She had met the stored Sylveste only once. In the more than sixty years that had passed since then—the time that Volyova had spent carefully infiltrating the very society that feared and loathed her—Khouri had allowed herself to forget that Sylveste was still out there, was still in some sense alive in the Hades computational matrix. On those rare occasions when she did think about him, she found herself wondering if he ever gave a moment’s thought to the consequences of his actions all those years ago; if memories of the Inhibitors ever stirred him from vain dreams of his own brilliance. She doubted it, for Sylveste had not struck her as someone overly troubled by the results of his own deeds. And in any case, by Sylveste’s accelerated reckoning, for time passed very rapidly in the Hades matrix, the events must have been centuries of subjective time in his past, as inconsequential as childhood misdeeds. Very little could touch him in there, so what was the point of worrying about him?
But that hardly helped those who were still outside the matrix. Khouri and Volyova had spent only twenty of those sixty-plus years out of reefersleep, for their infiltration scheme had been necessarily slow and episodic. But of those twenty years, Khouri doubted that a single day had passed when she had not thought of—and worried about—the prospect of the Inhibitors.
Now at least her worry had transmuted into certainty. They were here; the thing that she had dreaded had finally started.
And yet it was not to be a quick, brutal culling. Something titanic was being brought into existence, something that required the raw material of three entire worlds. For the time being the activities of the Inhibitors could not be detected from Resurgam, even with the tracking systems put in place to spot approaching lighthuggers. But Khouri doubted that this could continue to be the case. Sooner or later the activities of the alien machines would exceed some threshold and the citizenry would begin to glimpse strange apparitions in the sky.
Very likely, all hell would break loose.
But by then it might not even matter.
TEN
Xavier saw one ship detach itself from the bright flow of other vessels on the main approach corridor to Carousel New Copenhagen, tugged down his helmet’s binoculars and swept space until he locked on to the ship itself. The image enlarged and stabilised, the spined pufferfish profile of Storm Bird rotating as the ship executed a slow turn. The Taurus IV salvage tug was still nosing against its hull, like a parasite looking for one last nibble.
Xavier blinked hard, requesting a higher magnification zoom. The image swelled, wobbled and then sharpened.
“Dear God,” he whispered. “What the hell have you done to my ship?”
Something awful had happened to his beloved Storm Bird since the last time he had seen it. Whole parts were gone, ripped clean away. The hull looked as if it had seen its last service some time during the Belle Époque, not a couple of months ago. He wondered where Antoinette had taken it—straight into the heart of Lascaille’s Shroud, perhaps? Either that or she had had a serious run-in with well-armed banshees.
“It’s not your ship, Xavier. I just pay you to look after it now and then. If I want to trash it, that’s entirely my business.”
“Shit.” He had forgotten that the suit-to-ship comm channel was still open. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“It’s a lot worse than it looks, Xave. Trust me on that.”
The salvage tug detached at the last minute, executed a needlessly complex pirouette and then was gone, curving away to its home on the other side of Carousel New Copenhagen. Xavier had already calculated how much the salvage tug was going to cost in the end. It didn’t matter who ultimately picked up that tab. It was going to be one hell of a sting, whether it was him or Antoinette, since their businesses were so intertwined. They were well into the red at the favour bank, and it was going to take about a year of retroactive favours before they groped their way back into the black . . .
But things could have been worse. Three days ago he had more or less given up hope of ever seeing Antoinette again. It was depressing how quickly the elation at finding her alive had degenerated into his usual nagging worries about insolvency. Dumping that hauler certainly hadn’t helped . . .
Xavier grinned. But hell, it had been worth it.
When she had announced her approach Xavier had suited up, gone out on to the carousel’s skin and hired a skeletal thruster trike. He gunned the trike across the fifteen kilometres to Storm Bird, then orbited it around the ship, satisfying himself that the damage looked every bit as bad up close as he had first thought it was. None of it would cripple the ship for good; it was all technically fixable—but it would cost money to put right.
He swung around, bringing the trike forwards so that he was ahead of Storm Bird. Against the dark hull he saw the two bright parallel slits of the cabin windows. Antoinette was a tiny silhouetted figure in the uppermost cabin, the small bridge that she only used during delicate docking/undocking procedures. She was reaching up to work controls above her head, a clipboard tucked under one arm. She looked so small and vulnerable that all his anger drained out of him in an instant. Instead of worrying about the damage, he should have been rejoicing that the ship had kept her alive all this time.
“You’re right; it’s superficial,” he said. “We’ll get it fixed easily enough. Do you have enough thruster control to do a hard docking?”
“Just point me to the bay, Xave.”
He nodded and flipped the trike over, arcing away from Storm Bird. “Follow me in, then.”
