Sylveste arrived at the ship’s medical centre, Sajaki increasingly heavy against his shoulders. The man seemed to weigh far too much for his lean frame. Sylveste wondered if it was because of the sheer mass of machines streaming through his blood; waiting dormant in every cell, biding their time until a crisis such as this stirred them to life. Sajaki was hot too; feverishly so—perhaps evidence that the medichines had gone into an emergency breeding frenzy, building up their forces to deal with the situation, conscripting molecules from the man’s “normal’ tissue until the hazard was averted. When Sylveste glanced reluctantly at the Triumvir’s ruined wrist, he saw that the blood had stopped flowing, and the dreadful circumferential wound was now enveloped in a membranous caul. A faint amber luminosity shone through the tissue.
Servitors emerged from the centre as he approached, taking the burden from him, lofting Sajaki to a couch. The machines fussed over him for a few minutes, swanlike monitors angling over the bed; various neural monitors settled gently over his scalp. They did not seem overly concerned by the wound. Perhaps the medical systems were already communicating with his medichines, and there was no need for further intervention at this stage. He was still conscious, Sylveste observed, despite his weakness.
“You should never have trusted Volyova,” he said angrily. “Now everything’s ruined because she had too much power. That was a fatal mistake, Sajaki.”
His voice was barely there. “Of course we trusted her. She was one of us, you fool! Part of the Triumvirate!” Then he added, in a croak, “What is it you know about Khouri?”
“She was an infiltrator,” Sylveste said. “Put aboard this ship to find me and kill me.”
Sajaki reacted to this as if it were only mildly diverting. “That’s all?”
“That’s all I believed. I don’t know who sent her, or why—but she had some absurd justification, which Volyova and my wife seem to have taken as the literal truth.”
“It isn’t over yet,” Sajaki said, his eyes wide, rimmed in yellow.
“What do you mean, it isn’t over?”
“I just know,” Sajaki said, and then closed his eyes, relaxing back into the couch. “Nothing is finished.”
“He’s going to survive,” Sylveste said, entering the bridge, obviously unaware of what had just taken place.
He looked around him, and Volyova could imagine his confusion. Superficially, nothing had changed in the time it had taken him to escort Sajaki to the infirmary—the same people holding the same guns, but the mood had undergone a dire transition. Hegazi, for instance, despite being on the wrong end of Khouri’s needler, did not wear the expression of a man on the defeated side. Neither, however, did he look particularly jubilant.
It’s out of all our hands now, Volyova thought, and Hegazi knows it.
“Something went wrong, didn’t it?” Sylveste said, who had by then taken in the view of Cerberus on the display, with its ruptured crust bleeding into space. “Your weapons actually opened fire, just as we wanted.”
“Sorry,” Volyova said, shaking her head. “It was none of my doing.”
“You’d better listen to her,” Pascale said. “Whatever’s going on here, we don’t want any part of it. It’s bigger than us, Dan. Bigger than you, anyway—hard as that may be to believe.”
He looked scornful. “Haven’t you realised yet? This is exactly how Volyova wanted it to happen.”
“You’re mad,” Volyova said.
“Now you get your chance,” Sylveste said. “You get to see your planet-penetrator in action, while at the same time salving your conscience with this conveniently unsuccessful display of eleventh-hour caution.” He clapped his hands twice. “No; honestly—I’m genuinely impressed.”
“You’ll be genuinely dead,” Volyova said.
But while she hated him for saying what he had said, there was part of her which refused easy denial. She would have done anything in her power to stop the weapons from completing their mission—hell; she had done everything in her power, and none of it had worked. Even if she had not given the order to release them from the ship, Sun Stealer would surely have found a way; she was sure of that. But now that the attack had taken place, a kind of fatalistic curiosity had settled over her. The bridgehead’s arrival would proceed as planned, unless she could find a way of stopping it, and thus far she had tried everything she knew. And therefore, because there was no way of preventing it from happening, a detached part of her was beginning to look forward to the event, tantalised not just by what would be learnt, but how well her child would endure its trials. Whatever happened, she knew—no matter how fearful the consequences might be—it could not help but be the most fascinating thing she had ever witnessed. And perhaps the most terrible.
There was nothing to do now except wait.
The hours passed neither swiftly nor slowly, because this was an event she was dreading as much as longing for. One thousand kilometres above Cerberus, the bridgehead commenced its final braking phase. The brilliance of the two Conjoiner drives was like a pair of miniature suns flaring into ignition above Cerberus, shocking the landscape into stark clarity, craters and ravines assuming enormously exaggerated prominence. For a moment, under that merciless glare, the world really did look artefactual; as if its makers had striven too hard to make Cerberus look weathered by aeons of bombardment.
On her bracelet now she was seeing images recorded from the downlooking cameras studded around the bridgehead’s flanks. There were rings of cameras every hundred metres along the length of the four-kilometre cone, so that, no matter how deeply it penetrated, some cameras would always be above and below the crustal layer. She was looking through that crust now; through the still unhealed wound which had been opened by the cache.
Sylveste had not been lying.
There were things down there. Huge and organic and tubular, like a nest of snakes. The heat of the cache attack had dissipated now, and although greyish clouds were still smoking from the hole, Volyova suspected they were more to do with incinerated machinery than boiled crustal matter. None of the snakelike tubes were moving, and their segmented silvery sides were marred by black smears and hundred-metre-wide gashes, through which a whole intestinal mass of smaller snakes had exploded.
Volyova had hurt Cerberus.
She did not know if it was a mortal wound, or just a graze which would heal in days, but she had hurt it, and the realisation of that made her shiver. She had hurt something alien.
Soon, however, the alien thing retaliated.
She jumped when it happened, even though—intellectually, if not emotionally—she had been expecting it. It happened when the bridgehead was two kilometres from the surface—half its own length away.
The event itself was almost too swift to absorb. Between one moment and the next the crust changed with startling swiftness. A series of grey dimples had formed, ringed concentrically around the kilometre-wide wound, blistering like stone pustules. Almost as soon as Volyova noticed their existence, they ruptured, unleashing twinkling spore, silver glints which swarmed towards the bridgehead like fireflies. She had no idea what they were, whether they were chips of naked antimatter, tiny warheads, viral capsules or miniature gun batteries, except that they intended harm to her creation.