The mysterious other crew could also not be dismissed too easily. Shipboard records revealed that another lighthugger—the Galatea—had been present in Yellowstone on both occasions when they had last visited the system. Could they have been the crew responsible for sending Khouri aboard?
For now, it was as good an explanation as any. And one thing was absolutely clear. Khouri was quite right in saying that none of this information could be presented to the rest of the Triumvirate. Sajaki would indeed blame Volyova totally for what was a grievous lapse in security. He would punish Khouri, of course… but Volyova could also expect some kind of retribution. The way their relationship had been strained of late, it was entirely possible that Sajaki would try and kill her. He might succeed, too—he was at least as strong as Volyova. It would not greatly trouble him that he would be losing his chief weapons expert and the only person who had any real insight into the cache. His argument would no doubt be that she had already demonstrated her incompetence in that regard. But there was something else, too: something Volyova could not entirely dismiss. No matter what had really transpired with the cache-weapon, the unavoidable truth was that Khouri had saved Volyova’s life.
Hateful though the thought was, she owed the infiltrator.
Her only option, when she considered the situation dispassionately, was to proceed as if nothing had happened. Khouri’s mission was in any case no longer viable; there would be no attempted takeover now. The woman’s hidden reason for being aboard the ship had no impact on the upcoming attempt to bring Sylveste aboard again, and in many respects Khouri would be needed simply as a crewmember. Now that Volyova knew the truth, and now that the original purpose of Khouri’s mission had been abandoned, Khouri would surely do everything in her power to fit into her pre-assigned position. It hardly mattered whether the loyalty treatments were working or not: Khouri would have to behave as if they were, and gradually the act would become indistinguishable from the truth. She might not even want to leave the ship when the opportunity arose to do so. After all, there were worse places to be. Over months or years of subjective time, she would become one of the crew, and her past duplicity could remain a secret shared only by her and Volyova. In time, it might even be something Volyova almost forgot.
Eventually, Volyova managed to convince herself that the infiltration question had been settled. Sun Stealer would remain a problem, of course—but now Khouri would be working with her to conceal it from Sajaki. And in the meantime, there were other things that needed to be concealed from the Triumvir. Volyova had set herself the task of eradicating every shred of evidence that the cache-weapon incident had ever happened. She had intended to do this before Sajaki and the others were revived, but it had not proved easy. Her first task had been to repair the damage to the lighthugger itself, patching the areas of the hull which had been hurt by the weapon’s detonation. Largely this consisted of coaxing the auto-repair routines to work faster, but she also had to ensure that all pre-existing scars, impact-craters, or areas of imperfect repair were precisely duplicated. She then had to hack into the auto-repair memory and erase the knowledge that the repairs had been orchestrated at all. She had to repair the spider-room, even though Sajaki and the others were not meant to know it even existed. Better to be safe than sorry, though, and that had been by far the simplest of the repairs. Next, she had to erase all evidence that the Palsy routine had been run; at least a week’s work.
The loss of the shuttle was much harder to hide. For a while, she considered making a new one: harvesting tiny amounts of raw materials from all over the ship, until she had what she needed. She would only have to use one ninety-thousandth of the entire mass of the ship. But it was too risky, and she doubted her ability to weather the shuttle authentically; to make it look as old as it should have been. Instead, she took the simpler option of editing the ship’s database so that it would always look as if there had been one shuttle fewer aboard. Sajaki might notice—all the crew might notice—-but there would be absolutely nothing that anyone could prove. Finally, of course, she remade the cache-weapon. It was only a facade; a replica designed to lurk in the cache chamber and look threatening on the rare occasions when Sajaki paid a visit to her domain. Covering her tracks took six days of manic work. On the seventh day she rested, and endeavoured to compose herself, so that none of the others would guess what labours she had been through. On the eighth day Sajaki had awakened and asked her what she had been up to in the years he had been in reefersleep.
“Oh,” she had said. “Nothing to write home about.”
His reaction—like much else about Sajaki these days—had been difficult to judge. Even if she had succeeded this time, she thought, she could not risk another mistake. Yet, already—though they had not even made contact with the colonists—things were drifting beyond the arena of her understanding. Her thoughts returned to the neutrino signature she had detected around the system’s neutron star, and of the feeling of unease which had been with her ever since. The source was still there, and while it remained weak, she had now studied it well enough to know that it was in orbit not just around the neutron star, but also around the moon-sized rocky world which attended the star. It had certainly not been present when the system had been surveyed decades earlier, immediately suggesting that it was something to do with the colony on Resurgam. But how could they have sent it? The colonists did not even seem capable of reaching orbit, let alone sending some kind of probe to the edge of their system. Even the ship which should have brought them here was missing; she had expected to find the Lorean in orbit around Resurgam, but there was no sign of it. Now, no matter what the evidence said, she kept in the back of her mind the possibility that the colonists might be capable of something completely unexpected. It was another burden to add to her mounting stockpile of worries.
“Ilia?” said Hegazi. “We’re almost ready now. The capital’s about to emerge from nightside.”
She nodded. The ship’s high-magnification cameras, dotted around the hull, would be zooming in on a very specific site several kilometres beyond the city boundary, focusing on a spot which had been identified and agreed upon before Sajaki’s departure. If no misfortune had befallen him, he should now be waiting at that spot, standing on the upper surface of an unshielded mesa, looking directly towards the rising sun. Timing was critical here, but Volyova did not doubt that Sajaki would be on the mark.
“Got him,” Hegazi said. “Image stabilisers phasing in…”
“Show us.”
A window opened in the globe near the capital, rapidly swelling. At first what lay within the window was unclear; a blurred smear that might have been a man standing on a rock. But the image quickly sharpened, until the figure was recognisably Sajaki. In place of the bulky adaptive armour which Volyova had last seen him wearing, Sajaki wore an ash-coloured overcoat, its long tails flapping around his booted legs, evidencing the mild wind playing over the mesa’s topside. The suit’s collar was drawn up around his ears, but his face was unobstructed.