‘It can’t be a very safe place he’s going to,’ Khouri said, and then wondered if Cerberus was any more dangerous than the ship, now.
‘No, I know. I don’t think even he realises how much danger he’s in — or the rest of us.’
‘Still, your husband isn’t just anyone. It’s Sylveste we’re talking about here.’ Khouri reminded Pascale that Sylveste’s life had been shot through with a core of rare luck, and that it would be strange if that fortune should desert him now, when the thing that he had always reached for was almost within his grasp. ‘He’s a slippery bastard, and I think there’s still a good chance he’ll find a way out of this.’
That seemed to calm Pascale, fractionally.
Then Khouri told her that Hegazi was dead and that the ship appeared to be trying to murder everyone else left aboard it.
‘Sajaki can’t be here,’ Pascale said. ‘I mean, he can’t, can he? Dan wouldn’t know how to find his own way to Cerberus. He’d need one of you to go with him.’
‘That’s what Volyova thought.’
‘Then why are we here?’
‘I guess Ilia didn’t trust her convictions.’
Khouri pushed open the door which led into the clinic from the partially flooded access corridor, kicking a janitor-rat out of the way as she did so. The clinic smelt wrong. She knew it instantly.
‘Pascale, something bad has happened here.’
‘I’ll… what is it I’m supposed to say at this point? Cover you?’ Pascale had her low-yield beam gun out, without looking like she had much idea what to do with it.
‘Yes,’ Khouri said. ‘You cover me. That’s a very good idea.’
She entered the clinic, pushing the barrel of the plasma-rifle ahead of her.
As she moved in, the room sensed her presence and notched up its illumination. She had visited Volyova here after the Triumvir had been injured; she felt she knew the approximate geometry of the place.
She looked to the bed where she was sure Sajaki ought to have been. Above the bed floated an elaborate array of gimballed and hinged servo-mechanical medical tools, radiating down from a central point like a mutated steel hand with far too many fingers, all of which seemed tipped with talons.
There was not a single inch of metal which was not covered in blood; thickly congealed, like candle-wax.
‘Pascale, I don’t think—’
But she too had seen what lay on the bed below the machinery; the thing that might once have been Sajaki. There was also not a single inch of the bed which was not adorned in red. It was difficult to see where Sajaki ended and where his eviscerated remains began. He reminded her of the Captain; except here the Captain’s silver borderlessness had been transfigured into scarlet; like an artist’s reworking of the same basic theme in a different and more carnal medium. Two halves of the same morbid diptych.
His chest was bloated, raised above the bed, as if a stream of galvanising current were still slamming through him. His chest was also hollow; the gore pooled in a deep excavated crater which ran from his sternum to his abdomen, like a terrible steel fist had reached down and ripped half of him out. Perhaps that was the way it had happened. Perhaps he had not even been awake when it did. For confirmation of this theory she scrutinised his face, the little of his expression she could decipher beneath the veil of red.
No; Triumvir Sajaki had almost certainly been awake.
She felt Pascale’s presence not far behind. ‘You shouldn’t forget I’ve seen death,’ she said. ‘I saw my father assassinated.’
‘You’ve never seen this.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I’ve never seen anything like this.’
His chest exploded. Something burst out of it, at first so efficiently concealed by the fountain of blood that it had disturbed that it was not obvious what it was — until it landed on the blood-slicked floor of the room and scampered away, wormlike tail lashing behind it. Then three more rats elevated their snouts out of Sajaki, sniffing the air, regarding Khouri and Pascale with matched pairs of black eyes. Then they too pulled themselves over the caldera which had been his rib-cage, landing on the floor, following the one who had just left. They vanished into the room’s darker recesses.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Khouri said. But even as she was speaking it moved; the fist of steel fingers, activating with blinding speed, reaching out to her with a pair of its clawed, diamond-tipped digits, so quickly that she could only begin to scream. The claws snagged her jacket, ripping into it, and then she began to pull away, with all the strength she had.
She wrenched free, but not before it had located a purchase around her gun, dragging it with brutal force from her fingers. Khouri fell back into the mess on the floor; noticing how her jacket was soiled with Sajaki’s blood; how at least some of the brighter red pooling from the rips must have been her own.
The surgical machine elevated the gun, cradling it for them to see, as if gloating at its acquisition of a hunting trophy. Now two of its more dextrous manipulators snaked into place and began to examine the gun’s controls, stroking the leather casing in eerie fascination. Slowly, ever so slowly, the manipulators began to point the gun in Khouri’s direction.
Pascale raised the beamer and blasted the whole assembly, blood-caked metallic chunks splattering over Sajaki’s remains. The plasma-rifle crashed down, blackened and gushing smoke, bluish sparks dancing from its shattered casing.
Khouri picked herself up, oblivious to the filth in which she was liberally covered.
Her ruined plasma-rifle was now buzzing angrily, the sparks dancing with increased ferocity.
‘It’s going to blow,’ Khouri said. ‘We have to get away from here.’
They turned to the door, and then had a second to adjust to what was now blocking their exit. There had to be a thousand of them; piled three deep in the ship-slime, each individual careless of its own life, but acting for the greater good of the whole senseless mass. Behind, more rats; hundreds and then thousands more, piling back along the corridor; a vast rodent tidal wave, brimming at the aperture of the clinic, ready to surge forwards in one consuming tsunami of appetite.
She unsheathed the only weapon she now had left, the tiny, ineffectual needler she carried only because of the precision it allowed. She began to squirt it at the mass of rats while Pascale doused them with the beamer, which was hardly more suited to the task. Rats exploded and burned wherever they pointed their guns, but there were always more of them, and now the first rank of rats was beginning to creep into the clinic.
Brightness flared down the corridor, followed by a series of bangs spaced so closely together that they almost merged into a solid roar. The noise and the light came closer. Rats were flying through the air now, propelled by the approaching explosions. The stench of cooked rodent was overpowering; worse than the smell which already pervaded the clinic. Gradually, the wave of rats began to thin and disperse.
Volyova stood in the doorway, her slug-gun belching smoke, its barrel the colour of lava. Behind them, Khouri’s ruined weapon grew suddenly and ominously silent.
‘Now would be a good time to leave,’ Volyova said.
They ran towards her, trampling over the dead rats and those still seeking shelter. Khouri felt something slam into her spine. There was a wind, hotter than any she had known. She felt herself lose contact with the floor, and then for a moment she was flying.