A sympathetic smile creased Clavain’s aged face. ‘Quite a lot, I fear. You have something that my counterpart wants very badly, you see.’ The servitor knew its way around the ship. Clavain led them through a labyrinth of corridors and shafts, ramps and ducts, chambers and antechambers, traversing many districts of which Khouri had only sketchy knowledge. There were regions of the ship that had not been visited for decades of worldtime, places into which even Ilia had shown a marked reluctance to stray. The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house. And yet now it was subtly different. It was entirely possible that the ship still retained all its old hauntings, all its places of menace. Now, however, there was a single encompassing spirit, a sentient presence that permeated every cubic inch of the vessel and could not be meaningfully localised to any specific point within the ship. Wherever they walked, they were surrounded by the Captain. He sensed them and they sensed him, even if it was only a tingling of the neck hairs, a keen sense of being scrutinised. It made the entire ship seem both more and less threatening than it had before. It all depended on whose side the Captain was on. Khouri didn’t know. She didn’t even think Ilia had ever been entirely sure. Gradually, Khouri began to recognise a district. It was one of the regions of the ship that had changed only slightly since the Captain’s transformation. The walls were the sepia of old manuscripts, the corridors pervaded by a cloisterlike gloom relieved only by ochre lights flickering within sconces, like candles. Clavain was leading them to the medical bay. The room that he led them into was low ceilinged and windowless. Medical servitors were crouched hunks of machinery backed well into the corners, as if they were unlikely to be needed. A single bed was positioned near the room’s centre, attended by a small huddle of squat monitoring devices. A woman was lying on her back in the bed, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes shut. Biomedical traces rippled above her like aurorae. Khouri stepped closer to the bed. It was Volyova; there was no doubt about that. But she looked like a version of her friend who had been subjected to some appalling experiment in accelerated ageing, something involving drugs to suck the flesh back to the bone and more drugs to reduce the skin to the merest glaze. She looked astonishingly delicate, as if liable to splinter into dust at any moment. It was not the first time Khouri had seen Volyova here, in the medical bay. There had been the time after the gunfight on the surface of Resurgam, when they were capturing Sylveste. Volyova had been injured then, but there had never been any question of her dying. Now it took close examination to tell that she was not already dead. Volyova looked desiccated. Khouri turned to the beta-level, horrified. ‘What happened?’ ‘I still don’t really know. Before she put me to sleep there was nothing the matter with her. Then I came back around and found myself here, in this room. She was in the bed. The machines had stabilised her, but that was about the best they could do. In the long term, she was still dying.’ Clavain nodded at the displays looming above Volyova. ‘I’ve seen these kinds of injuries before, during wartime. She breathed vacuum without any kind of protection against internal moisture loss. Decompression must have been rapid, but not quite quick enough to kill her instantly. Most of the damage is in her lungs — scarring of the alveoli, where ice crystals formed. She’s blind in both eyes, and there is some damage to brain function. I don’t think it’s cognitive. There’s tracheal damage as well, which makes it difficult for her to speak.’ ‘She’s an Ultra,’ Thorn said with a touch of desperation. ‘Ultras don’t die just because they swallow a little vacuum.’ ‘She isn’t much like the other Ultras I’ve met,’ Clavain said.‘ There were no implants in her. If there had been, she might have walked it off. At the very least, the medichines could have buffered her brain. But she had none. I understand she was repulsed by the idea of anything invading her.’ Khouri looked at the beta-level. ‘What have you done, Clavain?’ ‘What it took. It was requested that I do what I could. The obvious thing was to inject a dose of medichines.’ ‘Wait.’ Khouri raised a hand. ‘Who requested what?’ Clavain scratched his beard. ‘I’m not sure. I just felt an obligation to do it. You have to understand that I’m just software. I wouldn’t claim otherwise. It’s entirely possible that something booted me up and intervened in my execution, forcing me to act in a certain manner.’ Khouri and Thorn exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing, Khouri knew. The only agency that could have switched Clavain back on and made him help Volyova was the Captain. Khouri felt cold, intensely aware that she was being observed. ‘Clavain,’ she said. ‘Listen to me. I don’t know what you are, really. But you have to understand: she would sooner have died than have you do what you’ve just done.’ ‘I know,’ Clavain said, extending his palms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘But I had to do it. It’s what I would have done had I been here.’ ‘Ignored her deepest wish, is that what you mean?’ ‘Yes, if you want to put it like that. Because someone once did the same for me. I was in the same position as her, you see. Injured — dying, in fact. I’d been wounded, but I definitely didn’t want any stinking machines in my skull. I’d have rather died than that. But someone put them in there anyway. And now I’m grateful. She gave me four hundred years of life I wouldn’t have had any other way.’ Khouri looked at the bed, at the woman lying in it, and then back to the man who had, if not saved her life, at the very least postponed her moment of death. ‘Clavain…’ she said. ‘Who the hell are you?’ ‘Clavain is a Conjoiner,’ said a voice as thin as smoke. ‘You should listen to him very carefully, because he means what he says.’ Volyova had spoken, yet there had been no movement from the figure on the bed. The only indication that she was now conscious, which had not been the case when they arrived, was a shift in the biomedical traces hovering above her. Khouri wrenched her helmet off. Clavain’s apparition vanished, replaced by the skeletal machine. She placed the helmet on the floor and knelt by the bed. ‘Ilia?’ ‘Yes, it’s me.’ The voice was like sandpaper. Khouri observed the tiniest movement of Volyova’s lips as she formed the words, but the sound came from above her. ‘What happened?’ ‘There was an incident.’ ‘We saw the damage to the hull when we arrived. Is…’ ‘Yes. It was my fault, really. Like everything. Always my fault. Always my damned fault .’ Khouri glanced back at Thorn. ‘Your fault?’ ‘I was tricked.’ The lips parted in what might almost have been a smile. ‘By the Captain. I thought he had finally come around to my way of thinking. That we should
