It was, Sylveste thought, a situation of disturbing symmetry. In a matter of hours Volyova’s cache-weapons would begin to combat the buried immunological systems of Cerberus; virus against virus, tooth against tooth. And here, on the eve of that attack, Sylveste was preparing to go to war against the Melding Plague which was consuming—or, depending on one’s point of view, grotesquely enlarging—Volyova’s afflicted Captain. The symmetry seemed to hint at an underlying order to which he was only partly privy. It was not a feeling he enjoyed; like being a participant in a game and realising, halfway through, that the rules were far more complicated than he had so far imagined.
In order that Calvin’s beta-level simulation be allowed to work through him, Sylveste had to slip into a state of ambulatory semi-consciousness akin to sleepwalking. Calvin would puppet him, receiving sensory input directly through Sylveste’s own eyes and ears, tapping directly into his nervous system to achieve mobility. He would even speak through Sylveste. The neuro-inhibitor drugs had already kicked him into a queasy full-body paralysis; as unpleasant as he remembered from the last time.
Sylveste thought of himself as a machine in which Calvin was about to become the ghost…
His hands worked the medical analysis tools, skirting the periphery of the growth. It was dangerous to stray too close to the heart; too high a risk of plague transmission into his own implants. At some point—this session, or perhaps the next—they would have to skirt the heart; that was inevitable, but Sylveste did not really want to think about that. For now, when they needed to work closer, Calvin used the simple, mindless drones which were slaved from elsewhere in the ship, but even those tools were susceptible. One drone had malfunctioned close to the Captain, and was even now being enmeshed in fine, fibrous plague tendrils. Even though the machine contained no molecular components, it still seemed that it was of use to the plague; still able to be digested into the Captain’s transformative matrix; fuel for his fever. Calvin was having to resort to cruder instruments now, but this was only a stopgap: at some point—soon now, undoubtedly—they would have to hit the plague with the only thing which could really work against it: something very like itself.
Sylveste could feel Calvin’s thought processes churning somewhere behind his own. It was nothing that could be called consciousness—the simulation which was running his body was no more than mimesis, but somewhere in the interfacing with his own nervous system… it was as if something had arisen, something which was riding that chaotic edge. The theories and his own prejudices denied that, of course—but what other explanation could there be for the sense of divided self Sylveste felt? He did not dare ask if Calvin experienced something similar, and would not necessarily have trusted any answer he received.
“Son,” Calvin said. “There’s something I’ve waited until now before discussing. I’m rather worried about it, but I didn’t want to discuss it in front of, well… our clients.”
Sylveste knew that only he could hear Calvin’s voice. He had to subvocalise to respond, Calvin momentarily relinquishing vocal control to his host. “This isn’t the time, either. In case you weren’t paying attention, we’re in the middle of an operation.”
“It’s the operation I want to talk about.”
“Make it quick, in that case.”
“I don’t think we’re meant to succeed.”
Sylveste observed that his hands—driven by Calvin—had not ceased working during this last exchange. He was conscious of Volyova, who was standing nearby, awaiting instructions. He subvocalised, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I think Sajaki is a very dangerous man.”
“Great—that makes two of us. But it hasn’t stopped you co-operating with him.”
“I was grateful to begin with,” Calvin admitted. “He saved me, after all. But then I started wondering how things must seem from his side. I began to wonder if he wasn’t just a touch insane. It struck me that any sane man would have left the Captain for dead years ago. The Sajaki I knew last time was fiercely loyal, but at least then there was some sense to his crusade. At least then there was a hope we could save the Captain.
“And now there isn’t?”
“He’s been infected with a virus which the entire resources of the Yellowstone system couldn’t combat. Admittedly, the system itself was under attack from the same virus, but there were still isolated enclaves which survived for months—places where people with techniques as sophisticated as our own struggled to find a cure—and yet they never succeeded. Not only that, but we don’t even know which blind alleys they pursued, or which approaches might almost have worked, if they’d had more time.”
