They orbited the weapon, steering their suits through the interstices of the monorail system.
The harness was a frame that Volyova had welded around the weapon, equipped with thrusters and control interfaces. She had achieved only very limited success in communicating with the weapons, and those that she had been most confident of controlling had been among those now lost. Once, she had attempted to interface all the weapons via a single controlling node: an implant-augmented human plugged into a gunnery seat. Though the concept had been sound, the gunnery had caused her no end of troubles. Indirectly, the whole mess they were in now could be traced back to those experiments.
“Harness looks sound,” Volyova said. “I think I’ll try to run through a low-level systems check.”
“Wake the weapon up, you mean?”
“No, no . . . just whisper a few sweet nothings to it, that’s all.” She tapped commands into the thick bracelet encircling her spacesuited forearm, watching the diagnostic traces as they scrolled over her faceplate. “I’m going to be preoccupied while I do this, so it’s down to you to keep an eye out for any trouble. Understood?”
“Understood. Um, Ilia?”
“What.”
“We have to make a decision on Thorn.”
Volyova did not like to be distracted, most especially not during an operation as dangerous as this. “Thorn?”
“You heard what the man said. He wants to come aboard.”
“And I said he can’t. It’s out of the question.”
“Then I don’t think we’ll be able to count on his help, Ilia.”
“He’ll help us. We’ll make the bastard help us.”
She heard Khouri sigh. “Ilia, he isn’t some piece of machinery we can poke or prod until we get a certain response. He doesn’t have a root level. He’s a thinking human being, fully capable of entertaining doubts and fears. He cares desperately about his cause and he won’t risk jeopardising it if he thinks we’re holding anything back from him. Now, if we were telling the truth, there’d be no good reason for refusing him the visit he asked for. He knows we have a means to reach the ship, after all. It’s only reasonable that he’d want to see the Promised Land he’s leading his people into, and the reason why Resurgam has to be evacuated.”
Volyova was through the first layer of weapons protocols, burrowing through her own software shell into the machine’s native operating system. So far nothing she had done had incurred any hostile response from either the weapon or the ship. She bit her tongue. It all got trickier from hereon in.
“I don’t think it’s in the least bit reasonable,” Volyova replied.
“Then you don’t understand human nature. Look, trust me on this. He has to see the ship or he won’t work with us.”
“If he saw this ship, Khouri, he’d do what any sane person would do under the same circumstances: run a mile.”
“But if we kept him away from the worst parts, the areas which have undergone the most severe transformations, I think he might still help us.”
Volyova sighed, while keeping her attention on the work at hand. She had the horrible, overfamiliar feeling that Khouri had already given this matter some consideration—enough to deflect her obvious objections.
“He’d still suspect something,” she countered.
“Not if we played our cards right. We could disguise the transformations in a small area of the ship and then keep him to that. Just enough so that we can appear to give him a guided tour, without seeming to be holding anything back.”
“And the Inhibitors?”
“He has to know about them eventually—everyone will. So what’s the problem with Thorn finding out now rather than later?”
“He’ll ask too many questions. Before long he’ll put two and two together and figure out who he’s working for.”
“Ilia, you know we have to be more open with him . . .”
“Do we?” She was angry now, and it was not merely because the weapon had refused to parse her most recent command. “Or do we just want to have him around because we like him? Think very carefully before you answer, Khouri. Our friendship might depend on it.”
“Thorn means nothing to me. He’s just convenient.”
Volyova tried a new syntax combination, holding her breath until the weapon responded. Previous experience had taught her that she could only make so many mistakes when talking to a weapon. Too many and the weapon would either clam up or start acting defensively. But now she was through. In the side of the weapon, what had appeared to be seamless alloy slid open to reveal a deep machine-lined inspection well, glowing with insipid green light.
“I’m going in. Watch my back.”
Volyova steered her suit along the weapon’s flanged length until she reached the hatch, braked and then inserted herself with a single cough of thrust. She arrested her movement with her feet, coming to a halt inside the well. It was large enough for her to rotate and translate without any part of her suit coming into contact with the machinery.
Not for the first time, she found herself wondering about the dark ancestry of these thirty-three horrors. The weapons were of human manufacture, certainly, but they were far in advance of the destructive potential of anything else that had ever been invented. Centuries ago, long before she had joined the ship, Nostalgia for Infinity had found the cache tucked away inside a fortified asteroid, a nameless lump of rock circling an equally nameless star. Perhaps a thorough forensic examination of the asteroid might have revealed some clue as to who had made the weapons, or who had owned them up to that point, but the crew had been in no position to linger. The weapons had been spirited aboard the ship, which had then left the scene of the crime with all haste before the asteroid’s stunned defences woke up again.
Volyova, of course, had theories. Perhaps the most likely was that the weapons were of Conjoiner manufacture. The spiders had been around long enough. But if these weapons belonged to them, why had they ever allowed them to slip out of their hands? And why had they never made an effort to reclaim what was rightfully theirs?
It was immaterial. The cache had been aboard the ship for centuries. No one was going to come and ask for it back now.
She looked around, inspecting the well. Naked machinery surrounded her: control panels, read-outs, circuits, relays and devices of less obvious function. Already there was an apprehensive feeling in the back of her mind. The weapon was focusing a magnetic field on part of her brain, instilling a sense of phobic dread.
She had been here before. She was used to it.
She unhooked various modules stationed around her suit’s thruster frame, attaching them to the interior of the well via epoxy-coated pads. From these modules, which were of her own design, she extended several dozen colourcoded cables that she connected or spliced into the exposed machinery.
“Ilia . . .” Khouri said. “How are you doing?”
“Fine. It doesn’t like me being in here very much, but it can’t kick me out—I’ve given it all the right authorisation codes.”
“Has it started doing the fear thing?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact it has.” She experienced a moment of absolute screaming terror, as if someone was poking her brain with an electrode, stirring her most primal fears and anxieties into daylight. “Do you mind if we have this conversation later, Khouri? I’d like to get this . . . over . . . as soon as possible.”
“We’re still going to have to decide about Thorn.”
“Fine. Later, all right?”
“He has to come here.”
“Khouri, do me a favour: shut up about Thorn and keep your eye on the job, understand?”
Volyova paused and forced herself to focus. So far, despite the fear, it had gone as well as she had hoped it would. She had only once before gone this deep into the weapon’s control architecture, and that was when she had prioritised the commands coming in from the ship. Since she was at the same level now she could theoretically, by issuing the right command syntax, lock out the Captain for good. This was only one weapon; there were thirty-two others, and some of those were utterly unknown to her. But she would surely not need the whole cache to make a difference. If she could gain control of a dozen or so weapons, it would hopefully be enough to throw a spanner into the Inhibitor’s plans . . .
And she would not succeed by prevarication.
“Khouri, listen to me. Minor change of plan.”
“Uh-oh.”