Fuck, Khouri thought. That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.
She struggled to her feet again, just as another charge from the attacker slammed past and the third caught her on the thigh. She started wheeling back, both arms flailing at the periphery of vision. There was something wrong with her arms; or more accurately, something not wrong where something should have been. They were completely intact; no sign that one of them had just been blasted off.
“Shit,” she said. “What the fuck is happening?”
The attack was continuing, each blast impacting her and driving her back.
“This is Volyova,” said a voice, not in any way calm and detached. “Listen to me carefully, all of you! Something’s going wrong with the scenario! I want you all to stop firing—”
Khouri had hit the deck again, this time with enough force that she felt it through the gel-air cushion, like a slap against her spine. Her thigh felt injured, and the suit was doing nothing to ameliorate the discomfort.
It’s gone live, she thought.
The weapons were for real now; or at least those which belonged to the suit attacking her.
“Kjarval,” Volyova said. “Kjarval! You have to stop firing! You’re killing Khouri!”
But Kjarval—Khouri guessed that she was the attacker—was not listening, or not capable of listening, or, more terrifyingly, not capable of stopping.
“Kjarval,” the Triumvir said again, “if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to disarm you!”
But Kjarval did not stop. She kept on firing, Khouri feeling each impact like a lash, writhing under the assault, desperate to claw her way through the tortured alloy of the chamber into the sanctuary beyond.
And then Volyova descended from the chamber’s middle, where she had apparently been all along, unseen. As she descended, she opened fire on Kjarval, at first with the lightest weapons she had, but with steadily mounting force. Kjarval countered by directing some portion of her fire upwards, towards the lowering Triumvir. The blasts hit Volyova, gouging black scars into her armour, chipping fragments from the flexible integument, slicing off weapons as her suit tried to extrude and deploy them. But Volyova maintained an edge on the trainee. Kjarval’s suit began to wilt, losing integrity. Its weapons went haywire, missing their targets and then shooting haphazardly around the chamber.
Eventually—it could not have been more than a minute after she had first started firing on Khouri—Kjarval dropped to the ground. Her suit, where it was not blackened by the hits it had sustained, was a quilt of mismatched psychedelic colours and rapidly morphing hyper-geometric textures, sprouting half-realised weapons and devices. Her limbs were thrashing crazily. The ends of the limbs had gone berserk, extruding—and then budding off—various manipulators and rough, baby-sized approximations of human hands.
Khouri got to her feet, stifling a scream of pain as her thigh protested against the movement. Her suit was a stiffening deadweight around her, but somehow she managed to walk, or at least totter, to the place where Kjarval lay.
Volyova and another suited figure—she had to be Sudjic—were already there, leaning over what remained of the suit, trying to make some sense of its medical diagnostic readouts.
“She’s dead,” Volyova said.
FOURTEEN
On the day that the newcomers announced their presence, Sylveste was woken by a stab of unforgiving white light. He held his arm up in supplication while he waited for his eyes to cycle through their initialisation routines. It was almost useless speaking to him in those moments; Sluka evidently realised this. With so many of their original functions gone, the eyes took longer than ever now to reach functionality. Sylveste experienced a slow rote of errors and warnings, little spectral prickles of pain as the eyes investigated critically impaired modes.
He was half aware of Pascale sitting up in bed next to him, lifting the sheets around her chest.
“You’d better wake up,” Sluka said. “Both of you. I’ll wait outside while you dress.”
The two of them struggled into clothes. Beyond the room, Sluka stood patiently with two guards, neither conspicuously armed. Sylveste and his wife were escorted towards Mantell’s commons, where the morning shift of True Path Inundationists were gathered around an oblong wallscreen. Flasks of coffee and breakfast rations lay undisturbed on the commons table. Whatever was going on, Sylveste surmised, was enough to kill any normal appetite. And the screen evidently held the key. He could hear a voice speaking, amplified and harsh, as if from a loudspeaker. There was so much background conversation taking place that he could do no more than snatch the odd word from the narrative. Unfortunately, that odd word tended to be his own name, spoken at too-frequent intervals by whoever was booming from the screen.
He pushed to the front, aware that the watchers deferred to him with more respect than he’d felt for several decades. But was it possibly only pity being afforded to a condemned man?
Pascale joined him at his side. “Do you recognise that woman?” she asked.
“What woman?”
“On the screen. The one you’re standing in front of.”
What Sylveste saw was only an oblong of pointillist silver-grey pixels.
“My eyes don’t read video too well,” he said, addressing Sluka as much as Pascale. “And I can’t hear a damned thing. Maybe you’d better tell me what I’m missing.”
Falkender had appeared out of the crowd. “I’ll patch you in neurally, if you wish. It’ll only take a moment.” He shunted Sylveste away from the watchers, towards a private alcove in one corner of the commons, Pascale and Sluka following. There, he opened his toolkit and removed a few glistening instruments.
“Now you’re going to tell me this won’t hurt at all,” Sylveste said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Falkender said. “After all, it wouldn’t be the complete truth, would it?” Then he clicked his fingers, either at an aide or Pascale; Sylveste was unsure, and his visual field was now too restricted to discriminate. “Get the man a mug of coffee; that’ll take his mind off it. In any case, when he’s able to read that screen, I think he’ll need something stronger.”
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid Falkender isn’t joking,” Sluka said.
“My, aren’t you all enjoying yourselves.” Sylveste bit his lip at the first cascade of pain from Falkender’s probings, although, as the minor operation proceeded, the pain never worsened. “Are you going to put me out of my misery? After all, it seemed important enough to wake me.”
“The Ultras have announced themselves,” Sluka said.
“That much I extrapolated for myself. What have they done? Landed a shuttle in the middle of Cuvier?”
“Nothing so obtrusive. Yet. There may be worse to come.”
Someone pushed a mug of coffee into his hands; Falkender relented in his ministrations long enough for Sylveste to sip a mouthful. It was acrid and not entirely warm, but sufficed to propel him fractionally closer towards alertness. He heard Sluka say, “What we’re showing on the screen is a repeating audiovisual message, one that’s been transmitting continuously now for about thirty minutes.”
“Transmitted from the ship?”
“No, seems they’ve managed to tap straight into our comsat girdle, piggybacking their message on our routine transmissions.”
Sylveste nodded, then regretted the movement. “Then they’re still edgy about being detected.” Or else, he thought, they merely want to reaffirm their absolute technological superiority over us; their ability to tap into and manipulate our existing data systems. That seemed more likely: it smacked not only of the arrogant Ultra way of doing things, but of one Ultra crew in particular. Why announce your presence in a mundane way, when you can do a full burning bush and impress the natives? But he hardly needed confirmation that he knew these people. He had known ever since the ship had entered the system.