“Something unexpected from the weapon—a fatal malfunction would do very nicely.”
“Then you really don’t want this to succeed, do you?” Pascale said. “A few days ago you were gloating over that thing like it was your finest hour. This is quite some turnaround.”
“That was before I knew who the Mademoiselle was. If I’d had any idea earlier…” Volyova found herself running out of anything to say. It was obvious now that using the weapon was an act of almost staggering recklessness—but would knowing that have altered a thing? Would she have felt compelled to make the weapon just because she could; just because it was elegant and she wanted her peers to see what fabulous creatures could spring forth from her mind; what Byzantine engines of war? The thought that she might have done so was sickening, but—in its own way—entirely plausible. She would have given birth to the bridgehead and hoped that she could prevent it completing its mission at some later point. She would, in short, have been in exactly the position in which she now found herself.
The bridgehead—the converted Lorean—was nearing Cerberus now, slowing as it did so. By the time it touched Cerberus it would be moving no faster than a bullet, but it would be a bullet massing millions of tonnes. If the bridgehead hit an ordinary planetary surface at that speed, its kinetic energy would be converted into heat rather efficiently: there would be a colossal explosion and her toy would be destroyed in a flash. But Cerberus was not a normal planet. Her assumption—backed up by endless simulations—was that the sheer grinding bulk of the weapon would be sufficient to push it through the thin layer of artificial crust overlaying the world’s interior. Once it had thrust below that, once it had impaled the world, she had no real idea what it would encounter.
And now that scared her beyond words. Intellectual vanity had brought Sylveste to this point—and something else, perhaps—but she was not unguilty of obeying the same unquestioning drive. She wished she had taken the project less seriously; made the bridgehead less likely to succeed. It terrified her to think what would happen if her child did not disappoint her.
“Had I known…” she said, finally. “I don’t know. But I didn’t, so what does it matter?”
“If you’d listened to me,” Khouri said, “I told you we had to stop this madness. But my word wasn’t good enough; you had to let it come to this.”
“I was hardly going to confront Sajaki on the basis of a vision you had in the gunnery. He’d have killed both of us, I’m sure of it.” Although now, she thought, they might have to move against Sajaki anyway—they could only do so much from the spider-room, and soon that might not be nearly enough.
“You could have decided to trust me,” Khouri said.
If circumstances had been any different, Volyova thought, she might have hit Khouri at the point. Instead, mildly, she answered, “You can talk to me about trust when you haven’t lied and cheated your way aboard my ship, but not before.”
“What did you expect me to do? The Mademoiselle had my husband.”
“Did she?” Volyova leant forward now. “Do you know that for sure, Khouri? I mean, did you ever meet him, or was that another of the Mademoiselle’s little deceptions? Memories can be implanted easily enough, can’t they?”
Khouri’s voice was soft now; as if there had never been an angry word between the two of them. “What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe he never made it, Khouri. Did you ever consider that? Maybe he never left Yellowstone; the way you always believed it had happened.”
Pascale pushed her face between the two of them. “Look, stop arguing, will you? If something awful is going to happen here, the last thing we need is division amongst ourselves. In case it has escaped your attention, I’m the only person on this ship who didn’t ask or want to come aboard.”
“Yeah, well that’s just tough luck,” Khouri said.
Pascale glared at her. “Well maybe what I just said wasn’t all true. I am after something. I’ve got a husband as well, and I don’t want him to hurt himself—or anyone around him—just because of something he wants so bad. And that’s why I need you now—both of you, because you seem to be the only two around here who feel the same way I do.”
“How do you feel?” Volyova asked.
“That none of this is right,” she said. “Not from the moment you mentioned that name.”
Volyova didn’t have to ask what name Pascale meant. “You acted as if you recognised it.”
“We did—both of us. Sun Stealer’s an Amarantin name; one of their gods, or mythic figures—maybe even a real historical individual. But Dan was too pigheaded—or perhaps too scared—to admit it.”
Volyova checked her bracelet again, but there was still no news. Then she waited while Pascale told her story. She told it well; there was no preamble, no scene-setting, and with the few carefully chosen facts which Pascale deployed, Volyova found herself visualising all that was necessary; events sketched with artful economy. She could see now why Pascale had helmed Sylveste’s biography. What she had to say concerned the Amarantin, the extinct avian-descended creatures who had lived on Resurgam. By now the crew had absorbed enough knowledge from Sylveste to place this story in its proper context, but it was still disturbing to find a connection to the Amarantin. After all, Volyova had found it troubling enough to think that her problems were in some way associated with the Shrouders. At least there the causality was clear enough. But how did the Amarantin fit into everything? How could there be a link between two radically different alien species, both now long since vanished from galactic affairs? Even the timescales were in radical disagreement: according to what Lascaille had told Sylveste, the Shrouders had vanished—perhaps by retreating into their spheres of restructured spacetime—millions of years before the Amarantin had ever evolved, taking with them artefacts and techniques too hazardous to be left within the reach of less experienced species. That, after all, was what had driven Sylveste and Lefevre to the Shroud boundary: the lure of that stored knowledge. The Shrouders were as alien in form as anything in human experience—carapacial, multi-limbed things brewed from nightmares. The Amarantin, by contrast, with their avian ancestry and four-limbed, bipedal body-plan, were less shatteringly alien.
Yet Sun Stealer showed a link. The ship had never before visited Resurgam; had never had aboard it anyone openly familiar with any aspect of the Amarantin—and yet Sun Stealer had been part of Volyova’s life for subjective years, and several decades of planetary time. Sylveste was clearly the key—but any kind of logical connection steadfastly refused to reveal itself to Volyova.
Pascale continued, while an unsupervised part of Volyova’s mind raced ahead and tried to fit things into some kind of order. Pascale was talking about the buried city; a vast Amarantin structure discovered during Sylveste’s imprisonment. About how the city’s central feature, a huge spire, had been surmounted by an entity which was not quite Amarantin, but looked like the Amarantin analog of an angel—except that this was an angel designed by someone with a scrupulous attention to the limits of anatomy. An angel that almost looked like it could fly.
“And that was Sun Stealer?” Khouri asked, awed.
“I don’t know,” Pascale said. “All we know is that the original Sun Stealer was just an ordinary Amarantin, but one who formed a renegade flock—a renegade social clade, if you like. We think they were experimentalists, studying the nature of the world; questioners of myth. Dan had this theory that Sun Stealer was interested in optics; that he made mirrors and lenses; literally, that he stole the sun. He may also have experimented with flight; simple machines and gliders. Whatever it was, it was heresy.”