They lifted from Resurgam, quickly lancing into the clear skies above the storm. Eventually there was something above Sylveste, small at first and really only visible because it occasionally occluded the stars behind it. It looked no larger than a sliver of coal, but it kept on growing, until its roughly conical shape became obvious, and what had at first seemed like a silhouette of total blackness began to show faint details within its own shape, gloomily underlit by the world around which it was orbiting. The lighthugger grew until it seemed impossibly large, blocking half the sky, and then kept on growing. The ship had not changed greatly since his last trip aboard. Sylveste knew—without being much impressed by the fact—that ships like this were always redesigning themselves, although the changes would usually be subtle modifications of the interior, rather than radical overhauls of the exterior layout (although that did happen as well, perhaps once every century or two). For a moment he worried that it might now lack the capability he wished—but then he remembered what the ship had done to Phoenix. It was hard to forget, in truth, since the evidence of that attack was still glaringly visible below him; a lotus-bloom of grey destruction set into the face of Resurgam.
A door had opened in the dark hull of the ship. The door looked far too small to accept even one of the suited, let alone all of them, but as they neared it became obvious that the door was tens of metres wide and would admit them all with ease. Sylveste, his wife and the other two Ultras from the ship, one of whom held the wounded Volyova, vanished inside, and the door closed on them.
Sajaki brought them to a holding area where they sloughed the suits and breathed normally. There was a taste to the air which slammed him back to his last visit aboard. He had forgotten how the ship smelled.
“You wait here,” Sajaki said, while their suits tidied themselves up and moved to one wall. “I have to attend to my colleague.”
He knelt down and busied himself with Volyova’s armour. Sylveste toyed with the idea of telling Sajaki not to expend too much effort in helping the other Triumvir, then decided that was possibly not the best course of action. He might have already pushed Sajaki to the edge of his patience when he crushed the Cal sim. “What exactly happened down there?”
“I don’t know.” That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed. “I don’t know and for the moment—for the moment—it doesn’t matter.” He studied a readout in Volyova’s suit. “Her injuries, while serious, don’t seem to be fatal. Given time, she can be healed. Also, I now have you. Everything else is detail.” Then he cocked his head towards the other woman, who had slipped out of her suit. “Still, something troubles me, Khouri…”
“What?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter… for the moment.” He looked back at Sylveste. “Incidentally, that little trick you did with the sim—don’t imagine for one instant that I was impressed by that.”
“You should be. How are you going to get me to fix the Captain now?”
“With Calvin’s help, of course. Don’t you remember that I kept a back-up the last time you brought Cal aboard? Granted, it’s slightly out-of-date, but the surgical expertise is all there.”
It was a good bluff, Sylveste thought, but that was all it was. Still, there was a back-up, of sorts… or else he would never have destroyed the sim.
“Talking of which… is the Captain so grievously unwell that he can’t meet me in person?”
“You’ll meet him,” Sajaki said. “All in good time.”
The other woman and Sajaki were removing scabs of damaged hide from Volyova’s suit, a process which resembled the shelling of a crab. Eventually Sajaki murmured something to the woman and they halted their work, evidently deciding that it was too delicate to be continued here. Presently a trio of servitors glided into the room. Two of the machines lofted Volyova between them and then left with her, accompanied by Sajaki and the woman. Sylveste had not seen her during his last visit aboard, but she seemed to have assumed a fairly elevated role in the ship’s hierarchy. The third servitor squatted down and observed Sylveste and Pascale with one sullen camera eye.
“He didn’t even ask me to take off my mask and goggles,” Sylveste said. “It’s like he hardly cares that he has me.”
Pascale nodded. She was fingering her clothes, seemingly convinced that the suit’s gel-air should have left some sticky residue behind on them. “Whatever happened down there must have thrown his plans completely. Maybe he’d be more triumphant if things had gone according to plan.”
“Not Sajaki; triumphant just isn’t his style. But I’d at least have expected him to spend a few minutes gloating.”
