“You call that a minor change of plan?”
“There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”
Before she could stop herself, before the fear became overwhelming, she connected the remaining lines. Status lights winked and pulsed; displays rippled with alphanumeric hash. The fear sharpened. The weapon really did not want her to tamper with it on this level.
“Tough luck,” she said. “Now let’s see . . .” And with a few discreet taps on her bracelet she released webs of mind-numbingly complicated command syntax. The three-valued logic that the weapon’s operating system ran on was characteristic of Conjoiner programming, but it was also devilishly hard to debug.
She sat still and waited.
Deep inside the weapon, the legality of her command would be thrashed out and scrutinised by dozens of parsing modules. Only when it had satisfied all criteria would it be executed. If that happened, and the command did what she thought it would, the weapon would immediately delete the Captain from the list of authenticated users. There would then only be one valid way to work the weapon, which was through her control harness, a piece of hardware disconnected from the ship’s Captain-controlled infrastructure.
It was a very sound theory.
She had the first indication that the command syntax had been bad an instant before the hatch slid shut on her. Her bracelet flashed red; she started assembling a particularly poetic sequence of Russish swearwords and then the weapon had locked her in. Next, the lights went out, but the fear remained. The fear, in fact, had grown very much stronger—but perhaps that was partly her own response to the situation.
“Damn . . .” Volyova said. “Khouri . . . can you hear me?”
But there was no reply.
Without warning machinery shifted around her. The chamber had become larger, revealing dimly glowing vaults plunging deeper into the weapon. Enormous fluidly shaped mechanisms floated in blood-red light. Cold blue lights flickered on the shapes or traced the flow lines of writhing intestinal power lines. The entire interior of the weapon appeared to be reorganising itself.
And then she nearly died of fright. She sensed something else inside the weapon, a presence that was coming closer, creeping through the shifting components with phantom slowness.
Volyova hammered on the hatch above her. “Khouri . . . !”
But the presence had reached her. She had not seen it arrive but she sensed its sudden proximity. It was shapeless, crouched behind her. She thought she could almost see it in her peripheral vision, but even as she wrenched her head around the presence flowed into her blind spot.
Suddenly her head hurt, the blinding pain making her squeal aloud.
Remontoire squeezed his lean frame into one of Nightshade’s viewing blisters, establishing by visual means that the engines had actually shut off. He had issued the correct sequence of neural commands, instantly feeling the shift to weightlessness as the ship ceased accelerating, but still he felt the need for additional confirmation that his order had been followed. Given what had happened already, he would not have been entirely surprised to see that the blue glow of scattered light was still present.
But he saw only darkness. The engines really had shut down; the ship was drifting at constant velocity, still falling towards Epsilon Eridani but far too slowly ever to catch Clavain.
“What now?” Felka asked quietly. She floated next to him, one hand hooked into a soft hoop that the ship had obligingly provided.
“We wait,” he said. “If I’m right, Skade won’t be long.”
“She won’t be pleased.”
He nodded. “And I’ll reinstate thrust as soon as she tells me what’s going on. But before that I’d like some answers.”
The crab arrived a few moments later, easing through a fist-sized hole in the wall. “This is unacceptable. Why have you . . .”
“The engines are my responsibility,” Remontoire said pleasantly, for he had rehearsed exactly what he would say. “They’re a highly delicate and dangerous technology, all the more so given the experimental nature of the new designs. Any deviation from the expected performance might indicate a serious, possibly catastrophic, problem.”
The crab waggled its manipulators. “You know perfectly well that there was nothing at all wrong with the engines. I demand that you restart them immediately. Every second we spend drifting is to Clavain’s advantage.”
“Really?” Felka said.
“Only in the very loosest sense. If we’re delayed any further our only realistic option will be a remote kill, rather than a live capture.”
“Not that that’s ever been under serious consideration, has it?” Felka asked.
“You’ll never know if Remontoire persists with this . . . insubordination.” “Insubordination?” Felka hooted. “Now you almost sound like a Demarchist.”
“Don’t play games, either of you.” The crab pivoted around on its suckered feet. “Reinstate the engines, Remontoire, or I’ll find a way to do it without you.”
It sounded like a bluff, but Remontoire was prepared to believe that overriding his commands was within the capabilities of an Inner Sanctum member. It might not be easy, certainly less easy than having him do what she wanted, but he did not doubt that Skade was capable of it.
“I will . . . once you show me what your machinery does.”
“My machinery?”
Remontoire reached over and prised the crab from the wall, each suckered foot detaching with a soft, faintly comical slurp. He held the crab at eye-level, looking into its tight assemblage of sensors and variegated weapons, daring Skade to hurt him. The little legs thrashed pathetically.
“You know exactly what I mean,” he said. “I want to know what it is, Skade. I want to know what you’ve learned to do.”
“This machinery . . . whatever it is . . .”
Skade cut him off. “You’d have found out about it sooner or later. As would all of the Mother Nest.”
“Was it something you learned from Exordium?”
“Exordium showed us the direction to follow, that’s all. Nothing was handed to us on a plate.” The crab skittered ahead of them and reached a sealed bulkhead, one of the mechanical doors that had closed before the increase in acceleration. “We have to go through here, into the part of the ship I sealed off. I should warn you that things will feel a little different on the other side. Not immediately, but this barricade more or less marks the point at which the effects of the machinery rise above the threshold of human sensitivity. You may find it disturbing. Are you certain that you wish to continue?”
Remontoire looked at Felka; Felka looked back at him and nodded.
“Lead on, Skade,” said Remontoire.
“Very well.”
The barricade wheezed open, revealing an even darker and deader space beyond it. They stepped through and then descended several further levels via vertical shafts, riding piston-shaped discs.
Remontoire examined his feelings but nothing was out of the ordinary. He raised a quizzical eyebrow in Felka’s direction, to which she responded with a short shake of her head. She felt nothing unusual either, and she was a good deal more attuned to such matters than he was.
They continued on through normal corridors, pausing now and then until they regained the energy to continue. Eventually they arrived at a plain stretch of walling devoid of any indicators—real, holographic or entoptic—to mark it as out of the ordinary. Yet the crab halted at a certain spot and after a moment a hole opened in the wall at chest height, enlarging to form an aperture shaped like a cat’s pupil. Red light spilled through the inverted gash.
“This is where I live,” the crab told them. “Please come in.”
They followed the crab into a large warm space. Remontoire looked around, realising as he did so that nothing he saw matched his expectations. He was simply in an almost empty room. There were a few items of machinery in it, but only one thing, resembling a small, slightly macabre piece of sculpture, that he did not instantly recognise. The room was filled with the soft hum of equipment, but again the sound was not unfamiliar.
The largest item was the first thing he had noticed. It was a black egg-shaped pod resting on a heavy rust-red pedestal inset with quivering analogue dials. The pod had the antique look of much modern space technology, like a relic from the earliest days of near-Earth exploration. He recognised it as an escape pod of Demarchist design, simple and robust. Conjoiner ships never carried escape pods.
This unit was marked with warning instructions in all the common languages—Norte, Russish, Canasian—along with icons and diagrams in bright primary colours. There were bee-stripes and cruciform thrusters; the grey bulges of sensors and communication systems; collapsed solar-wings and parachutes.
There were explosive bolts around a door and a tiny triangular window in the door itself.