Revelation Space

TEN

Volyova sat alone in the huge sphere of the bridge, under the holographic display of the Resurgam system. Her seat, like the other vacant ones around her, was mounted on a long, telescopic, highly articulated arm, so that it could be steered to almost any point in the sphere. Hand under chin, she had been staring into the orrery for hours, like a child transfixed by some glittery toy.

Delta Pavonis was a chip of warm-red ambergris fixed at the middle, the system’s eleven major planets spaced around it on their respective orbits, positioned at their true positions; smears of asteroidal debris and comet-shards following their own ellipses; the whole orrery haloed by a tenuous Kuiper belt of icy flotsam; tugged into slight asymmetry by the presence of the neutron star which was Pavonis’s dark twin. The picture was a simulation, rather than an enlargement of what lay ahead. The ship’s sensors were acute enough to glean data at this range, but the view would have been distorted by relativistic effects, and—worse—would have been a snapshot of the system as it was years earlier, with the relative positions of the planets bearing no resemblance to the present situation. Since the ship’s approach strategy would depend critically on using the system’s larger gas giants for camouflage and gravitational braking, Volyova needed to know where things would be when they got there, not how they had been five years ago. And not only that. Before the ship arrived in the Resurgam system, its advance envoys would already have skimmed by invisibly, and it was just as crucial to arrange their passage at the optimum planetary alignment.

“Release pebbles,” she said, satisfied now that she had run enough simulations. Heeding her, Infinity deployed one thousand of the tiny probes, firing them ahead of the decelerating ship in a slowly spreading pattern. Volyova spoke a command into her bracelet and a window opened ahead of her, captured by a camera on the hull. The entire ensemble of pebbles contracted into the distance, apparently tugged away by an invisible force. The cloud diminished as it fell further and further ahead of the ship, until all Volyova could see was a blurred nimbus, diminishing quickly. The pebbles were moving at almost the speed of light, and would reach the Resurgam system months ahead of the ship. The swarm, by then, would be wider than the orbit of Resurgam around the sun. Each tiny probe would align itself towards the planet and catch photons across the electromagnetic spectrum. The data from each pebble would be sent in a tightly focused laser pulse back towards the ship. The resolution of any one unit in the swarm would be tiny, but by combining their results, a very sharp and detailed picture of Resurgam could be assembled. It would not tell Sajaki where Sylveste was, but it would give him an idea of the likely centres of power on the planet, and—more importantly—what kind of defences they were capable of mustering.

That was one thing on which Sajaki and Volyova had been in complete agreement. Even if they found Sylveste, it seemed unlikely that he would agree to come aboard without coercion.

“Do you know what they did to Pascale?” Sylveste said.

“She’s safe,” said the eye surgeon, as he led Sylveste along tracheal, rock-clad tunnels deep in Mantell. “That’s what I’ve heard, at least,” he added, lessening Sylveste’s ease. “But I could be wrong. I don’t think Sluka would have killed her without good reason, but she may have had her frozen.”

“Frozen?”

“Until she’s useful. You’ll understand by now that Sluka thinks long-term.”

Continual waves of nausea kept threatening to overwhelm him. His eyes hurt, but, as he kept reminding himself, it was vision. That at least was something. Without it he was powerless, not even capable of effective disobedience. With it, escape might still be impossible, but at least he was spared the stumbling indignity of the blind. What vision he had, though, would have shamed the lowliest invertebrate. Spatial perception was haphazard, and colour existed in his world now only via nuances of grey-greens.

What he knew—what he remembered—was this.

