‘But he’s even less likely to trust us if we keep finding excuses for why he can’t come aboard…’
‘He’ll just have to deal with them.’
Volyova waited for a response, and waited, and then noticed that there no longer appeared to be anyone on the other side of the gap. The hard blue light that had been coming from Khouri’s suit was gone, and no hand was on the tool.
‘Khouri…?’ she said, beginning to lose her calm again.
‘Ilia…’ Khouri’s voice came through weakly, as if she were fighting for breath. ‘I think I have a slight problem.’
‘Shit.’ Volyova reached for the end of the crowbar and tugged it through to her side of the hatch. She braced herself and then worked the gap wider, until it was just wide enough for her to push her helmet through. In intermittent flashes she saw Khouri falling into the darkness, her suit harness tumbling away from her. Crouched on the side of the weapon she also saw the belligerent lines of a heavy-construction servitor. The mantislike machine must have been under the Captain’s direct control.
‘You vicious bastard! It was me who broke into the weapon, not her…’
Khouri was very distant now, perhaps halfway to the far wall. How fast was she moving? Three or four metres per second, perhaps. It was not fast, but her suit’s armour was not designed to protect her against impacts. If she hit badly…
Volyova worked harder, forcing the hatch open inch by painful inch. Dully, she realised that she was not going to make it in time. It was taking too long. Khouri would reach the wall long before Volyova freed herself.
‘Captain… you’ve really done it now.’
She pushed harder. The crowbar slipped from her fingers, whacked the side of her helmet and went spinning into the dark depths of the machine. Volyova hissed her anger, knowing that she did not have time to go searching for the lost tool. The hatch was wide enough to wriggle through now, but to do so she would have to abandon her harness and life-support pack. She could survive long enough to fend for herself, but there would be no way to save Khouri.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit… shit… shit.’
The hatch slid open.
Volyova climbed through the hole and kicked off from the side of the weapon, leaving the servitor behind. There was no time to reflect on what had just happened, except to acknowledge that only Seventeen or the Captain could have made the hatch open.
She had her helmet drop a radar overlay over her faceplate. Volyova rotated and then got an echo from Khouri. Her fall was taking her through the long axis of the chamber, through a gallery of menacing stacked weapons. Judging by her trajectory she must have already glanced against one of the monorail tracks that threaded the chamber.
‘Khouri… are you still alive?’
‘I’m still here, Ilia…’ But she sounded as if she had been hurt. ‘I can’t stop myself.’
‘You don’t have to. I’m on my way.’
Volyova jetted after her, zooming between weapons that were both familiar to her and yet still quietly mysterious. The radar echo assumed definition and shape, becoming a tumbling human figure. Behind it, looming closer and closer, was the far wall. Volyova checked her own speed relative to it: six metres per second. Khouri could not have been moving much slower than that.
Volyova squirted more thrust from her harness. Ten… twenty metres per second. She saw Khouri now, grey and doll-like, with one arm flopping limply into space. The figure swelled. Volyova applied reverse thrust in incremental stabs, feeling the frame creak at the unusual load it was being expected to distribute. Fifty metres from Khouri… forty. She looked in a bad way: a human arm was definitely not meant to articulate that way.
Tlia… that wall’s coming up awfully fast.‘
‘So am I. Hold on. There may be a slight…’ They thumped together. ‘… impact.’
Mercifully, the collision had not thrown Khouri off on another trajectory. Volyova held on to her by her unharmed arm just long enough to unwind a line and fasten it to Khouri’s belt and then let her go. The wall was visible now, no more than fifty metres away.
Volyova braked, her thumb hard down on the thruster toggle, ignoring the protestations from the suit’s subpersona. The line tethering Khouri extended to maximum tautness, Khouri hanging between her and the wall. But they were slowing. The wall was not rushing towards them with quite the same sense of inevitability.
‘Are you all right?’ Volyova asked.
I think I may have broken something. How did you get out of the weapon? When the machine flicked me off, the hatch was still nearly shut.‘
I managed to get it open a little wider. But I had some help, I think.‘
‘The Captain?’
‘Possibly. But I don’t know if it means he’s fully on our side after all.’ She concentrated on flying for a moment, keeping the tether taut as she swung around. The pale green ghosts of the thirty-three cache weapons loomed on her radar; she plotted a course through them back to the airlock.
I still don’t know why he set the servitor on you,‘ Volyova said. Maybe he wanted to warn us off rather than kill us. As you say, he could have killed us already. Just possibly he prefers to have us around.’
‘You’re reading a lot into one hatch.’
‘That’s why I don’t think we should count on the Captain’s assistance, Khouri.’
‘No?’
‘There’s someone else we could ask for help,’ Volyova said. ‘We could ask Sylveste.’
‘Oh no.’
‘You met him once before, inside Hades.’
‘Ilia, I had to die to get inside that fucking thing. It’s not something I’m going to do twice.’
‘Sylveste has access to the stored knowledge of the Amarantin. He might know of a suitable response to the Inhibitor threat, or at the very least have some idea of how long we have left to come up with one. His information could be vital, Ana, even if he can’t help us in a material sense.’
‘No way, Ilia.’
‘You don’t actually remember dying, do you? And you’re fine now. There were no ill effects.’
Khouri’s voice was very weak, like someone mumbling on the edge of sleep. ‘You fucking do it, if it’s that easy.’
Presently — and not a moment too soon — Volyova saw the pale rectangle which marked the airlock. She approached it slowly, winding Khouri in and depositing her first into the lock. By then the injured woman was unconscious.
Volyova pulled herself in, closed the door behind them and waited for the lock to pressurise. When the air pressure had reached nine-tenths of a bar she wrenched her own helmet off, her ears popping, and flicked sweat-drenched hair from her eyes. The biomedical displays on Khouri’s suit were all in the green: nothing to worry about. All she had to do now was drag her to somewhere where she could get medical attention.
The door into the rest of the ship irised open. She pushed herself towards it, hoping she had the strength to haul Khouri’s dead weight along behind her.
‘Wait.’
The voice was calm and familiar, yet it was not one she had heard in a long time. It reminded her of unspeakable cold, of a place where the other crewmembers had feared to tread. It was coming from the wall of the chamber, hollowly resonant.
‘Captain?’ she said.
‘Yes, Ilia. It’s me. I’m ready to talk now.’
Skade led Felka and Remontoire down into the bowels of Nightshade, deep into the realm of influence of her machinery. By turns, Remontoire started to feel light-headed and feverish. At first he thought it was his imagination, but then his pulse started racing and his heart thundered in his chest. The sensations worsened with every level that they descended, as if they were lowering themselves into an invisible fog of psychotropic gas.
Something’s happening.
The head snapped around to look at him, while the ebony servitor continued striding forwards. [Yes. We’re well into the field now. It wouldn’t be safe for us to descend much further, not without medical support. The physiological effects become quite upsetting. Another ten vertical metres, then we’ll call it a day.]