Revelation Space

SIX

“I expect,” Volyova said, “that you’re one of those otherwise rational people who pride themselves on not believing in ghosts.”

Khouri looked at her, frowning slightly. Volyova had known from the outset that the woman was no fool, but it was still interesting to see how she reacted to the question.

“Ghosts, Triumvir? You can’t be serious.”

“One thing you’ll quickly learn about me,” Volyova said, “is that I’m very seldom anything other than completely serious.” And then she indicated the door at which they had arrived, set unobtrusively into one rusty-red interior wall of the ship. The door was of heavy construction, a stylised drawing of a spider discernible through layers of corrosion and staining. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

Khouri did as she was told without hesitation. Volyova was satisfied. In the three weeks since the woman had been snared—or recruited, if one wanted to be polite about it—Volyova had administered a complex regimen of loyalty-altering therapies. The treatment was almost complete, apart from the top-up doses which would continue indefinitely. Soon the woman’s loyalty would be so strongly instilled that it would transcend mere obedience and become an animating compulsion, a principle to which she could no more fail to adhere than a fish could choose to stop breathing water. Taken to an extreme which Volyova hoped would prove unnecessary, Khouri could be made not only to desire to do the crew’s will, but to love them for giving her the chance. But Volyova would relent before she programmed the woman that deeply. After her less than fruitful experiences with Nagorny, she was wary of creating another unquestioning guinea pig. It would not displease her if Khouri retained a trace of resentment.

Volyova did as she had promised, following Khouri into the door. The recruit had halted a few metres beyond the threshold, realising that there was no way to go further.

Volyova sealed the great iron iris of a door behind them.

“Where are we, Triumvir?”

“In a little private retreat of my own,” Volyova said. She spoke into her bracelet and made a light come on, but the interior remained shadowy. The room was shaped like a fat torpedo, twice as long as it was wide. The interior was sumptuously outfitted, with four scarlet-cushioned seats installed on the floor, next to each other, and space for another two behind, though nothing remained but their anchor-points. Where they were not upholstered in cushioned velvet, the room’s brass-ribbed walls were curved and glossily dark, as if made of obsidian or black marble. There was a console of black ebony, attached to the armrest of the front seat in which Volyova now sat. She folded down the console, familiarising herself with the inset dials and controls, all of which were tooled in brass or copper, with elaborately inscribed labels, offset by flowered curlicues of differently inlaid woods and ivories. Not that it took much familiarising, since she visited the spider-room with reasonable regularity, but she enjoyed the tactile pleasure of stroking her fingertips across the board.

“I suggest you sit down,” she said. “We’re about to move.”

Khouri obeyed, sitting next to Volyova, who threw a number of ivory-handled switches, watching some of the dials on the panel light up with roseate glows, their needles quivering as power entered the spider-room’s circuits. She extracted a certain sadistic pleasure in observing Khouri’s disorientation, for the woman clearly had no idea where she was in the ship, nor what was about to happen. There were clunking sounds, and a sudden shifting, as if the room were a lifeboat which had just come adrift from a mother vessel.

“We’re moving,” Khouri diagnosed. “What is this—some kind of luxury elevator for the Triumvirate?”

“Nothing so decadent. We’re in an old shaft which leads to the outer hull.”

“You need a room just to take you to the hull?” Some of Khouri’s scornful disregard for the niceties of Ultra life was coming to the fore again. Volyova liked that, perversely. It convinced her that the loyalty therapies had not destroyed the woman’s personality, only redirected it.

“We’re not just going to the hull,” Volyova said. “Otherwise we’d walk.”

The motion was smooth now, but there were still occasional clunks as airlocks and traction systems assisted their passage. The shaft walls remained utterly black, but—Volyova knew—all that was about to change. Meanwhile, she watched Khouri, trying to guess whether the woman was scared or merely curious. If she had sense she would have realised by now that Volyova had invested too much time in her simply to kill her—but on the other hand, the woman’s military training on Sky’s Edge must have taught her to take absolutely nothing for granted.

Her appearance had changed considerably since her recruitment, but little of that was due to the therapies. Her hair had always been short, but now it was absent entirely. Only up close was the peachy fuzz of regrowth visible. Her skull was quilted with fine, salmon-coloured scars. Those were the incision marks where Volyova had opened her head in order to emplace the implants which had formerly resided in Boris Nagorny.

There had been other surgical procedures, too. Khouri’s body was peppered with shrapnel from her soldiering days, in addition to the almost invisibly healed scars of beam-weapon or projectile impact points. Some of the shrapnel shards lay deep—too deep, it seemed, for the Sky’s Edge medics to retrieve. And for the most part they would have caused her no harm, for they were biologically-inert composites not situated close to any vital organs. But the medics had been sloppy, too. Near the surface, dotted under Khouri’s skin, Volyova found a few shards they really should have removed. She did it for them, examining each in turn before placing it in her lab. All but one of the shards would have caused no problems to her systems; non-metallic composites which could not interfere with the sensitive induction fields of the gunnery’s interface machinery. But she catalogued and stored them anyway. The metal shard she frowned at, cursing the medics’ procedures, and then laid it next to the rest.

