Whoever the mysterious Brannigan was.
“Welcome to the gunnery,” Volyova said.
They had arrived somewhere near the middle of the ship. Volyova had opened a hole in the ceiling, folded down a telescopic ladder and beckoned Khouri to climb its sharp-edged rungs.
Her head was poking into a large spherical room full of curved, jointed machinery. At the centre of this halo of bluish-silver was a rectilinear hooded black seat, festooned with machinery and a seemingly random tangle of cables. The seat was fixed within a series of elegant gyroscopic axes, arranged so that its motion would be independent of that of the ship. The cables passed into sliding armatures which transmitted power between each concentric shell, before the final thigh-thick clump dove into the machinery-clotted spherical wall of the room. The room reeked of ozone.
There was nothing in the gunnery which looked much newer than a few hundred years old, and plenty that looked as if it had been around for considerably longer. All of it, though, had been scrupulously cared for.
“This is what it’s all been building up to, isn’t it?” Khouri pushed herself through the trapdoor into the heart of the chamber, slithering between the curved skeletal shells until she reached the seat. Massive as it was, it seemed to beckon to her with promises of comfort and security. She could not stop herself from sliding into it, letting its cumbersome black bulk softly encase her with a whirr of buried servomechanisms.
“How does it feel?”
“Like I’ve been here before,” she said wonderingly, voice distorted by the bulk of the studded black helmet which had slid over her head.
“You have,” Volyova answered. “Before you were properly conscious. Besides, the gunnery implant in your head already knows its way around here—that’s where half the sense of familiarity comes from.”
What Volyova said was true. Khouri felt as if the chair were some familiar piece of furniture she had grown up around, its every wrinkle and scratch known to her. She already felt powerfully relaxed and calm, and the urge to actually do something—to use the power that the chair bestowed on her—was building by the second.
“I can control the cache-weapons from here?”
“That’s the intention,” Volyova said. “But not just the cache, of course. You’ll also be directing every other major weapon system aboard the Infinity—with as much fluency as if these instruments were simply extensions of your own anatomy. When you’re fully subsumed by the gunnery, that’s how it’ll feel—your own body image swelling out to take in the ship itself.”
Khouri had already begun to feel something similar; the sense at least that her body was blurring into the chair. Tantalising as it was, she had no wish for the sense of subsumption to continue any further. With a conscious effort she eased herself from the chair, its enfolding panels whirring aside to release her.
“I’m not sure I like this,” the Mademoiselle said.
SEVEN
Never quite forgetting that she was aboard a ship (it was the ever-so-slightly irregular pattern of the induced gravity, caused by tiny imbalances in the thrust stream, which in turn reflected mysterious quantum capriciousness in the bowels of the Conjoiner drives) Volyova entered the green seclusion of the glade alone and hesitated at the top of the rustic staircase which led down to the grass. If Sajaki was aware of her presence, he chose not to show it, kneeling silently and motionlessly next to the gnarled tree stump which was their informal meeting place. But he undoubtedly sensed her. Volyova knew that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers on the aquatic world Wintersea, accompanying Captain Brannigan, back when Captain Brannigan was capable of leaving the ship. She did not know what the purpose of that trip had been—for either of them—but there had been rumours that the Pattern Jugglers had tampered with his neocortex, embossing neural patterns which configured an unusual degree of spatial awareness: the ability to think in four or five dimensions. The patterns had been the rarest kind of Juggler transform: one that lingered.
Volyova ambled down the staircase and allowed her foot to creak on the lowest tread. Sajaki turned to regard her with no visible hint of surprise.
“Something up?” he asked, reading her expression.
“It concerns the stavlennik,” she said, momentarily lapsing back into Russish. “The protegee, I mean.”
“Tell me about it,” Sajaki said absently. He wore an ash-grey kimono, damp grass darkening his knees to olive-black. His Komuso’s shakuhachi rested on the stump’s mirror-smooth, elbow-polished surface. He and Volyova were now the only two crewmembers yet to enter reefersleep, two months out from Yellowstone.
“She’s one of us now,” Volyova said, kneeling opposite him. “The core of her indoctrination is complete.”
“I welcome this news.”
Across the glade a macaw screeched, then left its perch in a flurry of clashing primary colours. “We can introduce her to Captain Brannigan.”
“No time like the present,” Sajaki said, smoothing a wrinkle from his kimono. “Or do you have second thoughts?”
“About meeting the Captain?” She clucked nervously. “None at all.”
“Then it’s deeper than that.”
“What?”
“Whatever’s on your mind, Ilia. Come on. Spit it out.”
“It’s Khouri. I’m no longer willing to risk her suffering the same kind of pychotic episodes as Nagorny.” She stopped, expecting—hoping, even—for some response from Sajaki. But instead all she got was the white-noise of the waterfall, and a total absence of expression on her crewmate’s face. “What I mean,” she continued—almost stammering with her own uncertainty—”is that I’m no longer sure she’s a suitable subject at this stage.”
“At this stage?” Sajaki spoke so softly she largely read his lips.
“I mean, to go into the gunnery immediately after Nagorny. It’s too dangerous, and I think Khouri is too valuable to risk.” She stopped, swallowed, and drew breath into her lungs for what she knew would be the hardest thing to say. “I think we need another recruit—someone less gifted. With an intermediate recruit I can iron out the remaining wrinkles before going ahead with Khouri as primary candidate.”
Sajaki picked up his shakuhachi and sighted along it thoughtfully. There was a little raised burr at the end of the bamboo, perhaps from the time when he had used the stick on Khouri. He rubbed it with his thumb, smoothing it back down.
When he spoke, it was with a calm so total that it was worse than any possible display of anger.
“You’re suggesting we look for another recruit?”
He made it sound as if what she was proposing was easily the most absurd, deranged thing he had ever heard uttered.
“Only in the interim,” she said, aware that she was speaking too quickly, hating herself for it, despising her sudden deference to the man. “Just until everything’s stable. Then we can use Khouri.”
Sajaki nodded. “Well, that sounds sensible. Goodness knows why we didn’t think of it earlier, but I suppose we had other things on our minds.” He put down the shakuhachi, although his hand did not stray far from its hollow shaft. “But that can’t be helped. What we have to do now is find ourselves another recruit. Shouldn’t be too hard, should it? I mean, we hardly taxed ourselves recruiting Khouri. Admittedly we’re two months into interstellar space and our next port of call is a virtually unheard-of outpost—but I don’t envisage any great problem in finding another subject. I expect we’ll have to turn them away in droves, don’t you?”