“I trust you about as far as I could piss you, svinoi,” Volyova said. “But on the other hand, you wouldn’t know what to do at the warchive even if you got there. And Sajaki isn’t in a fit state to give you any particularly cogent suggestions.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Be quick about it, Dan.” Volyova emphasised the point with a stab of the needler, her finger tense on the trigger. “If you aren’t back here in ten minutes I’m sending Khouri after you.”
In a minute the two men had left, Sajaki slumped on Sylveste, barely capable of walking without support from the other man. Khouri wondered if Sajaki would still be conscious by the time he was brought to the infirmary, and found that she did not particularly care.
“About the warchive,” she said. “I don’t think you have to worry too much about anyone else using it. I shot the fucking place to bits as soon as I had what I wanted.”
Volyova mulled on that and then nodded appreciatively.
“That was sound tactical thinking, Khouri.”
“Tactics didn’t come into it. It was that persona running the place. I just decided to open up and torch the bastard.”
Pascale said, “Does this mean we’ve won? I mean, have we actually achieved what we set out to do?”
“Guess so,” Khouri said. “Sajaki’s out of the picture, and I don’t think our friend Hegazi is going to make too much trouble for himself. And it doesn’t look like your husband is going to keep his word about killing us all if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
“How very disappointing,” Hegazi said.
“I told you,” Pascale said. “He was always bluffing. That’s it, then? We can still call off those weapons, can’t we?” She was looking at Volyova, who nodded instantly.
“Of course.” And then she reached in her jacket and snapped a new bracelet around her wrist, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “You think I’d be so foolish as not to carry a spare with me?”
“Not you, Ilia,” Khouri said.
She raised the bracelet to her mouth and spoke into it; a mantralike sequence of commands designed to bypass various levels of security. Finally, when everyone’s attention was on the armillary, she said, “All cache-weapons return to ship; repeat, all cache-weapons return to ship.”
But nothing happened; not even when enough seconds had elapsed for the expected light-travel timelag. Nothing, that is, except that the icons representing the cache-weapons changed from black to red, and began to flash with evil regularity.
“Ilia,” Khouri said. “What does that actually mean?”
“It means they’re arming up and preparing to fire,” she said, very evenly, as if barely surprised. “It means that something very bad is about to happen.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
She had lost control again.
Volyova watched helplessly as the cache-weapons opened fire on Cerberus. The beam weapons found their mark first, of course, and the first indication that returned was a spark of blue-white light, winking open against the arid grey backdrop of the world, in the precise spot where, shortly, the bridgehead would reach the surface. The relativistic projectile weapons were only slightly tardier, and reports of their success followed a few seconds later; spectacular stuttering pulses as the projectiles rained home, slugs of neutronium and antimatter slamming into the world. All the while, she kept barking the disarming commands into the bracelet, but with steadily draining hope that she could have any influence over the weapons. For one foolish instant she had assumed that the replacement bracelet was faulty, but of course that could not be why the weapons were now behaving autonomously. They had fired for a purpose; just as they had disregarded her order to return to the bowels of the ship.
Because someone—or something—now had control.
“What’s happening?” Pascale asked, in the tones of someone who did not honestly expect a comprehensible answer.
“It must be Sun Stealer,” Volyova said, finally giving up on the bracelet, relinquishing all hope of the weapons returning to her steerage. “Because it can’t possibly be Khouri’s Mademoiselle. Even if she were still capable of influencing the cache, she’d be doing everything in her power to prevent this.”
“Part of him must have stayed behind in the gunnery,” Khouri said. She seemed to regret that, because she went quiet very abruptly, before adding, “I mean, we always knew he could control the gunnery—that was why he resisted the Mademoiselle when she wanted to kill Sylveste with the other weapon.”
“But with this precision?” Volyova shook her head. “Not all my commands to the cache-weapons are routed through the gunnery; I knew that was too big a risk to take.”
“And you’re saying even those aren’t working?”
“So it would appear.”