He had not seen Mantell since the night of the coup twenty years earlier. The first coup, he corrected himself. Now that Girardieau had been overthrown, Sylveste had to get used to thinking of his own dethronement in purely historical terms. Girardieau’s regime had not immediately closed the place down, even though its Amarantin-directed research conflicted with their Inundationist agenda. For five or six years after the coup they had kept the place running, but one by one they had moved Sylveste’s best researchers back to Cuvier, replacing them with eco-engineers, botanists and geopower specialists. Finally, Mantell had been reduced to a skeleton-crewed test station, whole portions mothballed or derelict. It should have stayed that way, but trouble was already looming from outside elements. For years it had been rumoured that True Path’s leaders in Cuvier, Resurgam City, or whatever they were calling it now, were under direction from individuals beyond, a clique of one-time Girardieau sympathisers who had fallen out of favour during the machinations of the first coup. Supposedly, these brigands had altered their physiologies to cope with the dusty, oxygen-depleted atmosphere beyond the domes, using biotech purchased from Captain Remilliod.

Stories like that could be expected. But after sporadic attacks against a number of outposts, they began to look far less speculative. Mantell had been abandoned at some point, Sylveste knew, which meant that the current occupants might have been here for much longer than the time since Girardieau’s assassination. Months, or possibly even years.

Certainly they acted as if they owned the place. He knew when they entered a room that it was the one where Gillian Sluka had addressed him upon his arrival, however long ago that was. He failed to recognise it, though: it was entirely possible that during his tenancy in Mantell he had known this room intimately, but there were no longer any points of reference to aid him. The room’s decor and furnishings—such as there were—had been completely replaced. She stood with her back to him, next to a table, gloved hands knitted primly above her hip. She wore a knee-length fluted jacket with leather shoulder patches, the colour rendered as murky olive by his eyes. Her hair was collected in a braided tail which hung between her shoulder blades. She was not projecting entoptics. On either side of the room, planetary globes orbited on slender, swan-necked plinths. Something approximating daylight slatted down from the ceiling, though his eyes leeched it of any warmth.

“When we first spoke after your imprisonment,” she said, in her croak of a voice, “I almost had the impression you couldn’t place me.”

“I’d always assumed you were dead.”

“That was what Girardieau’s people wished you to think. The story about our crawler being hit by a landslide—all lies. We were attacked—they thought you were aboard, of course.”

“Why didn’t they kill me later, when they found me at the dig?”

“They realised you were more useful to them alive than dead, of course. Girardieau was no fool—he always used you profitably.”

“If you’d stayed with the dig, none of it would have happened. How did you survive, anyway?”

“Some of us got out of the crawler before Girardieau’s henchmen reached it. We took what equipment we could; made it into the Bird’s Claw canyons and set up bubbletents. That’s all I saw for a year, you know: the inside of a bubbletent. I was hurt quite badly in the attack.”

Sylveste brushed his fingers over the mottled surface of one of Sluka’s pedestal-mounted globes. What they represented, he saw now, was the topography of Resurgam at different epochs during the planned Inundationist terraforming program. “Why didn’t you join Girardieau in Cuvier?” he asked.

“He considered me too embarrassing to admit back into his fold. He was prepared to let us live, but only because killing us would have attracted too much attention. There were lines of communication, but they broke down.” She paused. “Fortunately we took some of Remilliod’s trinkets with us. The scavenger enzymes were the most useful. The dust doesn’t hurt us.”

He studied the globes again. With his impaired vision, he could only guess at the colours of the planetscapes, but he assumed that the spheres represented a steady march towards blue-green verdure. What were now merely upraised plateaux would become landmasses limned by ocean. Forests would fester across steppes. He looked to the furthest globes, which represented some remote version of Resurgam several centuries hence. Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit. How would that delicate future vision fare, he wondered, if Resurgam’s sun again erupted, as it had done nine hundred and ninety thousand years ago, just when Amarantin civilisation was approaching a human level of sophistication?

Not, he ventured, terribly well.

“Apart from the biotech,” he said, “what else did Remilliod give you? You appreciate I’m curious.”

She seemed ready to humour him.

“You haven’t asked me about Cuvier. That surprises me.” She added: “Or your wife.”

“Falkender told me Pascale was safe.”

“She is. Perhaps I’ll allow you to join her at some point. For now, I wish your attention. We haven’t secured the capital. The rest of Resurgam is ours, but Girardieau’s people still hold Cuvier.”

