Cal raised a hand from the armrest, disputatiously. “No; that would be much too simplistic a version of things. After all, I was that copy, once. But what I was then—and what the copy remained, until you killed it—was just a shadow of what I am now. Let’s just say I had a moment of epiphany, shall we, and leave it at that?”
“So…” Sylveste stepped forward, finger tapping against his lip. “In that case, I never really killed you, did I?”
“No,” Calvin said, with deceptive placidity. “You didn’t. But it’s what you might have been doing that counts. And on that score, dear boy, I’m afraid you’re still a callous, patricidal bastard.”
“Touching, isn’t it?” Hegazi said. “Nothing I like better than a good old family reunion.”
They proceeded to the Captain. Khouri had been here before, but despite her minor familiarity with the place, she still felt unnerved; obtrusively aware of the contaminating matter which was only barely contained by the envelope of cold which been caulked around the man.
“I think I should know what you want from me,” Sylveste said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Sajaki said. “Do you think we went to all this trouble just to ask you how you were doing these days?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you: Sylveste said. “Your behaviour never made much sense to me in the past, so why should it start doing so now? And besides, let’s not deceive ourselves that what went on back there was everything it seemed.”
“What do you mean?” Khouri asked.
“Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out?”
“That it never actually happened.” Sylveste fixed her with the blank depths of his eyes; a scrutiny which felt more like the scanning of a mindless automatic surveillance system than any human apperception. “Or perhaps not,” he added. “Perhaps you haven’t actually figured it out yet. Who are you anyway?”
“You’ll get your chance to ask all the questions you want,” Hegazi said, edgy now that they were within a stone’s throw of the Captain.
“No,” Khouri said. “I want to know. What do you mean, none of that actually happened?”
Sylveste’s voice was slow and calm. “I’m talking about that business with the settlement Volyova wiped out.”
Khouri stepped ahead of the entourage, blocking their progress. “You’d better explain that.”
“That can wait,” Sajaki said, stepping forward to push her aside. “Certainly until you’ve explained your role in things to my complete satisfaction, Khouri.” The Triumvir was eyeing her suspiciously all the time now, convinced that the two deaths in her presence had to be more than coincidence. With Volyova out of the way—and the Mademoiselle silent—she had no one to shelter her. It would be only a matter of time before Sajaki acted on his suspicions and did something drastic.
But Sylveste said, “No. Why need it wait? I think we should all be absolutely clear about what’s going on here. Sajaki; you didn’t go down to Resurgam just to obtain a copy of the biography, did you? What would have been the point? You had no knowledge that Descent contained a copy of Cal until I told you. You only picked up the biography because it might have come in useful in your negotiations with me. But it wasn’t the reason you went down there. That was something else entirely.”
“Intelligence gathering,” Sajaki said, carefully.
“More than that. You went there to glean information, yes. But you also had to plant some.”
“About Phoenix?” Khouri said.
“Not just about Phoenix, the place itself. It never existed.” Sylveste allowed a pause before continuing. “It was a ghost planted there by Sajaki. It wasn’t even on the old maps we kept at Mantell, but as soon as we updated them from the master copies in Cuvier it appeared. We just assumed it was a new settlement; too recent to show up on the previous maps. That was stupid, of course—I should have seen through it then. But we assumed the master copies hadn’t been corrupted.”
“Doubly stupid,” Sajaki said. “Given that you must have wondered where I was.”
“If I’d given it more than a moment’s thought…”
“Pity you didn’t,” Sajaki said. “Or we might not be having this conversation. But then again, we’d have only resorted to another means of securing you.”
Sylveste nodded. “I suppose your next logical step would have been to blow up a bigger fictitious target. But I’m not entirely sure you could have pulled off the same trick twice. I’ve a nasty suspicion you might have had to hit somewhere real.”
The cold had a steely texture to it, like a thousand pieces of barbed metal constantly scraping softly against the skin; threatening to pierce to the bone with each movement. But as soon as they were truly in the Captain’s realm, it became impossible to notice the cold, since the cold in which he was imprisoned was so obviously deeper.
“He’s sick,” Sajaki said. “With a variant of the Melding Plague. You know all about that, of course.”
“We heard reports from Yellowstone,” Sylveste said. “I can’t say they were exceptionally detailed.” All the while he had not actually looked directly at the Captain.
“We haven’t been able to contain it,” Hegazi said. “Not properly, anyway. Extreme cold goes some way to slowing it, but no more than that. It—or rather, he—is spreading slowly, incorporating the mass of the ship into his own template.”
“Then he’s still alive, at least by some biological definition?”
Sajaki nodded, “Of course, no organism can really be said to be alive at these temperatures. But if we were to warm the Captain now… parts of him would function.”
“That’s hardly reassuring.”
“I brought you aboard to heal him, not to hear reassurances.”
