And yet something very unexpected was happening. Her suit, via the monitors on the hull, was telling her that the ship was being bombarded by optical laser light.
Volyova’s first reaction was a crushing sense of failure. Finally, for whatever reason, she had alerted the Inhibitors and drawn their attention. It was as if just intending to deploy the weapons had been sufficient. The wash of laser light must be from their long-range sensor sweeps. They were noticing the ship, sniffing it out of the darkness.
But then she realised that the emissions were not coming from the right part of the sky.
They were coming from interstellar space.
“Ilia . . . ?” the Captain asked. “Is something wrong? Shall I abort the deployment?”
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” she said.
“Knew about what?”
“That someone was firing laser light at us. Communications frequency.”
“I’m sorry, Ilia, but I just . . .”
“You didn’t want me to know about it. And I didn’t until I tapped into those hull sensors to watch the weapon emerging.”
“What emissions . . . ah, wait.” His great deific voice hesitated. “Wait. I see what you mean now. I didn’t notice them—there was too much else going on. You’re more attuned to such concerns than me, Ilia . . . I am very self-focused these days. If you wait, I will backtrack and determine when the emissions began . . . I have the sensor data, you know . . .”
She didn’t believe him, but knew there was no way to prove otherwise. He controlled everything, and it was only through a slip of his concentration that she had learned about the laser light at all.
“Well. How long?”
“No more than a day, Ilia. A day or so . . .”
“What does ‘or so’ mean, you lying bastard?”
“I mean . . . a matter of days. No more than a week . . . at a conservative estimate.”
“Svinoi. Lying pig bastard. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I assumed you were already aware of the signal, Ilia. Didn’t you pick it up as your shuttle approached me?”
Ah, she thought. So it was a signal now, not just a meaningless blast of laser light. What else did he know?
“Of course I didn’t. I was asleep until the very last moment, and the shuttle wasn’t programmed to watch for anything other than in-system transmissions. Interstellar communications are blue-shifted out of the usual frequency bands. What was the blue shift, Captain?”
“Modest, Ilia . . . ten per cent of light. Just enough to shift it out of the expected frequency band.”
She did the sums. Ten per cent of light . . . a lighthugger couldn’t slow down from that kind of speed in much less than thirty days. Even if a starship was breaking into the system, she still had half a month before it would arrive. It wasn’t much of a breathing space, but it was a lot better than finding out they were mere days away.
“Captain? The signal must be an automated transmission locked on repeat, or they wouldn’t have kept up it up for so long. Patch it through to my suit. Immediately.”
“Yes, Ilia. And the cache weapons? Shall I abandon the deployment?”
“Yes . . .” she started saying, before correcting herself. “No. No! Nothing changes. Keep deploying the fucking things—it’ll still take hours to get all eight of them outside. You heard what I said before, didn’t you? I want your mass screening them from the Inhibitors.”
“What about the source of the signal, Ilia?”
Had the option been available to her, she would have kicked part of him then. But she was floating far from anything kick-able. “Just play the fucking thing.”
Her faceplate opaqued, blanking out the view of the cache chamber. For a moment she stared into a dimensionless sea of white. Then a scene formed, a slow dissolve into an interior. She appeared to be standing at one end of a long austerely furnished room, with a black table between her and the three people at the table’s far end. The table was a wedge of pure darkness.
“Hello,” said the only human male among the three. “My name is Nevil Clavain, and I believe you have something I want.”
At first glance he appeared to be an extension of the table. His clothes were the same unreflective black, so that only his hands and head loomed out of the shadows. His fingers were laced neatly in front of him. Ropelike veins curled across the backs of his hands. His beard and hair were white, his face notched here and there by crevasses of extreme shadow.
“He means the devices inside your ship,” said the person sitting next to Clavain. She was a very young-looking woman who wore a similarly black quasi-uniform. Volyova struggled with her accent, thinking it sounded like one of the local Yellowstone dialects. “We know you have thirty-three of them. We have a permanent fix on their diagnostic signatures, so don’t even think of bluffing.”