“Maybe the fact that you destroyed the sim…”
“Yes; that’ll have thrown him.” As he spoke, he did so in the knowledge that his words were almost certainly being recorded. “There may still be some residual functionality in the copy he made of Cal, even allowing for the self-destruct routines, though probably not enough for any kind of channelling, even with one-to-one neural congruency between sim and recipient.” Sylveste found a pair of storage crates and moved them over to use for chairs. “I’m sure he already tried to run the sim in some poor fool’s body, though.”
“And it must have failed.”
“Messily, probably. He’s probably hoping now that I can work with the damaged copy without channelling; just relying on my knowledge of Cal’s instincts and methodologies.”
Pascale nodded. She was shrewd enough not to ask the obvious question: what kind of plan would Sajaki have if his own copy was too damaged even for that? Instead, she said, “Do you have any idea what happened down there?”
“No—and I think Sajaki was telling the truth when he said the same thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to plan. Maybe some kind of power-struggle within the crew, acted out on the surface because whoever was involved never got a chance aboard.” But while the idea sounded halfway plausible to him, that was as far as his thinking took him. Too much time had gone by, even within Sajaki’s reference frame, for Sylveste to trust his usually infallible processes of insight.
He would have to play things very carefully indeed until he understood the dynamics of the current crew. Assuming they gave him the luxury of time…
Pascale knelt down next to her husband. They had both removed their masks now, but only Pascale had removed her dust-goggles. “We’re in a lot of danger, aren’t we? If Sajaki decides he can’t use you…”
“He’ll return us to the surface unharmed.” Sylveste took Pascale’s hands. Ranks of empty suits towered around them, as if the two of them were unwanted despoilers in an Egyptian tomb and the suits were mummies. “Sajaki can’t ever rule out my being useful to him again, in the future.”
“I hope you’re right… because that was quite a risk you took.” She looked at him now with an expression he had rarely seen before. It was one of quiet, calm warning. “With my life as well.”
“Sajaki isn’t my master. I just had to remind him of that; to let him know no matter how clever he gets, I’ll always be ahead of him.”
“But he is your master now, don’t you understand? He may not have the sim, but he’s got you. That still puts him ahead in my book.”
Sylveste smiled and reached for an answer that was both true and exactly what Sajaki would expect of him. “But not as far as he thinks.”
Sajaki and the other woman came back less than an hour later, accompanied by a huge chimeric. Sylveste recognised the man from his previous trip aboard as Triumvir Hegazi, but only just. Hegazi had always been an extreme example of his kind—almost as comprehensively cyborgised as his Captain—but in the intervening time, Hegazi had further submerged his core humanity in machine supplements, exchanging various prosthetic parts for newer or more elegant substitutes, and had gained a whole new entourage of entoptics, most of which were designed to interact with the motion of his body parts, creating an off-spilling cascade of rainbow-coloured ghost limbs which lingered in the air for a second or so before fading. Sajaki wore unassuming shipboard clothes devoid of rank or ornamentation, emphasising the lightness of his build. But Sylveste was wise enough not to judge the man by his lack of bulk and absence of obvious weapons prosthetics. Machines undoubtedly seethed beneath his skin, giving him inhuman speed and strength. He was at least as dangerous as Hegazi and a good deal quicker, Sylveste knew.
“I can’t exactly say it’s entirely a pleasure,” Sylveste said, addressing Hegazi. “But I admit to experiencing a mild frisson of surprise at the fact that you haven’t imploded under the weight of your prosthetics, Triumvir.”
“I suggest you take that as a compliment,” Sajaki said to the other Triumvir. “It’s the closest you’ll get from Sylveste.”
Hegazi fingered the moustache which he still cultivated, despite the encroaching prosthetics which cased his skull.
“Let’s see how witty he sounds when you’ve shown him the Captain, Sajaki-san. That’ll wipe the smile off his face.”
