Revelation Space

TWO

The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.

She had just boarded the elevator from the bridge, weary after eighteen hours in consultation with various simulations of once-living figures from the ship’s distant past. She had been trying to catch them out, hoping one or more of them would disclose some revealing fact about the origins of the cache. It had been gruelling work, not least because some of the older beta-level personae could not even speak modern Norte, and for some reason the software which ran them was unwilling to do any translating. Volyova had been chain-smoking for the entire session, trying to get her head around the grammatical peculiarities of middle Norte, and she was not about to stop filling her lungs now. In fact, back stiff from the nervous tension of the exchanges, she needed it more than ever. The elevator’s air-conditioning was functioning imperfectly, so it took only a few seconds for her to veil the interior with smoke.

Volyova hoisted the cuff of her fleece-lined leather jacket and spoke into the bracelet which wrapped around her bony wrist. “The Captain’s level,” she said, addressing the Nostalgia for Infinity, which would in turn assign a microscopic aspect of itself to the primitive task of controlling the elevator. A moment later, the floor plunged away.

“Do you wish musical accompaniment for this transit?”

“No, and as I’ve had to remind you on approximately one thousand previous occasions, what I wish is silence. Shut up and let me think.”

She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator’s internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them. Below the forests, she ghosted through the high eight hundreds; vast realms of the ship which had once been at the disposal of the crew, when the crew numbered thousands. Below 800 the elevator passed through the vast and now immobile armature which spaced the ship’s rotatable habitat and nonrotatable utility sections, and then dropped through two hundred levels of cryogenic storage bays; sufficient capacity for one hundred thousand sleepers—had there been any.

Volyova was now more than a kilometre below her starting point, but the ship’s ambient pressure remained constant, life-support one of the rare systems which still functioned as intended. Nonetheless some residual instinct told her that ears should be popping with the rush of descent.

“Atrium levels,” said the elevator, accessing a long-redundant record of the ship’s prior layout. “For your enjoyment and recreation needs.”

“Very droll.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I mean, you’d need a pretty odd definition of recreation. Unless your idea of relaxation happened to be suiting-up in full vacuum-rated armour and dosing on a bowel-loosening regimen of anti-radiation therapies. Which doesn’t strike me as being particularly pleasurable.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Forget it,” Volyova said, sighing.

For another kilometre she passed through only sparsely pressurised districts. Volyova felt her weight lessen and knew she was passing the engines—braced beyond the hull on elegant, swept-back spars. Gape-mouthed, they sucked in tiny amounts of interstellar hydrogen and subjected the harvest to some frankly unimaginable physics. No one, not even Volyova, pretended to know how the Conjoiner engines worked. What mattered was that they functioned. What also mattered was that they gave off a steady warm glow of exotic particle radiation, and while most would have been mopped up by the ship’s hull shielding, some of it would get through. That was why the elevator sped up momentarily as it dropped past the engines, and then slowed down to its normal descent speed once it had passed out of danger.

Now she was two-thirds of the way down the ship. She knew this district better than any of the other crew members: Sajaki, Hegazi and the others seldom came down this far unless they had excellent reason. And who could blame them? The further down they went, the closer they got to the Captain. She was the only one who was not terrified by the very idea of his proximity.

No; far from fearing this realm of the ship, she had made an empire of it. At level 612 she could have disembarked, navigated to the spider-room and taken it outside the hull, where she could listen to the ghosts which haunted the spaces between the stars. Tempting—always so. But she had work to do—she was on a specific errand—and the ghosts would still be there another time. At level 500, she passed the floor which contained the gunnery, and thought of all the problems which it represented, and had to resist stopping to carry out a few new investigations. Then the gunnery was gone and she was falling through the cache chamber—one of several huge, non-pressurised inclusions within the ship.

The chamber was enormous; the best part of half a kilometre from end to end, but it was dark now and Volyova had to imagine for herself the forty things which it contained. That was never hard. While there were many unanswered questions relating to the functions and origins of the things, Volyova knew their shapes and relative positions perfectly, as if they were the carefully positioned furnishings of a blind person’s bedroom. Even in the elevator she felt she could reach out and stroke the alloy husk of the nearest of them, just to reassure herself that it was still there. She had been learning what she could of the things for most of the time since she had joined the Triumvirate, but she would not have claimed to have been at ease with any of them. She approached them with the nervousness of a new lover, knowing that the knowledge she had gleaned to date was entirely skin-deep, and that what lay below might shatter every illusion she had.

She was never entirely sorry to exit the cache.

At 450 she shot through another armature, spacing the utility section from the ship’s tapering conic tail, which extended below for another kilometre. Again a surge as the elevator rode through a rad-zone, then the beginning of prolonged deceleration which would eventually bring it to a halt. It was passing through the second set of cryogenic storage decks, two hundred and fifty levels capable of holding one hundred and twenty thousand, though of course there was currently only one sleeper, if one was so generously inclined as to describe the Captain’s state as sleep. The elevator was slowing now. Midway through the cryo levels it stopped, cordially announcing that it had reached her destination.

“Passenger cryogenic sleep level concierge,” said the elevator. “For your in-flight reefersleep requirements. Thank you for using this service.”

The door opened and she stepped across the threshold, glancing down at the converging, illuminated walls of the shaft framed by the gap. She had travelled almost the entire length of the ship (or height—it was difficult not to think of the ship as a tremendously tall building) and yet the shaft seemed to drop down to infinite depths below. The ship was so large—so stupidly large—that even its extremities beggared the mind.

“Yes, yes. Now kindly piss off.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Go away.”

Not that the elevator would, of course—at least not for any real purpose other than placating her. It had nothing else to do but wait for her. Being the sole person awake, Volyova was the only one who had any cause to use the elevators at all.

It was a long hike from the spinal shaft to the place where they kept the Captain. She could not take the most direct route either, since whole sections of the ship were inaccessible, riddled with viruses which were causing widespread malfunction. Some districts were flooded with coolant, while others were infested with rogue janitor-rats. Others were patrolled by defence drogues which had gone berserk and so were best avoided, unless Volyova felt in the mood for sport. Others were filled with toxic gas, or vacuum, or too much high-rad, or were rumoured to be haunted.

Volyova did not believe in hauntings, (though of course she had her own ghosts, accessed via the spider-room), but the rest she took very seriously indeed. Some parts of the ship she would not enter unless armed. But she knew the Captain’s surroundings well enough not to take excessive precautions. It was cold, though, and she hiked up the collar of her jacket, tugged the bib of her cap tighter down, its mesh fabric crunching against her scalp stubble. She lit another cigarette, hard sucks perishing the vacuum in her head, replacing it with a frosty military alertness. Being alone suited her. She looked forward to human company, but not with any great fervour. And certainly not if that company also entailed dealing with the Nagorny situation. Perhaps when they reached the Yellowstone system she would consider locating a new Gunnery Officer.

Now, how had that worry escaped from her mental partitioning?

It was not Nagorny that concerned her now, but the Captain. And here he was, or at least the outermost extent of what he had now become. Volyova composed herself. That composure was necessary. What she had to examine always made her sick. It was worse for her than for the others; her repulsion stronger. She was brezgati; squeamish.

The miracle was that the reefersleep unit which cased Brannigan was still functional. It was a very old model, Volyova knew—sturdily built. It was still striving to hold the cells of his body in stasis, even though the shell of the reefer had ruptured in great Palaeolithic cracks, fibrous metallic growth spilling out. The growth came from within the reefer, like a fungal invasion. Whatever remained of Brannigan remained at its heart.

It was bitterly cold near the reefer, and Volyova soon found herself shivering. But there was work to do. She fished a curette from her jacket and used it to burn off slivers of the growth for analysis. Back in her lab she would attack them with various viral weapons, hoping to find one which had an edge on the growth. She knew from experience that the routine was largely futile—the growth had a fantastic capacity for corrupting the molecular tools with which she probed it. Not that there was any pressing hurry: the reefer kept Brannigan at only a few hundred millikelvin above absolute zero, and that cold did appear to offer some hindrance to the spread: On the negative side, Volyova knew that no human being had ever survived revival from such a cold, but that seemed oddly irrelevant against the Captain’s condition.

She spoke into her bracelet, voice hushed. “Open my log file on the Captain and append this entry.”

The bracelet chirped to indicate readiness.

“Third check on Captain Brannigan since my revival. Extent of spread of the…”

She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.

“… of the illness, seems unchanged since last entry. No more than a few millimetres of encroachment. Cryogenic functions are still green, miraculously. But I think we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the unit’s failure at some point in the future…” Thinking to herself, that when it did fail, if they were not speedy in transferring the Captain to a new reefer (exactly how was an unanswered question), then he would certainly be one less problem for them to worry about. His own problems would be over as well—she sincerely hoped.

