All that changed when the dogs came home.
They were the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds: cybernetic agents she had unleashed into the gunnery during one of Khouri’s sessions. The dogs had clawed their way into the system itself via the neural interface, exploiting the system’s one forgivable weakness. Volyova had hardened it against software attack, but had obviously never imagined that the attack might come from the brain of the person hooked into the gunnery. The dogs barked back safe assurances that they had entered the gunnery’s core. They had not returned to Khouri during the session in which they were unleashed, since it would take more than a few hours for them to sniff every nook and cranny of the gunnery’s Byzantine architecture. So they had stayed in the system for more than a day, until Volyova once again hooked Khouri in.
Then the dogs returned to the Mademoiselle, and she decrypted them and unravelled the prey they had located.
“She has a stowaway,” the Mademoiselle said when she and Khouri were alone after a session. “Something has hidden itself in the gunnery system, and I’m prepared to bet she knows nothing about it at all.”
Which was when Khouri stopped regarding the gunnery chamber with such total equanimity. “Go on,” she said, feeling her body temperature plummet.
“A data entity; that’s as well as I can describe it.”
“Something the dogs encountered?”
“Yes, but…” Once again the Mademoiselle sounded lost for words. Occasionally Khouri suspected it was genuine: the implant was having to deal with a situation light-years away from anything in the real Mademoiselle’s expectations. “It’s not that they saw it, or even saw a part of it. It’s too subtle for that, or else Volyova’s own counter-intrusion systems would have caught it. It’s more that they sensed the absences where it had just been; sensed the breeze it stirred when it moved around.”
“Do me a favour,” Khouri said. “Try not to make it sound so damned scary, will you?”
“I’m sorry,” the Mademoiselle answered. “But I can’t deny that the thing’s presence is disturbing.”
“Disturbing to you? How do you think I feel?” Khouri shook her head, stunned at the casual viciousness of reality.” All right; what do you think it is? Some kind of virus, like all the others which are eating away this ship?”
“The thing seems much too advanced for that. Volyova’s own defences have kept the ship operational despite the other viral entities, and she’s even kept the Melding Plague at bay. But this…” The Mademoiselle looked at Khouri with a convincing facsimile of fear. “The dogs were frightened by it, Khouri. In the way it evaded them, it revealed itself to be much cleverer than almost anything in my experience. But it didn’t attack them, and that troubles me even more.”
“Yes?”
“Because it suggests that the thing is biding its time.”
Sylveste never found out how long they had slept. It might only have been minutes, packed with fevered, adrenalin-charged dreams of chaos and flight, or it might have been hours, or even a whole portion of the day. No way of knowing. Whatever the case, it had not been natural fatigue that sent them under. Roused by something, Sylveste realised with a stunned jolt that they had been breathing sleeping gas, pumped into the tunnel system. No wonder the air had seemed so fragrant and breezy.
There was a sound like rats in the attic.
He pawed Pascale awake; she came to consciousness with a plaintive moan, assimilating her surroundings and predicament in a few troubled seconds of reality-denial. He studied the heat-signature of her face, watching waxy neutrality cave in to an expressive melange of remorse and fear.
“We have to move,” Sylveste said. “They’re after us—they gassed the tunnels.”
The scrabbling sound grew closer by the second. Pascale was still somewhere between wakefulness and dream, but she managed to open her mouth—it sounded as if she were speaking through cotton wool—and ask him, “Which way?”
“This way,” Sylveste said, grabbing her and propelling her forwards, down the nearest valvelike opening. She stumbled on the slipperiness. Sylveste helped her up, squeezed beyond her and took her hand. Gloom lay ahead, his eyes revealing only a few metres of the tunnel beyond their position. He was, he realised, only slightly less blind than his wife.
Better than nothing.
“Wait,” Pascale said. “There’s light behind us, Dan!”
And voices. He could hear their wordless, urgent babble now. The rattle of sterile metal. Chemosensor arrays were probably already tracking them; pheromonal sniffers were reading the airborne human effluent of panic, graphing data directly into the sensoria of the chasers.
“Faster,” Pascale said. He snatched a glance back, his eyes momentarily overloaded by the new light. It was a bluish radiance limning the shaft’s far reach, quivering, as if someone were holding a torch. He tried to increase speed, but the tunnel was steepening, making it harder to find traction on the glassily smooth sides: too much like trying to scramble up an ice chimney.
Panting sounds, metal scraping against the walls, barked commands.
Too steep now. It was now a constant battle just to hold balance, just to keep from slipping backwards. “Get behind me,” he said, turning to face the blue light.
Pascale rushed past him.
“What now?”
The light wavered, crept in intensity. “We have no choice,” Sylveste said. “We can’t outrun them, Pascale. Have to turn and face them.”
“That’s suicide.”
“Maybe they won’t kill us if they see our faces.”
He thought to himself that four thousand years of human civilisation put the lie to that hope, but, given that it was the only one he had, it hardly mattered that it was forlorn. His wife locked her arms round his chest and pressed her head against his, looking the same way. Her breathing was pulsed and terrified. Sylveste had no doubt that his own sounded much the same.
The enemy could probably smell their fear, quite literally.
“Pascale,” Sylveste said. “I need to tell you something.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.” He could no longer separate his own rapid breathing from hers, each exhalation a quick hard beat against the skin. “In case I don’t get a chance to tell anyone else. Something I’ve kept a secret for too long.”
“You mean in case we die?”
He avoided answering her question directly, one half of his mind trying to guess how many seconds or tens of seconds they had left. Perhaps not enough for what had to be said. “I lied,” he said. “About what happened around Lascaille’s Shroud.”
She started to say something.
“No, wait,” Sylveste said. “Hear me out. I have to say this. Have to get it out.”
Her voice was barely audible. “Say it.”
“Everything that I said happened out there was true.” Her eyes were wide now; oval voids in the heat-map of her face. “It just happened in reverse. It wasn’t Carine Lefevre’s transform that began to break down when we were close to the Shroud.”
“What are you saying?”
“That it was mine. I was the one who nearly got both of us killed.” He paused, waiting either for her to say something, or for the chasers to erupt from the blue light which was slowly creeping closer. When neither happened he continued, lost in the momentum of confession. “My Juggler transform started to decay. The gravity fields around the Shroud began to lash at us. Carine was going to die unless I separated my half of the contact module from hers.”
He could imagine the way she was trying to fit this over the existing template she carried in her mind, part of the consensus history with which she had been born. What he was saying was not, could not, should not be the truth. The way it was was very simple. Lefevre’s transform had begun to decay; Lefevre had made the supreme sacrifice, jettisoning her half of the contact module so that Sylveste stood a chance at surviving this bruising encounter with the totally alien. It could not be any other way. It was what she knew.