The display now showed that the weapons had ceased their attack, depleted of energy and munitions, drifting into useless orbits around Hades, where they would remain for millions of years, until swept by random gravitational perturbations into trajectories which would smash them into Cerberus or fling them out towards the Trojan points, where they would endure even the red-giant death of Delta Pavonis. Volyova extracted a residual grain of comfort in knowing that the weapons could not be used again; could not be turned against her. But it was far too late for such succour. The damage against Cerberus had already been done, and there would now be very little to hinder the bridgehead when it arrived. She could already see the evidence of their attack displayed on the display, plumes of pulverised regolith fanning into space around the impact point.
Sylveste arrived at the ship’s medical centre, Sajaki increasingly heavy against his shoulders. The man seemed to weigh far too much for his lean frame. Sylveste wondered if it was because of the sheer mass of machines streaming through his blood; waiting dormant in every cell, biding their time until a crisis such as this stirred them to life. Sajaki was hot too; feverishly so—perhaps evidence that the medichines had gone into an emergency breeding frenzy, building up their forces to deal with the situation, conscripting molecules from the man’s “normal’ tissue until the hazard was averted. When Sylveste glanced reluctantly at the Triumvir’s ruined wrist, he saw that the blood had stopped flowing, and the dreadful circumferential wound was now enveloped in a membranous caul. A faint amber luminosity shone through the tissue.
Servitors emerged from the centre as he approached, taking the burden from him, lofting Sajaki to a couch. The machines fussed over him for a few minutes, swanlike monitors angling over the bed; various neural monitors settled gently over his scalp. They did not seem overly concerned by the wound. Perhaps the medical systems were already communicating with his medichines, and there was no need for further intervention at this stage. He was still conscious, Sylveste observed, despite his weakness.
“You should never have trusted Volyova,” he said angrily. “Now everything’s ruined because she had too much power. That was a fatal mistake, Sajaki.”
His voice was barely there. “Of course we trusted her. She was one of us, you fool! Part of the Triumvirate!” Then he added, in a croak, “What is it you know about Khouri?”
“She was an infiltrator,” Sylveste said. “Put aboard this ship to find me and kill me.”
Sajaki reacted to this as if it were only mildly diverting. “That’s all?”
“That’s all I believed. I don’t know who sent her, or why—but she had some absurd justification, which Volyova and my wife seem to have taken as the literal truth.”
“It isn’t over yet,” Sajaki said, his eyes wide, rimmed in yellow.
“What do you mean, it isn’t over?”
“I just know,” Sajaki said, and then closed his eyes, relaxing back into the couch. “Nothing is finished.”
“He’s going to survive,” Sylveste said, entering the bridge, obviously unaware of what had just taken place.
He looked around him, and Volyova could imagine his confu
sion. Superficially, nothing had changed in the time it had taken him to escort Sajaki to the infirmary—the same people holding the same guns, but the mood had undergone a dire transition. Hegazi, for instance, despite being on the wrong end of Khouri’s needler, did not wear the expression of a man on the defeated side. Neither, however, did he look particularly jubilant.
It’s out of all our hands now, Volyova thought, and Hegazi knows it.
“Something went wrong, didn’t it?” Sylveste said, who had by then taken in the view of Cerberus on the display, with its ruptured crust bleeding into space. “Your weapons actually opened fire, just as we wanted.”
“Sorry,” Volyova said, shaking her head. “It was none of my doing.”
“You’d better listen to her,” Pascale said. “Whatever’s going on here, we don’t want any part of it. It’s bigger than us, Dan. Bigger than you, anyway—hard as that may be to believe.”
He looked scornful. “Haven’t you realised yet? This is exactly how Volyova wanted it to happen.”
“You’re mad,” Volyova said.
“Now you get your chance,” Sylveste said. “You get to see your planet-penetrator in action, while at the same time salving your conscience with this conveniently unsuccessful display of eleventh-hour caution.” He clapped his hands twice. “No; honestly—I’m genuinely impressed.”
“You’ll be genuinely dead,” Volyova said.