That had been messy work, but not nearly as bad as the neural work. For centuries, the commonest forms of implant had either been grown in situ or were designed to self-insert painlessly via existing orifices, but such procedures could not be applied to the unique and delicate gunnery interface implants. The only way to get them in or out was with a bone-saw, scalpel and a lot of mopping up afterwards. It had been doubly awkward because of the routine implants already resting in Khouri’s skull, but after giving them a cursory examination Volyova had seen no reason to remove them. Had she done so, she would sooner or later have had to re-implant very similar devices just so Khouri could function normally beyond the gunnery. The implants had grafted well, and within a day—with Khouri unconscious—Volyova had placed her in the gunnery seat and verified that the ship was able to talk to her implants and vice versa. Further testing had to wait until the loyalty therapies were complete. That would mainly be done while the rest of the crew were asleep.

Caution: that was Volyova’s current watchword. It was incaution that had resulted in the whole unpleasantness with Nagorny.

She would not make that mistake again.

“Why do I get the idea this is some kind of test?” Khouri said.

“It isn’t. It’s just—” Volyova waved a hand dismissively. “Indulge me, will you? It’s not much to ask.”

“How do I oblige—by claiming to see ghosts?”

“Not by seeing them, Khouri, no. By hearing them.”

A light was visible now, beyond the black walls of the moving room. Of course, the walls were nothing but glass, and until that moment they had been surrounded only by the unlit metal of the shaft in which the room rested. But now illumination was shining from the shaft’s approaching end. The rest of the short journey took place in silence. The room pushed itself towards the light, until the chill blue luminance was flooding in from all angles. Then the room pushed itself beyond the hull.

Khouri upped from her seat and went to the glass, edging towards it with trepidation. The glass was, of course, hyperdiamond, and there was no danger that it would shatter or that Khouri would stumble and plunge through it. But it looked ridiculously thin and brittle, and the human mind was able to take only so many things on trust. Looking laterally, she would have seen the articulated spider-legs, eight of them, anchoring the room to the exterior hull of the ship. She would have understood why Volyova called this place the spider-room.

“I don’t know who or what built it,” Volyova said. “My guess is that they installed it when the ship itself was constructed, or when it was due to change hands, assuming anyone could ever afford to buy it. I think this room was a very elaborate ploy for impressing potential clients—hence the general level of luxury.”

“Someone used it to make a sales pitch?”

“It makes a kind of sense—assuming one has any need in the first place to actually be outside a vessel like this. If the ship’s under thrust, then any observation pod sent outside also has to match that level of thrust, or else it gets left behind. No problem if that pod’s just a camera system, but as soon as you put people aboard it it gets a lot more complicated; someone actually has to fly the damned thing, or at the very least know how to program the autopilot to do what you want. The spider-room avoids that difficulty by physically attaching itself to the ship. It’s child’s play to operate; just like crawling around on all-eights.”

“What happens if…”

“It loses its grip? Well, it’s never happened—even if it did, the room has various magnetic and hull-piercing grapples it can deploy; and even if those failed—which they wouldn’t, I assure you—the room can propel itself independently; certainly for long enough to catch up with the ship. And even if that failed…” Volyova paused. “Well, if that failed, I’d consider having a word with my deity-of-choice.”

Although Volyova had never taken the room more than a few hundred metres from its exit point on the hull, it would have been possible to crawl all around the ship. Not necessarily wise, however, for at relativistic speed the ship pushed through a blizzard of radiation which was normally screened by the hull insulation. The spider-room’s thin walls only shielded a fraction of the flux, lending the whole exercise of being outside an odd and hazardous glamour.

The spider-room was her little secret; it was absent from the major blueprints, and to the best of her knowledge none of the others knew anything about it at all. In an ideal world, she would have kept it that way, but the problems with the gunnery had forced her into some necessary indiscretions. Even given the state of the ship’s decay, Sajaki’s network of surveillance devices was extensive, leaving the spider-room as one of the few places where Volyova could guarantee absolute privacy when she needed to discuss something sensitive with one of her recruits; something that she did not want the other Triumvirs to know about. She had been forced to reveal the spider-room to Nagorny so that she could talk with him frankly about the Sun Stealer problem, and for months—as his condition deteriorated—she had regretted that decision, always fearful that he would reveal the room’s existence to Sajaki. But she need not have worried. By the end, Nagorny had been far too occupied with his nightmares to indulge in any subtleties of shipboard politick. Now he had taken the secret to his grave and for the time being Volyova had been able to sleep easy, safe in the knowledge that her sanctuary was not about to be betrayed. Perhaps what she was doing now was an error she would later regret—she had certainly sworn to herself not to violate the room’s secrecy again—but as always, current circumstances had forced her to amend an earlier decision. There was something she needed to discuss with Khouri; the ghosts were merely a pretext so that Khouri would not become overly suspicious of Volyova’s deeper motives.

