Revelation Space

SIXTEEN

Sylveste felt the aircraft haul itself aloft, at first moving horizontally to clear Mantell’s dugout hangar, then making rapid height and swerving to avoid dashing itself against the stacked strata of the adjacent mesa wall. He made himself a window, but the thickening dust allowed him only a glimpse of the base, the mesa in which it had been tunnelled falling away below the brilliant undercurve of the plasma-wing. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would not be returning. It was not just Mantell that he sensed he was seeing for the last time, but—and he could not have articulated exactly why—the colony itself.

The machine was the smallest and least valuable aircraft that the settlement could muster; barely larger than one of the volantors which he had flown in Chasm City a lifetime earlier. It was also fast enough to make that six hours of grace count; capable of putting a useful distance between itself and the mesa. The aircraft could have carried four, but only Sylveste and Pascale were riding it. Yet—insofar as their freedom of movement went—they were still Sluka’s captives. Her people had programmed the aircraft’s route before it left Mantell, and it would only deviate from that flight-plan if the autopilot judged that the weather conditions merited a different course. Unless ground conditions at the site became intolerable, it would deposit Sylveste and his wife at a pre-agreed location which had still not been revealed to Volyova and her crew. If conditions were bad, another site could be picked in the same area.

The plane would not linger at the delivery point. After Sylveste and Pascale had been let off—with enough provisions to survive in the storm for a few hours at most—the plane would return swiftly to Mantell, evading the few extant radar systems which could have alerted Resurgam City to its trajectory. Sylveste would then contact Volyova and inform her of his location, although, because he would then be broadcasting directly, she would have no difficulty triangulating his position. Thereafter things would be in Volyova’s hands. Sylveste had no real idea how events would proceed, how she would bring him aboard the ship. That was her problem, not his. All he knew was that it was very unlikely that this whole affair was a trap. Although the Ultras wanted access to Calvin, Calvin was essentially useless without Sylveste. They would want to take very good care of him indeed. And if the same logic did not automatically apply to Pascale, Sylveste had taken steps to amend that deficiency.

The aircraft levelled now. It was flying below the average height of the mesas, using their bulk for cover. Every few seconds it would veer, steering through the narrow, canyonlike corridors which spaced the mesas. Visibility was near zero. Sylveste hoped that the terrain map on which the plane was basing its manoeuvres had not been compromised by any recent landfalls, or else the ride would be very much shorter than the six hours Volyova had allocated.

“Where the hell…” Calvin, who had just appeared in the cabin, looked around frantically. He was, as usual, reclining in an enormous, fussily upholstered chair. There was not enough room for its bulk in the fuselage, so its extremities had to vanish awkwardly into the walls. “Where the hell am I? I’m not getting anything! What the hell’s happened? Tell me!”

Sylveste turned to his wife. “The first thing he does, on being woken, is sniff the local cybernetic environment—allows him to get his bearings, establish the time frame, and so on. Trouble is, right now there isn’t a local cybernetic environment, so he’s a bit disorientated.”

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here. Wherever the hell here is!”

“You’re in a plane,” Sylveste said.

“A plane? That’s novel,” Cal nodded, regaining some of his composure. “Very novel indeed. Don’t think I’ve ever been in one of those before. I don’t suppose you’d mind filling your old dad in on a few key facts?”

“That’s exactly why I’ve woken you.” Sylveste paused to cancel the windows; there was no view now and the unchanging pall of dust served only to remind him of what lay ahead once the plane had deposited them. “Don’t for one moment imagine it was because I felt in need of a fireside chat, Cal.”

“You look older, son.”

“Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.”

“Ouch. That hurts, you know.”

Pascale said, “Stop it, will you? There isn’t time for this bickering.”

“I don’t know,” Sylveste said. “Five hours—seems like more than enough to me. What do you think, Cal?”

“Too right. What does she know anyway?” Cal glared at her. “It’s traditional, dearie. It’s how we—how shall I put it? Touch base. If he showed even the remotest hint of cordiality towards me, then I’d really start worrying. It would mean he wanted some excruciatingly difficult favour.”

“No,” Sylveste said. “For merely excruciatingly difficult favours, I’d just threaten you with erasure. I haven’t needed anything big enough from you to justify being pleasant, and I doubt I ever will.”

Calvin winked at Pascale. “He’s right, of course. Silly me.”

He was manifesting in a high-collared ash-coloured frock coat, its sleeves patterned with inter-locked gold chevrons. One booted foot was resting on the knee of his other leg, and the frock’s tail draped over the raised leg in a long curtain of gently rippling fabric. His beard and moustache had attained some realm beyond the merely fussy, sculpted into a whole of such complexity that it could only have been maintained by the fastidious attention of an army of dedicated grooming-servitors. An amber data-monocle rested in one socket (an affectation, since Calvin had been implanted for direct interfacing since birth), and his hair (long now) extended beyond the back of his skull in an oiled handle, reconnecting with his scalp somewhere above his nape. Sylveste attempted to date the ensemble, but failed. It was possible that the look referred to a particular era from Calvin’s days on Yellowstone. It was equally possible that the simulation had invented it entirely from scratch, to kill the time while all his routines booted.