Carousel New Copenhagen loomed larger again. Xavier led Storm Bird around the rim, tapping the trike’s thrusters until he had matched rotation with the carousel, sustaining the pseudo-orbit with a steady rumble of power from the trike’s belly. They passed over a complex of smaller bays, repair wells lit up with golden or blue lights and the periodic flashes of welding tools. A rim train snaked past, overtaking them, and then he saw Storm Bird’s shadow blot out his own. He looked back and behind. The freighter was coming in nice and steadily, although it looked as large as an iceberg.
The huge shadow slid and dipped, flowing over the hemispherical gouge in the rim known locally as Lyle’s Crater, the impact point where the rogue trader’s chemical-drive scow had collided with the carousel while trying to evade the authorities. It was the only serious damage that the carousel had sustained during wartime, and while it could have been repaired easily enough, it now made far more money as a tourist attraction than it would ever have had it been reclaimed and returned to normal use. People came in shuttles from all around the Rust Belt to gape at the damage and hear stories of the deaths and heroics that had followed the incident. Even now, Xavier saw a party of ghouls being led out on to the skin by a tourist guide, all of them hanging by harnesses from a network of lines spidering across the underside of the rim. Since he knew several people who had died during the accident, Xavier felt only contempt for the ghouls.
His repair well was a little further around the rim. It was the second largest on the carousel and it still looked as if it would be an impossibly tight fit, even allowing for all the bits of Storm Bird that Antoinette had helpfully removed . . .
The iceberg-sized ship came to a halt relative to the carousel and then tipped up, nose down to the rim. Through the gouts of vapour coming from the carousel’s industrial vents and the ship’s own popping micro-gee verniers, Xavier saw a loom of red lasers embrace Storm Bird, marking her position and velocity with ångström precision. Still applying a half-gee of thrust from its main motors, Storm Bird began to push itself into its allocated slot in the rim. Xavier held station, wanting to close his eyes, for this was the part that he dreaded.
The ship nosed in at a speed of no more than four or five centimetres per second. Xavier waited until the nose had vanished into the carousel, still leaving three-quarters of the ship out in space, and then guided his trike alongside, slipping ahead of Storm Bird. He parked the trike on a ledge, disembarked and authorised the trike to return to the place where he had hired it. He watched the skeletal thing buzz away, streaking back out into open space.
He did close his eyes now, hating the final docking procedure, and only opened them again after he had felt the rapid thunder of the docking latches, transmitted through the fabric of the repair bay to his feet. Below Storm Bird, pressure doors began to close. If she was going to be stuck here for a while, and it looked as if she would, they might even consider pumping the chamber so that Xavier’s repair monkeys could work without suits. But that was something to worry about later.
Xavier made sure that the pressurised connecting walkways were aligned with and clamped to Storm Bird’s main locks, guiding them manually. Then he made his way to an airlock, passing out of the repair bay. He was in a hurry, so did not bother removing more than his gloves and helmet. He could feel his heart in his chest, knocking like an air pump that needed a new armature.
Xavier walked down the connecting tube to the airlock closest to the flight deck. Lights were pulsing at the end of the tube, indicating that the lock was already being cycled.
Antoinette was coming through.
Xavier stooped and placed his helmet and gloves on the floor. He started running down the tube, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. The airlock door was irising open with glorious slowness, condensation heaving out of it in thick white clouds. The corridor dilated ahead of him, time crawling the way it did when two lovers were running towards each other in a bad holo-romance.
The door opened. Antoinette was standing there, suited-up but for her helmet, which she cradled beneath one arm. Her blunt-cut blonde hair was dishevelled and plastered across her forehead with grease and filth, her skin was sallow and there were dark bags under her eyes. Her eyes were tired, bloodshot slits. Even from where Xavier was standing, she smelt as if she hadn’t been near a shower in weeks.
He didn’t care. He thought she still looked pretty great. He pulled her towards him, the tabards of their suits clanging together. Somehow he managed to kiss her.
“I’m glad you’re home,” Xavier said.
“Glad to be home,” Antoinette replied.
“Did you . . . ?”
“Yes,” she said. “I managed it.”
He said nothing for several moments, desperately wishing not to trivialise what she had done, fully aware of how important it had been to her and that nothing must spoil that triumph. She had been through enough pain already; the last thing he wanted to do was add to it.
“I’m proud of you.”
“Hey. I’m proud of me. You bloody well should be.”
“Count on it. I take it there were a few difficulties, though?”
“Let’s just say I had to get into Tangerine’s atmosphere a bit faster than I’d planned.”
“Zombies?”
“Zombies and spiders.”
“Hey, two for the price of one. But I don’t imagine that’s quite how you saw it. And how the hell did you get back if there were spiders out there?”
She sighed. “It’s a long story, Xave. Some strange shit happened around that gas giant and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.”
“So tell me.”
“I will. After we’ve eaten.”