Breathing with the mask in place took some effort. He had to work hard to draw air through the dust-collector built into the mask’s snout. Two-thirds of the oxygen which entered his lungs would now come from Resurgam’s atmosphere, while the remaining third came from a pressurised canister slung beneath the proboscis. It was doped with enough carbon dioxide to trigger the body’s breathing response.
He had barely felt the aircraft touch down—had not even been certain that they had arrived somewhere until the door was opened. Now the guard undid his restraints and shoved him peremptorily towards the coldness and the wind of the exit.
Was it dark or daytime out there?
He had no idea; no way of telling.
“Where are we?” he called. The mask muffled his voice and made him sound moronic.
“You imagine it makes any difference?” The guard’s voice was not distorted. He was breathing the air directly, Sylveste realised. “Even if the city was within walking distance—which it isn’t—you wouldn’t get beyond spitting distance of where you are now without killing yourself.”
“I want to speak to my wife.”
The guard grabbed his arm and pivoted it back to the point where Sylveste felt it was going to be dislocated. He stumbled, but the guard refused to let him fall. “You’ll speak to her when we’re good and ready. Told you she was fine, didn’t I? You don’t trust me or something?”
“I just watched you kill my new father-in-law. What do you think?”
“I think you should keep your head down.”
A hand ducked him, forcing him into shelter. The wind ceased stinging his ears; voices suddenly had an echoey quality .Behind, a pressure door hove shut and amputated the sound of the storm. Though blind, he sensed that Pascale was nowhere near him, and hoped that that meant she had been escorted separately, and that his captors were not lying when they said she was safe.
Someone snatched the mask away.
What followed was a forced march down narrow, shoulder-bruising corridors which stank of brutal hygiene. His escort helped him descend rattling stairwells and ride two lurching elevators down an unguessable distance. They exited into an echoey subterranean space, the air metallic and breezy .They walked past a gusting air duct; from the surface came the shrill proclamation of the wind. Intermittently he heard voices, and though he thought he recognised intonations, he could not begin to put names to the sounds.
Finally there was a room.
He was sure it was painted white. He could almost sense the blank cubic pressure of its walls.
Someone stepped next to him; cabbage breath. He felt fingers touch his face, delicately. They were sheathed in something textureless, reeking faintly of disinfectant. The fingers touched his eyes, tapping their facets with something hard.
Each tap was a small nova of pain behind his temples.
“Fix them when I say,” said a voice which, beyond any doubt, he knew. It was female, but with a throaty quality which rendered it almost masculine. “For now keep him blind.”
Footsteps left; the speaker must have dismissed the escort with a silent gesture. Alone now, with no reference points, Sylveste felt his balance go. No matter how he moved, the grey matrix remained in front of him. His legs felt weak, but there was nothing with which to support himself. For all he knew he was standing on a plank of wood ten storeys above the floor.
He began to topple, arms flailing pathetically.
Something snatched at his forearm and stabilised him. He heard a pulsing rasp, like someone sawing through timber.
His breathing.
He heard a moist click, and knew that she had opened her mouth to speak again. Now she must be smiling, contemplating.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“You hopeless bastard. You don’t even remember my voice.”
Her fingers gouged his forearm, expertly locating nerves and pinching them in the appropriate place. He let out a doglike yelp; it was the first stimulus which had made him forget the pain in his eyes. “I swear,” Sylveste said, “I don’t know you.”
She released the pressure. As his nerves and tendons sprang back into place there was more pain, subsiding into a numb discomfort which gloved his entire arm and shoulder.
“You should,” said the wrecked voice. “I’m someone you think died a long time ago, Dan, buried under a landslide.”
“Sluka,” he said.
Volyova was on her way to the Captain when the disturbing thing happened. Now that the rest of the crew were sleeping out the journey to Resurgam—including Khouri—Volyova had again fallen into her old habit of conversing with the slightly warmed Captain; elevating his brain temperature by the fraction of a kelvin necessary to allow him some kind of consciousness, however fragmentary. This had been her routine now for the better part of two years, and would continue for another two and half, until the ship arrived around Resurgam and the others came out of reefersleep. Of course, the conversations were infrequent—she could not risk warming the Captain too often, for with each warming the plague claimed a little more of both him and the surrounding matter—but they were little oases of human interaction in weeks otherwise filled only with the contemplating of viruses, weapons and the general matter of the ship’s ailing fabric.
So, in her own way, Volyova looked forward to their talks, even though the Captain seldom showed much sign of remembering what they had talked about previously. Worse, a certain frostiness had entered their relationship of late. Partly this was due to Sajaki’s lack of fortune in locating Sylveste in the Yellowstone system, condemning the Captain to another half-decade of torment at the very least—or longer, if Sylveste could not be found on Resurgam either, which struck Volyova as an at least theoretical possibility. What made matters difficult was that the Captain kept asking her how the search for Sylveste was going, and she kept having to break the news to him that it was not going as auspiciously as one might wish. The Captain would become sullen at that point—she could hardly blame him for that—and the tone of the conversation would darken, often to the point where the Captain became completely incommunicative. When, days or weeks later, she tried to speak to him again, he would have forgotten what she had told him before and they would go through the same process again, except this time Volyova would do her best to break the bad news more gently, or put some kind of optimistic spin on it.