“It won’t work,” said the third speaker, who was a pig. “We are very determined, you see. We captured this ship, when they said it couldn’t be done. We’ve even given the Conjoiners a bloody nose. We’ve come a long way to get what we want and we won’t be going home empty-handed.” As he spoke he reinforced his points with downward swipes of one trotterlike hand.
Clavain, the first speaker, leaned forward. “Scorpio’s right. We have the technical means to repossess the weapons. The question is, do you have the good sense to hand them over without a fight?”
Volyova felt as if Clavain was waiting for her to answer. The urge to say something even though she knew this was not a real-time message was almost overwhelming. She began to speak, knowing that the suit could capture whatever she was saying and uplink it back to the intruding ship. There would be a hell of a turnaround on the signal, though: three days out, at the very least, which meant she could not expect a reply for a week.
But Clavain was speaking again. “Let’s not be too dogmatic, however. I appreciate you have local difficulties. We’ve seen the activity in your system, and we understand how it might give cause for concern. But that doesn’t change our immediate objective. We want those weapons ready to be handed over as soon as we break into circumstellar space. No tricks, no delays. That isn’t negotiable. But we can discuss the details, and the benefits of mutual co-operation.”
“Not when you’re half a month out, you can’t,” Volyova whispered.
“We will arrive shortly,” Clavain said. “Perhaps sooner than you expect. But for now we’re outside efficient communications range. We will continue transmitting this message until we arrive. In the meantime, to facilitate negotiations I have prepared a beta-level copy of myself. I am sure you are familiar with the necessary simulation protocols. If not, we can also supply technical documentation. Otherwise, you can proceed to a full and immediate installation. By the time this message has cycled one thousand times, you will have all the data you need to implement my beta-level.” Clavain smiled reasonably, spreading his hands in a gesture of openness. “Please, will you consider it? We will of course make any reciprocal arrangements for your own beta-level, should you wish to uplink a negotiating proxy. We await your reaction with interest. This is Nevil Clavain, for Zodiacal Light, signing off.”
Ilia Volyova swore to herself. “Of course we’re familiar with the fucking protocols, you patronising git.”
The message had cycled more than a thousand times, which meant that the necessary data to implement the beta-level had already been recorded.
“Did you get that, Captain?” she asked.
“Yes, Ilia.”
“Scrub the beta-level, will you? Check it for any nasties. Then find a way to implement it.”
“Even if it contained some kind of military virus, Ilia, I doubt very much that it would harm me in my present state. It would be a little like a man with advanced leprosy worrying about a mild skin complaint, or the captain of a sinking ship concerning himself with a minor incident of woodworm, or . . .”
“Yes, I get the point, thank you. But do it anyway. I want to talk to Clavain. Face to face.”
She reached up and de-opaqued her faceplate just in time to see the next cache weapon commence its crawl towards space. She was furious beyond words. It was not simply the fact that the newcomers had arrived so unexpectedly, or made such awkward and specific demands. It was the way the Captain appeared to have gone out of his way to conceal the whole business from her.
She did not know what he was playing at, but she did not like it at all.
“Start,” she said, not without a little wariness.
The beta-level had conformed to the usual protocols, backwardly compatible with all major simulation systems since the mid Belle Époque. It also revealed itself to be free of any contaminating viruses, either deliberate or accidental. Volyova still did not trust it, so she spent another half-day verifying the fact that the simulation had not, in some exceedingly devious way, managed to infiltrate and modify her virus filters. It appeared that it had not, but she still did her best to make sure it was isolated from as much of the ship’s control network as possible.
The Captain, of course, was entirely correct: he was, in all major respects, now the ship. What attacked the ship attacked him. And since he had become the ship thanks to his own takeover by a super-adapted alien plague, it appeared highly unlikely that anything of merely human origin would be able to piggyback its way into him. He had already been stormed and corrupted by an expert invader.