‘Give me a coffee,’ the Inquisitor said.
‘There isn’t any coffee.’
‘Then give me the nearest fucking equivalent.’
‘You shouldn’t speak like that.’
‘I’ll speak any fucking way I want to. Especially until I get a coffee.’ She leant on the plastic lip of the serving hatch. ‘You can get me one, can’t you? I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for the world.’
‘You government?’
‘No, just thirsty. And a tiny bit irritable. It’s morning, you see, and I really don’t do mornings.’
A hand landed on her shoulder. She twisted around sharply, her own hand instinctively reaching for the haft of the boser-pistol.
‘Causing trouble again, Ana?’ said the woman behind her.
The Inquisitor blinked. She had rehearsed this moment many times since she had left Cuvier, but still it felt unreal and melodramatic. Then Triumvir Ilia Volyova nodded at the woman behind the hatch.
‘This is my friend. She wants a coffee. I suggest you give her one.’
The serving woman squinted at her, then grunted something and vanished from view. She reappeared a few moments later with a cup of something that looked as if it had just been drained from the main axle bearing of an overland cargo hauler.
‘Take it, Ana,’ Volyova said. ‘It’s about as good as it gets.’
The Inquisitor took the coffee, her hand trembling faintly. ‘You shouldn’t call me that,’ she whispered.
Volyova steered her towards a table. ‘Call you what?’
‘Ana.’
‘But it’s your name.’
‘Not any more, it isn’t. Not here. Not now.’
The table that Volyova had found was tucked into a corner, half-hidden by several stacked beer crates. Volyova swept her sleeve across the surface, brushing detritus on to the floor. Then she sat, placing both elbows on the table’s edge and locking her fingers under her chin. ‘I don’t think we need worry about anyone recognising you, Ana. No one’s given me more than a second glance and, with the possible exception of Thorn, I’m the most wanted person on the planet.’
The Inquisitor, who had once called herself Ana Khouri, sipped experimentally at the treaclelike concoction that passed for coffee. ‘You’ve had the benefit of some expert misdirection, Ilia…’ She paused and looked around, realising as she did so how suspicious and theatrical she must look. ‘Can I call you Ilia?’
‘That’s what I call myself. Best leave off the Volyova part for the time being, though. No sense in pushing our luck.’
‘None at all. I suppose I should say…’ Again, she looked around. She could not help herself. ‘It’s good to see you again, Ilia. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.’
‘I’ve missed your company, too. Odd to think we once started out almost killing each other. All water under the bridge now, of course.’
‘I began to worry. You hadn’t been in touch for so long…’
‘I had good reasons to keep a low profile, didn’t I?’
‘I suppose so.’
For several minutes neither of them said anything. Khouri, for that was how she was daring to think of herself again, found herself recalling the origin of the audacious game the two of them were playing. They had devised it themselves, amazing each other with their nerve and ingenuity. Together, they made a very resourceful pair indeed. But for maximum usefulness they found that they had to work alone.
Khouri broke the silence, unable to wait any longer. ‘What is it, Ilia? Good news or bad?’
‘Knowing my track record, what do you think?’
‘A wild stab in the dark? Bad news. Very bad news indeed.’
‘Got it in one.’
‘It’s the Inhibitors, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry to be so predictable, but there you are.’
‘They’re here?’
‘I think so.’ Volyova’s voice had dropped low now. ‘Something is happening, anyway. I’ve seen it myself.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Volyova’s voice, if anything, became quieter still. Khouri had to strain to hear it. ‘Machines, Ana, huge black machines. They’ve entered the system. I never saw them actually arrive. They were just… here.’
Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.
‘Dear God.’
‘We can’t say we weren’t expecting them, Ana. From the moment Sylveste started fiddling around with things he didn’t understand, it was only a matter of when and where.’
Khouri stared at her friend, wondering why the temperature in the room appeared to have dropped ten or fifteen degrees. The feared and hated Triumvir looked small and faintly grubby, like a bag lady. Volyova’s hair was a close-cropped greying thatch above a round, hard-eyed face which betrayed remote Mongol ancestry. She did not look like a very convincing herald of doom.
‘I’m scared, Ilia.’
‘I think you have excellent reason to be scared. But try not to show it, will you? We don’t want to terrify the locals just yet.’
‘What can we do?’
‘Against the Inhibitors?’ Volyova squinted through her glass, frowning slightly, as if this was the first time she had given the subject any serious consideration. ‘I don’t know. The Amarantin didn’t have a lot of success in that department.’
‘We’re not flightless birds.’
‘No, we’re humans — the scourge of the galaxy… or something like that. I don’t know, Ana. I really don’t. If it was just you and I, and if we could persuade the ship, the Captain, to come out of his shell, we could at least consider running away. We could even contemplate using the weapons, if that would help matters.’
Khouri shuddered. ‘But even if it did, and even if we could make a getaway, it wouldn’t help Resurgam much, would it?’
‘No. And I don’t know about you, Ana, but my conscience isn’t exactly whiter-than-white as it is.’
‘How long do we have?’
‘That’s the odd thing. The Inhibitors could have destroyed Resurgam already, if that was all they intended to do — it’s within even our technology to do that much, so I very much doubt that it would trouble them particularly.’
‘So maybe they haven’t come to kill us after all.’
Volyova tipped back her drink. ‘Or maybe… just maybe… they have.’
In the swarming heart of the black machines, processors that were not themselves sentient determined that an overseer mind must be quickened to consciousness.
The decision was not taken lightly; most cleansings could be performed without raising the spectre of the very thing that the machines had been made to suppress. But this system was problematic. Records showed that an earlier cleansing had been performed here, a mere four and half thousandths of a Galactic Turn ago. The fact that the machines had been called back showed that additional measures were clearly necessary.
The overseer’s task was to deal with the specifics of this particular infestation. No two cleansings were ever quite the same, and it was a regrettable fact of life that the best way to annihilate intelligence was with a dose of intelligence itself. But once the cleansing was over, the immediate outbreak traced back to source and its daughter spores sanitised-which might take another two-thousandths of a Galactic Turn, half a million years — the overseer would be dumbed down, its self-awareness packed away until it needed it again.
Which might be never.
The overseer never questioned its work. It knew only that it was acting for the ultimate good of sentient life. It was not at all concerned that the crisis it was acting to avert, the crisis that would become an unmanageable cosmic disaster if intelligent life was permitted to spread, lay a total of thirteen Turns — three billion years — in the future.