“The city’s still intact?”

“No,” she said. “We…” she looked over his shoulder, directly at Falkender. “Fetch Delaunay, will you? And have him bring one of Remilliod’s gifts.”

Falkender left, leaving them alone.

“I understand there was some agreement between you and Nils,” Sluka said. “Although the rumours I’ve heard are too contradictory to make much sense. Do you mind enlightening me?”

“There was never anything formal,” Sylveste said. “No matter what you may have heard.”

“I understand his daughter was brought in to paint you in an unflattering light.”

“It made sense,” Sylveste said wearily. “There’d be a certain cachet in having the biography scripted by a member of the family who was holding me prisoner. And Pascale was young, but not so young that it wasn’t time for her to make her mark. There were no losers: Pascale could hardly fail, though in fairness she applied herself to the task excellently.” He winced inwardly, remembering how close she had come to exposing the truth about Calvin’s alpha-level simulation. More than ever he was convinced that she had correctly guessed the facts, but had held back from committing them to the biography. Now, of course, she knew much more: what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and how Carine Lefevre’s death was not the clear-cut thing he had made it seem upon his return to Yellowstone. But he had not spoken to her since that announcement. “As for Girardieau,” he said, “he had the satisfaction of seeing his daughter associated with a genuinely important project. Not to mention the fact that I was opened to the world for closer scrutiny. I was the prize butterfly in his collection, you see—but until the biography, he’d had no easy means of showing me off.”

“I’ve experienced the biography,” Sluka said. “I’m not entirely sure Girardieau got what he wanted.”

“All the same, he promised to keep his word.” His eyes faltered, and for a moment the woman he was addressing seemed to be a woman-shaped hole cut in the fabric of the room’s volume, a hole through which infinities lay.

The odd moment passed. He continued, “I wanted access to Cerberus/Hades. I think—towards the end—Nils was almost ready to give it to me, provided the colony had the means.”

“You think there’s something out there?”

“If you’re acquainted with my ideas,” Sylveste said, “then you must bow to their logic.”

“I find them intriguing—like any delusional construct.”

As she spoke, the door opened and a man Sylveste had not seen before entered, shadowed by Falkender. The new man—whom he assumed to be Delaunay—was bulldog-stocky. His wore several days’ growth of beard, a purple beret resting on his scalp. There were red weals around his eyes and a pair of dust goggles around his neck. His chest was crossed by webbing and his feet vanished into ochre mukluks.

“Show the nasty little thing to our guest,” Sluka said.

Delaunay was carrying an obviously heavy black cylinder in one hand, gripped in a thick handle.

“Take it,” Sluka told Sylveste.

He did; it was as heavy as he had expected. The handle was attached to the top of the cylinder; beneath it was a single green key. Sylveste put the cylinder down on the table; it was too heavy to hold comfortably for any length of time.

“Open it,” Sluka said.

He pressed the key—it was the obvious thing to do—and the cylinder split open like a Russian doll, the top half rising on four metal supports which surrounded a slightly smaller cylinder hidden until now. Then the inner cylinder split open similarly, revealing another nested layer, and the process continued until six or seven shells had been revealed.

Inside was a thin silver column. There was a tiny window set into the column’s side, showing an illuminated cavity. Cradled in the cavity was what looked like a bulbous-headed pin.

“I assume by now you understand what this is,” Sluka said.

“I can guess it wasn’t manufactured here,” Sylveste said. “And I know nothing like this was brought with us from Yellowstone. Which leaves our excellent benefactor Remilliod. He sold this to you?”

“This and nine others,” she said. “Eight now, since we used the tenth against Cuvier.”

“It’s a weapon?”

“Remilliod’s people called it hot-dust,” she said. “Antimatter. The pinhead contains only a twentieth of a gramme of antilithium, but that’s more than sufficient for our purposes.”

“I didn’t realise such a weapon was possible,” he said. “Something so small, I mean.”

“That’s understandable. The technology’s been outlawed for so long almost nobody remembers how to actually make one.”