“I told Sajaki he needed a miracle worker. It’s his problem if he didn’t believe me.”
“The problem is, I think he did believe you. That’s what I mean when I said we weren’t meant to succeed.”
Sylveste happened to be looking at the Captain, Calvin having judiciously arranged the view. Confronted with the thing before his eyes, he experienced a moment of epiphany in which he knew that Calvin was absolutely right. They could go through the preliminary motions of healing the Captain—the rituals of establishing just how corrupted the man’s flesh was—but it could never progress beyond that. Whatever they tried, no matter how intelligent, no matter how conceptually brilliant, could not possibly succeed. Or, more significantly, could not be permitted to succeed. It was that latter realisation which was the most disturbing, because it had come from Calvin, rather than Sylveste. He had seen something which to Sylveste was still opaque, and now it seemed obvious; shatteringly so.
“You think he’ll hinder us?”
“I think he already has. We both observed that the Captain’s rate of growth had accelerated since we were brought aboard, but we dismissed it—either just a coincidence or our imaginations. But I don’t think so. I think Sajaki allowed him to warm.”
“Yes… I was drawn to that conclusion myself. There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“The biopsies—the tissue samples I asked for.”
Sylveste knew where this was leading. The drone that they had sent in to extract the cell samples was now half-digested by the plague. “You don’t think that was a genuine malfunction, do you? You think Sajaki made it happen.”
“Sajaki, or one of his crewmates.”
“Her?”
Sylveste felt himself glance towards the woman. “No,” Calvin said, effecting an entirely unnecessary murmur. “Not her. That doesn’t mean I trust her, but on the other hand, I don’t see her as one of Sajaki’s automatic minions.”
“What are you discussing?” asked Volyova, stepping towards them.
“Don’t come too close,” Calvin said, speaking through Sylveste, who, for the moment, was unable to form his own sounds even subvocally. “Our investigations may have unleashed plague spore—you wouldn’t want to inhale them.”
“It wouldn’t harm me,” Volyova said. “I’m brezgatnik. I have nothing in me that the plague can touch.”
“Then why are you looking so stand-offish?”
“Because it’s cold, svinoi.” She paused. “Wait a minute. Which one of you am I actually talking to? It’s Calvin, isn’t it? I suppose I owe you fractionally more respect—it isn’t you holding us to ransom, after all.”
“You’re too kind,” Sylveste found himself saying.
“I trust you’ve arrived at a strategy here? Triumvir Sajaki won’t be pleased if he suspects you aren’t keeping up your side of the bargain.”
“Triumvir Sajaki,” Calvin said, “may well be part of the problem.”
She had come closer now, even though she was visibly shivering, lacking the thermal protection which Sylveste wore. “I’m not sure I understand that remark.”
“Do you honestly think he wants us to heal the Captain?”
She looked as if he had slapped her across the face. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“He’s had a long time to get used to being in command. This Triumvirate of yours is a farce—Sajaki’s your Captain in all but name, and you and Hegazi know it. He isn’t going to relinquish that without a fight.”
She answered too hastily to be totally convincing. “If I were you I’d concentrate on the job in hand and stop worrying about the Triumvir’s wishes. He brought you here, after all. He came light-years for your services. That’s hardly the work of a man who doesn’t want to see his Captain reinstated.”
“He’ll ensure that we fail,” Calvin said. “But in the course of our failure, he’ll find another glimmer of hope; something or someone else who can heal the Captain, if only he can find it or them. And before you know it, you’ll be on another century-long quest.”
“If that’s the case,” she said slowly, as if fearful of being drawn into a trap, “then why hasn’t Sajaki already killed the Captain? That would safeguard his position.”
“Because then he’d have to find a use for you.”
“A use?”
