“So what was the statue?”
Pascale told them the rest; how the renegade flock became known as the Banished Ones; how they effectively disappeared from Amarantin history for thousands of years.
“If I can interject a theory at this point,” Volyova said, “is it possible that the Banished Ones went away to a quiet corner of the planet and invented technology?”
“Dan thought so. He thought they went the whole way—until they had the power to leave Resurgam entirely. And then one day—not long before the Event—they came back, but by then they were like gods compared to those who had stayed behind. And that was what the statue was—something raised in honour of the new gods.”
“Gods who became angels?” Khouri asked.
“Genetic engineering,” Pascale said, with conviction. “They could never have flown, even with those wings they gave themselves, but then again, they’d already left gravity behind; become spacefaring.”
“What happened?”
“Much later—centuries afterwards, or even thousands of years—Sun Stealer’s people returned to Resurgam. It was almost the end. We can’t resolve the archaeological timescale, it’s so short. But it’s as if they brought it with them.”
“Brought what?” Khouri said.
“The Event. Whatever it was that ended life on Resurgam.”
As they trudged through the effluent which lay ankle-deep along the corridor floor, Khouri said, “Is there a way to stop your weapon reaching Cerberus? I mean, you still have control of it, don’t you?”
“Be quiet!” Volyova hissed. “Anything we say down here…” She trailed off, pointing to the walls, presumably indicating all manner of concealed spy devices; part of the surveillance web she believed Sajaki controlled.
“Might get back to the rest of the Triumvirate. So what?” Khouri kept her voice low—no point in taking needless risks, but she spoke anyway. “The way things are going, we’re going to be openly resisting them before too long. My guess is Sajaki’s listening network isn’t as comprehensive as you think, anyway—that’s what Sudjic said. Even if it is, he’s likely to be preoccupied right now.”
“Dangerous, very dangerous.” But perhaps recognising the sense in what Khouri had said—that at some very imminent time subterfuge would have to become rebellion—she elevated the cuff of her jacket to reveal her bracelet, glowing with schematics and slowly updating numerics. “I can control almost everything with this. But what good does it do me? Sajaki’ll kill me if he thinks I’m trying to sabotage the operation—and he’ll know the instant the weapon deviates from its intended course. And let’s not forget that Sylveste is holding all of us to ransom—I don’t know how he’d react.”
“Badly, I suspect—but that doesn’t change anything.”
Now Pascale spoke. “He won’t do what he’s been threatening. There’s nothing in his eyes; he told me. But because Sajaki could never be sure—because it was possible—Dan said he was sure it would work.”
“And you’re absolutely certain he wasn’t lying to you?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“A perfectly legitimate one, under the circumstances. I fear Sajaki, but I can confront him with force if the need arises. But not your husband.”
“It never happened,” Pascale said. “Trust me on that.”
“Like we’ve got a choice,” Khouri said. They had arrived at an elevator; the door opened and they had to step up to reach the elevator’s floor. Khouri kicked the slime from her boots, hammered the wall and said, “Ilia, you have to stop that thing. If it reaches Cerberus, we’re all dead. That’s what the Mademoiselle knew all along; that’s why she wanted to kill Sylveste. Because she knew that, one way or another, he was going to try and get there. Now, I haven’t got all of this straight in my head, but I do know one thing. The Mademoiselle knew it was going to be really bad news for all of us if he ever succeeded. And I mean really bad news.”
The elevator was rising now, but Volyova had not stated their destination.
“It’s like Sun Stealer was pushing him on,” Pascale said. “Putting ideas in his head, shaping his destiny.”
“Ideas?” Khouri asked.
“Like coming here in the first place—to this system.” Volyova was animated now. “Khouri; don’t you remember how we retrieved that recording of Sylveste from ship’s memory, from when he was last aboard?” Khouri nodded; she remembered it well enough: how she had looked into the eyes of the recorded Sylveste and imagined killing the real man. “And how he dropped hints that he was already thinking of the Resurgam expedition? And that bothered us because there was no logical way he could know about the Amarantin? Well, now it makes perfect sense. Pascale’s right. It was Sun Stealer, already in his head, pushing him here. I don’t think he even knew it was happening himself, but Sun Stealer was in control, all that time.”
Khouri said, “It’s like Sun Stealer and the Mademoiselle are fighting each other, but they need to use us to wage their war. Sun Stealer’s some kind of software entity, and she’s confined to Yellowstone, in her palanquin… so they’ve been pulling our strings, puppeting us against each other.”
“I think you’re right,” Volyova said. “Sun Stealer has me worried. Deeply worried. We haven’t heard from him since the cache-weapon went up.”
Khouri said nothing. What she knew was that Sun Stealer had entered her head during her last session in the gunnery. Later, during her final visitation, the Mademoiselle had appeared to tell her that Sun Stealer was consuming her; that he would inevitably overwhelm her in hours or—at most—-days. Yet that had been weeks earlier. According to her estimated rate of losses, the Mademoiselle should be now be dead, and Sun Stealer victorious. Yet nothing had changed. If anything, her head had been quieter than at any time since she had been revived around Yellowstone. No damn Shadowplay proximity implant; no damn midnight apparitions from the Mademoiselle. It was as if Sun Stealer had died just as he triumphed. Not that Khouri believed that, and his utter absence was all the more stressing; heightening the waiting until—as she was sure would happen—he appeared. And somehow she sensed he would be even less pleasant company than her previous lodger.
“Why should he show his face?” Pascale said. “He’s almost won, in any case.”
“Almost won,” Volyova agreed. “But what we’re about to do might make him intervene. I think we should be ready for that—you especially, Khouri. You know he found his way into Boris Nagorny, and you can take it from me, it wasn’t nice knowing either of them.”
“Maybe you should lock me up now, before it’s too late.” Khouri hadn’t given the statement much thought, but she said it with deadly seriousness. “I mean it, Ilia—I’d rather you did that than be forced into shooting me later.”
“I’d love to do that,” said her mentor. “But it isn’t as if we’re already vastly outnumbering the others. At the moment it’s the three of us against Sajaki and Hegazi—and God only knows whose side Sylveste will choose, if it comes to that.”
Pascale said nothing.
They reached the warchive, the destination Volyova had always had in mind, though she had said nothing until they arrived. Khouri had never been to this sector of the ship, but she did not need to have it identified to her. She had been in plenty of armouries before and there was a smell to them.
“This is some heavy shit we’re getting ourselves into,” she said. “Right?”
The vast oblong room constituted the display and dispensary section of the warchive, with somewhere in the region of a thousand weapons racked for immediate use. Tens of thousands more could be manufactured in short order, assembled according to blueprints distributed holographically through the mass of the ship.