She told the bracelet: “Close log file.” And then added, wishing devoutly that she had spared herself one smoke for this moment: “Warm Captain’s brain core by fifty millikelvins.”

Experience had told her that this was the minimum necessary temperature increase. Short of it, his brain would remain locked in glacial stasis. Above, the plague would begin to transform him too rapidly for her tastes.

“Captain?” she said. “Can you hear me? It’s Ilia.”

Sylveste stepped down from the crawler and walked back towards the grid. During his meeting with Calvin the wind had increased appreciably; he could feel it stinging his cheeks, the scouring dust a witch’s caress.

“I hope that little conversation was beneficial,” Pascale said, snatching away her mask to bellow into the wind. She knew all about Calvin, even though she had never spoken to him directly. “Have you agreed to see sense now?”

“Get Sluka for me.”

Ordinarily she might have rejected an order like that; now she just accepted his mood and returned to the other crawler, emerging shortly afterwards with Sluka and a handful of other workers.

“You’re ready to listen to us, I take it?” Sluka stood before him, the wind whipping a loose strand of hair across her goggles. She took periodic inhalations from her mask, cupped in one hand, while the other hand rested on her hip. “If so, I think you’ll find we can be reasonable. We all have your reputation in mind. None of us will speak of this matter once we return to Mantell. We’ll say you gave the order to withdraw once the advisory came in. The credit will be yours.”

“And you think any of that matters in the long term?”

Sluka snarled: “What’s so damned important about one obelisk? For that matter, what’s so damned important about the Amarantin?”

“You never really saw the big picture, did you?”

Discreetly—but not so discreetly that he missed her doing it—Pascale had begun taping the exchange, standing to one side with her compad’s detachable camera in one hand. “Some people might say there never was one to see,” Sluka said. “That you inflated the significance of the Amarantin just to keep the archaeologists in business.”

“You’d say that, wouldn’t you, Sluka? But then again, you were never exactly one of us to begin with.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that if Girardieau had wanted to plant a dissenter in our midst, you’d have made an excellent candidate.”

Sluka turned back to what Sylveste was increasingly thinking of as her mob. “Listen to the poor bastard—sinking into conspiracy theories already. Now we’re getting a taste of what the rest of the colony has seen for years.” Then her attention snapped back to him. “There’s no point talking to you. We’re leaving as soon as we have the equipment packed—sooner, if the storm intensifies. You can come with us.” She caught her breath from the mask, colour returning to her cheeks. “Or you can take your chances out here. The choice is entirely yours.”

He looked beyond her, to the mob. “Go on, then. Leave. Don’t allow anything as trivial as loyalty to get in your way. Unless one of you has the guts to stay here and finish the job they came to do.” He looked from face to face, meeting only awkwardly averted gazes. He barely knew any of their names. He recognised them, but only from recent experience; certainly none of them had come on the ship from Yellowstone; certainly none had known anything other than Resurgam, with its handful of human settlements strewn like a few rubies across otherwise total desolation. To them he must have seemed monstrously atavistic.

“Sir,” one of them said—possibly the one who had first alerted him to the storm. “Sir; it’s not that we don’t respect you. But we have to think of ourselves as well. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s buried here, it isn’t worth this risk.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “It’s worth more risk than you can possibly imagine. Don’t you understand? The Event didn’t happen to the Amarantin. They caused it. They made it happen.”

Sluka shook her head slowly. “They made their sun flare up? Is that what you actually believe?”

“In a word, yes,”

“Then you’re a lot further gone than I feared.” Sluka turned her back to him to address her mob. “Power up the crawlers. We’re leaving now.”

“What about the equipment?” Sylveste said.

“It can stay here and rust for all I care.” The mob began to disperse towards the two hulking machines.

“Wait!” Sylveste shouted. “Listen to me! You only need to take one crawler—there’s enough room for all of you in one, if you leave the equipment behind.”

Sluka faced him again. “And you?”

“I’ll stay here—finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.”

She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other—the one containing his stateroom—for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.

He looked around to see who was still with him.

There was Pascale—but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.

Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. “Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.” He addressed another pair. “Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.”

“What are you planning now?” Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.

“I would have thought it was obvious,” Sylveste said. “I’m going to see what it says on that obelisk.”

The suite console chimed as Ana Khouri was brushing her teeth. She came out of the bathroom, foam on her lips.

“Morning, Case.”

The hermetic glided into the apartment, his travelling palanquin decorated in ornate scrollwork, with a tiny, dark window in the front side. When the light was right she could just make out K. C. Ng’s deathly pale face bobbing behind an inch of green glass.

“Hey, you look great,” he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. “Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?”

“It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.”

“I was joking,” Ng said. “You look like shit warmed over.”

She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. “I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.”

“Excuses.” Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.

The voice rasped again, “Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.”

“Off my back, Case.”

“Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?”

Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.

“I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then let us discuss matters of a terminal nature, at least where Taraschi is concerned.”

Ng began to hit her with the final details for the kill. Most of it was already in the plan, or stuff that she had guessed for herself, based on her experience of previous kills. Taraschi was to be her fifth consecutive assassination, so she was beginning to grasp the wider scope of the game. Though they were not always obvious, the game had its own rules, subtly reiterated in the grand movements of each kill. The media attention was even picking up, her name being bandied around Shadowplay circles with increasing frequency, and Case was apparently setting up some juicy, high-profile targets for her next few hunts. She was, she felt, on the way to becoming one of the top hundred or so assassins on the planet; elite company indeed.

“Right,” she said. “Under the Monument, plaza level eight, west annex, one hour. Couldn’t be easier.”

“Aren’t you forgetting one thing?”

“Right. Where’s the kill weapon, Case?”

Ng’s form nodded behind her. “Where the tooth fairy left it, dear girl.”

And then he turned his box and retreated from the room, leaving only a faint whiff of lubricant. Khouri, frowning, reached a hand slowly beneath the pillow on her bed. There was something, just as Case had said. There had been nothing there when she went to sleep, but this sort of thing hardly bothered her these days. The company always had moved in mysterious ways.

Soon, she was ready.

She called a cable-car from the roof, the kill weapon snuggling under her coat. The car detected the weapon and the presence of implants in her head, and would have refused to carry her had she not shown it her Omega Point ident, grafted beneath the nail of her right index finger, making a tiny holographic target symbol seem to dance beneath the keratin. “Monument to the Eighty,” Khouri said. Sylveste stepped off the ladder and walked across the stepped base of the pit until he reached the pool of light around the obelisk’s exposed tip. Sluka and one of the other archaeologists had deserted him, but the one remaining worker—assisted by the servitor—had managed to uncover nearly a metre of the object, peeling away the nested layers of the stone sarcophagi to reach the massive block of obsidian, skilfully carved, on which Amarantin graphicforms had been engraved in precise lines. Most of it was textual: rows of ideopicts. The archaeologists understood the basics of Amarantin language, though there had been no Rosetta stone to aid them. The Amarantin were the eighth dead alien culture discovered by humanity within fifty light years of Earth, but there was no evidence that any of those eight species had come into contact with each other. Nor could the Pattern Jugglers or the Shrouders offer assistance: neither had revealed anything remotely resembling a written language. Sylveste, who had come into contact with both the Jugglers and the Shrouders—or at least the latter’s technology—appreciated that as well as anyone.

Instead, computers had cracked the Amarantin language. It had taken thirty years—correlating millions of artefacts—but finally a consistent model had been evolved which could determine the broad meaning of most inscriptions. It helped that, at least towards the end of their reign, there had only been one Amarantin tongue, and that it had changed very slowly, so that the same model could interpret inscriptions which had been made tens of thousands of years apart. Of course, nuances of meaning were another thing entirely. That was where human intuition—and theory—came in.

Amarantin writing was not, however, like anything in human experience. All Amarantin texts were stereoscopic—consisting of interlaced lines which had to be merged in the reader’s visual cortex. Their ancestors had once been something like birds—flying dinosaurs, but with the intelligence of lemurs. At some point in their past their eyes had been situated on opposite sides of their skulls, leading to a highly bicameral mind, each hemisphere synthesising its own mental model of the world. Later, they had become hunters and evolved binocular vision, but their mental wiring still owed something to that earlier phase of development. Most Amarantin artefacts mirrored their mental duality, with a pronounced symmetry about the vertical axis.

The obelisk was no exception.

Sylveste had no need for the special goggles his co-workers needed to read Amarantin graphicforms: the stereoscopic merging was easily accommodated within his own eyes, employing one of Calvin’s more useful algorithms. But the act of reading was still tortuous, requiring strenuous concentration.