“Yes, think about it.” Calvin let go of the medical tools and stepped away from the Captain, like an actor preparing to enter the limelight for his soliloquy. “This quest to heal the Captain is the only god you’re capable of serving. Maybe there was a time when it was a means to an end… but that end never came, and after a while it didn’t even matter. You have the weapons aboard this ship; I know all about those, even the ones you don’t really like talking about. For now, the only purpose they serve is bargaining power when you need someone like me—someone who can go through the motions of healing the Captain, without actually making any real difference.” Sylveste was glad when Calvin did not speak for a few seconds, for he needed to catch his breath and lubricate his mouth. “Now, if Sajaki suddenly became Captain, what would he do next? You’d still have the weapons—but who could you use them against? You’d have to invent an enemy from scratch. Maybe they wouldn’t even have something you wanted—after all, you’re the ones with the ship; what else do you need? Ideological enemies? Tricky, because the one thing I haven’t noticed among you is an ideological attachment to anything, except perhaps your own survival. No; I think Sajaki knows what would happen, deep down. He knows that if he became Captain, sooner or later you’d have to use those weapons just because they existed. And I don’t mean the kind of minimalist intervention you demonstrated on Resurgam. You’d have to go all the way: use every one of those horrors.”
Volyova was quick; Sylveste had already been impressed by that. “In which case, we owe Triumvir Sajaki our gratitude, don’t we? By not killing the Captain, he’s keeping us from the brink.” But the way she spoke, it was as if she were reciting the argument of a devil’s advocate, saying it aloud only to better illuminate its heresies.
“Yes,” Calvin said, dubiously. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I don’t believe any of this,” Volyova said, with sudden fire. “And if you were one of us, it would be treason just to entertain those thoughts.”
“Suit yourself. But we’ve already seen evidence that Sajaki wants to sabotage the operation.”
For a moment curiosity flashed in her expression, but she crushed it just as efficiently. “I’m not interested in your paranoia, Calvin—assuming it’s Calvin I’m talking to. I have an obligation to Dan, which is to get him into Cerberus. And I have an obligation to you, which is to help with the healing. The discussion of any other topics is superfluous.”
“So you have the retrovirus, I take it?”
Volyova reached into her jacket and removed the vial she had been carrying. “It works against the plague samples I was able to isolate and keep in culture. Whether or not it will work against that is another question entirely.”
Sylveste felt his hands jerk forward to catch the vial as she threw it. The tiny glass autoclave reminded him of the vial he had carried before his wedding, but only fleetingly.
“It’s a pleasure doing business with you,” Calvin said.
Volyova left Calvin or Dan Sylveste—she had never been entirely sure who she had been dealing with—having given the man explicit instructions concerning the administration of the counteragent. Her relationship to him had been that of an apothecary to a surgeon, she thought: she had formulated a serum which worked in the laboratory, and she could offer broad guidelines regarding the manner in which it should be administered, but the ultimate decisions, the true life-and-death questions; those were at the discretion of the surgeon only, and she had no desire to intervene. After all, if the manner of the administration had not been so critical, there would have been no need to bring Sylveste aboard in the first place. And her retrovirus would form only one element of the treatment, though it might prove decisive.
She rode the elevator back to the bridge, trying hard not to think about what Calvin (it had been him, surely?) had been saying to her about Sajaki. But it was difficult; there was too much internal logic—too much reason to what he said. And what was she to make of the alleged sabotage against the healing process? She had almost dared ask, but was perhaps too fearful of hearing something she could not refute. As she had said—and it was true, in a way—just thinking along those lines was treasonable.
But in many ways she had already committed treason.
Sajaki was beginning to have his doubts about her; that much was obvious. Disagreeing with him over whether or not Khouri should have been trawled was one thing. But rigging the trawl to inform her when Sajaki activated it was something else entirely—not the act of someone exhibiting mild professional concern over her charge, but one which spoke of quiet paranoia, fear and brooding hatred. Luckily she had reached him in time. The trawl had not done any lasting damage and it was doubtful that Sajaki had mapped enough neural volume in sufficient detail to pullout anything more than blurred impressions, rather than fully fledged incriminating memories. Now, she thought, Sajaki would be more cautious: it would be no good losing their Gunnery Officer now. But what if he turned the focus of his suspicion towards Volyova herself? She could be trawled, too. Sajaki would have few qualms about that, other than the fact that it would completely destroy any lingering sense of equality between them. Certainly she had no implants to damage. And to some extent, with the work aboard the Lorean progressing autonomously, her period of maximum usefulness to him had passed.
