“Wait.” Khouri raised a hand. “Who requested what?”
Clavain scratched his beard. “I’m not sure. I just felt an obligation to do it. You have to understand that I’m just software. I wouldn’t claim otherwise. It’s entirely possible that something booted me up and intervened in my execution, forcing me to act in a certain manner.”
Khouri and Thorn exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing, Khouri knew. The only agency that could have switched Clavain back on and made him help Volyova was the Captain.
Khouri felt cold, intensely aware that she was being observed. “Clavain,” she said. “Listen to me. I don’t know what you are, really. But you have to understand: she would sooner have died than have you do what you’ve just done.”
“I know,” Clavain said, extending his palms in a gesture of helplessness. “But I had to do it. It’s what I would have done had I been here.”
“Ignored her deepest wish, is that what you mean?”
“Yes, if you want to put it like that. Because someone once did the same for me. I was in the same position as her, you see. Injured—dying, in fact. I’d been wounded, but I definitely didn’t want any stinking machines in my skull. I’d have rather died than that. But someone put them in there anyway. And now I’m grateful. She gave me four hundred years of life I wouldn’t have had any other way.”
Khouri looked at the bed, at the woman lying in it, and then back to the man who had, if not saved her life, at the very least postponed her moment of death.
“Clavain . . .” she said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Clavain is a Conjoiner,” said a voice as thin as smoke. “You should listen to him very carefully, because he means what he says.”
Volyova had spoken, yet there had been no movement from the figure on the bed. The only indication that she was now conscious, which had not been the case when they arrived, was a shift in the biomedical traces hovering above her.
Khouri wrenched her helmet off. Clavain’s apparition vanished, replaced by the skeletal machine. She placed the helmet on the floor and knelt by the bed. “Ilia?”
“Yes, it’s me.” The voice was like sandpaper. Khouri observed the tiniest movement of Volyova’s lips as she formed the words, but the sound came from above her.
“What happened?”
“There was an incident.”
“We saw the damage to the hull when we arrived. Is . . .”
“Yes. It was my fault, really. Like everything. Always my fault. Always my damned fault.”
Khouri glanced back at Thorn. “Your fault?”
“I was tricked.” The lips parted in what might almost have been a smile. “By the Captain. I thought he had finally come around to my way of thinking. That we should use the cache weapons against the Inhibitors.”
Khouri could almost imagine what must have happened. “How did he trick . . .”
“I deployed eight of the weapons beyond the hull. There was a malfunction. I thought it was genuine, but it was really just a way to get me outside the ship.”
Khouri lowered her voice. It was an absurd gesture—there was nothing that could be hidden from the Captain now—but she could not help it. “He wanted to kill you?”
“No,” Volyova said, hissing her answer. “He wanted to kill himself, not me. But I had to be there to see it. Had to be a witness.”
“Why?”
“To understand his remorse. To understand that it was deliberate, and not an accident.”
Thorn joined them. He too had removed his helmet, tucking it respectfully under one arm. “But the ship’s still here. What happened, Ilia?”
Again that weary half-smile. “I drove my shuttle into the beam. I thought it might make him stop.”
“Seems as if it did.”
“I didn’t expect to survive. But my aim wasn’t quite right.”
The servitor strode towards the bed. Unclothed of Clavain’s image, its motions appeared automatically more machinelike and threatening.
“They know that I injected medichines into your head,” it said, its voice no longer humanoid. “And now they know that you know.”
“Clavain . . . the beta-level . . . had no choice,” Volyova said before either of her two human visitors could speak. “Without the medichines I’d be dead now. Do they horrify me? Yes. Utterly, to the absolute core of my being. I am racked with revulsion at the thought of them crawling inside my skull like so many spiders and snakes. At the same time, I accept the necessity of them. They are the tools I have always worked with, after all. And I am fully aware that they cannot work miracles. Too much damage has been done. I am not amenable to repair.”
“We’ll find a way, Ilia,” Khouri said. “Your injuries can’t be . . .”
Volyova’s whisper of a voice cut her off. “Forget me. I don’t matter. Only the weapons matter now. They are my children, spiteful and wicked as they may be, and I won’t have them falling into the wrong hands.”
“Now we seem to be getting to the crux of things,” Thorn said.
“Clavain—the real Clavain—wants the weapons,” Volyova said. “By his own estimation he has the means to take them from us.” Her voice grew louder. “Isn’t that so, Clavain?”
The servitor bowed. “I’d much rather negotiate their hand-over, Ilia, as you know, especially now that I’ve invested time in your welfare. But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.”
“Why are you telling us that?” Khouri said.
“It’s in his—our—best interests,” the servitor said amiably. “I’d far rather convince you to give up the weapons without a fight. At the very least we’d avoid any risk of damaging the damned things.”
“You don’t seem like a monster to me,” Khouri said.
“I’m not,” the servitor replied. “And nor is my counterpart. He’ll always choose the path of least bloodshed. But if some bloodshed is required . . . well, my counterpart won’t flinch from a little surgical butchery. Especially not now.”
The servitor said the last with such emphasis that Thorn asked, “Why not now?”
“Because of what he has had to do to get this far.” The servitor paused, its openwork head scanning each of them. “He betrayed everything that he had believed in for four hundred years. That wasn’t done lightly, I assure you. He lied to his friends and left behind his loved ones, knowing that it was the only way to get this done. And lately he took a terrible decision. He destroyed something that he loved very much. It cost him a great deal of pain. In that sense, I am not an accurate copy of the real Clavain. My personality was shaped before that dreadful act.”
Volyova’s voice rasped out again, instantly commanding their attention. “The real Clavain isn’t like you?”
“I’m a sketch taken before a terrible darkness fell across his life, Ilia. I can only speculate on the extent to which we differ. But I would not like to trifle with my counterpart in his current state of mind.”
“Psychological warfare,” she hissed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That is why you’ve come, isn’t it? Not to help us negotiate a sensible settlement, but to put the fear of God into us.”
The servitor bowed again, with something of the same mechanical modesty. “If I were to achieve that,” Clavain said, “I would consider my work well done. The path of least bloodshed, remember?”