She assimilated.
The cache-weapon was holding station, several hundred metres away from the hull. Its prong was pointed in the direction of flight, straight towards Resurgam—allowing, Khouri knew, for the tiny relativistic light-bending effects caused by their moderate velocity. Near the space-door from which the weapon had emerged, the shuttle had left a black smear along the side of the hull. There were damage-points there; Khouri felt them as little pricks of discomfort, numbing as auto-repair systems phased in. Gravity sensors felt ripples emanating from the weapon; Khouri felt periodic—and quickening—breezes wash over her. The black holes in the weapon must be spinning up, orbiting quicker and quicker around the torus.
A presence sniffed her, not from outside, but from within the gunnery itself.
“Sun Stealer’s detected your entry,” the Mademoiselle said.
“No problem.” Khouri reached out into gunspace, slipping abstract hands into cybernetically realised gauntlets. “I’m accessing ship’s defences. A few seconds is all I need.”
But something was wrong. The weapons felt differently from the way they had in simulation; unwilling to budge to her whims. Quickly she intuited: they were being fought over, and she was merely joining in the struggle.
The Mademoiselle—or rather, her avatar—was trying to block the hull defences, prevent them from being turned on the cache-weapon. The weapon itself was firmly out of Khouri’s reach, veiled by numerous firewalls. But who—or what—was resisting the Mademoiselle, trying to bring those weapons to bear? Sun Stealer, of course. She could sense him now. Vast, powerful, but also intent on invisibility and slyness, careful to camouflage his actions behind routine data movements. For years that had worked, and Volyova had known nothing of his presence. But now Sun Stealer was driven to recklessness, like a crab forced to scuttle from one hideaway to another by the retreating tide. Nothing remotely human; no sense that this third presence in the gunnery was anything so mundane as another downloaded personality simulation; what Sun Stealer felt like was pure mentality, as if this data-representation was all that he had ever been; all that he ever would be.
It felt like absolutely nothing—but a locus of nothingness which had somehow achieved a terrifying degree of organisation.
Was she seriously contemplating joining forces with this thing?
Maybe. If that was what it took to stop the Mademoiselle.
“You can still back out,” the woman said. “He’s busy at the moment—can’t spare his energies to invade you. But in a moment that won’t be the case.”
Now the aiming systems were at least under her control, although they operated sluggishly. She bracketed the cache-weapon, encasing the whole bulk in a potential sphere of annihilation. Now all that had to happen was for the Mademoiselle to surrender control of the weapons, if only for the microsecond necessary for them to slew, target and fire.
She felt them loosen. She—or rather, she and Sun Stealer—seemed to be winning.
“Don’t do this, Khouri. You don’t know what’s at stake…”
“Then clue me in, bitch. Tell me what’s so important.”
The cache-weapon was moving away from the hull, surely a sign that the Mademoiselle was worried about its safety. But the pulses of gravitational radiation were quickening, now coming almost too rapidly to separate. No guessing how long it would be before the cache-weapon fired, but Khouri suspected it could only be seconds away.
“Listen,” the Mademoiselle said. “You want the truth, Khouri?”
“Damn right I do.”
“Then you’d better brace yourself. You’re about to get the whole thing.”
And then—as soon as she had adjusted to being sucked into gunspace—she felt herself being sucked somewhere else entirely. The odd thing was that it seemed to be a part of herself she had until that moment completely overlooked.
They were on a battlefield, surrounded by the chameleoflaged bubbletents, the temporary enclosures of some hospital or forward command post. The sky above the compound was azure, cloud-streaked, but littered with dirty, intermingling vapour trails. It was as if some world-spanning squid were spilling its viscera into the stratosphere. Sowing the trails, and darting between them, were numerous arrow-winged jet aircraft. Lower, there were drone-dirigibles and, lower still, bulbous-bodied transport helicopters, tilt-wings and veetols, skimming the periphery of the compound, occasionally dropping to disgorge armoured personnel carriers or walking troops, ambulances or armed servitors. There was a scorched, grass-covered apron to one side of the compound, where six delta-winged, windowless aircraft were parked on skids, their upper surfaces precisely mimicking the sun-bleached hue of the ground, their VTOL irises open for inspection.
Khouri felt herself stumbling, falling towards the grass at her feet. She wore chameleoflage fatigues, currently emitting in dappled khaki. There was a lightweight projectile weapon in her hands, its alloy grip contour-moulded to match her palm. She was helmeted, a two-d readout monocle dangling down from the helmet’s rim, showing a false-colour heat-map of the battlezone, telemetered from one of the dirigibles.
“This way, please.”
A whitehat was directing her into one of the bubbletents. Inside, an aide took her gun, ident-chipped it and racked it with eight other weapons, varying in firepower from projectile units like her own to medium-yield party-poopers and a ferocious shoulder-held ack-am weapon, something one would really not want to use on the same continent as one’s adversary. The feed from the dirigibles fuzzed and vanished, occluded by the anti-surveillance shroud around the bubbletent. She reached up with her now free hand and flicked the monocle back over the helmet rim, raking a strand of sweaty hair away from her eye with the same movement.
“Through here, Khouri.”
They led her into a partitioned back area of the tent, through a room filled with bunkbeds, injured, and quietly humming med-servitors, craning over their patients like mechanised green swans. From outside she heard a shriek of jets, then a series of concussive explosions, but no one inside the tent seemed to even notice the sound.
Finally they let her into a tiny, square-walled room outfitted with a single desk. The walls were draped with the transnational flags of the Northern Coalition and there was a large bronze-mounted globe of Sky’s Edge on one corner of the desk. The globe was currently in geological mode, showing only the varying landmasses and terrain-types on the surface, rather than the hotly contested political boundaries. But Khouri paid it no more than cursory attention, because what snared her attention was the person sitting behind the desk, in full military dress: cross-buttoned olive-drab tunic, gold epaulettes, a conspicuous panoply of NC medals ranked across his chest, his black hair slicked back in brilliant grooves.
“I’m sorry,” Fazil said. “That it had to happen this way. But now that you’re here…” He motioned across the room. “Have a seat; we need to talk. Rather urgently, as it happens.”
Khouri recalled, distantly, another place. She remembered a chamber, metallic, containing a seat, but while there was something about the memory that made her nervous—as if time were precious—-it felt unreal compared to the present, which was this room. Fazil absorbed her attention totally. He looked exactly as she remembered him (remembered him from where, she wondered?), although his cheek bore evidence of a scar she did not recall, and he had grown a moustache, or at least (she could not be sure) changed something about the one he had worn last time; thickened it or allowed it to grow out from simply thick black stubble, to the point where it now had the onset of a rakish droop on either side of his upper lip.
She did as he had suggested, easing herself into a folding chair.