“What yield does this have?”

“About two kilotonnes. Enough to put a hole in Cuvier.”

Sylveste nodded, absorbing the implication of what she had said. In his mind’s eye he tried to imagine what it must have been like, for those who had either died in or had been blinded by the pinhead True Path had used against the capital. The slight pressure differential between the domes and the outside air would have led to ferocious winds combing through the ordered municipal spaces. He imagined the trees and plants of the arboreta uprooted and shredded by the force of it, the birds and other animals carried aloft on the hurricane. Those people who survived the initial breach—no guessing how many—would have had to seek shelter underground, quickly, before the choking outside air replaced the leaking dome air. Admittedly the air was closer to being breathable now than it had been twenty years ago, but it took skill to learn how to do it, even for a few minutes only. Most of the inhabitants of the capital had never left it. He did not greatly value their chances.

“Why?” he asked.

“It was a…” She paused. “I was going to call it a mistake, but you could argue that there are no mistakes in war, only fortunate and less fortunate events. The intention, at least, was not to use the pinhead. Girardieau’s loyals were to surrender the city once they knew we possessed the weapon. But it didn’t work like that. Girardieau himself had known of the existence of the pinheads, but he hadn’t communicated that knowledge to his subordinates. No one would believe we had it.”

It was not necessary for her to tell him the rest; what had taken place was clear enough. Frustrated by the fact that their weapon was not taken seriously, the brigands had used it anyway. Yet the capital was still inhabited; Sluka had made that clear early on. Girardieau’s loyals still held it. He imagined them running things from subsurface bunkers, while overhead dust storms fingered through the open latticework of the ruined domes.

“So you see,” the woman said, “no one should underestimate us, much less anyone who retains any lingering attachment to Girardieau’s rule.”

“What do you plan to use the others for?”

“Infiltration. Remove the shrouding, and the pinhead itself is tiny enough to be implanted in a tooth. You’d never find it, except with the most detailed medical scan.”

“Is that your plan?” he asked. “To find eight volunteers, and have those things surgically implanted? Then have your eight infiltrate the capital again? This time they’d believe you, I think.”

“Except we don’t even need volunteers,” Sluka said. “They might be preferable, but they’re not necessary.”

Ignoring his own better judgement, Sylveste said, “Gillian, I think I liked you better fifteen years ago.”

“You can take him back to his cell,” she said to Falkender. “I’m bored with him for now.”

He felt the surgeon tug at his sleeve.

“May I spend more time with his eyes, Gillian? There was more I could do, but at the expense of greater discomfort.”

“Do what you like,” Sluka said. “But don’t feel any obligation. Now that I have him, I have to confess I’m a little disappointed. I think I liked him better in the past as well, before Girardieau turned him into a martyr.” She shrugged. “He’s too valuable to throw away, but in the absence of anything better, I might just have him frozen, until I find a use for him. That might be a year from now, or it might be five years. All I’m saying is, it would be a shame to invest very much time in something we might soon tire of, Dr Falkender.”

“Surgery has its own rewards,” the man said.

“I can see well enough now,” Sylveste said.

“Oh no,” Falkender answered. “There’s much more I can do for you, Dr Sylveste. Very much more. I’ve barely begun.”

Volyova was down with Captain Brannigan when a janitor-rat informed her that the pebbles had sent back their reports. She was gathering fresh samples from the Captain’s periphery, encouraged by recent successes of one of her retrovirus strains against the plague. Her virus was adapted from one of the military cyberviruses which had struck the ship, suitably modified for Plague-compatibility. Amazingly, it actually seemed to be working—at least against the tiny samples she had so far tried it against. How irritating to be snatched from this by something she had set in motion nine months earlier, and had in the meantime all but forgotten. For a moment she refused to believe that so much time could possibly have passed. Yet she was excited by what she might learn.

