They would be over the maw—the cone’s open end—in a few minutes. Sylveste could already feel gravity tugging at his viscera now, even though he was still immersed in the suit’s liquid air. It was admittedly weak; a quarter of Earth normal—but a fall from his present height would still be adequately fatal, with or without the suit to protect him.
Now, finally, something else shared his immediate volume of space. He called in enhancements and saw a suit exactly like his own, twinkling brightly against the night. It was a little ahead of him, but following the same trajectory, heading for the circular entrance into the bridgehead. Two morsels of drifting marine food, he thought, about to be sucked into the enormous waiting funnel of the bridgehead, digested into the heart of Cerberus.
No going back now, he thought.
The three women ran down a corridor carpeted in dead rats and the blackened, stiff shells of things that might possibly once have been rats, though they did not invite close scrutiny. The trio had one big gun between the three of them now; one gun capable of despatching any servitor which the ship sent against them. The small pistols they also had might do the same job, but only if used with expertise and a certain degree of luck.
Occasionally, the floor shifted under their feet, unnervingly.
“What is it?” asked Khouri, limping now, after the bruising she had taken when the clinic had exploded. “What does it mean?”
“It means Sun Stealer is experimenting,” Volyova said, pausing between every two or three words to catch her breath, her side aflame with pain now; every injury which had been healed since Resurgam seemed on the point of unstitching. “So far he’s moved against us with the less critical systems; the robots and the rats, for instance. But he knows that if he can understand the drive properly—if he can learn how to operate it within its safety margins—he can crush us just by ramping up the thrust for a few seconds.” She ran for a few more strides, wheezing. “It’s how I killed Nagorny. But Sun Stealer doesn’t know the ship so well, even though he controls it. He’s trying to adjust the drive very gradually; reaching an understanding of how it operates. When he has that—”
Pascale said, “Is there anywhere we can go where we can be safe? Somewhere the rats and the machines can’t reach?”
“Yes, but nowhere that the acceleration can’t reach in and crush us.”
“So we should get off the ship, is that what you’re saying?”
She stopped, audited the corridor they were in and decided it was not one of the ones in which the ship could hear their conversations. “Listen,” she said. “Don’t be under any illusions. If we leave here, I doubt very much that we’ll ever find a way to return. But on the other hand, we also have an obligation to stop Sylveste, if there’s even a slim chance of doing so. Even if we kill ourselves in the process.”
“How could we reach Dan?” Pascale asked. Obviously, stopping Sylveste still amounted—in her mind—to catching him and talking him out of going further. Volyova decided not to disabuse her of that notion, not just yet; but it wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
“I think your husband took one of our suits,” she said. “According to my bracelet all the shuttles are still present. Besides, he could never have piloted one of them.”
“Not unless he had help from Sun Stealer,” Khouri said. “Listen, can we keep moving? I know we don’t have any particular direction in mind, but I’d feel a hell of a lot happier than standing around.”
“He’d have taken a suit,” Pascale said. “That would have been his style. But he wouldn’t have done so alone.”
“Is it possible he would have accepted Sun Stealer’s help?”
She shook her head. “Forget it. He didn’t even believe in Sun Stealer. If he’d had an inkling that he was being led—pushed into something—no; he wouldn’t have accepted it.”
“Maybe he didn’t have any choice,” Khouri said. “But anyway; assuming he took a suit, is there any way we can catch him?”
“Not before he reaches Cerberus.” There was no need to think about that. She knew just how quickly a million kilometres of space could be traversed if one could tolerate a constant ten gees of acceleration. “It’s too risky to take suits ourselves; not the kind your husband used. We’ll have to get there in one of the shuttles. It’ll be a lot slower, but there’s less chance Sun Stealer will have infiltrated its control matrix.”
“Why’s that?”
“Claustrophobia. The shuttles are about three centuries less advanced than the suits.”
“And that’s supposed to help us?”
