“Perhaps. If I had to take a guess, I’d say they were unbelievers who came to realise that the Birdmaker myth was just that—myth. Of course, that wouldn’t have gone down very well with the other fundamentalist flocks.”
“Which is why they were Banished?”
“Assuming they ever existed in the first place. But I can’t help thinking, what if they were some kind of technological sect, like an enclave of scientists? Amarantin who were prepared to experiment, to question the nature of their world?”
“Like mediaeval alchemists?”
“Yes.” He liked the analogy immediately. “Perhaps they even tried experimenting with flight, the way Leonardo did. Against the backdrop of general Amarantin culture, that would have been like spitting in God’s eye.”
“Agreed. But assuming they were real—and were Banished—what happened to them? Did they just die out?”
“I don’t know. But one thing’s clear. The Banished Ones were important—more than just a minor detail in the overall story of the Birdmaker myth. They’re mentioned all over the spire; all over this damned city, in fact—far more frequently than in any other Amarantin relics.”
“But the city is late,” Pascale said. “Apart from the marker obelisk, it’s the most recent relic we’ve found. Dating from near the Event. Why would the Banished Ones suddenly crop up again, after so long an absence?”
“Well,” Sylveste said. “Maybe they came back.”
“After—what? Tens of thousands of years?”
“Perhaps.” Sylveste smiled privately. “If they did return—after that long away—it might be the kind of thing to inspire statue-building.”
“Then the statue—do you think it might portray their leader? The one called—” Pascale took another stab at the graphicform. “Well, this is the symbol for the sun, isn’t it?”
“And the rest?”
“I’m not sure. Looks like the glyph for the act of… theft—but how can that be?”
“Put the two together, what have you got?”
He imagined her shrugging, noncommittally. “One who steals suns? Sun Stealer? What would that mean?”
Sylveste shrugged himself. “That’s what I’ve been asking myself all morning. That and one other thing.”
“Which would be?”
“Why I think I’ve heard that name before.” After the weapons chamber, the three of them rode another elevator further into the ship’s heart.
“You’re doing well,” the Mademoiselle said. “Volyova honestly believes that she’s turned you to her side.”
She had, more or less, been with them the whole time—silently observing Volyova’s guided tour, only occasionally interjecting with remarks or prompts for Khouri’s ears only. This was extremely disquieting: Khouri was never able to free herself of the feeling that Volyova was also privy to these whispered asides.
“Maybe she’s right,” Khouri answered, automatically thinking her response. “Maybe she’s stronger than you.”
The Mademoiselle scoffed. “Did you listen to anything I told you?”
“As if I had any choice.”
Shutting out the Mademoiselle when she wanted to say something was like trying to silence an insistent refrain playing in her head. There was no respite from her apparitions.
“Listen,” the woman said. “If my countermeasures were failing, your loyalty to Volyova would force you to tell her of my existence.”
“I’ve been tempted.”
The Mademoiselle looked at her askance, and Khouri felt a brief frisson of satisfaction. In some respects the Mademoiselle—or rather, her implant-distilled persona—seemed omniscient. But apart from the knowledge which had been instilled in it upon its creation, the implant’s learning was restricted entirely to what it could perceive through Khouri’s own senses. Maybe the implant could hook into data networks even if Khouri herself were not interfaced, but while that might have been possible, it seemed unlikely; there was too much risk of the implant itself being detected by the same systems. And although it could hear her thoughts when Khouri chose to communicate with it, it could not read her state of mind, other than by the most superficial biochemical cues in the neural environment in which it floated. So for the implant, there was a necessary element of doubt concerning the efficacy of its countermeasures.
“Volyova would kill you. She killed her last recruit, if you haven’t worked that out for yourself.”
“Maybe she had good reason.”
“You don’t know anything about her—or any of them. Neither do I. We haven’t even met her Captain yet.”
There was no arguing with that. Captain Brannigan’s name had come up once or twice when Sajaki or one of the others had been indiscreet in Khouri’s presence, but in general they did not speak often of their leader. Clearly they were not Ultras in the usual sense, although they maintained a meticulous front even the Mademoiselle had not seen through. The fiction was so absolute that they went through the motions of trade just like all the other Ultra crews. But what was the reality behind the facade?
Gunnery Officer, Volyova had said. And now Khouri had seen something of the cache of weapons stored within the ship. It was rumoured that many trade vessels carried discreet armaments, for resolving the worst sorts of breakdown in client-customer relations, or for staging acts of blatant piracy against other ships. But these weapons looked far too potent to be used in mere squabbles, and in any case, the ship clearly had an extra layer of conventional weaponry for just those circumstances. So what exactly was the point behind this arsenal? Sajaki must have had some long-term plan in mind, Khouri thought, and that was disturbing enough—but even more worrying was the thought that perhaps there was no plan at all; that Sajaki was carrying the cache around until he found an excuse for using it, like a tooled-up thug stumbling around in search of a fight.
Over the weeks, Khouri had considered and discarded numerous theories, without coming close to anything that sounded plausible. It was not the military side of the ship’s nature that troubled her, of course. She had been born to war; war was her natural environment, and while she was ready to consider the possibility that there were other, more benign states of being, there was nothing about war that felt alien to her. But, she had to admit, the kinds of wars which she had known on Sky’s Edge were hardly comparable to any of the scenarios in which the cache-weapons might be used. Though Sky’s Edge had remained linked to the interstellar trade network, the average technological level of the combatants in the surface battles had been centuries behind the Ultras who sometimes parked their ships in orbit. A campaign could be won just by one side gaining one item of Ultra weaponry… but those items had always been scarce; sometimes too valuable even to use. Even nukes had been deployed only a few times in the colony’s history, and never in Khouri’s lifetime. She had seen some vile things—things that still haunted her—but she had never seen anything capable of instant, genocidal death. Volyova’s cache-weapons were much worse than that.
And perhaps they had been used, once or twice. Volyova had said as much—pirate operations, perhaps. There were plenty of thinly populated systems, only loosely connected to the trade nets, where it would be entirely possible to exterminate an enemy without anyone ever finding out. And some of those enemies might be as amoral as any of Sajaki’s crew; their pasts littered with acts of random atrocity. So, yes, it was quite likely that parts of the cache had been tested. But Khouri suspected that this would only have ever been a means to an end; self-preservation, or tactical strikes against enemies with resources they needed. The heavier cache-weapons would not have been tested. What they eventually planned to do with the cache—how they planned to discharge the world-wrecking power they possessed—was not yet clear, perhaps not even to Sajaki. And perhaps Sajaki was not the man in whom the ultimate power lay vested. Perhaps, in some way, Sajaki was still serving Captain Brannigan.