use the cache weapons against the Inhibitors.’ Khouri could almost imagine what must have happened. ‘How did he trick…’ ‘I deployed eight of the weapons beyond the hull. There was a malfunction. I thought it was genuine, but it was really just a way to get me outside the ship.’ Khouri lowered her voice. It was an absurd gesture — there was nothing that could be hidden from the Captain now — but she could not help it. ‘He wanted to kill you?’ ‘No,’ Volyova said, hissing her answer. ‘He wanted to kill himself, not me. But I had to be there to see it. Had to be a witness.’ ‘Why?’ ‘To understand his remorse. To understand that it was deliberate, and not an accident.’ Thorn joined them. He too had removed his helmet, tucking it respectfully under one arm. ‘But the ship’s still here. What happened, Ilia?’ Again that weary half-smile. ‘I drove my shuttle into the beam. I thought it might make him stop.’ ‘Seems as if it did.’ ‘I didn’t expect to survive. But my aim wasn’t quite right.’ The servitor strode towards the bed. Unclothed of Clavain’s image, its motions appeared automatically more machinelike and threatening. ‘They know that I injected medichines into your head,’ it said, its voice no longer humanoid. ‘And now they know that you know.’ ‘Clavain… the beta-level… had no choice,’ Volyova said before either of her two human visitors could speak. ‘Without the medichines I’d be dead now. Do they horrify me? Yes. Utterly, to the absolute core of my being. I am racked with revulsion at the thought of them crawling inside my skull like so many spiders and snakes. At the same time, I accept the necessity of them. They are the tools I have always worked with, after all. And I am fully aware that they cannot work miracles. Too much damage has been done. I am not amenable to repair.’ ‘We’ll find a way, Ilia,’ Khouri said. ‘Your injuries can’t be…’ Volyova’s whisper of a voice cut her off. ‘Forget me. I don’t matter. Only the weapons matter now. They are my children, spiteful and wicked as they may be, and I won’t have them falling into the wrong hands.’ ‘Now we seem to be getting to the crux of things,’ Thorn said. ‘Clavain — the real Clavain — wants the weapons,’ Volyova said. ‘By his own estimation he has the means to take them from us.’ Her voice grew louder. ‘Isn’t that so, Clavain?’ The servitor bowed. ‘I’d much rather negotiate their handover, Ilia, as you know, especially now that I’ve invested time in your welfare. But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.’ ‘Why are you telling us that?’ Khouri said. ‘It’s in his — our — best interests,’ the servitor said amiably. ‘I’d far rather convince you to give up the weapons without a fight. At the very least we’d avoid any risk of damaging the damned things.’ ‘You don’t seem like a monster to me,’ Khouri said. ‘I’m not,’ the servitor replied. ‘And nor is my counterpart. He’ll always choose the path of least bloodshed. But if some bloodshed is required… well, my counterpart won’t flinch from a little surgical butchery. Especially not now.’ The servitor said the last with such emphasis that Thorn asked, ‘Why not now?’ ‘Because of what he has had to do to get this far.’ The servitor paused, its openwork head scanning each of them. ‘He betrayed everything that he had believed in for four hundred years. That wasn’t done lightly, I assure you. He lied to his friends and left behind his loved ones, knowing that it was the only way to get this done. And lately he took a terrible decision. He destroyed something that he loved very much. It cost him a great deal of pain. In that sense, I am not an accurate copy of the real Clavain. My personality was shaped before that dreadful act.’ Volyova’s voice rasped out again, instantly commanding their attention. ‘The real Clavain isn’t like you?’ ‘I’m a sketch taken before a terrible darkness fell across his life, Ilia. I can only speculate on the extent to which we differ. But I would not like to trifle with my counterpart in his current state of mind.’ ‘Psychological warfare,’ she hissed. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘That is why you’ve come, isn’t it? Not to help us negotiate a sensible settlement, but to put the fear of God into us.’ The servitor bowed again, with something of the same mechanical modesty. ‘If I were to achieve that,’ Clavain said, ‘I would consider my work well done. The path of least bloodshed, remember?’ ‘You want bloodshed,’ Ilia Volyova said, ‘you’ve come to the right woman.’ Shortly afterwards she fell into a different state of consciousness, something perhaps not too far from sleep. The displays relaxed, sine waves and Fourier harmonic histograms reflecting a seismic shift in major neural activity. Her visitors observed her in that state for several minutes, wondering to themselves whether she was dreaming or scheming, or if the distinction even mattered. The next six hours went by quickly. Thorn and Khouri returned to the transfer shuttle and conferred with their immediate underlings. They were gratified to hear that no crises had occurred while they were visiting Volyova. There had been some minor flare-ups, but for the most part the two thousand passengers had accepted the cover story about a problem with the atmospheric compatibility of the two ships. Now the passengers were assured that the technical difficulty had been resolved — it had been a sensor malfunction all along — and that disembarkation could commence in the orderly fashion that had already been agreed. A large holding area had been prepared a few hundred metres from the parking bay, just into the spun part of the ship. It was a region that was relatively unafflicted by the Captain’s plague transformations, and Khouri and Volyova had worked hard to disguise the most overtly disturbing parts of the area that the plague had affected. The holding area was cold and dank, and though they had done their best to make it comfortable, it still had the atmosphere of a crypt. Interior partitions had been put up to divide the space into smaller chambers which were each capable of containing a hundred passengers, and those chambers were in turn equipped with partitions to allow some privacy for family units. The holding area could accommodate ten thousand passengers — four further arrivals of the transfer shuttle — but by the time the sixth flight arrived, they would have to begin dispersing passengers into the main body of the ship. And then, inevitably, the truth would dawn: that they had been brought not only aboard a ship which was carrying the feared Melding Plague, but aboard a ship which had been subsumed and reshaped by its own Captain; that they were, in
