Redemption Ark

CHAPTER 14

Triumvir Ilia Volyova gazed into the abyss of the cache chamber, wondering if she was about to make the kind of dreadful mistake she had always feared would end her days.

Khouri’s voice buzzed in her helmet. ‘Ilia, I really think we should give this just a tiny bit more thought.’

‘Thank you.’ She checked the seals on her spacesuit again, and then flicked through her weapon status indicators.

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you mean it. Unfortunately I’ve already given it more than enough thought. If I gave it any more thought I might decide not to do it. Which, given the wider circumstances, would be even more suicidally dangerous and stupid than doing it.’

‘I can’t fault your logic, but I’ve a feeling the ship… I mean the Captain… really isn’t going to like this.’

‘No?’ Volyova considered that a far from remote possibility herself. Then perhaps he’ll decide to co-operate with us.‘

‘Or kill us. Have you considered that?’

‘Khouri?’

‘Yes, Ilia?’

‘Please shut up.’

They were floating inside an airlock that allowed entry into the chamber. It was a large lock, but there was still only just enough room for the two of them. It was not simply that their suits had been augmented with the bulky frames of thruster-packs. They also carried equipment, supplemental armour and a number of semi- autonomous weapons, clamped to the frames at strategic points.

‘All right; let’s just get it over with,’ Khouri said. ‘I’ve never liked this place, not from the first time you showed it to me. Nothing that’s happened since has made me like it any more.’

They powered out into the chamber, propelling themselves with staccato puffs of micro-gee thrust.

It was one of five similarly sized spaces in Nostalgia for Infinity’s interior: huge inclusions large enough to stow a fleet of passenger shuttles or several megatonnes of cargo, ready to be dropped down to a needy colony world. So much time had passed since the days when the ship had carried colonists that only scant traces of its former function remained, overlaid by centuries of adaptation and corruption. For years the ship had rarely carried more than a dozen inhabitants, free to wander its echoing interior like looters in an evacuated city. But beneath the accretions of time much remained more or less intact, even allowing for the changes that had come about since the Captain’s transformations.

The smooth sheer walls of the chamber reached away in all directions, vanishing into darkness and only fitfully illuminated by the roving spotlights of their suits. Volyova had not been able to restore the chamber’s main lighting system: that was one of the circuits the Captain now controlled, and he clearly did not like them entering this territory.

Gradually the wall receded. They were immersed in darkness now, and it was only the head-up display in Volyova’s helmet that gave her any indication of where to aim for or how fast she was moving.

‘It feels as if we’re in space,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s hard to believe we’re still inside the ship. Any sign of the weapons?’

‘We should be coming up on weapon seventeen in about fifteen seconds.’

On cue, the cache weapon loomed out of the darkness. It did not float free in the chamber, but was embraced by an elaborate arrangement of clamps and scaffolds, which were in turn connected to a complicated three-dimensional monorail system which plunged through the darkness, anchored to the chamber walls by enormous splayed pylons.

This was one of thirty-three weapons that remained from the original forty. Volyova and Khouri had destroyed one of them on the system’s edge after it went rogue, possessed by a splinter of the same software parasite that Khouri herself had carried aboard the ship. The other six weapons had been abandoned in space after the Hades episode. They were probably recoverable, but there was no guarantee they would work again, and by Volyova’s estimate they were considerably less potent than those that remained.

They fired their suit thrusters and came to a halt near the first weapon.

‘Weapon seventeen,’ Volyova said. ‘Ugly son of a svinoi, don’t you think? But I’ve had some success with this one — reached all the way down to its machine-language syntax layer.’

‘Meaning you can talk to it?’

‘Yes. Isn’t that just what I said?’

None of the cache weapons looked exactly alike, though they were all clearly the products of the same mentality. This one looked like a cross between a jet engine and a Victorian tunnelling machine: an axially symmetric sixty-metre-long cylinder faced with what could have been cutting teeth or turbine blades, but which were probably neither. The thing was sheathed in a dull, battered alloy that seemed either green or bronze, depending on the way their lights played across it. Cooling flanges and fins leant it a rakish art deco look.

‘If you can talk to it,’ Khouri said, ‘can’t we just tell it to leave the ship and then use it against the Inhibitors?’

‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ Volyova’s sarcasm could have etched holes in metal. The problem is that the Captain can control the weapons as well, and at the moment his commands will veto any I send, since his come in at root level.‘

‘Mm. And whose bright idea was that?’

‘Mine, now you come to mention it. Back when I wanted all the weapons to be controlled from the gunnery, it seemed quite a good idea.’

‘That’s the problem with good ideas. They can turn out to be a real fucking pain in the arse.’

‘So I’m learning. Now then.’ Volyova’s tone became hushed and businesslike. ‘I want you to follow me, and keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to check my control harness.’

‘Right behind you, Ilia.’

They orbited the weapon, steering their suits through the interstices of the monorail system.

The harness was a frame that Volyova had welded around the weapon, equipped with thrusters and control interfaces. She had achieved only very limited success in communicating with the weapons, and those that she had been most confident of controlling had been among those now lost. Once, she had attempted to interface all the weapons via a single controlling node: an implant-augmented human plugged into a gunnery seat. Though the concept had been sound, the gunnery had caused her no end of troubles. Indirectly, the whole mess they were in now could be traced back to those experiments.

‘Harness looks sound,’ Volyova said. ‘I think I’ll try to run through a low-level systems check.’

‘Wake the weapon up, you mean?’

‘No, no… just whisper a few sweet nothings to it, that’s all.’ She tapped commands into the thick bracelet encircling her spacesuited forearm, watching the diagnostic traces as they scrolled over her faceplate. ‘I’m going to be preoccupied while I do this, so it’s down to you to keep an eye out for any trouble. Understood?’

‘Understood. Um, Ilia?’

‘What.’

‘We have to make a decision on Thorn.’

Volyova did not like to be distracted, most especially not during an operation as dangerous as this. ‘Thorn?’

‘You heard what the man said. He wants to come aboard.’

‘And I said he can’t. It’s out of the question.’

‘Then I don’t think we’ll be able to count on his help, Ilia.’

‘He’ll help us. We’ll make the bastard help us.’

She heard Khouri sigh. ‘Ilia, he isn’t some piece of machinery we can poke or prod until we get a certain response. He doesn’t have a root level. He’s a thinking human being, fully capable of entertaining doubts and fears. He cares desperately about his cause and he won’t risk jeopardising it if he thinks we’re holding anything back from him. Now, if we were telling the truth, there’d be no good reason for refusing him