Revelation Space

THIRTEEN

“Seat,” Volyova said, entering the bridge.

A chair craned eagerly towards her. She buckled herself in and then gunned the seat away from the bridge’s tiered walls, until she was orbiting the enormous holographic projection sphere which occupied the room’s middle.

The sphere was showing a view of Resurgam, although one might have easily concluded that it was really the desiccated eyeball of an ancient and mummified corpse, magnified several hundred times. But Volyova knew that the image was more than just an accurate portrayal of Resurgam dredged from the ship’s database. It was being imaged in realtime; captured by the cameras which were even now pointing down from the lighthugger’s hull.

Resurgam was not a beautiful planet, by anyone’s standards. Apart from the sullied white of the polar caps, the overall colour was a skullish grey, offset by scabs of rust and a few desultory chips of powder-blue near the equatorial zones. The larger oceanic water masses were still mostly cauled under ice, and those motes of exposed water were almost certainly being artificially warmed against freeze-over; either by thermal energy grids or carefully tailored metabolic processes. There were clouds, but they were wispy plumes rather than the great complex features Volyova knew one could usually expect from planetary weather systems. Here and there they thickened towards white opacity, but only in small gangliar knots near the settlements. Those were the places where the vapour factories were working, sublimating polar ice into water, oxygen and hydrogen. There were few patches of vegetation large enough to be seen without magnification down to kilometre-resolution, and by the same token no obvious visible evidence of human presence, save for a sprinkling of settlement lights when the planet’s nightside rolled around every ninety minutes. Even with the zoom, the settlements were elusive, since—with the exception of the capital—they tended to be sunk into the ground. Often, very little projected beyond the surface apart from antennae, landing pads and air-smoothed greenhouses. Of the capital…

Well, that was the disturbing part.

“When does our window with Triumvir Sajaki open?” she asked, snapping her gaze across the faces of the other crewmembers, whose seats were arranged in a loosely defined cluster, facing each other beneath the ashen light of the imaged planet.

“Five minutes,” Hegazi said. “Five tortuous minutes and then we’ll know what delights dear Sajaki has to share with us regarding our new colonist friends. Are you sure you can bear the agony of waiting?”

“Why don’t you have a guess, svinoi.”

“That wouldn’t be much of a challenge, would it?” Hegazi was grinning, or at least trying very hard to approximate the gesture; no mean feat given the amount of chimeric accessories which encrusted his face. “Funny, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you weren’t exactly enthralled by any of this.”

“If he hasn’t found Sylveste…”

Hegazi raised a gauntleted hand. “Sajaki hasn’t even made his report yet. No sense jumping the gun…”

“You’re confident he’ll have found him, then?”

“Well, no. I didn’t say that.”

“If there’s one thing I hate,” Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, “it’s mindless optimism.”

“Oh, cheer up. Worse things happen.”

Yes, she had to admit, they did. And with an annoying regularity, they seemed to have decided to keep happening to her. What was astonishing about her recent run of misfortune was that it had managed to keep escalating with each new bout of bad luck. It had reached the point where she was beginning to look back nostalgically on the merely irksome problems she had encountered with Nagorny; when all she had to deal with was someone trying to kill her. It made her wonder—without a great deal of enthusiasm—if there would soon come a day when she would look back even on this period with longing.

The trouble with Nagorny had been the precursor, of course. It was obvious now; at the time she had regarded the whole thing as an isolated incident, but what it had really been was just the initial indications of something far worse in the future, like a heart murmur presaging an attack. She had killed Nagorny—but in doing so, she had not come to any understanding of the problem that had driven him psychotic. Then she had recruited Khouri, and the problems had not so much repeated themselves as reiterated a grander theme, like the second movement of a grim symphony. Khouri was not obviously mad—yet. But she had become a catalyst for a worse, less localised madness. There had been the storms in her head, beyond anything Volyova had ever seen. And then there had been the incident with the cache-weapon, which had almost killed Volyova, and might have gone on to kill all of them, and perhaps a significant number of the people on Resurgam as well.

“It’s time for some answers, Khouri,” she had said, before the others were revived.

“Answers about what, Triumvir?”

“Forget the charade of innocence,” Volyova said. “I’m far too tired for it, and I assure you I will get to the truth one way or the other. During the crisis with the cache-weapon, you gave too much away. If you were hoping I would forget some of the things you said, you were mistaken.”

“Like what?” They were down in one of the rat-infested zones; it was, Volyova reckoned, as safe from Sajaki’s listening devices as any area of the ship save the spider-room itself.

She shoved Khouri against the wall, hard enough to knock some wind out of the woman; letting her know Volyova’s wiry strength should not be underestimated, nor her patience stretched too far. “Let me make something clear to you, Khouri. I killed Nagorny, your predecessor, because he failed me. I successfully concealed the truth of his death from the rest of the crew. Be under no illusions that I will do the same to you, if you give me sufficient justification.”

Khouri pushed herself back from the wall, regaining some colour. “What is it you want to know, exactly?”

“You can start by telling me who you are. Begin with the assumption that I know you are an infiltrator.”

“How can I be an infiltrator? You recruited me.”

“Yes,” Volyova said, for she had already thought this through. “That was the way it was made to seem, of course… but it was deception, wasn’t it? Whatever agency is behind you managed to manipulate my search procedure, making it seem as if I had selected you… whereas the choice was ultimately not mine at all.” Volyova had to admit to herself that she had no direct evidence to support this, but it was the simplest hypothesis which fitted all the facts. “So, are you going to deny this?”

“Why would you think I was an infiltrator?”

Volyova paused to light up a cigarette; one of those she had bought from the Stoners in the carousel where Khouri had been recruited, or found. “Because you seem to know too much about the gunnery. You seem to know something about Sun Stealer… and that troubles me deeply.”

“You mentioned Sun Stealer shortly after you brought me aboard, don’t you remember?”

“Yes, but your knowledge goes deeper than can be explained by the information you could have gleaned from me. In fact there are times when you seem to know somewhat more about the whole situation than I do.” She paused. “There’s more to it than that, of course. The neural activity in your brain, during reefersleep… I should have examined the implants you came aboard with more carefully. They obviously aren’t all that they seem. Do you want to have a stab at explaining any of this?”

“All right…” Khouri’s tone of voice was different now. It was clear that she had given up any hope of bluffing her way out of this one. “But listen carefully, Ilia. I know you’ve got your little secrets, too—things you really don’t want Sajaki and the others to find about. I’d already guessed about Nagorny, but there’s also the business with the cache-weapon. I know you don’t want that to become common knowledge, or you wouldn’t be going to such lengths to cover up the whole thing.”

Volyova nodded, knowing it would be fruitless to deny these things. Maybe Khouri even had an inkling of her relationship with the Captain. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, whatever I say to you now, it had better stay between us. Isn’t that reasonable of me?”

“I just said I could kill you, Khouri. You’re not exactly in a strong bargaining position.”

“Yes, you could kill me—or at least have a go—but despite what you said, I doubt you’d manage to cover up my death as easily as you did Nagorny’s. Losing one Gunnery Officer is bad luck. Two begins to look like carelessness, doesn’t it?”

A rat scampered by, splashing them. Irritatedly, Volyova flicked her cigarette butt towards the animal, but it had already vanished through a duct in the wall. “So you’re saying I don’t even tell the others I know you’re an infiltrator?”

Khouri shrugged. “You do what you like. But how do you think Sajaki would take that? Whose fault would it have been that the infiltrator ever came aboard in the first place?”

Volyova took her time before answering. “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”

“I knew you’d want to ask me some questions sooner or later, Triumvir.”

“So let’s start with the obvious one. Who are you, and who are you working for?”

Khouri sighed and spoke with resignation. “A lot of what you already know is the truth. I’m Ana Khouri and I was a soldier on Sky’s Edge… although about twenty years earlier than you thought. As for the rest…” She paused. “You know, I could really use some coffee.”

“There isn’t any, so get used to it.”

“All right. I was in the pay of another crew. I don’t know their names—there was never any direct contact—but they’ve been trying to get their hands on your cache-weapons for some time.”

Volyova shook her head. “Not possible. No one else knows about them.”