She consulted her bracelet. That little splinter she had pulled from Khouri was causing more headaches than she had ever thought possible. Now she had the composition and stress patterning more or less pinned down, she had asked the ship to match the sample against something in its memory. Her hunch about it being Manoukhian’s doing was looking good, for the shard had clearly not originated on Sky’s Edge. But the ship was still searching, burrowing deeper and deeper into its memory. Now it was working through technological data from nearly two centuries previously. Absurd to search such antiquity… but, on the other hand, why stop now? In a matter of hours the ship would have correlated right back to the founding of the colony; to the few records surviving from the Amerikano era. She would at least be able to tell Khouri that the search had been exhaustive—even if it had been futile.
She entered the bridge, alone.
The gigantic chamber was dark except for the glow cast by the display sphere, which was locked in a schematic of the whole Pavonis-Hades binary. There were no other crewmembers (of the few who remained alive, she thought), and none of the dead were currently being recalled from archival posterity to share their views in languages hardly anyone now spoke. The solitude suited Volyova. She had no wish to deal with Sajaki (most especially not him), and Hegazi’s was a species of company she did not especially prize. She did not even want to talk to Khouri; not just now. Being with Khouri raised too many questions; forced her mind onto topics with which it did not wish to be preoccupied. Now, for a few minutes at least, Volyova could be alone, and in her element, and—however foolishly—forget everything that threatened to transform order into chaos.
She could be with her beautiful weapons.
The transfigured Lorean had dropped to an even lower orbit without provoking a response from Cerberus—only ten thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. She had named the vast conic object the bridgehead, because that was its function. As far as the others were concerned, it was just Volyova’s weapon, if they bothered calling it anything. The thing was four thousand metres long; almost the same length as the lighthugger which had given birth to it. Very little of it was solid; even the walls were honeycombed with pores, in which lay clades of primed military cyberviruses, similar in structure to the counteragent about to be used against the Captain. Larger energy and projectile weapons were set inside caverns in the walls. The whole thing was sheathed in several metres of hyperdiamond which would be ablated sacrificially upon impact. Shock waves would rush up the length of the bridgehead as it hit the surface, but piezoelectric crystal boundaries would gradually bleed energy from the shock waves, energy which could be redirected into weapons systems. The impact speed would be relatively slow, in any case—less than a kilometre a second, since the bridgehead would decelerate massively just before puncturing the crust. And the crust would be softened up beforehand; apart from the bridgehead’s own frontal guns, Volyova would deploy as much of the cache armament as she dared.
She interrogated the weapon via her bracelet. It was not the most riveting of conversations. The device’s controlling personality was rudimentary; nothing more could be expected from something mere days old. In a sense that was good. Better that the thing be pigeon-minded, or it might start getting ideas above its station. And, as she reminded herself, the bridgehead might not have very long to enjoy its sentience in the first place.
Numerics dancing in the sphere told her of the bridgehead’s total readiness. She had to trust what the summarising systems told her, for the weapon was in many ways unknown to her. She had sketched out her basic requirements, but the dogwork had been done by autonomous design programs, and they had not deigned to inform her of every technical problem and solution encountered along the way. But as profound as her ignorance of the bridgehead might be, it was not so very different from the way a mother managed to create a child without knowing the precise location of every artery and nerve… or even the precise biochemistry of its metabolism. It was no less her creation for that—no less her child.
A child she was consigning to an early, ignominious death—but by no means a meaningless one.
Her bracelet chirped. She glanced down at it, expecting that it would be a technical squirt from the bridgehead; a brief update concerning some last-minute inflight redesign which had been put in place by the replicating systems still at work in its core.