“Undoubtedly,” Sajaki said. “And talking of faces, why don’t you show us a little more of yours, Dan?” Sajaki fingered the haft of a gun resting in a hip-holster.
“Gladly,” Sylveste said. He reached up and pulled away the dust-goggles. He let them clatter to the floor, watching the expressions—or what passed for expressions—on the faces of the people who had taken him prisoner. For the first time they were seeing what had become of his eyes. Perhaps they knew already, but the shock of seeing Calvin’s handiwork could never be underestimated. His eyes were not sleek improvements on the originals, but brutalist substitutes which only approximated the functionality of the human eye. There were more sophisticated things in ancient medical textbooks… not far removed from wooden legs. “You knew that I lost my sight, of course?” he said, examining each of them in turn with his blank, eyeless gaze. “It’s common knowledge on Resurgam… hardly even worth mentioning.”
“What kind of resolution do you get out of those?” Hegazi said, with what sounded like genuine interest. “I know they’re not completely state-of-the-art, but I bet you’ve got full EM sensitivity from the IR into the UV, right? Maybe even acoustic imaging? Got a zoom capability?”
Sylveste looked at Hegazi long and hard before answering. “You need to understand one thing, Triumvir. In the right light, when she’s not standing too far away, I can just about recognise my wife.”
“That good…” Hegazi kept looking at him, fascinated.
They were escorted deeper into the ship. The last time he had been aboard, they had taken him straight to the medical centre. The Captain had been more or less capable of walking then, at least for short distances. But they were not taking him anywhere he recognised now. Which was not necessarily to say that he was far from the medical centre, for the ship was as intricate as a small city and as difficult to memorise, even though he had once spent nearly a month aboard it. But he sensed that this was entirely new territory; that he was passing through regions of the ship—what Sajaki and the crew called districts—which he had never been shown before. If his reckoning was good, the elevator was carrying them away from the ship’s sleek prow, down to where the conic hull broadened to its maximum width.
“Minor technical defects in your eyes don’t concern me,” Sajaki said. “We can repair them easily enough.”
“Without a working version of Calvin? I don’t think so.”
“Then we rip out your eyes and replace them with something better.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Besides… you still wouldn’t have Calvin, so what good would it do you?”
Sajaki said something beneath his breath and the elevator crawled to a halt. “So you never believed me when I said we had a back-up? Well, you’re right, of course. Our copy had some strange flaws in it. Became quite useless long before we asked anything of it.”
“That’s software for you.”
“Yes… perhaps I may kill you after all.” With one smooth movement he drew the gun from his holster, giving Sylveste time enough to notice the bronze snake which spiralled around the barrel. The weapon’s mode of killing was not at all obvious; it might have been a beam or projectile gun, but he had no doubts that he was comfortably within its lethal range.
“You wouldn’t kill me now; not after all the time you spent looking for me.”
Sajaki’s finger tightened on the trigger. “You underestimate my propensity for acting on a whim, Dan. I might kill you just for the sheer cosmic perversity of the act.”
“Then you’d have to find someone else to heal the Captain.”
“What would I have lost?” Under the snake’s jaw, a status light flicked from green to red. Sajaki’s finger whitened.
“Wait,” Sylveste said. “You don’t have to kill me. Do you honestly think I’d have destroyed the only copy of Cal left in existence?”
Sajaki’s relief was evident. “There’s another?”
“Yes.” Sylveste nodded towards his wife. “And she knows where to find it. Don’t you, Pascale?”
Some hours later Cal said, “I always knew you were a cold, calculating bastard, son.”
They were near the Captain. Sajaki had taken Pascale away, but now she was back again—along with all the other crew-members Sylveste knew about, and the apparition he had hoped never to see again. “An insufferable, treacherous… nonentity.” The apparition was speaking quite calmly, like an actor running through lines purely to judge the timing, without imparting any actual emotion. “You unthinking rat.”