“So, anyway…”

“The plane’s taking me to meet Volyova,” Sylveste said. “You remember her, of course?”

“How could we forget.” Calvin removed the monocle, polishing it absently against his sleeve. “And just how did all this come about?”

“It’s a long story. She’s put the squeeze on the colony. They had little choice but to hand me over. You too, in fact.”

“She wanted me?”

“Don’t look all surprised about it.”

“I’m not; just disappointed. And of course this is rather a lot to take in all of a sudden.” Calvin popped the monocle back in, one eye glaring magnified behind the amber. “Do you think she wanted us together as a safeguard, or because she has something specific in mind?”

“Probably the latter. Not that she’s been exactly open about her intentions.”

Calvin nodded thoughtfully. “So you’ve been dealing only with Volyova, is that it?”

“Does that strike you as odd?”

“I would have expected our friend Sajaki to show his face at some point.”

“Me too, but she hasn’t made any reference to his absence.” Sylveste shrugged. “Does it really matter? They’re all as bad as each other.”

“Granted, but at least with Sajaki we knew where we were.”

“Shafted, you mean?”

Calvin rocked his head equivocally. “Say what you like about the man, at least he kept his word. And he—or whoever is running things—has at least had the decency not to bother you again until now. How long has it been since we were last aboard that Gothic monstrosity they call Nostalgia for Infinity?”

“About a hundred and thirty years. A lot less for them, of course—only a few decades as far as they were concerned.”

“I suppose we’d better assume the worst.”

“The worst what?” Pascale said.

“That,” Calvin began, with laboured patience, “we have a certain task to perform, in connection with a certain gentleman.” He squinted at Sylveste. “How much does she know, anyway?”

“Rather less than I imagined, I suspect.” Pascale did not look amused.

“I told her the minimum,” Sylveste said, glancing between his wife and the beta-level simulation. “For her own good.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“Of course, I had some doubts of my own…”

“Dan, just what is it these people want with you and your father?”

“Ah, well, that’s another very long story, I’m afraid.”

“You’ve got five hours—you just said so yourself. Assuming, of course, you two can bear to break off from your mutual admiration session.”

Calvin raised one eyebrow. “Never heard it called that before. But maybe she’s got something, eh, son?”

“Yes,” Sylveste said. “What she’s got is a severe misapprehension of the situation.”

“Nonetheless, maybe you should tell her a bit more—keep her in the picture and all that.”

The aircraft executed a particularly abrupt turn, Calvin the only one amongst them impervious to the motion. “All right,” Sylveste said. “Though I still say she’d be better off knowing less rather than more.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” Pascale said.

Calvin smiled. “Start by telling her about dear Captain Brannigan, that’s my advice.”

So Sylveste told her the rest of it. Until then, he had deliberately skirted the issue of what exactly it was that Sajaki’s crew wanted of him. Pascale had always had every right to know, of course… but the subject itself was so unpalatable to Sylveste that he had done his best to avoid it at all times. It was not that he had anything personal against Captain Brannigan, or even any lack of sympathy for what had become of the man. The Captain was a unique individual with a uniquely horrifying affliction. Even if he was not in any sense aware now (to the best of Sylveste’s knowledge), he had been in the past, and could be again in the future, in the admittedly unlikely event that he could be cured. So what if the Captain’s murky past quite possibly contained crimes? Surely the man had atoned for prior sins a thousand times over in his present state. No; anyone would have wished the Captain well, and most people would have been willing to expend some energy in helping him, provided they ran no risk to themselves. Even some small risk might have been accepted.

But what the crew were asking of Sylveste was much more than just the acceptance of personal risk. They would require him to submit to Calvin; to allow Cal to invade his mind and take command of his motor functions. The thought alone was repulsive. It was bad enough dealing with Cal as a beta-level simulation; as bad as being haunted by his father’s ghost. He would have destroyed the beta-level years ago if it had not proven so intermittently useful, but just knowing it existed made him uncomfortable. Cal was too perceptive; too shrewd in his… in its judgements. It knew what he had done with the alpha-level simulation, even if it had never come out and said it. But every time he allowed it into his head, it seemed to sink deeper tendrils into him. It seemed to know him better each time; seemed able to predict his own responses more closely. What did that make him, if what seemed like his own free will was so easily mimicked by a piece of software which had no theoretical consciousness of its own? It was worse than simply the dehumanising aspect of the channelling process, of course. The physical procedure was itself far from pleasant, for his own voluntary motor signals had to be blocked at source, obstructed by a stew of neuro-inhibitory chemicals. He would be paralysed, yet moving—as close to demonic possession as anyone ever came. It had always been a nightmarish experience; never one he was in a hurry to repeat.

No, he thought. The Captain could go to hell, for all he cared. Why should he lose his own humanity to save someone who had lived longer than most people in history? Sympathy be damned. The Captain should have been allowed to die years ago, and the greater crime now was not the Captain’s suffering, but what his crew were prepared to put Sylveste through to alleviate it.

