“Look,” Khouri said, in the relative calm which followed. “Is that something moving?”
“Where?”
She pointed, almost vertically downwards. Volyova squinted after her, then spoke into the bracelet again. “Auxiliary lighting—cache chamber quadrant five. “Then to Khouri: “Let’s see what the svinoi’s up to.”
“You weren’t really serious, were you?”
“About what?”
“A glitch in the monitoring systems.”
“Not really,” Volyova said, squinting even more as the auxiliaries came online, spotlighting a portion of the chamber far beneath their feet. “It’s called optimism—but I’m losing the hang of it fast.”
The weapon, Volyova said, was one of the planet-killers. She was not really sure how it functioned; still less exactly what it was capable of doing. But she had her suspicions. She had tested it years ago at the very lowest range of its destructive settings… against a small moon. Extrapolating—and she was very good at extrapolating—the weapon would have no trouble dismantling a planet even at a range of hundreds of AU. There were things inside it which had the gravitational signatures of quantum black holes, yet which, strangely, refused to evaporate. Somehow the weapon created a soliton—a standing-wave—in the geodesic structure of spacetime.
And now the weapon had come alive, without her bidding. It was gliding through the chamber, riding the network of tracks which would eventually deliver it to open space. It was like watching a skyscraper crawl through a city.
“Can we do anything?”
“I’m open to suggestions. What did you have in mind?”
“Well, you have to appreciate I haven’t given this a hell of a lot of thought…”
“Say it, Khouri.”
“We could try blocking it.” Khouri’s forehead was furrowed, as if, on top of all this, she was battling with a sudden migraine attack. “You’ve got shuttles on this thing, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then use one to block the exit. Or is that too crude for you?”
“Right now, the expression ‘too crude’ isn’t in my vocabulary.”
Volyova glanced at her bracelet. All the while the weapon was moving down the chamber wall, for all the world like an armoured slug retracing its own slime-trail. At the bottom of the chamber a vast iris was opening; the track led through the aperture into the dark chamber nested below this one. The weapon was almost level with the aperture.
“I can move one of the shuttles… but it’ll take too long to get it outside the ship. I don’t think we’d get there in time…”
“Do it!” Khouri said, every muscle in her face screaming tension. “Piss around any more and we won’t even have this option!”
Volyova nodded, regarding the recruit suspiciously. What did Khouri know about all this? She seemed less bewildered than Volyova, although she also looked far more agitated than Volyova would have expected. But she had a point; the shuttle idea was worth a try, even though it was unlikely to succeed.
“We need something else,” she said, calling up the shuttle-control subpersona.
The weapon was halfway through the transfer iris, sliding into second chamber.
“Something else?”
“In case this doesn’t work. The problem’s in the gunnery, Khouri—and maybe that’s where we should attack it.”
She blanched. “What?”
“I want you in the seat.”
While they dropped towards the gunnery, accelerating so hard that the floor inverted to become the ceiling—and Khouri’s stomach felt like it had done something similar—Volyova whispered frantic, breathless instructions into her bracelet. It took a maddening few seconds to access the right subpersona, another few to bypass the safeguards which prevented unauthorised remote control of the shuttles. Still more to warm up the engines of one of the shuttles, and then longer still while the machine declamped from the docking restraints and vectored out of its holding bay, beyond the hull, handling—Volyova said—like the damn thing was still half asleep. The lighthugger was still under thrust, so the manoeuvre was doubly tricky.
“What worries me,” Khouri said, “is what the weapon plans to do once it gets outside. Are we in range of anything?”
“Resurgam, conceivably.” Volyova raised her eyes from the bracelet. “But maybe now it won’t get a chance.”
The Mademoiselle chose that moment to blink into existence, somehow managing to accommodate herself within the elevator without intruding on the volume already claimed by Khouri and the Triumvir. “She’s wrong. This isn’t going to work. I control more than just the cache-weapon.”
“Admitting it now, are you?”
“What’s to deny?” The Mademoiselle smiled pridefully. “You recall that I downloaded an avatar of myself into the gunnery? Well my avatar now controls the cache. Nothing I can do can influence her actions. She’s as far beyond my reach as I am beyond the reach of my original self on Yellowstone.”
The elevator was slowing now, Volyova engrossed by the complex little readouts patterning her bracelet. A schematic holo showed the shuttle moving along the lighthugger’s hull; a tiny remora nosing along the smooth flank of a basking shark.
“But you gave her orders,” Khouri said. “You know what the hell she’s up to, don’t you.”
“Oh, her orders were very simple. If control of the gunnery placed at her disposal any systems which could quicken the completion of the mission, she was to make whatever arrangements were necessary to hasten that end.”
Khouri shook her head in abject disbelief.
“I thought you wanted me to kill Sylveste.”
“The weapon may now make that end achievable rather sooner than I anticipated.”
“No,” Khouri said, after the Mademoiselle’s remark had had time to settle in. “You wouldn’t wipe out a planet just to kill one man.”
“Discovered a conscience all of a sudden, have we?” The Mademoiselle shook her head, lips pursed. “You exhibited no qualms over Sylveste. Why should the deaths of others trouble you so much? Or is it simply a question of scale?”
“It’s just…” Khouri hesitated, knowing what she was about to say would not trouble the Mademoiselle. “Inhuman. But I don’t expect you to understand that.”
The elevator halted, door opening to reveal the semi-flooded access way which led to the gunnery. Khouri took a moment to get her bearings. Ever since the descent had begun, she had been suffering the worst headache imaginable. It seemed to be lessening now, but she had no wish to dwell on what might have caused it.
“Quickly,” Volyova said, traipsing out.
“What you don’t understand,” the Mademoiselle said, “is why I would go to the trouble of destroying an entire colony just to ensure one man’s death.”
Khouri followed Volyova, boots disappearing to the knees in the flood.
“Damn right I don’t. And I’d try and stop you whether I did or not.”
“Not if you grasped the facts, Khouri. You’d actually be urging me on.”
“Then it’s your fault for not telling me.”
They pushed through bulkhead seals, dead janitor-rats bobbing by as the water levels equalised, loosened from the little crannies where they had curled up to expire.
“Where’s the shuttle?” Khouri called.
“Parked over the space-door,” Volyova said, turning back to look Khouri in the eye. “And the weapon hasn’t emerged yet.”
“Does that mean we won?”
“Means we haven’t lost yet. But I still want you in the gunnery.”
The Mademoiselle had gone now, but her disembodied voice lingered, wrongly echoless in the cramped corridor.