“Give me some light here,” he said, and the student unclipped one of the portable floods and held it by hand over the side of the obelisk. From somewhere above lightning strobed: electricity coursing between dust planes in the storm.

“Can you read it, sir?”

“I’m trying,” Sylveste said. “It isn’t the easiest thing in the world, you know. Especially if you don’t keep that light steady.”

“Sorry sir. Doing my best. But it is getting windy here.”

He was right: vortices were forming, even in the pit. It would soon get very much windier, and then the dust would begin to thicken, until it formed sheets of grey opacity in the air. They would not be able to work for very long in those conditions.

“I apologise,” Sylveste said. “I appreciate your help.” Feeling that something more was called for, he added: “And I’m grateful that you chose to stay with me, rather than Sluka.”

“It wasn’t difficult, sir. Not all of us are ready to dismiss your ideas.”

Sylveste looked up from the obelisk. “All of them?”

“We at least accept they should be investigated. After all, it’s in the colony’s best interests to understand what happened.”

“The Event, you mean?”

The student nodded. “If it really was something the Amarantin caused to happen… and if it really did coincide with them achieving spaceflight—then it might be of more than academic interest.”

“I despise that phrase. Academic interest—as if any other kind were automatically more worthy. But you’re right. We have to know.”

Pascale came closer. “Know what, exactly?”

“What it was they did that made their sun kill them.” Sylveste turned to face her, pinning her down with the oversized silvery facets of his artificial eyes. “So that we don’t end up making the same mistake.”

“You mean it was an accident?”

“I very much doubt that they did it deliberately, Pascale.”

“I realise that.” He had condescended to her, and she hated that, he knew. He also hated himself for doing it. “I also know that stone-age aliens just don’t have the means to influence the behaviour of their star, accidentally or otherwise.”

“We know they were more advanced than that,” Sylveste said. “We know they had the wheel and gunpowder; a rudimentary science of optics and an interest in astronomy for agrarian purposes. Humanity went from that level to spaceflight in no more than five centuries. It would be prejudiced to assume another species was not capable of the same, wouldn’t it?”

“But where’s the evidence?” Pascale stood to shake rivulets of settled dust from her greatcoat. “Oh, I know what you’re going to say—none of the high-tech artefacts survived, because they were intrinsically less durable than earlier ones. But even if there was evidence—how does that change things? Even the Conjoiners don’t go around tinkering with stars, and they’re a lot more advanced than the rest of humanity, us included.”

“I know. That’s precisely what bothers me.”

“Then what does the writing say?”

Sylveste sighed and looked back at it again. He had hoped that the distraction would allow his subconscious to work at the piece, and that now the meaning of the inscription would snap into clarity, like the answer to one of the psychological problems they had been posed before the Shrouder mission. But the moment of revelation stubbornly refused to come; the graphicforms were still not yielding meaning. Or perhaps, he thought, it was his expectations that were at fault. He had been hoping for something momentous; something that would confirm his ideas, terrifying as they were.

But instead, the writing seemed only to commemorate something that had happened here—something that might have been of great importance in Amarantin history, but which—set against his expectations—was bound to be parochial in the extreme. It would take a full computer analysis to be sure, and he had only been able to read the top metre or so of the text—but already he could feel the crush of disappointment. Whatever this obelisk represented, it was no longer of interest to him.

“Something happened here,” Sylveste said. “Maybe a battle, or the appearance of a god. That’s all it is—a marker stone. We’ll know more when we unearth it and date the context layer. We can run a TE measurement on the artefact itself, too.”

“It’s not what you were looking for, is it?”

“I thought it might be, for a while.” Then Sylveste looked down, towards the lowest exposed part of the obelisk. The text ended a few inches above the highest layer of cladding, and something else began, extending downwards out of sight. It was a diagram, of some sort—he could see the topmost arcs of several concentric circles, and that was all. What was it?

Sylveste could not—would not—begin to guess. The storm was growing stronger. No stars at all were visible now, only a single occluding sheet of dust, roaring overhead like a great bat’s wing. It would be a kind of hell when they left the pit.

“Give me something to dig with,” he said. And then started scraping away at the permafrost around the topmost layer of the sarcophagus, like a prisoner who had until dawn to tunnel from his cell. Only a few moments passed before Pascale and the student joined him in the work, while the storm howled above. “I don’t remember much,” the Captain said. “Are we still around Bloater?”

“No,” Volyova said, trying not to make it seem as if she had already explained this to him a dozen times, each time she had warmed his mind. “We left Kruger 6OA some years ago, once Hegazi negotiated us the shield ice we needed.”

“Oh. Then where are we?”

“Heading towards Yellowstone.”

“Why?” The Captain’s basso voice rumbled out of speakers arranged some distance from his corpse. Complex algorithms scanned his brain patterns and translated the results into speech, fleshing out the responses when required. He had no real right to be conscious at all, really—all neural activity should have ended when his core temperature had dropped below freezing. But his brain was webbed by tiny machines, and in a way it was the machines which were thinking now, even though they were doing so at less than half a kelvin above absolute zero.

“That’s a good question,” she said. Something was bothering her now and it was more than just this conversation. “The reason we’re going to Yellowstone is…”

“Yes?”

“Sajaki thinks there’s a man there who can help you.”

The Captain pondered this. On her bracelet she had a map of his brain: she could see colours squirming across it like armies merging on a battlefield. “That man must be Calvin Sylveste,” the Captain said.

“Calvin Sylveste is dead.”

“The other one, then. Dan Sylveste. Is that the man Sajaki seeks?”

“I can’t imagine it’s anyone else.”

“He won’t come willingly. He didn’t last time.” There was a moment of silence; quantum temperature fluctuations pushing the Captain back below consciousness. “Sajaki must be aware of that,” he said, returning.

“I’m sure Sajaki has considered all the possibilities,” Volyova said, in a manner which made it clear she was sure of anything but that. But she would be careful of speaking against the other Triumvir. Sajaki had always been the Captain’s closest adjutant—the two of them went back a long way; times long before Volyova had joined the crew. To the best of her knowledge, no one else—including Sajaki—ever spoke to the Captain, or even knew that there was a way to do so. But there was no point taking stupid risks—even given the Captain’s erratic memory.

“Something’s troubling you, Ilia. You’ve always been able to confide in me. Is it Sylveste?”

“It’s more local than that.”

“Something aboard the ship, then?”

It was not something to which she was ever going to become totally accustomed, Volyova knew, but in recent weeks visiting the Captain had begun to take on definite tones of normality. As if visiting a cryogenically cooled corpse infected with a retarded but potentially all-consuming plague was merely one of life’s unpleasant but necessary elements; something that, now and again, everyone had to do. Now, though, she was taking their relationship a step further—about to ignore the same risk which had stopped her expressing her misgivings about Sajaki.

“It’s about the gunnery,” she said. “You remember that, don’t you? The room from which the cache-weapons can be controlled?”

“I think so, yes. What about it?”

“I’ve been training a recruit to become Gunnery Officer; to assume the gunnery seat and interface with the cache-weapons through neural implants.”

“Who was this recruit?”

“Someone called Boris Nagorny. No; you never met him—he came aboard only recently, and I tended to keep him away from the others when I could help it. I would never have brought him down here, for obvious reasons.” Namely that the Captain’s contagion might have reached Nagorny’s implants if she had allowed the two of them to get too close. Volyova sighed. She was getting to the crux of her confession now. “Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane—at least, I thought so at the time. But I underestimated the degree of Nagorny’s psychosis.”

“He got worse?”

“It started not long after I put the implants in and allowed him to tap into the gunnery. He began to complain of nightmares. Very bad ones.”

“How unfortunate for the poor fellow.”

Volyova understood. What the Captain had undergone—what the Captain was still in the process of undergoing—would make most people’s nightmares seem very tame phantasms indeed. Whether or not he experienced pain was a debatable point, but what was pain anyway, compared to the knowledge that one was being eaten alive—and transformed at the same time—by something inexpressibly alien?

“I can’t guess what those nightmares were really like,” Volyova said. “All I know is that for Nagorny—a man who already had enough horrors loose in his head for most of us—they were too much.”

“So what did you do?”

“I changed everything—the whole gunnery interface system, even the implants in his head. None of it worked. The nightmares continued.”

“You’re certain they had something to do with the gunnery?”

“I wanted to deny it at first, but there was a clear correlation with the sessions when I had him in the seat.” She lit herself another cigarette, the orange tip the only remotely warm thing anywhere near the Captain. Finding a fresh packet of cigarettes had been one of the few joyful moments of recent weeks. “So I changed the system again, and still it didn’t work. If anything, he just got worse.” She paused. “That was when I told Sajaki of my problems.”

