Volyova took her time before answering. ‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’
‘I knew you’d want to ask me some questions sooner or later, Triumvir.’
‘So let’s start with the obvious one. Who are you, and who are you working for?’
Khouri sighed and spoke with resignation. ‘A lot of what you already know is the truth. I’m Ana Khouri and I was a soldier on Sky’s Edge… although about twenty years earlier than you thought. As for the rest…’ She paused. ‘You know, I could really use some coffee.’
‘There isn’t any, so get used to it.’
‘All right. I was in the pay of another crew. I don’t know their names — there was never any direct contact — but they’ve been trying to get their hands on your cache-weapons for some time.’
Volyova shook her head. ‘Not possible. No one else knows about them.’
‘That’s what you’d like to think. But you have used parts of the cache, right? There must have been survivors, witnesses, you never knew about. Gradually word got about that your ship was carrying some serious shit. Maybe no one knew the whole picture, but they knew enough of it to want to have their own slice of the cache.’
Volyova was silent. What Khouri was saying was shocking — like finding out that her most private of habits was public knowledge — but, she had to admit, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Conceivably there had been a leak. Crew had left the ship, after all — not always willingly — and while those who had done so were not supposed to have had access to anything sensitive — certainly nothing pertaining to the cache — there was always the chance that an error had been made. Or perhaps, as Khouri had said, someone had witnessed the cache being used and had lived to pass on that information.
‘This other crew — you may not have known their names, but did you know what their ship was called?’
‘… no. That would have been just as sloppy as letting me know who they were, wouldn’t it?’
‘What did you know, in that case? How were they expecting to steal the cache from us?’
‘That’s where Sun Stealer comes into it. Sun Stealer was a military virus they snuck aboard your ship when you were last in the Yellowstone system. A very smart, adaptive piece of infiltration software. It was designed to worm its way into enemy installations and wage psychological warfare on the occupants, driving them mad through subliminal suggestion.’ Khouri paused, giving Volyova time to digest that. ‘But your own defences were too good. Sun Stealer was weakened, and the strategy never really worked. So they bided their time. They didn’t get another chance until you were back in the Yellowstone system, nearly a century later. I was the next line of attack: get a human infiltrator aboard.’
‘How was the original viral attack made?’
‘They got it in via Sylveste. They knew all about you bringing him aboard to fix up your Captain. They planted the software on him without him knowing, then let it infect your systems while he was hooked in to your medical suite, fixing the Captain.’
There was, Volyova thought, something deeply and worryingly plausible about that. It was just an example of another crew being as predatory as they were. It would be arrogance in the extreme to assume that only Sajaki’s Triumvirate were capable of such subterfuge.
‘And what was your function?’
‘To assess the state of Sun Stealer’s corruption of your gunnery systems. If possible, to gain control of the ship. Resurgam was a good destination for that — sufficiently out of the way not to be under any kind of system-wide police jurisdiction. If a takeover could be staged, there would be no one to observe it except maybe a few colonists.’ Khouri sighed. ‘But believe me, that plan’s well and truly shit-canned. The Sun Stealer program was flawed; too dangerous and too adaptive. It drew too much attention to itself when it drove Nagorny mad — but on the other hand, he was the only one it could reach. Then it started screwing around with the cache itself…’
‘The rogue weapon.’
‘Yeah. That scared me, as well.’ Khouri shivered. ‘I knew Sun Stealer was too powerful by then. There was nothing I could do to control it.’
Over the next few days, Volyova would ask Khouri more questions, testing different aspects of her story against what passed for the known facts. Certainly, Sun Stealer could have been some kind of infiltration software… even if it was more subtle, more insidious, than anything she had heard of in all her years of experience. But did that mean she could dismiss it? No; of course not. After all, she knew the thing existed. Khouri’s story, in fact, was the first explanation she had encountered that made any kind of objective sense at all. It explained why her attempts to cure Nagorny had failed. He had not been sent mad by any subtle combination of effects stemming from her gunnery implants. He had been driven mad, purely and simply, by an entity that had been designed for just that purpose. No wonder it had been so hard to find any explanation for Nagorny’s problems. Of course, there remained the irksome question of why exactly Nagorny’s madness had expressed itself so forcefully in the manner it had — all those fevered sketches of nightmarish birds’ parts, and the designs on his coffin — but who was to say that Sun Stealer had not simply amplified some pre-existing psychosis, letting Nagorny’s subconscious work with whatever imagery suited it?
The mysterious other crew could also not be dismissed too easily. Shipboard records revealed that another lighthugger — the Galatea — had been present in Yellowstone on both occasions when they had last visited the system. Could they have been the crew responsible for sending Khouri aboard?
For now, it was as good an explanation as any. And one thing was absolutely clear. Khouri was quite right in saying that none of this information could be presented to the rest of the Triumvirate. Sajaki would indeed blame Volyova totally for what was a grievous lapse in security. He would punish Khouri, of course… but Volyova could also expect some kind of retribution. The way their relationship had been strained of late, it was entirely possible that Sajaki would try and kill her. He might succeed, too — he was at least as strong as Volyova. It would not greatly trouble him that he would be losing his chief weapons expert and the only person who had any real insight into the cache. His argument would no doubt be that she had already demonstrated her incompetence in that regard. But there was something else, too: something Volyova could not entirely dismiss. No matter what had really transpired with the cache-weapon, the unavoidable truth was that Khouri had saved Volyova’s life.
Hateful though the thought was, she owed the infiltrator.
Her only option, when she considered the situation dispassionately, was to proceed as if nothing had happened. Khouri’s mission was in any case no longer viable; there would be no attempted takeover now. The woman’s hidden reason for being aboard the ship had no impact on the upcoming attempt to bring Sylveste aboard again, and in many respects Khouri would be needed simply as a crewmember. Now that Volyova knew the truth, and now that the original purpose of Khouri’s mission had been abandoned, Khouri would surely do everything in her power to fit into her pre-assigned position. It hardly mattered whether the loyalty treatments were working or not: Khouri would have to behave as if they were, and gradually the act would become indistinguishable from the truth. She might not even want to leave the ship when the opportunity arose to do so. After all, there were worse places to be. Over months or years of subjective time, she would become one of the crew, and her past duplicity could remain a secret shared only by her and Volyova. In time, it might even be something Volyova almost forgot.