“No . . .” She was suddenly weary. “No. It didn’t happen like that. She just made it seem that way, don’t you understand? Nobody actually died.”
“And you can be sure of that, can you?”
“I was there.”
The hull creaked and reconfigured itself again. Shortly they would be outside the electromagnetic influence of the gas giant. The Inhibitor processes continued unabated: the slow laying of the sub-atmospheric tubes, the building of the great orbital arc. What had just happened within Roc had made no difference to that grander scheme.
“Tell me about it, Ana. Is that really your name, or is it another layer of untruth that I need to peel back?”
“It is my name,” she said. “But Vuilleumier isn’t. That was a cover. It was a colonist name. We created a history for me, the necessary past that enabled me to infiltrate the government. My true name is Khouri. And yes, I was part of the Triumvir’s crew. I came here aboard Nostalgia for Infinity. We came to find Sylveste.”
Thorn folded his arms. “Well, now we’re finally getting somewhere.”
“The crew wanted Sylveste, that’s all. They had no grudge against the colony. They used misinformation to make you think that they were more willing to use force than was really the case. But Sylveste double-crossed us. He needed a way to explore the neutron star and the thing in orbit around it, the Cerberus /Hades pair. He persuaded the Ultras to help him with their ship.”
“And afterwards? What happened then? Why did the two of you come back to Resurgam if you had a starship to yourselves?”
“There was trouble on the ship, as you guessed. Serious fucking trouble.”
“A mutiny?”
Khouri bit her lip and nodded. “Three of us, I suppose, turned against the rest. Ilia and myself, and Sylveste’s wife, Pascale. We didn’t want Sylveste to explore the Hades pair.”
“Pascale? As in Pascale Girardieau, you mean?”
Khouri remembered that Sylveste’s wife had been the daughter of one of the most powerful colonial politicians; the man whose regime had taken power after Sylveste was deposed for his beliefs.
“I didn’t know her that well. She’s dead now. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“This isn’t going to be easy, Thorn. You’ll just have to accept what I say, understand? No matter how insane or unlikely it sounds. Although given what’s just happened, I have a feeling you’ll be more receptive than before.”
He touched a finger to his lip. “Try me.”
“Sylveste and his wife entered Hades.”
“You mean the other object, surely? Cerberus?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “I mean Hades. They entered the neutron star, although it turned out that it’s a lot more than just a neutron star. It’s not really a neutron star at all, actually; more a kind of giant computer, left behind by aliens.”
He shrugged. “Like you say, it’s not as if I haven’t seen some strange things today. And? What happened next?”
“Sylveste and his wife are inside the computer, running like programs. Like alpha-levels, I guess.” She raised a finger, anticipating his point. “I know this, Thorn, because I took a stroll inside it myself. I encountered Sylveste, after he’d been mapped into Hades. Pascale too. As a matter of fact, there’s probably a copy of me in there as well. But I—this me—didn’t stay. I came back out here into the real universe, and I haven’t been back since. Matter of fact, I’m not planning on ever going back. There’s no easy way into Hades, not unless you count dying by being ripped apart by gravitational tidal stresses.”
“But you think the mind we met was Sylveste’s?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “Sylveste’s been inside Hades for subjective centuries, Thorn—subjective aeons, probably. What happened to us all sixty years ago must just be a dim, distant memory from the dawn of time for him. He’s had time to evolve beyond anything our imaginations can deal with. And he’s immortal, since nothing within Hades has to die. I can’t guess how he’d act now, whether we’d even recognise his mind. But it sure as hell felt like Sylveste to me. Maybe he was able to recreate himself the way he used to be, just so I’d know what it was that saved us.”
“He’d take an interest in us?”
“He’s never shown any sign of it before. But then again, nothing very much has happened in the outside world since he was mapped into Hades. But now, all of a sudden, the Inhibitors have arrived and they’ve started ripping the place up. Information must still be reaching him inside Hades, even if it’s only on an emergency basis. But think about it, Thorn. There is some serious shit going down here. It might even affect Sylveste. We can’t know that, but we can’t say for sure it isn’t true either.”
“So what was that thing?”
“An envoy, I suppose. A chunk of Hades, sent out to gather information. And Sylveste sent a copy of himself along with it. The envoy learned what it could, buzzed around the machinery, shadowed us, and then headed back to Hades. Presumably when it gets there it’ll merge back into the matrix. Maybe it was never totally disconnected—there could have been a filament of nuclear matter a single quark wide stretching all the way from the marble back to the edge of the system, and we’d never have known it.”
“Go back a bit. What happened after you left Hades? Did Ilia come with you?”
“No. She was never mapped into the matrix. But she survived and we met up again in orbit around Hades, inside Nostalgia for Infinity. The logical thing to have done would have been to get away from this system, a long way away, but it wasn’t happening. The ship was, well, not exactly damaged, but changed. It had suffered a kind of psychotic episode. It didn’t want to have any further dealings with the external universe. It was all we could do to get it back to the inner system, within an AU of Resurgam.”
“Hm.” Thorn had his chin propped on his knuckle. “This gets better, it really does. The odd thing is, I actually think you might be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you’d at least come up with something that made sense.”
“It does make sense, you’ll see.”
“That much I think you’ve convinced me of,” Thorn said.
“Sylveste brought them down, unless they were already on their way here. That’s why he might still feel some obligation to protect us, or at least take a passing interest in the external universe. The thing around Hades was a kind of trigger, we think. Sylveste knew there was risk in what he did, but he didn’t care.” Khouri scowled, feeling a surge of anger. “Fucking arrogant scientist. I was supposed to kill him, you know. That’s why I was on that ship in the first place.”
“Another delicious complication.” He nodded approvingly. “Who sent you?”
“A woman from Chasm City. Called herself the Mademoiselle. She and Sylveste went years back. She knew what he was up to, and that he had to be stopped. That was my job. Trouble was, I fucked up.”
“You don’t look like the sort to commit cold-blooded murder.”
“You don’t know me, Thorn. Not at all.”
“Not yet, perhaps.” He looked at her long and hard until, with some reluctance, she turned away from his gaze. He was a man she felt attracted to and she knew that he was a man who believed in something. He was strong and brave—she had seen that for herself, in Inquisition House. And it was true, even if she did not necessarily want to admit it, that she had engineered this situation with some inkling of how it might play out, from the moment she had insisted that they bring Thorn aboard. But there was no escaping the single painful truth that continued to define her life, even after so much had happened. She was a married woman.
Thorn added, “But there’s always time, as they say.”
“Thorn . . .”
“Keep talking, Ana. Keep talking.” Thorn’s voice was very soft. “I want to hear it all.”
“I see you are on your way home,” she said, intense displeasure etched into every word. “I see also that you went much closer to the heart of their activity than we agreed. That is not good. Not good at all.”
“She doesn’t sound happy,” Thorn whispered.
“What you did was exceptionally dangerous. I just hope you learned something for your efforts. I demand that you make all haste back to the starship. We mustn’t detain Thorn from his urgent work on Resurgam . . . nor the Inquisitor from her duties in Cuvier. I will have more to say on this matter when you return.” She paused before adding, “Irina out.”
“She still doesn’t know that I know,” Thorn said.
“I’d better tell her.”
“That doesn’t sound terribly wise to me, Ana.”