“And Sajaki’s response was?”

“That I should discontinue the experiments, at least until we’d arrived around Yellowstone. Let Nagorny spend a few years in reefersleep, and see if that cured his psychosis. I was welcome to continue tinkering with the gunnery, but I wasn’t to put Nagorny in the seat again.”

“Sounds like very reasonable advice to me. Which of course you disregarded.”

She nodded, paradoxically relieved that the Captain had guessed her crime, without her having to spell it out.

“I woke a year ahead of the others,” Volyova said. “To give me time to oversee the system and keep an eye on how you were doing. That was what I did for a few months, too. Until I decided to wake Nagorny as well.”

“More experiments?”

“Yes. Until a day ago.” She sucked hard on the cigarette.

“This is like drawing teeth, Ilia. What happened yesterday?”

“Nagorny disappeared.” There; she’d said it now. “He had a particularly bad episode and tried to attack me. I defended myself, but he escaped. He’s elsewhere in the ship. I have no idea where.”

The Captain pondered this for long moments. She could tell what he must be thinking. It was a big ship and there were whole regions of it through which nothing could be tracked, where sensors had stopped working. It would be even harder trying to find someone who was actively hiding.

“You’re going to have to find him,” the Captain said. “You can’t have him still at large when Sajaki and the others awaken.”

“And then what?”

“You’ll probably have to kill him. Do it cleanly, and you can put his body back in the reefersleep unit and then arrange for the unit to fail.”

“Make it look like an accident, you mean?”

“Yes.” There was, as usual, absolutely no expression on the part of the Captain’s face she could see through the casket window. He was no more capable of altering his expression than a statue.

It was a good solution—one that, in her preoccupation with the nature of the problem, she had failed to devise herself. Until then, she had feared any confrontation with Nagorny because it might put her in the position of having to kill him. Such an outcome had seemed unacceptable—but as always, no outcome was unacceptable if you looked at it the right way.

“Thank you, Captain,” Volyova said. “You’ve been very helpful. Now—with your permission—I’m going to cool you again.”

“You’ll be back again, won’t you? I do so enjoy our little conversations, Ilia.”

“I wouldn’t miss them for the world,” she said, and then told her bracelet to drop his brain temperature by fifty millikelvin; all it would take to send him to dreamless, thoughtless oblivion. Or so she hoped.

Volyova finished her cigarette in silence and then looked away from the Captain, along the dark curve of the corridor. Somewhere out there—somewhere else in the ship—Nagorny was waiting, bearing her what she knew to be the deepest of grudges. He was ill himself now; sick in the head.

Like a dog that had to be put down.

“I think I know what it is,” Sylveste said, when the last obstructing block of stone had been removed from the obelisk’s cladding, revealing the upper two metres of the object.

“Well?”

“It’s a map of the Pavonis system.”

“Something tells me you’d already guessed that,” Pascale said, squinting through her goggles at the complex motif, which resembled two slightly offset groups of concentric circles. Stereoscopically merged, they fell into one group which seemed to hang some distance above the obsidian. And they were planetary orbits; no doubt of that. The sun Delta Pavonis lay at the centre, marked with the appropriate Amarantin glyph—a very human-looking five-pointed star. Then came correctly sized orbits for all the major bodies in the system, with Resurgam marked with the Amarantin symbol for world. Any doubts that this was just a coincidental arrangement of circles was banished by the carefully marked moons of the major planets.

“I had my suspicions,” Sylveste said. He was fatigued, but the night’s work—and the risk—had surely been worthwhile. It had taken them much longer to unearth the second metre of the obelisk than the first, and at times the storm had seemed like a squadron of banshees, only ever a moment away from inflicting shrieking death. But—as had happened before, and would certainly happen again—the storm had never quite reached the fury that Cuvier had predicted. Now the worst of it was done, and though streaks of dust were still rippling in the sky like dark banners, pink dawnlight was beginning to chase away the night. It seemed they had survived after all.

“But it doesn’t change anything,” Pascale said. “We always knew they had astronomy; this just shows that at some point they discovered the heliocentric universe.”

“It means more than that,” Sylveste said, carefully. “Not all of these planets are visible to the naked eye, even allowing for Amarantin physiology.”

“So they used telescopes.”

“Not long ago you described them as stone-age aliens. Now you’re ready to accept that they knew how to make telescopes?”

He thought she might have smiled, but it was hard to tell when she wore the breather mask. Instead, she looked skywards. Something had crossed between the baulks; a bright deltoid moving under the dust.

“I think someone’s here,” she said.

They climbed the ladder quickly, out of breath when they reached the top. Though the wind had lessened from its peak of several hours earlier, it was still an ordeal to move around topside. The dig was in disarray, with floods and gravitometers toppled and broken, equipment strewn around.

The aircraft was hovering above them, veering to and fro as it scouted landing sites. Sylveste recognised it immediately as one of Cuvier’s; Mantell had nothing as large. Aircraft were in short supply on Resurgam: the only means of crossing distances more than a few hundred kilometres. All the aircraft in existence now had been manufactured during the early days of the colony by servitors working from local raw materials. But the constructional servitors had been destroyed or stolen during the mutiny, and consequently the artefacts they had left behind were of incalculable value to the colony. The aircraft regenerated themselves if they were involved in minor accidents, and never needed maintenance—but they could still be ruined by sabotage or recklessness. Over the years the colony had steadily depleted its supply of flying machines.

The deltoid hurt his eyes. The underside of the plane’s wing was sewn with thousands of heat elements which glowed white-hot, generating lift thermally. The contrast was too much for Calvin’s algorithms.

“Who are they?” one of his students asked.

“I wish I knew,” Sylveste said. But the fact that this plane had originated in Cuvier entirely failed to cheer him. He watched it lower, casting actinic shadows across the ground before the heat elements slid down the spectrum and the plane settled onto skids. After a moment a ramp folded out and a cluster of figures trooped from the plane. His eyes snapped to infrared—he could see the figures clearly now, even as they moved away from the plane towards him. Clad in dark clothes, they wore breather masks, helmets and what looked like strap-on armour, flashed with the Administration insignia: the closest the colony came to a fully-fledged militia. And they were carrying things—long, evil-looking rifles held in double-grips, with a torch slung under each barrel.

“This doesn’t look good,” Pascale said, accurately.

The squad halted a few metres from them. “Doctor Sylveste?” called a voice, attenuated by the wind, which was still considerable. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid, sir.”

He had been expecting nothing else. “What is it?”

“The other crawler, sir—the one that left earlier tonight?”

“What about it?”

“They never made it back to Mantell, sir. We found them. There’d been a landslide—dust had built up on the ridge. They didn’t have a chance, sir.”

“Sluka?”

“They’re all dead, sir.” The Administration man’s heavy breather mask made him look like an elephantine god. “I’m sorry. It’s lucky not all of you tried to get back at the same time.”

“It’s more than luck,” Sylveste said.

“Sir? There’s one other thing.” The guard tightened his grip on his rifle, emphasising its presence rather than aiming it. “You’re under arrest, sir.”

K. C. Ng’s rasp of a voice filled the cable-car’s cockpit like a trapped wasp. “You developing a taste for it yet? Our fair city, I mean.”

“What would you know?” Khouri said. “I mean, when was the last time you set foot outside of that damned box, Case? It can’t have been in living memory.”

He was not with her, of course—there was nowhere near enough room for a palanquin aboard her cable-car. The car was necessarily small; nothing that would attract attention so close to the conclusion of a hunt. Parked on the roof, the vehicle had looked like a tailless helicopter which had partially furled its rotors. But rather than blades, the cable-car’s arms were slender telescopic appendages, each terminating in a hook as viciously curved as a sloth’s foreclaw.

Khouri had entered the car, and the door had slumped shut, barriering the rain and the low background noise of the city. She had stated her destination, which was the Monument to the Eighty, down in the deep Mulch. The car had paused momentarily, undoubtedly calculating the optimum route based on current traffic conditions and the generally shifting topology of the cableways which would carry it there. The process took a moment because the car’s computer brain was not especially smart.

Then Khouri had felt the car’s centre of gravity shift slightly. Through the upper window of the gullwing door, she had seen one of the car’s three arms extend to more than twice its previous length, until the clawed end was able to grasp one of the cables which overran the top of the building. Now one of the other arms found a similar grasping point on an adjacent cable, and with a sudden heave they were, in a manner, airborne. For a moment the car slid down the two cables to which it had attached itself, but after a few seconds the latter of the two cables had diverged too far for the car to reach. Smoothly, it released its grasp, but before it could fall the car’s third arm swooped out and grabbed another handy cable which happened to cross their approximate path. And then they slid for another second or so, and then fell again, and then rose again, and Khouri began to recognise a too-familiar feeling in her gut. What failed to assist matters was that the car’s pendulous progress felt arbitrary, as if it was just making up its trajectory as it proceeded, luckily finding cables when it needed them. To compensate, Khouri ran through breathing exercises, restlessly tightening each finger of her black leather gloves in sequence.