“That’s what you’d like to think. But you have used parts of the cache, right? There must have been survivors, witnesses, you never knew about. Gradually word got about that your ship was carrying some serious shit. Maybe no one knew the whole picture, but they knew enough of it to want to have their own slice of the cache.”

Volyova was silent. What Khouri was saying was shocking—like finding out that her most private of habits was public knowledge—but, she had to admit, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Conceivably there had been a leak. Crew had left the ship, after all—not always willingly—and while those who had done so were not supposed to have had access to anything sensitive—certainly nothing pertaining to the cache—there was always the chance that an error had been made. Or perhaps, as Khouri had said, someone had witnessed the cache being used and had lived to pass on that information.

“This other crew—you may not have known their names, but did you know what their ship was called?”

“… no. That would have been just as sloppy as letting me know who they were, wouldn’t it?”

“What did you know, in that case? How were they expecting to steal the cache from us?”

“That’s where Sun Stealer comes into it. Sun Stealer was a military virus they snuck aboard your ship when you were last in the Yellowstone system. A very smart, adaptive piece of infiltration software. It was designed to worm its way into enemy installations and wage psychological warfare on the occupants, driving them mad through subliminal suggestion.” Khouri paused, giving Volyova time to digest that. “But your own defences were too good. Sun Stealer was weakened, and the strategy never really worked. So they bided their time. They didn’t get another chance until you were back in the Yellowstone system, nearly a century later. I was the next line of attack: get a human infiltrator aboard.”

“How was the original viral attack made?”

“They got it in via Sylveste. They knew all about you bringing him aboard to fix up your Captain. They planted the software on him without him knowing, then let it infect your systems while he was hooked in to your medical suite, fixing the Captain.”

There was, Volyova thought, something deeply and worryingly plausible about that. It was just an example of another crew being as predatory as they were. It would be arrogance in the extreme to assume that only Sajaki’s Triumvirate were capable of such subterfuge.

“And what was your function?”

“To assess the state of Sun Stealer’s corruption of your gunnery systems. If possible, to gain control of the ship. Resurgam was a good destination for that—sufficiently out of the way not to be under any kind of system-wide police jurisdiction. If a takeover could be staged, there would be no one to observe it except maybe a few colonists.” Khouri sighed. “But believe me, that plan’s well and truly shit-canned. The Sun Stealer program was flawed; too dangerous and too adaptive. It drew too much attention to itself when it drove Nagorny mad—but on the other hand, he was the only one it could reach. Then it started screwing around with the cache itself…”

“The rogue weapon.”

“Yeah. That scared me, as well.” Khouri shivered. “I knew Sun Stealer was too powerful by then. There was nothing I could do to control it.”

Over the next few days, Volyova would ask Khouri more questions, testing different aspects of her story against what passed for the known facts. Certainly, Sun Stealer could have been some kind of infiltration software… even if it was more subtle, more insidious, than anything she had heard of in all her years of experience. But did that mean she could dismiss it? No; of course not. After all, she knew the thing existed. Khouri’s story, in fact, was the first explanation she had encountered that made any kind of objective sense at all. It explained why her attempts to cure Nagorny had failed. He had not been sent mad by any subtle combination of effects stemming from her gunnery implants. He had been driven mad, purely and simply, by an entity that had been designed for just that purpose. No wonder it had been so hard to find any explanation for Nagorny’s problems. Of course, there remained the irksome question of why exactly Nagorny’s madness had expressed itself so forcefully in the manner it had—all those fevered sketches of nightmarish birds’ parts, and the designs on his coffin—but who was to say that Sun Stealer had not simply amplified some pre-existing psychosis, letting Nagorny’s subconscious work with whatever imagery suited it?

The mysterious other crew could also not be dismissed too easily. Shipboard records revealed that another lighthugger—the Galatea—had been present in Yellowstone on both occasions when they had last visited the system. Could they have been the crew responsible for sending Khouri aboard?

For now, it was as good an explanation as any. And one thing was absolutely clear. Khouri was quite right in saying that none of this information could be presented to the rest of the Triumvirate. Sajaki would indeed blame Volyova totally for what was a grievous lapse in security. He would punish Khouri, of course… but Volyova could also expect some kind of retribution. The way their relationship had been strained of late, it was entirely possible that Sajaki would try and kill her. He might succeed, too—he was at least as strong as Volyova. It would not greatly trouble him that he would be losing his chief weapons expert and the only person who had any real insight into the cache. His argument would no doubt be that she had already demonstrated her incompetence in that regard. But there was something else, too: something Volyova could not entirely dismiss. No matter what had really transpired with the cache-weapon, the unavoidable truth was that Khouri had saved Volyova’s life.

Hateful though the thought was, she owed the infiltrator.

Her only option, when she considered the situation dispassionately, was to proceed as if nothing had happened. Khouri’s mission was in any case no longer viable; there would be no attempted takeover now. The woman’s hidden reason for being aboard the ship had no impact on the upcoming attempt to bring Sylveste aboard again, and in many respects Khouri would be needed simply as a crewmember. Now that Volyova knew the truth, and now that the original purpose of Khouri’s mission had been abandoned, Khouri would surely do everything in her power to fit into her pre-assigned position. It hardly mattered whether the loyalty treatments were working or not: Khouri would have to behave as if they were, and gradually the act would become indistinguishable from the truth. She might not even want to leave the ship when the opportunity arose to do so. After all, there were worse places to be. Over months or years of subjective time, she would become one of the crew, and her past duplicity could remain a secret shared only by her and Volyova. In time, it might even be something Volyova almost forgot.

Eventually, Volyova managed to convince herself that the infiltration question had been settled. Sun Stealer would remain a problem, of course—but now Khouri would be working with her to conceal it from Sajaki. And in the meantime, there were other things that needed to be concealed from the Triumvir. Volyova had set herself the task of eradicating every shred of evidence that the cache-weapon incident had ever happened. She had intended to do this before Sajaki and the others were revived, but it had not proved easy. Her first task had been to repair the damage to the lighthugger itself, patching the areas of the hull which had been hurt by the weapon’s detonation. Largely this consisted of coaxing the auto-repair routines to work faster, but she also had to ensure that all pre-existing scars, impact-craters, or areas of imperfect repair were precisely duplicated. She then had to hack into the auto-repair memory and erase the knowledge that the repairs had been orchestrated at all. She had to repair the spider-room, even though Sajaki and the others were not meant to know it even existed. Better to be safe than sorry, though, and that had been by far the simplest of the repairs. Next, she had to erase all evidence that the Palsy routine had been run; at least a week’s work.

The loss of the shuttle was much harder to hide. For a while, she considered making a new one: harvesting tiny amounts of raw materials from all over the ship, until she had what she needed. She would only have to use one ninety-thousandth of the entire mass of the ship. But it was too risky, and she doubted her ability to weather the shuttle authentically; to make it look as old as it should have been. Instead, she took the simpler option of editing the ship’s database so that it would always look as if there had been one shuttle fewer aboard. Sajaki might notice—all the crew might notice—-but there would be absolutely nothing that anyone could prove. Finally, of course, she remade the cache-weapon. It was only a facade; a replica designed to lurk in the cache chamber and look threatening on the rare occasions when Sajaki paid a visit to her domain. Covering her tracks took six days of manic work. On the seventh day she rested, and endeavoured to compose herself, so that none of the others would guess what labours she had been through. On the eighth day Sajaki had awakened and asked her what she had been up to in the years he had been in reefersleep.

“Oh,” she had said. “Nothing to write home about.”

His reaction—like much else about Sajaki these days—had been difficult to judge. Even if she had succeeded this time, she thought, she could not risk another mistake. Yet, already—though they had not even made contact with the colonists—things were drifting beyond the arena of her understanding. Her thoughts returned to the neutrino signature she had detected around the system’s neutron star, and of the feeling of unease which had been with her ever since. The source was still there, and while it remained weak, she had now studied it well enough to know that it was in orbit not just around the neutron star, but also around the moon-sized rocky world which attended the star. It had certainly not been present when the system had been surveyed decades earlier, immediately suggesting that it was something to do with the colony on Resurgam. But how could they have sent it? The colonists did not even seem capable of reaching orbit, let alone sending some kind of probe to the edge of their system. Even the ship which should have brought them here was missing; she had expected to find the Lorean in orbit around Resurgam, but there was no sign of it. Now, no matter what the evidence said, she kept in the back of her mind the possibility that the colonists might be capable of something completely unexpected. It was another burden to add to her mounting stockpile of worries.

