Revelation Space

TWENTY-FOUR

Sylveste did not have long to wait. When Volyova arrived, she was accompanied by Khouri; the woman who had saved Volyova’s life on the surface. If Volyova was something of a rogue variable in his plans then Khouri was worse, because he had not so far ascertained where her loyalties lay; whether to Volyova or Sajaki, or somewhere else entirely. But for now he suppressed his concerns, sharing Calvin’s urgency.

“What do you mean, it’s killing him faster?”

“I mean just that,” Calvin made him say, before either of the two women had drawn breath. “We administered it according to your instructions. But it’s as if we’ve given the plague a massive shot in the arm. It’s spreading faster than ever. If I didn’t know better I’d say your retrovirus has actually helped it.”

“Damn,” Volyova said. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a wearying few hours.”

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

“I tested the counteragent against small samples of isolated plague,” she said defensively. “It worked against them. I couldn’t promise it would work against the main body of the plague so effectively… but at the very least, in the worst possible scenario… I assumed it would have some effect, however limited. The plague has to expend some of its resources against the counteragent; there’s no getting around that. It has to direct some of the energy it would ordinarily use for expansion into resisting the agent. I hoped it would kill it—subvert it, I mean, into a form we could manipulate—but even when I was being pessimistic, I assumed the plague would catch a cold; that it would slow down perceptibly.”

“That’s not what we’re seeing,” Calvin said.

“But she has a point,” Khouri said, and Sylveste felt himself glare at her, as if questioning the very reason for her existence.

“What are you seeing?” Volyova asked. “You understand, I’m more than a little curious.”

“We’ve stopped administering,” Calvin said. “So for now the growth has stabilised. But when we gave the Captain the counteragent, he spread faster. It was as if he were incorporating the mass of the counteragent into his matrix more rapidly than he could convert the substrate of the ship.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Volyova said. “The ship doesn’t even resist the plague. For him to spread faster… that would mean that the counteragent was giving itself over to him; converting itself faster than the plague could subvert it.”

“Like frontline soldiers defecting before they’ve even heard any propaganda,” Khouri said.

“Exactly like that,” Volyova said, and for the first time, Sylveste sensed something between the two women, something suspiciously like mutual respect. “But that just isn’t possible. For that to happen, the plague would have to have hijacked the replication routines almost without trying—almost as if they were willingly hijacked. I’m telling you, it isn’t possible.”

“Well, try it for yourself.”

“No thanks. It isn’t that I don’t believe you, but you have to see it from my side. From my point of view—and I engineered the damn thing—it doesn’t make much sense.”

“There is something,” Calvin said.

“What?”

“Could sabotage have done this? I told you already that we think someone doesn’t want this operation to succeed. You know who I’m talking about.” He was being circumspect now, unwilling to say too much in Khouri’s presence, or within range of Sajaki’s listening systems. “Could your counteragent have been tampered with?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said. Sylveste had not administered all of the vial Volyova had given him, so she was able to run a check on the molecular structure of that sample and the other batches which remained in her laboratory, using the same tools she had employed on Khouri’s splinter. When she compared the sample against her lab batches, they were identical, within the normal boundaries of quantum accuracy. The sample Calvin had given to the Captain was exactly as she had intended it to be, down to the humblest chemical bond linking the least significant atoms in the smallest and least essential molecular component…

Volyova checked the counteragent’s structure against her records, and observed that it had not deviated from the blueprint she had held in her head for subjective years. It was exactly as she had planned it. Her virus had not been tampered with; its teeth had not been pulled. So much for Calvin’s sabotage theory. She felt a surge of relief—she had not really wanted to believe that Sajaki was actually hampering the whole process; the notion that he might be consciously prolonging the Captain’s illness was too hideous, and she was glad when examination of the counteragent gave her a justification for flushing the idea of sabotage from her mind. She still had misgivings about Sajaki, of course; but there was at least no evidence that he had become something as monstrous as that.

But there was another possibility.

Volyova left the lab and returned to the Captain, cursing herself for not thinking of this earlier and sparing herself the runaround. Sylveste asked what she was doing now. She looked at him for long moments before speaking. Yes, there was a connection with Lascaille’s Shroud; she was sure of that. Was it purely revenge on the Mademoiselle’s part—in payment for his cowardice, or treachery, or whatever it was that had almost killed her in the Shroud boundary? Or did it go beyond that, connected in some way with the aliens themselves; the ancient, protective minds Lascaille had touched during his own flyby? Was it human spite they were dealing with here, or some imperative as alien and old as the Shrouders themselves? There was much she needed to discuss with Sylveste—but it would have to be in the sanctuary of the spider-room.