“Believe me, when you’re dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best.” Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared stray into the corridor.
“I remember this place,” Pascale said. “This is where you brought us when—”
Khouri made the door open; the one marked with a barely legible spider.
“Get in,” she said. “Make yourself at home. And start praying that I remember how Ilia worked this thing.”
“Where is she going to meet us?”
“Outside,” Khouri said. “I sincerely hope.”
By which time she was already closing the spider-room’s door; already looking at the brass and bronze controls and hoping for some spark of recognition.
THIRTY-THREE
Cerberus/Hades Orbit, 2566
Volyova slipped out the needier, approaching the Captain.
She knew that she had to get to the hangar chamber as quickly as possible; that any delay might give Sun Stealer the time he needed to find a way to kill her. But there was something she had to do first. There was no logic to it, no rationality—but she knew she had to do it anyway. So she took the stairwells to the Captain’s level, into the deadening cold, her breath seeming to solidify in her throat. There were no rats down here: too cold. And servitors would not be able to reach him without running the risk of becoming part of him, subsumed by the plague.
“Can you hear me, you bastard?” She told her bracelet to warm him enough for conscious thought processes. “If so, pay attention. The ship’s been taken over.”
“Are we still around Bloater?”
“No… no, we’re not still around Bloater. That was some time ago.”
After a few moments the Captain said, “Taken over, did you say? Who by?”
“Something alien, with some unpleasant ambitions. Most of us are dead now—Sajaki, Hegazi; all the other crew you ever knew—and the few of us left are getting out while we can. I don’t expect to ever come back aboard, which is why what I’m about to do might strike you as slightly drastic.”
She aimed the needler now; directing it towards the cracked, misshaped husk of the reefer encasing the Captain.
“I’m going to let you warm, do you understand? For the last few decades it’s been all we can do to keep you as cool as possible—but it hasn’t worked, so maybe it was never the right approach. Maybe what we need to do now is let you take over the damned ship, in whatever way you see fit.”
“I don’t think—”
“I don’t care what you think, captain. I’m doing it anyway.”
Her finger grew tight against the needler’s trigger; already she was mentally calculating how his rate of spread would increase as he warmed, and the numbers she was coming up with were not quite believable… but then, they had never considered doing this before.
“Please, Ilia.”
“Listen, svinoi,” she said, finally. “Maybe it works; maybe it doesn’t. But if I’ve ever shown any loyalty to you—if you even remember me—all I’m asking is that you do what you can for us.”
She was about to fire; about to unload the needler into the reefer, but then something made her hesitate.
“There’s one other thing I have to say to you. Which is that I think I know who the hell you are, or rather who the hell you became.”
Sh
e was acutely conscious of the dryness of her mouth, and of the time she was wasting, but something made her continue.
“What do you have to say to me?”
“You travelled with Sajaki to the Pattern Jugglers, didn’t you? I know. The crew spoke of it often enough—even Sajaki himself. What no one discussed was what happened down there: what the Jugglers did to the two of you. Oh, I know there were rumours—but that’s all they were; engineered by Sajaki to throw me off the scent.”
“Nothing happened there.”
“No; what happened was this. You killed Sajaki, all those years ago.”
His answer came back, amused, as if he had misheard her. “I killed Sajaki?”
“You had the Jugglers do it; had them erase his neural patterns and overlay your own on his mind. You became him.”
Now she had to catch her breath, although she was almost done.
“One existence wasn’t enough for you—and maybe by then you’d sensed that this body wasn’t going to last too long; not with so many viruses flying around. So you colonised your adjutant, and the Jugglers did what you wished because they’re so alien they couldn’t even grasp the concept of murder. But that’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“No…”
“Shut up. That’s why Sajaki never wanted you healed—because by then he was you, and he didn’t need healing. And that’s why Sajaki was able to denature my treatment for the plague—because he had all your expertise. I should let you die for this, svinoi—except of course you already are, because what’s left of Sajaki is now redecorating the medical centre.”