Of course, Calvin saw it differently… less an ordeal, more an opportunity…

“Of course, I was the first,” Calvin said. “Back when I was still corporeal.”

“The first what?”

“First to serve him. He was heavily chimeric even then. Some of the technologies holding him together dated from before the Transenlightenment. God knows how old the flesh parts of him were.” He fingered his beard and moustache, as if needing to remind himself how artful the combination was. “This was before the Eighty, of course. But I was known even then as an experimenter on the fringe of the radical chimeric sciences. I wasn’t just content with renovating the techniques developed before the Transenlightenment. I wanted to go beyond what they’d attained. I wanted to leave them in my dust. I wanted to push the envelope so far it ripped into shreds, and then remake it from the pieces.”

“Yes, enough about you Cal,” Sylveste said. “We were discussing Brannigan, remember?”

“It’s called setting the scene, dear boy.” Calvin blinked. “Anyway, Brannigan was an extreme chimeric, and I was someone prepared to consider extreme measures. When he became sick, his friends had no choice but to hire my services. Of course, this was all strictly below-board—and it was a total diversion, even for me. I was increasingly uninterested in physiological modifications, at the expense of a growing fascination—obsession, if you will—with neural transformations. Specifically, I wanted to find a way of mapping neural activity straight into—” Calvin broke off, biting his lower lip.

“Brannigan used him,” Sylveste continued. “And in return, helped him to establish ties with some of the Chasm City rich; potential clients for the Eighty program. And if he’d done a good job of healing Brannigan, that would have been the end of the story. But he botched the job—did the minimum he could get away with, to get Brannigan’s allies off his back. If he’d taken the trouble to do it properly, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.”

“What he means,” Calvin cut in, “is that my repair of the Captain could not be considered permanent. It was inevitable, given the nature of his chimerism, that some other aspect of his physiology would eventually need our attention. And by then—because of the complexity of the work I’d done on him—there was literally no other person they could turn to.”

“So they came back,” Pascale said.

“This time he was commanding the ship we’re about to board.” Sylveste looked at the simulation. “Cal was dead; the Eighty a publicly staged atrocity. All that remained of him was this beta-level simulation. Needless to say Sajaki—he was with the Captain by then—was not best pleased. But they found a way, all the same.”

“A way?”

“For Calvin to work on the Captain. They found he could work through me. The beta-level sim provided the expertise in chimeric surgery. I provided the meat it needed to move around to get the job done. ‘Channelling’ was what the Ultras called it.”

“Then it needn’t have been you at all,” Pascale said. “Provided they had the beta-level simulation—or a copy of it—couldn’t one of them have acted as the—as you so charmingly put it—meat?”

“No, though they probably would have preferred it that way: it would have freed them of any dependency on me. But channelling only worked when there was a close match between the beta-level sim and the person it was working through. Like a hand fitting into a glove. It worked with me and Calvin because he was my father; there were many points of genetic similarity. Slice open our brains and you’d probably have trouble telling them apart.”

“And now?”

“They’re back.”

“Now if only he’d done a good job last time,” Calvin said, dignifying his remark with a thin smile of self-satisfaction.

“Blame yourself; you were in the driving seat. I just did what you told me.” Sylveste scowled. “In fact for most of it I wasn’t even what you’d term conscious. Not that I didn’t hate every minute of it, all the same.”

“And they’re going to make you do it again,” Pascale said. “Is that all it’s about? Everything that’s happened here? The attack on that settlement? Just to get you to help their Captain?”

Sylveste nodded. “In case it hasn’t escaped your attention, the people we’re about to do business with are not what you’d properly term human. Their priorities and timescales are a little… abstract.”

“I wouldn’t call it business, in that case. I’d call it blackmail.”

“Well,” Sylveste said. “That’s where you’re wrong. You see, this time Volyova made a small miscalculation. She gave me some warning of her arrival.”

Volyova glanced up at the imaged view of Resurgam. At the moment Sylveste’s location on the planet’s surface was completely unknown, like a quantum wave function which had not yet collapsed. Yet in a moment they would have an accurate triangulation fix on his broadcast, and that wave function would shed a myriad unselected possibilities.

“You have him?”

“Signal’s weak,” Hegazi said. “That storm you made is causing a lot of ionospheric interference. I bet you’re really proud, aren’t you?”

“Just a get a fix, svinoi.”

“Patience, patience.”

Volyova had not really doubted that Sylveste would call in on time. Nonetheless, when she heard from him, she could not help but feel relief. It meant that another element in the tricky business of getting him aboard had been achieved. She did not, however, deceive herself that the job was in any way complete. And there had been something arrogant about Sylveste’s demands—the way he seemed to be ordering how things should happen—which left her wondering if her colleagues really did have the upper hand. If Sylveste had set out to sow a seed of doubt in her mind, the man had certainly succeeded. Damn him. She had prepared herself, knowing that Sylveste was adept at mind games, but she had not prepared herself enough. Then she took a mental back step and asked herself how things had so far proceeded. After all, Sylveste was shortly to be in their custody. He could not possibly desire such an outcome, especially as he would know just what it was they wanted from him. If he were in control of his destiny, he would not now be on the verge of being brought aboard.

