“Thank you,” Sylveste said. “It’s… an improvement.”
“I think we’d better move,” said Falkender. “We’re five minutes behind schedule as it is.”
Sylveste nodded, and just the action of tipping his head was enough to spark pulsing migraines. Still, they were nothing compared with what he had endured until Falkender’s work.
He helped himself from the couch and stepped towards the door. Maybe it was because he now moved to the door with a purpose—because, for the first time, he actually expected to step through it—but the action suddenly seemed perverse and alien. He felt as if he were casually stepping off a precipice. He now had no balance. It was as if his inner equilibrium had become accustomed to no vision, and was now thrown by its return. The dizziness faded, though, just as two True Path heavies emerged from the outer corridor and took him by the elbows.
Falkender trailed behind. “Be careful. There may be perceptual glitches…”
But though Sylveste heard his words, they meant nothing to him. He knew where he was now, and that knowledge was momentarily too overpowering. He was back home, after more than twenty years of exile.
His prison was Mantell, a place he had not seen—and barely even visited in his memory—since the coup.
TEN
Volyova sat alone in the huge sphere of the bridge, under the holographic display of the Resurgam system. Her seat, like the other vacant ones around her, was mounted on a long, telescopic, highly articulated arm, so that it could be steered to almost any point in the sphere. Hand under chin, she had been staring into the orrery for hours, like a child transfixed by some glittery toy.
Delta Pavonis was a chip of warm-red ambergris fixed at the middle, the system’s eleven major planets spaced around it on their respective orbits, positioned at their true positions; smears of asteroidal debris and comet-shards following their own ellipses; the whole orrery haloed by a tenuous Kuiper belt of icy flotsam; tugged into slight asymmetry by the presence of the neutron star which was Pavonis’s dark twin. The picture was a simulation, rather than an enlargement of what lay ahead. The ship’s sensors were acute enough to glean data at this range, but the view would have been distorted by relativistic effects, and—worse—would have been a snapshot of the system as it was years earlier, with the relative positions of the planets bearing no resemblance to the present situation. Since the ship’s approach strategy would depend critically on using the system’s larger gas giants for camouflage and gravitational braking, Volyova needed to know where things would be when they got there, not how they had been five years ago. And not only that. Before the ship arrived in the Resurgam system, its advance envoys would already have skimmed by invisibly, and it was just as crucial to arrange their passage at the optimum planetary alignment.
“Release pebbles,” she said, satisfied now that she had run enough simulations. Heeding her, Infinity deployed one thousand of the tiny probes, firing them ahead of the decelerating ship in a slowly spreading pattern. Volyova spoke a command into her bracelet and a window opened ahead of her, captured by a camera on the hull. The entire ensemble of pebbles contracted into the distance, apparently tugged away by an invisible force. The cloud diminished as it fell further and further ahead of the ship, until all Volyova could see was a blurred nimbus, diminishing quickly. The pebbles were moving at almost the speed of light, and would reach the Resurgam system months ahead of the ship. The swarm, by then, would be wider than the orbit of Resurgam around the sun. Each tiny probe would align itself towards the planet and catch photons across the electromagnetic spectrum. The data from each pebble would be sent in a tightly focused laser pulse back towards the ship. The resolution of any one unit in the swarm would be tiny, but by combining their results, a very sharp and detailed picture of Resurgam could be assembled. It would not tell Sajaki where Sylveste was, but it would give him an idea of the likely centres of power on the planet, and—more importantly—what kind of defences they were capable of mustering.
That was one thing on which Sajaki and Volyova had been in complete agreement. Even if they found Sylveste, it seemed unlikely that he would agree to come aboard without coercion.
“Do you know what they did to Pascale?” Sylveste said.
“She’s safe,” said the eye surgeon, as he led Sylveste along tracheal, rock-clad tunnels deep in Mantell. “That’s what I’ve heard, at least,” he added, lessening Sylveste’s ease. “But I could be wrong. I don’t think Sluka would have killed her without good reason, but she may have had her frozen.”
“Frozen?”
“Until she’s useful. You’ll understand by now that Sluka thinks long-term.”
Continual waves of nausea kept threatening to overwhelm him. His eyes hurt, but, as he kept reminding himself, it was vision. That at least was something. Without it he was powerless, not even capable of effective disobedience. With it, escape might still be impossible, but at least he was spared the stumbling indignity of the blind. What vision he had, though, would have shamed the lowliest invertebrate. Spatial perception was haphazard, and colour existed in his world now only via nuances of grey-greens.
What he knew—what he remembered—was this.
He had not seen Mantell since the night of the coup twenty years earlier. The first coup, he corrected himself. Now that Girardieau had been overthrown, Sylveste had to get used to thinking of his own dethronement in purely historical terms. Girardieau’s regime had not immediately closed the place down, even though its Amarantin-directed research conflicted with their Inundationist agenda. For five or six years after the coup they had kept the place running, but one by one they had moved Sylveste’s best researchers back to Cuvier, replacing them with eco-engineers, botanists and geopower specialists. Finally, Mantell had been reduced to a skeleton-crewed test station, whole portions mothballed or derelict. It should have stayed that way, but trouble was already looming from outside elements. For years it had been rumoured that True Path’s leaders in Cuvier, Resurgam City, or whatever they were calling it now, were under direction from individuals beyond, a clique of one-time Girardieau sympathisers who had fallen out of favour during the machinations of the first coup. Supposedly, these brigands had altered their physiologies to cope with the dusty, oxygen-depleted atmosphere beyond the domes, using biotech purchased from Captain Remilliod.
Stories like that could be expected. But after sporadic attacks against a number of outposts, they began to look far less speculative. Mantell had been abandoned at some point, Sylveste knew, which meant that the current occupants might have been here for much longer than the time since Girardieau’s assassination. Months, or possibly even years.
Certainly they acted as if they owned the place. He knew when they entered a room that it was the one where Gillian Sluka had addressed him upon his arrival, however long ago that was. He failed to recognise it, though: it was entirely possible that during his tenancy in Mantell he had known this room intimately, but there were no longer any points of reference to aid him. The room’s decor and furnishings—such as there were—had been completely replaced. She stood with her back to him, next to a table, gloved hands knitted primly above her hip. She wore a knee-length fluted jacket with leather shoulder patches, the colour rendered as murky olive by his eyes. Her hair was collected in a braided tail which hung between her shoulder blades. She was not projecting entoptics. On either side of the room, planetary globes orbited on slender, swan-necked plinths. Something approximating daylight slatted down from the ceiling, though his eyes leeched it of any warmth.