“Thorn wants to be the saviour of the people; the man who leads them to the Promised Land.”
“You seem to think more direct action is appropriate.”
“Have you studied the object lately, Captain?”
Of course he had. He still had morbid curiosity, if nothing else. He had watched the Inhibitors dismantle the gas giant with ridiculous ease, spinning it apart like a child’s toy. He had seen the dense shadows of new machines coming into existence in the nebula of liberated matter, components as vast as worlds themselves. Embedded in the glowing skein of the nebula, they resembled tentative, half-formed embryos. Clearly the machines would soon assemble into something even larger. It was, perhaps, possible to guess what it would look like. The largest component was a trumpet-shaped maw, two thousand kilometres wide and six thousand kilometres deep. The other shapes, the Captain judged, would plug into the back of this gigantic blunderbuss.
It was a single machine, nothing like the extended ring-shaped structures that the Inhibitors had thrown around the gas giant. A single machine that could maim a star, or so Volyova believed. Captain John Brannigan almost thought it would be worth staying alive to see what the machine would do.
“I’ve studied it,” he told Volyova.
“It’s nearly finished, I think. A matter of months, perhaps, maybe less, and it will be ready. That’s why we can’t take any chances.”
“You mean the cache?”
He sensed her trepidation. “You told me you would consider letting me use it, Captain. Is that still the case?”
He let her sweat before answering. She really did not appear to know about the laser signal. He was certain it would have been the first thing on her mind had she noticed it.
He asked, “Isn’t there some risk in using the cache, Ilia, when we have come so far without being attacked?”
“There’s even more risk in leaving it too late.”
“I imagine Khouri and Thorn were less than enthusiastic about hitting back now if the exodus is proceeding according to plan.”
“They’ve moved barely two thousand people off the surface, Captain—one per cent of the total. It’s no more than a gesture. Yes, things will move more quickly once the government is handling the operation. But there will be a great deal more civil unrest, too. That’s why we have to consider a pre-emptive strike against the Inhibitors.”
“We would surely draw their fire,” he pointed out. “Their weapons would destroy me.”
“We have the cache.”
“It has no defensive value, Ilia.”
“Well, I’ve thought about that,” she said testily. “We’ll deploy the weapons at a distance of several light-hours from this ship. They can move themselves into position before we activate them, just like they did against the Hades artefact.”
There was no need to remind her that the attack against the Hades artefact had gone less than swimmingly. But, in fairness to Volyova, it was not the weapons themselves that had let her down.
He groped for another token objection. He must not appear too willing, or she would begin to have suspicions. “What if they were traced back to us . . . to me?”
“By then we’ll have inflicted a decisive blow. If there is a response, we’ll worry about it then.”
“And the weapons that you had in mind . . . ?”
“Details, Captain, details. You can leave that part to me. All you have to do is assign control of them to me.”
“All thirty-three weapons?”
“No . . . that won’t be necessary. Just the ones I’ve earmarked for use. I don’t plan to throw everything against the Inhibitors. As you kindly reminded me, we may need some weapons later, to deal with any reprisal.”
“You’ve thought all this through, haven’t you?”
“Let’s just say there have always been contingency plans,” she told him. Then her tone of voice changed expectantly. “Captain, one final thing.”
He hesitated before replying. Here, perhaps, it came. She was going to ask him about the laser signal spraying repeatedly against his hull, the signal that he had been very unwilling to bring to her attention.
“Go on, Ilia,” he said, heavy-hearted.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those cigarettes, have you?”
THIRTY
She toured the cache chamber, riding through it like a queen inspecting her troops. Thirty-three weapons were present, no two of them alike. She had spent much of her adult life studying them, together with the seven others that were now lost or destroyed. And yet in all that time she had come to no more than a passing familiarity with most of the weapons. She had tested very few of them in any meaningful sense. Indeed, those she had known most about were the ones that were now lost. Some of the remaining weapons, she was certain, could not even be tested without wasting the one opportunity that existed to use them. But they were not all like that. The tricky part was distinguishing amongst the subclasses of cache weapon, cataloguing them according to their range, destructive capability and the number of times they could be used. Though she had always concealed her ignorance from her colleagues, Volyova had no more than the sketchiest idea about what at least half of her weapons were capable of doing. But she had worked scrupulously hard to gain even that inadequate understanding.
Based on what she had learned in her years of study, she had come to a decision as to which weapons would be deployed against the Inhibitor machinery. She would release eight of the weapons, retaining twenty-five aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. They were low-mass weapons, so they could be deployed across the system quickly and discreetly. Her studies had also suggested that the eight were weapons with sufficient range to strike the Inhibitor site, but there was a lot of guesswork involved in her calculations. Volyova hated guesswork. She was even less sure that they would be able to do enough damage to make a difference to the Inhibitors’ work. But she was certain of one thing: they would get noticed. If the human activity in the system had so far been on the buzzing-fly level—irritating without being actively dangerous—she was about to notch it up to a full-scale mosquito attack.
Swat this, you bastards, she thought.
She passed each weapon amongst the eight, slowing down her propulsion pack long enough to make sure nothing had changed since her last inspection. Nothing had. The weapons hung in their armoured cradles precisely as she had left them. They looked just as foreboding and sinister, but they had not done anything unexpected.
“These are the eight I’ll need, Captain,” she said.
“Just the eight?”
“They’ll do for now. Mustn’t put all our chicks in one egg, or whatever the metaphor is.”
“I’m sure there’s something suitable.”
“When I say the word, I’ll need you to deploy each weapon one at a time. You can do that, can’t you?”
“When you say ‘deploy,’ Ilia . . . ?”
“Just move them outside the ship. Outside you, I mean,” she corrected herself, having noticed that the Captain now tended to refer to himself and the ship as the same entity. She did not want to do anything, no matter how slight, that might interfere with his sudden spirit of co-operation. “Just to the outside,” she continued. “Then, when all eight weapons are outside, we’ll run another systems check. We’ll keep you between them and the Inhibitors, just to be on the safe side. I don’t have the feeling that we’re being monitored, but it makes sense to play safe.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Ilia.”
“Right then. We’ll start with good old weapon seventeen, shall we?”
“Weapon seventeen it is, Ilia.”
The motion was sudden and startling. It was such a long time since any of the cache weapons had moved in any way that she had forgotten what it was like. The cradle that held the weapon began to glide along its support rail so that the whole obelisk-sized mass of the weapon slid smoothly and silently aside. Everything in the cache chamber took place in silence, of course, but nonetheless it seemed to Volyova that there was a more profound silence here, a silence that was judicial, like the silence of a place of execution.
The network of rails allowed the cache weapons to reach the much smaller chamber immediately below the main one. The smaller chamber was just large enough to accommodate the largest weapon, and had been rebuilt extensively for just this purpose.
She watched weapon seventeen vanish into the chamber, remembering her encounter with the weapon’s controlling subpersona “Seventeen,” the one that had shown worrying signs of free will and a marked lack of respect for her authority. She did not doubt that something like Seventeen existed in all the weapons. There was no sense worrying about it now; all she could do was hope that the Captain and the weapons continued to do what she asked of them.
No sense worrying about it, no. But she did have a dreadful sense of foreboding all the same.