“I admit,” Case said, “that I haven’t exposed myself to the city’s native fragrances for some time now. But you shouldn’t knock it. The air isn’t quite as filthy as it seems. The purifiers were one of the few things still running after the plague.”

Now that the cable-car had lofted itself past the huddle of buildings which defined her neighbourhood, a much greater expanse of Chasm City was coming slowly into view. It was strange to think that this twisted forest of malformed structures had once been the most prosperous city in human history; the place from which—for nearly two centuries—a welter of artistic and scientific innovations had sprung. Now even the locals were admitting that the place had seen better days. With little in the way of irony they were calling it the City That Never Wakes Up, because so many thousands of its one-time rich were now frozen in cryocrypts, skipping centuries in the hope that this period was only an aberration in the city’s fortunes.

Chasm City’s border was the natural crater which hemmed the city, sixty kilometres from edge to edge. Within the crater the city was ring-shaped, encircling the central maw of the chasm itself. The city sheltered under eighteen domes which spanned the crater wall and reached inwards to the chasm’s rim. Linked at their edges, supported here and there by reinforcing towers, the domes resembled sagging drapery covering the furniture of the recently deceased. In local parlance it was the Mosquito Net, though there were at least a dozen other names, in as many languages. The domes were vital to the city’s existence. Yellowstone’s atmosphere—a cold, chaotic mix of nitrogen and methane, spiced with long-chain hydrocarbons—would have been instantly deadly. Fortunately the crater sheltered the city from the worst of the winds and liquid methane flash-floods, and the broth of hot gases belching from the chasm itself could be cracked for breathable air with relatively cheap and rugged atmospheric processing technology. There were a few other settlements elsewhere on Yellowstone, much smaller than Chasm City, and they all had to go to much more trouble to keep their biospheres running.

Sometimes, in her early days on Yellowstone, Khouri had asked a few of the locals why anyone had ever bothered settling the planet in the first place if it was so inhospitable. Sky’s Edge might have its wars, but at least you could live there without domes and atmosphere-cracking systems. She had quickly learned not to expect anything resembling a consistent answer, if the question itself was not deemed an outsider’s impudence. Evidently, though, this much was clear: the chasm had drawn the first explorers and around them had accreted a permanent outpost, and then something like a frontier town. Lunatics, chancers and wild-eyed visionaries had come, driven by vague rumours of riches deep within the chasm. Some had gone home disillusioned. Some had died in the chasm’s hot, toxic depths. But a few had elected to stay because something about the nascent city’s perilous location actually appealed to them. Fast forward two hundred years and that huddle of structures had become… this.

The city stretched away infinitely in all directions, it seemed, a dense wood of gnarled interlaced buildings gradually lost in murk. The very oldest structures were still more or less intact: boxlike buildings which had retained their shapes during the plague because they had never contained any systems of self-repair or redesign. The modern structures, by contrast, now resembled odd, up-ended pieces of driftwood or wizened old trees in the last stages of rot. Once those skyscrapers had looked linear and symmetrical, until the plague made them grow madly, sprouting bulbous protrusions and tangled, leprous appendages. The buildings were all dead now, frozen into the shapes which seemed calculated to induce disquiet. Slums adhered to their sides, lower levels lost in a scaffolded maze of shanty towns and ramshackle bazaars, aglow with naked fires. Tiny figures were moving in the slums, walking or rickshawing to business along haphazard roadways laid down over old ruins. There were very few powered vehicles, and most of the contraptions Khouri saw looked like they were steam-driven.

The slums never reached more than ten levels up the sides of the buildings before collapsing under their own weight, so for two or three hundred further metres the buildings rose smoothly, relatively unscathed by plague transformations. There was no evidence of occupation in these mid-city levels. It was only near the very tops that human presence again re-asserted itself: tiered structures perched like cranes’ nests among the branches of the malformed buildings. These new additions were aglow with conspicuous wealth and power; bright apartment windows and neon advertisements. Searchlights swept down from the eaves, sometimes picking out the tiny forms of other cable-cars, navigating between districts. The cable-cars picked their way through a network of fine branches, lacing the buildings like synaptic threads. The locals had a name for this high-level city-within-a-city: the Canopy.

It was never quite daytime, Khouri had noticed. She could never feel fully awake in this place, not while the city seemed caught in an eternal twilight gloom.

“Case, when are they going to get around to scraping the muck off the Mosquito Net?”

Ng chuckled, a sound like gravel being stirred around in a bucket. “Never, probably. Unless someone figures a way of making some money out of it.”

“Now who’s bad-mouthing the city?”

“We can afford to. When we finish our business we can hightail it back to the carousels with all the other beautiful people.”

“In their boxes. Sorry, Case, count me out of that particular party. The excitement might kill me.” She could see the chasm now, since the car was skirting close to the sloping inner rim of the toroidal dome. The chasm was a deep gully in the bedrock, weathered sides curving lazily over from horizontal before plunging vertically down, veined by pipes which reached down into belching vapour, towards the atmospheric cracking station which supplied air and heat to the city. “Talking of which… being killed, I mean—what’s the deal with the weapon?”

“Think you can handle it?”

“You pay me to, I’ll handle it. But I’d like to know what I’m dealing with.”

“If you have a problem with that you’d better talk to Taraschi.”

“He specified this thing?”

“In excruciating detail.”

The car was over the Monument to the Eighty now. Khouri had never seen it from this precise angle. In truth, without the grandeur that it attained from street level, it looked weatherworn and sad. It was a tetrahedral pyramid, slatted so that it resembled a stepped temple, its lower levels barnacled in slums and reinforcements. Near the apex the marble cladding gave way to stained-glass windows, but portions of glass were shattered or sheeted-over in metal; damage one never saw from the street. This was to be the venue for the kill, apparently. It was unusual to know that in advance, unless it was another thing that Taraschi had actually had written into his contract. Contracting to be hunted by a Shadowplay assassin was only usually done if the client thought that they stood a good chance of evading the pursuer over the period determined by the contract. It was the way the virtually immortal rich kept ennui at bay, forcing their behaviour patterns out of predictable ruts—and ending up with something to brag about when they outlived the contract, as the majority did.

Khouri could date her involvement in Shadowplay very precisely; it was the day she was revived in Yellowstone orbit in a carousel run by an order of Ice Mendicants. Although there had been no Ice Mendicants around Sky’s Edge, she had heard stories of them and knew something of their function. They were a voluntary religious organisation who dedicated themselves to assisting those who had suffered some form of trauma while crossing interstellar space, such as the revival amnesia which was a common side-effect of reefersleep.

That in itself was very bad news. Perhaps her amnesia was so bad that it had erased years of her previous life, but Khouri had no recollection even of embarking on an interstellar journey. Her last memories were quite specific, in fact. She had been in a medical tent on the surface of Sky’s Edge, lying in a bed next to her husband Fazil. They had both been wounded in a firefight; injuries which—while not actually life-threatening—could best be treated in one of the orbital hospitals. An orderly had come around and prepped them both for a short immersion in reefersleep. They would be cooled, carried to orbit in a shuttle, then stacked up in a cryogenic holding facility until surgical slots were available in the hospital. The process might take months, but—as the orderly smilingly assured them—there was every chance that the war would still be going on when they were again fit for duty. Khouri and Fazil had trusted the orderly. They were both professional soldiers, after all.

Later, she was revived. But instead of coming around in the recuperation ward in the orbital hospital, Khouri was confronted by Ice Mendicants with Yellowstone accents. No, they explained, she was not amnesiac. Nor had she suffered any kind of injury in the reefersleep process. It was considerably worse than that.

There had been what the lead Mendicant chose to call a clerical error. It had happened around Sky’s Edge, after the cryogenic holding facility was hit by a missile. Khouri and Fazil had been among the lucky few not to have been killed by the missile, but the attack had still wiped all the data records in the facility. The locals had done their best to identify the frozen, but inevitably they had made mistakes. In Khouri’s case they had confused her with a Demarchist observer who had come to Sky’s Edge to study the war and who had been ready to return home to Yellowstone when she was caught in the same missile attack. Khouri had been fast-tracked for surgery and then placed aboard a starship scheduled for immediate departure. They had, unfortunately, not made the same mistake in Fazil’s case. While Khouri was asleep, winging her way across the light-years to Epsilon Eridani, Fazil was growing older, one year for every year that she flew. Of course, said the Mendicants, the error was discovered quickly—but by then it was much too late. There were no other ships due to follow that route for decades. And even if Khouri had immediately returned to Sky’s Edge (which was again impossible given the stated destinations of all the ships now parked around Yellowstone), the best part of forty years would have passed before she met Fazil again. And during most of that time Fazil could have no knowledge that she was coming home; nothing to prevent him picking up the pieces of his life, remarrying, having children and perhaps even grandchildren before she returned, a ghost from a part of his life he might have nearly consigned to oblivion by then. Assuming, of course, that he had not died as soon as he returned to combat.