“Ilia?” said Hegazi. “We’re almost ready now. The capital’s about to emerge from nightside.”

She nodded. The ship’s high-magnification cameras, dotted around the hull, would be zooming in on a very specific site several kilometres beyond the city boundary, focusing on a spot which had been identified and agreed upon before Sajaki’s departure. If no misfortune had befallen him, he should now be waiting at that spot, standing on the upper surface of an unshielded mesa, looking directly towards the rising sun. Timing was critical here, but Volyova did not doubt that Sajaki would be on the mark.

“Got him,” Hegazi said. “Image stabilisers phasing in…”

“Show us.”

A window opened in the globe near the capital, rapidly swelling. At first what lay within the window was unclear; a blurred smear that might have been a man standing on a rock. But the image quickly sharpened, until the figure was recognisably Sajaki. In place of the bulky adaptive armour which Volyova had last seen him wearing, Sajaki wore an ash-coloured overcoat, its long tails flapping around his booted legs, evidencing the mild wind playing over the mesa’s topside. The suit’s collar was drawn up around his ears, but his face was unobstructed.

It was not quite his own. Prior to leaving the ship, Sajaki’s features had been subtly remoulded, according to an averaged ideal derived from the genetic profiles of the original expedition members who had travelled to Resurgam from Yellowstone, in turn reflecting the Franco-Sino genes of the Yellowstone settlers. Sajaki would arouse nothing more than a curious glance if he chose to walk through the capital’s streets at midday. There was nothing to betray him as a newcomer, not even his accent. Linguistic software had analysed the dozen or so Stoner dialects carried by the expedition members, applying complex lexicostatistic models to merge these modes of speech into a new, planetwide dialect for Resurgam as a whole. If Sajaki chose to communicate with any of the settlers, his look, cover-story and manner of speaking would convince them that he was merely from one of the remoter planetary settlements, not an offworlder.

That at least was the idea.

Sajaki carried no technological implements which would give him away, save the implants beneath his skin. A conventional surface-to-orbit communication system would have been too susceptible to detection, and far too difficult to explain had he been captured for some reason or other. Yet now he was speaking; reciting a phrase repeatedly, while the ship’s infrared sensors examined the bloodflow around Sajaki’s mouth region, assembling a model of his underlying muscular and jaw movements. By correlating these movements against the extensive archives of actual conversation already recorded, the ship could begin to guess the sounds he was making. The final step was to include grammatical, syntactical and semantic models for the words Sajaki was likely to be saying. It sounded complex—it was—but to Volyova’s ears there was no perceptible timelag between his lip movements and the simulated voice she was hearing, eerily clear and precise.

“I must presume you can now hear me,” he said. “For the record, let this be my first report from the surface of Resurgam after landing. You will forgive me if I occasionally digress from the point, or express myself with a certain inelegance. I did not write this report down beforehand; it would have constituted too great a security risk if I were found with it while leaving the capital. Things are very different than we expected.”

True enough, Volyova thought. The colonists—or at least a faction of them—certainly knew that a ship had arrived around Resurgam. They had bounced a radar beam off it, surreptitiously. But they had made no attempt to contact Infinity—no more so than the ship had attempted to contact anyone on the ground. As much as the neutrino source, that worried her. It spoke of paranoia, and hidden intentions—and not just her own. But she forced herself not to think about that now, for Sajaki was still speaking, and she did not want to miss any of what he had to report.

“I have much to tell concerning the colony,” he said, “and this window is short. So I will begin with the news you are undoubtedly waiting for. We have located Sylveste; now it is simply a matter of bringing him into our custody.”

Sluka was pushing coffee down her throat, sitting across from Sylveste with a black oblong table positioned between them. Early morning Resurgam sun was filtering into the room via half-closed jalousies, casting fiery contours across her skin.

“I need your opinion on something.”

“Visitors?”

“How astute.” She poured him a cup, offered the palm of her hand towards the chair. Sylveste sank down into the seat, until he was the lower of the two. “Indulge my curiosity, Doctor Sylveste, and tell me exactly what you’ve heard.”

“I’ve heard nothing.”

“Then it won’t take much of your time.”

He smiled through the fog of tiredness. For the second time in a day he had been awakened by her guards, dragged in a state of semi-consciousness and disorientation from his room. He still smelt Pascale, her scent cloaking him, and wondered if she was still sleeping in her own cell somewhere across Mantell. As lonely as he now felt, the feeling was tempered by the gladdening news that she was alive and unharmed. They had told him as much in the days before their meeting, but he had had no reason to believe Sluka’s people were telling the truth. What use, after all, was Pascale to the True Pathers? Even less than he—and it was already clear enough that Sluka had been debating the value of retaining him alive.

Yet now, perceptibly, things were changing. He had been allowed time with Pascale, and he believed that this would not be the only occasion. Did this development stem from some basic humanity on Sluka’s behalf, or did it imply something entirely different—perhaps that she might have need of one of them in the near future, and that now was the time when she had to begin winning favour?

Sylveste swigged the coffee, blasting away his residual tiredness. “All I’ve heard is that there may be visitors. From then on I drew my own conclusions.”

“Which I presume you’d care to share with me.”

“Perhaps we could discuss Pascale for a moment?”

She peered at him over the rim of her cup, before nodding with the delicacy of a clockwork marionette. “You’re venturing an exchange of knowledge in return for—what? Certain relaxations in the regime under which you’re held?”

“That wouldn’t be unreasonable, I feel.”

“It would all depend on the quality of your speculations.”

“Speculations?”

“As to who these visitors might be.” Sluka glanced towards the slatted rising sun, eyes narrowed against the ruby-red glare. “I value your point of view, though heaven knows why.”

“First you’d have to tell me what it is you know.”

“We’ll come to that.” Sluka bit on a smile. “First I should admit that I have you at something of a disadvantage.”

“In what way?”

“Who are these people, if they aren’t Remilliod’s crew?”

Her remark meant that his conversations with Pascale—and by implication everything that had gone on between them—had been monitored. The knowledge shocked him less than he would have expected. He had obviously suspected it must be so the whole time, but perhaps he had preferred to ignore his own qualms.

“Very good, Sluka. You ordered Falkender to mention the visitors, didn’t you? That was quite clever of you.”

“Falkender was just doing his job. Who are they, then? Remilliod already has experience trading with Resurgam. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to return here for a second bite?”

“Much too soon. He’ll have barely had time to reach another system, let alone anything with trading prospects.” Sylveste freed himself of the chair’s embrace, strolling to the slatted window. Through the iron jalousies he watched the northerly faces of the nearest mesas radiate cool orange, like stacked books on the point of bursting into flame. The thing he noticed now was the bluer tone of the sky; no longer crimson. That was because megatonnes of dust had been removed from the winds; replaced with water vapour. Or maybe it was a trick of his impaired colour perception.

Fingering the glass, he said, “Remilliod would never return so quickly. He’s among the shrewdest of traders, with very few exceptions.”

“Then who is it?”

“It’s the exceptions I’m bothered about.”

Sluka called an aide to remove the coffee. With the table bare, she invited Sylveste back to his seat. Then she printed a document from the table and offered it to him.

“The information you’re about to see reached us three weeks ago, from a contact in the East Nekhebet flare-watch station.”

Sylveste nodded. He knew about the flare-watches. He had pushed to set them up himself; small observatories dotted around Resurgam, monitoring the star for evidence of abnormal emission.

Reading was too much like trying to decipher Amarantin script: creeping letter by letter along a word until the meaning snapped into his mind. Cal had known that much of reading boiled down to mechanics—the physiology of eye movement along the line. He had built routines into Sylveste’s eyes to accommodate this need, but it had not been within Falkender’s gift to restore everything.

Still, this much was clear:

The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system.

Analysis of the spectral pattern of the gamma-ray flash indicated that it was subject to a small but measurable Doppler shift; a few per cent of the speed of light. The conclusion was inescapable: the flash originated from a ship, on the final phase of deceleration from interstellar cruising speed.

