Yes, now he remembered more. Sajaki’s midnight call, and the hurried rush to the suits. He remembered leaving a message for Pascale, though not the details. That had been his only concession; the one luxury he permitted himself. Yet even if there had been days to prepare for the entry, there would have been very little that he could have changed. He had no requirements for extra documentation or recording apparatus, since he had access to the suit’s libraries and integral sensors. The suits were armed, he knew, and capable of defending themselves autonomously, against much the same modes of attack which Volyova’s weapon was now experiencing. They were also able to extrude scientific analysis tools, or create compartments in themselves for the storing of samples. Quite apart from that, they were as independent as any spacecraft. He realised with a snap that he was thinking wrongly; the suits were actually spacecraft; just very flexible spacecraft with room inside for only one occupant; spacecraft which became their own atmospheric shuttles, and—if needed—their own surface rovers. Rationally, there was no other way he would rather be entering Cerberus.
“I’m glad I slept through that acceleration,” Sylveste said.
“You had no choice,” the suit said, evincing a complete lack of interest. “Consciousness was suppressed. Now please ready yourself for the deceleration phase. When you resume wakefulness, we will have arrived in the vicinity of our destination.”
Sylveste began to frame a question in his head; intending to ask the suit why Sajaki had not yet shown himself, despite his assurance that he would accompany Sylveste. Yet, before he had even begun to concretise his thoughts into the unspoken state which the trawl could read, the suit made him sleep again, as dreamlessly as before.
While Khouri went to find Pascale Sylveste, Volyova made her way back up to the bridge. Now she dared not take the elevators, but thankfully there were fewer than twenty levels to climb; an exertion, but bearable. It was also relatively safe: the ship could not send drones into the stairwells, she knew; not even the floating machines which rode through the normal corridors on superconducting magnetic fields. All the same, she kept the slug-gun at readiness, sweeping it ahead of her as she endlessly rounded the ascending spiral, occasionally stopping and holding her breath, listening for the sounds of things following her, or lurking some distance ahead.
On the way up, she tried to think of the myriad ways in which the ship could kill her. It was an interesting intellectual challenge; testing her knowledge of the vessel in a way she had not previously considered. It made her look at things in a new light. Once—not so very long ago—she had been in much the same position as the ship was now. She had wanted to kill Nagorny, or at the very least prevent him from becoming a threat to her, which practically amounted to the same thing. In the end she had killed him because he first tried to kill her—but it was the manner of his execution that preyed on her mind now. She had killed Nagorny by accelerating and decelerating the ship so fiercely that he had been pulped alive. Sooner or later—and she could think of no pressing reason why it should not be the case—the ship would surely think of that for itself. When that happened, it would be a very good idea not to be in the ship any more.
She reached the bridge unhindered, although that did not stop her checking every shadow for a lurking machine, or—worse, now—rat. She did not know what the rats could do to her, but she was less than minded to find out.
The bridge was empty, much as when she had left it. The damage Khouri had wrought on it was still there; even the staining of Sajaki’s blood on the floor of the vast spherical meeting place. The holodisplay was still aglow, looming over her with its constantly updating progress report on the establishment of the Cerberus bridgehead. For a moment she could not help but take a proprietorial interest in her creation, which was still gamely holding its own against the antibiotic forces deployed by the alien world. Yet even as she experienced a flush of pride, she willed it to fail, so that Sylveste would be denied entry. Assuming that he had not already arrived.
“What have you come for?” asked a voice.
She whipped around, and there was a figure, looking down at her from one of the curved levels of the bridge. It was no one she recognised; just a darkly cloaked male with clasped hands and a sunken skull of a face. She blasted it, but the figure remained, even after the slug-gun’s discharges had ripped through it, ion trails lingering in the air like banners.
Another figure, differently dressed, had appeared next to it. “Your tenancy here has expired,” it said, in the oldest variant of Norte, Volyova’s processing of it so tardy that she did not immediately understand his words.
“You must understand, Triumvir, that this domain is no longer yours,” said another, shivering to life on the chamber’s opposite side, clad in the body section of a fantastically ancient spacesuit, ribbed with cooling lines and boxy attachments. The language he spoke was the oldest strain of Russish she could parse.
“What do you hope to achieve here?” asked the first figure, even as another appeared next to it, and began talking to her, and another; figures from the past hectoring her from all sides. “This is outrageous…” But the voice blurred into that of another ghost, speaking to her from her right.
“… lack a mandate here, Triumvir. I have to tell you…”
“… gravely exceeded your authority and must now submit to…”
“… bitterly disappointed, Ilia, and must politely request that you…”
“… rescind… privileges…”
“… completely unacceptable…”
She screamed as the welter of voices became a constant wordless roar, the congregation of the dead filling the chamber totally, until all she could see in any direction was a mass of ancient faces, their mouths moving as if each one were the only one speaking; as if each imagined that he had her absolute attention. It was as if they were praying to her; as if they thought she was omniscient. Praying, but at the same time complaining; carpingly at first, as if disappointed, but—with every second—with more hate and scorn, as if she had not only let them down in the bitterest way possible, but that she had also committed some atrocity so dire it was unspeakable even now, but could only be acknowledged in the curved revulsion of their lips and the naked shame in their eyes.
She hefted the gun. The temptation to empty a slug-clip into the ghosts was overwhelming. She could not kill them, of course, but she could seriously disable their projection systems. But she needed to conserve her ammo now that the warchive was inaccessible.
“Go away!” she shouted. “Get away from me!”
One by one, the dead grew silent and vanished. As each departed, each shook its head disappointedly, as if ashamed of staying in her presence a moment longer. Finally, she had the room to herself. She was breathing in hard rasps and needed to calm down. She lit another cigarette and smoked it slowly, trying to give her mind a few minutes’ rest. She palmed the gun, glad she had not wasted the clip, for all the transient pleasure it would have given her to destroy the bridge. Khouri had chosen well. Emblazoned along the gun’s flanks were silver and gold Chinese dragon motifs.
A voice spoke from the display.
Volyova looked up into the face of Sun Stealer.
It was as she had known it must be, after Pascale had first told her the significance of the creature’s name. As she had known it must be, and yet also much worse. Because she was not simply seeing how the alien looked. She was seeing how the alien looked to itself—and there was evidently something very wrong with Sun Stealer’s mind. She thought back to Nagorny, and understood how the man had been driven mad. She could hardly blame him, now—not if he had lived with this thing in his head all that time, and yet had lacked an inkling of where it came from or what it wanted from him. No; she sympathised with the dead Gunnery Officer, the poor, poor bastard. Perhaps she too would have sunk into psychosis when faced with this apparition, looming behind every dream, every waking thought.