“I’m not seeing any ghosts yet,” the recruit said. “You’ll see, or rather hear them, shortly,” Volyova said.

The Triumvir was acting oddly, Khouri thought. More than once she had hinted that this room was her private retreat aboard the ship, and that the others—Sajaki, Hegazi, and the other two women—were not even aware that it existed. It seemed strange indeed that Volyova was prepared to reveal the room to Khouri so soon in their working relationship. Volyova was a solitary, obsessive figure, even aboard a ship crewed by militaristic chimerics—not someone with a natural instinct for trustfulness, Khouri would have thought. Volyova was going through the motions of friendliness towards her, but there was something artificial about all her efforts… they were too planned, too lacking in anything resembling spontaneity. When Volyova made some kind of friendly overture to Khouri—a piece of smalltalk, shipboard gossip or a joke—there was always the feeling that Volyova had spent hours rehearsing, hoping she would sound off-the-cuff. Khouri had known people like that in the military; they seemed genuine at first, but they were usually the ones who turned out to be foreign spies or intelligence-gathering stooges from high command. Volyova was doing her best to act casually about the whole spider-room business, but it was obvious to Khouri that the ghost thing was not all that it appeared. A number of disquieting thoughts struck Khouri, prime among them the idea that perhaps Volyova had brought her to this room with no intention of her ever leaving… alive, anyway.

But that turned out not to be the case.

“Oh, something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Volyova said, breezily. “Does the phrase Sun Stealer mean anything to you yet?”

“No,” Khouri said. “Should it?”

“Oh; there’s no reason it should—just a question, that’s all. Too tedious to explain why, of course—don’t worry about it, will you?”

She was about as convincing as a Mulch fortune-teller.

“No,” Khouri said. “I won’t worry, no…” And then added: “Why did you say ‘yet’?”

Volyova cursed inwardly: had she blown it? Perhaps not; she had delivered the question as blithely as she dared, and there was nothing in Khouri’s demeanour to suggest that she had taken it as anything other than a casual enquiry… and yet… now was emphatically not the time to start making errors.

“Did I say that?” she said, hoping to inject the right degree of surprise-mingled-with-indifference into her voice. “Slip of the tongue, that’s all.” Volyova groped for a change of subject, quickly. “See that star, the faint red one?”

Now that their eyes had adjusted to the ambient light-levels of interstellar space, with even the blue radiance of the engine exhausts no longer seeming to blot out everything, a few stars were visible.

“That’s Yellowstone’s sun?”

“Epsilon Eridani, yes. We’re three weeks beyond the system. Pretty soon you wouldn’t have such an easy time finding it. We’re not moving relativistically now—only a few per cent of light—but we’re accelerating all the time. Soon the visible stars will move, the constellations warping, until all the stars in the sky are bunched ahead and behind us. It’ll be as if we’re poised midway down a tunnel, with light streaming in from either end. The stars will change colour as well. It isn’t simple, since the final colour depends on the spectral type of each star; how much energy it emits in different energies, including the infrared and ultraviolet. But the tendency will be for those stars ahead of us to shift to the blue; those behind us to the red.”

“I’m sure it’ll be very pretty,” Khouri said, somewhat spoiling the moment. “But I’m not quite sure where the ghosts come into it.”

Volyova smiled. “I’d almost forgotten about them. That would have been a shame.”

And then she spoke into her bracelet, vocalising softly so that Khouri would not hear what it was she had to ask the ship.

Voices of the damned filled the chamber.

“Ghosts,” Volyova said.

Sylveste hovered in midair above the buried city, bodyless.

The encaging walls rose around him, densely engraved with the equivalent of ten thousand printed volumes of Amarantin writing. Although the graphicforms of the writing were mere millimetres high and he floated hundreds of metres from the wall, he only had to focus on any one part of it for the words to slam into clarity. As he did so, parallel translating algorithms processed the text into something approaching Canasian, while Sylveste’s own quick semi-intuitive thought processes did likewise. More often than not he came to broad agreement with the programs, but occasionally they missed what might have been a crucial, context-dependent subtlety.

Meanwhile in his quarters in Cuvier, he made rapid, cursive notes, filling page after page of writing pad. These days, he favoured pen and paper over modern recording devices where possible. Digital media were too susceptible to later manipulation by his enemies. At least if his notes were pulped they would be lost for ever, rather than returning to haunt him in a guise warped to suit somebody else’s ideology.

He finished translating a particular section, coming to one of the folded-wing glyphs which signified the end of a sequence. He pulled back from the dizzying textual precipice of the wall.

