‘Ah.’ Clavain scratched his beard. ‘You mean really help, in a military sense?’
‘Storm Bird’s hull can take more weapons,’ Antoinette said. ‘And she’s fast and manoeuvrable. Had to be, to make a profit back home.’
‘She’s armoured, too,’ Xavier said. ‘You saw the damage she did when we busted out of Carousel New Copenhagen. And there’s a lot of room inside her. She could probably carry half of Scorpio’s army, with space to spare.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Then what’s your objection?’ Antoinette asked.
‘This isn’t your fight. You helped me, and I’m grateful for that. But if I know Ultras, and I think I do, they won’t give up anything without some trouble. There’s been enough bloodshed already, Antoinette. Let me handle the rest of it.’
The two youngsters — he wondered if they had really seemed so young to him before — exchanged coded looks. He had the sense that they were privy to a script he had not been shown.
‘You’d be making a mistake, Clavain,’ Xavier said.
Clavain looked into his eyes. ‘Thought this through, have you, Xavier?’
‘Of course…’
‘I really don’t think you have.’ Clavain returned his attention to the hovering image of the lighthugger. ‘Now, if you don’t mind… I’m a little on the busy side.’
CHAPTER 33
‘Ilia. Wake up.’
Khouri stood by Ilia’s bedside, watching the neural diagnostics for a sign that Volyova was returning to consciousness. The possibility that she might have died could not be dismissed — there was certainly very little visual indication that she was alive — but the diagnostics looked very much as they had before Khouri had taken her trip to the cache chamber.
‘May I help?’
Khouri turned around, startled and ashamed at the same time. The skeletal servitor had just spoken to her again.
‘Clavain…’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you were still switched on.’
I wasn’t until a moment ago.‘ The servitor advanced out of the shadows, coming to a halt on the opposite side of the bed from Khouri. It moved to one of the squat hunks of machinery attending the bed and made a series of adjustments to the controls.
‘What are you doing?’ Khouri asked.
‘Elevating her to consciousness. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘I… I’m not sure if I should trust you or smash you apart,’ she said.
The servitor stepped back from its handiwork. ‘You should certainly not trust me, Ana. My primary goal is to convince you to turn over the weapons. I can’t use force, but I can use persuasion and disinformation.’ Then it reached down beneath the bed and tossed something to her with a lithe sweep of one limb.
Khouri caught a pair of goggles equipped with an earpiece. They appeared to be perfectly normal shipboard issue, scuffed and discoloured. She slipped them on and watched Clavain’s human form cloak itself over the skeletal frame of the servitor. His voice came through the earpiece with human timbre and inflection.
‘That’s better,’ he said,
‘Who’s running you, Clavain?’
‘Ilia told me a little about your Captain,’ the servitor said. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from him, but I think he must be using me. He switched me on when Ilia was injured, and I was able to help her. But I’m just a beta-level simulation. I have Clavain’s expertise, and Clavain has detailed medical training, but then I imagine the Captain must be able to draw on many other sources for that kind of thing, including his own memories. My only conclusion is that the Captain does not wish to intervene directly, so he has elected to use me as an intermediary. I’m his puppet, more or less.’
Khouri felt an urge to disagree with him, but nothing in Clavain’s manner suggested that he was lying or aware of a more plausible explanation. The Captain had only emerged from his isolation in order to orchestrate his suicide, but now that the attempt had failed, and Ilia had been hurt in the process, he had retreated into some even darker psychosis. She wondered whether that made Clavain the Captain’s puppet or his weapon.
‘What can I trust you to do, in that case?’ Khouri looked from Clavain to Volyova. ‘Could you kill her?’
‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Your ship, or your Captain, wouldn’t allow me to do it. I’m certain of that. And I wouldn’t think of doing it anyway — I’m not a cold-blooded murderer, Ana.’
‘You’re just software,’ she said. ‘Software’s capable of anything.’
‘I won’t kill her, I assure you. I want those weapons because I believe in humanity. I’ve never believed that the ends justify the means. Not in this war, not in any damned war I’ve ever served in. If I have to kill to get what I want, I will. But not before I’ve done all that I can to avoid it. Otherwise I’m no better than the other Conjoiners.’
Without warning, Ilia Volyova spoke from her bed. ‘Why do you want them, Clavain?’
I could ask you the same question.‘
‘They’re my damned weapons.’
Khouri studied Volyova’s figure, but she appeared no more awake than she had five minutes earlier.
‘Actually, they don’t belong to you,’ Clavain said. ‘They’re still Conjoiner property.’
‘Taken your damned time reclaiming them, haven’t you?’
‘It isn’t me who’s doing the reclaiming, Ilia. I’m the nice man who’s come to take them off your hands before the really nasty people arrive. Then they’ll be my worry, not yours. And when I say nasty, I mean it. Deal with me and you’ll be dealing with someone reasonable. But the Conjoiners won’t even bother negotiating. They’ll just take the weapons without asking.’
‘I still find this defection story a little hard to believe, Clavain.’
‘Ilia…’ Khouri leaned closer to the bed. ‘Ilia, never mind Clavain for now. There’s something I need to know. What have you done with the cache weapons? I only counted thirteen in the chamber.’
Volyova clucked before answering. Khouri thought she sounded amused at her own cleverness. ‘I dispersed them. Killed two birds with one stone. Put them out of Clavain’s easy reach, strewn across the system. I also let them go into autonomous firing mode against the Inhibitor machinery. How are my little beauties doing, Khouri? Are the fireworks impressive tonight?’
‘There are fireworks, Ilia, but I haven’t got a fucking clue who’s winning.’?,
‘At least the battle is still continuing, then. That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?’ She did nothing visibly, but a flattened globe popped into existence above her head, looking for all the world like a cartoon thought-bubble. Though she had been blinded in the attack by the cache weapon, she now wore slender grey goggles that communicated with the implants Clavain’s proxy had installed in her head. In some respects she was now better sighted than she had been before, Khouri thought. She could see in all the wavelength and non-EM bands offered by the goggles, and she could tap into machine-generated fields with far greater clarity than had been possible before. For all that, however, she must have been quietly repulsed by the presence of the foreign machines inside her skull. Such things had always revolted her, and she would accept them now only out of necessity.
The projected globe was a mutual hallucination rather than a hologram. It was gridded with the green lines of an equatorial coordinate system, bulging at the equator and narrowing at the poles. The system’s ecliptic was a milky disc spanning the bubble from side to side, dotted with many annotated symbols. In the middle was the hard orange eye of the star, Delta Pavonis. A vermilion smudge was the ruined corpse of Roc, with a harder, offset core of red indicating the bugle-shaped vastness of the Inhibitor weapon, now locked in rotational phase with the star. The star was itself gridded with glowing lilac contour lines. The spot on the surface of the star immediately below the weapon was shown to be bulging inwards for an eighth of the star’s diameter, a quarter of the way to the nuclear-burning core. Furious violet-white rings of fusing matter radiated out from the depression, frozen like ripples on a lake, but those hotspots of fusion were mere sparks compared with the powerhouse of the core itself. And yet, as disturbing as these transformations were, the star was not the immediate centre of attention. Khouri counted twenty black triangles in the same approximate quadrant of the ecliptic as the Inhibitor weapon, and judged that those were the cache weapons.