“I think this calls for a cigarette,” Volyova said, and for a moment she had to remember where she had last stowed the smokes. When she found them, in a little-visited pocket of her flying jacket, she did not rush either to open the pack or fish out one of the crumpled, yellowing tubes which resided within. She took her time, and when at last she was ready, she took an unhurried inhalation and allowed her nerves to settle, like a blizzard of feathers slowly returning to the ground.
“The ship killed him,” she said, staring down at the remnants of Hegazi, but doing her best not to think too hard about what she was looking at. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Killed him?” Khouri asked, still directing the barrel of her plasma-rifle at the elements of the Triumvir which floated in suspension in the slick of ship-slime around their feet, as if nervous that his disassociated remains might be on the verge of spontaneously reassembling. “You mean this wasn’t an accident?”
“No, it wasn’t an accident. I know he was in league with Sajaki, and therefore Sylveste. Yet Sun Stealer still killed him. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it does.”
Perhaps Khouri had already worked it out for herself, but Volyova decided to spell it out anyway. “Sylveste is gone. He’s on his way to Cerberus, and because I didn’t manage to sabotage the weapon, there’ll be very little to stop him getting inside. Do you understand? It means Sun Stealer has won. Nothing remains for him to achieve. The rest is only a question of time, and of maintaining the status quo. And what threatens that?”
“We do,” Khouri said, hesitantly, like a clever pupil who wanted to impress teacher but not draw the derision of her classmates.
“More than that. Not just you and I; not even when we include Pascale. Hegazi was also a threat, as far as Sun Stealer was concerned. And for no other reason than that he was human.” She was guessing, of course, but it seemed to make complete sense to her. “To something like Sun Stealer, human loyalty is fluid and chaotic—maybe not even properly comprehensible. He’d turned Hegazi—or at the very least those to whom Hegazi was already loyal. But did he understand the dynamics which governed that loyalty? I doubt it. Hegazi was a component which had served its usefulness, and which might malfunction at some point in the future.” She felt the icy calm which came from contemplating her own oblivion, knowing that there were few times when she had ever been so close to it. “So he had to die. And now that his objective is almost achieved, I think Sun Stealer will want to do the same to all of us.”
“If he wanted to kill us…”
“He’d already have done so? He may well have already tried, Khouri. Whole parts of the ship are no longer under any central control, which means that Sun Stealer is limited in what he can do. He’s taken possession of a body already half-paralysed; already half-leprous and half afflicted with the palsy.”
“Very poetic, but what does it mean to us, then?”
Volyova lit another cigarette; she had thoroughly seen off the first of them. “It means he will try and kill us, but that his options are difficult to predict. He can’t simply depressurise the whole ship, since there are no command channels which allow for that—even I couldn’t do it, other than by physically opening all the locks, and to do that I’d have to disable thousands of electromechanical safeties. He would probably find it difficult to flood an area larger than the airlock. But he will think of something; I’m sure of it.”
Suddenly, and it was almost without thinking, she had the slug-gun in her hands and she was pointing it down the dark lengths of the flooded corridor which led to the lock.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Volyova said. “I’m just scared. Remarkably so. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions, Khouri?”
She did, as a matter of fact.
“We’d better find Pascale. She doesn’t know her way around as well as we do. And if it gets nasty…”
Volyova stubbed out what was left of her cigarette, mashing it against the barrel of the slug-gun.
“You’re right; we should stay together. And we will. Just as soon as…”
Something emerged noisily from the gloom and halted ten metres from them.
Volyova had the gun on it immediately, but she did not fire; some instinct was telling her that the thing had not come to kill them, or at least not yet. It was one of the tracked servitors which she had seen Sylveste using in the aborted operation to heal the Captain; one of the units lacking any great internal sophistication. One of those, in short, which was primarily controlled by the ship, rather than its own brain.
Its chunkily mounted sensor eyes locked onto them.
“It’s not armed,” Volyova breathed, realising as she did so that whispering was useless. “I think it’s just been sent to scout us out. This is one of the parts of the ship which the ship can’t see into; one of its blind spots.”
The servitor’s sensors made little swivelling motions from side to side, as if triangulating their exact positions. Then it began to reverse back into the gloom.
Khouri shot it.
“Why did you do that?” Volyova asked, when the concussive echoes of the blast had died down and she no longer had to squint against the glare of the machine’s demise. “Whatever it saw was already transmitted back to the ship. Shooting it was pointless.”
“I didn’t like the way it was looking at me,” Khouri said. Then she frowned. “And besides—it’s one less we have to worry to about.”
“Yes,” Volyova said. “And given the speed at which the ship can manufacture a drone that simple, it may be ten or twenty seconds before it’s replaced.”
Khouri looked at her as if she’d just said a joke with an impenetrable punchline. But Volyova was serious. What she had just noticed had chilled her far more deeply than the appearance of the servitor. It was, after all, logical that the ship would soon resort to the drones for its sense-gathering operations; logical too that it would explore ways to outfit the machines for the murder of the remaining human crew and passengers. It was something she would have predicted herself, sooner or later. But not this. Not what had just poked itself above the ooze of the ship-slime; for the instant it took its black rodent eyes to spot her, before turning tail and swimming into the darkness.
Ship controlled the janitor-rats, she remembered.
When consciousness returned—and for a moment Sylveste did not remember precisely when it had left—he was surrounded by an audience of blurred stars. They were doing a very complex dance, and if he had not already felt nauseous, he felt sure that sight alone would have been sickening. What was he doing here? And why did he feel so strange; so much as if cotton-wool had been pressed into every cell in his body? Because he was in a suit, that was why. One of the special suits which the crew owned; of the sort which had carried him and Pascale up from the surface of Resurgam. The suit had forced his lungs to accept the fluid it filled itself with instead of air.
“What’s happening?” he subvocalised, in the way he knew that the suit would be able to read, via the simple speech-centre trawl built into its helmet.
“I’m reversing,” the suit informed him. Midpoint thrust inversion.”
“Where the hell are we?” Picking through his memories was still arduous, like finding the end of a tangled rope. He had no idea where to begin.
“More than a million kilometres from the ship; somewhat less than that distance from Cerberus.”
“We’ve come all that way so—” He stopped. “No, wait. I’ve no idea how long it’s been.”
“We departed seventy-four minutes ago.” Hardly more than an hour, Sylveste thought. Yet if the suit had told him it had been a day he would have accepted it unquestioningly. “Our average acceleration was ten gees. I was instructed to make all haste by Triumvir Sajaki.”