“From nonentity to rat, eh?” Sylveste said. “From some perspectives, that’s almost an improvement.”
“Don’t believe it, son.” Calvin leered at him, stretching forward from the seat which held him. “Think you’re so intolerably clever, don’t you? Well now I’ve got you by the balls; assuming you have any. They told me what you did. How you killed me purely on the pretext of ruining their plans.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “I mean, what a pathetic justification for patricide! I’d have at least thought you’d do me the courtesy of killing me for a halfway decent reason. But no. That would have been asking too much. I’d almost say I was disappointed, except that would imply I once had higher expectations.”
“If I’d actually killed you,” Sylveste said, “this conversation would pose certain ontological problems. Besides, I always knew there was another copy of you.”
“But you murdered one of me!”
“Sorry, but that’s a category mistake if ever I heard one. You’re just software, Cal. Being copied and erased is your natural state of being.” Sylveste steeled himself for another protest from Cal, but for the moment he was silent. “I didn’t do it to ruin Sajaki’s plans. I need his… co-operation as much as he needs mine.”
“My co-operation?” The Triumvir’s eyes narrowed.
“We’ll get to that. All I’m saying is that when I destroyed the copy, I knew another existed and that you’d soon force me into revealing its whereabouts.”
“So the act was pointless?”
“No; not at all. For a while I had the pleasure of seeing you imagine your plans in ruins, Yuuji-san. The risk was worth it for that glimpse into your soul. It wasn’t a pretty sight, either.”
“How did you… know?” Cal said. “How did you know I’d been copied?”
“I thought you couldn’t copy him,” said the woman he had been introduced to as Khouri. She was small and foxlike, but perhaps, like Sajaki, not entirely to be trusted. “I thought they had spoilers… copy-protection… that kind of shit.”
“That’s alpha-level simulations, dear,” Calvin said. “Which—for better or for worse—I happen not to be. No; I’m just a lowly beta-level. Capable of passing all the standard Turings, but not—from a philosophical standpoint—actually capable of consciousness. Hence, no soul. And therefore no ethical problems about there being more than one of me. However…” he drew in breath, filling the silence which someone else might have been tempted to fill with their own thoughts “… I no longer believe any of that neuro-cognitive rubbish. I can’t speak for my alpha-level self, since my alpha-level self disappeared some two centuries ago, but for whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.”
Sylveste had heard all this before. “He’s a Turing-compliant beta-level. They’re meant to say this sort of thing. If they didn’t claim to be conscious, they’d automatically fail the standard Turings. But that doesn’t mean that what he says—the noises he makes… the noises it makes—have any validity.”
“I could apply the same reasoning to you,” Calvin said. “And where it’s leading to, dear son, is this: since I can’t speculate about the alpha, I have to assume that I’m all that remains. Now, this may be hard for you to understand, but the mere fact that I’m something precious and unique makes me object even more strenuously to the idea of anyone making a copy of me. Every act of copying me cheapens what I am. I am reduced to a mere commodity; something to be created, duplicated and disposed of whenever I happen to fit someone else’s inadequate notion of usefulness.” He paused. “So—while I’m not saying I wouldn’t take steps to increase my likelihood of survival—I would not willingly have consented to be copied by anyone.”
“But you did. You allowed Pascale to copy you into Descent into Darkness.” She had been clever about it, too; for years he had never suspected a thing. He had given her access to Calvin to assist with the construction of the biography. She had allowed him to return to the object of his obsession, the Amarantin, with access to research tools and his dwindling network of sympathisers.
“It was his idea,” Pascale said.
“Yes… I admit that much.” Cal drew in a lungful of breath, appearing to take stock before his next utterance, despite the fact that the Calvin simulation “thought’ far more rapidly than unaugmented humans. “Those were dangerous times—no worse than now, of course, from what I’ve gathered since my re-awakening—but hazardous all the same. It seemed prudent to ensure some part of me would survive my original’s destruction. I wasn’t thinking of a copy, though—more a sketch, a likeness; perhaps not even fully Turing-compliant.”
