikes. ‘Give me the weapons and I’ll see that they’re used against the wolves. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Except that I don’t believe you. And if these weapons are as potent as you say, I’m not sure I’m willing to hand them over to any other party. We’ve looked after them for centuries, after all. No harm was done. I’d say that puts us in rather a good light, wouldn’t you? We’ve been responsible custodians. It would be quite cavalier of us to let any old bunch of rogues get their hands on them now, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘Especially as you admit that you’re not the rightful owners, Clavain.’
‘You’ll regret dealing with the Conjoiners, Ilia.’
‘Mm. But at least I’ll be dealing with a legitimate faction.’
Clavain pushed the fingers of his right hand against his brow, like someone fighting a migraine. ‘No, you won’t be. Not in the sense you think. They only want the weapons so they can scuttle off into deep space with them.’
‘And I suppose you have some vastly more magnanimous use in mind?’
Clavain nodded. ‘I do, as a matter of fact. I want to put them back into the hands of the human race. Demarchists… Ultras… Scorpio’s army… I don’t care who takes them over, so long as they convince me that they’ll do the right thing with them.’
‘Which is?’
‘Fight the wolves. They’re coming closer. The Conjoiners knew it, and what’s happening here proves it. The next few centuries are going to be very interesting, Ilia.’
‘Interesting?’ she repeated.
‘Yes. But not in quite the way we’d wish.’
She switched the beta-level off for the time being. The image of Clavain shattered into speckles and then faded away, leaving only the skeletal shape of the servitor where he had been standing. The transition was quite jarring: she had felt a palpable sense of being in his presence.
‘Ilia?’ It was the Captain. ‘We’re ready now. The last cache weapon is outside the hull.’
She tugged the earpiece out and spoke normally. ‘Good. Anything to report?’
‘Nothing major. Five weapons deployed without incident. Of the remaining three, I noted a transient anomaly with the propulsion harness of weapon six, and an intermittent fault with the guidance subsystems of weapons fourteen and twenty-three. Neither has recurred since deployment.’
She lit a cigarette and smoked a quarter of it before answering. ‘That doesn’t sound like nothing major to me.’
‘I’m sure the faults won’t happen again,’ boomed the Captain’s voice. ‘The electromagnetic environment of the cache chamber is quite different from that beyond the hull. The transition probably caused some confusion, that’s all. The weapons will settle down now that they’re outside.’
‘Make a shuttle ready, please.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You heard me. I’m going outside to check on the weapons.’ She stamped her feet, waiting for his answer.
‘There’s no need for that, Ilia. I can monitor the wellbeing of the weapons perfectly well.’
‘You may be able to control them, Captain, but you don’t know them as well as I do.’
‘Ilia…’
‘I won’t need a large shuttle. I’d even consider taking a suit, but I can’t smoke in one of those things.’
The Captain’s sigh was like the collapse of a distant building. ‘Very well, Ilia. I’ll have a shuttle ready for you. You’ll take care, won’t you? You can keep to the side of the ship that the Inhibitors can’t see, if you’re careful.’
‘They’re a long way from taking any notice of us. That isn’t about to change in the next five minutes.’
‘But you appreciate my concern.’
Did the Captain really care for her? She was not certain that she really believed it. Granted, he might be a little lonely out here, and she was his only chance of human companionship. But she was also the woman who had exposed his crime and punished him with this transformation. His feelings towards her were bound to be a little on the complex side.
She had finished enough of the cigarette. On a whim she inserted the butt-end into the wirework head assembly of the servitor, jamming it between two thin metal spars. The tip burned dull orange.
‘Filthy habit,’ Ilia Volyova said.
She took the two-seater snake-headed shuttle that Khouri and Thorn had used to explore the Inhibitor workings around the former gas giant. The Captain had already warmed the craft and presented it to an air lock. The craft had sustained some minor damage during the encounter with the Inhibitor machinery inside Roc’s atmosphere, but most of it had been easy to repair from existing component stocks. The defects that remained certainly did not prevent the shuttle being used for short-range work like this.
She settled into the command seat and assayed the avionics display. The Captain had done a very good job: even the fuel tanks were brimming, although she would not be taking the ship more than a few hundred metres out.
Something nagged at the back of her mind, a feeling she could not quite put her finger on.
She took the shuttle outside, transiting through the armoured doors until she reached naked space. She exited near the much larger aperture where the cache weapons had emerged. The weapons themselves had vanished around the mountainous curve of the great ship’s hull, out of the Inhibitors’ line of sight. Volyova followed the same path, watching the nebulous mass of the shredded planet fall beneath the sharp horizon of the hull.
The eight cache weapons came into view, lurking like monsters. They were all different, but had clearly been shaped by the same governing intellects. She had always suspected that the builders were the Conjoiners, but it was unsettling to have this confirmed by Clavain. She saw no reason for him to have lied. Why, though, had the Conjoiners brought into existence such atrocious tools? It could only have been because they had some intention, at some point, of using them. Volyova wondered whether the intended target had been humanity.
Around each weapon was a harness of girders to which were attached steering rockets and aiming subsystems, as well as a small number of defensive armaments, purely to protect the weapons themselves. The harnesses were able to move the weapons around, and in principle they could have positioned them anywhere within the system, but they were too slow for her requirements. Instead, she had lately fastened sixty-four tug rockets on to the harnesses, eight apiece, positioned at opposing corners of each weapon’s frame. It would take fewer than thirty days to move the eight weapons to the other side of the system.
She nosed the shuttle towards the group of weapons. The weapons, sensing I her approach, shifted their positions. She slid through them, then banked, circled and slowed, examining the specific weapons that the Captain had reported difficulties with. Diagnostic summaries, terse but efficient, scrolled on to her wrist bracelet. She called up each weapon, paying meticulous attention to what she saw.
Something was wrong.
Or rather, something was not wrong. There appeared to be nothing the matter with any of the eight
