The Captain took a step back. “Good,” he said, approvingly. He rolled the helmet in his hands, inspecting it for signs of wear. Antoinette noticed now that there was a vacant round socket in one side, into which the red umbilical was meant to plug. “Thank you for bringing this down to me. The gesture is appreciated.”
“You left it with Palfrey. That wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“I suppose not. What did you say it was—a ‘calling card?’ Not far from the truth, I guess.”
“I took it as a sign that you were willing to talk to someone.”
“You seemed very anxious to talk to me,” he said.
“We were. We are.” She looked at the apparition with a mixture of fear and dangerous, seductive relief. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” She took his silence to indicate assent. “What shall I call you? ‘Captain’ doesn’t seem quite right to me, not now that we’ve been through the mutual-trust thing.”
“Fair point,” he conceded, not sounding entirely convinced. “John will do for now.”
“Then, John, what have I done to deserve this? It wasn’t just my bringing back the helmet, was it?”
“Like I said, you seemed anxious to talk.”
Antoinette bent down to pick up her torch. “I’ve been trying to reach you for years, with no success at all. What’s changed?”
“I feel different now,” he said.
“As if you were asleep but have finally woken up?”
“It’s more as if I need to be awake now. Does that answer your question?”
“I’m not sure. This might sound rude, but… who am I talking to, exactly?”
“You’re talking to me. As I am. As I was.”
“No one really knows who you were, John. That suit looks pretty old to me.”
A gloved hand moved across the square chest-pack, tracing a pattern from point to point. To Antoinette it looked like a benediction, but it might equally have been a rote-learned inspection of critical systems. Air supply, pressure integrity, thermal control, comms, waste management … she knew that litany herself.
“I was on Mars,” he said.
“I’ve never been there,” she said.
“No?” He sounded disappointed.
“Fact of the matter is, I really haven’t seen all that many worlds. Yellowstone, a bit of Resurgam, and this place. But never Mars. What was it like?”
“Different. Wilder. Colder. Savage. Unforgiving. Cruel. Pristine. Bleak. Beautiful. Like a lover with a temper.”
“But this was a while back, wasn’t it?”
“Uh huh. How old do you think this suit is?”
“It looks pretty damn antique to me.”
“They haven’t made suits like this since the twenty-first century. You think Clavain’s old, a relic from history. I was an old man before he took a breath.”
It surprised her to hear him mention Clavain by name. Clearly the Captain was more aware of shipboard developments than some gave him credit for. “You’ve come a long way, then,” she said.
“It’s been a long, strange trip, yes. And just look where it’s brought me.”
“You must have some stories to tell.” Antoinette reckoned that there were two safe areas of conversation: the present and the very distant past. The last thing she wanted was to have the Captain dwelling on his recent sickness and bizarre transformation.
“There are some stories I don’t want told,” he said. “But isn’t that true for us all?”
“No argument from me.”
His thin slit of a mouth hinted at a smile. “Dark secrets in your own past, Antoinette?”
“Nothing I’m going to lose any sleep over, not when we have so much else we need to worry about.”
“Ah.” He rotated the helmet in his gloved hands. “The difficult matter of the present. I am aware of things, of course, perhaps more than you realise. I know, for instance, that there are other agencies in the system.”
“You feel them?”
“It was their noises that woke me from long, calm dreams of Mars.” He regarded the icons and decals on the helmet, stroking them with the stubby tip of one gloved finger. Antoinette wondered about the memories they stirred, preserved across five or six hundred years of experience. Memories thick with the grey dust of centuries.
“We thought that you were waking,” she said. “In the last few weeks we’ve become more aware of your presence. We didn’t think it was coincidence, especially after what Khouri told us. I know you remember Khouri, John, or you wouldn’t have brought me down here.”
“Where is she?”
“With Clavain and the others.”
“And Ilia? Where is Ilia?”
Antoinette was sweating. The temptation to lie, to offer a soothing platitude, was overwhelming. But she did not doubt for one instant that the Captain would see through any attempt at deception. “Ilia’s dead.”
The black and white cap bowed down. “I thought I might have dreamed it,” he said. “That’s the problem now. I can’t always tell what’s real and what’s imagined. I might be dreaming you at this very moment.”
“I’m real,” she said, as if her assurance would make any difference, “but Ilia’s dead. You remember what happened, don’t you?”
His voice was soft and thoughtful, like a child remembering the significant events in a nursery tale. “I remember that she was here, and that we were alone. I remember her lying in a bed, with people around her.”
What was she going to tell him now? That the reason Ilia had been in a bed in the first place was because she had suffered injuries during her efforts to thwart the Captain’s own suicide attempt, when he had directed one of the cache weapons against the hull of the ship. The scar he had inflicted on the hull was visible even now, a vertical fissure down one side of the spire. She was certain that on some level he knew all this but also that he did not need to be reminded of it now.
“She died,” Antoinette said, “trying to save us all. I gave her the use of my ship, Storm Bird, after we’d used it to rescue the last colonists from Resurgam.”
“But I remember her being unwell.”
“She wasn’t so unwell that she couldn’t fly a ship. Thing is, John, she felt she had something to atone for. You remember what she did to the colonists, when your crew were trying to find Sylveste? Made them think she’d wiped out a whole settlement in a fit of pique? That’s why they wanted her for a war criminal. Towards the end, I wonder whether she didn’t start believing it herself. How are we to know what went through her head? If enough people hate you, it can’t be easy not to start thinking they might be right.”
“She wasn’t a particularly good woman,” the Captain said, “but she wasn’t what they made her out to be. She only ever did what she thought right for the ship.”
“I guess that makes her a good woman in my book. Right now the ship is about all we have, John.”
“Do you think it worked for her?” he asked.
“What?”
“Atonement, Antoinette. Do you think it made the slightest difference, in the end?”
“I can’t guess what went through her mind.”
“Did it make any difference to the rest of you?”
“We’re here, aren’t we? We got out of the system alive. If Ilia hadn’t taken her stand, we’d probably all be smeared over a few light-hours of local solar space around Resurgam.”
“I hope you’re right. I did forgive her, you know.”
Antoinette knew that it had been Ilia who had allowed the Captain’s Melding Plague to finally engulf the ship. At the time she did it, it had seemed the only way to rid the ship of a different kind of parasite entirely. Antoinette did not think that Ilia had taken the decision lightly. Equally—based on her very limited experience of the woman—she did not think consideration of the Captain’s feelings had had very much influence on her decision.