“Yes?”
“You’re going to need it.”
Clavain nodded and held his bottle aloft. “To me, in that case.”
Antoinette and Xavier raised their own bottles in toast. “To you, Clavain.”
Antoinette and Xavier showed him which rim train to take and made sure he had enough money to cover the fare. He waved goodbye as the train slid out of the station, the battered ruin of Lyle Merrick’s ship vanishing around the gentle curve of the carousel.
Clavain closed his eyes, willing his consciousness rate into a three-to-one ratio, snatching a few moments of calm before he arrived at his destination.
TWENTY
Thorn had been ready to argue with Vuilleumier, but she had agreed to his wishes with surprising ease. It was not that she viewed the prospect of diving into the heart of the Inhibitor activity around Roc with anything less than deep concern, she told him, but that she wanted him to believe that she was totally sincere about the threat. If the only way to convince him of that was to let him see things in close-up, then she would have to go along with his wishes.
“But make no mistake, Thorn. This is dangerous. We’re in uncharted territory now.”
“I’d say we were never exactly safe, Inquisitor. We could have been attacked at any moment. We’ve certainly been within range of human weapons for the last few hours, haven’t we?”
The snake-headed ship plunged towards the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere. The trajectory would take them close to the impact point of one of the extruded tubes, only a thousand kilometres from the roiling chaos of tortured air around the eyelike collision zone. Their sensors could not glimpse anything beneath that confusion, only the vaguest suggestion that the tube continued to plunge deeper into Roc, unharmed by the impact.
“We’re dealing with alien machinery, Thorn. Alien machine psychology, if you want. It’s true that they haven’t attacked us yet, or shown the slightest interest in any of our activities. They haven’t even bothered wiping life off the surface of Resurgam. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a threshold we might inadvertently cross if we’re not very careful.”
“And you think this might constitute being not very careful?”
“It worries me, but if this is what it takes . . .”
“It’s about more than just convincing me, Inquisitor.”
“Do you have to keep calling me that?”
“I’m sorry?”
She made an adjustment to the controls. Thorn heard an orchestrated creaking as the ship’s hull reshaped itself for optimum transatmospheric insertion. The gas giant Roc was about all they could see outside now. “You don’t have to call me that all the time.”
“Vuilleumier, then?”
“My first name is Ana. I’m a lot more comfortable with that, Thorn. Perhaps I shouldn’t call you Thorn, either.”
“Thorn will do. It’s a name I’ve grown into. It seems to fit me rather well. And I wouldn’t want to help Inquisition House in its investigations too much, would I?”
“We know exactly who you are. You’ve seen the dossier.”
“Yes. But I have the distinct impression you’d be less than eager to use it against me, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re useful to us.”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
They continued their descent into Roc without speaking for several minutes. Only the occasional chirp or spoken warning from the console interrupted the silence. The ship was not at all enthusiastic about what was being asked of it, and kept offering suggestions as to what it would rather be doing.
“I think we’re like insects to them,” Vuilleumier said eventually. “They’ve come here to wipe us out, like pest-control specialists. They’re not going to bother killing one or two of us—they know it won’t make enough of a difference to matter. Even if we sting them, I’m not sure we’d provoke the response we were expecting. They’ll just keep on doing their work, slowly and methodically, knowing that it will be more than sufficient in the long run.”
“Then we’re safe now, is that it?”
“It’s just a theory, Thorn—it isn’t something I particularly want to bet my life on. But it’s clear that we don’t understand all that they’re doing. There has to be a higher purpose to their activity. There has to be a reason for it; it can’t simply be the annihilation of life for its own sake. Even if it was, even if they were nothing more than mindless killing machines, there’d be more efficient ways of doing it.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Only that we shouldn’t count on our understanding of events to be correct, any more than an insect understands about pest-control programmes.” With that, she clenched her jaw and palmed a control. “All right. Hold on. This is where it gets a little bumpy.”
A pair of armoured eyelids snicked down over the windows, blocking the view. Almost immediately Thorn felt the ship rumble, the way a car did when it left a smooth road and hit dirt. He had weight, too—it was the tiniest pressure squeezing him back into his seat, but it would keep growing and growing.
“Who are you exactly, Ana?”
“You know who I am. We’ve been over that.”
“Not to my entire satisfaction, we haven’t. There’s something funny about that ship, isn’t there? I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but the whole time I was aboard it, I had the feeling you and the other woman, Irina, were holding your breath. It was as if you couldn’t wait to get me off it.”
“You have urgent work to do on Resurgam. Irina didn’t agree with you coming aboard in the first place. She’d much rather you stayed on the planet, putting in the groundwork for the evacuation operation.”
“A few days won’t make much difference. No, that definitely wasn’t it. There was something else. You two were hiding something, or hoping I wouldn’t notice something. I just can’t work out exactly what it was.”
“You have to trust us, Thorn.”
“You make it difficult, Ana.”
“What else could we do? We showed you the ship, didn’t we? You saw that it was real. It has enough capacity to evacuate the planet. We even showed you the shuttle hangar.”
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s everything that you didn’t show me that makes me wonder.”
The rumbling had increased. The ship felt as if it was tobogganning down an ice-slope, hitting the occasional buried rock. The hull creaked and reshaped itself again and again, struggling to smooth out the transition. Thorn found himself excited and terrified at the same time. He had entered a planet’s atmosphere only once before in his life, when his parents had brought him as a child to Resurgam. He had been frozen and unconscious at the time, and had no more recollection of it than he did of his birth in Chasm City.
“We didn’t show you everything because we don’t know that the whole of the ship is safe,” Vuilleumier said. “We don’t know what sorts of traps Volyova’s crew left behind.”
“You didn’t even let me see it from outside, Ana.”
“It wasn’t convenient. Our approach—”
“Had nothing to do with it. There’s something about that ship that you can’t let me see, isn’t there?”
“Why are you asking me this now, Thorn?”
He smiled. “I thought the gravity of the situation would focus your attention.”
She said nothing.