Until that moment when the Ice Mendicant explained the situation to her, Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster… but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive. In one instant of cruel clarity, she understood that it was nothing less than the underlying structure of the universe, its physical laws, which had conspired to bring her to this moment of horror and loss. It would have been so much easier, infinitely easier, if she had known he was dead. Instead, there was this terrible gulf of separation, as much in time as in space. Her anger had become something sharp inside her, something that needed release if it was not going to kill her from within.

Later that day, when the man came to offer her a job as a contract assassin, she found it surprisingly easy to accept.

The man’s name was Tanner Mirabel; like her he was an ex-soldier from the Edge. He was a kind of talent scout for potential new assassins. His network taps had flagged her soldiering skills as soon as she was defrosted. Mirabel gave her a business contact: a Mr Ng, a prominent hermetic. An interview with Ng swiftly followed, then a spread of psychometric tests. Assassins, it turned out, had to be among the sanest, most analytic people on the planet. They had to know exactly when a kill would be legal—and when it would cross the sometimes blurred line into murder and send a company’s stocks crashing into the Mulch.

She passed all these tests with ease.

There were other kinds of tests, too. The contractees sometimes specified arcane modes of execution for themselves, while secretly assuring themselves that it would never actually come to that, because they imagined themselves clever and resourceful enough to outrun the assassin, even over weeks or months. But Khouri had to learn an easy familiarity with all manner of weapons, and that turned out to be a talent she had never even suspected in herself.

But she had never seen anything quite like the weapon which the tooth fairy had left.

It had only taken her a minute or so to figure out how the gun’s precision parts fitted together. Assembled, it had the form of a sniper’s rifle with a ridiculously fat perforated barrel. The clip contained a number of dartlike slugs: black swordfishes. Near the snout of each slug was a tiny biohazard symbol. It was that holographic death’s head which had set her wondering. She had never used toxins against a target before.

And what was this business with the Monument?

“Case,” Khouri said. “There’s one more thing…”

But then the car thumped down on the street, rickshaw drivers peddling furiously to avoid its descent. The toll burst onto her retina. She swiped her little finger through the credit slot, debiting a secure Canopy account which had no traceable links to Omega Point. That was vital, for any well-connected target could have easily traced the movements of their assassin via the ripples they left in the planet’s ragged financial systems. Screens and blinds had to be maintained.

Khouri pushed back the gullwing and hopped out. It was, as ever down here, softly raining. Interior rain, they called it. The smell of the Mulch assailed her instantly, a melange of sewage and sweat, cooking spices, ozone and smoke. The noise was just as inescapable. The constant trundling of rickshaws and the ringing of their bells and horns created a steady clamorous background, spiced with the cries of vendors and caged animals, bursts of song from singers and holograms voicing languages as diverse as Modern Norte and Canasian.

She pulled on a wide-brimmed fedora and closed the raised collar of her kneelength coat. The cable-car rose, grasping high for a dangling cable. It was soon lost among the other specks swinging through the brown depths of the roofed sky.

“Well, Case,” she said. “It’s your show now.”

His voice came through her skull now. “Trust me. I have a very good feeling about this one.”

The Captain’s advice had been excellent, Ilia Volyova thought. Killing Nagorny really had been her only viable option. And Nagorny had made the task that much easier by trying to kill her first, neatly obviating any moral considerations.

All that had happened some months of shiptime ago, and she had delayed attending to the job that now confronted her. But very shortly the ship would arrive around Yellowstone, and the others would emerge from reefersleep. When that happened, her options would be severely limited by the need to maintain the lie that Nagorny had died while sleeping, via some plausible malfunction of his reefersleep casket.

Now she had to steel herself to act. She sat silently in her lab and willed the strength to do what had to be done. Volyova’s quarters were not large, by the standards of the Nostalgia for Infinity: she could have allocated herself a mansion of rooms, had she wished. But what would have been the point? Her waking hours were consumed with weapon systems, and little else. When she slept, she dreamed of weapon systems. She allowed herself what few luxuries she had time to use—enjoy was too strong a term—and she had sufficient space for her needs. She had a bed and some furniture, utilitarian in design, even though the ship could have outfitted her with any style imaginable. She had a small annex which contained a laboratory, and it was only here that much in the way of attention to detail had been lavished. In the lab, she worked on putative cures for the Captain; modes of attack too speculative to share with the other crew, for fear of raising their hopes.

It was here, also, that she had kept Nagorny’s head since killing him.

It was frozen, of course; entombed within a space helmet of old design which had gone into emergency cryopreservation mode the instant it detected that its occupant was no longer living. Volyova had heard of helmets with razor-sharp irises built into the neck, which quickly and cleanly detached the head from the rest of the body in dire circumstances—but this had not been one of those.

He had died in an interesting manner, though.

Volyova had woken the Captain and explained the whole Nagorny situation to him: how the Gunnery Officer had appeared to have lost his mind as a consequence of her experiments. She had told the Captain about the problems she had encountered in linking Nagorny into the gunnery systems via the implants she had put in his head. She had even mentioned the fact that Nagorny had been somewhat troubled by recurrent nightmares, before getting quickly to the point that the recruit had attacked her and disappeared into the depths of the ship. The Captain had not drawn her on the subject of the nightmares, and at the time Volyova had been glad of that, for she was not entirely comfortable with discussing them herself, much less analysing their content.

Afterwards, however, she had found it much harder to ignore the subject. The problem lay in the fact that these were not simply random nightmares, however disturbing that might have been. No, from what she could gather, Nagorny’s nightmares had been highly repetitious and detailed. For the most part they had concerned an entity called Sun Stealer. Sun Stealer was Nagorny’s private tormentor, it seemed. It was not at all clear how Sun Stealer had manifested to Nagorny, but what was beyond doubt was the sense of overwhelming evil the apparition had brought. She had glimpsed something of this in sketches she had found in Nagorny’s quarters once: feverish pencil marks limning hideous birdlike creatures, skeletal and empty-socketed. If that was a glimpse into Nagorny’s madness, a glimpse was more than adequate. How were these phantasms related to the gunnery sessions? What unsuspected glitch in her neural interface was leaking current into the part of the mind which sparked terrors? With hindsight, it was obvious that she had pushed too hard, too fast. Equally, she had only been following Sajaki’s orders to bring the weaponry to a state of full readiness.

So Nagorny had snapped, escaping into the ship’s unmonitored warrens. The Captain’s recommendation—that she hunt down and kill the man—had tallied with her own instincts. But it had taken many days, Volyova deploying webs of sensor gear through as many corridors as she could manage, listening to her rats for any evidence of Nagorny’s whereabouts. It had begun to look hopeless. Nagorny would be still at large when the ship arrived in the Yellowstone system and the other crew were woken…

Then, however, Nagorny had made two mistakes: the final flourishes of his madness. The first mistake had been to break into her quarters and leave a message daubed in his own arterial blood on her wall. The message was very simple. She could have guessed in advance the two words Nagorny would choose to leave her:

Afterwards, on the edge of rationality, he had stolen her space helmet, leaving the rest of her suit. The break-in had drawn Volyova to her cabin, and while she had taken precautions, Nagorny had still managed to ambush her. He had relieved her of the gun she was carrying, and then frogmarched her down a long curving corridor to the nearest elevator shaft. Volyova had tried resisting, but Nagorny’s strength was that of the psychotic and his hold on her might as well have been steel. Still, she assumed a chance for escape would present itself as Nagorny took her to wherever he had in mind, once the elevator arrived.

But Nagorny had no intention of waiting for the elevator. With her gun, he forced the door, revealing the echoing depths of the shaft. With nothing in the way of ceremony—not even a goodbye—Nagorny pushed Volyova into the hole.

It was a dreadful mistake.

The shaft threaded the ship from top to bottom; she had kilometres to fall before she hit the bottom. And for a few almost heart-stopping moments, she had assumed that was exactly what would happen. She would drop until she hit—and whether it took a few seconds or the better part of a minute was of no consequence at all. The walls of the shaft were sheer and frictionless; there was no way to gain a purchase or arrest her fall in any way whatsoever.

She was going to die.

