“Never mind their motives,” Sluka said, brushing her fingers against one of the pedestal-mounted globes which flanked the room, seemingly to anchor herself to the planet which now seemed to be spinning irrevocably beyond her control. “As long as Phoenix—or whatever they called it—is there, that’s all I care.”
“It’s there all right,” Pascale said.
Her finger penetrated the projected terrain, arrowing a tiny, labelled dot in the otherwise unpopulated north-eastern ranges. “It’s the only thing so far north,” she said. “And the only settlement in remotely the right direction. It’s called Phoenix, too.”
“What else do you have on it?”
Sluka’s aide—he was a small man with a delicately oiled moustache and goatee—spoke softly into his sleeve-mounted compad, instructing the map to zoom in on the settlement. A series of demographic icons popped into existence above the table. “Not much,” he said. “Just a few multi-family surface shacks linked by tubes. A few underground workings. No ground connections, although they did have a landing pad for aircraft.”
“Population?”
“I don’t think population’s quite the word for it,” the man said. “Just a hundred or so; about eighteen family units. Most of them from Cuvier, by the look of this.” He shrugged. “Actually, if this was her idea of a strike against the colony, I think we did remarkably well. A hundred or so people—-well, it’s a tragedy. But I’m surprised she didn’t play her hand against a more populous target. The fact that none of us really knew this place existed—it almost nullifies the act, don’t you think?”
“A splendidly inept thing,” Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.
“What?”
“The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feels a damn about these people.” Sylveste looked at the map, wondering what it must have been like for the inhabitants, given those few seconds of warning which Volyova had prescribed them. He wondered if any of them had taken the trouble to leave their dwellings and face the sky, in order to quicken—fractionally—the coming annihilation. “But I do know one thing. We have all the evidence we need that she’s a woman of her word. And that means you have to let me go to them.”
“I’m reluctant to lose you,” Sluka said. “But it isn’t like I have much choice in the matter. You’ll be wanting to contact them, of course.”
“Naturally,” Sylveste said. “And of course Pascale will be coming with me. But there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me first.”
“A favour?” Sluka sounded amused, as if this were the last thing in the world she would have expected from him. “Well, what can I do for you, now that we’ve become such firm friends?”
Sylveste smiled. “Actually it’s not so much what you can do for me as what Doctor Falkender can. It concerns my eyes, you see.”
From the vantage point of her floating, boom-suspended seat, the Triumvir observed the handiwork she had wrought on the planet below. It was all perfectly clear, imaged precisely on the bridge’s projection sphere. In the last ten hours she had observed the wound extend dark cyclonic tendrils away from its focus, evidence that the weather in that region—and, by implication, elsewhere on the planet—had been tipped towards a violent new equilibrium. According to the locally culled data, the colonists on Resurgam called such phenomena razorstorms, on account of the merciless flensing quality of the airborne dust. It was fascinating to watch, much like the dissection of some unfamiliar animal species. Although she had had more experience with planets than many of her crewmates, there were still things about them which she found surprising and not a little disturbing. It was disturbing that simply puncturing a hole in the planet’s integument could have this much effect—not just on the immediate locality of the place she had attacked, but thousands of kilometres beyond. Eventually, she knew, there would not be a spot on the planet which had not been in some measurable way affected by her action. The dust she had caused to be elevated would eventually settle; a fine blackened, faintly radioactive caul deposited fairly uniformly around the planet. In the temperate regions it would soon be washed away by the weather processes which the colonists had instigated, assuming of course that those processes still functioned. But in the arctic regions there was never any rain, so the fine fall of dust would remain unperturbed for centuries to come. Eventually other deposits would cover it, and it would become part of the irrevocable geological memory of the planet. Perhaps, the Triumvir mused, in a few million years other beings would arrive on Resurgam, sharing something of humanity’s curiosity. They would want to learn of the planet’s history, and in doing so they would take core samples, reaching far back into Resurgam’s past. Doubtless that deposited layer of dust would not be the only mystery they had to solve, but nonetheless they would mull on it, if only fleetingly. And she had no doubt that those hypothetical future investigators would come to a totally wrong conclusion regarding the layer’s origin. It would never occur to them that it had been put there by an act of conscious volition…
Volyova had slept only a few hours in the last thirty, but her nervous energy currently seemed limitless. She would, of course, pay a price for it at some point in the near future, but for now she felt like she was careering, imbued with unstoppable momentum. Even so, she did not immediately snap to alertness when Hegazi steered his chair next to hers.
“What is it?”
“I’m getting something which might very much be our boy.”
“Sylveste?”
“Or someone pretending to be him.” Hegazi entered one of his intermittent phases of fugue, which to Volyova signified that he was in deep rapport with the ship. “Can’t trace the communication route he’s using. It’s coming from Cuvier, but you can bet Sylveste isn’t physically there.”
She did not raise her voice, even though the two of them were quite alone in the bridge.
“What’s he saying?”
“He’s just asking to speak to us. Over and over again.”
