‘What about the engines?’ ‘Still functionally intact, as far as I can tell. But only the Captain has control of them.’ ‘Have you been talking with him?’ ‘I’m not sure talking is quite the word I’d use. Communicating, possibly… but even that might be stretching things.’ The elevator veered, switching between shafts. The shaft tubes were mostly transparent, but the elevator spent much of its time whisking between densely packed decks or boring through furlongs of solid hull material. Now and then, through the window, Khouri saw dank chambers zoom by. Mostly they were too large for her to see the other side in the weakly reflected light of the elevator. There were five chambers which were the largest of all, huge enough to hold cathedrals. She thought of the one Volyova had shown her during her first tour of Infinity , the one that held the forty horrors. There were fewer than forty of them now, but that was surely still enough to make a difference. Even, perhaps, against an enemy like the Inhibitors. Provided that the Captain could be persuaded. ‘Have you and him patched up your differences?’ Khouri asked. I think the fact that he didn’t kill us when he had the chance more or less answers that question.‘ ‘And he doesn’t blame you for what you did to him?’ For the first time there was a sign of annoyance from Volyova. ‘Did to him? Ana, what I “did to him” was an act of extreme mercy. I didn’t punish him at all. I merely… stated the facts and then administered the cure.’ ‘Which by some definitions was worse than the disease.’ Now Volyova shrugged. ‘He was going to die. I gave him a new lease on life.’ Khouri gasped as another chamber ghosted by, filled with fused metamorphic shapes. ‘If you call this living.’ ‘Word of advice.’ Volyova leant closer, lowering her voice. ‘There’s a very good chance he can hear this conversation. Just keep that in mind, will you? There’s a good girl.’ If anyone else had spoken to her like that they would have been nursing at least one interesting dislocation about two seconds later. But Khouri had long since learned to make allowances for Volyova. ‘Where is he? Still on the same level as before?’ ‘Depends what you mean by “him”. I suppose you could say his epicentre is still there, yes. But there’s really very little point in distinguishing between him and the ship nowadays.’ ‘Then he’s everywhere? All around us?’ ‘All-seeing. All-knowing.’ I don’t like this, Ilia.‘ ‘If it’s any consolation, I very much doubt that he does either.’ After many delays, reversals and diversions the elevator finally brought them to the bridge of Nostalgia for Infinity . To Khouri’s considerable relief a consultation with the Captain did not seem to be imminent. The bridge was much as she remembered it. The chamber was damaged and careworn, but most of the vandalism had been inflicted before the Captain changed. Khouri had even done some of it herself. Seeing the impact craters where her weapons discharges had fallen gave her a faint and mischievous sense of pride. She remembered the tense power-struggle that had taken place aboard the lighthugger when it was in orbit around the neutron star Hades, on the very edge of the present system. It had been touch and go at times, but because they had survived she had dared to believe that a greater victory had been won. But the arrival of the Inhibitor machines suggested otherwise. The battle, in all likelihood, had already been lost before the first shots were fired. But they had at least bought themselves a little time. Now they had to do something with it. Khouri settled into one of the seats facing the bridge’s projection sphere. It had been repaired since the mutiny and now showed a real-time display of the Resurgam system. There were eleven major planets, but the display also showed their moons and the larger asteroids and comets — all were of potential importance. Their precise orbital positions were indicated, along with vectors showing the motion, prograde or retrograde, of the body in question. Pale cones radiating from the lighthugger showed the extent of the ship’s instantaneous deep-sensor coverage, corrected for light-travel time. Volyova had strewn a handful of monitor drones on other orbits so that they could peer into blind spots and increase the interferometric baseline, but she used them cautiously. ‘Ready for a recent-history lesson?’ Volyova asked. ‘You know I am, Ilia. I just hope this little jaunt turns out to be worth it, because I’m still going to have to answer some tricky questions when I get back to Cuvier.’ ‘They may not seem so massively pressing when you’ve seen what I have to show you.’ She made the display zoom in, enlarging one of the moons spinning around the system’s second-largest gas giant. ‘This is where the Inhibitors have set up camp?’ Khouri asked. ‘Here and on two other worlds of comparable size. Their activities on each seem broadly the same.’ Now dark shapes fluttered into view around the moon. They swarmed and scattered like agitated crows, their numbers and shapes in constant flux. In an instant they settled on to the surface of the moon, linking together in purposeful formations. The playback was evidently accelerated — hours compressed into seconds, perhaps — for transformations blistered across the moon’s surface in a quick black inundation. Zoom-in showed a tendency for the structures to be formed of cubic subelements of widely differing sizes. Vast lasers pumped heat back into space as the transformations raged. Grotesque black machines the size of mountains clotted the landscape, ramping down the moon’s albedo until only infra-red could tease out significant patterns. ‘What are they doing?’ Khouri asked. I couldn’t tell at first.‘ One or two weeks had passed before what was taking place became clear. Dotted at regular intervals around the moon’s equator were volcanic apertures, squat gape-mouthed machines that extended a hundredth of the moon’s diameter into space. Without warning, they began to spew out rocky material in ballistic dust plumes. The matter was hot but not actually molten. It arced above the moon, falling into orbit. Another machine — Volyova had not noticed it until then — circled in the same orbit, processing the dust, shepherding, cooling and compactifying the plume. In its wake it left an organised ring system of processed and refined matter, gigatonnes of it in tidy lanes. Droves of smaller machines trailed behind like minnows, sucking in the pre-refined matter and subjecting it to even further purification. ‘What’s happening?’ ‘The machines seem to be dismantling the moon,’