But while she hated him for saying what he had said, there was part of her which refused easy denial. She would have done anything in her power to stop the weapons from completing their mission—hell; she had done everything in her power, and none of it had worked. Even if she had not given the order to release them from the ship, Sun Stealer would surely have found a way; she was sure of that. But now that the attack had taken place, a kind of fatalistic curiosity had settled over her. The bridgehead’s arrival would proceed as planned, unless she could find a way of stopping it, and thus far she had tried everything she knew. And therefore, because there was no way of preventing it from happening, a detached part of her was beginning to look forward to the event, tantalised not just by what would be learnt, but how well her child would endure its trials. Whatever happened, she knew—no matter how fearful the consequences might be—it could not help but be the most fascinating thing she had ever witnessed. And perhaps the most terrible.
There was nothing to do now except wait.
The hours passed neither swiftly nor slowly, because this was an event she was dreading as much as longing for. One thousand kilometres above Cerberus, the bridgehead commenced its final braking phase. The brilliance of the two Conjoiner drives was like a pair of miniature suns flaring into ignition above Cerberus, shocking the landscape into stark clarity, craters and ravines assuming enormously exaggerated prominence. For a moment, under that merciless glare, the world really did look artefactual; as if its makers had striven too hard to make Cerberus look weathered by aeons of bombardment.
On her bracelet now she was seeing images recorded from the downlooking cameras studded around the bridgehead’s flanks. There were rings of cameras every hundred metres along the length of the four-kilometre cone, so that, no matter how deeply it penetrated, some cameras would always be above and below the crustal layer. She was looking through that crust now; through the still unhealed wound which had been opened by the cache.
Sylveste had not been lying.
There were things down there. Huge and organic and tubular, like a nest of snakes. The heat of the cache attack had dissipated now, and although greyish clouds were still smoking from the hole, Volyova suspected they were more to do with incinerated machinery than boiled crustal matter. None of the snakelike tubes were moving, and their segmented silvery sides were marred by black smears and hundred-metre-wide gashes, through which a whole intestinal mass of smaller snakes had exploded.
Volyova had hurt Cerberus.
She did not know if it was a mortal wound, or just a graze which would heal in days, but she had hurt it, and the realisation of that made her shiver. She had hurt something alien.
Soon, however, the alien thing retaliated.
She jumped when it happened, even though—intellectually, if not emotionally—she had been expecting it. It happened when the bridgehead was two kilometres from the surface—half its own length away.
The event itself was almost too swift to absorb. Between one moment and the next the crust changed with startling swiftness. A series of grey dimples had formed, ringed concentrically around the kilometre-wide wound, blistering like stone pustules. Almost as soon as Volyova noticed their existence, they ruptured, unleashing twinkling spore, silver glints which swarmed towards the bridgehead like fireflies. She had no idea what they were, whether they were chips of naked antimatter, tiny warheads, viral capsules or miniature gun batteries, except that they intended harm to her creation.
“Now,” she whispered. “Now…”
She was not disappointed. Perhaps, on some level, it would have been better if her weapon had been destroyed in that moment—but then she would have been denied the thrill of seeing it react, and react with all the efficacy she had intended. The armaments in the bridgehead’s circular rim erupted into life, tracking, lasering and bosering each of the glints before many of them had touched the conic weapon’s hyperdiamond carapace.
The bridgehead accelerated now, covering the final two kilometres in a third of a minute, the crust around the wound constantly blistering and releasing glitter, the bridgehead parrying the strikes. There were craters in the weapon’s hull now, where a few of the glitter-spore had impacted with brief pink radiance, but the bridgehead’s operational integrity remained uncompromised. The needle-sharp tip pushed below the level of the crust, accurately positioned in the middle of the wound.
Seconds passed, and then the widening haft of the weapon began to brush against its ragged periphery. The ground began to rupture, fracture lines racing away. The blisters were still sprouting, but now at a greater radial distance from the wound, as if the underlying mechanisms were damaged or depleted within that circumference. The bridgehead was now hundreds of metres into Cerberus, shockwaves radiating out from the entry point and haring up the weapon’s length. The piezoelectric crystal buffers which Volyova had integrated into the hyperdiamond would damp those shocks, converting their energy into heat which would then be channelled into the defensive armaments.