He slipped a blotter into the pad and closed it. By touch he slipped the pad back into a rack and removed the next pad along. He opened it at the page marked by its own blotter, then ran his fingers down the page until he felt the roughness of the ink vanish. Positioning the book exactly parallel with the desk, he stationed the pen at the start of the first new blank line.

“You’re working too hard,” Pascale said.

She had entered the room unheard; now he had to visualise her standing at his side—or sitting, whichever was the case.

“I think I’m getting somewhere,” Sylveste said.

“Still banging your head against those old inscriptions?”

“One of us is beginning to crack.” He turned his bodyless point of view away from the wall, towards the centre of the enclosed city. “Still, I didn’t think it would take this long.”

“Me neither.”

He knew what she meant. Eighteen months since Nils Girardieau had shown him the buried city; a year since their wedding had been mooted and then put on hold until he had made significant progress on the translating work. Now he was doing exactly that—and it scared him. No more excuses, and she knew it as well as he did.

Why was that such a big problem? Was it only a problem because he chose to classify it as such?

“You’re frowning again,” Pascale said. “Are you having problems with the inscriptions?”

“No,” Sylveste said. “They aren’t the problem any more.” And it was the truth; it was now second nature for him to merge the bimodal streams of Amarantin writing into their implied whole, like a cartographer studying a stereographic image.

“Let me look.”

He heard her move across the room and address the escritoire, instructing it to open a parallel channel for her sensorium. The console—and, indeed, Sylveste’s whole access to the data-model of the city—had come not long after that first visit. For once the idea had not been Girardieau’s, but something Pascale had initiated. The success of Descent into Darkness, the recently published biography, and the upcoming wedding had increased her leverage over her father, and Sylveste had known better than to argue when she had offered him—literally—the keys to the city.

The wedding was the talk of the colony now. Most of the gossip which reached its way back to Sylveste assumed that the motives were purely political; that Sylveste had courted Pascale as a way of marrying his way back into something close to power; that—seen cynically—the wedding was only a means to an end, and that the end was a colonial expedition to Cerberus/Hades. Perhaps, for the briefest of instants, Sylveste had wondered that himself; wondered if his subconscious had not engineered his love for Pascale with this deeper ambition in mind. Perhaps there was the tiniest grain of truth in that, as well. But from his current standpoint, it was mercifully impossible to tell. He certainly felt as if he loved her—which, as far as he could tell, was the same thing as loving her—but he was not blind to the advantages that the marriage would bring. Now he was publishing again; modest articles based on tiny portions of translated Amarantin text; co-authorship with Pascale; Girardieau himself acknowledged as having assisted in the work. The Sylveste of fifteen years ago would have been appalled, but now he found it hard to stir up much self-disgust. What mattered was that the city was a step towards understanding the Event.

“I’m here,” Pascale said—louder now, but just as bodyless as Sylveste. “Are we sharing the same point of view?”

“What are you seeing?”

“The spire; the temple—whatever you call it.”

“That’s right.”

The temple was at the geometric centre of the quarter-scale city, shaped like the upper third of an egg. Its topmost point extended upwards, becoming a spiriform tower which ascended—narrowing as it did—towards the roof of the city chamber. The buildings around the temple had the fused look of weaver-bird nests; perhaps the expression of some submerged evolutionary imperative. They huddled like misshapen orisons before the vast central spire which curled from the temple.

“Something bothering you about this?”

He envied her. Pascale had visited the real city dozens of times. She had even climbed the spire on foot, following the gulletlike spiral passage which wound up its height.

“The figure on the spire? It doesn’t fit.”

It looked like a small, daintily carved figurine by comparison with the rest of the city, but was still ten or fifteen metres tall, comparable to the Egyptian figures in the Temple of Kings. The buried city was built to an approximate quarter-scale, based on comparisons with other digs. The full-size counterpart of the spire figure would have been at least forty metres tall. But if this city had ever existed on the surface, it would have been lucky to survive the firestorms of the Event, let alone the subsequent nine hundred and ninety thousand years of planetary weathering, glaciation, meteorite impacts and tectonics.

“Doesn’t fit?”

“It isn’t Amarantin—at least not any kind I’ve ever seen.”

“Some kind of deity, then?”

“Maybe. But I don’t understand why they’ve given it wings.”

“Ah. And this is problematic?”

“Take a look around the city wall it you don’t believe me.”

“Better lead me there, Dan.”

Their twin points of view curved away from the spire, dropping down dizzyingly.

Volyova watched the effect the voices had on Khouri, certain that somewhere in Khouri’s armour of self-assurance was a chink of fearful doubt—the thought that maybe these really were ghosts after all, and that Volyova had found a way to tune into their phantom emanations.

The sound that the ghosts made was moaning and cavernous; long drawn-out howls so low that they were almost felt rather than heard. It was like the eeriest winter night’s wind imaginable; the sound that a wind might make after blowing through a thousand miles of cavern. But this was clearly no natural phenomenon, not the particle wind streaming past the ship, translated into sound; not even the fluctuations in the delicately balanced reactions in the engines. There were souls in that ghost-howl; voices calling across the night. In the moaning, though not one word was understandable, there remained nonetheless the unmistakable structure of human language.