The other thing that was casting a shadow over their talks stemmed from Volyova’s side, which was her nagging insistence on probing the Captain about the visit he and Sajaki had made to the Pattern Jugglers. It was only in the last few years that Volyova had become interested in the details of the visit, for it now seemed to her that Sajaki’s change of personality had occurred around the same time. Of course, having one’s mind altered was the whole point of visiting the Jugglers—but why would Sajaki have allowed the aliens to change him for the worse? He was crueller than he had been before; despotic and single-minded where once he had been a firm but fair leader; a valued member of the Triumvirate. Now she hardly trusted him at all. And yet—instead of casting some light on the change—the Captain deflected her questions aggressively, and left her even more obsessed with what had happened.
She was on her way to speak to him, then, with these things foremost in her mind; wondering how she would deal with the inevitable question about Sylveste, and what new approach she would take when probing the Captain about the Jugglers. And, because she was taking her usual route, she was obliged to pass through the cache-chamber.
And she saw that one of the weapons—one of the most feared, as it happened—appeared to have moved.
“There have been developments,” said the Mademoiselle. “Both fortuitous and otherwise.”
It was a surprise to be conscious at all; let alone to hear the Mademoiselle. The very last thing Khouri remembered was climbing into a reefersleep casket with Volyova looking down on her, tapping commands into her bracelet. Now she could neither see nor feel anything, not even a sense of cold, yet sh
e knew she was still—somehow—in the reefer, and still by some measure asleep.
“Where—when—am I?”
“Still aboard the ship; about halfway to Resurgam. We are moving very quickly now; less than one per cent slower than light. I have raised your neural temperature slightly—enough for conversation.”
“Won’t Volyova notice?”
“Her noticing may be the least of our problems, I am afraid. Do you remember the cache, how I found something hiding in the gunnery architecture?” The Mademoiselle did not wait for an answer. “The message that the bloodhounds brought back was not easy to decipher. Over the subsequent three years… their auguries have become clearer, now.”
Khouri had a vision of the Mademoiselle disembowelling her dogs, studying the topology of the outspilled entrails.
“So is the stowaway real?”
“Oh yes. And hostile too, though we’ll come to that in a moment.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“No,” she said, though the answer was guarded. “But what I have learnt is almost as interesting.”
What the Mademoiselle had to say related to the gunnery’s topology. The gunnery was an enormously complex assemblage of computers: layers accreted over decades of shiptime. It was doubtful that any one mind—even Volyova’s—could have grasped more than the very basics of that topology; how the various layers interpenetrated each other and folded back on themselves. But in one sense the gunnery was easy to visualise, since it was almost totally disconnected from the rest of the ship, which was why most of the higher cache-weapon functions could only be accessed by someone physically present in the gunnery seat. The gunnery was surrounded by a firewall, and data could only pass from the rest of the ship to the gunnery. The reasons for this were tactical; since the gunnery’s weapons (and not just those in the cache) would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship’s dataspace by a one-way trapdoor. The door only allowed data to enter the gunnery from the rest of the ship; nothing within the gunnery could traverse it.
“Now,” said the Mademoiselle, “given that we have discovered something in the gunnery, I invite you to draw the logical conclusion.”
“Whatever it was got there by mistake.”
“Yes.” The Mademoiselle sounded pleased, almost as if the thought had not struck her. “I suppose we must consider the possibility that the entity found its way into the gunnery via the weapons, but I think it is far more likely it entered via the trapdoor. I also happen to know when the door was last traversed.”
“How long ago?”
“Eighteen years ago.” Before Khouri could interject, the Mademoiselle added, “Shiptime, that is. In worldtime, I estimate between eighty and ninety years prior to your recruitment.”
“Sylveste,” Khouri said, wonderingly. “Sajaki said that the reason Sylveste went missing was because they brought him aboard this ship, to fix Captain Brannigan. Do the dates tie together?”
“Conclusively, I would say. This would have been 2460—twenty or so years after Sylveste returned from the Shrouders.”
“And you think he brought—whatever it is—with him?”
“All we know is what Sajaki told us, which is that Sylveste accepted the Calvin simulation in order to heal Captain Brannigan. At some point during the operation Sylveste must have been connected to the ship’s dataspace. Perhaps that was how the stowaway gained access. Thereafter—very soon after, I suspect—it entered the gunnery through the one-way door.”
“And it’s been there ever since?”
“So it appears.”
This seemed to be a pattern: whenever Khouri felt she had things ordered in her head, or at least approximately so, some new fact would dash her scheme to shreds. She felt like a mediaeval astronomer, creating ever more intricate clockwork cosmologies to incorporate every new observational oddity. Now, in some way she could not begin to guess, Sylveste was related to the gunnery. At least she could take comfort in her ignorance. Even the Mademoiselle was foxed.