She took the lift upship. Nine months, yes. It hardly seemed possible—but that was what happened when you were working. And she should have been expecting it. Rationally she had known that so much time had passed—but the information had managed not to tunnel into the part of her mind where she actually acknowledged such things and began to deal with them. But the clues had been there all along. The ship was now cruising at only one quarter of lightspeed. In about a hundred days they would be making final insertion into Resurgam orbit, and they would need a strategy when they got there. That was where the pebbles came in.

Snapshots of Resurgam and near-Resurgam space were assembling in the bridge, in various EM and exotic-particle bands. It was the first recent glimpse of a possible enemy. Volyova let the salient facts mole deep into her consciousness, so that she could recall them with instinctive ease during a crisis. The pebbles had whipped past either side of Resurgam so that there was data from both its day and night sides. Additionally, the pebble cloud had elongated itself in the line of flight until fifteen hours spaced the passage of its first and last unit through the system, enabling the entire surface of Resurgam to be glimpsed under both illumination and darkness. The dayside pebbles were looking away from Delta Pavonis, so they snooped for neutrino leakage from fusion and antimatter power units on the surface. The nightside pebbles snooped for the heat signatures of population centres and orbital facilities. Other sensors sniffed the atmosphere, measuring oxygen, ozone and nitrogen levels; sensing the extent to which the colonists had tampered with the native biome.

Given that the colonists had been here for more than half a century, it was striking how much they had managed to live without. There were no large structures in orbit; no evidence of local spaceflight within the system. Only a few comsats girdled the planet, and given the lack of large-scale industrialisation on the surface, it was doubtful whether they could be repaired or replaced if any were damaged. It would be a simple matter to disable or confuse those that remained, if that fitted in with the as yet unformulated plan.

Yet they had not been entirely idle; the atmosphere showed signs of extensive modification, with free oxygen now well above what Volyova would have expected. The infrared sensors revealed geothermal taps aligned along what were certainly continental subduction zones. Neutrino leakage from the polar zones hinted at oxygen factories; fusion-powered units which would crack open water-ice molecules to extract oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen would be bled into the atmosphere—or pumped to domed-over communities—while the hydrogen was cycled back into the fusors. Volyova identified upwards of fifty communities, but most were small affairs, and none approximated the size of the main settlement. She assumed there were other, tinier outposts—family-tended stations and homesteads—but the pebbles would miss these.

So what did she have to report? No orbital defences, almost certainly no capability for spaceflight, and most of the planet’s inhabitants still crammed into one community. At least from a standpoint of relative strengths, persuading the Resurgamites to give up Sylveste ought to be the simplest of matters.

But there was something else.

The Resurgam system was a wide binary. Delta Pavonis was the life-giving star, but—as she had known—it possessed a dead twin. The dark companion was a neutron star, separated by ten light hours from Pavonis, far enough for stable planetary orbits to be possible around both stars. And indeed, the neutron star had claimed a planet of its own. The fact of the planet’s existence was known to her in advance of the information from the pebbles. All it warranted in the ship’s database was a line of comment and a scrawl of terse numerics. These worlds were invariably chemically dull, atmosphereless and biologically inert, flensed sterile by the wind that the neutron star had blown when it was a pulsar. Little more, Volyova thought, than lumps of stellar slag-iron, and about as interesting.

But near this world was a neutrino source. It was weak—almost at the limit of detectability—but nothing she could ignore. Volyova digested this knowledge for a few moments before regurgitating it as a tiny, troublesome cud of certainty. Only a machine could create such a signature.

And that worried her.

“You’ve really been awake all this time?” Khouri asked, shortly after waking herself, as she and Volyova journeyed down to see the Captain.

“Not literally,” Volyova said. “Even my body needs sleep occasionally. I tried dispensing with it once; there are drugs you can take. And implants which can be put into the RAS… that’s the reticular activating system, the region of the brain which mediates sleep—but you still need to clean out those fatigue poisons.” She winced. It was evident to Khouri that Volyova found the topic of implants about as pleasant as toothache.