“Ah,” Hegazi said. “We have a fix. You want to hear what the bastard has to say?”

“Put him on.”

The man’s voice burst in on them again, as it had done six hours previously, but there was a difference now, very obviously. Every word Sylveste spoke was backgrounded—almost drowned out—by the continuous howl of the razorstorm.

“I’m here, where are you? Volyova, are you listening to me? I said are you listening to me? I want an answer! Here are my coordinates relative to Cuvier—you’d better be listening.” And then he recited—several times, for safety—a string of numbers which would pinpoint him to within one hundred metres; redundant information, given the triangulation which had now been performed. “Now get down here! We can’t wait for ever—we’re in the middle of a razorstorm, we’re going to die out here if you don’t hurry.”

“Mmm,” Hegazi said. “I think at some point it might not be a bad idea to answer the poor fellow.”

Volyova took out and lit a cigarette. She savoured a long intake before replying. “Not yet,” she said. “In fact, maybe not for an hour or two. I think I’ll let him get really worried first.” Khouri heard only the faintest of scuffling sounds as the open suit shuffled towards her. She felt its gently insistent pressure against her spine and the backs of her legs, arms and head. In her peripheral vision she observed the wet-looking side-parts of the head fold around her, and then felt the legs and arms of the suit meld around her limbs. The chest cavity sealed, with a sound like someone taking the last slurp from a pudding bowl.

Her vision was restricted now, but she could see enough to watch the suit’s limbs closing up along their dissection-lines. The seals lingered for a second or so before becoming invisible, lost in the bland whiteness of the rest of the suit’s hide. Then the head formed over her own, and for a moment there was darkness before a transparent oval appeared ahead of her. Smoothly, the darkness around the oval lit up with numerous readouts and status displays. Later the suit would flood itself with gel-air, to protect its occupant against the gee-loads of flight, but for now Khouri was breathing mintily fresh oxygen/nitrogen air at shipboard pressure.

“I have now run through my safety and functionality tests,” the suit informed her. “Please confirm that you wish to accept full control of this unit.”

“Yes, I’m ready,” Khouri said.

“I have now disabled the majority of my autonomous control routines. This persona will remain online in an advisory capacity, unless you request otherwise. Full suit-autonomous control can be reinstated by—”

“I get the deal, thanks. How are the others doing?”

“All other units report readiness.”

Volyova’s voice cut in: “We’re set, Khouri. I’ll lead the team; triangular descent formation. I shout, you jump. And don’t make a move unless I authorise it.”

“Don’t worry; I had no plans to.”

“I see you have her well under your thumb,” Sudjic said, on the open channel. “Does she shit to order as well?”

“Shut it, Sudjic. You’re only along because you know worlds. One step out of line…” Volyova paused. “Well, put it this way; Sajaki won’t be around to intercede if I lose my temper, and I’ve got a lot of firepower with which to lose it.”

“Talking of firepower,” Khouri said, “I’m not seeing any weapons data on my readout.”

“That’s because you’re not authorised,” Sudjic said. “Ilia doesn’t trust you not to shoot at the first thing that moves. Do you, Ilia?”

“If we run into trouble,” Ilia said, “I’ll let you have weps usage, trust me.”

“Why not now?”

“Because you don’t need it now, that’s why. You’re along for the ride; to assist if things deviate from the plan. Which of course they won’t…” She drew breath audibly. “But if they do, you get your precious weapons. Just try and be discreet if you have to use them, that’s all.”

Once outside, the shipboard air was purged and replaced by gel-air: breathable fluid. For a moment it felt like drowning, but Khouri had made the transition enough times on Sky’s Edge not to feel much discomfort. Normal speech was impossible now, but the suit helmets contained trawls which were able to interpret subvocal commands. Speakers in the helmets shifted incoming sounds by the appropriate frequency to compensate for the gel-air-induced distortions, which ensured that the voices she heard sounded perfectly normal. Although it was a harder and heavier descent than any shuttle insertion, it felt easier, apart from an occasional pressure above Khouri’s eyeballs. It was only by reference to the suit’s readouts that she knew they were routinely exceeding six gees of acceleration, impelled by the tiny antilithium-fed thrusters buried in the suit’s spine and heels. With Volyova leading the descent, the suits formed a deltoid pattern, the two inhabited suits following her and the three slaved empty suits trailing behind. For the first part of the descent, the suits remained in the configuration they had assumed aboard the lighthugger, making a rough concession to human anatomy. But by the time the first traces of Resurgam’s upper atmosphere began to glow around them, the suits had silently transformed their exteriors. Now—although none of this was obvious from within—the membrane linking the arms to the body had thickened, until the arms and body were no longer easily divisible. The angle of the arms had altered as well; now they were held rigid but slightly bent, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the body. Since the head had retracted and flattened, there was now a smooth arc running from the tip of each arm, over the head and down again. The columnar legs had fused into a single flared tail, and any transparent patches defined by the user had been forcibly re-opaqued, to protect against the glare of re-entry. The suits met the atmosphere chest-on, with the tail hanging slightly lower than the head: complex shockwave patterns being tamed and exploited by the morphing geometry of the suit hide. While direct vision was no longer possible, the suits were continuing to perceive their surroundings in other EM bands, and were perfectly capable of adapting this data for human senses. Looking around and below, Khouri saw the other suits, each seemingly immersed in a radiant teardrop of pinkish plasma.