What the Captain resembled was a statue smeared in ropelike silver tendrils, extending tens of metres in either direction; beautifully aglisten with sinister biochimeric malignancy. The reefersleep unit at the heart of the frozen explosion was still, by some miracle of design or accident, nominally functional. But its once symmetrical form had been tugged and warped by the glacially slow but unyielding forces of the Captain’s spread. Most of its status readouts were now dead; there were no active entoptics surrounding it. Of the display devices which still worked, some showed unreadable mush; the senseless hieroglyphics of machine senility. Khouri was grateful that there were no entoptics. She had the feeling that if there had been any, they too would have been corrupted; a host of malignant seraphim or disfigured cherubim signifying the excessive state of the Captain’s illness.
“You don’t need a surgeon here,” Sylveste said. “You need a priest.”
“That isn’t what Calvin thought,” Sajaki said. “He was rather eager to begin the work.”
“Then the copy they had in Cuvier must have been delusional. Your Captain isn’t sick. He isn’t even dead, since there isn’t enough left which was ever alive in the first place.”
“Nonetheless,” Sajaki said. “You will help us. You’ll have Ilia’s assistance, as well—as soon as she’s well herself. She thinks that she has created a counteragent for the plague—a retrovirus. I’m told it works on small samples. But she’s a weaponeer. Applying it to the Captain would be strictly a medical matter. But at least she can provide you with a tool.”
Sylveste directed a smile at Sajaki. “I’m sure you’ve discussed the matter with Calvin already.”
“Let’s just say he’s been briefed. He’s willing to try it—he thinks it might even work. Does this encourage you?”
“I would have to bow to Calvin’s wisdom,” Sylveste replied. “He’s the medical man, not me. But before I enter into any commitment we’d have to negotiate terms.”
“There won’t be any,” Sajaki said. “And if you resist us, don’t imagine we won’t consider ways of persuading you via Pascale.”
“You’d probably regret it.”
Khouri prickled. For the dozenth time this day, something felt seriously wron
g. She sensed that the others were also attuned to it, though there was nothing to read in their expressions. Sylveste sounded too cocksure; that was it. Too cocksure for someone who had been abducted and was about to be forced to undergo a painful ordeal. Instead he sounded like someone who was about to reveal a winning hand.
“I’ll fix your damn Captain,” Sylveste said. “Or at least prove it can’t be done; one of the two. But in return, there’s a small favour you have to do for me.”
“Excuse me,” Hegazi said, “but when negotiating from a position of weakness, you don’t ask for favours.”
“Who said anything about weakness?” Sylveste smiled again, this time with unconcealed ferocity, and something which looked dangerously like joy. “Before I left Mantell, my captors did me a small, final favour. I don’t think they particularly felt they owed me anything. But the act was a small thing, and it allowed them to spite you, which did, I think, rather appeal to them. They were losing me, after all—but they saw no reason why you should get quite what you thought you were getting.”
“I don’t like this at all,” Hegazi said.
“Believe me,” Sylveste said, “you’re about to like it a lot less. Now; I have to ask a question, just to clarify our positions.”
“Go ahead,” Sajaki said.
“Are you all completely familiar with the concept of hot-dust?”
“You’re talking to Ultras,” Hegazi said.
“Well, of course. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t under any illusions. And you’ll know that hot-dust fragments can be sealed within containment devices smaller than pinheads? Of course you do.” He tapped his finger against his chin, extemporising like an expert lawyer. “You heard about Remilliod’s visit, of course? The last lighthugger to trade with the Resurgam system before you came?”
“We heard about it.”
“Well, Remilliod sold hot-dust to the colony. Not many fragments; just enough for a colony which might want to do some hefty landscape-rearranging in the near future. Of his sample, a dozen or less fell into the hands of the people who were holding me prisoner. Do you want me to continue, or are you ahead of me already?”
“I fear I may be,” Sajaki said. “But continue anyway.”
“One of those pinheads is now installed in the vision system which Cal made for me. It draws no current, and even if you dismantled my eyes, you would not be able to tell which component was the bomb. But you wouldn’t want to try that, because even tampering with my eyes will detonate the pinhead, with a yield sufficient to turn the front kilometre of this ship into a very expensive and useless piece of glass sculpture. Kill me, or even harm me to the extent that certain bodily functions are compromised beyond a preset limit, and the device triggers. Clear on that?”
“As crystal.”
“Good. Harm Pascale and the same thing happens: I can trigger it deliberately, by executing a series of neural commands. Or I could of course simply kill myself—the result would be indistinguishable.” He clasped his hands together, beaming like a statue of Buddha. “So. How does a little negotiation sound to you?”
Sajaki said nothing for what seemed like an eternity; doubtless considering every ramification of what Sylveste had said. Finally he said, without having consulted Hegazi: “We can be… flexible.”
“Good. Then I expect you’re keen to hear my terms.”
“Burning with enthusiasm.”
“Thanks to the recent unpleasantness,” Sylveste said, “I have a reasonably good idea what this ship can do. And I suspect that little demonstration was very much at the timid end of things. Am I right?”
“We have… capabilities, but you’d have to talk to Ilia. What did you have in mind?”
Sylveste smiled.
“First you have to take me somewhere.”