“I need another sample,” she said. “From the infection boundary, where you administered the counteragent.” And she fished out her laser-curette, made the deft light-guided incisions and popped the sample—it felt like a metallic scab—into a waiting autoclave.

“What about the counteragent? Was it altered?”

“It hadn’t been touched,” she said. Then she turned down the curette’s yield and used it to scratch in tiny letters a quick message in the ship’s fabric, just ahead of the Captain’s encroachment. Long before Sajaki stood a chance of reading it, the Captain would have flowed over it like an erasing tide.

“What are you doing?” Sylveste said.

But before the man could ask anything else, she was gone.

“You were right,” Volyova said, when they were safely beyond the hull of the Nostalgia for Infinity, perched on its outer carapace like some adventurous steel parasite. “It was sabotage. But not in the way I first imagined.”

“What do you mean?” said Sylveste, who by now was grudgingly impressed by the existence of the spider-room. “I thought you cross-referenced the retrovirus against your earlier batches, those which worked against small samples of the plague.”

“I did, and—as I said—there was no difference. Which only left one possibility.”

Silence hung in the air. Finally, it was Pascale Sylveste who broke it. “He—it—must have been inoculated. That’s what must have happened, isn’t it? Someone must have stolen a batch of your retrovirus and denatured it—removed its lethality, its urge to replicate—and then shown it to the Melding Plague.”

“It’s the only thing which would explain it,” Volyova said.

Khouri said, “You think Sajaki did it, don’t you?” She was talking to Sylveste.

He nodded. “Calvin had as good as predicted that Sajaki would try and ruin the operation.”

“I don’t follow,” Khouri said. “You’re talking about the Captain being inoculated—isn’t that for the better?”

“Not in this case—and it wasn’t the Captain who was inoculated, really, but the plague resident in him.” It was Volyova speaking now. “We’ve always known that the Melding Plague is hyperadaptive. That’s always been the problem—every molecular weapon we throw at it ends up being co-opted, smothered and reprocessed into the plague’s own all-consuming offensive. But this time I hoped we’d steal an advantage. The retrovirus was extraordinarily potent—there was a chance it could outmanoeuvre the plague’s normal corruption pathways. But what happened was that the plague got a sneak look at the enemy before it ever encountered it in its active form. It got a chance to dismantle and know the counteragent before it ever posed a threat to it. And by the time Calvin administered it, the plague already knew all its tricks. It had worked out a way to disarm the virus and persuade it to join the plague without even expending any energy in the process. So the Captain grew faster.”

“Who could have done this?” Khouri asked. “I thought you were the only person on this ship who could do something like that.”

Sylveste nodded. “As much as I still think Sajaki’s trying to sabotage the operation… this doesn’t look like it could be his handiwork.”

“I agree,” Volyova said. “Sajaki just doesn’t have the expertise to have done this.”

“What about the other man?” Pascale asked. “The chimeric.”

“Hegazi?” Volyova shook her head. “You can ignore him. He might become a problem if any of us ever move against the Triumvirate, but this isn’t within his capabilities any more than Sajaki’s. No; the way I see it, there are only three people on this ship who could have done it, and I’m one of them.”

“Who are the other two?” Sylveste asked.

“Calvin is one of them,” she said. “Which rather removes him from suspicion as well.”

“And the other?”

“That’s the—problematic part,” she said. “The only other person who could do this to a cybervirus is the one we’ve been trying to heal all this time.”

“The Captain?” Sylveste said.

“He could have done it—from a theoretical standpoint, I mean.” Volyova clucked. “Were he not already dead.”

Khouri wondered how Sylveste would react to that, but he seemed unimpressed. “It doesn’t matter who it was—if it wasn’t Sajaki himself, it was someone acting for him.” Now he addressed Volyova. “I take it this convinces you.”

She graced him with a nod. “Regrettably, yes. What does it mean to you and Calvin?”