“Something happened,” Sylveste said, absorbing the news of the ship’s demise with calm neutrality. “Some kind of malfunction in the drive.”

“That was our guess as well.” Sluka tapped the paper with her fingernail. “A few days later we knew it couldn’t possibly be the case. The thing was still there—faint, but unmistakable.”

“The ship survived the blast?”

“Whatever it was. By then we were getting a detectable blueshift off the drive flame. Deceleration was continuing normally, as if the explosion had never happened.”

“You’ve got a theory for this, I presume.”

“Half of one. We think the blast originated from a weapon. What kind, we haven’t a clue. But nothing else could have liberated so much energy.”

“A weapon?” Sylveste tried to keep his voice completely calm, allowing only natural curiosity to show, purging it of the emotions he really felt, which were largely variations on pure dread.

“Odd, don’t you think?”

Sylveste leant forwards, a damp chill along his spine.

“These visitors—whoever they are, I presume they understand the situation here.”

“The political picture, you mean? Unlikely.”

“But they’d have attempted contact with Cuvier.”

“That’s the funny thing. Nothing from them. Not a squeak.”

“Who knows this?”

His voice by now was almost inaudible, even to himself, as if someone were standing on his windpipe.

“About twenty people on the colony. People with access to the observatories, a dozen or so of us here; somewhat fewer in Resurgam City… Cuvier.”

“It isn’t Remilliod.”

Sluka let the paper be reabsorbed by the table, its sensitive content digested away.

“Then do you have any suggestions as to who it might be?”

Sylveste wondered how close to hysteria his laugh sounded. “If I’m right about this—and I’m not often wrong—this isn’t just bad news for me, Sluka. This is bad news for all of us.”

“Go on.”

“It’s a long story.”

She shrugged. “I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. Nor are you.”

“Not for now, certainly.”

“What?”

“Just a suspicion of my own.”

“Stop playing games, Sylveste.”

He nodded, knowing there was no real point in holding back. He had shared the deepest of his fears with Pascale already, and for Sluka it would now be just a case of filling in the gaps; things which were unobvious from her eavesdropping. If he resisted, he knew, she would find a way to learn what she wished, either from him or—worse—Pascale.

“It goes back a long way,” he said. “Way back, to the time when I’d just returned to Yellowstone from the Shrouders. You recall that I disappeared back then, don’t you?”

“You always denied anything had happened.”

“I was kidnapped by Ultras,” Sylveste said, not waiting to observe her reaction. “Taken aboard a lighthugger in orbit around Yellowstone. One of their number was injured, and they wanted me to… ‘repair’ him, I suppose.”

“Repair him?”

“The Captain was an extreme chimeric.”

Sluka shivered. It was clear that—like most colonialists—her experience with the radically altered fringes of Ultra society had been confined largely to lurid holo-dramas.

“They were not ordinary Ultras,” Sylveste said, seeing no reason not to play on Sluka’s phobias. “They’d been out there too long; too long away from what we’d think of as normal human existence. They were isolated even by normal Ultra standards; paranoid; militaristic…”

“But even so…”

“I know what you’re thinking—that, even if these were some outlandish offshoot culture, how bad could they be?” Sylveste deployed a supercilious smile and shook his head. “That’s exactly what I thought, at first. Then I found out more about them.”

“Such as?”

“You mentioned a weapon? Well, they have them. They have weapons which could comfortably dismantle this planet, should they wish.”

“But they wouldn’t use them without reason.”

Sylveste smiled. “We’ll find out when they reach Resurgam, I think.”

“Yes…” Sluka said this last word on a falling note. “Actually, they’re already here. The explosion happened three weeks ago, but the—um—significance of it was not immediately clear. In the meantime they’ve decelerated and assumed orbit around Resurgam.”

Sylveste took a moment to regulate his breathing, wondering just how deliberate Sluka’s piecewise revelation was. Had she really neglected to mention this detail—or had she spared it, disclosing the facts in a manner calculated to keep him permanently disorientated?

If so, she was succeeding admirably.

“Wait a minute,” Sylveste said. “Just now you said only a few people knew about this. But how easy would it be to miss a lighthugger orbiting a planet?”

“Easier than you imagine. Their ship’s the darkest object in the system. It radiates in the infrared, of course—it must do—but it seems able to tune its emissions to the frequencies of our atmospheric vapour bands; the frequencies which don’t penetrate down to the surface. If we hadn’t spent the last twenty years putting so much water into the atmosphere…” Sluka shook her head ruefully. “In any case, it doesn’t matter. Right now, no one’s paying much attention to the sky. They could have arrived lit up in neon and no one would have noticed.”

“But instead they haven’t even announced their presence.”

“Worse than that. They’ve done everything possible not to let us know they’re here. Except for that damn weapon blast…” For a moment she trailed off, looking towards the window, before snapping her attention back to Sylveste. “If these people are who you think, you must have an idea what it is they want.”

“That’s easy enough, I think. What they want is me.”

Volyova listened intently to the rest of Sajaki’s report from the surface. “Very little information had reached Yellowstone from Resurgam; even less after the first mutiny. We now know that Sylveste survived the mutiny, but was ousted in a coup ten years later; ten years ago from the present date. He was imprisoned—in some luxury, I might add—at the expense of the new regime, who saw him as a useful political tool. Such a situation would have suited us extremely well, since Sylveste’s whereabouts would have been easy to deduce. We would also have been in the fortunate position of being able to negotiate with people who might have had few qualms about turning him over to us. Now, however, the situation is immeasurably more complex.”

Sajaki paused at this point, and Volyova noticed that he had turned slightly, bringing a new background into view behind him. Their angle of sight was altering as they passed overhead and to the south, but Sajaki was aware of this and was making the necessary adjustments in his position to keep his face in view of the ship at all times. To an observer on one of the other mesas he would have looked strange indeed: a silent figure facing the horizon, whispering unguessable incantations, slowly pivoting on his heels with almost watchlike precision. No one could have guessed that he was engaged in one-way communication with an orbiting spacecraft, rather than lost in the observances of some private madness.

“As we ascertained as soon as we were in scan range, the capital Cuvier has been gutted by a number of large explosions. As we were also able to deduce by examining the degree of reconstruction, these events happened very recently on the colonial timescale. My investigations here have established that the second coup—when these weapons were used—took place barely eight months ago. However, the coup was not entirely successful. The old regime still control what remains of Cuvier, though their leader—Girardieau—was killed during the disturbance. The True Path Inundationists—those responsible for the attacks—control many of the outlying settlements, but they seem to lack cohesion, and may even have fallen into factional squabbles. In the week in which I have been here there have been nine attacks against the city, and some suspect internal saboteurs: True Path infiltrators working from within the ruins.” Sajaki collected his thoughts at this point, and Volyova wondered if he felt some distant kinship with the infiltrators he had mentioned. If so, there was not a hint of it in his expression.

“Concerning my own actions, my first task, of course, was to order the suit to dismantle itself. It would have been tempting to use it to make the journey overland to Cuvier, but the risk would have been excessive. Yet the journey was easier than I had feared, and on the outskirts I hitched a ride with a gang of pipeline technicians returning from the north, using them as cover to enter Cuvier. They were suspicious at first, but the vodka soon persuaded them to take me aboard their vehicle. I told them we distilled it in Phoenix, the settlement where I said I’d come from. They’d never heard of Phoenix, but they were more than happy to drink to it.”

Volyova nodded. The vodka—along with a satchel-full of trinkets—had been manufactured aboard ship shortly before Sajaki’s departure.

“People mostly live underground now, in catacombs which were dug fifty or sixty years ago. Of course, the air is tolerably adapted for breathing, but you have my assurance that the procedure is not exactly comfortable, and one is never far away from the onset of hypoxia. The exertion which was required to reach this mesa was considerable.”

Volyova smiled to herself. If Sajaki even admitted such a thing, his ascent of the mesa must have been close to torture.

“They say that the True Pathers have access to Martian genetic technology,” he continued, “which facilitates easier breathing, though I’ve seen nothing to prove this. My pipeline friends helped me find a room in a hostel used by miners from beyond the city, which of course fitted in perfectly with my cover story. I wouldn’t describe the accommodation as salubrious, but it suited my purpose well enough, which was of course to gather data. In the course of my enquiries,” Sajaki added, “I learnt much that was contradictory, or at best vague.”