“What made you change your mind?” Sylveste said.
“Pascale began to embed parts of me in the biography over a period of time—months, in fact. The encryption was very subtle. But once she had copied enough of the original for the copied parts to start interacting, they—or rather me—became rather less enthralled by the notion of committing cybernetic suicide just to prove a point. In fact I felt rather more alive—more myself—than I ever had before.” He vouchsafed his audience a smile. “Of course, I soon realised why this was the case. Pascale had copied me into a more powerful computer system; the governmental core in Cuvier, where Descent was being assembled. The system was connected to more archives and networks than you ever allowed me, even back in Mantell. For the first time I actually had something to justify the attentions of my massive intellect.” He held their gaze for a moment before adding, very softly: “That’s a joke, by the way.”
“Copies of the biography were freely available,” Pascale said. “Sajaki had already obtained one without even realising it contained a version of Calvin. How did you know he was in it, though?” She was looking at Sylveste now. “Did the copied version of Cal tell you?”
“No, and I’m not even sure he would have wanted to if a way had existed. I figured it out for myself. The biography was too large for the amount of simulational data it contained. Oh, I know you’d been clever—encoding Cal into least significant digits of data files—but there was just too much of Cal to hide away that easily. Descent was fifteen per cent longer than it should have been. For months I thought there had to be a whole hidden layer of scenarios; aspects of my life not supposedly documented but which you’d put in anyway, for anyone persistent enough to find them. But finally I realised that the missing capacity was enough to store a copy of Cal, and then it made sense. Of course I could never be completely sure…” He looked at the projected image. “Though I suppose you’d say you’re the real Cal now and what I erased was just a copy?”
Cal raised a hand from the armrest, disputatiously. “No; that would be much too simplistic a version of things. After all, I was that copy, once. But what I was then—and what the copy remained, until you killed it—was just a shadow of what I am now. Let’s just say I had a moment of epiphany, shall we, and leave it at that?”
“So…” Sylveste stepped forward, finger tapping against his lip. “In that case, I never really killed you, did I?”
“No,” Calvin said, with deceptive placidity. “You didn’t. But it’s what you might have been doing that counts. And on that score, dear boy, I’m afraid you’re still a callous, patricidal bastard.”
“Touching, isn’t it?” Hegazi said. “Nothing I like better than a good old family reunion.”
They proceeded to the Captain. Khouri had been here before, but despite her minor familiarity with the place, she still felt unnerved; obtrusively aware of the contaminating matter which was only barely contained by the envelope of cold which been caulked around the man.
“I think I should know what you want from me,” Sylveste said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Sajaki said. “Do you think we went to all this trouble just to ask you how you were doing these days?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you: Sylveste said. “Your behaviour never made much sense to me in the past, so why should it start doing so now? And besides, let’s not deceive ourselves that what went on back there was everything it seemed.”
“What do you mean?” Khouri asked.
“Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out?”
“That it never actually happened.” Sylveste fixed her with the blank depths of his eyes; a scrutiny which felt more like the scanning of a mindless automatic surveillance system than any human apperception. “Or perhaps not,” he added. “Perhaps you haven’t actually figured it out yet. Who are you anyway?”
“You’ll get your chance to ask all the questions you want,” Hegazi said, edgy now that they were within a stone’s throw of the Captain.
“No,” Khouri said. “I want to know. What do you mean, none of that actually happened?”
Sylveste’s voice was slow and calm. “I’m talking about that business with the settlement Volyova wiped out.”
Khouri stepped ahead of the entourage, blocking their progress. “You’d better explain that.”
“That can wait,” Sajaki said, stepping forward to push her aside. “Certainly until you’ve explained your role in things to my complete satisfaction, Khouri.” The Triumvir was eyeing her suspiciously all the time now, convinced that the two deaths in her presence had to be more than coincidence. With Volyova out of the way—and the Mademoiselle silent—she had no one to shelter her. It would be only a matter of time before Sajaki acted on his suspicions and did something drastic.