“Tell me we’re winning,” Sylveste said. “For God’s sake, tell me we’re winning!”
She speed-read the detailed status summaries spilling onto her bracelet. For a moment there was no antagonism between them; only a shared curiosity. “We’re coping,” she said. “… Weapon is now one kilometre in; maintaining steady descent rate at one kilometre every ninety seconds. Thrust level increasing to maximum; that must mean it’s encountering mechanical resistance…”
“What is it passing through?”
“Can’t tell,” she said. “Alicia’s data said the fake crust was no more than half a kilometre deep, but there are few sensors in the weapon’s skin—they would have increased its vulnerability to cybernetic attack modes.”
What showed on the armillary, relayed from the ship’s cameras, was a piece of abstract sculpture: a cone sliced off midway and positioned with its narrowest end resting on a scabrous grey surface. Anguished patterns were playing over the surrounding terrain, blisters spewing spore in random directions, as if their underlying targeting had gone awry. The weapon was slowing now, and though the scene was playing in absolute silence, Volyova could imagine the awful grinding friction; what it would have sounded like, had there been air to carry the sound and ears to be deafened by that titanic scraping roar. Now her bracelet told her, the pressure on the tip had fallen drastically, as if the weapon had finally punctured all the way through the crust, and was now probing into the relative hollowness beneath: the domain of the snakes.
Slowing.
Skull-and-crossbones symbols danced on her bra
celet, signifying commencement of molecular weapon attack against the bridgehead. Volyova had expected as much. Already, antibodies would be oozing through the carapace, meeting and matching the alien attackers.
Slowing… and now stopping.
This was as deep as they were going to get. One and one-third of a kilometre of the cone still projected above the cracked surface of Cerberus; what it looked like was some kind of top-heavy cylindrical fortification. The rim armaments were still lancing away at the crustal countermeasures, but now the spore discharges were coming from tens of kilometres away, and it was clear that no immediate threat was posed, unless the crust was capable of improbably rapid regeneration.
The bridgehead would now commence anchoring itself, consolidating its gains, analysing the forms of the molecular weapons being used against it, devising subtly matched reverse strategies.
It had not let Volyova down.
She pivoted her couch round to face the others, noticing—for the first time in ages—that her fist was still locked around a needle-gun.
“We’re in,” she said.
It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.
In the hours immediately after the weapon’s anchoring, Khouri stayed in close consultation with Volyova, reviewing the constantly changing status of the sluggishly fought battle. The geometric forms of the two protagonists reminded her of a conic virus dwarfed by the much larger spherical cell which it was in the business of corrupting. Yet she had to keep reminding herself that even that insignificant cone was the size of a mountain; that the cell was a world.
Nothing very much seemed to be happening now, but that was only because the conflict was being waged primarily on the molecular level, across an invisible, near-fractal front which extended for tens of square kilometres. At first, and without success, Cerberus had tried to repel the invader with highly entropic weapons; trying to degrade the enemy into megatonnes of atomic ash. Now its strategy had evolved towards one of digestion. It was still trying to dismantle the enemy atom by atom, but systematically, like a child deconstructing a complex toy rather than smashing it to pieces, diligently placing each component into its assigned compartment so that it could be used again in the future, in some as yet undreamt-of project. There was logic to this, after all; a few cubic kilometres of the world had been annihilated by the cache-weapons, and Volyova’s device presumably consisted of matter in much the same elemental and isotopic ratios as that which had been destroyed. The enemy was a huge potential reservoir of repair material, obviating the need for Cerberus to consume its own finite resources in the process. And perhaps it always sought motherlodes like this, to repair the inevitable damage wrought by millennia of meteorite strikes and the constant ablative toll of cosmic ray bombardment. Perhaps it had seized Sylveste’s first probe more because it was hungry than out of a misguided sense that it was preserving its own secrecy; as much acting out of blind stimulus as a Venus flytrap, with no thought for the future.
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