At twenty kilometres’ altitude the suits used their thrusters to drop to merely supersonic speeds. Now they remoulded themselves to adapt to the thickening atmosphere, transforming into human-sized aircraft. The suits grew stabilising fins along their backs, and the face parts again returned to transparency. Snug in the suit’s embrace, Khouri barely felt these changes, only a slight pressure from the surrounding suit material which nudged her limbs from one position to another. At fifteen kilometres, the sixth suit broke formation and went hypersonic, configuring itself into an aerodynamically optimum shape into which no human could have fitted without drastic surgery. It disappeared over the horizon in a few seconds, probably moving faster than any artificial object which had ever entered Resurgam’s atmosphere, exerting upward thrust to keep itself from escaping from the planet entirely. Khouri knew that the suit was heading to pick up Sajaki—it would meet with him near the designated site where he had last communicated with the ship, now that his work on Resurgam was complete.

At ten kilometres—maintaining silence, even though the com-laser links between the suits were totally secure—they hit the first traces of the razorstorm Volyova had stirred to life. From space it had looked black and impenetrable, like a plateau of ash. Inside, there was more illumination than Khouri had expected. The light was gritty and sepia, like a bad afternoon in Chasm City. A muddyish rainbow haloed the sun, and then that too vanished as they sank deeper into the storm. Now light did not so much stream down to them as stumble haphazardly, navigating layer upon layer of elevated dust like a drunkard descending stairs. Since there was no feeling of weight in the gel-air, Khouri rapidly lost all sensation of up and down, but she instinctively trusted the suit’s own inertial systems to figure things out. Now and again—even though the thrusters were trying to smooth out the ride—she felt lurches as the suit hit a pressure cell. As the speed of the ensemble dropped below that of sound, the suits reconfigured again, becoming more statuesque. The ground was only a few kilometres below, and the highest peaks of the mesa system were only hundreds of metres under them, though they remained unseen. It was increasingly hard now to make out the other four suits in the formation; they kept fading in and out of the dust.

Khouri began to get a little concerned. She had never used a suit in conditions anything like this. “Suit,” she asked. “Are you quite sure you can handle this stuff? I wouldn’t want you dropping out of the sky on me.”

“Wearer,” it said, managing to sound sniffy. “When the dust becomes a problem I shall immediately inform you of that fact.”

“All right; just asking.”

Now there was hardly anything to see. It was like swimming through mud. There were occasional rents in the storm which afforded glimpses of towering canyon and mesa walls, but most of the time the dust was completely featureless. “Can’t see anything,” she said.

“Is this an improvement?”

It was. The storm had casually blinked out of existence. She could see around her for tens of kilometres; all the way to the relatively near horizon, where it was unobstructed by closer rock walls. It was just like flying on a dazzlingly clear day, except that the entire scene was rendered in sickly variations of pale green. “A montage,” the suit said. “Constructed from ambient infrared, interpolated random-pulse/snapshot sonar and gravimetric data.”

“Very nice, but don’t get cocky about it. When I get annoyed with machines, even very sophisticated ones, I have a nasty habit of abusing them.”

“Duly noted,” the suit said, shutting up.

She called up an overlay which gave her some idea where she was on a larger scale. The suit knew exactly where to go—homing in on the coordinates where Sylveste had called from—but it made her feel more professional to actually take an active interest in things. Three and a half hours had passed now since Volyova and Sylveste had spoken, which, assuming he was on foot, would not allow Sylveste to get seriously far from the agreed rendezvous point. Even if, for some reason, he now tried to evade the pick-up, the suit’s sensors would have no trouble locating him, unless he had found a conveniently deep cave in which to ensconce himself: but then the suit’s detector systems would do their level best to track him down, using the thermal and biochemical evidence he would have unavoidably left behind on his route.

“Listen up,” Volyova said, using the intersuit com for the first time since they had entered the atmosphere. “We’ll be at the reception point in two minutes. I’ve just had a signal from orbit. Triumvir Sajaki’s suit has located him and made successful pick-up. He’s currently en route to meet us, but because his suit can’t move so quickly now he won’t make it for another ten minutes.”

“He’s meeting us?” Khouri asked. “Why doesn’t he just return to the ship? Doesn’t he believe we can do the job without him breathing down our necks?”

“Are you kidding?” Sudjic asked. “Sajaki’s waited years—decades—for this. He wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Sylveste won’t put up a struggle, will he?”

“Not unless he’s feeling incredibly lucky,” Volyova said. “But don’t take anything for granted. I’ve dealt with this bastard before; you two haven’t.”

