“Yes,” Volyova said, for she had already thought this through. “That was the way it was made to seem, of course… but it was deception, wasn’t it? Whatever agency is behind you managed to manipulate my search procedure, making it seem as if I had selected you… whereas the choice was ultimately not mine at all.” Volyova had to admit to herself that she had no direct evidence to support this, but it was the simplest hypothesis which fitted all the facts. “So, are you going to deny this?”
“Why would you think I was an infiltrator?”
Volyova paused to light up a cigarette; one of those she had bought from the Stoners in the carousel where Khouri had been recruited, or found. “Because you seem to know too much about the gunnery. You seem to know something about Sun Stealer… and that troubles me deeply.”
“You mentioned Sun Stealer shortly after you brought me aboard, don’t you remember?”
“Yes, but your knowledge goes deeper than can be explained by the information you could have gleaned from me. In fact there are times when you seem to know somewhat more about the whole situation than I do.” She paused. “There’s more to it than that, of course. The neural activity in your brain, during reefersleep… I should have examined the implants you came aboard with more carefully. They obviously aren’t all that they seem. Do you want to have a stab at explaining any of this?”
“All right…” Khouri’s tone of voice was different now. It was clear that she had given up any hope of bluffing her way out of this one. “But listen carefully, Ilia. I know you’ve got your little secrets, too—things you really don’t want Sajaki and the others to find about. I’d already guessed about Nagorny, but there’s also the business with the cache-weapon. I know you don’t want that to become common knowledge, or you wouldn’t be going to such lengths to cover up the whole thing.”
Volyova nodded, knowing it would be fruitless to deny these things. Maybe Khouri even had an inkling of her relationship with the Captain. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, whatever I say to you now, it had better stay between us. Isn’t that reasonable of me?”
“I just said I could kill you, Khouri. You’re not exactly in a strong bargaining position.”
“Yes, you could kill me—or at least have a go—but despite what you said, I doubt you’d manage to cover up my death as easily as you did Nagorny’s. Losing one Gunnery Officer is bad luck. Two begins to look like carelessness, doesn’t it?”
A rat scampered by, splashing them. Irritatedly, Volyova flicked her cigarette butt towards the animal, but it had already vanished through a duct in the wall. “So you’re saying I don’t even tell the others I know you’re an infiltrator?”
Khouri shrugged. “You do what you like. But how do you think Sajaki would take that? Whose fault would it have been that the infiltrator ever came aboard in the first place?”
Volyova took her time before answering. “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”
“I knew you’d want to ask me some questions sooner or later, Triumvir.”
“So let’s start with the obvious one. Who are you, and who are you working for?”
Khouri sighed and spoke with resignation. “A lot of what you already know is the truth. I’m Ana Khouri and I was a soldier on Sky’s Edge… although about twenty years earlier than you thought. As for the rest…” She paused. “You know, I could really use some coffee.”
“There isn’t any, so get used to it.”
“All right. I was in the pay of another crew. I don’t know their names—there was never any direct contact—but they’ve been trying to get their hands on your cache-weapons for some time.”
Volyova shook her head. “Not possible. No one else knows about them.”
“That’s what you’d like to think. But you have used parts of the cache, right? There must have been survivors, witnesses, you never knew about. Gradually word got about that your ship was carrying some serious shit. Maybe no one knew the whole picture, but they knew enough of it to want to have their own slice of the cache.”
Volyova was silent. What Khouri was saying was shocking—like finding out that her most private of habits was public knowledge—but, she had to admit, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Conceivably there had been a leak. Crew had left the ship, after all—not always willingly—and while those who had done so were not supposed to have had access to anything sensitive—certainly nothing pertaining to the cache—there was always the chance that an error had been made. Or perhaps, as Khouri had said, someone had witnessed the cache being used and had lived to pass on that information.
“This other crew—you may not have known their names, but did you know what their ship was called?”
“… no. That would have been just as sloppy as letting me know who they were, wouldn’t it?”
“What did you know, in that case? How were they expecting to steal the cache from us?”
“That’s where Sun Stealer comes into it. Sun Stealer was a military virus they snuck aboard your ship when you were last in the Yellowstone system. A very smart, adaptive piece of infiltration software. It was designed to worm its way into enemy installations and wage psychological warfare on the occupants, driving them mad through subliminal suggestion.” Khouri paused, giving Volyova time to digest that. “But your own defences were too good. Sun Stealer was weakened, and the strategy never really worked. So they bided their time. They didn’t get another chance until you were back in the Yellowstone system, nearly a century later. I was the next line of attack: get a human infiltrator aboard.”
“How was the original viral attack made?”
“They got it in via Sylveste. They knew all about you bringing him aboard to fix up your Captain. They planted the software on him without him knowing, then let it infect your systems while he was hooked in to your medical suite, fixing the Captain.”
There was, Volyova thought, something deeply and worryingly plausible about that. It was just an example of another crew being as predatory as they were. It would be arrogance in the extreme to assume that only Sajaki’s Triumvirate were capable of such subterfuge.
“And what was your function?”
“To assess the state of Sun Stealer’s corruption of your gunnery systems. If possible, to gain control of the ship. Resurgam was a good destination for that—sufficiently out of the way not to be under any kind of system-wide police jurisdiction. If a takeover could be staged, there would be no one to observe it except maybe a few colonists.” Khouri sighed. “But believe me, that plan’s well and truly shit-canned. The Sun Stealer program was flawed; too dangerous and too adaptive. It drew too much attention to itself when it drove Nagorny mad—but on the other hand, he was the only one it could reach. Then it started screwing around with the cache itself…”
“The rogue weapon.”
“Yeah. That scared me, as well.” Khouri shivered. “I knew Sun Stealer was too powerful by then. There was nothing I could do to control it.”
Over the next few days, Volyova would ask Khouri more questions, testing different aspects of her story against what passed for the known facts. Certainly, Sun Stealer could have been some kind of infiltration software… even if it was more subtle, more insidious, than anything she had heard of in all her years of experience. But did that mean she could dismiss it? No; of course not. After all, she knew the thing existed. Khouri’s story, in fact, was the first explanation she had encountered that made any kind of objective sense at all. It explained why her attempts to cure Nagorny had failed. He had not been sent mad by any subtle combination of effects stemming from her gunnery implants. He had been driven mad, purely and simply, by an entity that had been designed for just that purpose. No wonder it had been so hard to find any explanation for Nagorny’s problems. Of course, there remained the irksome question of why exactly Nagorny’s madness had expressed itself so forcefully in the manner it had—all those fevered sketches of nightmarish birds’ parts, and the designs on his coffin—but who was to say that Sun Stealer had not simply amplified some pre-existing psychosis, letting Nagorny’s subconscious work with whatever imagery suited it?