dossier.’ ‘Yes. But I have the distinct impression you’d be less than eager to use it against me, wouldn’t you?’ ‘You’re useful to us.’ That’s not quite what I meant.‘ They continued their descent into Roc without speaking for several minutes. Only the occasional chirp or spoken warning from the console interrupted the silence. The ship was not at all enthusiastic about what was being asked of it, and kept offering suggestions as to what it would rather be doing. ‘I think we’re like insects to them,’ Vuilleumier said eventually. ‘They’ve come here to wipe us out, like pest-control specialists. They’re not going to bother killing one or two of us — they know it won’t make enough of a difference to matter. Even if we sting them, I’m not sure we’d provoke the response we were expecting. They’ll just keep on doing their work, slowly and methodically, knowing that it will be more than sufficient in the long run.’ ‘Then we’re safe now, is that it?’ ‘It’s just a theory, Thorn — it isn’t something I particularly want to bet my life on. But it’s clear that we don’t understand all that they’re doing. There has to be a higher purpose to their activity. There has to be a reason for it; it can’t simply be the annihilation of life for its own sake. Even if it was, even if they were nothing more than mindless killing machines, there’d be more efficient ways of doing it.’ ‘So what are you saying?’ ‘Only that we shouldn’t count on our understanding of events to be correct, any more than an insect understands about pest-control programmes.’ With that, she clenched her jaw and palmed a control. ‘All right. Hold on. This is where it gets a little bumpy.’ A pair of armoured eyelids snicked down over the windows, blocking the view. Almost immediately Thorn felt the ship rumble, the way a car did when it left a smooth road and hit dirt. He had weight, too — it was the tiniest pressure squeezing him back into his seat, but it would keep growing and growing. ‘Who are you exactly, Ana?’ ‘You know who I am. We’ve been over that.’ ‘Not to my entire satisfaction, we haven’t. There’s something funny about that ship, isn’t there? I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but the whole time I was aboard it, I had the feeling you and the other woman, Irina, were holding your breath. It was as if you couldn’t wait to get me off it.’ ‘You have urgent work to do on Resurgam. Irina didn’t agree with you coming aboard in the first place. She’d much rather you stayed on the planet, putting in the groundwork for the evacuation operation.’ ‘A few days won’t make much difference. No, that definitely wasn’t it. There was something else. You two were hiding something, or hoping I wouldn’t notice something. I just can’t work out exactly what it was.’ ‘You have to trust us, Thorn.’ ‘You make it difficult, Ana.’ ‘What else could we do? We showed you the ship, didn’t we? You saw that it was real. It has enough capacity to evacuate the planet. We even showed you the shuttle hangar.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it’s everything that you didn’t show me that makes me wonder.’ The rumbling had increased. The ship felt as if it was tobogganning down an ice-slope, hitting the occasional buried rock. The hull creaked and reshaped itself again and again, struggling to smooth out the transition. Thorn found himself excited and terrified at the same time. He had entered a planet’s atmosphere only once before in his life, when his parents had brought him as a child to Resurgam. He had been frozen and unconscious at the time, and had no more recollection of it than he did of his birth in Chasm City. ‘We didn’t show you everything because we don’t know that the whole of the ship is safe,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘We don’t know what sorts of traps Volyova’s crew left behind.’ ‘You didn’t even let me see it from outside, Ana.’ ‘It wasn’t convenient. Our approach—’ ‘Had nothing to do with it. There’s something about that ship that you can’t let me see, isn’t there?’ ‘Why are you asking me this now, Thorn?’ He smiled. ‘I thought the gravity of the situation would focus your attention.’ She said nothing. Presently, the ride became smoother. The airframe creaked and reshaped one last time. Vuilleumier waited another few minutes and then raised the armoured eyelids. Thorn blinked against the sudden intrusion of daylight. They were inside the atmosphere of Roc. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked. ‘Your weight has doubled since we were aboard the ship.’ ‘I’ll manage.’ He was fine provided he did not have to move around. ‘How deep did you take us?’ ‘Not far. Pressure’s about half an atmosphere. Wait…’ At that moment she frowned at something on one of her displays, tapping controls below it so that the image shifted through pastel-coloured bands. Thorn saw a simplified silhouette of the ship they were in, surrounded by pulsing, concentric circles. He suspected it was some form of radar, and saw a small smudge of light wink in and out of existence on the limit of the display. She tapped another control and the concentric circles tightened, bringing the smudge closer. Now it was there, now it was gone, now it was there again. ‘What’s that?’ Thorn asked. ‘I don’t know. Passive radar says there’s something following us, about thirty thousand klicks astern. I didn’t see anything on our approach. It’s small and it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, but I don’t like it.’ ‘Could it be a mistake, an error that the ship’s making?’ ‘I’m not sure. I suppose the radar might be confused, picking up a false return from our wake vortex. I could switch to a focused active sweep, but I really don’t want to provoke anything I don’t have to. I suggest we get away from here while we still can. I’m a firm believer in listening to warnings.’ Thorn tapped the console. ‘And how do I know that you didn’t arrange for that bogey to appear?’ She laughed the sudden, nervous laugh of a person caught completely unawares. ‘I didn’t, believe me.’ Thorn nodded, sensing that she was telling the truth — or at least lying very well indeed. ‘Perhaps not. But I still want you to steer us towards the impact site, Ana. I’m not leaving until I see what’s happening here.’ ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ She waited for him to answer, but Thorn said nothing, looking at her unflinchingly. ‘All right,’ Vuilleumier said finally. ‘We’ll get close enough that you can see things for yourself. But no closer than that. And if that other thing shows any signs of coming nearer, we’re out of here. Got that?’