Khouri felt her suit slither to a configuration very similar to the one it had first had aboard the ship. The wing membrane had vanished entirely now, and her limbs were properly defined and articulated, rather than just being flattened winglike appendages. The tips of the arms had bifurcated into mittenlike claws, but a more developed hand could be formed, if she needed to do delicate manipulations. Now she was tipping back into a near-vertical posture, while still moving forwards. The suit was now maintaining altitude solely by thrust, utterly impervious to the dust.

“One minute,” Volyova said. “Altitude two hundred metres. Expect visual acquisition of Sylveste any moment now. And remember we’ll also be looking for his wife; I doubt they’ll be far apart.”

Tiring of the pale-green false image, Khouri reverted to normal vision. She could hardly make out the other suits. They were now a long way from the canyon walls of any major rock features or crevasses. The terrain was flat for thousands of metres in any direction, apart from the odd boulder or gully. But even when pockets opened in the storm, calm ventricles in the chaos, it was impossible to see more than a few tens of metres, and the ground was ceaselessly aswirl in dust eddies. Yet in the suit it was totally cool and silent, lending the whole situation a dangerous air of unreality. If she had wished it, the suit could have relayed the ambient sound to her, but it would have told her nothing except that it was hellishly windy out there.

She returned to the pale-green.

“Ilia,” she said. “I’m still weaponless here. Starting to feel a bit itchy.”

“Give her something to play with,” Sudjic said. “It can’t hurt, can it? She can go away and shoot some rocks while we take care of Sylveste.”

“Fuck you.”

“In spades, Khouri. Didn’t it occur to you I might be trying to do you a favour? Or do you think you can persuade Ilia all on your lonesome?”

“All right Khouri,” Volyova said. “I’m enabling your minimal-volition defence protocols. That suit you?”

Not exactly, no. While Khouri’s suit had now been given the autonomous privileges to defend itself against external threats—even, to some extent, to act proactively towards that goal—Khouri still did not have her finger on the trigger. And that might prove to be a problem if she wanted to kill Sylveste, which was an objective she had not entirely jettisoned.

“Yeah, thanks,” she said. “Excuse me if I don’t whoop for joy.”

“My pleasure…”

A second or so later they landed, soft as five feathers. Khouri felt a shiver as her suit depowered its thrusters, then made a further series of minute readjustments to its anatomy. The status readouts had now flicked over from flight to ambulatory mode, signifying that she could, if she wished, walk around normally. At this point she could even ditch the suit entirely, but without protective gear she would not have lasted long in the razorstorm. She was more than happy to remain encased in the suit’s silence, even if it meant that she did not feel entirely participatory.

“We split,” Volyova said. “Khouri; I’m assigning control of the two empty suits to your own; they’ll shadow you when you move. The three of us move apart for one hundred paces; initiate active sensor sweep in all EM and supplemental bands. If Sylveste is anywhere nearby we’ll find the svinoi.”

The two empty suits had shuffled next to Khouri already, latching onto her like stray dogs. This was, she knew, definitely the short straw choice; Volyova was letting her look after the empty units as a consolation prize for not being better armed. But there was no point whining. Her only reasonable argument for being properly armed was so that she could use those defences to kill Sylveste. It was probably not an argument which would prove entirely effective against Volyova. Still, it was worth bearing in mind that the suits could be deadly even without their armaments. In training on Sky’s Edge, she had been shown how someone wearing a suit could inflict damage on an enemy by the exertion of sheer brute force, literally tearing an opponent apart.

Khouri watched Sudjic and Volyova move off in their respective directions, walking with the deceptively plodding slowness of the suits in their default ambulatory modes. Deceptive, because the suits were capable of moving with gazelle-like speed if required, but there was no need to deploy such swiftness at the moment. She switched off the pale-green overlay, returning to normal vision. Sudjic and Volyova were not visible at all now, unsurprisingly. And while occasional pockets continued to open in the storm, Khouri was generally unable to see beyond the end of her own outstretched arm.

With a jolt, though, she realised she had seen something—someone—moving in the dust. It had only been there for a moment; not even something she could properly dignify by calling it a glimpse. Khouri was just beginning—without too much concern—to rationalise the apparition as a chance swirling of dust, momentarily assuming a vaguely human shape. But then she saw it again.

Now the figure was better defined. It lingered, teasingly. And stepped out of the maelstrom, into clear vision.

“It’s been a long time,” the Mademoiselle said. “I thought you’d be happier to see me.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Wearer,” the suit said. “I am not able to interpret your last subvocalised statement. Would you mind rephrasing what you had to say?”

“Tell it to ignore you,” the Mademoiselle’s dust-ghost said. “I don’t have very long.”

Khouri told the suit to ignore what she was subvocalising, until she gave a codeword. The suit acceded with a note of stuffy displeasure, as if it had never ever been asked to do something so irregular, and that it would have to seriously rethink the terms of their working relationship in future.

“All right,” she said. “It’s just you and me, Mad. Care to tell where you’ve been?”

