“If there are,” Khouri said, “they haven’t got anything to do with Volyova.”
“So you admit it.” Sudjic smiled primly, like a valiant schoolgirl acknowledging victory in a game, but hoping not to look too proud of the fact. “Well, whether you do or don’t, it doesn’t matter. The fact is you’re disillusioned with her. With the Triumvirate as a whole. You can’t kid yourself you liked what they just did.”
“I’m not sure I understand what it was they just did, Sudjic. There are a few things I haven’t got right in my head.” Khouri felt the cold, wet fabric of her trousers clinging to her buttocks. “That’s why I came down here, as a matter of fact. For some peace and quiet. To get my head together.”
“And see if he had wisdom to spare?”
Sudjic had nodded towards the Captain.
“He’s dead, Sudjic. I may be the only person here who recognises that, but it’s true all the same.”
“Maybe Sylveste can cure him.”
“Even if he could, would Sajaki want it to happen?”
Sudjic nodded knowingly. “Of course, of course. I understand totally. But listen.” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper, though the only possible eavesdroppers were the skulking rats. “They’ve found Sylveste—I just heard, before I came down.”
“Found him? You mean he’s here?”
“No, of course not. They’ve just made contact. They don’t even know where he is yet, just that he’s alive. Still got to get the bastard aboard somehow. And that’s where you come in. Me too, in fact.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t pretend to understand what happened with Kjarval in the training chamber, Khouri. Maybe she just cracked, although I knew her better than anyone else on this ship, and I’d say she wasn’t really the cracking type. Whatever it was, it gave Volyova an excuse to finish her off—not that I ever thought the bitch really hated her that much…”
“It wasn’t Volyova’s fault…”
“Whatever.” Sudjic shook her head. “That’s not important—just now. But what it means is she needs you for the mission. You and me, Khouri—and maybe the bitch-queen herself—are going down there to retrieve him.”
“You can’t know that yet.”
Sudjic shook her head. “Not officially I can’t. But when you’ve been aboard this ship as long as I have, you’ll know a thing or two about bypassing the usual channels.”
For a moment there was only silence, broken by the distant dripping of a leaking conduit, some distance down the flooded corridor.
“Sudjic, why are you telling me this? I thought you hated my guts.”
“Maybe I did,” the woman said. “Once. But now we need all the allies we can get. And I thought you might appreciate forewarning. Especially if you’ve got any sense, and you know who to trust.”
Volyova addressed her bracelet. “Infinity, I want you to correlate the voice you’re about to hear against shipboard records of Sylveste. If you can’t confirm a match, let me know immediately via secure readout.”
Sylveste’s voice burst in on them, mid-sentence: “… if you are reading me. Repeat, I need to know if you are reading me. I demand that you acknowledge me, bitch. I demand that you fucking acknowledge me!”
“That’s him all right,” Volyova said, speaking over the man’s voice, “I’d know that petulant tone anywhere. Better put him out of it. I presume we still don’t have a fix on him?”
“Sorry. You’re going to have to address the colony as a whole and assume he has a means of reading you.”
“I’m sure he won’t have neglected that detail.” Volyova consulted her bracelet, observing that the ship could so far not disprove the hypothesis that the voice she was hearing belonged to Sylveste. There was room for error, since the Sylveste who had come aboard the ship once before was a much younger counterpart of the one they were now looking for, and so the voice match was not expected to be perfect. But even allowing for that, it looked increasingly likely that they had found him, and that this was not simply another hapless impersonator corning forward to “save’ the colony. “All right, patch me through. Sylveste? This is Volyova. Tell me if you’re hearing this.”
His voice was clearer now. “About fucking time.”
“I think we’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” Hegazi said.
“We need to discuss the logistics of picking you up, and I believe it would be very much easier if we could do so on a secure channel. If you give me your current location, we can make a detailed sensor-sweep of that region and pick up your transmission at source, avoiding the relay at Cuvier.”
“Now why would you need to do that? Is there something you want me to know that the colony as a whole can’t share?” Sylveste paused, but Volyova mentally inserted a sneer at that point. “After all, you haven’t been slow in bringing them into it so far.” Another pause. “Incidentally, it troubles me that I’m dealing with you and not Sajaki.”
“He’s indisposed,” Volyova said. “Give me your position.”
“Sorry, but that isn’t possible.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Why should I bother? You’re the ones with all the firepower. You figure out a solution.”
Hegazi waved his hand, signalling Volyova to cut the audio link. “Maybe he can’t reveal his position.”
“Can’t?”
Hegazi tapped a steel forefinger against his steel-bridged nose.
“His captors might not let him. They’re ready to let him go, but they don’t want to give up their position.”
Volyova nodded, admitting that Hegazi’s suggestion was probably close to the truth. She reinstated the link. “All right Sylveste. I think I understand your predicament. I propose the following compromise, assuming that you have the means to move around. Your—uh—hosts can doubtless arrange something at short notice, I presume?”
“We have transportation, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You have six more hours, in that case. Enough time to get to a location sufficiently far from where you are now that you won’t compromise it when you reveal your position. But if in six hours we don’t hear from you, we will bring forward the attack against the next target. Is that perfectly clear to all concerned?”
“Oh yes,” Sylveste said, tartly. “Perfectly clear.”
“There’s one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Bring Calvin with you.”
SIXTEEN
Sylveste felt the aircraft haul itself aloft, at first moving horizontally to clear Mantell’s dugout hangar, then making rapid height and swerving to avoid dashing itself against the stacked strata of the adjacent mesa wall. He made himself a window, but the thickening dust allowed him only a glimpse of the base, the mesa in which it had been tunnelled falling away below the brilliant undercurve of the plasma-wing. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would not be returning. It was not just Mantell that he sensed he was seeing for the last time, but—and he could not have articulated exactly why—the colony itself.
The machine was the smallest and least valuable aircraft that the settlement could muster; barely larger than one of the volantors which he had flown in Chasm City a lifetime earlier. It was also fast enough to make that six hours of grace count; capable of putting a useful distance between itself and the mesa. The aircraft could have carried four, but only Sylveste and Pascale were riding it. Yet—insofar as their freedom of movement went—they were still Sluka’s captives. Her people had programmed the aircraft’s route before it left Mantell, and it would only deviate from that flight-plan if the autopilot judged that the weather conditions merited a different course. Unless ground conditions at the site became intolerable, it would deposit Sylveste and his wife at a pre-agreed location which had still not been revealed to Volyova and her crew. If conditions were bad, another site could be picked in the same area.