“So you keep telling us,” Sluka said.
“Our options are therefore rather limited,” Volyova continued. “We want Sylveste, and our intelligence has confirmed that he is not… how shall I put it—at large?”
“All that from orbit?” Pascale asked. “That’s what I call good intelligence.”
“Too good,” Sylveste said.
“This then,” Volyova added, “is how things will proceed. Within twenty-four hours Sylveste will make his presence and location known to us via a radio-frequency broadcast. Either he emerges from hiding or those who are holding him set him free. We leave the details to you. If Sylveste is dead, then irrefutable evidence of his death must be offered in place of the man himself. Whether we accept it will be entirely at our discretion, of course.”
“Good job I’m not dead, in that case. I doubt there’s anything you could do to convince Volyova.”
“She’s that intransigent?”
“Not just her; the whole crew.”
But Volyova was still speaking: “Twenty-four hours, then. We will be listening. And if we hear nothing, or suspect deception in any form, we will enact a punishment. Our ship has certain capabilities—ask Sylveste, if you doubt us. If we have not heard from him within the next day, we will use that capability against one of your planet’s smaller surface communities. We have already selected the target in question, and the nature of the attack will be such that no one in the community will survive. Is that clear? No one. Twenty-four hours after that, if we have still heard nothing of the elusive Dr Sylveste, we will escalate to a larger target. Twenty-four hours after that, we will destroy Cuvier.” And Volyova proffered another brief smile at that point. “Though you seem to be doing an admirable job there yourselves.”
The message ended, then recommenced from the beginning, with Volyova’s blunt introduction. Sylveste listened to it in its entirety twice more before anyone dared interrupt his concentration.
“They wouldn’t do it,” Sluka said. “Surely not.”
“It’s barbaric,” Pascale added, eliciting a nod from their captor. “No matter how much they need you—they couldn’t possibly intend to do what she said. I mean, destroy a whole settlement?”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “They’ve done it before. And I don’t doubt that they’ll do it again.”
There had been never been any real certainty in Volyova’s mind that Sylveste was alive—but on the other hand, the fact that he might not be present was something she had carefully avoided dwelling on, because the consequences of failure were too unpleasant to bring to mind. It mattered not that this was Sajaki’s quest, rather than her own. If it failed, he would punish her just as severely as if she had contrived the whole thing herself; as if it were Volyova who had brought them to this dispiriting place.
She had not really expected anything to happen in the first few hours. That was too optimistic; it presumed that Sylveste’s captors were awake and immediately aware of her warning. Realistically, it might be a fraction of a day before the news was passed along the chain of command to the right people; yet more time while it was verified. But as the hours became tens of hours, and then most of a day, she was forced to the conclusion that her threat would have to be enacted.
Of course, the colonists had not been entirely silent. Ten hours earlier, one unnamed group had come forward with what they claimed were Sylveste’s remains. They had left them on the top of a mesa, then retreated into caves through which the ship’s sensors could not peer. Volyova sent down a drone to examine the remains, but while they were a close genetic match, they did not agree precisely with the tissue samples retained since Sylveste’s last visit to the ship. It would have been tempting to punish the colonists for this, but on reflection she decided against such a course of action: they had acted solely out of fear, with no prospect of personal gain except their own—and everyone else’s—survival, and she did not want to deter any other parties coming forward. Likewise she had stilled her hand when two independently acting individuals announced themselves as Sylveste, since it was obvious that the people in question were not really lying, but genuinely believed themselves to be the man himself.
Now, however, there was not even time left for deception.
“I’m actually rather surprised,” she said. “I thought by now they would have given him over. But evidently one party in this arrangement is seriously underestimating the other.”
“You can’t back down now,” Hegazi said.
“Of course not.” Volyova said it with surprise, as if the thought of clemency had never once occurred to her.
“No; you have to,” Khouri said. “You can’t go through with this.”
This was almost the first thing she had said all day. Perhaps she was having trouble coming to terms with the monster for whom she now worked: this suddenly tyrannical incarnation of the previously fair Volyova. It was difficult not to sympathise. When she examined herself, what she saw was indeed something monstrous, even if it was not entirely the truth.
“Once a threat’s made,” Volyova said, “it’s in everyone’s interests to carry it through if the terms aren’t met.”
“What if they can’t keep the terms?” Khouri said.
Volyova shrugged. “That’s their problem, not mine.”
She opened the link to Resurgam and said her piece—reiterating the demands she had made, and stating her deep disappointment that Sylveste had not been brought to light. She was wondering how convincing she sounded—whether the colonists truly believed her threats—when she was struck by an inspirational idea. She unclipped her bracelet, whispering the command which would instruct it to accept limited input from a third party, rather than injuring them.
She passed the bracelet to Khouri.
“You want to salve your conscience, be my guest.”
Khouri examined the device as if it might suddenly extrude fangs, or spit venom into her face. Finally she raised it to her mouth, not actually slipping it around her wrist.
“Go ahead,” Volyova said. “I’m serious. Say whatever you want—I assure you it won’t do a blind bit of good.”
“Speak to the colonists?”
“Certainly—if you think you can convince them better than I can.”
For a moment Khouri said nothing. Then—diffidently—she started speaking into the bracelet. “My name is Khouri,” she said. “For whatever it’s worth, I want you to know I’m not with these people. I don’t agree with what they’re doing.” Khouri’s large and frightened eyes scanned the bridge, as if she expected any moment to be punished for this. But the others showed only mild interest in what she had to say.
“I was recruited,” she said. “I didn’t understand what they were. They want Sylveste. They’re not lying. I’ve seen the weapons they’ve got in this ship, and I think they will use them.”
Volyova affected a look of bored indifference, as if all of this were exactly what she would have expected; tiresomely so.
“I’m sorry none of you have brought Sylveste forward. I think Volyova’s serious when she says she’s going to punish you for that. All I want to say is, you’d better believe her. And maybe if some of you can bring him forward now it won’t be too—”
“Enough.”
Volyova took back the bracelet. “I’m extending my deadline by one hour only.” But the hour passed. Volyova barked cryptic commands into her bracelet, causing a target-designator to spring into place over the northerly latitudes of Resurgam. The red cross-hairs hunted with sullen, sharklike calm, until they latched onto a particular spot near the planet’s northern icecap. Then they pulsed a bloodier red, and status graphics informed Volyova that the ship’s orbital-suppression elements—almost the puniest weapons system it could deploy—were now activated, armed, targeted and ready.