“I’m reluctant to lose you,” Sluka said. “But it isn’t like I have much choice in the matter. You’ll be wanting to contact them, of course.”
“Naturally,” Sylveste said. “And of course Pascale will be coming with me. But there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me first.”
“A favour?” Sluka sounded amused, as if this were the last thing in the world she would have expected from him. “Well, what can I do for you, now that we’ve become such firm friends?”
Sylveste smiled. “Actually it’s not so much what you can do for me as what Doctor Falkender can. It concerns my eyes, you see.”
From the vantage point of her floating, boom-suspended seat, the Triumvir observed the handiwork she had wrought on the planet below. It was all perfectly clear, imaged precisely on the bridge’s projection sphere. In the last ten hours she had observed the wound extend dark cyclonic tendrils away from its focus, evidence that the weather in that region—and, by implication, elsewhere on the planet—had been tipped towards a violent new equilibrium. According to the locally culled data, the colonists on Resurgam called such phenomena razorstorms, on account of the merciless flensing quality of the airborne dust. It was fascinating to watch, much like the dissection of some unfamiliar animal species. Although she had had more experience with planets than many of her crewmates, there were still things about them which she found surprising and not a little disturbing. It was disturbing that simply puncturing a hole in the planet’s integument could have this much effect—not just on the immediate locality of the place she had attacked, but thousands of kilometres beyond. Eventually, she knew, there would not be a spot on the planet which had not been in some measurable way affected by her action. The dust she had caused to be elevated would eventually settle; a fine blackened, faintly radioactive caul deposited fairly uniformly around the planet. In the temperate regions it would soon be washed away by the weather processes which the colonists had instigated, assuming of course that those processes still functioned. But in the arctic regions there was never any rain, so the fine fall of dust would remain unperturbed for centuries to come. Eventually other deposits would cover it, and it would become part of the irrevocable geological memory of the planet. Perhaps, the Triumvir mused, in a few million years other beings would arrive on Resurgam, sharing something of humanity’s curiosity. They would want to learn of the planet’s history, and in doing so they would take core samples, reaching far back into Resurgam’s past. Doubtless that deposited layer of dust would not be the only mystery they had to solve, but nonetheless they would mull on it, if only fleetingly. And she had no doubt that those hypothetical future investigators would come to a totally wrong conclusion regarding the layer’s origin. It would never occur to them that it had been put there by an act of conscious volition…
Volyova had slept only a few hours in the last thirty, but her nervous energy currently seemed limitless. She would, of course, pay a price for it at some point in the near future, but for now she felt like she was careering, imbued with unstoppable momentum. Even so, she did not immediately snap to alertness when Hegazi steered his chair next to hers.
“What is it?”
“I’m getting something which might very much be our boy.”
“Sylveste?”
“Or someone pretending to be him.” Hegazi entered one of his intermittent phases of fugue, which to Volyova signified that he was in deep rapport with the ship. “Can’t trace the communication route he’s using. It’s coming from Cuvier, but you can bet Sylveste isn’t physically there.”
She did not raise her voice, even though the two of them were quite alone in the bridge.
“What’s he saying?”
“He’s just asking to speak to us. Over and over again.”
Khouri heard footsteps sloshing through the inch-thick sludge which flooded the entire Captain’s level.
She did not have a rational answer for why she had come down here. Perhaps that was the point, really: now that she no longer trusted Volyova—the one person she had thought she could place her faith in—and now that the Mademoiselle was absent, as she had been ever since the attack against the cache-weapon, Khouri had to turn to the irrational. The only person left on the ship who had not in some way betrayed her, or had not earned her hatred, was the one she could never expect an answer from.
She knew almost immediately that the footsteps did not belong to Volyova, but there was a purposefulness to them which suggested that the person knew exactly where they were going, and had not simply strolled into this area of the ship by accident.
Khouri got up out of the muck. The seat of her trousers was wet and cold with the stuff, but the darkness of the fabric concealed most of the damage.
“Relax,” said the person, strolling casually round the bend, her boots sloshing through the sludge. There was a glint of metal from the woman’s free-swinging arms and a multicoloured glow from the holographic designs worked into the arms’ metalwork.
“Sudjic,” Khouri identified. “How the hell did you—”
Sudjic shook her head with a tight-lipped smile. “How did I find my way down here? Simple, Khouri. I followed you. Once I saw which general direction you’d gone, it was obvious you must be headed here. So I came after you, because I reckon you and I could use a little chat.”
“A chat?”
“About the situation here.” Sudjic gestured expansively. “On this ship. More specifically, the fucking Triumvirate. It can’t have escaped you that I have a grievance against one of them.”
“Volyova.”
“Yes, our mutual friend Ilia.” Sudjic managed to make the woman’s name sound like a particularly unsavoury expletive. “She killed my lover, you know that.”
“I understand there’d been… problems.”
“Problems, ha. That’s a good one. Do you call turning someone psychotic a problem, Khouri?” She paused, stepped a little closer, but still kept a respectful distance from the fused, angelic core of the Captain. “Or maybe I should call you Ana, now that we’re on—uh—closer terms.”
“Call me what you want. It doesn’t alter anything. I may hate her guts right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to betray her. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
Sudjic nodded sagely. “She really hit you with that loyalty therapy, didn’t she? Look, Sajaki and the others are not nearly as omniscient as you’d think. You can tell me everything.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that.”
“Such as?” Sudjic was standing akimbo now, her gauntleted hands placed daintily against her narrow hips. The woman was beautiful, in the emaciated way which was common among the spaceborn. Her physiology was wraith-like; had her underlying skeletal-muscular structure not been chimerically enhanced, it was doubtful she would have been fully ambulatory in normal gravity. But now, with those subcutaneous augmentations, Sudjic was undoubtably stronger and faster than any non-augmented human. Her strength was double-edged, because she looked so fragile. She was like an origami sculpture of a woman folded from razor-sharp paper.
“I can’t tell you,” Khouri said. “But Ilia and I—we have mutual secrets.” Instantly she regretted saying that, but she wanted to deflate the smug superiority of the Ultra. “What I mean is—”
“Listen, I’m sure that’s the way she wants you to feel. But ask yourself this, Khouri. How much of what you remember is real? Isn’t it possible that Volyova’s been screwing with your memories? She tried it with Boris. She tried to cure him by erasing his past, but it didn’t work. He still had the voices to deal with. That go for you too? Any new voices floating around in your head?”