time she had come to no more than a passing familiarity with most of the weapons. She had tested very few of them in any meaningful sense. Indeed, those she had known most about were the ones that were now lost. Some of the remaining weapons, she was certain, could not even be tested without wasting the one opportunity that existed to use them. But they were not all like that. The tricky part was distinguishing amongst the subclasses of cache weapon, cataloguing them according to their range, destructive capability and the number of times they could be used. Though she had always concealed her ignorance from her colleagues, Volyova had no more than the sketchiest idea about what at least half of her weapons were capable of doing. But she had worked scrupulously hard to gain even that inadequate understanding. Based on what she had learned in her years of study, she had come to a decision as to which weapons would be deployed against the Inhibitor machinery. She would release eight of the weapons, retaining twenty-five aboard Nostalgia for Infinity . They were low-mass weapons, so they could be deployed across the system quickly and discreetly. Her studies had also suggested that the eight were weapons with sufficient range to strike the Inhibitor site, but there was a lot of guesswork involved in her calculations. Volyova hated guesswork. She was even less sure that they would be able to do enough damage to make a difference to the Inhibitors’ work. But she was certain of one thing: they would get noticed. If the human activity in the system had so far been on the buzzing-fly level — irritating without being actively dangerous — she was about to notch it up to a full-scale mosquito attack. Swat this, you bastards , she thought. She passed each weapon amongst the eight, slowing down her propulsion pack long enough to make sure nothing had changed since her last inspection. Nothing had. The weapons hung in their armoured cradles precisely as she had left them. They looked just as foreboding and sinister, but they had not done anything unexpected. These are the eight I’ll need, Captain,‘ she said. ’Just the eight?‘ ‘They’ll do for now. Mustn’t put all our chicks in one egg, or whatever the metaphor is.’ ‘I’m sure there’s something suitable.’ ‘When I say the word, I’ll need you to deploy each weapon one at a time. You can do that, can’t you?’ ‘When you say “deploy”, Ilia… ?’ ‘Just move them outside the ship. Outside you, I mean,’ she corrected herself, having noticed that the Captain now tended to refer to himself and the ship as the same entity. She did not want to do anything, no matter how slight, that might interfere with his sudden spirit of co-operation. ‘Just to the outside,’ she continued. ‘Then, when all eight weapons are outside, we’ll run another systems check. We’ll keep you between them and the Inhibitors, just to be on the safe side. I don’t have the feeling that we’re being monitored, but it makes sense to play safe.’ ‘I couldn’t agree more, Ilia.’ ‘Right then. We’ll start with good old weapon seventeen, shall we?’ ‘Weapon seventeen it is, Ilia.’ The motion was sudden and startling. It was such a long time since any of the cache weapons had moved in any way that she had forgotten what it was like. The cradle that held the weapon began to glide along its support rail so that the whole obelisk-sized mass of the weapon slid smoothly and silently aside. Everything in the cache chamber took place in silence, of course, but nonetheless it seemed to Volyova that there was a more profound silence here, a silence that was judicial, like the silence of a place of execution. The network of rails allowed the cache weapons to reach the much smaller chamber immediately below the main one. The smaller chamber was just large enough to accommodate the largest weapon, and had been rebuilt extensively for just this purpose. She watched weapon seventeen vanish into the chamber, remembering her encounter with the weapon’s controlling subpersona ‘Seventeen’, the one that had shown worrying signs of free will and a marked lack of respect for her authority. She did not doubt that something like Seventeen existed in all the weapons. There was no sense worrying about it now; all she could do was hope that the Captain and the weapons continued to do what she asked of them. No sense worrying about it, no. But she did have a dreadful sense of foreboding all the same. The connecting door closed. Volyova switched her suit’s monitor feed to tap into the external cameras and sensors so that she could observe the weapon as it emerged beyond the hull. It would take a few minutes to get there, but she was in no immediate hurry. And yet something very unexpected was happening. Her suit, via the monitors on the hull, was telling her that the ship was being bombarded by optical laser light. Volyova’s first reaction was a crushing sense of failure. Finally, for whatever reason, she had alerted the Inhibitors and drawn their attention. It was as if just intending to deploy the weapons had been sufficient. The wash of laser light must be from their long-range sensor sweeps. They were noticing the ship, sniffing it out of the darkness. But then she realised that the emissions were not coming from the right part of the sky. They were coming from interstellar space. ‘Ilia…?’ the Captain asked. Ts something wrong? Shall I abort the deployment?‘ ‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘Knew about what?’ ‘That someone was firing laser light at us. Communications frequency.’ ‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I just…’ ‘You didn’t want me to know about it. And I didn’t until I tapped into those hull sensors to watch the weapon emerging.’ ‘What emissions… ah, wait.’ His great deific voice hesitated. ‘Wait. I see what you mean now. I didn’t notice them — there was too much else going on. You’re more attuned to such concerns than me, Ilia… I am very self-focused these days. If you wait, I will backtrack and determine when the emissions began… I have the sensor data, you know…’ She didn’t believe him, but knew there was no way to prove otherwise. He controlled everything, and it was only through a slip of his concentration that she had learned about the laser light at all. ‘Well. How long?’ ‘No more than a day, Ilia. A day or so…’ ‘What does “or so” mean, you lying bastard?’ ‘I mean… a matter of days. No more than a week… at a conservative estimate.’ ‘Svinoi . Lying pig bastard. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ I assumed you were already aware of the signal, Ilia. Didn’t you pick it up as your shuttle approached me?‘ Ah, she thought. So it was a signal now, not just a meaningless blast of laser light. What else did he know? ‘Of course I didn’t. I was asleep until the very last moment, and the shuttle wasn’t programmed to watch for anything other than in-system transmissions. Interstellar communications are blue-shifted out of the usual frequency bands. What was the blue shift, Captain?‘ ‘Modest, Ilia… ten per cent of light. Just enough to