But it was not that at all.
It was from the ship, and it had found a match for the splinter. It had needed to look back into technical files more than two centuries old, but it had found a match all the same. And apart from the stress patterning—which must have come after the shard’s manufacture—the agreement was absolute, within the errors of measurement.
She was still alone in the bridge.
“Put it on the display,” Volyova said.
A magnified, visible-light image of the splinter appeared in the sphere. A series of zoom-ins appeared, beginning with a grey-scale electron-microscopy view which showed the shard’s tortured crystalline structure, and ending with a gaudily hued atomic-scale resolution ATM image, individual atoms blurred together. X-ray crystallographic and mass spectrograph plots popped into separate windows, jostling for her attention with reams of technical summary data. Volyova paid no attention to these results; they were completely familiar to her for she had made most of the measurements herself.
Instead, she waited while the entire display shuffled to one side and a very similar set of graphics sprang into existence next to it, arrayed around a sliver of similar-looking material, identical at atomic resolution, but showing none of the stress patterning. The compositions, isotopic ratios and lattice properties were identical: lots of fullerenes, knitted into structural allotropes, threading a bafflingly complex matrix of sandwiched metal layers and odd alloys. Spikes of yttrium and scandium, with a whole slew of stable-island transuranic elements in trace quantities, presumably adding some arcane resilience to the shard’s bulk properties. Still, by Volyova’s reckoning, there were stranger substances aboard the ship, and she had synthesised a few of them herself. The splinter was unusual, but it was clearly human technology—the buckytube filaments, in fact, were a typical Demarchist signature, and stable-island transuranics had been in massive vogue in the twenty-fourth and -fifth centuries.
The shard, in fact, looked a lot like the kind of thing a spacecraft hull from that era might have been made of.
The ship seemed to think so too. What was Khouri doing with a piece of hull buried in her? What kind of message had Manoukhian intended by that? Perhaps she was wrong, and this was none of Manoukhian’s doing—just an accident. Unless this had been a very specific spacecraft…
It seemed that it was. The technology was typical for that era, but in every specific, the shard was unique—manufactured to tighter tolerances than would have been required even in a military application. In fact, as Volyova digested the results, it became clear that the shard could only have come from one kind of ship: a contact vessel owned by the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies.
Subtleties of isotopic ratio established that it had come from one ship in particular: the contact vessel that had carried Sylveste to the boundary of Lascaille’s Shroud. For a moment, that discovery was enough for Volyova. There was a circularity about it; confirmation that Khouri’s Mademoiselle really did have some connection with Sylveste. But Khouri already knew that… which meant that the message must be telling them something more profound. Of course, Volyova had already seen what it must be. But for an instant she flinched at the enormity of it. There was no way it could be her, could it? No way she could have survived what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud. But Manoukhian had always told Khouri that he had found his paymistress in space. And it was entirely possible that her disguise of a hermetic masked an injury more savage than anything the plague could have inflicted…
“Show me Carine Lefevre,” Volyova said, retrieving the name of the woman who should have died around the Shroud.
Vast as a goddess, the face of the woman stared down at her. She was young, and from the little of her that was visible below her face, it could be seen that she was dressed in the fashions of the Yellowstone Belle Epoque, the glittering golden age before the Melding Plague. And her face was familiar—not shatteringly so, but enough for Volyova to know she had seen this woman before. She had seen this woman’s face in a dozen historical documentaries, and in every one of them the assumption had been made that she was long dead; murdered by alien forces beyond human comprehension.
Of course. Now it was obvious what caused that stress patterning. The gravitational riptides around Lascaille’s Shroud had squeezed matter until it bled.
Everyone thought Carine Lefevre had died the same way.
“Svinoi,” said Triumvir Ilia Volyova, because now there could be no doubt.