Then—with a detachment which later shocked her—part of her mind had re-examined the problem. She had seen herself, not falling through the ship, but stationary: floating in absolute rest with respect to the stars. What moved, instead, was the ship: rushing upwards around her. She was not accelerating at all now—and the only thing that made the ship accelerate was its thrust.

Which she could control from her bracelet.

Volyova had not had time to ponder the details. An idea had formed—exploded—in her mind, and she knew that either she executed the idea almost immediately or accepted her fate. She could stop her fall—her apparent fall—by ramping the ship’s thrust into reverse for however long it took to achieve the desired effect. Nominal thrust was one gee, which was why Nagorny had found it so easy to mistake the ship for something like a very tall building. She had fallen for perhaps ten seconds while her mind processed things. What was it to be, then? Ten second of reverse thrust at one gee? No—too conservative. She might not have enough shaft to fall through. Better to ramp up to ten gees for a second—she knew the engines were capable of that. The manoeuvre would not harm the other crew, safely cocooned in reefersleep. It would not harm her, either—she would just see the rushing walls of the shaft slow down rather violently.

Nagorny, though, was not so well protected.

It had not been easy—the rush of air had almost drowned out her voice as she screamed the appropriate instructions into the bracelet. Agonising moments had followed before the ship seemed to take any notice of her.

Then—dutifully—it had moved to her whim.

Later, she had found Nagorny. The ten gees of thrust, sustained for a second, would not ordinarily have been fatal. Volyova had, however, not whittled her speed down to zero in one go. She had achieved that through trial and error, and with each impulse Nagorny had been flung between ceiling and floor.

She had been hurt herself; the impacts with the side of the shaft as she fell had broken one leg, but that was healed now and the pain no more than a foggy memory. She remembered using the laser-curette to remove Nagorny’s head, knowing that she would need to open it to get at the dedicated implants buried in his brain. They were delicate, those implants, and because they had come into being through laborious processes of mediated molecular growth, she would not be best pleased if they had to be duplicated.

Now it was time to remove them.

She took the head out of the helmet, immersing it in a bath of liquid nitrogen. Then she pushed her hands into two pairs of gauntlets suspended above the workbench within a scaffold of pistons. Tiny, glistening medical instruments whirred into life and descended on the skull, ready to slice it open in pieces which would later lock back together with fiendish precision. Before reassembling the head, Volyova would insert dummy implants so that—if the head were ever examined—it would not seem as if she had removed anything from it. It would have to be re-attached to the body, too—but there was no need to worry herself too much over that. By the time the others found out what had happened to Nagorny—what she going to convince them had happened—they would not be in a hurry to examine him in any kind of detail. Sudjic might be a problem, of course—she and Nagorny had been lovers, until Nagorny went insane.

Like many others that remained before her, Ilia Volyova would cross that bridge when she came to it.

In the meantime, as she delved deep into Nagorny’s head for what was hers, she began to give the first thought to who was going to replace him.

Certainly no one now aboard the ship.

But perhaps around Yellowstone she would find a new recruit.

“Case, are we getting warm?”

The voice came back, blurred and trembly through the mass of the building above her. “So warm we’re incandescent, dear girl. Just hold on and make sure you don’t waste those toxin darts.”

“Yes, about those, Case, I—”

Khouri dived aside as three New Komuso trooped past, their heads enveloped in basketlike wicker helmets. Shakuhachi—bamboo flutes—cut the air ahead of them like majorettes’ staffs, dispersing a gang of capuchin monkeys into the shadows. “I mean,” she continued, “what if we take out a collateral?”

“It can’t happen,” Ng said. “The toxin’s keyed directly to Taraschi’s biochemistry. Hit anyone else on the planet and what they’ll have to show for it is a nasty puncture wound.”

“Even if I hit Taraschi’s clone?”

“You think you might?”

“Just a question.” It struck her that Case was unusually jumpy.

“Anyway, if Taraschi had a clone, and we killed him by mistake, that would be Taraschi’s problem, not ours. It’s all in the fine print. You should read it sometime.”

“When I’m gripped by existential boredom,” Khouri said, “I might try it.”

She stiffened, then, because all of a sudden it was different. Ng was silent, and in place of his voice was a clear pulsing tone. It was soft and evil, like the echolocation pulse of a predator. She had heard that tone a dozen times in the last six months, each time signifying her proximity to the target. It meant that Taraschi was no more than five hundred metres away. That fact, coupled with the onset of the pulse, strongly suggested that he was within the Monument itself.

The moves of the game were now public property. Taraschi would know it, for an identical device—implanted in a secure Canopy clinic—was generating similar pulses in his own head. Across Chasm City, the various media networks which concentrated on Shadowplay would even now be sending their field teams across town to the location of the kill. A lucky few would already be in the vicinity.

The tone hastened as they walked further under the Monument’s concourse, but not quickly. Taraschi must have been overhead—actually in the Monument—so that the relative distance between them was not changing swiftly.

The concourse beneath was cracked by land subsidence, lying perilously close to the chasm. Originally there had been an underground mall complex beneath the structure, but the Mulch had infiltrated it. The lowest levels were flooded, sunken walkways emerging from water the colour of caramel. The tetrahedron of the Monument was elevated well above the concourse and the flooded plaza by a smaller inverted pyramid abutted deep into rock foundations. There was only one entrance to the structure. That meant that Taraschi was as good as dead already, if she caught him aside. But to reach it she had to cross a bridge across the plaza, and her approach would be obvious to the man inside. She wondered what kind of primal thoughts were slipping through his mind now. In her dreams, she had often found herself in some half-deserted city being chased by some implacable hunter, but Taraschi was experiencing that terror in reality. She remembered that in those dreams the hunter never had to move quickly. That was part of its unpleasantness. She would run desperately, as if through thickened air with weighted-down legs, and the hunter would move with a slowness born of great patience and wisdom.

The pulsing quickened as she crossed the bridge, the ground beneath her feet wet and gritty. Occasionally the pulsing would slow and requicken, evidence that Taraschi was moving around in the structure. But there was no real escape for him now. He could arrange to be met on the roof of the Monument, perhaps, but in utilising aerial transport he would forfeit the terms of the contract. In the parlours of the Canopy, the shame of that might be less desirable than being killed.

She walked through into the atrium within the Monument’s supporting pyramid. It was dark inside and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. She slipped the toxin gun out of her coat and checked the exit in case Taraschi had planned to sneak out. His absence was unsurprising, the atrium almost empty, ransacked by looters. Rain drummed on metal. She looked up into a suspended cloud of rusted, damaged sculptures hung on copper cables from the ceiling. A few had fallen to the marbled terrazzo, metal birds’ wings stabbing into the ground with the impact. They were softly defined in dust, its whiteness like mortar between the primary feathers.

She looked towards the ceiling.

“Taraschi?” she called. “Can you hear me yet? I’m coming.”

She wondered, briefly, why the television people had not yet arrived. It was strange to be this close to the termination of the kill and not have them baying for blood around her, along with the usual impromptu crowd which they invariably drew.

He had not answered her. But she knew he was above the ceiling, somewhere. She walked across the atrium, towards the spiral staircase that led higher. She climbed quickly, then cast around for large objects she could budge, to obstruct Taraschi’s escape route. There were plenty of ruined exhibits and pieces of furniture. She began to assemble an obstructing pile atop the staircase. It would hinder Taraschi more than block his exit completely, but that was all she needed.

By the time it was half done she was sweating and her back was stiff. She took a moment to collect herself and take in her surroundings; the constant arpeggiating note in her head confirming that Taraschi was still nearby.

The upper part of the pyramid had been dedicated to individual shrines to the Eighty. These little memorials were set in recesses within the impressive black marble walls which rose partway to the dizzyingly high ceilings, framed by pillars adorned with suggestively posed caryatids. The walls, pierced by corniced archways, blocked her view for a few tens of metres in any direction. The three triangular sides of the ceiling had been punctured in places; sepia shafts of light entering the chamber. Rain fell in steady streamers from the larger rents. Khouri saw that many of the recesses were empty; evidently, those shrines had either been looted or the families of those members of the Eighty had decided to remove their memorials to some safer place. Perhaps half remained. Of those, roughly two-thirds had been arranged in a similar manner—images, biographies and keepsakes of the dead, placed in a standard fashion. Other exhibits were more elaborate. There were holograms or statues, even, in one or two grisly cases, the embalmed corpses of the actual people being celebrated, doubtless subjected to some skilled taxidermy to offset the worst damage wrought by the procedure which had killed them.

