Or found?
The thought jarred home, seeming to find a vacant hole in his mind where it fitted precisely. As if it belonged there. They found something; Sun Stealer’s flock. Far out on the edge of the system, they found something.
He was still trying to deal with the certainty of that feeling when the closest of the graphicforms detached from the shaft, leaving a hollow recess where it had been a second earlier. Others followed; whole words, clauses and sentences unpeeled from the shaft and loomed around him, vast as buildings, circling Sajaki and Sylveste with raptorial patience. They floated free, suspended by some unguessable mechanism invisible to the suit defences; no gravitational or magnetic fluctuation. For a moment Sylveste was stunned at the sheer alienness behind the objects, but then he grasped that there was a kind of indisputable logic at play here. What made more sense than a warning message which, when transgressed, enforced itself?
But suddenly there was no time for detached consideration.
‘Suit defences to automatic,’ Sajaki said, voice rising an octave only above his routine implacable calm. ‘I believe these things seek to crush us to death.’
As if he really needed telling.
The floating words had them spherically corralled now, and had commenced a ponderous spiralling-in. Sylveste let his suit do its thing, visual shields snicking down to guard against the retina-melting glare of plasma-bursts, all manual control modes temporarily suspended. It was for the best: the last thing his suit needed was a human being trying to do the job better than it could. Even with the dense shielding in place, Sylveste’s vision was aflame with fireworks, photon events triggering his circuits, and he knew that there must have been fryingly intense multi-spectrum radiation just beyond the skin of his suit. He registered bucking surges of motion; episodes of up/down thrust (he assumed) so intense that he passed in and out of consciousness like a train threading a series of short mountain tunnels. He assumed that his suit was trying to cut and run, and with each crushing deceleration was being thwarted.
Finally he blacked out long and hard.
Volyova ramped up the Melancholia’s thrust, until it was nudging four gees of steady acceleration, with intermittent random-swerves programmed in for extra effect, in case the lighthugger launched any kinetics. It was the most they could withstand without protective suits or tabards; more than was comfortable, especially for Pascale, who was even less accustomed to this sort of thing than Khouri. It meant they could not leave their seats, and that movement of their arms had to be restricted to a minimum. But they could speak, after a fashion, and even hold something approximating a coherent discussion.
‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’ Khouri said. ‘Sun Stealer. I could tell by the look on your face when you rescued us from the rats in the infirmary. I’m right, aren’t I?’
Volyova’s voice sounded slightly choked, as if she were in the process of slow strangulation.
‘If I had any doubts about your story, they vanished the instant I looked into his face. There was never any question that I was confronting something alien. And I began to understand some of what Boris Nagorny must have gone through.’
‘What drove him mad, you mean.’
‘Believe me, I think I’d have suffered something similar if I’d had that in my head. What worries me, too, is that some of Boris might have corrupted Sun Stealer.’
‘Then how do you think I feel?’ Khouri asked. ‘I have got that thing in my head.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
Volyova was shaking her head now, a gesture which verged on the reckless in the four-gee field. ‘You had him in your head for a while, Khouri — just long enough for him to crush what remained of the Mademoiselle. But then he got out.’
‘Got out when?’
‘When Sajaki trawled you. It was my fault, I suppose. I should not have allowed him even to switch on the trawl.’ For someone admitting guilt she sounded remarkably devoid of repentance. Perhaps for Volyova the act of admission was enough in itself. ‘When your neural patterns were scanned, Sun Stealer embedded himself in them and reached the trawl, encoded in the data. From there it was only a short hop to every other system in the ship.’
They absorbed that in silence, until Khouri said, ‘Letting Sajaki do that wasn’t your smartest ever move, Ilia.’
‘No,’ she said, as if the thought had only just struck her. ‘I don’t think it was.’
When he came round — it might have been tens of seconds later, or tens of minutes — the visual shields had retracted and he was falling unimpeded down the shaft. He looked up, and though it was now kilometres overhead, he saw the residual glow of their skirmish, the shaft walls pocked and scarred by energy impacts. Some of the words were still circling, but parts of them had been chipped off so that they no longer made much sense. As if in recognition that their warning was now hopelessly corrupted, the words seemed to have given up being weapons. Even as he watched, they were returning to their hollows, like sullen rooks returning to the rookery.
But something was wrong.
Where was Sajaki?
‘What the hell happened?’ he asked, hoping that his suit would interpret the query successfully. ‘Where’s he gone?’
‘There was an engagement against an autonomous defence system,’ the suit informed him, as if commenting on the weather earlier that morning.
‘Thank you, I realised that, but where’s Sajaki?’
‘His suit sustained critical damage during the evasive action. Crypted telemetry squirts indicate extensive and possibly irreparable damage to both primary and secondary thrust units.’
‘I said where is he?’
‘His suit would not have been able to restrict his rate of fall or counteract Coriolis drift towards the wall. Telemetry bursts indicate he is fifteen kilometres below and still falling, with a blueshift relative to your position of one point one kilometres a second and climbing.’
‘Still falling?’
‘It is likely that, owing to the non-functionality of his thruster units, and the inability to deploy a monofilament braking line at his current speed, he will fall until further descent is inhibited by the termination of the shaft.’
‘You mean he’s going to die?’
‘At his predicted terminal velocity, survival is excluded in all models except as an extreme statistical outlier.’
‘One chance in a million,’ Calvin said.
Sylveste angled himself so that he was able to peer vertically down the shaft. Fifteen kilometres — more than seven times the shaft’s echoless width. He looked and looked, all the while falling himself… and thought that perhaps he saw a flash, once or twice, at the extreme limit of his vision. He wondered if the flash had been the spark of friction, as Sajaki brushed against the walls in his unstoppable descent. If he had seen it at all, it was fainter each time, and soon he stopped seeing anything except the uninterrupted walls of the shaft.
THIRTY-SIX
‘You learnt something,’ Pascale said. ‘Sun Stealer told you something. That’s why you’ve been so desperate to stop him ever since.’
She was addressing Volyova, who had begun to feel slightly less vulnerable once the shuttle had passed turnover, midway between Cerberus and the point where she had increased the thrust to four gees. Now, with the drive flame pointing away from the pursuing lighthugger, they would make a far less conspicuous target. The downside of this, of course, was that the drive flame was now wafting towards Cerberus, and might be interpreted as a sign of hostility by the planet itself, if it had not already got the message that its recent human visitors did not necessarily have its best interests at heart.