“What do you think?” Volyova asked.

“They’re voices, aren’t they? Human voices. But they sound so… exhausted; so sad.” Khouri listened attentively. “Every now and then I think I understand a word.”

“You know what they are, of course.” Volyova diminished the sound, until the ghosts formed only a muted, infinitely pained chorus. “They’re crew. Like you and me. Occupants of other vessels, talking to each other across the void.”

“Then why—” Khouri hesitated. “Oh, wait a minute. Now I understand. They’re moving faster than us, aren’t they? Much faster. Their voices sound slow because they are, literally. Clocks run slower on ships moving near the speed of light.”

Volyova nodded, the tiniest bit saddened that Khouri had understood so swiftly. “Time dilation. Of course, some of those ships are moving towards us, so doppler-blueshifting acts to reduce the effect, but the dilation factor usually wins…” She shrugged, seeing that Khouri was not yet ready for a treatise on the finer principles of relativistic communications. “Normally, of course, Infinity corrects for all this; removes the doppler and dilatory distortions, and translates the result into something which sounds perfectly intelligible.”

“Show me.”

“No,” Volyova said. “It isn’t worth it. The end product is always the same. Trivia, technical talk, boastful old trade rhetoric. That’s the interesting end of the spectrum. At the boring end you get paranoid gossip or brain-damaged cases baring their souls to the night. Most of the time it’s just two ships handshaking as they pass in the night; exchanging bland pleasantries. There’s hardly ever any interaction since the light-travel times between ships are seldom less than months. And anyway, half the time the voices are just prerecorded messages, since the crew are usually in reefersleep.”

“Just the usual human babble, in other words.”

“Yes. We take it with us wherever we go.”

Volyova relaxed back in her seat, instructing the sound-system to pump out the sorrowful, time-stretched voices even louder than before. This signal of human presence ought to have made the stars seem less remote and cold, but it managed to have exactly the opposite effect; just like the act of telling ghost stories around a campfire served to magnify the darkness beyond the flames. For a moment—one that she revelled in, no matter what Khouri made of it—it was possible to believe that the interstellar spaces beyond the glass were really haunted.

“Notice anything?” Sylveste asked.

The wall consisted of chevron-shaped granite blocks, interrupted at five points by gatehouses. The gatehouses were surmounted by sculptural Amarantin heads, in a not-quite-realistic style reminiscent of Yucatan art. A fresco ran around the outer wall, made from ceramic tiles, depicting Amarantin functionaries performing complex social duties.

Pascale paused before answering, her gaze tracking over the different figures in the fresco.

They were shown carrying farming implements which looked almost like actual items from human agricultural history, or weapons—pikes, bows and a kind of musket, although the poses were not those of warriors engaged in combat, but were far more formalised and stiff, like Egyptian figurework. There were Amarantin surgeons and stoneworkers, astronomers—they had invented reflecting and refracting telescopes, recent digs had confirmed—and cartographers, glassworkers, kitemakers and artists, and above each symbolic figure was a bimodal chain of graphicforms picked out in gold and cobalt-blue, naming the flock which assumed the duty of the representational figure.

“None of them have wings,” Pascale said.

“No,” Sylveste said. “What used to be their wings turned into their arms.”

“But why object to a statue of a god with a pair of wings? Humans have never had wings, but that’s never stopped us investing angels with them. It strikes me that a species which really did once have wings would have even fewer qualms.”

“Yes, except you’re forgetting the creation myth.”

It was only in the last years that the basic myth had been understood by the archaeologists; unravelled from dozens of later, embroidered versions. According to the myth, the Amarantin had once shared the sky with the other birdlike creatures which still existed on Resurgam during their reign. But the flocks of that time were the last to know the freedom of flight. They made an agreement with the god they called Birdmaker, trading the ability to fly for the gift of sentience. On that day, they raised their wings to heaven and watched as consuming fire turned them to ash, for ever excluding them from the air.

So that they might remember their arrangement, the Birdmaker gave them useless, clawed wing-stubs—enough to remind them of what they had forsaken, and enough to enable them to begin writing down their history. Fire burned in their minds too, but this was the unquenchable fire of being. That light would always burn, the Birdmaker told them—so long as they did not try to defy the Birdmaker’s will by once more returning to the skies. If they did that, it was promised, the Birdmaker would take back the souls they had been given on the Day of Burning Wings.

It was, Sylveste knew, simply the understandable attempt of a culture to raise a mirror to itself. What made it significant was the complete extent to which it had permeated their culture—in effect, a single religion which had superseded all others and which had persisted, through different tellings, for an unthinkable span of centuries. Undoubtedly it had shaped their thinking and behaviour, perhaps in ways too complex to begin guessing.

