‘We should be coming up on weapon seventeen in about fifteen seconds.’ On cue, the cache weapon loomed out of the darkness. It did not float free in the chamber, but was embraced by an elaborate arrangement of clamps and scaffolds, which were in turn connected to a complicated three-dimensional monorail system which plunged through the darkness, anchored to the chamber walls by enormous splayed pylons. This was one of thirty-three weapons that remained from the original forty. Volyova and Khouri had destroyed one of them on the system’s edge after it went rogue, possessed by a splinter of the same software parasite that Khouri herself had carried aboard the ship. The other six weapons had been abandoned in space after the Hades episode. They were probably recoverable, but there was no guarantee they would work again, and by Volyova’s estimate they were considerably less potent than those that remained. They fired their suit thrusters and came to a halt near the first weapon. ‘Weapon seventeen,’ Volyova said. ‘Ugly son of a svinoi , don’t you think? But I’ve had some success with this one — reached all the way down to its machine-language syntax layer.’ ‘Meaning you can talk to it?’ ‘Yes. Isn’t that just what I said?’ None of the cache weapons looked exactly alike, though they were all clearly the products of the same mentality. This one looked like a cross between a jet engine and a Victorian tunnelling machine: an axially symmetric sixty-metre-long cylinder faced with what could have been cutting teeth or turbine blades, but which were probably neither. The thing was sheathed in a dull, battered alloy that seemed either green or bronze, depending on the way their lights played across it. Cooling flanges and fins leant it a rakish art deco look. ‘If you can talk to it,’ Khouri said, ‘can’t we just tell it to leave the ship and then use it against the Inhibitors?’ ‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ Volyova’s sarcasm could have etched holes in metal. The problem is that the Captain can control the weapons as well, and at the moment his commands will veto any I send, since his come in at root level.‘ ‘Mm. And whose bright idea was that?’ ‘Mine, now you come to mention it. Back when I wanted all the weapons to be controlled from the gunnery, it seemed quite a good idea.’ ‘That’s the problem with good ideas. They can turn out to be a real fucking pain in the arse.’ ‘So I’m learning. Now then.’ Volyova’s tone became hushed and businesslike. ‘I want you to follow me, and keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to check my control harness.’ ‘Right behind you, Ilia.’ They orbited the weapon, steering their suits through the interstices of the monorail system. The harness was a frame that Volyova had welded around the weapon, equipped with thrusters and control interfaces. She had achieved only very limited success in communicating with the weapons, and those that she had been most confident of controlling had been among those now lost. Once, she had attempted to interface all the weapons via a single controlling node: an implant- augmented human plugged into a gunnery seat. Though the concept had been sound, the gunnery had caused her no end of troubles. Indirectly, the whole mess they were in now could be traced back to those experiments. ‘Harness looks sound,’ Volyova said. ‘I think I’ll try to run through a low-level systems check.’ ‘Wake the weapon up, you mean?’ ‘No, no… just whisper a few sweet nothings to it, that’s all.’ She tapped commands into the thick bracelet encircling her spacesuited forearm, watching the diagnostic traces as they scrolled over her faceplate. ‘I’m going to be preoccupied while I do this, so it’s down to you to keep an eye out for any trouble. Understood?’ ‘Understood. Um, Ilia?’ ‘What.’ ‘We have to make a decision on Thorn.’ Volyova did not like to be distracted, most especially not during an operation as dangerous as this. ‘Thorn?’ ‘You heard what the man said. He wants to come aboard.’ ‘And I said he can’t. It’s out of the question.’ ‘Then I don’t think we’ll be able to count on his help, Ilia.’ ‘He’ll help us. We’ll make the bastard help us.’ She heard Khouri sigh. ‘Ilia, he isn’t some piece of machinery we can poke or prod until we get a certain response. He doesn’t have a root level . He’s a thinking human being, fully capable of entertaining doubts and fears. He cares desperately about his cause and he won’t risk jeopardising it if he thinks we’re holding anything back from him. Now, if we were telling the truth, there’d be no good reason for refusing him the visit he asked for. He knows we have a means to reach the ship, after all. It’s only reasonable that he’d want to see the Promised Land he’s leading his people into, and the reason why Resurgam has to be evacuated.’ Volyova was through the first layer of weapons protocols, burrowing through her own software shell into the machine’s native operating system. So far nothing she had done had incurred any hostile response from either the weapon or the ship. She bit her tongue. It all got trickier from hereon in. ‘I don’t think it’s in the least bit reasonable,’ Volyova replied. ‘Then you don’t understand human nature. Look, trust me on this. He has to see the ship or he won’t work with us.’ ‘If he saw this ship, Khouri, he’d do what any sane person would do under the same circumstances: run a mile.’ ‘But if we kept him away from the worst parts, the areas which have undergone the most severe transformations, I think he might still help us.’ Volyova sighed, while keeping her attention on the work at hand. She had the horrible, overfamiliar feeling that Khouri had already given this matter some consideration — enough to deflect her obvious objections. ‘He’d still suspect something,’ she countered. ‘Not if we played our cards right. We could disguise the transformations in a small area of the ship and then keep him to that. Just enough so that we can appear to give him a guided tour, without seeming to be holding anything back.’ ‘And the Inhibitors?’ ‘He has to know about them eventually — everyone will. So what’s the problem with Thorn finding out now rather than later?’ ‘He’ll ask too many questions. Before long he’ll put two and two together and figure out who he’s working for.’ ‘Ilia, you know we have to be more open with him…’
