‘Well,’ Triumvir Hegazi said, lording over her from his seat, ‘I hope this is worth it, Ilia.’
So did she — but the last thing she was going to do was concede any of her feelings of unease to Hegazi. ‘Bear in mind,’ she said, addressing them all, ‘that as soon as this is done, there won’t be any going back. This is going to look like bad news in anyone’s book. We might elicit an immediate response from the planet.’
‘Or we might not,’ Sylveste said. ‘I’ve told you repeatedly, Cerberus won’t do anything to draw unwarranted attention to itself.’
‘Then we’d better hope your theories are right.’
‘I think we can trust the good doctor,’ Sajaki said from Sylveste’s flank. ‘He’s just as vulnerable as the rest of us.’
Volyova felt an urge to get things over with. She illuminated the previously dark holo, filling it with a realtime image of the Lorean. The wreck showed no sign of having changed in any way since they had first found it — the hull was still peppered with awful wounds, inflicted, as they now knew, immediately after Cerberus had attacked and destroyed the probes. But within the ship, Volyova’s machines had been busy. There had been only a tiny swarm of them at first, spawned by the robot she had sent to find Alicia’s log entries. But the swarm had grown swiftly, consuming metal in the ship to fuel expansion, interfacing with the ship’s own self-replicating repair and redesign systems, most of which had failed to reboot after the Cerberus attack. Other populations would have followed — and then, a day or so after the first impregnation, the work proper would commence: transformation of the ship’s interior and skin. To a casual observer, none of this activity would have been apparent, but any kind of industry produced heat, and the outer layer of the wrecked ship had grown slightly warmer over the last few days, betraying the furious activity inside.
Volyova stroked her bracelet, doublechecking that all the indications were nominal. In a moment it would begin; there was now nothing that she could do to arrest the process.
‘My God,’ Hegazi said.
The Lorean was changing: shedding its skin. Sections of the damaged outer hull were flaking away in great acres, the ship enveloping itself in a slowly expanding cocoon of shards. What was revealed underneath still had the same form as the wreck, but it was smoothly carapaced, like a snake’s new skin. The transformations had been really rather easy to impose — the Lorean, unlike the Infinity, did not fight back with replicating viruses of its own; did not resist her sculpting hand. If reshaping the Infinity was like trying to carve fire, the other ship had been clay in her hands.
The angle of the view shifted, as the sloughing debris caused the Lorean to turn about its long axis. The Conjoiner engines were still attached and working — and now she had control of them, delegated to her bracelet. They would probably never have reached sufficient functionality to push the ship to the edge of light, but that was not Volyova’s intention. The journey it had to make — the last journey it would ever make — was almost insultingly small for such a ship. And now the ship was mostly hollow, the interior volume compressed into the thickened walls of the conic hull. The cone was open at the base; the ship was like a huge pointed thimble.
‘Dan,’ she said. ‘My machines found Alicia’s body, and the other crew, of course. Most of the mutineers had been in reefersleep… but even they didn’t survive the attack.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I can have them returned here, if you wish. There’ll be a delay, of course — we’d have to send a shuttle over to retrieve them.’
Sylveste’s answer, when it came, was swifter than she had expected. She had assumed he would want to dwell on it for anything up to an hour or so. Instead, he said: ‘No. There can’t be any delay now. You’re right — Cerberus will have witnessed this activity.’
‘Then the bodies?’
When he spoke, it was as if his answer were the only reasonable course of action. ‘They’ll have to go down with it.’
TWENTY-TWO
It was beginning.
Sylveste sat with steepled fingers before a luminous entoptic projection which occupied a good fraction of the volume of his quarters. Pascale, half consumed by shadow, was a series of abstract sculptural curves on their bed; he was cross-legged on a tatami mat, reeling in the delicious reprisals from a few millimetres of ship-distilled vodka he had downed minutes earlier. After years of forced abstinence, his tolerance for alcohol was abysmally low, which in this instance was a distinct advantage, hastening the process by which he negated the outside world. The vodka did not quell his inner voices, and, if anything, the withdrawal served only to create an echo-chamber, in which the voices took on an additional insistence. One in particular rose above the clamour. It was the voice which dared ask exactly what it was he expected to find in Cerberus; what it was that would make any kind of objective sense. And he had no idea. Not having an answer to that question was like descending a staircase in darkness and miscounting the number of steps; expecting floor and feeling sudden, heart-stopping vertigo.
Like a shaman shaping air-spirits with his fingers, Sylveste made the orrery which was projected ahead of him tick to life. The entoptic was a schematic of the little pocket of space englobing Hades, encompassing the orbit of Cerberus and — at its very limit — the approaching human machines, no longer cloaked by an asteroid. At the geometric centre was Hades itself, burning foul, abscessive red. The tiny neutron star was only a few kilometres wide, yet it dominated all around it; its gravitational field was whirlpool-fierce.
Objects which were two hundred and twenty thousand kilometres from the neutron star orbited twice an hour. Now that they had more thoroughly investigated Alicia’s testimony, they knew that another of the surveyor probes had been destroyed near that point, so Sylveste marked the radius with a red death-line. Cerberus had killed it, just as if the little world were as intent on protecting the secrets of Hades as its own felicities. Another mystery — what possible advantage lay in that? Sylveste had grasped for an answer and failed. But it had told him one thing: nothing here was predictable, or even logical. If he kept those two truths foremost, he might stand a chance where the dumb machines — and his wife — had failed.
Cerberus orbited further out; nine hundred thousand kilometres from Hades, in an orbit which whipped it around once every four hours and six minutes. He had marked its orbit in cool emerald — it seemed safe, at least until one strayed too close to the planet itself.
Now Volyova’s weapon — what had once been the Lorean — had moved under its own power to a lower orbit; it had not so far triggered a response from Cerberus. But Sylveste did not doubt for one moment that something down there knew they were here; that something had its eye on the waiting weapon. It was just waiting to see what would happen next.
He made the orrery contract, until the lighthugger hove into proper view. It was two million kilometres from the neutron star; a mere six light-seconds, which was within the conceivable strike range of energy weapons, although they would have to be very large indeed to do their job: the targeting arrays alone would have to be kilometres wide just to resolve the ship. No material weapons could touch them at this range, save for a brute-force swarm attack by relativistic weapons, but that again was unlikely — the lesson of the Lorean was that the planet acted swiftly and discreetly, rather than in some gauche display of firepower which would betray the careful camouflaging of the crust.