“I understand,” Pascale said. “As a species, they couldn’t deal with being flightless, so they created the Birdmaker story so they could feel some superiority over the birds which could still fly.”

“Yes. And while that belief worked, it had one unexpected side-effect: to deter them from ever taking flight again: Much like the Icarus myth, only exhibiting a stronger hold over their collective psyche.”

“But if that’s the case, the figure on the spire…”

“Is a big two-fingered salute to whatever god they used to believe in.”

“Why would they do that?” Pascale said. “Religions just fade away; get replaced by new ones. I can’t believe they’d build that city, everything in it, just as an insult to their old god.”

“Me neither. Which suggests something else entirely.”

“Like what?”

“That a new god moved in. One with wings.”

Volyova had decided it was time to show Khouri the instruments of her profession. “Hold on,” she said, as the elevator approached the cache chamber. “People don’t generally like this the first time it happens.”

“God,” Khouri said, instinctively pressing herself against the rear wall as the vista suddenly expanded shockingly; the elevator a tiny beetle crawling down the side of the vast space. “It looks too big to fit inside!”

“Oh, this is nothing. There are another four chambers this large. Chamber two is where we train for surface ops. Two are empty or semi-pressurised; the fourth holds shuttles and in-system vehicles. This is the only one dedicated to holding the cache.”

“You mean those things?”

“Yes.”

There were forty cache-weapons in the chamber, though none exactly resembled any other. Yet in their general style of construction, a certain affinity was betrayed. Each machine was cased in alloy of a greenish-bronze hue. Though each of the devices was large enough to be a medium-sized spacecraft in its own right, none exhibited any indication that this was their function. There were no windows or access doors visible in what would have been their hulls, no markings or communications systems. While some of the objects were studded with what might have been vernier jets, they were only there to assist in the moving around and positioning of the devices, much as a battleship was only there to assist in moving around and positioning its big guns.

Of course, that was exactly what the cache devices were.

“Hell-class,” Volyova said. “That was what their builders called them. Of course, we’re going back a few centuries here.”

Volyova watched as her recruit appraised the titanic size of the nearest cache-weapon. Suspended vertically, its long axis aligned with the ship’s axis of thrust, it looked like a ceremonial sword dangling from a warrior-baron’s ceiling. Like all the weapons, it was surrounded by a framework which had been added by one of Volyova’s predecessors, to which were attached various control, monitoring and manoeuvring systems. All the weapons were connected to tracks—a three-dimensional maze of sidings and switches—which merged lower down in the chamber, feeding into a much smaller volume directly below, large enough to contain a single weapon. From there, the weapons could be deployed beyond the hull, into space.

“So who built them?” Khouri said.

“We don’t know for sure. The Conjoiners, perhaps, in one of their darker incarnations. All we know is how we found them—hidden away in an asteroid, circling a brown dwarf so obscure it has only a catalogue number.”

“You were there?”

“No; this was long before my time. I only inherited them from the last caretaker—and he from his. I’ve been studying them ever since. I’ve managed to access the control systems of thirty-one of them, and I’ve figured out—very roughly—about eighty per cent of the necessary activation codes. But I’ve only tested seventeen of the weapons, and of that number, only two in what you might term actual combat situations.”

“You mean you’ve actually used them?”

“It wasn’t something I rushed into.”

No need, she thought, to burden Khouri with details of past atrocities—at least, not immediately. Over time, Khouri would come to know the cache-weapons as well as Volyova knew them—perhaps even more intimately, since Khouri would know them via the gunnery, through direct neural-interface.

“What can they do?”

“Some of them are more than capable of taking planets apart. Others… I don’t even want to guess. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of them did unpleasant things to stars. Exactly who’d want to use such weapons…” She trailed off.

“Who did you use them against?”

“Enemies, of course.”

Khouri regarded her for long, silent seconds.

“I don’t know whether to be horrified that such things exist… or relieved to know that at least it’s us who have our fingers on the triggers.”

“Be relieved,” Volyova said. “It’s better that way.”

Sylveste and Pascale returned to the spire, hovering. The winged Amarantin was just as they had left it, but now it seemed to brood over the city with imperious disregard. It was tempting to think that a new god really had moved in—what else could have inspired the building of such a monument, if not fear of the divine? But the accompanying text on the spire was maddeningly hard to unscramble.

“Here’s a reference to the Birdmaker,” Sylveste said. “So chances are good the spire had some bearing on the Burning Wings myth, even though the winged god clearly isn’t a representation of the Birdmaker.”

“Yes,” Pascale said. “That’s the graphicform for fire, next to the one for wings.”

“What else do you see?”

Pascale concentrated for a few long moments. “There’s some reference here to a renegade flock.”

“Renegade in what sense?” He was testing her, and she knew it, but the exercise was valuable in itself, for Pascale’s interpretation would give him some indication of how subjective his own analysis had been.