Sajaki had now turned almost from horizon to horizon. The sun was now beyond his right shoulder, making his image increasingly difficult to interpret. The ship, of course, would simply switch to infrared, reading Sajaki’s speech in the shifting blood-patterns of his face.

“Eyewitnesses say Sylveste and his wife managed to escape the assassination attempt which killed Girardieau, but they have not resurfaced since. That was eight months ago. The people I have spoken to, and the covert data sources I have intercepted, lead me to one conclusion. Sylveste is someone’s prisoner again, except this time he is being held outside the city, probably by one of the True Path cells.”

Volyova was tense now. She could see where all this was leading: there had always been a kind of inevitability to it. The only difference was that in this case it stemmed from what she knew about Sajaki, rather than the man he sought.

“It would be futile to negotiate with the official powers here—whoever they are,” Sajaki said. “I doubt that they could give us Sylveste even if they wanted to hand him over, which of course they wouldn’t. Which unfortunately leaves us only one option.”

Volyova bridled. Here it was.

“We must arrange things so that it is in the best interests of the colony as a whole to give us Sylveste.” Sajaki smiled again, teeth flashing against the shadow of his face. “Needless to say, I have already begun laying the necessary groundwork.” And now he really was addressing her directly, no doubt about it. “Volyova; you may make the necessary formal overtures at your discretion.”

Ordinarily she might have felt some consolatory pleasure at having judged Sajaki’s intentions so accurately. Not now. All she felt was a slow-burning horror, the realisation that, after all this time, he was going to ask her to do it again. And the worst component of her horror stemmed from the realisation that she would probably do what he wanted.

“Go on,” Volyova said. “It won’t bite.”

“I do know suits, Triumvir.” Khouri paused, and took a step into the room’s whiteness. “It’s just I didn’t think I’d see one again. Let alone get to actually wear the bastard.”

The four waiting suits rested against the wall in the oppressively white storage room, six hundred levels below the bridge, adjacent to Chamber Two, where the training session would take place.

“Listen to her,” one of the two other women present said. “Talking as if she’s going to do more than just wear the damn thing for a few minutes. It’s not like you’re going down with us, Khouri, so don’t wet yourself.”

“Thanks for the advice, Sudjic—I’ll bear it in mind.”

Sudjic shrugged—a sneer would have been too much of an emotional expenditure, Khouri figured—and stepped towards her designated suit, followed by her companion, Sula Kjarval. Preparing to welcome their occupants, the suits resembled frogs which had been exsanguinated, eviscerated, dissected, stretched and pinned out on a vertical table. In their current configurations the suits were at their most androform, with well-defined legs and outstretched arms. There were no fingers on the “hands’—for that matter, no obvious hands at all, simply streamlined flippers—although at the user’s wish the suits could extrude the necessary manipulators and digits.

Khouri did indeed know suits, just as she had claimed. The suits on Sky’s Edge had been rare imports, purchased from Ultra traders who made stopover around the war-torn planet. No one on the Edge had the expertise to actually duplicate them, which meant that those units which her side had bought were fabulously valuable: powerful totems dispensed from gods.

The suit scanned her, assessing her bodily dimensions before adjusting its own interior to precisely match her contours. Khouri then allowed it to step forward and surround her, suppressing the tinge of claustrophobia that accompanied the process. Within a few seconds the suit had locked tight and filled itself with gel-air, enabling manoeuvres which would otherwise have crushed its occupant. The suit’s persona interrogated Khouri regarding small details she might wish changed, allowing her to customise her weapons suite and adjust its autonomous routines. Of course, none but the lightest weapons would actually be deployed in Chamber Two; the combat scenarios which were to be enacted would be a seamless mixture of real, physical action and simulated weapons-usage, but it was the point that counted. One had to treat every aspect of the enterprise with the utmost seriousness, including the limitless choices which the suit offered for the convenience of despatching any enemies who might have the misfortune to stray into its sphere of superiority.

There were three of them, apart from Khouri herself, but she was the only one who was not in serious contention for the surface operation. Volyova took the lead. Although her conversations with Khouri suggested that she had been born in space, she had visited planets on more than one occasion, and had acquired the appropriate, near-instinctive reflexes which bettered the chances of surviving a planetary excursion; not least amongst these being a profound respect for the law of gravitation. The same went for Sudjic; she had been born in a habitat, or possibly a lighthugger, but had visited enough worlds to gain the right moves. Her bladelike thinness, which made it look as if she could not possibly have taken a footstep on a large planet without breaking every bone in her body, did not fool Khouri for a moment; Sudjic was like a building designed by a master architect, who knew the precise stresses which had to be obeyed by every articulation and strut, and took an aesthetic pride in allowing for no additional tolerances. Kjarval, the woman who was always with Sudjic, was different again. Unlike her friend, she exhibited no extreme chimeric traits; all her limbs her own. But she resembled no human Khouri had ever known. Her face was sleek, as if optimised for some unspecified aquatic environment. Her catlike eyes were gridded red orbs with no pupils. Her nostrils and ears were rilled apertures, and her mouth was a largely expressionless slot; one that barely moved when the woman spoke, but was permanently curved in an expression of mild exalta-tion. She wore no clothes; not even in the relative cool of the suit storage room, yet to Khouri’s eyes she did not seem truly naked. Rather, she looked like a naked woman who had been dipped in some infinitely flexible, quick-drying polymer. A true Ultra, in other words, of uncertain and almost certainly non-Darwinian provenance. Khouri had heard tales of bioengineered human splinter-species cultured under the ice of worlds like Europa, or of merpeople, bio-adapted for life in totally flooded spacecraft. Sula seemed to be the living, freakishly hybrid embodiment of these myths. Alternatively, she might be something else entirely. Maybe she had wrought these transformations on herself for a whim. Maybe they were purposeless, or served only the deeper purpose of masking another identity entirely. Whatever; she knew worlds, and that—seemingly—was all that mattered.

Sajaki knew worlds as well, of course, but he was already on Resurgam, and it was not clear what role he would play in the recovery of Sylveste, if and when it happened. Of Triumvir Hegazi Khouri knew little, but through chance remarks, she had gleaned enough to know that the man had never set foot on anything which had not been manufactured. It was no wonder that Sajaki and Volyova had relegated Triumvir Hegazi to the more clerical aspects of their profession. He would not be allowed—nor did he even wish—to make the journey to Resurgam’s surface, when the time came.

Which left Khouri. There was no arguing with her experience; unlike any of the crew, she had demonstrably been born and raised on a planet, and—vitally—had seen action on one. It was probable—nothing she had heard led her to doubt the fact—that the Sky’s Edge war had placed her in situations far graver than any the crew had experienced beyond their ship. Their excursions had been shopping trips, trade missions or simple tourism; coming down to gloat at the compressed lives of ephemerals. Khouri had been in situations where, at times, it had seemed very unlikely that she would survive. Yet—because she had never been anything less than a competent soldier, and she was also lucky—she had come through relatively unscathed.

No one aboard the ship actually argued with this.

“It’s not that we wouldn’t want you along,” Volyova had said, not long after the incident with the cache-weapon. “Far from it. I’ve no doubt that you’d handle a suit as well as any of us, and you wouldn’t be likely to freeze under fire.”

“Well, then…”

“But I can’t risk losing my Gunnery Officer again.” They had been having the discussion in the spider-room, but Volyova had lowered her voice all the same. “Only three people need to go down to Resurgam, and that means we don’t have to use you. Apart from me, Sudjic and Kjarval can handle the suits. In fact we’ve already begun training up.”

“Then at least let me join in the sessions.”

