In this system, yes. I’d need you to deploy beyond the ship . . . beyond this chamber . . . and help me.
[But what if we decide not to help you?]
You will. I’ve looked after you for so long, taking care of you, keeping you safe from harm. I know you’ll help me.
The weapon held her suspended, stroking her mind playfully. Now she knew what a mouse felt like after the cat had caught it. She felt that she was only an instant away from having her spine broken in two.
But as abruptly as it had come, the paralysis eased. The weapon still imprisoned her, but she was regaining some voluntary muscle control.
[Perhaps, Ilia. But let’s not pretend that there aren’t complicating factors.]
Nothing we can’t work around . . .
[It will be very difficult for us to do anything without the co-operation of the other one, Ilia. Even if we wanted to.]
The other one?
[The other . . . entity . . . that continues to exert a degree of control over us.]
Her mind dwelled on the possibilities before she realised what the weapon had to be talking about. You mean the Captain.
[Our autonomy is not so great that we can act without the other entity’s permission, Ilia. No matter how cleverly you attempt to persuade us.]
The Captain just needs persuading, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll come around, in the end.
[You have always been an optimist, haven’t you, Ilia?]
No . . . not at all. But I have faith in the Captain.
[Then we hope your powers of persuasion are up to the task, Ilia.]
I do too.
She gasped suddenly, as if she had been stomach-punched. Her head was empty again and the horrid sense of something sitting immediately behind her had gone, as abruptly as a slamming door. There was not even a hint of the presence in her peripheral vision. She was floating alone, and although she was still imprisoned in the weapon, the feeling that it was haunted had vanished.
Volyova gathered her breath and her composure, marvelling at what had just happened. In all the years she had worked with the weapons she had never once suspected that any of them harboured a guardian subpersona, much less a machine intelligence of at least high gamma-level status—even possibly low-to-medium beta-level.
The weapon had scared the living daylights out of her. Which, she supposed, had undoubtedly been the intended affect.
There was a bustle of motion around her. The access panel—in a totally different part of the wall than she remembered—budged open an inch. Harsh blue light rammed through the gap. Through it, squinting, Volyova could just make out another spacesuited figure. “Khouri?”
“Thank God. You’re still alive. What happened?”
“Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?” She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.
“What, you gave it the wrong command or something?”
“No, I gave it the right command but for a different interpreter shell than I was actually accessing.”
“But that would still make it the wrong command, wouldn’t it?”
Volyova turned herself around until her helmet was aligned with the slit of light. “It’s more technical than that. How did you get the panel open?”
“Good old brute force. Or is that not technical enough?”
Khouri had wedged a crowbar from her suit utility kit into what must have been a hair-fine joint in the weapon’s skin, and then levered back on that until the panel slid open.
“And how long did you take to do that?”
“I’ve been trying to get it open since you went inside, but it only just gave way, right this minute.”
Volyova nodded, fairly certain that absolutely nothing would have happened until the weapon decided it was time to let her go. “Very good work, Khouri. And how long do you think it will take to get it open all the way?”
Khouri adjusted her position, re-attaching herself to the weapon so that she could apply more leverage to the bar. “I’ll have you out of there in a jiffy. But while I’ve got you there, so to speak, can we come to some agreement on the Thorn issue?”
“Listen to me, Khouri. He only barely trusts us now. Show him this ship, give him even a hint of a reason to begin to guess who I am, and you won’t see him for daylight. We’ll have lost him, and with him the only possible means of evacuating that planet in anything resembling a humane manner.”
“But he’s even less likely to trust us if we keep finding excuses for why he can’t come aboard . . .”
“He’ll just have to deal with them.”
Volyova waited for a response, and waited, and then noticed that there no longer appeared to be anyone on the other side of the gap. The hard blue light that had been coming from Khouri’s suit was gone, and no hand was on the tool.
“Khouri . . . ?” she said, beginning to lose her calm again.
“Ilia . . .” Khouri’s voice came through weakly, as if she were fighting for breath. “I think I have a slight problem.”
“Shit.” Volyova reached for the end of the crowbar and tugged it through to her side of the hatch. She braced herself and then worked the gap wider, until it was just wide enough for her to push her helmet through. In intermittent flashes she saw Khouri falling into the darkness, her suit harness tumbling away from her. Crouched on the side of the weapon she also saw the belligerent lines of a heavy-construction servitor. The mantislike machine must have been under the Captain’s direct control.
“You vicious bastard! It was me who broke into the weapon, not her . . .”
Khouri was very distant now, perhaps halfway to the far wall. How fast was she moving? Three or four metres per second, perhaps. It was not fast, but her suit’s armour was not designed to protect her against impacts. If she hit badly . . .
Volyova worked harder, forcing the hatch open inch by painful inch. Dully, she realised that she was not going to make it in time. It was taking too long. Khouri would reach the wall long before Volyova freed herself.
“Captain . . . you’ve really done it now.”
She pushed harder. The crowbar slipped from her fingers, whacked the side of her helmet and went spinning into the dark depths of the machine. Volyova hissed her anger, knowing that she did not have time to go searching for the lost tool. The hatch was wide enough to wriggle through now, but to do so she would have to abandon her harness and life-support pack. She could survive long enough to fend for herself, but there would be no way to save Khouri.
“Shit,” she said. “Shit . . . shit . . . shit.”
The hatch slid open.
Volyova climbed through the hole and kicked off from the side of the weapon, leaving the servitor behind. There was no time to reflect on what had just happened, except to acknowledge that only Seventeen or the Captain could have made the hatch open.
She had her helmet drop a radar overlay over her faceplate. Volyova rotated and then got an echo from Khouri. Her fall was taking her through the long axis of the chamber, through a gallery of menacing stacked weapons. Judging by her trajectory she must have already glanced against one of the monorail tracks that threaded the chamber.