“Much happen?” Khouri asked.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with,” Volyova said, taking a drag on a cigarette. Khouri assumed that would be the end of it, but then her tutor fixed her with an uneasy expression. “Well, now you mention it, there was something. Two things, in fact, though I’m not sure to which I should attach the greater significance. The first need not concern you immediately. As for the second…”

Khouri searched Volyova’s face for concrete evidence of the seven additional years the woman had aged since their last meeting. There was nothing; not a hint of it, which meant that she had balanced the seven years with infusions of anti-senescence drugs. She looked different, but only because she had permitted her hair to grow out from her usual crop. It was still short, but the extra volume served to ameliorate the sharp lines of her jaw and cheekbones. If anything, Khouri thought, Volyova looked seven years younger, rather than older. Not for the first time, she attempted to assess the woman’s actual physiological age, and failed miserably.

“What was it?”

“There was something unusual about your neural activity while you were in reefersleep. There shouldn’t have been any. But what I saw didn’t even look normal for someone awake. It looked like a small war going on in your head.”

The elevator had arrived at the Captain’s level. “That’s an interesting analogy,” Khouri said, stepping into the chill of the corridor.

“Assuming it is one. I doubted that you’d have been aware of much, of course.”

“I don’t remember anything,” Khouri said.

Volyova was silent until they reached the human nebula which was the Captain. Glittering and uncomfortably mucoid, he less resembled a human being than an angel which had dropped from the sky onto a hard, splattering surface. The antiquated reefer which had until recently cased him was now shattered and fissured. It still functioned, but only barely, and the cold it offered was no longer adequate to stifle the plague’s relentless encroachment. Captain Brannigan had sunk dozens of tendril-like roots into the ship now, roots which Volyova tracked but was powerless to prevent spreading. She could sever them, but what effect would that have on the Captain? For all she knew, the roots were all that was keeping him alive, if she dared dignify his state with the word. Eventually, Volyova said, the roots would permeate the whole vessel, and by then it would probably be unwise to make much of a distinction between the ship and the Captain. Of course, she could arrest that spread if she wished, by the simple expedient of ejecting this portion of the ship; cutting it entirely free from the rest of the vessel, the way an oldtime surgeon might have dealt with a particularly voracious tumour. The volume Brannigan had subsumed was tiny now, and the ship would certainly not miss it. Undoubtedly his transformations would continue, but lacking sustaining material they would be turned incestuously inwards, until entropy drove the life from what he had become.

“You’d consider doing that?” Khouri asked.

“Consider it, yes,” Volyova replied. “But I’m hoping it won’t come to that. All these samples I’ve been taking—I think I’m actually getting somewhere. I’ve found a counteragent—a retrovirus which seems stronger than the plague. It subverts the plague machinery faster than the plague subverts it. Only tested it on tiny pieces so far—and there’s really no way I can do any better than that, because testing it on the Captain would be a medical matter, and I’m not qualified to do that.”

“Of course,” Khouri said hastily. “But if you won’t do that, you’re really trusting all on Sylveste, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, but one shouldn’t underestimate his skills. Or Calvin’s, I should say.”

“And he’ll help you, just like that?”

“No, but he didn’t willingly help us the first time either, and we still found a way.”

“Persuasion, you mean?”

Volyova took a moment to take a scraping from one of the pipelike tendrils, just before it dove into an intestinal mass of ship plumbing. “Sylveste is a man with obsessions,” she said. “And people like that are more easily manipulated than they imagine. They’re so intent on whatever goal it is they have in mind that they don’t always notice that they’re being bent to someone else’s will.”

“Like yours, for instance.”

She took the sliver-thin sample and popped it away for analysis. “Sajaki told you that we brought him aboard during his missing month?”

“Thirty days in the wilderness.”

“Stupid name, that,” Volyova said, gritting her teeth. “Did they have to make it sound so damned Biblical? Wasn’t as if he didn’t already have a messiah complex, if you ask me. Anyway, yes, that was when we brought him aboard. And the interesting thing was, this was fully thirty years before the Resurgam expedition ever left Yellowstone. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret. Until we returned to Yellowstone and recruited you, we didn’t even know of the existence of this expedition. We still expected to find Sylveste on Yellowstone.”

