An alarm sounded. Sajaki glanced up at one of the displays, seeing how Khouri’s implants were now glowing red; red which was leaking into surrounding brain areas.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Inductive heat,” Sajaki said, unconcernedly. “Your implants are getting a little hot.”
“Shouldn’t you stop?”
“Oh; not yet. Volyova would have hardened them against EM pulse attack, I think. A little thermal overload won’t do any irreversible damage.”
“But my head hurts… it doesn’t feel right.”
“I’m sure you can take it, Khouri.”
The migrainous pressure had come from nowhere, but it was really quite unbearable now, as if Sajaki had her head in a vice and was screwing it tighter. The heat build-up in her skull must be a lot worse than the scans suggested. Doubtless Sajaki—who must seldom have had the best interests of his clients at heart—had calibrated the displays not to show lethal brain temperature until it was already much too late…
“No, Yuuji-san. She can’t take it. Get her out of that thing.”
The voice, miraculously, was Volyova’s. Sajaki looked to the door. He must have been aware of her entrance long before Khouri, but even now he only affected a look of bored indifference.
“What is it, Ilia?”
“You know exactly what it is. Stop the trawl before you kill her.” Volyova stepped into view now. Her tone of voice had been authoritative, but Khouri could see that she was unarmed.
“I haven’t learned anything useful yet,” Sajaki said. “I need a few more minutes…”
“A few more minutes and she’ll be dead.” With typical pragmatism, she added: “And her implants will be damaged beyond repair.”
Perhaps the second thing worried Sajaki more than the first. He made a tiny adjustment to the trawl. The red hue faded to a less alarming pink. “I thought these implants would be adequately hardened.”
“They’re just prototypes, Yuuji-san.” Volyova stepped closer to the displays and surveyed them for herself. “Oh, no… you fool, Sajaki. You damned fool. I swear you may have already damaged them.” It was as if she were talking to herself.
Sajaki waited silently for a moment. Khouri wondered if he was going to lash out and kill Volyova in an eyeblink of furious motion. But then, scowling, the Triumvir snapped the trawl controls to their off settings, watched the displays pop out of existence, then hoisted the helmet off Khouri’s head.
“Your tone of voice—and choice of wording—was inappropriate there, Triumvir,” Sajaki said. Khouri saw his hand slip into his trouser pocket and finger something—something that, for an instant, looked like a hypodermic syringe.
“You nearly destroyed our Gunnery Officer,” Volyova said.
Tm not finished with her. Or you, for that matter. You rigged something to this trawl, didn’t you, Ilia? Something to alert you when it was running? Very clever.”
“I did it to protect a shipboard resource.”
“Yes, of course…” Sajaki left his answer hanging in the air, its threat implicit, and then quietly walked out of the trawl room.
TWENTY-THREE
It was, Sylveste thought, a situation of disturbing symmetry. In a matter of hours Volyova’s cache-weapons would begin to combat the buried immunological systems of Cerberus; virus against virus, tooth against tooth. And here, on the eve of that attack, Sylveste was preparing to go to war against the Melding Plague which was consuming—or, depending on one’s point of view, grotesquely enlarging—Volyova’s afflicted Captain. The symmetry seemed to hint at an underlying order to which he was only partly privy. It was not a feeling he enjoyed; like being a participant in a game and realising, halfway through, that the rules were far more complicated than he had so far imagined.
In order that Calvin’s beta-level simulation be allowed to work through him, Sylveste had to slip into a state of ambulatory semi-consciousness akin to sleepwalking. Calvin would puppet him, receiving sensory input directly through Sylveste’s own eyes and ears, tapping directly into his nervous system to achieve mobility. He would even speak through Sylveste. The neuro-inhibitor drugs had already kicked him into a queasy full-body paralysis; as unpleasant as he remembered from the last time.
Sylveste thought of himself as a machine in which Calvin was about to become the ghost…
His hands worked the medical analysis tools, skirting the periphery of the growth. It was dangerous to stray too close to the heart; too high a risk of plague transmission into his own implants. At some point—this session, or perhaps the next—they would have to skirt the heart; that was inevitable, but Sylveste did not really want to think about that. For now, when they needed to work closer, Calvin used the simple, mindless drones which were slaved from elsewhere in the ship, but even those tools were susceptible. One drone had malfunctioned close to the Captain, and was even now being enmeshed in fine, fibrous plague tendrils. Even though the machine contained no molecular components, it still seemed that it was of use to the plague; still able to be digested into the Captain’s transformative matrix; fuel for his fever. Calvin was having to resort to cruder instruments now, but this was only a stopgap: at some point—soon now, undoubtedly—they would have to hit the plague with the only thing which could really work against it: something very like itself.
Sylveste could feel Calvin’s thought processes churning somewhere behind his own. It was nothing that could be called consciousness—the simulation which was running his body was no more than mimesis, but somewhere in the interfacing with his own nervous system… it was as if something had arisen, something which was riding that chaotic edge. The theories and his own prejudices denied that, of course—but what other explanation could there be for the sense of divided self Sylveste felt? He did not dare ask if Calvin experienced something similar, and would not necessarily have trusted any answer he received.
“Son,” Calvin said. “There’s something I’ve waited until now before discussing. I’m rather worried about it, but I didn’t want to discuss it in front of, well… our clients.”
Sylveste knew that only he could hear Calvin’s voice. He had to subvocalise to respond, Calvin momentarily relinquishing vocal control to his host. “This isn’t the time, either. In case you weren’t paying attention, we’re in the middle of an operation.”
“It’s the operation I want to talk about.”
“Make it quick, in that case.”
“I don’t think we’re meant to succeed.”
Sylveste observed that his hands—driven by Calvin—had not ceased working during this last exchange. He was conscious of Volyova, who was standing nearby, awaiting instructions. He subvocalised, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I think Sajaki is a very dangerous man.”
“Great—that makes two of us. But it hasn’t stopped you co-operating with him.”
“I was grateful to begin with,” Calvin admitted. “He saved me, after all. But then I started wondering how things must seem from his side. I began to wonder if he wasn’t just a touch insane. It struck me that any sane man would have left the Captain for dead years ago. The Sajaki I knew last time was fiercely loyal, but at least then there was some sense to his crusade. At least then there was a hope we could save the Captain.