“It won’t do you any good. There’s no system in the gunnery that I can’t override, so your presence would be futile.”
“So why are you obviously so keen to talk me out of going in there?”
The Mademoiselle did not answer.
Two bulkheads further, they reached the ceiling access point which led to the chamber. They were running by that point, and it took a few moments for the water to stop sloshing up and down the angled sides of the corridor. When it did, Volyova frowned.
“Something’s up,” she said.
“What?”
“Can’t you hear it? There’s a noise.” She angled her head. “Seems to be coming from the gunnery itself.”
Khouri could hear it for herself now. It was a high-pitched mechanical sound, like ancient industrial machinery going haywire.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Volyova paused. “At least, I hope I don’t. Let’s get inside.”
Volyova reached up and tugged at the overhead access door, budging it open, a small shower of ship-sludge loosening from its seals, spattering their shoulders. The alloy ladder descended, the industrial noise intensifying. It was clearly coming from the gunnery itself. The gunnery’s bright internal lights were on, but they appeared to be unsteady, as if something were moving around up there interrupting the light-beams. Whatever it was was moving quickly as well.
“Ilia,” she said. “I’m not sure I like this.”
“Join the club.”
Her bracelet chimed. Volyova was bending to examine it when an almighty shudder rammed through the entire fabric of the ship. The two of them slipped into the floodwater, falling against the slippery corridor-sides. Khouri was struggling to her feet when a tiny tidal wave of viscous sludge upended her. She hit the deck. For a moment she was swallowing the stuff, the closest to eating shit since her army days. Volyova hooked her by the elbows, hauling her to her feet. Khouri gagged and spat out the sludge, though the awful taste lingered.
Volyova’s bracelet was in scream-mode again.
“What the hell…”
“The shuttle,” Volyova said. “We just lost it.”
“What?”
“I mean it just got blown up.” Volyova coughed. Her face was wet; she must have taken a good mouthful of the stuff herself. “Far as I can tell, the cache-weapon didn’t even have to push its way out. Secondary weapons did the job—turned on the shuttle.”
Above, the gunnery was still making frightening noises.
“You want me to go up there, don’t you?”
Volyova nodded. “Right now, getting you in the chair is the only option we have left. But don’t worry. I’m right behind you.”
“Listen to her,” the Mademoiselle said, quite suddenly. “All ready to have you do what she hasn’t the guts to do herself.”
“Or the implants,” Khouri shouted, aloud.
“What?” Volyova said.
“Nothing.” Khouri planted one foot on the lowest rung. “Just telling an old friend to go stuff herself.” Her foot slid off the slime-encrusted rung. Next attempt, she found something approximating a grip and planted her second foot on the same rung. Her head was poking into the little access tunnel which fed into the gunnery, no more than two metres above.
“You won’t get in,” the Mademoiselle said. “I’m controlling the chair. As soon as you put your head into the chamber, you lose it.”
“I’d love to see the look on your face, in that case.”
“Khouri, haven’t you grasped things yet? The loss of your head would be no more than a minor inconvenience.”
Her head was just below the chamber entrance now. She could see the gimballed chair, moving in whiplash arcs through the chamber’s volume. It had never been designed for such acrobatics; Khouri could smell the ozone of fried power-systems greasing the air. “Volyova,” she called, shouting above the din. “You built this set-up. Can you cut the power to the chair from below?”
“Cut power to the chair? Certainly—but what good would it do us? I need you linking in to the gunnery.”
“Not everything—just enough to stop the bastard moving around.”
There was a brief pause, during which Khouri imagined Volyova summoning ancient wiring diagrams to mind. The woman had constructed the gunnery herself—but it might have been decades and decades of subjective time ago, and something as vulgarly functional as the main power trunk had probably never needed to be upgraded since.
“Well,” Volyova said, eventually. “There’s a main feed line here—I suppose I could sever it…”
Volyova left, trudging quickly out of sight below. It sounded simple; severing the power feed. Maybe, Khouri thought, Volyova would have to fetch a specialised cutter from elsewhere. Surely there was not that much time. But no; Volyova had something. There was that little laser, the one she used to flense away samples from Captain Brannigan. She always carried it. Agonising seconds passed, Khouri thinking of the cache-weapon, easing slowly beyond the hull, entering naked space. By now it would be locking on target—Resurgam—going to final power-up, preparing to unleash a pulse of gravitational death.
Above, the noise stopped.
All was still, the light steady. The chair hung motionless within its gimbals, a throne imprisoned within an elegantly curved cage.
Volyova shouted, “Khouri, there’s a secondary power-source. The gunnery can tap it, if it senses a drain from the main feed. Means you might not have much time to reach the chair…”
Khouri sprang into the gunnery, heaving her body weight out of the hole in the floor. The slender alloy gimbals now looked sharper than before. She moved fast, monkeying through the feed lines, hopping under or above the gimbals. The chair was still static, but the closer she got, the less room she would have if the apparatus swung into motion again. If it happened now, she thought, the walls would be rapidly redecorated in sticky, coagulating red.
And then she was in. Khouri buckled, and the instant she closed the clasp, the chair whined and shot forwards. The gimbals rolled about her, swerving the chair backwards and forwards, upside down and sideways, until all sense of orientation was lost. The motion was neck-breaking, and Khouri felt her eyeballs bulging out of their sockets with each hairpin reversal—but the motion was surely less vicious than before.
She wants to deter me, Khouri thought, but not kill me… yet.
“Don’t attempt to hook in,” the Mademoiselle said.
“Because it might screw up your little plan?”
“Not at all. Might I remind you of Sun Stealer? He’s waiting in there.”
The chair was still bucking, but not so violently as to hinder conscious thought.
“Maybe he doesn’t exist,” Khouri said, subvocalising. “Maybe you invented him to have more leverage over me.”
“Go ahead then.”
Khouri made the helmet lower itself down over her head, masking the whirling motion of the chamber. Her palm rested on the interface control. All it would take was slight pressure to initiate the link; to close the circuit which would result in her psyche being sucked into the military data-abstraction known as gunspace.
“You can’t do it, can you? Because you believe me. Once you open that connection, there’s no going back.”
She increased the pressure, feeling the slight give as the control threatened to close. Then—either via some unconscious neuromuscular twitch, or because part of her knew it had to be done, she closed the connection. The gunnery environment enfolded around her, as it had done in a thousand tactical simulations. Spatial data came first: her own body-image become nebulous, replaced by the lighthugger and its immediate surroundings, and then a series of hierarchical overlays conveying the tactical/strategic situation, constantly updating, self-checking its own assumptions, running frantic realtime-extrapolated simulations.