Khouri knew well enough from her own experience with Fazil the kind of difficulty Volyova’s crew must have faced, but she decided a little fake ignorance would seem more plausible.

“Careless of you not to check firsthand.”

“Not at all. In fact we did—it was just that our best information was already decades old before we obtained it. And then by the time we’d acted on it—made the hop to Yellowstone—it was twice as old again.”

“I suppose it wasn’t a bad gamble. The family had always been associated with Yellowstone, so you’d have expected to find the rich young brat still hanging around the old place.”

“Except we were wrong. But the interesting thing is, it looks as if we could have spared ourselves the bother all along. Sylveste may have had the Resurgam expedition in mind when we first brought him aboard. If only we’d listened, we could have gone there directly.”

As they traversed the complicated series of elevators and access tunnels which led from the Captain’s corridor to the glade, Volyova spoke beneath audibility into the bracelet which she never let slip from her wrist. Khouri knew that she must be addressing one of the ship’s many artificial personae, but Volyova gave no hint of what it was she was arranging.

The green light of the glade was a sensual feast after the unremitting cold and gloom of the Captain’s corridor. The air was warm and bouquet-fresh, and the painted birds which owned the aerial spaces of the chamber were almost too gaudy for Khouri’s dark-adapted eyes. For a moment she was too overwhelmed to notice that Volyova and she were not alone. Then she saw the three other people who were present. The trio sat facing each other around a stump of wood, kneeling in the dew-moistened grass. Sajaki was one of them, though he wore his hair in a different style from those Khouri had seen before: he was entirely bald apart from a topknot. The second person she recognised was Volyova herself—hair short now, which accentuated the angular form of her skull and made her look older than the version of Volyova which was standing next to Khouri. The third person, Khouri realised, was Sylveste himself.

“Shall we join them?” Volyova said, leading the way down the rickety staircase which descended to the lawn.

Khouri followed. “This dates from…” She paused and recalled the date when Sylveste had gone missing from Chasm City. “Around 2460, right?”

“Spot on,” Volyova said, turning to fix Khouri with a look of mild amazement. “What are you, an expert on Sylveste’s life and times? Oh, never mind. The point is, we recorded his entire visit, and I knew there was one particular remark he made which… well, in the light of what we now know, I find curious.”

“Intriguing.”

Khouri jumped, because it was not she who had spoken, and the voice had appeared to come from behind her. It was then that she became conscious of the Mademoiselle, loitering some distance up the staircase.

“I should have known you’d show your ugly face,” Khouri said, not even bothering to subvocalise, since the constant chatter of the songbirds served to mask her words from Volyova, who had gone on ahead to the others. “You’re like a bad penny, you know.”

“At least you know I’m still around,” she said. “If I weren’t, you’d have real grounds to worry. It would mean Sun Stealer had overwhelmed my countermeasures. Your sanity would be next, and I hate to speculate about what that would do for your employment prospects where Volyova’s concerned.”

“Shut up and let me concentrate on what Sylveste has to say.”

“Be my guest,” the Mademoiselle said curtly, not straying from her vantage point.

Khouri joined Volyova next to the trio.

“Of course,” the standing Volyova said, addressing Khouri, “I could have replayed this conversation from any point in the ship. But it took place here, so this is where I chose to re-enact it.” As she spoke, she reached into her jacket pocket and slipped out a pair of smoke-coloured goggles which she proceeded to place over her eyes. Khouri understood: lacking implants, Volyova could only witness this playback with the aid of direct retinal projection. Until she slipped on the goggles, she would not have seen the figures at all.

“So you see,” Sajaki was saying, “it’s in your best interests to do what we want. You’ve made use of Ultra elements in the past—your trip out to Lascaille’s Shroud, for instance—and it’s highly probable you’ll want to do so in the future.”

