“You’re much too tense,” she said. “Volyova will suspect you have something to hide.”
“Go away.”
Volyova glanced in her direction. “Did you say something?”
“I said it’s cold in here.”
Volyova seemed to take far too long to digest the statement. “Yes. I suppose it is.”
“You don’t have to speak out loud,” the Mademoiselle replied. “You don’t even have to subvocalise. Just imagine yourself speaking what you wish me to hear. The implant detects the ghost impulses generated in your speech area. Go on; try it.”
“Go away,” Khouri said, or rather imagined herself thinking it. “Get the hell out of my head. This was never in the contract.”
“My dear,” the Mademoiselle said, “there never was any contract, merely a—what shall I say? A gentlewomen’s agreement?” She looked directly at Khouri as if expecting some kind of response. Khouri merely stared, venomously. “Oh, very well,” the woman said. “But I promise you I shall be back before very long.”
She popped out of existence.
“Can’t wait,” Khouri said quietly.
“Pardon?” Volyova asked.
“I said I can’t wait,” Khouri answered. “I mean until we get out of this damn elevator.”
Before very long they reached the hub, cleared customs and boarded the shuttle, a non-atmospheric craft consisting of a sphere with four thruster pods splayed out at right angles. The ship was called the Melancholia of Departure, the kind of ironic name Ultras favoured for their craft. The interior had the ribbed look of a whale’s gut. Volyova told her to go forward through a series of bulkheads and gullet-like crawlspaces until they reached the thing’s bridge. There were a few bucket seats, together with a console displaying reams of avionics gibberish, latticed by delicate entoptics. Volyova thumbed one of the visual readouts, causing a small, traylike device to chug out of a black recess in the side of the console. The tray was gridded with an oldstyle keyboard. Volyova’s fingers danced on the keys, causing a subtle change to sweep through the avionics data.
Khouri realised with a tingling feeling that the woman had no implants; that her fingers were actually one of the ways by which she communicated.
“Buckle in,” Volyova said. “There’s so much garbage floating round Yellowstone we might have to pull some gee-loads.”
Khouri did as she was told. For all the discomfort which ensued, it was her first chance to relax in days. Much had happened since her revival, all of it hectic. In all the time she had been asleep in Chasm City, the Mademoiselle had been waiting for a ship to arrive which was carrying on to Resurgam, and—given Resurgam’s lack of importance in the ever-shifting web of interstellar commerce—the wait had been a long one. That was the trouble with lighthuggers. No individual, no matter how powerful, could ever own one now unless it had already been in their possession for centuries. The Conjoiners were no longer manufacturing drives and people who already owned ships were in no mind to sell them.
Khouri knew that the Mademoiselle had not been searching passively. Nor had Volyova. Volyova—so the Mademoiselle said—had unleashed a search program into Yellowstone’s data network, what she called a bloodhound. A mere human—even a mere computerised monitor—could not have detected the dog’s elaborate sniffing. But the Mademoiselle was seemingly neither of these things, and she sensed the dog the way a pond-skater feels ripples in the membrane on which it walks.
What she did next was clever.
She whistled to the bloodhound until it came bounding towards her. Then she casually broke the thing’s neck, but not before she had flensed it open and examined its informational innards, working out just what it was that the dog had been sent to find. The gist was that the dog had been sent to retrieve supposedly secret information relating to individuals who had had slaver experience; exactly what one would have expected from a group of Ultras who were searching for a crewperson to fill a vacancy on their ship. But there was something else. Something a tiny bit strange, which pricked the Mademoiselle’s curiosity.
Why were they looking for someone with military activity in their backgrounds?
Perhaps they were disciplinarians: professional traders who were operating one level above the normal state of play of commerce, ruthless experts who used slippery constructs to glean the knowledge they wanted, and who were not averse to travelling to backwater colonies like Resurgam when they saw a chance of some massive reward, perhaps centuries hence. It was probable that their entire organisation was structured along military lines, rather than the quasi-anarchy which existed on most trade craft. So by searching for military experience in the backgrounds of their candidates, what they were doing was ensuring themselves that the candidate would fit into their crew.
That was it, naturally.
Things had gone well so far, even allowing for the strange way in which Volyova had not corrected Khouri when she made obvious her ignorance of the ship’s true destination. Khouri had known all along that the destination was Resurgam, of course—but if the Ultras knew this was where she really wanted to go to, she would have been forced to use one of several cover stories to explain her motivations for visiting the backwater colony. She had been ready to employ one of the stories as soon as Volyova corrected her—except she had failed to do so, seemingly willing to let her recruit keep on thinking they were really travelling to Sky’s Edge.
That was indeed odd, though understandable if one assumed they were now desperate to recruit anyone who came forward. It said little for their honesty, of course, but then again, it saved Khouri using a cover story. It was, she decided, nothing to worry about. It would, in fact, all have been roses, were it not for what the Mademoiselle had placed in her head while she was sleeping. The implant was tiny and would not elicit suspicion from the Ultras, designed to resemble—and function as—a standard entoptic splice. If they got too inquisitive and removed the damn thing, all its incriminating parts would self-erase or reorganise. But that was not the point. Khouri’s objection to the implant was not on the grounds that it was risky or unnecessary, but rather that the last person she wanted in her head on a daily basis was the Mademoiselle. Of course, it was just a beta-level simulation constructed to mimic her personality, projecting an image of the Mademoiselle into Khouri’s visual field and tickling her aural centre to allow her to hear what the ghost said. No one else would be privy to the woman’s apparitions, and Khouri would be able to communicate silently with her.
“Call it need to know,” the ghost had said. “As an ex-soldier, I’m certain you understand this principle.”
“Yes, I understand it,” Khouri said with sullen acceptance. “And it stinks, but I don’t suppose you’re about to take the damned thing out of my head just because I don’t like it.”
The Mademoiselle smiled. “To burden you with too much knowledge at this point would be to risk a momentary indiscretion in the presence of the Ultras.”
“Wait a minute,” Khouri said. “I already know you want me to kill Sylveste. What more could there possibly be to find out?”
The Mademoiselle repeated her smile, maddeningly. Like many beta-level sims, her compendium of facial expressions was small enough to make repetition inevitable, like a bad actor constantly falling into the same characterisations.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that what you now know is not even a fragment of the whole story. Not even a splinter.”
When Pascale arrived, Sylveste made a point of studying her face, matching it against his memories of Nils Girardieau. As usual he rammed against the limitations of his vision. His eyes were poor at curves, tending to approximate the nuances of the human face as a series of stepped edges.