“Sajaki—dead?” It was as if her news of the others’ deaths had not reached him at all.
“Is that justice for you? You’re alone now. All on your own. So the only thing you can do is protect your own existence against Sun Stealer by growing. By letting the plague have its way with you.”
“No… please.”
“Did you kill Sajaki, Captain?”
“It was… such a long time ago…” But there was something in his voice which was not quite denial. Volyova delivered the needler rounds into the reefer. Watched the few remaining indices on its shell flicker and die, and then felt the chill fading, by the second, ice on the shell already beginning to glisten with its own warming.
“I’m going now,” she said. “I just wanted to get to the truth. I suppose I should wish you good luck, Captain.”
And then she was running, afraid of what might be happening behind her.
Sajaki’s suit stayed tantalisingly ahead of Sylveste as they commenced the descent into the funnel of the bridgehead. The half-submerged, inverted cone of the device had seemed tiny only minutes ago, but now it was all he could see, its steep grey sides blocking the horizon in all directions. Occasionally the bridgehead shuddered, and Sylveste was reminded that it was fighting a constant battle with the crustal defences of Cerberus, and that he should not count blindly on its protection. If it failed, he knew, it would be consumed in hours; the wound in the crust would close, and with it his escape route.
“It is necessary to replenish reaction mass,” the suit said.
“What?”
Sajaki spoke for the first time since they had left the ship. “We used a lot of mass getting here, Dan. We need to top up before we enter hostile territory.”
“Where from?”
“Look around you. There’s an awful lot of reaction mass waiting to be used.”
Of course; there was nothing to stop them drawing resources from the bridgehead itself. He agreed, doing nothing while Sajaki took control of his suit. One of the steep, incurving walls loomed nearer, dense with ornate extrusions and random clusters of machinery. The scale of the thing was overwhelming now; like a dam wall which curved round until its ends met. Somewhere in that wall, he thought, were the bodies of Alicia and her fellow mutineers…
There was enough sense of gravity to engender a strong sense of vertigo, not aided by the way the bridgehead narrowed below, which made it seem like an infinitely deep shaft. The best part of a kilometre away, the star-shaped speck of Sajaki’s suit had made contact with the precipitous wall on the far side. A few moments later Sylveste touched a narrow ledge, one that jutted no more than a metre beyond the wall. His feet made soft contact and suddenly he was poised there, ready to topple back into the nothingness behind him.
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing,” Sajaki said. “Your suit knows exactly what to do. I suggest you start trusting it: it’s all that’s keeping you alive.”
“Is that meant to reassure me?”
“Do you think reassurance would be especially appropriate at this point? You’re about to enter one of the most alien environments that any human has ever known. I think the last thing you need is reassurance.”
While Sylveste watched, a trunk extruded from the suit’s chest until it made contact with a section of the bridgehead’s wall material. A few seconds later it began to pulse, bulges squirming along its length, back into the suit.
“Vile,” Sylveste said.
“It’s digesting heavy elements from the bridgehead,” Sajaki said. “The bridgehead gives of itself freely, since it recognises the suit as being friendly.”
“What if we run out of power inside Cerberus?”
“You’ll be dead long before running out of power becomes a problem to your suit. But it needs to replenish reaction mass for its thrusters. It has all the energy it needs, but it still requires atoms to accelerate.”
“I’m not sure I like that last bit; about being dead.”
“It isn’t too late to return.”
Testing me, Sylveste thought. For a moment he considered it rationally, but only for a moment. He was scared, yes—more so than he could comfortably remember; even if he went back to Lascaille’s Shroud. But, as then, he knew that the only way to punch through his fear was to push on. To confront whatever it was that led to that fear. But, when the refuelling process was complete, it took all the nerve in the world to step off the ledge and continue the descent into the emptiness enclosed by the bridgehead.