But Sylveste said, “No. Why need it wait? I think we should all be absolutely clear about what’s going on here. Sajaki; you didn’t go down to Resurgam just to obtain a copy of the biography, did you? What would have been the point? You had no knowledge that Descent contained a copy of Cal until I told you. You only picked up the biography because it might have come in useful in your negotiations with me. But it wasn’t the reason you went down there. That was something else entirely.”
“Intelligence gathering,” Sajaki said, carefully.
“More than that. You went there to glean information, yes. But you also had to plant some.”
“About Phoenix?” Khouri said.
“Not just about Phoenix, the place itself. It never existed.” Sylveste allowed a pause before continuing. “It was a ghost planted there by Sajaki. It wasn’t even on the old maps we kept at Mantell, but as soon as we updated them from the master copies in Cuvier it appeared. We just assumed it was a new settlement; too recent to show up on the previous maps. That was stupid, of course—I should have seen through it then. But we assumed the master copies hadn’t been corrupted.”
“Doubly stupid,” Sajaki said. “Given that you must have wondered where I was.”
“If I’d given it more than a moment’s thought…”
“Pity you didn’t,” Sajaki said. “Or we might not be having this conversation. But then again, we’d have only resorted to another means of securing you.”
Sylveste nodded. “I suppose your next logical step would have been to blow up a bigger fictitious target. But I’m not entirely sure you could have pulled off the same trick twice. I’ve a nasty suspicion you might have had to hit somewhere real.”
The cold had a steely texture to it, like a thousand pieces of barbed metal constantly scraping softly against the skin; threatening to pierce to the bone with each movement. But as soon as they were truly in the Captain’s realm, it became impossible to notice the cold, since the cold in which he was imprisoned was so obviously deeper.
“He’s sick,” Sajaki said. “With a variant of the Melding Plague. You know all about that, of course.”
“We heard reports from Yellowstone,” Sylveste said. “I can’t say they were exceptionally detailed.” All the while he had not actually looked directly at the Captain.
“We haven’t been able to contain it,” Hegazi said. “Not properly, anyway. Extreme cold goes some way to slowing it, but no more than that. It—or rather, he—is spreading slowly, incorporating the mass of the ship into his own template.”
“Then he’s still alive, at least by some biological definition?”
Sajaki nodded, “Of course, no organism can really be said to be alive at these temperatures. But if we were to warm the Captain now… parts of him would function.”
“That’s hardly reassuring.”
“I brought you aboard to heal him, not to hear reassurances.”
What the Captain resembled was a statue smeared in ropelike silver tendrils, extending tens of metres in either direction; beautifully aglisten with sinister biochimeric malignancy. The reefersleep unit at the heart of the frozen explosion was still, by some miracle of design or accident, nominally functional. But its once symmetrical form had been tugged and warped by the glacially slow but unyielding forces of the Captain’s spread. Most of its status readouts were now dead; there were no active entoptics surrounding it. Of the display devices which still worked, some showed unreadable mush; the senseless hieroglyphics of machine senility. Khouri was grateful that there were no entoptics. She had the feeling that if there had been any, they too would have been corrupted; a host of malignant seraphim or disfigured cherubim signifying the excessive state of the Captain’s illness.
“You don’t need a surgeon here,” Sylveste said. “You need a priest.”
“That isn’t what Calvin thought,” Sajaki said. “He was rather eager to begin the work.”
“Then the copy they had in Cuvier must have been delusional. Your Captain isn’t sick. He isn’t even dead, since there isn’t enough left which was ever alive in the first place.”
“Nonetheless,” Sajaki said. “You will help us. You’ll have Ilia’s assistance, as well—as soon as she’s well herself. She thinks that she has created a counteragent for the plague—a retrovirus. I’m told it works on small samples. But she’s a weaponeer. Applying it to the Captain would be strictly a medical matter. But at least she can provide you with a tool.”