She left the well-tended shrines alone, plundering only those that were obviously derelict, even then uncomfortable with the act of vandalism. The busts were useful—just large enough to move if she got both fingers under the base. Rather than placing them in an ordered pile at the top of the stairs, she just let them drop. Most of them had had their jewelled eyes gouged out already. The full-size statues were much harder to move, and she managed to shift only one of them.

Soon her barricade was done. For the most part it was a rubble-like pile of toppled heads, dignified faces unembarrassed by what she had done to them. The pile was surrounded by smaller, foot-tangling bric-a-brac: vases, Bibles and loyal servitors. Even if Taraschi began to dismantle the pile to reach the stairs, she was sure she would hear him doing it and be able to reach the site long before he was finished. It might even be good to kill him on that pile of heads, since it did slightly resemble Golgotha.

All this time she had been listening to his ponderous footsteps somewhere behind the black dividing walls.

“Taraschi,” she called. “Make this easy for yourself. There’s no escape from here.”

His reply sounded remarkably strong and confident. “You’re so wrong, Ana. The escape’s why we’re here.”

Shit. He was not supposed to know her name.

“Escape is death, right?”

He sounded amused. “Something like that.”

It was not the first time she had heard such eleventh-hour bravado. She rather admired them for it. “You want me to come find you, is that it?”

“Now that we’ve come this far, why not?”

“I understand. You want your money’s worth. A contract with as many clauses in it as this one couldn’t have come cheap.”

“Clauses?”—the pulse in her head shifting minutely, rhapsodically.

“This weapon. The fact that we’re alone.”

“Ah,” Taraschi said. “Yes. That did cost. But I wanted this to be a personal matter. When it came to finalities.”

Khouri was getting edgy. She had never had an actual conversation with one of her targets. Usually it would have been impossible, in the roaring bloodlust of the crowd she generally attracted. Readying the toxin gun, she began to walk slowly down the aisle. “Why the privacy clause?” she asked, unable to sever the contact.

“Dignity. I may have played this game, but I didn’t have to dishonour myself in the process.”

“You’re very close,” Khouri said.

“Yes, very close.”

“And you’re not frightened?”

“Naturally. But of living, not dying. It’s taken me months to reach this state.” His footsteps stopped. “What do you think of this place, Ana?”

“I think it needs a bit of attention.”

“It was well chosen, you must admit.”

She turned the aisle. Her target was standing next to one of the shrines, looking preternaturally calm, almost calmer than one of the statues which watched the encounter. The interior rain had darkened the burgundy fabric of his Canopy finery, his hair was plastered unglamorously to his forehead. In person he looked younger than any of her previous kills, which meant he was either genuinely younger or rich enough to afford the best longevity therapies. Somehow she knew it was the former.

“You do remember why we’re here?” he asked.

“I do, but I’m not sure I like it.”

“Do it anyway.”

One of the shafts of light falling from the ceiling shifted magically onto him. It was only an instant, but long enough for her to raise the toxin gun.

She fired.

“You did well,” Taraschi said, no pain showing in his voice. He reached out with one hand to steady himself against the wall. The other touched the swordfish protruding from his chest and prised it free, as if picking a thistle from his clothes. The pointed husk dropped to the floor, serum glistening from the end. Khouri raised the toxin gun again, but Taraschi warded her off with a blood-smeared palm. “Don’t overdo it,” he said. “One should be sufficient.”

Khouri felt nauseous.

“Shouldn’t you be dead?”

“Not for a little while. Months, to be precise. The toxin is very slow-acting. Plenty of time to think it over.”

“Think what over?”

Taraschi raked his wet hair and wiped dust and blood from his hands onto the shins of his trousers.

“Whether I follow her.”

The pulsing stopped and the sudden absence of it was enough to make Khouri dizzy. She fell in a half-faint to the floor. The contract was over, she grasped. She had won—again. But Taraschi was still alive.

“This was my mother,” Taraschi said, gesturing at the nearest shrine. It was one of the few that were well-tended. There was no dust at all on the woman’s alabaster bust, as if Taraschi had cleaned it himself just before their meeting. Her skin was uncorrupted and her jewelled eyes were still present, aristocratic features unmarred by dent or blemish. “Nadine Weng-da Silva Taraschi.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died, of course, in the process of being scanned. The destructive mapping was so swift that half her brain was still functioning normally while the other half was tom apart.”

“I’m sorry—even though I know she volunteered for it.”

“Don’t be. She was actually one of the lucky ones. Do you know the story, Ana?”

“I’m not from around here.”

“No; that was what I heard—that you were a soldier once, and that something terrible happened to you. Well, let me tell you this much. The scannings were all successful. The problem lay in the software which was supposed to execute the scanned information; to allow the alphas to evolve forward in time and experience awareness, emotion, memory—everything that makes us human. It worked well enough until the last of the Eighty had been scanned, a year after the first. But then strange pathologies began to emerge amongst the early volunteers. They crashed irrecoverably, or locked themselves in infinite loops.”

“You said she was lucky?”

“A few of the Eighty are still running,” Taraschi said. “They’ve managed to keep doing so for a century and a half. Even the plague didn’t hurt them—they’d already migrated to secure computers in what we now call the Rust Belt.” He paused. “But they’ve been out of direct contact with the real world for some time now—evolving themselves in increasingly elaborate simulated environments.”

“And your mother?”

“Suggested I join her. Scanning technology’s better now; it doesn’t even have to kill you.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“It wouldn’t be me, would it? Just a copy—and my mother would know it. Whereas now…” He fingered the tiny wound again. “Whereas now, I will definitely die in the real world, and the copy will be all that’s left of me. There’s time enough for me to be scanned before the toxin leads to any measurable deterioration in my neural structure.”

“Couldn’t you just have injected it?”

Taraschi smiled. “That would have been too clinical. I am killing myself, after all—nothing anyone should take lightly. By involving you, I prolonged the decision and introduced an element of chance. I might decide life was preferable and resist you, and yet you might still win.”

“Russian roulette would have been cheaper.”

“Too quick, too random, and not nearly so stylish.” He stepped towards her and—before she could draw back—reached for her hand and shook it, for all the world like someone concluding an auspicious business deal. “Thank you, Ana.”

“Thank you?”

Without answering he walked past her, towards noise. The sacrificial mound of heads was tumbling, footsteps clattering on the staircase. A cobalt vase shattered as the barricade gave way. Khouri heard the whisper of floatcams, but when the people emerged, they had none of the faces she expected. They were respectably dressed without being ostentatious, old-money Canopy. Three older men wore ponchos and fedoras and tortoiseshell floatcam glasses, the cameras hovering above them like attendant familiars. Two bronze palanquins rose behind them, one small enough to have held a child. A man with a plum matador’s jacket carried a tiny hand-held camera. Two teenage girls carried umbrellas painted with watercolour cranes and Chinese pictograms. Between the girls was an older woman, her face so colourless she might as well have been a lifesize origami toy, infolded, white and easily crushed. She fell to her knees in front of Taraschi, weeping. Khouri had never seen the woman before, but she knew intuitively that this was Taraschi’s wife and that the little toxin-filled swordfish had robbed her of him.

She looked at Khouri, her eyes limpid smoke-grey. Her voice, when she spoke, was bleached of anger. “I hope they paid you well.”

“I just did my job,” Khouri said, but she hardly managed to force the words out. The people were helping Taraschi towards the stairs. She watched them descend out of sight, the wife turning to direct one last reproachful glance at Khouri. She heard the reverberation of their retreat and the sound of footsteps across the terrazzo. Minutes passed, and then she knew that she was completely alone.

Until something moved behind her. Khouri spun round, automatically bringing the toxin gun to bear, another dart in the chamber.

A palanquin emerged from between two shrines.

“Case?” She lowered the gun—it was of little use anyway, with the toxin keyed so precisely to Taraschi’s biochemistry.

But this was not Case’s palanquin: it was unmarked, unornamented black. And now it opened—she had never seen a palanquin do that—divulging a man who stepped fearlessly towards her. He wore a plum matador’s jacket; not the hermetic clothing she might have expected from someone who feared the plague. In one hand he carried a fashion accessory: a tiny camera.

“Case has been taken care of,” the man said. “He’s of no concern to you from now on, Khouri.”

“Who are you—someone connected to Taraschi?”

“No—I just came along to see if you were as efficient as your reputation implied.” The man spoke with a soft accent which was not local—not from this system, nor the Edge. “And, I’m afraid, you were. Which means—as of now—you’re working for the same employer as myself.”

She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness. “And who would that be?”

“The Mademoiselle,” the man said.

“I’ve never heard of her.”

He raised the lensed end of the little camera. It split open like a particularly ingenious Faberge egg, hundreds of elegant jade fragments sliding to new positions. Suddenly she was looking down the barrel of a gun.

“No, but she’s heard of you.”