Sylveste placed his elbows on the tree stump. Khouri studied the man. She had seen plenty of lifelike evocations of Sylveste before, but this image seemed more real than any she had yet experienced. She guessed it was because Sylveste was in conversation with two people she knew, rather than anonymous figures from Yellowstone’s history. That made a lot of difference. He was handsome; improbably so, in her opinion, but she doubted that the image had been cosmetically doctored. His long hair hung in tangles either side of his magisterial brow; his eyes were acutely green. Even if she had to look him in the eyes before killing him—and the Mademoiselle’s specifications about the killing did not make that unlikely—it would be something to see those eyes for real.

“That sounds awfully like blackmail,” Sylveste said, his voice the lowest of those present. “You talk as if you Ultras have some kind of binding agreement. It might fool some people, Sajaki, but I’m afraid I’m not one of them.”

“Then you may be in for a surprise the next time you attempt to enlist Ultra assistance,” Sajaki answered, toying with a splinter of wood. “Let’s be quite clear on this. If you refuse us—in addition to whatever else that might bring upon yourself—you’d ensure that you never leave your home planet.”

“I doubt that that would greatly inconvenience me.”

Volyova—the seated version—shook her head. “Not what our spies tell us. Rumour has it you’re trying to find funding for an expedition to the Delta Pavonis system, Dr Sylveste.”

“Resurgam?” Sylveste snorted. “I don’t think so. There’s nothing there.”

The real, standing Volyova said, “He’s clearly lying. It’s obvious now, though at the time I just assumed the rumour I had heard was false.”

Sajaki had replied to Sylveste, and now Sylveste was speaking again, defensively. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t care what rumours you’ve heard—you’d better ignore them. There’s not a scrap of a reason to go there. Check the records if you don’t believe me.”

“But that’s the odd thing,” the standing Volyova said. “I did just that, and damned if he wasn’t right. Based on what was known at the time, there was absolutely no reason to consider an expedition to Resurgam.”

“But you just said he was lying…”

“And he was, of course—hindsight proves that much.” She shook her head. “You know, I’ve never really thought about this, but it’s actually very strange—paradoxical, even. Thirty years after this meeting took place the expedition left for Resurgam, which means the rumour was correct after all.” She nodded at Sylveste, embroiled in heated discussion with her seated image. “But back then nobody knew about the Amarantin! So what in hell’s name gave him the idea to go to Resurgam in the first place?”

“He must have known he’d find something there.”

“Yes, but where did that information come from? There were automated surveys of the system prior to his expedition, but none of them were thorough. As far as I know, none of them scanned the planetary surfaces close enough to find evidence that there’d once been intelligent life on Resurgam. Yet Sylveste knew.”

“Which makes no sense.”

“I know,” Volyova said. “Believe me, I know.”

At which point she joined her twin next to the stump and leant so close to the image of Sylveste that Khouri could see the reflection of his unwavering green eyes in the smoky facets of her goggles. “What did you know?” she asked. “More to the point, how did you know?”

“He isn’t going to tell you,” Khouri said.

“Maybe not now,” Volyova said. And then smiled. “But before very long it’ll be the real one sitting there. And then we may get some answers.”

As she was speaking, her bracelet began to emit a sonorous chiming. The sound was unfamiliar, but it obviously connoted alarm. Above, without any fuss, the synthetic daylight turned blood-red and began to pulse in rhythm with the chiming.

“What’s that?” Khouri asked.

“An emergency,” Volyova said, holding the bracelet close to her jaw. She snatched the retinal-projection goggles from her face and studied a little display inset into the bracelet. It was also pulsing red, in perfect time with the sky and the chiming. Khouri could see words trickling onto the display, but not clearly enough to read them.

“What sort of emergency?” Khouri breathed, wary of disturbing the woman’s attention. Though she had not noticed their departure, the trio had vanished quietly back into whatever portion of the ship’s memory had tricked them to life.

Volyova looked up from the bracelet, face quite pale. “One of the cache-weapons.”

“Yes?”

“It’s arming itself.”