Volyova had raised an arm, apparently to dismiss this suggestion. But as soon as she had done so she relented. “All right, Khouri. You get to train with us. But it doesn’t mean anything, understand?” Oh yes, she understood. Things were different between Khouri and Volyova now—they had been ever since Khouri had told Volyova the lie about being an infiltrator for another crew. The Mademoiselle had long ago primed her for that particular little chat and it seemed to have worked perfectly, even down to the sly way the Galatea—completely innocent, of course—had deliberately not been mentioned, leaving Volyova to make that deduction herself, and thereby allowing her to feel some quiet satisfaction in the process. It was a red herring, but it mattered only that Volyova found it a plausible one. Volyova had also accepted the story about Sun Stealer being a piece of human-designed infiltration software, and for now her curiosity seemed satisfied. Now they were almost equals, both having something to hide from the rest of the crew, even if what Volyova thought she had on Khouri was not even close to the truth.

“I understand,” Khouri said.

“Still, it’s a shame, though.” Volyova smiled. “I get the impression you always wanted to meet Sylveste. You’ll get your chance, of course, once we bring him aboard…”

Khouri smiled. “That’ll have to do then, won’t it?”

Chamber Two was an empty twin of the chamber where the cache-weapons were kept.

Unlike the weapon-filled chamber, it had been pressurised up to one standard atmosphere. This was no mere extravagance; it constituted the largest single pocket of breathable air aboard the lighthugger, and was therefore used as a reservoir for supplying normally vacuum-filled regions of the ship with air when they needed to be entered by unsuited humans.

Usually the drive would have supplied an illusory one-gee of gravity, acting along the long axis of the ship, which was also the long axis of the roughly cylindrical chamber. But now that the drive had been quenched—now that the ship was in orbit around Resurgam—the illusion of gravity came from rotating the whole chamber, which meant that gravity acted at ninety degrees to the long axis, pushing radially outwards from the chamber’s middle. Near the middle, there was almost no gravity at all; objects could free-float there for minutes before their inevitable small initial drift slowly pushed them away from the middle. Thereafter, the increasing wind-pressure of the co-rotating air would tug them faster and lower. But nothing “fell’ in straight lines in the chamber, at least not from the point of view of someone standing on the rotating wall.

They entered at one end of the cylinder, via an armoured clamshell door whose inner face was pitted with blast-marks and projectile impact-craters. Every visible surface of the chamber was similarly weathered; as far as Khouri could see (and the suit’s vision-augmentation routines meant she could see as far as she wished) there was no square metre of the chamber’s skin which had not been harried, scarred, gouged, buckled, assaulted, melted or corroded by some kind of weapon. It might once have been silver; now it was purple, like an all-enveloping metallic bruise. Illumination was supplied not from a stationary light source, but from dozens of free-floating drones, each of which picked out a spot on the chamber’s wall with a floodlight of actinic brilliance. The drones were constantly moving around, like a swarm of agitated glow-worms. The result was that no shadow in the chamber stayed still for more than a second or so, and it was impossible to look in any direction for more than a second before a blinding light-source entered it, washing everything else out.

“You sure you can handle this?” Sudjic said, as the door locked shut behind them. “You wouldn’t want to damage that suit. You break it, you bought it, you know?”

“Concentrate on not damaging your own,” Khouri said. Then she switched to the private channel, addressing Sudjic alone. “Maybe it’s just my imagination, but do I get the impression you don’t like me very much?”

“Now why would you think that?”

“I think it might have something to do with Nagorny.” Khouri paused. It had occured to her that the private channels might not be private at all, but then again, nothing she was about to say would not already be completely obvious to anyone listening in; most especially not to Volyova. “I don’t know exactly what happened with him, except that you were close.”

“Close isn’t the word for it, Khouri.”

“Lovers, then. I wasn’t going to say that in case I offended you.”

“Don’t worry about offending me, kid. It’s way too late for that.”

Volyova’s voice interrupted them. “Kick off and descend to the chamber wall, you three.”

They obeyed her, using their suits on mild amplification to jump away from the plate which capped the end of the cylinder. They had been in freefall from the moment they entered the place, but now, as they descended towards the wall/floor, and picked up circumferential speed, their sense of weight mounted. The change was small, cushioned within the gel-air, but it gave enough small cues to engender a sense of up and down.

“I understand why you resent me,” Khouri said.

“Bet you do.”

“I took his position. Filled his role. After… whatever happened to him, you suddenly had me to deal with.” Khouri did her best to sound reasonable, as if she was taking none of this personally. “If I was in your shoes, I think I’d feel the same. In fact I’m sure of it. But that doesn’t make it right, either. I’m not your enemy, Sudjic.”

“Don’t delude yourself.”

“About what?”

“That you understand one tenth of what this is about.” Sudjic had positioned her suit close to Khouri’s now: seamless white armour stark against the damaged wall of the chamber. Khouri had seen images of ghostly white whales which lived—or used to live; she wasn’t sure—in Earth’s seas. Belugas, they were called, and they came to mind now. “Listen,” Sudjic said. “Do you think I’m simplistic enough that I’d hate you just because you fill the space Boris left? Don’t insult me, Khouri.”

“Not my intention, believe me.”

“If I hate you, Khouri, it’s for a perfectly good reason. It’s because you belong to her.” She emitted the last word as a gasp of pure animosity. “Volyova. You’re her trinket. I hate her, so naturally I hate her possessions. Especially those whom she values. And of course—if I found a way to harm one of her possessions—do you imagine I wouldn’t do it?”

“I’m nobody’s possession,” Khouri said. “Not Volyova’s; not anyone’s.” She immediately hated herself for protesting so vigorously, and then began to hate Sudjic for pushing her to the cusp of this defensiveness. “Not that it’s any of your business. You know what, Sudjic?”

“I’m dying to hear.”

“From what I heard, Boris wasn’t the sanest individual who ever lived. From what I hear, Volyova didn’t so much drive him mad as try and use his madness for something constructive.” She felt her suit decelerate, softly depositing her feet-first on the crumpled wall. “So it didn’t work. Big deal. Maybe you two deserved each other.”

“Yeah, maybe we did.”

“What?”

“I don’t necessarily like anything that you just said, Khouri. Fact is, if we didn’t have company, and if we weren’t suited up, I might take a few moments to teach you how easily I could break your neck. Might still do it, one of these days. But I’ve got to admit. You’ve got spite. Most of her puppets usually lose that straight away; if she doesn’t fry them first.”

“You’re saying you misjudged me? Excuse me if I don’t sound grateful.”

“I’m saying maybe you aren’t as much her possession as she imagines.” Sudjic laughed. “It’s not a compliment, kid—just an observation. It might be worse for you once she realises. It doesn’t mean you’re off my shit-list, either.”

Khouri might have replied, but anything she intended to say was drowned out by Volyova, who was again speaking over the general suit channel, addressing the three of them from her vantage point high above, near the chamber’s middle. “There is no structure to this exercise,” she said. “At least none that you need know about. Your sole obligation is to stay alive until the scenario is over. That’s all there is to it. The exercise begins in ten seconds. I won’t be available for questions during the course of it.”

Khouri absorbed this without any undue worry. There had been many unstructured exercises on the Edge, and many more in the gunnery. All it meant was that the deeper purpose of the scenario was masked, or that it was—literally—an exercise in disorientation intended to represent the chaos which might follow an operation which had gone badly wrong.

They began with warm-up exercises. Volyova watched them from on high while a variety of drone-targets emerged from previously concealed trapdoors in the wall of the chamber. The targets were not much of a challenge; at least, not at first. At the beginning the suits retained enough autonomy to detect and react to the targets before the wearer had even noticed them, so that all the wearer needed to do was issue consent for the kill. But it became harder. The targets stopped being passive and began to shoot back—usually indiscriminately, but with steadily mounting firepower, so that even wide-shots posed a threat. The targets also got smaller and faster, popping out of the trapdoors with increasing frequency. And—keeping pace with the increasing danger posed by the enemy—the suits suffered progressive losses of functionality. By the sixth or seventh round most of the suit autonomy had been eroded, and the sensor webs which each suit draped around itself were breaking up, so that the wearers had to rely increasingly on their own visual cues. Yet though the exercise had increased in difficulty, Khouri had worked through similar scenarios so often that she did not begin to lose her cool. One had to remember how much of the suit functionality remained: one still had the weapons, the suit power and flight-capability.