Sylveste directed a smile at Sajaki. “I’m sure you’ve discussed the matter with Calvin already.”
“Let’s just say he’s been briefed. He’s willing to try it—he thinks it might even work. Does this encourage you?”
“I would have to bow to Calvin’s wisdom,” Sylveste replied. “He’s the medical man, not me. But before I enter into any commitment we’d have to negotiate terms.”
“There won’t be any,” Sajaki said. “And if you resist us, don’t imagine we won’t consider ways of persuading you via Pascale.”
“You’d probably regret it.”
Khouri prickled. For the dozenth time this day, something felt seriously wrong. She sensed that the others were also attuned to it, though there was nothing to read in their expressions. Sylveste sounded too cocksure; that was it. Too cocksure for someone who had been abducted and was about to be forced to undergo a painful ordeal. Instead he sounded like someone who was about to reveal a winning hand.
“I’ll fix your damn Captain,” Sylveste said. “Or at least prove it can’t be done; one of the two. But in return, there’s a small favour you have to do for me.”
“Excuse me,” Hegazi said, “but when negotiating from a position of weakness, you don’t ask for favours.”
“Who said anything about weakness?” Sylveste smiled again, this time with unconcealed ferocity, and something which looked dangerously like joy. “Before I left Mantell, my captors did me a small, final favour. I don’t think they particularly felt they owed me anything. But the act was a small thing, and it allowed them to spite you, which did, I think, rather appeal to them. They were losing me, after all—but they saw no reason why you should get quite what you thought you were getting.”
“I don’t like this at all,” Hegazi said.
“Believe me,” Sylveste said, “you’re about to like it a lot less. Now; I have to ask a question, just to clarify our positions.”
“Go ahead,” Sajaki said.
“Are you all completely familiar with the concept of hot-dust?”
“You’re talking to Ultras,” Hegazi said.
“Well, of course. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t under any illusions. And you’ll know that hot-dust fragments can be sealed within containment devices smaller than pinheads? Of course you do.” He tapped his finger against his chin, extemporising like an expert lawyer. “You heard about Remilliod’s visit, of course? The last lighthugger to trade with the Resurgam system before you came?”
“We heard about it.”
“Well, Remilliod sold hot-dust to the colony. Not many fragments; just enough for a colony which might want to do some hefty landscape-rearranging in the near future. Of his sample, a dozen or less fell into the hands of the people who were holding me prisoner. Do you want me to continue, or are you ahead of me already?”
“I fear I may be,” Sajaki said. “But continue anyway.”
“One of those pinheads is now installed in the vision system which Cal made for me. It draws no current, and even if you dismantled my eyes, you would not be able to tell which component was the bomb. But you wouldn’t want to try that, because even tampering with my eyes will detonate the pinhead, with a yield sufficient to turn the front kilometre of this ship into a very expensive and useless piece of glass sculpture. Kill me, or even harm me to the extent that certain bodily functions are compromised beyond a preset limit, and the device triggers. Clear on that?”
“As crystal.”
“Good. Harm Pascale and the same thing happens: I can trigger it deliberately, by executing a series of neural commands. Or I could of course simply kill myself—the result would be indistinguishable.” He clasped his hands together, beaming like a statue of Buddha. “So. How does a little negotiation sound to you?”
Sajaki said nothing for what seemed like an eternity; doubtless considering every ramification of what Sylveste had said. Finally he said, without having consulted Hegazi: “We can be… flexible.”
“Good. Then I expect you’re keen to hear my terms.”
“Burning with enthusiasm.”
“Thanks to the recent unpleasantness,” Sylveste said, “I have a reasonably good idea what this ship can do. And I suspect that little demonstration was very much at the timid end of things. Am I right?”
“We have… capabilities, but you’d have to talk to Ilia. What did you have in mind?”
Sylveste smiled.
“First you have to take me somewhere.”