They sank lower, dropping for long seconds before checking their fall with brief squirts of thrust. Sajaki was beginning to allow Sylveste some voluntary control of his suit now; slowly decreasing the suit’s autonomic dominance until Sylveste was controlling most of it himself; the transition was barely noticeable. They were descending now at a rate of thirty metres per second, but it seemed to quicken as the walls of the funnel came closer together. Now Sajaki was only a few hundred metres away, but the facelessness of his suit offered little sense of human presence, no sense of companionship. Sylveste still felt dreadfully alone. And with good reason, he thought—it was possible that no thinking creature had been this close to Cerberus since it was last visited by the Amarantin. What ghosts had festered here in the intervening thousand centuries?
“Approaching the final injection tube,” Sajaki said.
The conic walls constricted now to a diameter of only thirty metres, then plunged vertically into darkness, as far as the eye could see. His suit veered towards the midline of the approaching hole without his bidding; Sajaki’s suit lagged slightly behind.
“I wouldn’t deny you the honour of being first in,” said the Triumvir. “You’ve waited for it long enough, after all.”
They were in the shaft. Sensing their arrival, the walls lit up with recessed red lights. The impression of vertical speed was huge now, and more than a little sickening; too much like being injected down a syringe. Sylveste remembered the time when Calvin had shown him the passage of an endoscope through one of his patients; the ancient surgical tool with a camera eye at one end of its coiled length. He remembered the headlong rush along an artery. He remembered the night flight to Cuvier after he had been arrested at the obelisk excavation, streaking through canyons towards his political nemesis. He wondered if there had ever been a time in his life when he was certain of what lay at the end of those rushing walls.
/> Then the shaft vanished and they were dropping through emptiness.
Volyova reached the hangar chamber, pausing at one of the observation windows to check that the shuttles really were accounted for, and that the data she had seen on her bracelet had not been manipulated by Sun Stealer. The plasma-winged transatmospheric ships were still there, clamped in their holding pens like rows of arrowheads in a fletcher’s workshop. She could begin powering one of them now, via the bracelet, but that was too dangerous, too likely to draw Sun Stealer’s attention and alert him to what she was planning. At the moment she was safe enough, since she had not entered a part of the ship where Sun Stealer’s senses could penetrate. At least, she hoped not.
She could not simply stroll aboard any of the shuttles. The usual access routes would take her through parts of the ship she did not dare enter; places where servitors had free range and janitor-rats were in direct biochemical consort with Sun Stealer. She had only one weapon now: the needler. She had left Khouri with the slug-gun, and while she did not doubt her proficiency, there were limits to what could be achieved by mere skill and determination. Especially as the ship would by now have had time to synthesise armed drones.
So now she found her way to an airlock chamber; not one which led to outside space, but one which accessed the depressurised vault of the hangar. The chamber was knee-deep in effluent, and all its lighting and heating systems had failed. Good. No chance then of Sun Stealer being able to watch her remotely, or even know she was there. She opened a locker and was relieved to find that the lightweight suit it was meant to contain was still present, and that it had not been visibly damaged by exposure to ship-slime. It was less bulky than the kind of suit Sylveste would have taken; less intelligent too, with no servosystems or integral propulsion. Before donning the suit she recited a series of words—well rehearsed—into her bracelet, and then arranged the bracelet to respond to vocal commands spoken into her communicator, rather than via its own acoustic sensors. Then she had to latch on a thruster backpack, taking a moment to stare intently at its controls, as if knowledge of how to use it would bubble up from her memory by sheer force of will. She decided that the basics would come back to her as soon as she required them, and carefully stowed the needler on the suit’s external equipment belt. She exited without fuss, jetting into the hangar, using a small constant thrust level to prevent herself drifting down the chamber. No part of the ship was in freefall, since the ship itself was not orbiting Cerberus, but holding itself artificially fixed in space, a tiny drain on the power of its engines.
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