“Yeah, thanks,” she said. “Excuse me if I don’t whoop for joy.”
“My pleasure…”
A second or so later they landed, soft as five feathers. Khouri felt a shiver as her suit depowered its thrusters, then made a further series of minute readjustments to its anatomy. The status readouts had now flicked over from flight to ambulatory mode, signifying that she could, if she wished, walk around normally. At this point she could even ditch the suit entirely, but without protective gear she would not have lasted long in the razorstorm. She was more than happy to remain encased in the suit’s silence, even if it meant that she did not feel entirely participatory.
“We split,” Volyova said. “Khouri; I’m assigning control of the two empty suits to your own; they’ll shadow you when you move. The three of us move apart for one hundred paces; initiate active sensor sweep in all EM and supplemental bands. If Sylveste is anywhere nearby we’ll find the svinoi.”
The two empty suits had shuffled next to Khouri already, latching onto her like stray dogs. This was, she knew, definitely the short straw choice; Volyova was letting her look after the empty units as a consolation prize for not being better armed. But there was no point whining. Her only reasonable argument for being properly armed was so that she could use those defences to kill Sylveste. It was probably not an argument which would prove entirely effective against Volyova. Still, it was worth bearing in mind that the suits could be deadly even without their armaments. In training on Sky’s Edge, she had been shown how someone wearing a suit could inflict damage on an enemy by the exertion of sheer brute force, literally tearing an opponent apart.
Khouri watched Sudjic and Volyova move off in their respective directions, walking with the deceptively plodding slowness of the suits in their default ambulatory modes. Deceptive, because the suits were capable of moving with gazelle-like speed if required, but there was no need to deploy such swiftness at the moment. She switched off the pale-green overlay, returning to normal vision. Sudjic and Volyova were not visible at all now, unsurprisingly. And while occasional pockets continued to open in the storm, Khouri was generally unable to see beyond the end of her own outstretched arm.
With a jolt, though, she realised she had seen something—someone—moving in the dust. It had only been there for a moment; not even something she could properly dignify by calling it a glimpse. Khouri was just beginning—without too much concern—to rationalise the apparition as a chance swirling of dust, momentarily assuming a vaguely human shape. But then she saw it again.
Now the figure was better defined. It lingered, teasingly. And stepped out of the maelstrom, into clear vision.
“It’s been a long time,” the Mademoiselle said. “I thought you’d be happier to see me.”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Wearer,” the suit said. “I am not able to interpret your last subvocalised statement. Would you mind rephrasing what you had to say?”
“Tell it to ignore you,” the Mademoiselle’s dust-ghost said. “I don’t have very long.”
Khouri told the suit to ignore what she was subvocalising, until she gave a codeword. The suit acceded with a note of stuffy displeasure, as if it had never ever been asked to do something so irregular, and that it would have to seriously rethink the terms of their working relationship in future.
“All right,” she said. “It’s just you and me, Mad. Care to tell where you’ve been?”
“In a moment,” the woman’s projected image said. She had stabilised now, but was certainly not rendered with the fidelity Khouri had come to expect. She looked more like a crude sketch of herself, or a blurred photograph, subject to rippling waves of distortion. “Firstly I’d better do what I can for you, or else you’ll be forced into foolishness like trying to ram Sylveste. Now let’s see; accessing primary suit systems… bypassing Volyova’s restriction codes… remarkably simple, in fact—I’m rather disappointed she didn’t give me more of a challenge, especially as this is the last time I’m likely—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about giving you firepower, dear girl.” As she was speaking, the status-readouts reconfigured, indicating that a number of previously locked-out suit weapons systems had just come online. Khouri appraised the sudden arsenal at her fingertips, only half believing what she had just witnessed. “There you are,” Mademoiselle said. “Anything else you’d like me to kiss better before I go?”
“I suppose I should say thanks…”
“Don’t bother, Khouri. The last thing I’d expect from you would be gratitude.”
“Of course, now I actually have no choice but to kill the bastard. Am I supposed to thank you for that as well?”
“You’ve seen the—uh—evidence. The case for the prosecution, if you will.”
Khouri nodded, feeling her scalp squidging against the suit’s internal matrix. You were not meant to make gestures in a suit. “Yes, that stuff about the Inhibitors. “Course, I still don’t know if any of it’s true…”
“Consider the alternative, in that case. You refrain from killing Sylveste, and yet what I’ve told you turns out to be the truth. Imagine how bad you’d feel after that, especially if Sylveste…” the dust apparition attempted a grisly smile, “fulfils his ambition.”
“I’d still have a clear conscience, wouldn’t I?”
“Undoubtedly. And I hope that would be sufficient consolation while your entire species is being eradicated by Inhibitor systems. Of course, in all likelihood you wouldn’t even be around to regret your mistake. They’re rather efficient, the Inhibitors. But you’ll find that out in due course…”
“Well, thanks for the advice.”
“That isn’t all, Khouri. Did it not occur to you that there might have been a very good reason for my absence until now?”
“Which is?”
“I’m dying.” The Mademoiselle let the word hover in the dust storm before continuing. “After the incident with the cache-weapon, Sun Stealer managed to inject another portion of himself into your skull—but of course, you’re aware of that. You felt him enter, didn’t you? I remember your screams. They were graphic. How odd it must have felt; how invasive.”
“Sun Stealer hasn’t exactly made an impression on me since.”
“But did it ever occur to you to ask why?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, dear girl, that I’ve spent the last few weeks doing my damnedest to stop him spreading further into your head. That’s why you haven’t heard anything from me. I’ve been too preoccupied with containing him. It was bad enough dealing with the part of him that I inadvertently let return with the bloodhounds. But at least then we reached a kind of stalemate. This time, though, it’s been rather different. Sun Stealer has become stronger, while I have become successively weaker with each of his onslaughts.”
“You mean he’s still here?”
“Very much so. And the only reason you haven’t heard from him is that he’s been equally preoccupied in the war the two of us have been waging within your skull. The difference is, he’s been making progress all the time—corrupting me, co-opting my systems, exploiting my own defences against me. Oh, he’s a crafty one, take my word for it.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“What’s going to happen is that I’m going to lose. I can be quite certain about this; it’s a mathematical certainty based on his current rate of gains.” The Mademoiselle smiled again, as if she were perversely proud of this analytical detachment. “I can delay his onslaught for a few days more, and then it’s all over. It might even be shorter. I’ve significantly weakened myself just by the act of presenting myself to you now. But I had no choice. I had to sacrifice time in order to reinstate your weapons privilege.”