NINETEEN
Delta Pavonis system, 2566
They retired to the bridge.
Sylveste had visited this room during his previous period aboard the ship and had spent hundreds of hours in it then, but it still impressed him. With the encircling ranks of empty seats rising towards the ceiling, it felt more like a court of law where some momentous case was about to be tried; the jurors about to take their places in the concentric seats. Judgement seemed to be waiting in the air, about to be voiced into being. Sylveste examined his state of mind and found nothing resembling guilt, so he did not place himself in the role of the accused. But he felt a weight. It was the weight that some legal functionary might feel; the burden of a task which had to be performed not only in public but to the highest possible standards of excellence. If he failed, more than his own dignity might be at stake. A long and elaborately connected chain of events leading to this point would be severed, a chain that stretched unimaginably far into the past.
He looked around and made out the holographic projection globe which jutted into the chamber’s geometric centre, but his eyes were barely able to make out the object which it was imaging, though there were enough ancillary clues to suggest it was a realtime representation of Resurgam.
“Are we still in orbit?” he asked.
“Now that we’ve got you?” Sajaki shook his head. “That would be pointless. We have no more business with Resurgam.”
“You’re worried about the colonists trying something?”
“They could inconvenience us, I admit.”
For a moment they were silent, before Sylveste said, “Resurgam never interested you, did it? You came all this way just for me. I find that singleminded to the point of monomania.”
“It was only the work of a few months, if that.” Sajaki smiled. “From our perspective, of course. Don’t flatter yourself that I’d have chased you for years.”
“From my perspective, of course, that’s just what you did.”
“Your perspective isn’t valid.”
“And yours is? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s… longer. That has to count for something. Now; to answer your earlier question, we’ve left orbit. We’ve been accelerating away from the ecliptic ever since you came aboard.”
“I haven’t told you where I want us to go.”
“No, our plan was simply to put an AU or so between us and the colony, then lock into a constant-thrust holding pattern while we think things over.” Sajaki clicked his fingers, causing a robotic seat to angle down beside him. He boarded it, then waited while another quartet of seats appeared for Sylveste and Pascale, Hegazi and Khouri. “During which time, of course, we anticipated that you’d assist with the Captain.”
“Did I say I wouldn’t do it?”
“No,” Hegazi said. “But you sure as hell came with some unanticipated fine print.”
“Don’t blame me for making the best of a bad situation.”
“We’re not, we’re not,” Sajaki said. “But it would help if you were a little clearer on your requirements. Isn’t that reasonable?”
Sylveste’s seat was hovering next to the one holding Pascale. She was looking at him now, as much in expectation as any of the crew who had captured him. Except that she knows so much more, he thought, almost everything there was to know, in fact—or at least as much as he knew, however insignificant a part of the truth that knowledge actually constituted.
“Can I call up a map of the system from this position?” Sylveste asked. “I mean, of course I can, in principle—but will you give me the freedom to do so and some instructions?”
“The most recent maps were compiled during our approach,” Hegazi said. “You can retrieve them from ship memory and project them into the display.”
“Then show me how. I’m going to be more than just a passenger for some time to come—you might as well get used to it.”
It took a minute or so to find the right maps; another half a minute to project the right composite into the projection sphere in the form Sylveste desired, eclipsing the realtime image of Resurgam. The image had the form of an orrery, the orbits of the system’s eleven planets and largest minor plan
ets and comets denoted by elegant coloured tracks, with the positions of the bodies themselves shown in their current relative positions. Because the scale adopted was large, the terrestrial planets—Resurgam included—were crammed into the middle; a tight scribble of concentric orbits banded around the star Delta Pavonis. The minor planets came next, followed by the gas giants and comets, occupying the system’s middle ground. Then came two smaller sub-Jovian gas worlds, hardly giants at all, then a Plutonian world—not much more than a captured cometary husk, with two attendant moons. The system’s Kuiper belt of primordial cometary matter was visible in infrared as a curiously distorted shoal, one nubby end pointing out from the star. And then there was nothing at all for twenty further AU, more than ten light-hours out from the star itself. Matter here—such as there was—was only weakly bound to the star; it felt its gravitational field, but orbits here were centuries long and easily disrupted by encounters with other bodies. The protective caul of the star’s magnetic field did not extend this far out, and objects here were buffeted by the ceaseless squall of the galactic magnetosphere; the great wind in which the magnetic fields of all stars were embedded, like tiny eddies within a vaster cyclone.
But that enormous volume of space was not completely empty. It appeared at first only as one body—but that was because the default magnification scale was too large to show its duplicity. It lay in the direction in which the Kuiper halo was pointing; its own gravitational drag had pulled the halo out of sphericity towards that bulged configuration, betraying its existence. The object itself would have been utterly invisible to the naked eye, unless one were within a million kilometres of it; at which point seeing the object would have been the least of one’s problems.
“You’ll know of this,” Sylveste said. “Even though you might not have paid it very much attention until now.”
“It’s a neutron star,” Hegazi said.
“Good. Remember anything else?”
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