“Mean to us?” Sylveste seemed surprised by the question. “It means absolutely nothing. I never promised we could heal the Captain in the first place. I told Sajaki I considered the task impossible, and I wasn’t exaggerating. Calvin agreed with me as well. In all honesty, I’m not even sure Sajaki had to sabotage the operation. Even if your retrovirus hadn’t been denatured, I doubt that it would have given the plague much trouble. So what has changed? Calvin and I will continue with the pretence of healing the Captain, and at some point it will be clear that we can’t succeed. We won’t let Sajaki know that we’re aware of his sabotage. We don’t want a confrontation with the man—especially not now, with the attack against Cerberus about to happen.” Sylveste smiled placidly. “And I don’t think Sajaki will be particularly disappointed to hear that our efforts have been in vain.”

“You’re saying that nothing changes, is that it?” Khouri looked around at the others for support, but their expressions were inscrutable. “I don’t believe this.”

“The Captain doesn’t matter to him,” said Pascale Sylveste. “Isn’t that obvious to you? He’s only doing this to keep his side of the bargain with Sajaki. Cerberus is all that matters to him. It’s been like a magnet to Dan.” She was talking as if her husband were somewhere else entirely.

“Yes,” Volyova said. “Well, I’m glad you raised that subject, because there’s something Khouri and I need to discuss with all of you. It concerns Cerberus.”

Sylveste looked scornful. “What do you know about Cerberus?”

“Too much,” Khouri said. “Too damned much.”

She began where it made sense to begin, at the beginning, with her revival on Yellowstone, her work as an assassin in Shadowplay, and how the Mademoiselle had recruited her and made it very difficult for her not to accept the woman’s offer.

“Who was she?” Sylveste asked, when the preliminaries had been dispensed with. “And what did she want you to do?”

“We’ll come to that,” Volyova said. “Just be patient.”

Khouri continued; repeating to Sylveste the story that she had not long ago told Volyova, though it felt that an eternity spaced the two recitations. How she had infiltrated the ship, and how—simultaneously—she had been tricked by Volyova, who needed a new Gunnery Officer, irrespective of whether anyone volunteered for that role. How the Mademoiselle had been in her head all this time, revealing only as much information as Khouri needed at any moment. How Volyova had interfaced Khouri into the gunnery, and how the Mademoiselle had detected something lurking in the gunnery, something—a software entity—that called itself Sun Stealer.

Pascale looked at Sylveste. “That name,” she said. “It… means something. I’ve heard it before; I’d swear it. Don’t you remember?”

Sylveste looked at her, but said nothing.

“This thing,” Khouri said. “Whatever it was—it had already tried to get out of the gunnery into the head of the last poor sucker Volyova recruited. Drove him insane.”

“I don’t see where this concerns me,” Sylveste said.

So Khouri told him. “The Mademoiselle worked out that this thing had to have entered the gunnery at a certain time.”

“Very good; continue.”

“Which was when you were last aboard this ship.”

She had wondered what it would take to shut Sylveste up, or at the very least wipe the look of smug superiority off his face. Now she knew, and realised that in the midst of everything, this achievement had been one of life’s small and unexpected pleasures. Breaking the spell, with admirable self-control, Sylveste said: “What does that mean?”

“It means what you think it means, but don’t want to consider.” The words had tumbled out of her mouth. “Whatever it was, you brought it with you.”

“Some kind of neural parasite,” Volyova said, taking the burden of explication from Khouri. “It came aboard with you and then hopped into the ship. It could have ridden your implants, or perhaps your mind itself, independent of any hardware.”

“This is ridiculous.” But something in his tone of voice failed to convince.

“If you weren’t aware of it,” Volyova said, “then you could have been carrying it around for years. Maybe even since you came back.”

“Came back from where?”

“Lascaille’s Shroud,” Khouri said, and, for the second time, her words seemed to lash against Sylveste like squalls of wintery rain. “We checked the chronology; it fits. Whatever it was, it got into you around the Shroud, and stayed with you until you came here. Maybe it didn’t even leave you; just split off part of itself into the ship, hedging its bets.”

Sylveste stood up, motioning for his wife to do likewise. “I’m not staying to hear any more of this madness.”

“I think you should,” Khouri said. “We still haven’t told you about the Mademoiselle, or what she wanted me to do.”

He just looked at her, poised on the verge of leaving, his face a study in disgust. Then—perhaps a minute later—he returned to his seat and waited for her to continue.