She had been here before. She was used to it.
She unhooked various modules stationed around her suit’s thruster frame, attaching them to the interior of the well via epoxy-coated pads. From these modules, which were of her own design, she extended several dozen colour-coded cables that she connected or spliced into the exposed machinery.
‘Ilia…’ Khouri said. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Fine. It doesn’t like me being in here very much, but it can’t kick me out — I’ve given it all the right authorisation codes.’
‘Has it started doing the fear thing?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact it has.’ She experienced a moment of absolute screaming terror, as if someone was poking her brain with an electrode, stirring her most primal fears and anxieties into daylight. ‘Do you mind if we have this conversation later, Khouri? I’d like to get this… over… as soon as possible.’
‘We’re still going to have to decide about Thorn.’
‘Fine. Later, all right?’
‘He has to come here.’
‘Khouri, do me a favour: shut up about Thorn and keep your eye on the job, understand?’
Volyova paused and forced herself to focus. So far, despite the fear, it had gone as well as she had hoped it would. She had only once before gone this deep into the weapon’s control architecture, and that was when she had prioritised the commands coming in from the ship. Since she was at the same level now she could theoretically, by issuing the right command syntax, lock out the Captain for good. This was only one weapon; there were thirty-two others, and some of those were utterly unknown to her. But she would surely not need the whole cache to make a difference. If she could gain control of a dozen or so weapons, it would hopefully be enough to throw a spanner into the Inhibitor’s plans…
And she would not succeed by prevarication.
‘Khouri, listen to me. Minor change of plan.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘I’m going to go ahead and see if I can get this weapon to submit entirely to my control.’
‘You call that a minor change of plan?’
‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’
Before she could stop herself, before the fear became overwhelming, she connected the remaining lines. Status lights winked and pulsed; displays rippled with alphanumeric hash. The fear sharpened. The weapon really did not want her to tamper with it on this level.
‘Tough luck,’ she said. ‘Now let’s see…’ And with a few discreet taps on her bracelet she released webs of mind-numbingly complicated command syntax. The three-valued logic that the weapon’s operating system ran on was characteristic of Conjoiner programming, but it was also devilishly hard to debug.
She sat still and waited.
Deep inside the weapon, the legality of her command would be thrashed out and scrutinised by dozens of parsing modules. Only when it had satisfied all criteria would it be executed. If that happened, and the command did what she thought it would, the weapon would immediately delete the Captain from the list of authenticated users. There would then only be one valid way to work the weapon, which was through her control harness, a piece of hardware disconnected from the ship’s Captain-controlled infrastructure.
It was a very sound theory.
She had the first indication that the command syntax had been bad an instant before the hatch slid shut on her. Her bracelet flashed red; she started assembling a particularly poetic sequence of Russish swearwords and then the weapon had locked her in. Next, the lights went out, but the fear remained. The fear, in fact, had grown very much stronger — but perhaps that was partly her own response to the situation.
‘Damn…’ Volyova said. ‘Khouri… can you hear me?’
But there was no reply.
Without warning machinery shifted around her. The chamber had become larger, revealing dimly glowing vaults plunging deeper into the weapon. Enormous fluidly shaped mechanisms floated in blood-red light. Cold blue lights flickered on the shapes or traced the flow lines of writhing intestinal power lines. The entire interior of the weapon appeared to be reorganising itself.
And then she nearly died of fright. She sensed something else inside the weapon, a presence that was coming closer, creeping through the shifting components with phantom slowness.
Volyova hammered on the hatch above her. ‘Khouri…!’
But the presence had reached her. She had not seen it arrive but she sensed its sudden proximity. It was shapeless, crouched behind her. She thought she could almost see it in her peripheral vision, but even as she wrenched her head around the presence flowed into her blind spot.
Suddenly her head hurt, the blinding pain making her squeal aloud.
Remontoire squeezed his lean frame into one of Nightshade’s viewing blisters, establishing by visual means that the engines had actually shut off. He had issued the correct sequence of neural commands, instantly feeling the shift to weightlessness as the ship ceased accelerating, but still he felt the need for additional confirmation that his order had been followed. Given what had happened already, he would not have been entirely surprised to see that the blue glow of scattered light was still present.
But he saw only darkness. The engines really had shut down; the ship was drifting at constant velocity, still falling towards Epsilon Eridani but far too slowly ever to catch Clavain.
‘What now?’ Felka asked quietly. She floated next to him, one hand hooked into a soft hoop that the ship had obligingly provided.
‘We wait,’ he said. ‘If I’m right, Skade won’t be long.’
‘She won’t be pleased.’
He nodded. ‘And I’ll reinstate thrust as soon as she tells me what’s going on. But before that I’d like some answers.’
The crab arrived a few moments later, easing through a fist-sized hole in the wall. ‘This is unacceptable. Why have you…’
‘The engines are my responsibility,’ Remontoire said pleasantly, for he had rehearsed exactly what he would say. ‘They’re a highly delicate and dangerous technology, all the more so given the experimental nature of the new designs. Any deviation from the expected performance might indicate a serious, possibly catastrophic, problem.’
The crab waggled its manipulators. ‘You know perfectly well that there was nothing at all wrong with the engines. I demand that you restart them immediately. Every second we spend drifting is to Clavain’s advantage.’
‘Really?’ Felka said.
‘Only in the very loosest sense. If we’re delayed any further our only realistic option will be a remote kill, rather than a live capture.’
‘Not that that’s ever been under serious consideration, has it?’ Felka asked.
‘You’ll never know if Remontoire persists with this… insubordination.’
‘Insubordination?’ Felka hooted. ‘Now you almost sound like a Demarchist.’
‘Don’t play games, either of you.’ The crab pivoted around on its suckered feet. ‘Reinstate the engines, Remontoire, or I’ll find a way to do it without you.’
It sounded like a bluff, but Remontoire was prepared to believe that overriding his commands was within the capabilities of an Inner Sanctum member. It might not be easy, certainly less easy than having him do what she wanted, but he did not doubt that Skade was capable of it.
‘I will… once you show me what your machinery does.’
‘My machinery?’
Remontoire reached over and prised the crab from the wall, each suckered foot detaching with a soft, faintly comical slurp. He held the crab at eye-level, looking into its tight assemblage of sensors and variegated weapons, daring Skade to hurt him. The little legs thrashed pathetically.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ he said. I want to know what it is, Skade. I want to know what you’ve learned to do.‘
They followed the proxy through Nightshade, navigating twisting grey corridors and vertical interdeck shafts, moving steadily away from the prow of the ship — ‘down’ as far as Remontoire’s inner ear was concerned. The acceleration was now one and three-quarter gees, Remontoire having agreed to reinstate the engines at a low level of thrust. His mental map of the other occupants showed that they were all still crammed into the volume of the ship immediately aft of the prow, and that Felka and he were the only people this far downship. He had yet to discover where Skade’s actual body was; she still had not spoken to him through any other medium than the crab’s voice box, and his usual omniscient knowledge of the ship’s layout had been replaced by a mental map riddled with precisely edited gaps, like the blocked-out text in a classified document.