Oh yes, he thought—all so neatly predictable. And there was the trap.
“Dan,” said Pascale, who had stirred awake. “It’s late. You need to rest before tomorrow.”
“Was I talking aloud?”
“Like a true madman.” Her eyes moved nervously around the room, alighting on the entoptic map. “Is it really going to happen? It all feels so unreal.”
“Are you talking about this or the Captain?”
“Both, I suppose. It’s not like we can separate them any more. The one depends on the other.” She stopped speaking and he moved from the mat to her bedside, stroking her face, old buried memories stirring, those he had held sacrosanct during all the years of imprisonment on Resurgam. She reciprocated his caress and in minutes they were making love, with all the efficiency of those on the eve of something epochal—knowing that there might never be another moment like this, and that every second was therefore heightened in its preciousness. “The Amarantin have waited long enough,” Pascale said. “And that poor man they want you to help. Can’t we leave both of them alone?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because I don’t like what it’s doing to you. Don’t you feel you’ve been driven here, Dan? Don’t you feel that none of this was really of your own doing?”
“It’s too late to stop now.”
“No! It isn’t, and you know it. Tell Sajaki to turn back now. Offer to do what you can for his Captain if you wish, but I’m sure he’s sufficiently scared of you now that he’ll accede to any terms you propose. Abandon Cerberus/Hades before it does to us what it did to Alicia.”
“They weren’t prepared for the attack. We will be, and that will make all the difference in the world. In fact, we’ll be attacking first.”
“Whatever you’re hoping to find in there, it just isn’t worth this kind of risk.” She held his face in her hands now. “Don’t you understand, Dan? You’ve won. You’ve been vindicated. You’ve got what you always wanted.”
“It isn’t enough.”
She was cold, but she stayed beside him as he passed in and out of shallow dreams. It was never anything that felt like true sleep. She was almost correct. The Amarantin did not have to flock through his mind; not for one night. She wanted him to forget them for eternity. No; that had never been remotely an option—more so now. But even willing them away for a few hours took more strength than he had. His dreams were Amarantin dreams. And whenever he woke, which was often, beyond the curved silhouette of his wife, the walls were alive with interlocking wings, balefully regarding wings, waiting.
For what was on the eve of beginning.
“You won’t feel much,” Sajaki said.
The Triumvir was telling the truth, at least initially. Khouri felt no sensation when the trawl began, except for the slight pressure of the helmet, locking itself rigid against her scalp so that its scanning systems could be targeted with maximum accuracy. She heard faint clicks and whines, but that was alclass="underline" not even the tingling sensation she had half expected.
“This isn’t necessary, Triumvir.”
Sajaki was finessing the trawl parameters, tapping commands into a grotesquely outdated console. Cross-sections of Khouri’s head—quick, low-resolution snapshots—were springing up around him. “Then you have nothing to fear, do you? Nothing to fear at all. It’s a procedure I should have run on you when you were recruited, Khouri. Of course, my colleague was against the idea…”
“Why now? What have I done to make you do this?”
“We’re nearing a critical time, Khouri. I can’t afford not to be able to trust any of my crewmembers totally.”
“But if you fry my implants, I won’t be any use to you at all!”
“Oh; you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Volyova’s little scare stories. She only wanted to keep her little trade secrets from me, in case I decided I could do her job as well as she does.” Her implants were showing up on the scans now; little geometric islands of order amid the amorphous soup of neural structure. Sajaki tapped in commands and the scan image zoomed in on one of the implants. Khouri felt her scalp tingle. Layers of structure peeled away from the implant, exposing its increasingly intricate innards in a series of dizzying enlargements, like a spysat gazing at a city, resolving first districts, then streets and then the details of buildings. Somewhere in that intricacy, stored in some ultimately physical form, was the data from which the Mademoiselle’s simulation sprang.
It had been a long time since her last visitation. Then—in the midst of the storm on Resurgam—the Mademoiselle had told Khouri that she was dying; losing the war against Sun Stealer. Had Sun Stealer won since then, or was the continued silence of the Mademoiselle simply evidence that she was putting all her energies into prolonging the war? Nagorny had gone mad as soon as Sun Stealer established tenancy in his head. Did that still lie ahead for Khouri, or was Sun Stealer’s residency in her going to be more stealthy? Perhaps—it was a disquieting thought—he had learnt from his mistakes with Nagorny. How much of this would be evident to Sajaki, after he had run the trawl?
He had taken her from her quarters; Hegazi there to add back-up. The other Triumvir was gone now, but even if Sajaki had come alone, Khouri would not have considered resisting him. Volyova had already warned her that Sajaki was stronger than he looked, and, adept at close-quarters combat as Khouri was, she had very little doubt that Sajaki would have been better than her.
The trawling room had the atmosphere of a torture chamber. There had been terror here, once—maybe not for decades, but it was not something that could ever be erased. The trawl equipment was ancient, as bulky and monstrous as anything Khouri had seen on the ship so far. Even if the gear had been subtly modified to work better than its original spec, it was never going to be as sophisticated as the kind of trawls her side’s intelligence wing had possessed on Sky’s Edge. Sajaki’s trawl was the kind that left a trail of neural damage behind as it scanned, like a frantic burglar ransacking a house. It was scarcely more advanced than the destructive scanning machines which Cal Sylveste had used during the Eighty… perhaps less so.
But he had her now. He was already learning things about her implants… unravelling their structures, reading out their data. Once he had those, he would adjust the trawl to resolve cortical patterns, pulling webs of neuronal connectivity from her skull. Khouri knew a lot about trawling just by knowing people in intelligence. Embedded in those topologies lay longterm memories and personality traits, tangled together in ways that were not easy to separate. But if Sajaki’s equipment was not the best, chances were good that he had excellent algorithms to distil memory traces. Over centuries, statistical models had studied patterns of memory storage in ten billion human minds, correlating structure against experience. Certain impressions tended to be reflected in similar neural structures—internal qualia—which were the functional blocks out of which more complex memories were assembled. Those qualia were never the same from mind to mind, except in very rare cases, but neither were they encoded in radically different ways, since nature would never deviate far from the minimum-energy route to a particular solution. The statistical models could identify those qualia patterns very efficiently, and then map the connections between them out of which memories were forged. All Sajaki had to do was identify enough qualia structures, map enough hierarchical linkages between them, and then let his algorithms chew through them, and there would be nothing about her that he could not in principle know. He could sift through her memories at leisure.