Khouri heard footsteps sloshing through the inch-thick sludge which flooded the entire Captain’s level.
She did not have a rational answer for why she had come down here. Perhaps that was the point, really: now that she no longer trusted Volyova—the one person she had thought she could place her faith in—and now that the Mademoiselle was absent, as she had been ever since the attack against the cache-weapon, Khouri had to turn to the irrational. The only person left on the ship who had not in some way betrayed her, or had not earned her hatred, was the one she could never expect an answer from.
She knew almost immediately that the footsteps did not belong to Volyova, but there was a purposefulness to them which suggested that the person knew exactly where they were going, and had not simply strolled into this area of the ship by accident.
Khouri got up out of the muck. The seat of her trousers was wet and cold with the stuff, but the darkness of the fabric concealed most of the damage.
“Relax,” said the person, strolling casually round the bend, her boots sloshing through the sludge. There was a glint of metal from the woman’s free-swinging arms and a multicoloured glow from the holographic designs worked into the arms’ metalwork.
“Sudjic,” Khouri identified. “How the hell did you—”
Sudjic shook her head with a tight-lipped smile. “How did I find my way down here? Simple, Khouri. I followed you. Once I saw which general direction you’d gone, it was obvious you must be headed here. So I came after you, because I reckon you and I could use a little chat.”
“A chat?”
“About the situation here.” Sudjic gestured expansively. “On this ship. More specifically, the fucking Triumvirate. It can’t have escaped you that I have a grievance against one of them.”
“Volyova.”
“Yes, our mutual friend Ilia.” Sudjic manage
d to make the woman’s name sound like a particularly unsavoury expletive. “She killed my lover, you know that.”
“I understand there’d been… problems.”
“Problems, ha. That’s a good one. Do you call turning someone psychotic a problem, Khouri?” She paused, stepped a little closer, but still kept a respectful distance from the fused, angelic core of the Captain. “Or maybe I should call you Ana, now that we’re on—uh—closer terms.”
“Call me what you want. It doesn’t alter anything. I may hate her guts right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to betray her. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
Sudjic nodded sagely. “She really hit you with that loyalty therapy, didn’t she? Look, Sajaki and the others are not nearly as omniscient as you’d think. You can tell me everything.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that.”
“Such as?” Sudjic was standing akimbo now, her gauntleted hands placed daintily against her narrow hips. The woman was beautiful, in the emaciated way which was common among the spaceborn. Her physiology was wraith-like; had her underlying skeletal-muscular structure not been chimerically enhanced, it was doubtful she would have been fully ambulatory in normal gravity. But now, with those subcutaneous augmentations, Sudjic was undoubtably stronger and faster than any non-augmented human. Her strength was double-edged, because she looked so fragile. She was like an origami sculpture of a woman folded from razor-sharp paper.
“I can’t tell you,” Khouri said. “But Ilia and I—we have mutual secrets.” Instantly she regretted saying that, but she wanted to deflate the smug superiority of the Ultra. “What I mean is—”
“Listen, I’m sure that’s the way she wants you to feel. But ask yourself this, Khouri. How much of what you remember is real? Isn’t it possible that Volyova’s been screwing with your memories? She tried it with Boris. She tried to cure him by erasing his past, but it didn’t work. He still had the voices to deal with. That go for you too? Any new voices floating around in your head?”
“If there are,” Khouri said, “they haven’t got anything to do with Volyova.”
“So you admit it.” Sudjic smiled primly, like a valiant schoolgirl acknowledging victory in a game, but hoping not to look too proud of the fact. “Well, whether you do or don’t, it doesn’t matter. The fact is you’re disillusioned with her. With the Triumvirate as a whole. You can’t kid yourself you liked what they just did.”
“I’m not sure I understand what it was they just did, Sudjic. There are a few things I haven’t got right in my head.” Khouri felt the cold, wet fabric of her trousers clinging to her buttocks. “That’s why I came down here, as a matter of fact. For some peace and quiet. To get my head together.”
“And see if he had wisdom to spare?”
Sudjic had nodded towards the Captain.
“He’s dead, Sudjic. I may be the only person here who recognises that, but it’s true all the same.”
“Maybe Sylveste can cure him.”
“Even if he could, would Sajaki want it to happen?”
Sudjic nodded knowingly. “Of course, of course. I understand totally. But listen.” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper, though the only possible eavesdroppers were the skulking rats. “They’ve found Sylveste—I just heard, before I came down.”
“Found him? You mean he’s here?”
“No, of course not. They’ve just made contact. They don’t even know where he is yet, just that he’s alive. Still got to get the bastard aboard somehow. And that’s where you come in. Me too, in fact.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t pretend to understand what happened with Kjarval in the training chamber, Khouri. Maybe she just cracked, although I knew her better than anyone else on this ship, and I’d say she wasn’t really the cracking type. Whatever it was, it gave Volyova an excuse to finish her off—not that I ever thought the bitch really hated her that much…”
“It wasn’t Volyova’s fault…”
“Whatever.” Sudjic shook her head. “That’s not important—just now. But what it means is she needs you for the mission. You and me, Khouri—and maybe the bitch-queen herself—are going down there to retrieve him.”
