“The bridgehead,” Sylveste said, as much to hear a human voice as anything else. “I see it.”
It was tiny, he saw now. It looked like the tip of an insignificant splinter blemishing the stone of God’s own statue. Cerberus was two thousand kilometres across; the bridgehead a mere four in length, and most of that was now buried beneath the crust. In a way, it was the device’s very tininess in relation to the world which best testified to Ilia Volyova’s skill. It might be small, but it was still a thorn in the side of Cerberus. That much was obvious even from here; the crust around the bridgehead looked inflamed, stressed to some point beyond its inbuilt tolerances. For several kilometres around the weapon, the crust had given up any pretence of looking realistic. Now it had reverted to what he assumed was its native state: a hexagonal grid which blurred into rock on its fringes.
They would be over the maw—the cone’s open end—in a few minutes. Sylveste could already feel gravity tugging at his viscera now, even though he was still immersed in the suit’s liquid air. It was admittedly weak; a quarter of Earth normal—but a fall from his present height would still be adequately fatal, with or without the suit to protect him.
Now, finally, something else shared his immediate volume of space. He called in enhancements and saw a suit exactly like his own, twinkling brightly against the night. It was a little ahead of him, but following the same trajectory, heading for the circular entrance into the bridgehead. Two morsels of drifting marine food, he thought, about to be sucked into the enormous waiting funnel of the bridgehead, digested into the heart of Cerberus.
No going back now, he thought.
The three women ran down a corridor carpeted in dead rats and the blackened, stiff shells of things that might possibly once have been rats, though they did not invite close scrutiny. The trio had one big gun between the three of them now; one gun capable of despatching any servitor which the ship sent against them. The small pistols they also had might do the same job, but only if used with expertise and a certain degree of luck.
Occasionally, the floor shifted under their feet, unnervingly.
“What is it?” asked Khouri, limping now, after the bruising she had taken when the clinic had exploded. “What does it mean?”
“It means Sun Stealer is experimenting,” Volyova said, pausing between every two or three words to catch her breath, her side aflame with pain now; every injury which had been healed since Resurgam seemed on the point of unstitching. “So far he’s moved against us with the less critical systems; the robots and the rats, for instance. But he knows that if he can understand the drive properly—if he can learn how to operate it within its safety margins—he can crush us just by ramping up the thrust for a few seconds.” She ran for a few more strides, wheezing. “It’s how I killed Nagorny. But Sun Stealer doesn’t know the ship so well, even though he controls it. He’s trying to adjust the drive very gradually; reaching an understanding of how it operates. When he has that—”
Pascale said, “Is there anywhere we can go where we can be safe? Somewhere the rats and the machines can’t reach?”
“Yes, but nowhere that the acceleration can’t reach in and crush us.”
“So we should get off the ship, is that what you’re saying?”
She stopped, audited the corridor they were in and decided it was not one of the ones in which the ship could hear their conversations. “Listen,” she said. “Don’t be under any illusions. If we leave here, I doubt very much that we’ll ever find a way to return. But on the other hand, we also have an obligation to stop Sylveste, if there’s even a slim chance of doing so. Even if we kill ourselves in the process.”
“How could we reach Dan?” Pascale asked. Obviously, stopping Sylveste still amounted—in her mind—to catching him and talking him out of going further. Volyova decided not to disabuse her of that notion, not just yet; but it wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
“I think your husband took one of our suits,” she said. “According to my bracelet all the shuttles are still present. Besides, he could never have piloted one of them.”
“Not unless he had help from Sun Stealer,” Khouri said. “Listen, can we keep moving? I know we don’t have any particular direction in mind, but I’d feel a hell of a lot happier than standing around.”
“He’d have taken a suit,” Pascale said. “That would have been his style. But he wouldn’t have done so alone.”
“Is it possible he would have accepted Sun Stealer’s help?”
She shook her head. “Forget it. He didn’t even believe in Sun Stealer. If he’d had an inkling that he was being led—pushed into something—no; he wouldn’t have accepted it.”
“Maybe he didn’t have any choice,” Khouri said. “But anyway; assuming he took a suit, is there any way we can catch him?”
“Not before he reaches Cerberus.” There was no need to think about that. She knew just how quickly a million kilometres of space could be traversed if one could tolerate a constant ten gees of acceleration. “It’s too risky to take suits ourselves; not the kind your husband used. We’ll have to get there in one of the shuttles. It’ll be a lot slower, but there’s less chance Sun Stealer will have infiltrated its control matrix.”
“Why’s that?”
“Claustrophobia. The shuttles are about three centuries less advanced than the suits.”
“And that’s supposed to help us?”
“Believe me, when you’re dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best.” Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared stray into the corridor.
“I remember this place,” Pascale said. “This is where you brought us when—”
Khouri made the door open; the one marked with a barely legible spider.
“Get in,” she said. “Make yourself at home. And start praying that I remember how Ilia worked this thing.”
“Where is she going to meet us?”
“Outside,” Khouri said. “I sincerely hope.”
By which time she was already closing the spider-room’s door; already looking at the brass and bronze controls and hoping for some spark of recognition.
THIRTY-THREE
Volyova slipped out the needier, approaching the Captain.
She knew that she had to get to the hangar chamber as quickly as possible; that any delay might give Sun Stealer the time he needed to find a way to kill her. But there was something she had to do first. There was no logic to it, no rationality—but she knew she had to do it anyway. So she took the stairwells to the Captain’s level, into the deadening cold, her breath seeming to solidify in her throat. There were no rats down here: too cold. And servitors would not be able to reach him without running the risk of becoming part of him, subsumed by the plague.
“Can you hear me, you bastard?” She told her bracelet to warm him enough for conscious thought processes. “If so, pay attention. The ship’s been taken over.”
“Are we still around Bloater?”
“No… no, we’re not still around Bloater. That was some time ago.”
After a few moments the Captain said, “Taken over, did you say? Who by?”
“Something alien, with some unpleasant ambitions. Most of us are dead now—Sajaki, Hegazi; all the other crew you ever knew—and the few of us left are getting out while we can. I don’t expect to ever come back aboard, which is why what I’m about to do might strike you as slightly drastic.”
She aimed the needler now; directing it towards the cracked, misshaped husk of the reefer encasing the Captain.