Instead, she waited while the entire display shuffled to one side and a very similar set of graphics sprang into existence next to it, arrayed around a sliver of similar-looking material, identical at atomic resolution, but showing none of the stress patterning. The compositions, isotopic ratios and lattice properties were identicaclass="underline" lots of fullerenes, knitted into structural allotropes, threading a bafflingly complex matrix of sandwiched metal layers and odd alloys. Spikes of yttrium and scandium, with a whole slew of stable-island transuranic elements in trace quantities, presumably adding some arcane resilience to the shard’s bulk properties. Still, by Volyova’s reckoning, there were stranger substances aboard the ship, and she had synthesised a few of them herself. The splinter was unusual, but it was clearly human technology—the buckytube filaments, in fact, were a typical Demarchist signature, and stable-island transuranics had been in massive vogue in the twenty-fourth and -fifth centuries.
The shard, in fact, looked a lot like the kind of thing a spacecraft hull from that era might have been made of.
The ship seemed to think so too. What was Khouri doing with a piece of hull buried in her? What kind of message had Manoukhian intended by that? Perhaps she was wrong, and this was none of Manoukhian’s doing—just an accident. Unless this had been a very specific spacecraft…
It seemed that it was. The technology was typical for that era, but in every specific, the shard was unique—manufactured to tighter tolerances than would have been required even in a military application. In fact, as Volyova digested the results, it became clear that the shard could only have come from one kind of ship: a contact vessel owned by the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies.
Subtleties of isotopic ratio established that it had come from one ship in particular: the contact vessel that had carried Sylveste to the boundary of Lascaille’s Shroud. For a moment, that discovery was enough for Volyova. There was a circularity about it; confirmation that Khouri’s Mademoiselle really did have some connection with Sylveste. But Khouri already knew that… which meant that the message must be telling them something more profound. Of course, Volyova had already seen what it must be. But for an instant she flinched at the enormity of it. There was no way it could be her, could it? No way she could have survived what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud. But Manoukhian had always told Khouri that he had found his paymistress in space. And it was entirely possible that her disguise of a hermetic masked an injury more savage than anything the plague could have inflicted…
“Show me Carine Lefevre,” Volyova said, retrieving the name of the woman who should have died around the Shroud.
Vast as a goddess, the face of the woman stared down at her. She was young, and from the little of her that was visible below her face, it could be seen that she was dressed in the fashions of the Yellowstone Belle Epoque, the glittering golden age before the Melding Plague. And her face was familiar—not shatteringly so, but enough for Volyova to know she had seen this woman before. She had seen this woman’s face in a dozen historical documentaries, and in every one of them the assumption had been made that she was long dead; murdered by alien forces beyond human comprehension.
Of course. Now it was obvious what caused that stress patterning. The gravitational riptides around Lascaille’s Shroud had squeezed matter until it bled.
Everyone thought Carine Lefevre had died the same way.
“Svinoi,” said Triumvir Ilia Volyova, because now there could be no doubt.
Ever since she was a child, Khouri had noticed that something happened when she touched something that was too hot, like the barrel of a projectile rifle which had just discharged its clip. There would be a flash of premonitory pain, but so brief that it was hardly pain at all; more a warning of true pain which was about to come. And then the premonitory pain would subside, and there would be an instant when there was no sensation at all, and in that instant she would snatch back her hand, away from whatever it was that was too hot. But it would be too late; the true pain was already coming, and there was nothing she could do about it except ready herself for its arrival, like a housekeeper forewarned about the imminent arrival of a guest. Of course, the pain was never so bad, and she had usually withdrawn her hand from whatever was its source, and there would usually not even be a scar afterwards. But it always made her wonder. If the premonitory pain was enough to persuade her to remove the hand—and it always was—what was the purpose of the tsunami of true pain which lagged behind it? Why did it have to come at all, if she had already received the message and removed her hand from harm? When, later, she found out that there was a sound physiological reason for the delay between the two warnings, it still seemed almost spiteful.
That was how she felt now, sitting in the spider-room with Volyova, who had just told her who she thought the face belonged to. Carine Lefevre; that was what she had said. And there had been a flash of premonitory shock, like an echo from the future of what the real shock of it was going to be like. A very faint echo indeed, and then—for an instant—nothing.
And then the true force of it.
“How can it be her?” Khouri said, afterwards, when the shock had not so much subsided as become a normal component of her emotional background noise. “It isn’t possible. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think it makes too much sense,” Volyova said. “I think it fits the facts too well. I think it’s something we can’t ignore.”
“But we all know she died! And not just on Yellowstone, but halfway across colonised space. Ilia, she died, violently. There’s no way it can be her.”
“I think it can. Manoukhian said he found her in space. So perhaps he did. Perhaps he found Carine Lefevre drifting near Lascaille’s Shroud—he might have been looking to salvage something from the wreckage of the SISS facility—and then rescued her and took her back to Yellowstone.” Volyova stopped, but before Khouri could speak, or even think about speaking, the Triumvir was on a roll again. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’d at least have a connection to Sylveste—and maybe even a reason for her wanting him dead.”
“Ilia, I’ve read what happened to her. She was shredded by the gravitational stresses around the Shroud. There wouldn’t have been anything left for Manoukhian to bring home.”
“No… of course not. Unless Sylveste was lying. Remember that we have only Sylveste’s word that any of it happened the way he said it did—none of the recording systems survived the encounter.”
“She didn’t die, is that what you’re saying?”
Volyova raised a hand, the way she always did when Khouri failed to read her mind perfectly.
“No… not necessarily. Perhaps she did die—just not in the way Sylveste had it. And maybe she didn’t die in the way we understand, and perhaps she isn’t really alive, even now—despite what you saw.”
“I didn’t see much of her, did I? Just the box she used to move around in.”
“You assumed she was a hermetic, because she rode something like a hermetic’s palanquin. But that might have been a piece of misdirection on her behalf.”
“She’d have been shredded. Nothing changes that.”
“Perhaps the Shroud didn’t kill her, Khouri. Perhaps something dreadful happened to her, but something kept her alive afterwards. Perhaps something actually saved her.”