“Interesting?” she repeated.
“Yes. But not in quite the way we’d wish.”
“Ilia?” It was the Captain. “We’re ready now. The last cache weapon is outside the hull.”
She tugged the earpiece out and spoke normally. “Good. Anything to report?”
“Nothing major. Five weapons deployed without incident. Of the remaining three, I noted a transient anomaly with the propulsion harness of weapon six, and an intermittent fault with the guidance subsystems of weapons fourteen and twenty-three. Neither has recurred since deployment.”
She lit a cigarette and smoked a quarter of it before answering. “That doesn’t sound like nothing major to me.”
“I’m sure the faults won’t happen again,” boomed the Captain’s voice. “The electromagnetic environment of the cache chamber is quite different from that beyond the hull. The transition probably caused some confusion, that’s all. The weapons will settle down now that they’re outside.”
“Make a shuttle ready, please.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me. I’m going outside to check on the weapons.” She stamped her feet, waiting for his answer.
“There’s no need for that, Ilia. I can monitor the well-being of the weapons perfectly well.”
“You may be able to control them, Captain, but you don’t know them as well as I do.”
“Ilia . . .”
“I won’t need a large shuttle. I’d even consider taking a suit, but I can’t smoke in one of those things.”
The Captain’s sigh was like the collapse of a distant building. “Very well, Ilia. I’ll have a shuttle ready for you. You’ll take care, won’t you? You can keep to the side of the ship that the Inhibitors can’t see, if you’re careful.”
“They’re a long way from taking any notice of us. That isn’t about to change in the next five minutes.”
“But you appreciate my concern.”
Did the Captain really care for her? She was not certain that she really believed it. Granted, he might be a little lonely out here, and she was his only chance of human companionship. But she was also the woman who had exposed his crime and punished him with this transformation. His feelings towards her were bound to be a little on the complex side.
She had finished enough of the cigarette. On a whim she inserted the butt-end into the wirework head assembly of the servitor, jamming it between two thin metal spars. The tip burned dull orange.
“Filthy habit,” Ilia Volyova said.
She settled into the command seat and assayed the avionics display. The Captain had done a very good job: even the fuel tanks were brimming, although she would not be taking the ship more than a few hundred metres out.
Something nagged at the back of her mind, a feeling she could not quite put her finger on.
She took the shuttle outside, transiting through the armoured doors until she reached naked space. She exited near the much larger aperture where the cache weapons had emerged. The weapons themselves had vanished around the mountainous curve of the great ship’s hull, out of the Inhibitors’ line of sight. Volyova followed the same path, watching the nebulous mass of the shredded planet fall beneath the sharp horizon of the hull.
The eight cache weapons came into view, lurking like monsters. They were all different, but had clearly been shaped by the same governing intellects. She had always suspected that the builders were the Conjoiners, but it was unsettling to have this confirmed by Clavain. She saw no reason for him to have lied. Why, though, had the Conjoiners brought into existence such atrocious tools? It could only have been because they had some intention, at some point, of using them. Volyova wondered whether the intended target had been humanity.
Around each weapon was a harness of girders to which were attached steering rockets and aiming subsystems, as well as a small number of defensive armaments, purely to protect the weapons themselves. The harnesses were able to move the weapons around, and in principle they could have positioned them anywhere within the system, but they were too slow for her requirements. Instead, she had lately fastened sixty-four tug rockets on to the harnesses, eight apiece, positioned at opposing corners of each weapon’s frame. It would take fewer than thirty days to move the eight weapons to the other side of the system.
She nosed the shuttle towards the group of weapons. The weapons, sensing her approach, shifted their positions. She slid through them, then banked, circled and slowed, examining the specific weapons that the Captain had reported difficulties with. Diagnostic summaries, terse but efficient, scrolled on to her wrist bracelet. She called up each weapon, paying meticulous attention to what she saw.
Something was wrong.
Or rather, something was not wrong. There appeared to be nothing the matter with any of the eight weapons.
She felt again that prickly sense of wrongness, the sense that she had been steered into doing something which only felt as if it had been her choice. The weapons were perfectly healthy; indeed, there was no evidence that there had been any faults at all, transient or otherwise. But that could only mean that the Captain had lied to her: that he had reported problems where none existed.
She composed herself. If only she had not taken him at his word, but had checked for herself before leaving the ship . . .
“Captain . . .” she said hesitantly.
“Yes, Ilia?”
“Captain, I’m getting some funny readings here. The weapons all appear to be healthy, no problems at all.”
“I’m quite sure there were transient errors, Ilia.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.” But he did not sound so convinced of himself. “Yes, Ilia, quite sure. Why would I have reported them otherwise?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps because you wanted to get me outside the ship for some reason?”
“Why would I have wanted to do that, Ilia?” He sounded affronted, but not quite as affronted as she would have liked.
“I don’t know. But I have a horrible feeling I’m about to find out.”
She watched one of the cache weapons—it was weapon thirty-one, the quintessence-force weapon—detach from the group. It slid sideways spouting bright sparks from its steering jets, the smooth movement belying the enormous mass of machinery that was being shunted so effortlessly. She examined her bracelet. Gyroscopes spun up, shifting the harness about its centre of gravity. Ponderously, like a great iron finger moving to point at the accused, the enormous weapon was selecting its target.
It was swinging back towards Nostalgia for Infinity.
Belatedly, stupidly, cursing herself, Ilia Volyova understood precisely what was happening.
The Captain was trying to kill himself.
She should have seen it coming. His emergence from the catatonic state had only ever been a ploy. He must have had it in mind all along to end himself, to finally terminate whatever extreme state of misery he found himself in. And she had given him the ideal means. She had begged him to let her use the cache weapons, and he had—too easily, she now saw—obliged.
“Captain . . .”
“I’m sorry, Ilia, but I have to do this.”
“No. You don’t. Nothing has to be done.”
“You don’t understand. I know you want to, and I know you think you do, but you can’t know what it is like.”
“Captain . . . listen to me. We can talk about it. Whatever it is that you feel you can’t deal with, we can discuss it.”