She was about to answer, about to tell him something, when the seat beneath her forced itself upwards, the suddenness of it taking her breath away. She expected the pressure to abate, but it did not. By her own estimation her weight, which had been uncomfortable enough beforehand, had just doubled.
Remontoire looked out and downwards, as Felka had done a few minutes before.
“What just happened? We seem to be accelerating harder,” she observed.
“We are,” he said. “Definitely.”
Felka followed his gaze, hoping to see something different in the view. But as accurately as she could judge, nothing had changed. Even the blue glow behind the engines seemed no brighter.
But after an hour it increased again. Two and a half gees. Felka could stand it no longer. She asked to be allowed back to her quarters, but learned it was still not possible to go into that part of the ship. Nonetheless the ship partitioned a fresh room for her and extruded a couch she could lie on. Remontoire helped her on to it, making it perfectly clear that he had no better idea than she did of what was happening.
“I don’t understand,” Felka said, wheezing between words. “We’re just accelerating. It’s what we always knew we’d have to do if we stood a chance of reaching Clavain.”
Remontoire nodded. “But there’s more to it than that. Those engines were already operating near their peak efficiency when we boosted to one gee. Nightshade may be smaller and lighter than most lighthuggers, but the engines are smaller as well. They were designed to sustain a one-gee cruise up to light-speed, no more than that. Over short distances, yes, greater speed is possible, but that isn’t what’s happening.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we shouldn’t have been able to accelerate so much harder. And definitely not three times as hard. I didn’t see any auxiliary boosters attached to our hull, either. The only other way Skade could have done it would be by jettisoning two-thirds of the mass we had when we left the Mother Nest.”
With some effort Felka shrugged. She had a profound lack of interest in the mechanics of spaceflight—ships were a means to an end as far as she was concerned—but she could work her way through an argument easily enough. “So the engines must be capable of working harder than you assumed.”
“Yes. That’s what I thought.”
“And?”
“They can’t be. We both looked out. You saw that blue glow? Scattered light from the exhaust beam. It would have had to get a lot brighter, Felka, bright enough that we’d have noticed. It didn’t.” Remontoire paused. “If anything, it got fainter, as if the engines had been throttled back a little. As if they weren’t having to work as hard as before.”
“That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?”
“No,” Remontoire said. “No sense at all. Unless Skade’s secret machinery had something to do with it.”
FOURTEEN
Triumvir Ilia Volyova gazed into the abyss of the cache chamber, wondering if she was about to make the kind of dreadful mistake she had always feared would end her days.
Khouri’s voice buzzed in her helmet. “Ilia, I really think we should give this just a tiny bit more thought.”
“Thank you.” She checked the seals on her spacesuit again, and then flicked through her weapon status indicators.
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it. Unfortunately I’ve already given it more than enough thought. If I gave it any more thought I might decide not to do it. Which, given the wider circumstances, would be even more suicidally dangerous and stupid than doing it.”
“I can’t fault your logic, but I’ve a feeling the ship . . . I mean the Captain . . . really isn’t going to like this.”
“No?” Volyova considered that a far from remote possibility herself. “Then perhaps he’ll decide to co-operate with us.”
“Or kill us. Have you considered that?”
“Khouri?”
“Yes, Ilia?”
“Please shut up.”
They were floating inside an airlock that allowed entry into the chamber. It was a large lock, but there was still only just enough room for the two of them. It was not simply that their suits had been augmented with the bulky frames of thruster-packs. They also carried equipment, supplemental armour and a number of semi-autonomous weapons, clamped to the frames at strategic points.
“All right; let’s just get it over with,” Khouri said. “I’ve never liked this place, not from the first time you showed it to me. Nothing that’s happened since has made me like it any more.”
They powered out into the chamber, propelling themselves with staccato puffs of micro-gee thrust.
It was one of five similarly sized spaces in Nostalgia for Infinity ’s interior: huge inclusions large enough to stow a fleet of passenger shuttles or several megatonnes of cargo, ready to be dropped down to a needy colony world. So much time had passed since the days when the ship had carried colonists that only scant traces of its former function remained, overlaid by centuries of adaptation and corruption. For years the ship had rarely carried more than a dozen inhabitants, free to wander its echoing interior like looters in an evacuated city. But beneath the accretions of time much remained more or less intact, even allowing for the changes that had come about since the Captain’s transformations.
The smooth sheer walls of the chamber reached away in all directions, vanishing into darkness and only fitfully illuminated by the roving spotlights of their suits. Volyova had not been able to restore the chamber’s main lighting system: that was one of the circuits the Captain now controlled, and he clearly did not like them entering this territory.
Gradually the wall receded. They were immersed in darkness now, and it was only the head-up display in Volyova’s helmet that gave her any indication of where to aim for or how fast she was moving.
“It feels as if we’re in space,” Khouri said. “It’s hard to believe we’re still inside the ship. Any sign of the weapons?”
“We should be coming up on weapon seventeen in about fifteen seconds.”
On cue, the cache weapon loomed out of the darkness. It did not float free in the chamber, but was embraced by an elaborate arrangement of clamps and scaffolds, which were in turn connected to a complicated three-dimensional monorail system which plunged through the darkness, anchored to the chamber walls by enormous splayed pylons.
This was one of thirty-three weapons that remained from the original forty. Volyova and Khouri had destroyed one of them on the system’s edge after it went rogue, possessed by a splinter of the same software parasite that Khouri herself had carried aboard the ship. The other six weapons had been abandoned in space after the Hades episode. They were probably recoverable, but there was no guarantee they would work again, and by Volyova’s estimate they were considerably less potent than those that remained.
They fired their suit thrusters and came to a halt near the first weapon.
“Weapon seventeen,” Volyova said. “Ugly son of a svinoi, don’t you think? But I’ve had some success with this one—reached all the way down to its machine-language syntax layer.”
“Meaning you can talk to it?”
“Yes. Isn’t that just what I said?”
None of the cache weapons looked exactly alike, though they were all clearly the products of the same mentality. This one looked like a cross between a jet engine and a Victorian tunnelling machine: an axially symmetric sixty-metre-long cylinder faced with what could have been cutting teeth or turbine blades, but which were probably neither. The thing was sheathed in a dull, battered alloy that seemed either green or bronze, depending on the way their lights played across it. Cooling flanges and fins leant it a rakish art deco look.
“If you can talk to it,” Khouri said, “can’t we just tell it to leave the ship and then use it against the Inhibitors?”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Volyova’s sarcasm could have etched holes in metal. “The problem is that the Captain can control the weapons as well, and at the moment his commands will veto any I send, since his come in at root level.”
“Mm. And whose bright idea was that?”
“Mine, now you come to mention it. Back when I wanted all the weapons to be controlled from the gunnery, it seemed quite a good idea.”
“That’s the problem with good ideas. They can turn out to be a real fucking pain in the arse.”
“So I’m learning. Now then.” Volyova’s tone became hushed and businesslike. “I want you to follow me, and keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to check my control harness.”