“You can’t know that yet.”
Sudjic shook her head. “Not officially I can’t. But when you’ve been aboard this ship as long as I have, you’ll know a thing or two about bypassing the usual channels.”
For a moment there was only silence, broken by the distant dripping of a leaking conduit, some distance down the flooded corridor.
“Sudjic, why are you telling me this? I thought you hated my guts.”
“Maybe I did,” the woman said. “Once. But now we need all the allies we can get. And I thought you might appreciate forewarning. Especially if you’ve got any sense, and you know who to trust.”
Volyova addressed her bracelet. “Infinity, I want you to correlate the voice you’re about to hear against shipboard records of Sylveste. If you can’t confirm a match, let me know immediately via secure readout.”
Sylveste’s voice burst in on them, mid-sentence: “… if you are reading me. Repeat, I need to know if you are reading me. I demand that you acknowledge me, bitch. I demand that you fucking acknowledge me!”
“That’s him all right,” Volyova said, speaking over the man’s voice, “I’d know that petulant tone anywhere. Better put him out of it. I presume we still don’t have a fix on him?”
“Sorry. You’re going to have to address the colony as a whole and assume he has a means of reading you.”
“I’m sure he won’t have neglected that detail.” Volyova consulted her bracelet, observing that the ship could so far not disprove the hypothesis that the voice she was hearing belonged to Sylveste. There was room for error, since the Sylveste who had come aboard the ship once before was a much younger counterpart of the one they were now looking for, and so the voice match was not expected to be perfect. But even allowing for that, it looked increasingly likely that they had found him, and that this was not simply another hapless impersonator corning forward to “save’ the colony. “All right, patch me through. Sylveste? This is Volyova. Tell me if you’re hearing this.”
His voice was clearer now. “About fucking time.”
“I think we’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” Hegazi said.
“We need to discuss the logistics of picking you up, and I believe it would be very much easier if we could do so on a secure channel. If you give me your current location, we can make a detailed sensor-sweep of that region and pick up your transmission at source, avoiding the relay at Cuvier.”
“Now why would you need to do that? Is there something you want me to know that the colony as a whole can’t share?” Sylveste paused, but Volyova mentally inserted a sneer at that point. “After all, you haven’t been slow in bringing them into it so far.” Another pause. “Incidentally, it troubles me that I’m dealing with you and not Sajaki.”
“He’s indisposed,” Volyova said. “Give me your position.”
“Sorry, but that isn’t possible.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Why should I bother? You’re the ones with all the firepower. You figure out a solution.”
Hegazi waved his hand, signalling Volyova to cut the audio link. “Maybe he can’t reveal his position.”
“Can’t?”
Hegazi tapped a steel forefinger against his steel-bridged nose.
“His captors might not let him. They’re ready to let him go, but they don’t want to give up their position.”
Volyova nodded, admitting that Hegazi’s suggestion was probably close to the truth. She reinstated the link. “All right Sylveste. I think I understand your predicament. I propose the following compromise, assuming that you have the means to move around. Your—uh—hosts can doubtless arrange something at short notice, I presume?”
“We have transportation, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You have six more hours, in that case. Enough time to get to a location sufficiently far from where you are now that you won’t compromise it when you reveal your position. But if in six hours we don’t hear from you, we will bring forward the attack against the next target. Is that perfectly clear to all concerned?”
“Oh yes,” Sylveste said, tartly. “Perfectly clear.”
“There’s one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Bring Calvin with you.”
SIXTEEN
North Nekhebet, 2566
Sylveste felt the aircraft haul itself aloft, at first moving horizontally to clear Mantell’s dugout hangar, then making rapid height and swerving to avoid dashing itself against the stacked strata of the adjacent mesa wall. He made himself a window, but the thickening dust allowed him only a glimpse of the base, the mesa in which it had been tunnelled falling away below the brilliant undercurve of the plasma-wing. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would not be returning. It was not just Mantell that he sensed he was seeing for the last time, but—and he could not have articulated exactly why—the colony itself.
The machine was the smallest and least valuable aircraft that the settlement could muster; barely larger than one of the volantors which he had flown in Chasm City a lifetime earlier. It was also fast enough to make that six hours of grace count; capable of putting a useful distance between itself and the mesa. The aircraft could have carried four, but only Sylveste and Pascale were riding it. Yet—insofar as their freedom of movement went—they were still Sluka’s captives. Her people had programmed the aircraft’s route before it left Mantell, and it would only deviate from that flight-plan if the autopilot judged that the weather conditions merited a different course. Unless ground conditions at the site became intolerable, it would deposit Sylveste and his wife at a pre-agreed location which had still not been revealed to Volyova and her crew. If conditions were bad, another site could be picked in the same area.
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