CHAPTER 32
The transfer shuttle slid alongside the larger spacecraft, a single bubble drifting down the flank of a great scarred whale. Khouri and Thorn made their way to the rarely used flight deck, sealed the door behind them and then ordered some floodlights to be deployed. Fingers of light clawed along the hull, throwing the topology into exaggerated relief. The baroque transformations were queasily apparent — folds and whorls and acres of lizardlike scales — but there was no sign of any further damage.
‘Well?’ Thorn whispered. ‘What’s your assessment?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But one thing’s for sure. Normally we’d have heard from Ilia by now.’
Thorn nodded. ‘You think something catastrophic happened here, don’t you?’
‘We saw a battle, Thorn, or what looked like one. I can’t help jumping to conclusions.’
‘It was a long way off.’
‘You can be certain of that, can you?’
‘Fairly, yes. The flashes weren’t spread randomly around the sky. They were clustered, and they all lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. That means that whatever we saw was distant — tens of light-minutes, maybe even whole light-hours from here. If this ship was in the thick of it, we’d have seen a much larger spatial extent to the flashes.’
‘Good. You’ll excuse me if I don’t sound too relieved.’
‘The damage we’re seeing here can’t be related, Ana. If those flashes really were on the far side of the system, then the energy being unleashed was fearsome. This ship looks as if it took a hit of some kind, but it can’t have been a direct hit from the same weapons or there wouldn’t be a ship here.’
‘So it got hit by shrapnel or something.’
‘Not very likely…’
‘Thorn, something sure as fuck happened.’
There was a shiver of activity from the console displays. Neither of them had done anything. Khouri leaned over and queried the shuttle, biting her lip.
‘What is it?’ Thorn asked.
‘We’re being invited to dock,’ she told him. ‘Normal approach vector. It’s as if nothing unusual’s happened. But if that’s the case, why isn’t Ilia speaking to us?’
‘We’ve got two thousand people in our care. We’d better be sure we’re not walking into a trap.’
I do realise that.‘ She skated a finger across the console, skipping through commands and queries, occasionally tapping a response into the system.
‘So what are you doing?’ Thorn asked.
‘Landing us. If the ship wanted to do something nasty, it’s had enough chances.’
Thorn pulled a face but offered no counter-argument. There was a tug of microgravity as the transfer shuttle inserted itself into the docking approach, moving under direct control of the larger ship. The hull loomed and then opened to reveal the docking bay. Khouri closed her eyes — the transfer shuttle only just appeared to fit through the aperture — but there was no collision, and then they were inside. The shuttle wheeled and then nudged itself into a berthing cradle. There was a tiny shove of thrust at the last moment, then a faint, faint tremor of contact. And then the console altered again, signifying that the shuttle had established umbilical linkage with the bay. Everything was absolutely normal.
‘I don’t like it,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s not like Ilia.’
‘She wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood the last time we met. Maybe she’s just having a very long sulk.’
‘Not her style,’ Khouri said, snapping her response and then immediately regretting it. ‘Something’s wrong. I just don’t know what.’
‘What about the passengers?’ he asked.
‘We keep ’em here until we know what’s going on. After fifteen hours, they can stand one or two more.‘
‘They won’t like it.’
‘They’ll have to. One of your people can cook up an excuse, can’t they?’
‘I suppose one more lie at this point won’t make much difference, will it? I’ll think of something — an atmospheric pressure mismatch, maybe.’
‘That’ll do. It doesn’t have to be a show stopper. Just a plausible reason to keep them aboard for a few hours.’
Thorn went back to arrange matters with his aides. It would not be too difficult, Khouri thought: the majority of the passengers would not expect to be unloaded for several hours anyway, and so would not instantly realise anything was amiss. Provided word did not spread around the ship that no one was being let out, a riot could be held off for a while.
She waited for Thorn to return.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘We can’t leave by the main airlock or people will get suspicious if we don’t come back.’
‘There’s a secondary lock here,’ Khouri said, nodding at an armoured door set in one wall of the flight deck. ‘I’ve requested a connecting tube to be fed across from the bay. We can get on and off the ship without anyone knowing we’re away.’
The tube clanged against the side of the hull. So far, the larger ship was being very obliging. Khouri and Thorn donned spacesuits from the emergency locker even though the indications were that the air in the connecting tube was normal in mix and pressure. They propelled themselves to the door, opened it and crammed into the chamber on the other side. The outer door opened almost immediately since there was no pressure imbalance to be adjusted.
Something waited in the tunnel.
Khouri flinched and sensed Thorn do likewise. Her soldiering years had given her a deep-seated dislike for robots. On Sky’s Edge a robot was often the last thing you saw. She had learned to suppress that phobia since moving in other cultures, but she still retained the capacity to be startled when she encountered one unexpectedly.
Yet the servitor was not one she recognised. It was human-shaped, but at the same time utterly non-human in form. It was largely hollow, a lacy scaffold of wire-thin joints and struts containing almost no solid parts. Alloyed mechanisms, whirring sensors and arterial feedlines hovered within the skeletal form. The servitor spanned the corridor with limbs outstretched, waiting for them.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ Khouri said.
‘Hello,’ the servitor said, barking at them with a crudely synthesised voice.
‘Where’s Ilia?’ Khouri asked.
‘Indisposed. Would you mind authorising your suits to interpret the ambient data field, full visual and audio realisation? It will make matters a great deal easier.’
‘What’s it talking about?’ Thorn asked.
‘It wants us to let it manipulate what we see through our suits.’
‘Can it do that?’
‘Anything on the ship can, if we let it. Most of the Ultras have implants to achieve the same effect.’
‘And you?’
‘I had mine removed before I came down to Resurgam. Didn’t want anyone to be able to trace me back here in a hurry.’
‘Sensible,’ Thorn said.
The servitor spoke again. I assure you that there won’t be any trickery. As you can see, I’m actually rather harmless. Ilia chose this body for me intentionally, so that I wouldn’t be able to do any damage.‘
‘Ilia chose it?’
The servitor nodded its wire-frame approximation of a skull. Something bobbed within the openwork cage: a stub of white wedged between two wires. It almost looked like a cigarette.
‘Yes. She invited me aboard. I am a beta-level simulation of Nevil Clavain. Now, I’m no oil painting, but I’m reasonably certain that I don’t look like this. If you want to see me as I really am, however…’ The servitor gestured invitingly with one hand.
