“I’ve got one word for you,” she said, moving towards the airlock, daring the drone to intercept her. And then she said that word, having already recited the preliminary incantations which were required before the word itself could have any effect. It was a word she had not really expected that she would ever have to use in this context. But it had been enough of a surprise that she had been forced to use it once already; almost as surprising as the fact that she remembered it at all. Volyova had decided that the time to rely on expectation was long gone.
That word was Palsy.
It had an interesting effect on the servitor. The machine did not try and obstruct her as she reached the airlock and helped herself into the Melancholia. Instead, it hovered aimlessly for a few seconds and then darted towards one wall, suddenly out of contact with the ship and now relying on its limited reservoir of independent behaviour-modes. Nothing had happened to the servitor itself, since execution of the Palsy command only affected ship systems. But one of the first systems to crash would have been the radio/optical command net serving all the drones. Only the autonomous drones would continue functioning unaffected—and those machines had never come under Sun Stealer’s influence. Now the thousands of supervised drones all over the ship would be scurrying to access terminals where they could tap into the controlling system directly. Even the rats would feel confused, since the aerosols dispersing their biochemical instructions would be among the affected systems. Unshackled from relentless machine control, the rodents would begin to revert to an archetype more characteristic of their feral ancestors.
Volyova closed the airlock and was gratified to feel the shuttle warming to readiness as soon as it sensed her. She tugged herself along to the cabin, already aglow with navigation readouts, already reconfiguring itself to match the kind of interface she preferred: surfaces flowing liquidly towards a new ideal.
Now all she had to do was get out. “Did you just feel that?” Khouri asked from the metal and plush opulence of the spider-room. “The whole ship just shuddered, like an earth tremor.”
“You think it was Ilia?”
“She said we should cast loose when we got a signal. And she said it’d be obvious as hell. That was pretty obvious, wasn’t it?”
She knew if she waited any longer she would begin to doubt the evidence of her own senses; start wondering if there really had been a shudder, and then it would be too late, because if Volyova had been clear about anything it was that when the signal came, Khouri had to move quickly. There would not be very much time, she said.
So she cast off.
She twisted two of the matched brass controls to their extremities; not as she had seen Volyova do, but in the simple hope that something so drastic, random, and quite possibly stupid must surely result in something as normally undesirable as the spider-room losing its purchase on the hull, which was now all that she wanted.
The spider-room fell away from the hull.
“In the next few seconds,” Khouri said, stomach squirming in the sudden transition to freefall, “we either live or die. If that was the signal Ilia meant to give, it’s safe to leave the hull. But if it wasn’t, we’re going to be in range of the ship’s own weapons in a few seconds.”
Khouri watched the ship recede, slowly falling up and away, until she had to squint to avoid the glare of the Conjoiner engines; barely ticking over, yet still sun-bright. Somewhere in the spider-room there was a way to close the shutters on its windows, but that was one detail Khouri had not committed to memory.
“Why won’t it shoot us immediately?”
“Too much risk of damaging itself. Ilia said those limits were hardwired—nothing Sun Stealer can do about it except live with them. Guess we’re about coming up on the mark now.”
“What do you think it was, that signal?” It seemed that Pascale preferred to talk.
“A program,” Khouri said. “Buried deep in the ship, where Sun Stealer would never find it. Wired up to thousands of circuit breaks all around the ship. When she ran it—if she ran it—it would have killed thousands of systems simultaneously. One big crunch. That was the shudder, I think.”
“And it takes out the weapons?”
“No… not exactly. Not if I remember what she told me. Some of the sensors, and maybe some of the targeting systems, but the gunnery isn’t affected; I remember that much. But I think the rest of the ship is so screwed up it’ll take Sun Stealer a while to put himself back together again; awhile to coordinate himself and get his bearings. Then he can start shooting again.”
“But the weapons could be online any time soon?”
“That’s why we have to hurry.”
“We seem to be still having a conversation. Does that mean…?”
“I think so.” Khouri forced a manic grin. “I think I interpreted the signal right, and I think we’re safe—for the time being, at least.”
Pascale let out a loud sigh. “What now?”
“We have to find Ilia.”
“It shouldn’t be hard. She said there wasn’t anything we’d have to do; just wait for that signal. Then she’d be right…” Khouri trailed off. She was looking back at the lighthugger, hanging over them like a levitating cathedral spire. And something was wrong with it.
Something was disturbing its symmetry.
Something was breaking out of it.
It had begun with the smallest of excisions; as a chick might force the tip of its mandible through the shell of its egg. White light, and then a series of explosions. Shards of disrupted hull mushroomed away, quickly seized by the hand of gravity, so that the veil of destruction was whipped away to reveal the underlying damage. It was a tiny hole punched through the hull. Tiny, but because the ship was so large, the hole must really have been the best part of a hundred metres across.
And now Volyova’s shuttle burst through the aperture she had opened, loitering momentarily next to the great trunk of the ship before pirouetting and diving towards the spider-room.
THIRTY-FOUR
Khouri let Volyova do all the hard work of getting the spider-room safely ensconced in the Melancholia. The operation was trickier than it seemed; not because the body of the spider-room was too large to fit the available volume, but because the room’s dangling legs refused to fold themselves neatly away, inhibiting closure of the cargo doors. In the end—and it could not have been more than a minute or so after the operation had commenced—Volyova had to send out a squad of servitors to wrestle the legs into position. To an external observer—not that there was one, of course, except the brooding, semi-paralysed mass of the lighthugger—the procedure must have resembled a team of pixies trying to cram an insect into a jewel-box.
Finally Volyova was able to close the doors, blocking out the last narrowing rectangle of twisting starfield from view. Interior lights came on, followed by the rapid, loudening howl of pressurisation, transmitted through the spider-room’s metallic hull. The servitors reappeared, quickly clamping the room against drift, and then, not more than a minute later, Volyova showed up, unsuited.
“Follow me,” she shouted, her voice ringing. “The sooner we’re out of weapons range the better.”
“How far, exactly, is weapons range?” Khouri said.
“I’m not sure.”
“You hit him with your program,” Khouri said, as the three of them pulled themselves hand-over-hand up to the shuttle’s cabin. “Good work, Ilia. We felt it out there—one mother of a shutdown.”