‘You must have some stories to tell.’ Antoinette reckoned that there were two safe areas of conversation: the present and the very distant past. The last thing she wanted was to have the Captain dwelling on his recent sickness and bizarre transformation.
‘There are some stories I don’t want told,’ he said. ‘But isn’t that true for us all?’
‘No argument from me.’
His thin slit of a mouth hinted at a smile. ‘Dark secrets in your own past, Antoinette?’
‘Nothing I’m going to lose any sleep over, not when we have so much else we need to worry about.’
‘Ah.’ He rotated the helmet in his gloved hands. ‘The difficult matter of the present. I am aware of things, of course, perhaps more than you realise. I know, for instance, that there are other agencies in the system.’
‘You feel them?’
‘It was their noises that woke me from long, calm dreams of Mars.’ He regarded the icons and decals on the helmet, stroking them with the stubby tip of one gloved finger. Antoinette wondered about the memories they stirred, preserved across five or six hundred years of experience. Memories thick with the grey dust of centuries.
‘We thought that you were waking,’ she said. ‘In the last few weeks we’ve become more aware of your presence. We didn’t think it was coincidence, especially after what Khouri told us. I know you remember Khouri, John, or you wouldn’t have brought me down here.’
‘Where is she?’
‘With Clavain and the others.’
‘And Ilia? Where is Ilia?’
Antoinette was sweating. The temptation to lie, to offer a soothing platitude, was overwhelming. But she did not doubt for one instant that the Captain would see through any attempt at deception. ‘Ilia’s dead.’
The black and white cap bowed down. ‘I thought I might have dreamed it,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem now. I can’t always tell what’s real and what’s imagined. I might be dreaming you at this very moment.’
‘I’m real,’ she said, as if her assurance would make any difference, ‘but Ilia’s dead. You remember what happened, don’t you?’
His voice was soft and thoughtful, like a child remembering the significant events in a nursery tale. ‘I remember that she was here, and that we were alone. I remember her lying in a bed, with people around her.’
What was she going to tell him now? That the reason Ilia had been in a bed in the first place was because she had suffered injuries during her efforts to thwart the Captain’s own suicide attempt, when he had directed one of the cache weapons against the hull of the ship. The scar he had inflicted on the hull was visible even now, a vertical fissure down one side of the spire. She was certain that on some level he knew all this but also that he did not need to be reminded of it now.
‘She died,’ Antoinette said, ‘trying to save us all. I gave her the use of my ship, Storm Bird, after we’d used it to rescue the last colonists from Resurgam.’
‘But I remember her being unwell.’
‘She wasn’t so unwell that she couldn’t fly a ship. Thing is, John, she felt she had something to atone for. You remember what she did to the colonists, when your crew were trying to find Sylveste? Made them think she’d wiped out a whole settlement in a fit of pique? That’s why they wanted her for a war criminal. Towards the end, I wonder whether she didn’t start believing it herself. How are we to know what went through her head? If enough people hate you, it can’t be easy not to start thinking they might be right.’
‘She wasn’t a particularly good woman,’ the Captain said, ‘but she wasn’t what they made her out to be. She only ever did what she thought right for the ship.’
‘I guess that makes her a good woman in my book. Right now the ship is about all we have, John.’
‘Do you think it worked for her?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Atonement, Antoinette. Do you think it made the slightest difference, in the end?’
‘I can’t guess what went through her mind.’
‘Did it make any difference to the rest of you?’
‘We’re here, aren’t we? We got out of the system alive. If Ilia hadn’t taken her stand, we’d probably all be smeared over a few light-hours of local solar space around Resurgam.’
‘I hope you’re right. I did forgive her, you know.’
Antoinette knew that it had been Ilia who had allowed the Captain’s Melding Plague to finally engulf the ship. At the time she did it, it had seemed the only way to rid the ship of a different kind of parasite entirely. Antoinette did not think that Ilia had taken the decision lightly. Equally — based on her very limited experience of the woman — she did not think consideration of the Captain’s feelings had had very much influence on her decision.
‘That’s pretty generous of you,’ she said.
‘I realise that she did it for the ship. I realise also that she could have killed me instead. I think she wanted to, after she learned what I had done to Sajaki.’
‘Sorry, but that’s way before my time.’
‘I murdered a good man,’ the Captain said. ‘Ilia knew. When she did this to me, when she made me what I am, she knew what I’d done. I would have sooner she’d killed me.’
‘Then you’ve paid for whatever you did,’ Antoinette said. ‘And even if you hadn’t then, even if she hadn’t done whatever she did, it doesn’t matter. What counts is that you saved one hundred and sixty thousand people from certain death. You’ve repaid that one crime a hundred thousand times over and more.’
‘You imagine that’s the way the world works, Antoinette?’
‘It’s good enough for me, John, but what do I know? I’m just a space pilot’s daughter from the Rust Belt.’
There was a lull. Still holding the helmet, the Captain took the end of the ribbed red umbilical and connected it to the socket in the side of the helmet. The interface between the real object and the simulated presence was disturbingly seamless.
‘The trouble is, Antoinette, what good was it to save those lives, if all that happens is that they die now, here on Ararat?’
‘We don’t know that anyone’s going to die. So far the Inhibitors haven’t touched us down here.’
‘All the same, you’d like some insurance.’
‘We need to consider the unthinkable, John. If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll need to leave Ararat. And you’re going to have to be the man with the plan.’
He slipped the helmet on to his neck ring, twisting it to and fro to engage the latching mechanisms. The faceplate glass was still up. The whites of his eyes were two bright crescents in the shadowed map of his face. Green and red numerals were back-reflected on to his skin.
‘It took some guts to come down here on your own, Antoinette.’
‘I don’t think this is a time for cowards,’ she said.
‘It never was,’ he said, beginning to slide down the faceplate glass. ‘About what you want of me?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll give the matter some thought.’
Then he turned around and walked slowly into the darkness. A skirl of red-brown dust swelled up to block him from view. It was like a sandstorm on Mars.
The Ultra captain was called Heckel, his ship the Third Gazometric. He had come down in a red-hulled shuttle of very ancient design — a triad of linked spheres with large, stylised tarantula markings.
Even by recent standards, Heckel struck Quaiche as a very strange individual. The mobility suit in which he came aboard the Lady Morwenna was a monstrous contraption of leather and brass, with rubberised accordion joints and gleaming metal plates secured by rivets. Behind the tiny grilled-over eyeholes of his helmet, wiper blades flicked back and forth to clear condensation. Steam vented from poorly maintained joints and seals. Two assistants had accompanied him: they were constantly opening and closing hatches in the suit, fiddling with brass knobs and valves. When Heckel spoke, his voice emerged from a miniature pipe organ projecting from the top of his helmet. He had to keep making adjustments to knobs in his chest area to stop the voice becoming too shrill or deep.