“A renegade flock which didn’t agree to the deal with the Birdmaker, or reneged on the deal afterwards.”

“That’s what I thought. I was worried I might have made an error or two.”

“Whoever they were, they were called the Banished Ones.” She read back and forth, testing hypotheses and revising her interpretation as she went. “It looks like they were originally part of the flock who agreed to the Birdmaker’s terms, but that they changed their minds sometime later.”

“Can you make out the name of their leader?”

She began: “They were led by an individual called…” But then Pascale trailed off. “No, can’t translate that string; at least not right now. What does all this mean, anyway? Do you think they really existed?”

“Perhaps. If I had to take a guess, I’d say they were unbelievers who came to realise that the Birdmaker myth was just that—myth. Of course, that wouldn’t have gone down very well with the other fundamentalist flocks.”

“Which is why they were Banished?”

“Assuming they ever existed in the first place. But I can’t help thinking, what if they were some kind of technological sect, like an enclave of scientists? Amarantin who were prepared to experiment, to question the nature of their world?”

“Like mediaeval alchemists?”

“Yes.” He liked the analogy immediately. “Perhaps they even tried experimenting with flight, the way Leonardo did. Against the backdrop of general Amarantin culture, that would have been like spitting in God’s eye.”

“Agreed. But assuming they were real—and were Banished—what happened to them? Did they just die out?”

“I don’t know. But one thing’s clear. The Banished Ones were important—more than just a minor detail in the overall story of the Birdmaker myth. They’re mentioned all over the spire; all over this damned city, in fact—far more frequently than in any other Amarantin relics.”

“But the city is late,” Pascale said. “Apart from the marker obelisk, it’s the most recent relic we’ve found. Dating from near the Event. Why would the Banished Ones suddenly crop up again, after so long an absence?”

“Well,” Sylveste said. “Maybe they came back.”

“After—what? Tens of thousands of years?”

“Perhaps.” Sylveste smiled privately. “If they did return—after that long away—it might be the kind of thing to inspire statue-building.”

“Then the statue—do you think it might portray their leader? The one called—” Pascale took another stab at the graphicform. “Well, this is the symbol for the sun, isn’t it?”

“And the rest?”

“I’m not sure. Looks like the glyph for the act of… theft—but how can that be?”

“Put the two together, what have you got?”

He imagined her shrugging, noncommittally. “One who steals suns? Sun Stealer? What would that mean?”

Sylveste shrugged himself. “That’s what I’ve been asking myself all morning. That and one other thing.”

“Which would be?”

“Why I think I’ve heard that name before.” After the weapons chamber, the three of them rode another elevator further into the ship’s heart.

“You’re doing well,” the Mademoiselle said. “Volyova honestly believes that she’s turned you to her side.”

She had, more or less, been with them the whole time—silently observing Volyova’s guided tour, only occasionally interjecting with remarks or prompts for Khouri’s ears only. This was extremely disquieting: Khouri was never able to free herself of the feeling that Volyova was also privy to these whispered asides.

“Maybe she’s right,” Khouri answered, automatically thinking her response. “Maybe she’s stronger than you.”

The Mademoiselle scoffed. “Did you listen to anything I told you?”

“As if I had any choice.”

Shutting out the Mademoiselle when she wanted to say something was like trying to silence an insistent refrain playing in her head. There was no respite from her apparitions.

“Listen,” the woman said. “If my countermeasures were failing, your loyalty to Volyova would force you to tell her of my existence.”

“I’ve been tempted.”

The Mademoiselle looked at her askance, and Khouri felt a brief frisson of satisfaction. In some respects the Mademoiselle—or rather, her implant-distilled persona—seemed omniscient. But apart from the knowledge which had been instilled in it upon its creation, the implant’s learning was restricted entirely to what it could perceive through Khouri’s own senses. Maybe the implant could hook into data networks even if Khouri herself were not interfaced, but while that might have been possible, it seemed unlikely; there was too much risk of the implant itself being detected by the same systems. And although it could hear her thoughts when Khouri chose to communicate with it, it could not read her state of mind, other than by the most superficial biochemical cues in the neural environment in which it floated. So for the implant, there was a necessary element of doubt concerning the efficacy of its countermeasures.

“Volyova would kill you. She killed her last recruit, if you haven’t worked that out for yourself.”

“Maybe she had good reason.”

“You don’t know anything about her—or any of them. Neither do I. We haven’t even met her Captain yet.”

There was no arguing with that. Captain Brannigan’s name had come up once or twice when Sajaki or one of the others had been indiscreet in Khouri’s presence, but in general they did not speak often of their leader. Clearly they were not Ultras in the usual sense, although they maintained a meticulous front even the Mademoiselle had not seen through. The fiction was so absolute that they went through the motions of trade just like all the other Ultra crews. But what was the reality behind the facade?

