“Sylveste would know.”
“Even if he doesn’t admit it to himself. We have to talk to him, I think—here, where we won’t be bothered by Sajaki.” Volyova had hardly finished speaking when her bracelet chirped and filled with a human face, eyes lost behind blank globes. “Speak of the devil,” Volyova murmured. “What is it, Calvin? You are Calvin, aren’t you?”
“For now,” the man said. “Though I fear my usefulness to Sajaki may be coming to an ignominious end.”
“What are you talking about?” Quickly she added: “There’s something I have to discuss with Dan; it’s rather on the urgent side, if you’d oblige.”
“I think what I have to say is more urgent,” Calvin said. “It’s your counteragent, Volyova. The retrovirus you fabricated.”
“What about it?”
“It doesn’t seem to be working quite as intended.” He took a step backwards; Khouri glimpsed part of the Captain behind him, silvery and muculent, like a statue covered with a palimpsest of snail tracks.
“As a matter of fact, it seems to be killing him faster.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Sylveste did not have long to wait. When Volyova arrived, she was accompanied by Khouri; the woman who had saved Volyova’s life on the surface. If Volyova was something of a rogue variable in his plans then Khouri was worse, because he had not so far ascertained where her loyalties lay; whether to Volyova or Sajaki, or somewhere else entirely. But for now he suppressed his concerns, sharing Calvin’s urgency.
“What do you mean, it’s killing him faster?”
“I mean just that,” Calvin made him say, before either of the two women had drawn breath. “We administered it according to your instructions. But it’s as if we’ve given the plague a massive shot in the arm. It’s spreading faster than ever. If I didn’t know better I’d say your retrovirus has actually helped it.”
“Damn,” Volyova said. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a wearying few hours.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“I tested the counteragent against small samples of isolated plague,” she said defensively. “It worked against them. I couldn’t promise it would work against the main body of the plague so effectively… but at the very least, in the worst possible scenario… I assumed it would have some effect, however limited. The plague has to expend some of its resources against the counteragent; there’s no getting around that. It has to direct some of the energy it would ordinarily use for expansion into resisting the agent. I hoped it would kill it—subvert it, I mean, into a form we could manipulate—but even when I was being pessimistic, I assumed the plague would catch a cold; that it would slow down perceptibly.”
“That’s not what we’re seeing,” Calvin said.
“But she has a point,” Khouri said, and Sylveste felt himself glare at her, as if questioning the very reason for her existence.
“What are you seeing?” Volyova asked. “You understand, I’m more than a little curious.”
“We’ve stopped administering,” Calvin said. “So for now the growth has stabilised. But when we gave the Captain the counteragent, he spread faster. It was as if he were incorporating the mass of the counteragent into his matrix more rapidly than he could convert the substrate of the ship.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Volyova said. “The ship doesn’t even resist the plague. For him to spread faster… that would mean that the counteragent was giving itself over to him; converting itself faster than the plague could subvert it.”
“Like frontline soldiers defecting before they’ve even heard any propaganda,” Khouri said.
“Exactly like that,” Volyova said, and for the first time, Sylveste sensed something between the two women, something suspiciously like mutual respect. “But that just isn’t possible. For that to happen, the plague would have to have hijacked the replication routines almost without trying—almost as if they were willingly hijacked. I’m telling you, it isn’t possible.”
“Well, try it for yourself.”
“No thanks. It isn’t that I don’t believe you, but you have to see it from my side. From my point of view—and I engineered the damn thing—it doesn’t make much sense.”
“There is something,” Calvin said.
“What?”
“Could sabotage have done this? I told you already that we think someone doesn’t want this operation to succeed. You know who I’m talking about.” He was being circumspect now, unwilling to say too much in Khouri’s presence, or within range of Sajaki’s listening systems. “Could your counteragent have been tampered with?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said. Sylveste had not administered all of the vial Volyova had given him, so she was able to run a check on the molecular structure of that sample and the other batches which remained in her laboratory, using the same tools she had employed on Khouri’s splinter. When she compared the sample against her lab batches, they were identical, within the normal boundaries of quantum accuracy. The sample Calvin had given to the Captain was exactly as she had intended it to be, down to the humblest chemical bond linking the least significant atoms in the smallest and least essential molecular component…
Volyova checked the counteragent’s structure against her records, and observed that it had not deviated from the blueprint she had held in her head for subjective years. It was exactly as she had planned it. Her virus had not been tampered with; its teeth had not been pulled. So much for Calvin’s sabotage theory. She felt a surge of relief—she had not really wanted to believe that Sajaki was actually hampering the whole process; the notion that he might be consciously prolonging the Captain’s illness was too hideous, and she was glad when examination of the counteragent gave her a justification for flushing the idea of sabotage from her mind. She still had misgivings about Sajaki, of course; but there was at least no evidence that he had become something as monstrous as that.
But there was another possibility.
Volyova left the lab and returned to the Captain, cursing herself for not thinking of this earlier and sparing herself the runaround. Sylveste asked what she was doing now. She looked at him for long moments before speaking. Yes, there was a connection with Lascaille’s Shroud; she was sure of that. Was it purely revenge on the Mademoiselle’s part—in payment for his cowardice, or treachery, or whatever it was that had almost killed her in the Shroud boundary? Or did it go beyond that, connected in some way with the aliens themselves; the ancient, protective minds Lascaille had touched during his own flyby? Was it human spite they were dealing with here, or some imperative as alien and old as the Shrouders themselves? There was much she needed to discuss with Sylveste—but it would have to be in the sanctuary of the spider-room.
“I need another sample,” she said. “From the infection boundary, where you administered the counteragent.” And she fished out her laser-curette, made the deft light-guided incisions and popped the sample—it felt like a metallic scab—into a waiting autoclave.
“What about the counteragent? Was it altered?”
“It hadn’t been touched,” she said. Then she turned down the curette’s yield and used it to scratch in tiny letters a quick message in the ship’s fabric, just ahead of the Captain’s encroachment. Long before Sajaki stood a chance of reading it, the Captain would have flowed over it like an erasing tide.
“What are you doing?” Sylveste said.
But before the man could ask anything else, she was gone.