Instead, she had minutes in which to act.
She was sucked into—not so much a pit of despondency, as a bottomless, endlessly plummeting gravitational well. But, when she had dropped deep into its maw—and several of those precious minutes had elapsed—she remembered something; something so obvious she should have thought of it long before.
Volyova began running.
Khouri crashed back into the gunnery.
A quick check on the status-clocks confirmed what Fazil had promised her, which was that no real time had passed. That was some trick; she really felt as if she had spent the best part of an hour in the bubbletent, when in fact the whole experience had just been laid down a fraction of a second earlier. She had lived through none of it, but that was almost impossible to accept. Yet she could not now relax—events had been frantic enough even before the memories had been triggered. The situation had not lost any of its urgency.
The cache-weapon must be nearly ready to blow now: its gravitational emissions were no longer detectable by the ship, like a whistle which had passed into the ultrasonic. Maybe the weapon was already able to fire. Was the Mademoiselle actually holding back? Was it important to her that Khouri come over to her side? If the weapon failed, Khouri would again be her only means of acting.
“Relinquish,” the Mademoiselle said. “Relinquish, Khouri. You must realise by now that Sun Stealer is something alien! You’re assisting it!”
The mental effort involved in subvocalising was almost too much for her now.
“Yeah, I’m quite prepared to believe that it’s alien. The trouble is, what does that make you?”
“Khouri, we don’t have time for this.”
“Sorry, but now seems as good a time as ever to get this into the open.” While she communicated her thoughts, Khouri kept up her side in the struggle, though part of her—the part that been swayed by what she had been shown in the memories—implored her to give up; to let the Mademoiselle assume total control of the cache-weapon. “You led me into thinking Sun Stealer was something Sylveste brought back from the Shrouders.”
“No; you saw the facts and jumped to the only logical conclusion.”
“Did I hell.” Khouri found new strength now, though it remained insufficient to tip the balance. “All along, you were desperate to turn me against Sun Stealer. Now, that may or may not have been justified—maybe he is an evil bastard—but it does beg a question. How would you know? You wouldn’t. Not unless you were alien yourself.”
“Assuming—for the moment—that that were the case—”
Something new snared Khouri’s attention. Even given the severity of the battle she was waging, this new thing was sufficiently important for her to relax momentarily; allocating some additional part of her conscious mind to assess the situation.
Something else was joining the fray.
This newcomer was not in gunspace; it was not another cybernetic entity, but a physical object, one which until now had not been present—or at least not noticed—in the arena of battle. At the moment Khouri had detected it, it was very close to the lighthugger; dangerously close by her reckoning—in fact, so close that it seemed to be physically attached, parasitic.
It was the size of a very small spacecraft, its central mass no more than ten metres from end to end. It resembled a fat, ribbed torpedo, sprouting eight articulated legs. It was walking along the hull of the ship. Most miraculously, it was not being shot at by the same defences which had destroyed the shuttle.
“Ilia…” Khouri breathed. “Ilia, you aren’t seriously thinking—” And then, a moment later, “Oh shit. You were, weren’t you?”
“What foolishness,” the Mademoiselle said.
The spider-room had detached itself from the hull, each of its eight legs releasing its grip simultaneously. Since the ship was still decelerating, the spider-room seemed to fall forwards with increasing speed. Ordinarily, so Volyova had said, the room would have fired its grapples at that point, to re-establish contact with the ship. Volyova must have disabled them, because the room kept falling, until its thrusters kicked in. Although Khouri was perceiving the scene via many different routes, and in some modes which would not have been assimilable to someone lacking the gunspace implants, a small aspect of that sensory stream was devoted to the optical, relayed from the external cameras on the ship. Via that channel she saw the thrusters burn violet-hot, jetting from pinprick-apertures around the midsection of the spider-room, where the torpedo-shaped body was attached to the turret from which sprouted the now purchaseless legs. The glare underlit the legs, picking them out in rapid strobing flashes as the room adjusted its fall, negated it and began to heave-to alongside the ship once more. But Volyova did not use the thrusters to bring the room within grasping range. After loitering for a few seconds, the room fell laterally away, accelerating towards the weapon.
“Ilia… I really don’t think—”
“Trust me,” the Triumvir’s voice replied, cutting into gunspace as if she were speaking from halfway across the universe, not merely a few kilometres from Khouri’s position. “I’ve got what you might charitably refer to as a plan. Or at the very least an option on going out fighting.”
“I’m not sure I liked the last bit.”
“Me neither, in case you were wondering.” Volyova paused. “Incidentally, Khouri, when all this is over—assuming we both survive all of this, which I admit isn’t exactly guaranteed at this juncture… I rather think we ought to set aside time for a little chat.”
Maybe she was talking to blank out the fear she must be feeling. “A little chat?”
“About all of this. The whole problem with the gunnery. It might also be a chance for you to ease yourself of any… niggling little burdens you might have been well advised to share with me much earlier.”
“Like what?”
“Like who you are, for a start.”
The spider-room covered the distance to the weapon rapidly, using its thrusters to slow down, but still holding station relative to the ship, maintaining a standard one-gee aft burn. Even with its legs splayed, the spider-room was less than a third the size of the cache-weapon. It looked less like a spider now, and more like a hapless squid, about to vanish into the maw of a slowly cruising whale.
“That’s going to take more than a little chat,” Khouri said, feeling—with, she suspected, no little justification—that there was really no point holding much back from Volyova any more.
“Good. Now excuse me for a moment; what I’m about to try is somewhat on the tricky side of downright impossible.”
“She means suicidal,” the Mademoiselle said.
“You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?”
“Immensely—more so given that I have no control over anything that transpires.”
Volyova had positioned the spider-room near the projecting spike of the cache-weapon, although she was too far from it for the wriggling mechanical legs to gain a scramblehold on the pitted surface. In any case, the weapon was moving around now, oscillating slowly and randomly from side to side with fierce bursts of its own thrusters, seemingly trying to evade Volyova’s approach, but restricted in its movements by its own inertia—just as if the mighty hell-class weapon was scared of a tiny little spider. Khouri heard four rapid pops, almost too closely spaced to discriminate, as if a projectile weapon had emptied its chamber.
She watched as four grapple lines whipped out from the body of the spider-room, impacting silently with the cache-weapon’s spike. The grapples were penetrators; designed to burrow a few tens of centimetres into their target before widening, so once they had bitten home there was no possibility of their breaking loose. The guy lines were illuminated by the arcing thrusters, taut now, and the spider-room was already hauling itself in, even though the weapon had kept up its ponderous evasions.