“In a moment,” the woman’s projected image said. She had stabilised now, but was certainly not rendered with the fidelity Khouri had come to expect. She looked more like a crude sketch of herself, or a blurred photograph, subject to rippling waves of distortion. “Firstly I’d better do what I can for you, or else you’ll be forced into foolishness like trying to ram Sylveste. Now let’s see; accessing primary suit systems… bypassing Volyova’s restriction codes… remarkably simple, in fact—I’m rather disappointed she didn’t give me more of a challenge, especially as this is the last time I’m likely—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about giving you firepower, dear girl.” As she was speaking, the status-readouts reconfigured, indicating that a number of previously locked-out suit weapons systems had just come online. Khouri appraised the sudden arsenal at her fingertips, only half believing what she had just witnessed. “There you are,” Mademoiselle said. “Anything else you’d like me to kiss better before I go?”

“I suppose I should say thanks…”

“Don’t bother, Khouri. The last thing I’d expect from you would be gratitude.”

“Of course, now I actually have no choice but to kill the bastard. Am I supposed to thank you for that as well?”

“You’ve seen the—uh—evidence. The case for the prosecution, if you will.”

Khouri nodded, feeling her scalp squidging against the suit’s internal matrix. You were not meant to make gestures in a suit. “Yes, that stuff about the Inhibitors. “Course, I still don’t know if any of it’s true…”

“Consider the alternative, in that case. You refrain from killing Sylveste, and yet what I’ve told you turns out to be the truth. Imagine how bad you’d feel after that, especially if Sylveste…” the dust apparition attempted a grisly smile, “fulfils his ambition.”

“I’d still have a clear conscience, wouldn’t I?”

“Undoubtedly. And I hope that would be sufficient consolation while your entire species is being eradicated by Inhibitor systems. Of course, in all likelihood you wouldn’t even be around to regret your mistake. They’re rather efficient, the Inhibitors. But you’ll find that out in due course…”

“Well, thanks for the advice.”

“That isn’t all, Khouri. Did it not occur to you that there might have been a very good reason for my absence until now?”

“Which is?”

“I’m dying.” The Mademoiselle let the word hover in the dust storm before continuing. “After the incident with the cache-weapon, Sun Stealer managed to inject another portion of himself into your skull—but of course, you’re aware of that. You felt him enter, didn’t you? I remember your screams. They were graphic. How odd it must have felt; how invasive.”

“Sun Stealer hasn’t exactly made an impression on me since.”

“But did it ever occur to you to ask why?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, dear girl, that I’ve spent the last few weeks doing my damnedest to stop him spreading further into your head. That’s why you haven’t heard anything from me. I’ve been too preoccupied with containing him. It was bad enough dealing with the part of him that I inadvertently let return with the bloodhounds. But at least then we reached a kind of stalemate. This time, though, it’s been rather different. Sun Stealer has become stronger, while I have become successively weaker with each of his onslaughts.”

“You mean he’s still here?”

“Very much so. And the only reason you haven’t heard from him is that he’s been equally preoccupied in the war the two of us have been waging within your skull. The difference is, he’s been making progress all the time—corrupting me, co-opting my systems, exploiting my own defences against me. Oh, he’s a crafty one, take my word for it.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“What’s going to happen is that I’m going to lose. I can be quite certain about this; it’s a mathematical certainty based on his current rate of gains.” The Mademoiselle smiled again, as if she were perversely proud of this analytical detachment. “I can delay his onslaught for a few days more, and then it’s all over. It might even be shorter. I’ve significantly weakened myself just by the act of presenting myself to you now. But I had no choice. I had to sacrifice time in order to reinstate your weapons privilege.”

“But when he wins…”

“I don’t know, Khouri. But be prepared for anything. He’s likely to be a rather less charming tenant than I’ve endeavoured to be. After all, you know what he did to your predecessor. Drove the poor man psychotic.” The Mademoiselle stepped back, seeming to partially cloak herself in the dust, as if she were stepping offstage via the curtains. “It’s doubtful that we’ll have the pleasure again, Khouri. I feel I should wish you well. But right now I ask only one thing of you. Do what you came here to do. And do it well.” She retreated further, her form breaking up, as if she were no more than a charcoal sketch of a woman, dispersed by wind. “You have the means now.”

The Mademoiselle was gone. Khouri waited a moment—not so much collecting her thoughts as kicking them into some vaguely cohesive mass which she hoped might stay bundled together for more than a few seconds. Then she issued the codeword which put the suit back online. The weapons, she observed with nothing remotely resembling relief, were all still functioning, just as the Mademoiselle had promised.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the suit said. “But if you’d care to reinstate full-spectrum vision you’ll observe that we have company.”

“Company?”

“I’ve just alerted the other suits. But you’re the closest.”

“Sure this isn’t Sajaki?”

“It isn’t Triumvir Sajaki, no.” It might have been Khouri’s imagination, but the suit sounded peeved that she had even doubted its judgement in this matter. “Even if it exceeds all safety limits, the Triumvir’s suit will not arrive here for another three minutes.”

“Then it must be Sylveste.”

Khouri had by then switched to the recommended sensory overlay. She could see the approaching figure—or more accurately, figures, since there were two of them, easily resolved. The other two occupied suits were converging on the location, at the same unhurried pace with which they had first departed. “Sylveste, I’m assuming you can hear us,” Volyova said. “Stop where you are. We’re zeroing in on you from three sides.”