“You mentioned the thing was hostile,” she said carefully, not really sure she wanted to ask any more questions, in case the answers were too difficult to assimilate.
“Yes.” Hesitating now. “The dogs were a mistake,” she said. “I was too impetuous. I should have realised that Sun Stealer—”
“Sun Stealer?”
“What it calls itself. The stowaway, I mean.”
This was bad. How did she know the thing’s name? Fleetingly, Khouri remembered that Volyova had once asked her if that name meant anything to her. But there was more to it than that. It was as if she had been hearing that name in her dreams for some time now. Khouri opened her mouth to speak, but the Mademoiselle was already talking. “It used the dogs to escape, Khouri. Or at least for a part of itself to escape. It used them to get into your head.”
Sylveste had no reliable way of marking the time in his new prison. All he remained certain of was that many days had passed since his capture. He suspected he was being drugged, forced into comalike sleep, barren of dreams. When he did dream, which was rarely, he had sight, but his dreams always revolved around his imminent blindness and the preciousness of the sight he retained. When he awoke he saw only grey, but after some time—days, he guessed—the grey had lost its geometric structure. The pattern had been imposed on his brain for too long; now his brain was simply filtering it out. What remained was a colourless infinity, no longer even recognisably grey, but simply a bright absence of hue.
He wondered what he was missing. Perhaps his actual surroundings were so dull and Spartan that his mind would sooner or later have performed the same filtering trick, even if he still had his sight. He sensed only the echoless enclosure of rock; many megatonnes of it. He thought constantly of Pascale, but it became harder by the day to hold her in his mind. The grey seemed to be seeping into his memories, smearing over them like wet concrete. Then there came a day, just after Sylveste had finished his rations, when the cell door was unlocked and two voices joined him.
The first was that of Gillian Sluka.
“Do what you can with him,” her croak of a voice said. “Within limits.”
“He should be put under while I operate,” said the other voice, male and treacle-thick. Sylveste recognised the cabbagy smell of the man’s breath.
“He should, but he won’t be.” The voice hesitated, then added: “I’m not expecting any miracles, Falkender. I just want the bastard to see me.”
“Give me a few hours,” Falkender said. There was a thump as the man placed something down on the cell’s blunt-edged table. “I’ll do my best,” he said, almost mumbling. “But from what I know, these eyes were nothing special before you had him blinded.”
“One hour.”
She slammed the door as she exited. Sylveste, cocooned in silence since his capture, felt its reverberations jar his skull. For too long he had been striving to pick up the softest of noises, clues to his fate. There had been none, but in the process he had become sensitised to silence.
He smelled Falkender loom nearer. “A pleasure to work with you, Dr Sylveste,” he said, almost diffidently. “I’m confident I can undo most of the damage she had inflicted on you, given time.”
“She gave you one hour,” Sylveste said. His own voice sounded foreign; it had been too long since he had done much except mumble incoherently to himself in his sleep. “What can you possibly do in one hour?”
He heard the man rummage through his tools. “At the very least improve things for you.” He punctuated his remarks with clucking noises. “Of course, I can do more if you don’t struggle. But I can’t promise that this will be pleasant for you.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your best.”
The man’s fingers skated over his eyes, lightly probing.
“I always admired your father, you know.” Another cluck, reminding Sylveste
of one of Janequin’s chickens. “It’s well known that he fashioned these eyes for you.”
“His beta-level simulation,” Sylveste corrected.
“Of course, of course.” He could visualise Falkender waving aside this vaporous distinction. “And not the alpha, either—we all know that vanished years ago.”
“I sold it to the Jugglers,” Sylveste said blankly. After years of holding it in, the truth had popped out of his mouth like a small sour pip.
Falkender made an odd tracheal sound which Sylveste eventually decided might be the man’s mode of chuckling. “Of course, of course. You know, I’m surprised no one ever accused you of that. But that’s human cynicism for you.” A shrill whirring sound filled the air, followed by a nerve-searing vibration. “I think you can say goodbye to colour perception,” Falkender said. “Monochrome’s going to be about the best I can manage.”
Khouri had been hoping for some mental breathing-space, some time in which to collect her thoughts, in which to listen quietly for the breathing of the invasive presence in her head. But the Mademoiselle was still speaking.
“I believe Sun Stealer has already attempted this once before,” she said. “I’m speaking of your predecessor, of course.”
“You mean the stowaway tried to get into Nagorny’s head?”
“Exactly that. Except in Nagorny’s case, there would have been no bloodhounds on which to hitch a ride. Sun Stealer must have had to resort to something cruder.”
Khouri considered what she had learnt from Volyova about this whole incident.
“Crude enough to drive Nagorny mad?”
“Evidently so,” her companion nodded. “And perhaps Sun Stealer only attempted to impose his will on the man. Escape from the gunnery was impossible, so Sun Stealer merely tried to make Nagorny his puppet. Perhaps it was all done via subconscious suggestion, while he was in the gunnery.”
“Exactly how much trouble am I in?”
“Little, for now. There were only a few dogs—not enough for him to do much damage.”
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