his abdomen. A few moments later he felt a series of visceral tremors as the shuttle latched itself home.She was back.He turned his attention inwards, becoming acutely and overwhelmingly aware of what was going on inside him. His awareness of the external universe — everything beyond his hull — stepped down a level of precedence. He descended through scale, focusing first on a district of himself, then on the arterial tangle of corridors and service tubes that wormed through that district. Ilia Volyova was a single corpuscular presence moving down one corridor. There were other living things inside him, as there were inside any living thing. Even cells contained organisms that had once been independent. He had the rats: scurrying little presences. But they were only dimly sentient, and ultimately they moved to his will, incapable of surprising or amusing him. The machines were even duller. Volyova, by contrast, was an invading presence, a foreign cell that he could kill but never control.Now she was speaking to him. He heard her sounds, picking them up from the vibrations she caused in the corridor material.‘Captain?’ Ilia Volyova asked. ‘It’s me. I’m back from Resurgam.’He answered her through the fabric of the ship, his voice barely a whisper to himself. ‘I’m glad to see you again, Ilia. I’ve been a little lonely. How was it down on the planet?’‘Worrying,’ she said.‘Worrying, Ilia?’‘Things are moving to a head. Khouri thinks she can hold it together long enough to get most of them off the surface, but I’m not convinced.’‘And Thorn?’ the Captain asked delicately. He was very glad that Volyova appeared more concerned about what was going on down on Resurgam than the other matter. Perhaps she had not noticed the incoming laser signal at all yet.‘Thorn wants to be the saviour of the people; the man who leads them to the Promised Land.’‘You seem to think more direct action is appropriate.’‘Have you studied the object lately, Captain?’Of course he had. He still had morbid curiosity, if nothing else. He had watched the Inhibitors dismantle the gas giant with ridiculous ease, spinning it apart like a child’s toy. He had seen the dense shadows of new machines coming into existence in the nebula of liberated matter, components as vast as worlds themselves. Embedded in the glowing skein of the nebula, they resembled tentative, half-formed embryos. Clearly the machines would soon assemble into something even larger. It was, perhaps, possible to guess what it would look like. The largest component was a trumpet-shaped maw, two thousand kilometres wide and six thousand kilometres deep. The other shapes, the Captain judged, would plug into the back of this gigantic blunderbuss.It was a single machine, nothing like the extended ring-shaped structures that the Inhibitors had thrown around the gas giant. A single machine that could maim a star, or so Volyova believed. Captain John Brannigan almost thought it would be worth staying alive to see what the machine would do. ‘I’ve studied it,’ he told Volyova.‘It’s nearly finished, I think. A matter of months, perhaps, maybe less, and it will be ready. That’s why we can’t take any chances.’‘You mean the cache?’He sensed her trepidation. ‘You told me you would consider letting me use it, Captain. Is that still the case?’He let her sweat before answering. She really did not appear to know about the laser signal. He was certain it would have been the first thing on her mind had she noticed it.He asked, ‘Isn’t there some risk in using the cache, Ilia, when we have come so far without being attacked?’‘There’s even more risk in leaving it too late.’‘I imagine Khouri and Thorn were less than enthusiastic about hitting back now if the exodus is proceeding according to plan.’‘They’ve moved barely two thousand people off the surface, Captain — one per cent of the total. It’s no more than a gesture. Yes, things will move more quickly once the government is handling the operation. But there will be a great deal more civil unrest, too. That’s why we have to consider a pre-emptive strike against the Inhibitors.’‘We would surely draw their fire,’ he pointed out. ‘Their weapons would destroy me.’‘We have the cache.’‘It has no defensive value, Ilia.’‘Well, I’ve thought about that,’ she said testily. ‘We’ll deploy the weapons at a distance of several light-hours from this ship. They can move themselves into position before we activate them, just like they did against the Hades artefact.’There was no need to remind her that the attack against the Hades artefact had gone less than swimmingly. But, in fairness to Volyova, it was not the weapons themselves that had let her down.He groped for another token objection. He must not appear too willing, or she would begin to have suspicions. ‘What if they were traced back to us… to me?’‘By then we’ll have inflicted a decisive blow. If there is a response, we’ll worry about it then.’‘And the weapons that you had in mind… ?’‘Details, Captain, details. You can leave that part to me. All you have to do is assign control of them to me.’‘All thirty-three weapons?’‘No… that won’t be necessary. Just the ones I’ve earmarked for use. I don’t plan to throw everything against the Inhibitors. As you kindly reminded me, we may need some weapons later, to deal with any reprisal.’‘You’ve thought all this through, haven’t you?’‘Let’s just say there have always been contingency plans,’ she told him. Then her tone of voice changed expectantly. ‘Captain, one final thing.’He hesitated before replying. Here, perhaps, it came. She was going to ask him about the laser signal spraying repeatedly against his hull, the signal that he had been very unwilling to bring to her attention.‘Go on, Ilia,’ he said, heavy-hearted.‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those cigarettes, have you?’CHAPTER 30
She toured the cache chamber, riding through it like a queen inspecting her troops. Thirty-three weapons were present, no two of them alike. She had spent much of her adult life studying them, together with the seven others that were now lost or destroyed. And yet in all that