Ever since she was a child, Khouri had noticed that something happened when she touched something that was too hot, like the barrel of a projectile rifle which had just discharged its clip. There would be a flash of premonitory pain, but so brief that it was hardly pain at all; more a warning of true pain which was about to come. And then the premonitory pain would subside, and there would be an instant when there was no sensation at all, and in that instant she would snatch back her hand, away from whatever it was that was too hot. But it would be too late; the true pain was already coming, and there was nothing she could do about it except ready herself for its arrival, like a housekeeper forewarned about the imminent arrival of a guest. Of course, the pain was never so bad, and she had usually withdrawn her hand from whatever was its source, and there would usually not even be a scar afterwards. But it always made her wonder. If the premonitory pain was enough to persuade her to remove the hand—and it always was—what was the purpose of the tsunami of true pain which lagged behind it? Why did it have to come at all, if she had already received the message and removed her hand from harm? When, later, she found out that there was a sound physiological reason for the delay between the two warnings, it still seemed almost spiteful.
That was how she felt now, sitting in the spider-room with Volyova, who had just told her who she thought the face belonged to. Carine Lefevre; that was what she had said. And there had been a flash of premonitory shock, like an echo from the future of what the real shock of it was going to be like. A very faint echo indeed, and then—for an instant—nothing.
And then the true force of it.
“How can it be her?” Khouri said, afterwards, when the shock had not so much subsided as become a normal component of her emotional background noise. “It isn’t possible. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think it makes too much sense,” Volyova said. “I think it fits the facts too well. I think it’s something we can’t ignore.”
“But we all know she died! And not just on Yellowstone, but halfway across colonised space. Ilia, she died, violently. There’s no way it can be her.”
“I think it can. Manoukhian said he found her in space. So perhaps he did. Perhaps he found Carine Lefevre drifting near Lascaille’s Shroud—he might have been looking to salvage something from the wreckage of the SISS facility—and then rescued her and took her back to Yellowstone.” Volyova stopped, but before Khouri could speak, or even think about speaking, the Triumvir was on a roll again. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’d at least have a connection to Sylveste—and maybe even a reason for her wanting him dead.”
“Ilia, I’ve read what happened to her. She was shredded by the gravitational stresses around the Shroud. There wouldn’t have been anything left for Manoukhian to bring home.”
“No… of course not. Unless Sylveste was lying. Remember that we have only Sylveste’s word that any of it happened the way he said it did—none of the recording systems survived the encounter.”
“She didn’t die, is that what you’re saying?”
Volyova raised a hand, the way she always did when Khouri failed to read her mind perfectly.
“No… not necessarily. Perhaps she did die—just not in the way Sylveste had it. And maybe she didn’t die in the way we understand, and perhaps she isn’t really alive, even now—despite what you saw.”
“I didn’t see much of her, did I? Just the box she used to move around in.”
“You assumed she was a hermetic, because she rode something like a hermetic’s palanquin. But that might have been a piece of misdirection on her behalf.”
“She’d have been shredded. Nothing changes that.”
“Perhaps the Shroud didn’t kill her, Khouri. Perhaps something dreadful happened to her, but something kept her alive afterwards. Perhaps something actually saved her.”
“Sylveste would know.”
“Even if he doesn’t admit it to himself. We have to talk to him, I think—here, where we won’t be bothered by Sajaki.” Volyova had hardly finished speaking when her bracelet chirped and filled with a human face, eyes lost behind blank globes. “Speak of the devil,” Volyova murmured. “What is it, Calvin? You are Calvin, aren’t you?”
“For now,” the man said. “Though I fear my usefulness to Sajaki may be coming to an ignominious end.”
“What are you talking about?” Quickly she added: “There’s something I have to discuss with Dan; it’s rather on the urgent side, if you’d oblige.”
“I think what I have to say is more urgent,” Calvin said. “It’s your counteragent, Volyova. The retrovirus you fabricated.”
“What about it?”
“It doesn’t seem to be working quite as intended.” He took a step backwards; Khouri glimpsed part of the Captain behind him, silvery and muculent, like a statue covered with a palimpsest of snail tracks.
“As a matter of fact, it seems to be killing him faster.”