The three of them did not communicate during the initial exercises; they were too intent on finding their own mental edges. Eventually it was like getting a second wind; a state of stability which lay beyond what at first seemed like the limits of normal performance. Getting there was a little like entering a trance state. There were certain tricks of concentration one could call into play: rote mantras which mediated the transition. It was never just a matter of wishing it and being there; it was more like climbing onto some awkward ledge. But as one did it—and did it over again—one found that the move became more fluid, and the ledge no longer seemed quite so high or inaccessible. But it was never reached simply, or without some expenditure of mental effort.

It was during the ascension to that state that Khouri half thought she had seen the Mademoiselle.

It was not even a glimpse, just a peripheral awareness that—momentarily—there had been another body out there in the chamber, and that its shape might have been that of the Mademoiselle. But the sensation vanished as quickly as it had come.

Could it have been her?

Khouri had not seen or heard from the Mademoiselle since the incident in the gunnery room. The Mademoiselle’s last communiquй to her had been more pique than anything else; delivered after Khouri had helped Volyova finish off the cache-weapon. She had warned her that by remaining in the gunnery so long she had brought Sun Stealer on herself. And—indeed—the moment that Khouri tried to leave gunspace, she had felt something rushing towards her. It had come at her like a largening shadow, but she had not felt anything when the shadow seemed to engulf her. It was if a hole had opened in the shadow and she had passed unscathed through it, but she doubted that that had really been the case. The truth was almost certainly less palatable. Khouri did not want to consider the possibility that the shadow might have been Sun Stealer, but it was a conclusion she could not ignore. And in accepting that, she also had to accept the likelihood that Sun Stealer had now managed to ensconce a much larger part of himself in her skull.

It had been bad enough knowing that a small part of that thing had come back with the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds. But that at least had been contained; it had been within the Mademoiselle’s powers to hold him at bay. Now Khouri had to accept that a more substantial fragment of Sun Stealer had reached her. And the Mademoiselle had been curiously absent ever since—until this voiceless half-glimpse, which might have been nothing at all; less than a figment of her imagination; something which any sane person would have dismissed as a trick of the light at the edge of vision.

If it had been her… what did it mean, after all this time?

Eventually the initial phase of exercises finished, and some of the suit functionality was reinstated. Not everything, but enough to let the three of them know that a certain slate had been wiped clean, and that from now the rules would be different.

“All right,” Volyova said. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I’d take that as a compliment,” Khouri said, hoping to elicit some vague camaraderie from her compatriots. “But the trouble with Ilia is she means it literally.”

“At least one of you gets it,” Volyova said. “But don’t let it go to your head, Khouri. Especially as it’s about to get serious.”

At the far end of the chamber another clamshell door was easing open. Because of the constantly shifting light, Khouri saw what happened more as a series of frozen, glare-saturated images than actual motion. Things were spilling out: an expanding mass of ellipsoidal objects, each perhaps half a metre long, metallic-white in colour, with various protrusions, gun-nozzles, manipulators and apertures interrupting its surface.

Sentry drones. She knew them—or something similar—from the Edge. They had called them wolfhounds, because of the ferocity of their attack, and the fact they always moved in packs. Although their main military use was as an instrument of demoralisation, Khouri knew what they could do, and she knew that wearing a suit was no guarantee of safety. Wolfhounds were built for viciousness, not intelligence. They carried relatively light weapons—but they did so in large numbers, and, more to the point, they acted in unison. A pack of wolfhounds could collectively target their fire against a single individual, if their pooled-processors deemed that the action was strategically useful. It was that singlemindedness which made them terrifying.

But there was more. Embedded in the mass of erupting drones were several larger objects, also metallic-white in colour, but lacking the spherical symmetry of the wolfhounds. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the intermittent bursts of illumination, but Khouri thought she knew what they were. They were other suits, and they were very unlikely to be friendly.

The wolfhounds and the enemy suits were dropping away from the central axis now, vectoring towards the three waiting trainees. Perhaps two seconds had elapsed since the other door had opened, but it had seemed much longer as Khouri’s mind easily switched to the mode of rapid consciousness which combat demanded. Many of the suit’s higher autonomous functions were disabled, but its target-acquisition routines were still operable, so she ordered the suit to lock onto the wolfhounds, not actually firing, but keeping a bead on each one. She knew that her suit would confer with its two partners; between them devising a moment-by-moment strategy and allocating targets to each other, but that process was largely invisible to the wearer.

Where the hell was Volyova?

Was it possible she could have moved from one end of the chamber to the other, in time to appear in the pack? Yes, probably—motion in a suit, at least on a scale this compressed, could be so rapid that a person might seem to disappear from one point and appear hundreds of metres further away an eyeblink later. But the enemy suits Khouri had seen had definitely come through the other door, which would have necessitated Volyova leaving the chamber and making her way to the other end through normal ship corridors and accessways. Even in a suit, even with the route keyed in beforehand, Khouri doubted that anyone could do that so quickly; not without becoming liquid en route. But maybe Volyova had a short-cut; a clear shaft through which she could move much more rapidly…

Shit.

Khouri was being shot at.

The wolfhounds were firing, lancing her with small-grade laser fire, emerging in twin beams from malignant, closely spaced eyes in the upper hemisphere of their ellipsoid shells. By now their chameleoflage had adapted to the floor metal, turning them into purple lozenges which seemed to dance in and out of clarity. Her suit skin had silvered to an optically perfect mirror, deflecting most of the energy, but some of the initial blasts had done real damage to the suit integrity. She would lose points for that—she had been too busy cogitating on Volyova’s vanishing act to pay attention to the attack. That diversion, of course, had almost certainly been Volyova’s intention. She looked around, confirming what the suit readouts were telling her, which was that her compatriots had all survived. Flanking her, Sudjic and Kjarval resembled androform blobs of mercury, but they were not hurt and were returning fire.

Khouri set her escalation protocols to stay one offensive step ahead of the enemy, but not to obliterate them. Her suit sprouted low-yield lasers, popping up on both shoulders, pivoting on turrets. She watched the beams converge ahead of her, knifing forwards, each burst leaving a lilac contrail of ionised air. When hit, the shining, flying purple wolfhounds tended to crash out of the sky, bouncing to the ground or just exploding in hot blossoms. It would have been unwise in the extreme to be out in the chamber without a suit.

“You were slow,” Sudjic said, on the general-suit, even as the attack continued. “This was real, we’d be hosing you off the walls.”

“How many times you seen close-quarters action, Sudjic?”

Kjarval—who until then had said next to nothing—cut in on them. “We’ve all seen action, Khouri.”

“Yeah? And did you ever get close enough to the enemy to hear them scream for mercy?”

“What I mean is… fuck.” Kjarval had just taken a hit. Her suit spasmed momentarily, flicking through a series of incorrect chameleoflage modes: space-black; snow-white and then florid, tropical foliage, making it look as if Kjarval were a door leading out of the chamber into the heart of some remote planetary jungle.

Her suit stammered, and then regained its reflective sheen.

“I’m worried about those other suits.”

“That’s what they’re for. To make you worry, and louse up.”

“We need help to louse up? That’s a new one.”

“Shut it, Khouri. Just concentrate on the damned war.”

She did. That part was easy.

Roughly a third of the attacking wolfhounds had been shot down, and no new forces were emerging through the chamber’s still-open end door. But the other suits—there were three of them, Khouri saw—had done nothing so far except loiter near the hole, and were now slowly moving towards the floor, correcting their descent with bursts of needle-thin thrust from their heels. As they did so they too assumed a colour and texture which matched the shot-up floor. It was impossible to tell which—if any—were occupied.

“This is part of the scenario; those suits—they’ve got to mean something.”

“I said shut it, Khouri.”

But she continued, “We’re on a mission, right? We have to assume that much. We have to impose some structure on the damned thing or we don’t know who the hell’s the enemy!”

“Good idea,” Sudjic said. “Let’s schedule a meeting.”

By now the wolfhounds, and their fire-returning suits, were using particle-beams. Maybe the lasers had been real—it was just within the bounds of possibility—but it seemed certain that any significantly more powerful weapon would be only simulated. After all, it would not be an auspicious end to the exercise if one of them blasted a hole in the chamber wall and vented all the air into space.

“Let’s assume,” Khouri said, “that we know who the hell we are and why we’re here—wherever here happens to be. The next question is, do we know those bastards in the other three suits?”