His voice cut across the suit channel. “I assumed you’d left us here to die. Nice of you to say you were coming.”

“I’m not in the habit of breaking my word,” Volyova said. “As you undoubtedly know by now.”

Khouri began to make preparations for the kill she was still not sure she could commit herself to. She called up a target overlay, boxing Sylveste, then allocated one of her less ferocious suit-weapons: a medium-yield laser built into the head. It was puny by comparison with the other suit armaments; really just intended to warn prospective attackers to go away and pick another target. But against an unarmoured man, at virtually zero-range, it would more than suffice.

It would take only an eyeblink now, and Sylveste would die, in strict compliance with the Mademoiselle’s terms.

Sudjic was moving more rapidly now, moving more swiftly towards Volyova than Sylveste. It was then that Khouri noticed something odd about the suit Sudjic was wearing. There was something projecting from one end of her clawed arm, something small and metallic. It looked like a weapon, a light hand-held boser-pistol. She was raising her arm with unhurried calm, the way a professional would have done. For an instant Khouri experienced a shocking sense of dislocation. It was as if she were seeing herself from beyond her own body; watching herself raise a weapon in readiness to kill Sylveste.

But something was wrong.

Sudjic was pointing the weapon at Volyova.

“I take it you have a plan here—” Sylveste said.

“Ilia!” Khouri shouted. “Get down, she’s going to—”

Sudjic’s weapon was more powerful than it looked. There was a flash of horizontal light—the containment laser for the coherent matter-beam—streaking laterally across Khouri’s field of view, knifing into Volyova’s suit. Various warning alarms went haywire, signifying an excessive energy-discharge in the vicinity. Khouri’s suit automatically jumped to a higher, more hair-trigger level of battle readiness, indices on the display changing to indicate that their respective subordinated weapons systems were set to go off without her conscious say-so if her suit were similarly threatened.

Volyova’s suit was badly hit; a significant acreage of the chest was gone, revealing densely laminated hypodermal armour layers and outspilling cabling and power lines.

Sudjic took aim again, fired.

This time the blast went deeper, cutting into the wound it had already opened. Volyova’s voice cut across the channel, but it sounded weak and distant. All Khouri could make out was a kind of questioning groan; more of shock than pain.

“That was for Boris,” Sudjic said, her own voice obscenely clear. “That was for what you did to him in your experiments.” She levelled the gun again, no less calmly than if she were an artist about to put the finishing dab of paint on a masterpiece. “And this is for killing him.”

“Sudjic,” Khouri said, “stop it.”

The woman’s suit did not turn to look at her. “Why stop, Khouri? Didn’t I make it clear I had a grudge against her?”

“Sajaki’ll be here in minute or so.”

“By which time I’ll have made it look like Sylveste fired at her.” Sudjic snorted derisively. “Shit; didn’t it occur to you I’d have thought of that? I wasn’t going to let myself get stuffed just to get revenge on the old hag. She isn’t worth the expense.”

“I can’t let you kill her.”

“Can’t let me? Oh, that’s funny, Khouri. What are you going to stop me with? I don’t recall her reinstating your weapons privilege, and right now I don’t think she’s in much of a state to do it.”

Sudjic was right.

Volyova was slumped over now, her suit having lost integrity. Maybe the wound reached into her by now. If she were making any sound, her suit was too damaged to amplify it.

Sudjic relevelled the boser, aiming low now. “One shot to finish you off, Volyova—then I plant the gun on Sylveste. He’ll deny everything, of course—but there’ll only be Khouri as a witness, and I don’t think she’s going to go out of her way to back up his story. I’m right, aren’t I? Admit it, Khouri, I’m about to do you a favour. You’d kill the bitch if you had the means.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Khouri said. “On two counts.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t kill her, despite everything she’s done. And I do have the means.” She took a moment—-not even a fraction of second—to target the laser. “Goodbye, Sudjic. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure.”

And fired.

By the time Sajaki arrived, not much more than a minute later, what was left of Sudjic was not worth burying.

Her suit had retaliated, of course, escalating to a higher level of response, directed plasma bolts emitting from projectors which had popped up on either side of her head. But Khouri’s suit had been expecting something like that. In addition to changing the exterior state of its armour to maximally avert the plasma (retexturing itself and applying massive plasma-deflective electric currents to its own hide), it was already returning fire at a yet higher level of aggression, dispensing with childish weapons like plasma and particle-beams and opting for the more decisive deployment of ack-am pulses, releasing tiny nano-pellets from its own antilithium reservoir; each pellet caulked in a shield of ablative normal-matter, and the whole thing accelerated up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Khouri had not even had time to gasp. After issuing the initial fire-order, her suit had done all the rest on its own.

“There’s been… trouble,” she said, as the Triumvir descended and made touch-down.

“You don’t say,” he said, surveying the carnage: the wounded husk of a suit containing Volyova; the liberally strewn and now radioactive residual pieces of what had once been Sudjic, and—in the middle of it—unharmed by the blast, but seemingly too stunned to speak or try to evade capture, Sylveste and his wife.