Gunnery Officer, Volyova had said. And now Khouri had seen something of the cache of weapons stored within the ship. It was rumoured that many trade vessels carried discreet armaments, for resolving the worst sorts of breakdown in client-customer relations, or for staging acts of blatant piracy against other ships. But these weapons looked far too potent to be used in mere squabbles, and in any case, the ship clearly had an extra layer of conventional weaponry for just those circumstances. So what exactly was the point behind this arsenal? Sajaki must have had some long-term plan in mind, Khouri thought, and that was disturbing enough—but even more worrying was the thought that perhaps there was no plan at all; that Sajaki was carrying the cache around until he found an excuse for using it, like a tooled-up thug stumbling around in search of a fight.

Over the weeks, Khouri had considered and discarded numerous theories, without coming close to anything that sounded plausible. It was not the military side of the ship’s nature that troubled her, of course. She had been born to war; war was her natural environment, and while she was ready to consider the possibility that there were other, more benign states of being, there was nothing about war that felt alien to her. But, she had to admit, the kinds of wars which she had known on Sky’s Edge were hardly comparable to any of the scenarios in which the cache-weapons might be used. Though Sky’s Edge had remained linked to the interstellar trade network, the average technological level of the combatants in the surface battles had been centuries behind the Ultras who sometimes parked their ships in orbit. A campaign could be won just by one side gaining one item of Ultra weaponry… but those items had always been scarce; sometimes too valuable even to use. Even nukes had been deployed only a few times in the colony’s history, and never in Khouri’s lifetime. She had seen some vile things—things that still haunted her—but she had never seen anything capable of instant, genocidal death. Volyova’s cache-weapons were much worse than that.

And perhaps they had been used, once or twice. Volyova had said as much—pirate operations, perhaps. There were plenty of thinly populated systems, only loosely connected to the trade nets, where it would be entirely possible to exterminate an enemy without anyone ever finding out. And some of those enemies might be as amoral as any of Sajaki’s crew; their pasts littered with acts of random atrocity. So, yes, it was quite likely that parts of the cache had been tested. But Khouri suspected that this would only have ever been a means to an end; self-preservation, or tactical strikes against enemies with resources they needed. The heavier cache-weapons would not have been tested. What they eventually planned to do with the cache—how they planned to discharge the world-wrecking power they possessed—was not yet clear, perhaps not even to Sajaki. And perhaps Sajaki was not the man in whom the ultimate power lay vested. Perhaps, in some way, Sajaki was still serving Captain Brannigan.

Whoever the mysterious Brannigan was.

“Welcome to the gunnery,” Volyova said.

They had arrived somewhere near the middle of the ship. Volyova had opened a hole in the ceiling, folded down a telescopic ladder and beckoned Khouri to climb its sharp-edged rungs.

Her head was poking into a large spherical room full of curved, jointed machinery. At the centre of this halo of bluish-silver was a rectilinear hooded black seat, festooned with machinery and a seemingly random tangle of cables. The seat was fixed within a series of elegant gyroscopic axes, arranged so that its motion would be independent of that of the ship. The cables passed into sliding armatures which transmitted power between each concentric shell, before the final thigh-thick clump dove into the machinery-clotted spherical wall of the room. The room reeked of ozone.

There was nothing in the gunnery which looked much newer than a few hundred years old, and plenty that looked as if it had been around for considerably longer. All of it, though, had been scrupulously cared for.

“This is what it’s all been building up to, isn’t it?” Khouri pushed herself through the trapdoor into the heart of the chamber, slithering between the curved skeletal shells until she reached the seat. Massive as it was, it seemed to beckon to her with promises of comfort and security. She could not stop herself from sliding into it, letting its cumbersome black bulk softly encase her with a whirr of buried servomechanisms.

“How does it feel?”

“Like I’ve been here before,” she said wonderingly, voice distorted by the bulk of the studded black helmet which had slid over her head.

“You have,” Volyova answered. “Before you were properly conscious. Besides, the gunnery implant in your head already knows its way around here—that’s where half the sense of familiarity comes from.”

What Volyova said was true. Khouri felt as if the chair were some familiar piece of furniture she had grown up around, its every wrinkle and scratch known to her. She already felt powerfully relaxed and calm, and the urge to actually do something—to use the power that the chair bestowed on her—was building by the second.

“I can control the cache-weapons from here?”

“That’s the intention,” Volyova said. “But not just the cache, of course. You’ll also be directing every other major weapon system aboard the Infinity—with as much fluency as if these instruments were simply extensions of your own anatomy. When you’re fully subsumed by the gunnery, that’s how it’ll feel—your own body image swelling out to take in the ship itself.”

Khouri had already begun to feel something similar; the sense at least that her body was blurring into the chair. Tantalising as it was, she had no wish for the sense of subsumption to continue any further. With a conscious effort she eased herself from the chair, its enfolding panels whirring aside to release her.

“I’m not sure I like this,” the Mademoiselle said.