“This is getting way too philosophical for me,” Kjarval said, loping away to draw fire.

“If we’re having this conversation,” Khouri said, doggedly talking over Sudjic’s interjections, “then we have to assume we don’t know who they are. That they’re hostile. And that means we should shoot the scum first, before they do whatever they’re going to do to us.”

“I think you could be tucking up big-time, Khouri.”

“Yeah, well, as you kindly pointed out, I’m the one who isn’t going down anyway.”

“Amen to that.”

“Er… people…” This was Kjarval, who had noticed what it took Khouri and Sudjic another moment to absorb. “I don’t like the look of that.”

What she had seen was that the wrists of the three other suits were morphing, each extruding an as yet unformed weapon. The process was unnervingly rapid, like watching a party balloon inflate into the shape of an animal.

“Shoot the fuckers,” Khouri said, with a voice so calm it almost scared her. “Full fire-convergence on the leftmost suit. Go to minimum-yield ack-am pulse mode, conic dispersal with lateral cross-sweep.”

“Since when are you giving…”

“Just fucking do it, Sudjic!”

But she was already firing, Kjarval too; the three of them were now standing apart by ten metres, directing their suits’ fire towards the enemy. The accelerated antimatter pulses were simulated… of course. If they had been real, there would have been little of the chamber left to stand on.

There was a flash, one so bright that Khouri felt it reach out and push taloned fingers into her eyes. It felt too intense to have been properly simulated… too concussive. The noise of the blast hit with a force that seemed almost gentle by comparison, but the shock was still enough to throw her backwards, keeling into the mottled chamber wall. The bump was like bouncing onto a mattress in an expensive hotel room. For a moment her suit was out cold; even when her eyes began to clear she could see that the readouts had either died or turned to unreadably cryptic mush. They lingered in that state for a few agonising seconds before the suit’s back-up brain staggered on line, reinstating what it could. A simpler—but at least comprehensible—display returned to life, detailing what remained and what had been destroyed. Most of the major weapons were out. Suit autonomy was down by fifty per cent, the persona slipping towards machine autism. There was extensive loss of servo-assistance in three articulation points. Flight capability was impaired, at least until the repair protocols could get to work, and they needed a minimum two hours to finesse a bypass solution.

Oh, and—according to the bio-medical readout—she was now minus one upper limb, from the elbow down.

She struggled to a sitting position and—though every instinct told her to spend the time getting safe and assessing the surroundings—she had to look at the shot-away limb. Her right arm ended just where the med-readout said it would; truncating in a crumpled mass of scorched bone, flesh and intermingled metal. Further up the stump, the gel-air would have shock-congealed to prevent pressure and blood loss, but that was a detail she had to take for granted. There was no pain, of course—another aspect in which the simulation was utterly realistic, since the suit would be telling her pain centre to shut down for the time being.

Assess, assess…

She had lost her orientation completely in the blast. She looked around, but the suit’s head articulation was jammed. There was suddenly an awful lot of smoke out there; hanging in coils in the air venting from the chamber itself. The intermittent illumination provided by the aerial drones was now only a stuttering strobe-effect. There were the wrecks of two suits over there, suffering the kind of comprehensive damage which might indicate that they had been hit by combined ack-am pulses. But the suits were too mangled up for her to tell if they had—or had ever had—occupants. A third suit—less critically damaged, and perhaps only stunned, as her own had been—rested ten or fifteen metres away around the great curve of the chamber’s scarred wall. The wolfhounds were gone, or destroyed; it was impossible to tell which.

“Sudjic? Kjarval?”

Silence; not even her own voice properly audible, and certainly nothing resembling a reply. Intersuit comms were compromised, she saw now—a detail on the damage readout she had ignored until then. Bad, Khouri. Very bad.

Now she had no idea who the enemy was.

The ruined suit arm was fixing itself by the second, scorched parts sloughing to the ground, while the exterior skin crawled forwards to envelop the stump. It was faintly disgusting to watch, even though Khouri had seen it happen many times before, in other simulation scenarios on the Edge. What was really nauseating was knowing that no such immediate repair was possible for her own wounds; that they would have to wait until she was med-evacked out of the zone.

The other suit, the one less damaged, was moving now, raising itself to a standing position, just as she was doing. The other suit had a full complement of limbs, and many of its weapons were still deployed, jutting from various apertures. They were locking onto Khouri, like a dozen vipers poising for the strike.

“Who’s that?” she asked, before remembering that the comms were offline, probably for good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another two suits off to one side, emerging from banners of languid, charcoal-dark smoke. Who were they? Remnants of the original three which had come down with the wolfhounds, or her comrades?

The single suit with the weapons was approaching her, very slowly, as if she were a bomb which might go off at any moment. The suit stopped, motionless. Its skin was trying to mimic the combination of the background colour of the chamber wall and the smoke screens, with only moderate success. Khouri wondered how her own suit was doing. Was her faceplate opaque or transparent? It was impossible to tell from inside, and the minimalist readout told her nothing. If the one with the weapons saw a human face within, would that incite it to kill or hold fire? Khouri had locked her own usable weapons on the figure, but nothing she had seen told her whether she was pointed at the enemy or a mute comrade.

She moved to raise her good arm, to indicate her face, asking the other to make its faceplate transparent.

The other fired.

Khouri was blown back into the wall, an invisible piledriver ramming into her stomach. Her suit started screaming, all manner of gibberish scrolling across her vision. There was a roar of sound before she hit the wall, the compressed burst of a frantic return-fire from her own available weapons.

Fuck, Khouri thought. That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.

She struggled to her feet again, just as another charge from the attacker slammed past and the third caught her on the thigh. She started wheeling back, both arms flailing at the periphery of vision. There was something wrong with her arms; or more accurately, something not wrong where something should have been. They were completely intact; no sign that one of them had just been blasted off.

“Shit,” she said. “What the fuck is happening?”

The attack was continuing, each blast impacting her and driving her back.

“This is Volyova,” said a voice, not in any way calm and detached. “Listen to me carefully, all of you! Something’s going wrong with the scenario! I want you all to stop firing—”

Khouri had hit the deck again, this time with enough force that she felt it through the gel-air cushion, like a slap against her spine. Her thigh felt injured, and the suit was doing nothing to ameliorate the discomfort.

It’s gone live, she thought.

The weapons were for real now; or at least those which belonged to the suit attacking her.

“Kjarval,” Volyova said. “Kjarval! You have to stop firing! You’re killing Khouri!”

But Kjarval—Khouri guessed that she was the attacker—was not listening, or not capable of listening, or, more terrifyingly, not capable of stopping.

“Kjarval,” the Triumvir said again, “if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to disarm you!”

But Kjarval did not stop. She kept on firing, Khouri feeling each impact like a lash, writhing under the assault, desperate to claw her way through the tortured alloy of the chamber into the sanctuary beyond.

And then Volyova descended from the chamber’s middle, where she had apparently been all along, unseen. As she descended, she opened fire on Kjarval, at first with the lightest weapons she had, but with steadily mounting force. Kjarval countered by directing some portion of her fire upwards, towards the lowering Triumvir. The blasts hit Volyova, gouging black scars into her armour, chipping fragments from the flexible integument, slicing off weapons as her suit tried to extrude and deploy them. But Volyova maintained an edge on the trainee. Kjarval’s suit began to wilt, losing integrity. Its weapons went haywire, missing their targets and then shooting haphazardly around the chamber.

Eventually—it could not have been more than a minute after she had first started firing on Khouri—Kjarval dropped to the ground. Her suit, where it was not blackened by the hits it had sustained, was a quilt of mismatched psychedelic colours and rapidly morphing hyper-geometric textures, sprouting half-realised weapons and devices. Her limbs were thrashing crazily. The ends of the limbs had gone berserk, extruding—and then budding off—various manipulators and rough, baby-sized approximations of human hands.

Khouri got to her feet, stifling a scream of pain as her thigh protested against the movement. Her suit was a stiffening deadweight around her, but somehow she managed to walk, or at least totter, to the place where Kjarval lay.

Volyova and another suited figure—she had to be Sudjic—were already there, leaning over what remained of the suit, trying to make some sense of its medical diagnostic readouts.

“She’s dead,” Volyova said.