‘It isn’t Remilliod.’
Sluka let the paper be reabsorbed by the table, its sensitive content digested away.
‘Then do you have any suggestions as to who it might be?’
Sylveste wondered how close to hysteria his laugh sounded. ‘If I’m right about this — and I’m not often wrong — this isn’t just bad news for me, Sluka. This is bad news for all of us.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s a long story.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. Nor are you.’
‘Not for now, certainly.’
‘What?’
‘Just a suspicion of my own.’
‘Stop playing games, Sylveste.’
He nodded, knowing there was no real point in holding back. He had shared the deepest of his fears with Pascale already, and for Sluka it would now be just a case of filling in the gaps; things which were unobvious from her eavesdropping. If he resisted, he knew, she would find a way to learn what she wished, either from him or — worse — Pascale.
‘It goes back a long way,’ he said. ‘Way back, to the time when I’d just returned to Yellowstone from the Shrouders. You recall that I disappeared back then, don’t you?’
‘You always denied anything had happened.’
‘I was kidnapped by Ultras,’ Sylveste said, not waiting to observe her reaction. ‘Taken aboard a lighthugger in orbit around Yellowstone. One of their number was injured, and they wanted me to… “repair” him, I suppose.’ ‘Repair him?’
‘The Captain was an extreme chimeric.’
Sluka shivered. It was clear that — like most colonialists — her experience with the radically altered fringes of Ultra society had been confined largely to lurid holo-dramas.
‘They were not ordinary Ultras,’ Sylveste said, seeing no reason not to play on Sluka’s phobias. ‘They’d been out there too long; too long away from what we’d think of as normal human existence. They were isolated even by normal Ultra standards; paranoid; militaristic…’
‘But even so…’
‘I know what you’re thinking — that, even if these were some outlandish offshoot culture, how bad could they be?’ Sylveste deployed a supercilious smile and shook his head. ‘That’s exactly what I thought, at first. Then I found out more about them.’
‘Such as?’
‘You mentioned a weapon? Well, they have them. They have weapons which could comfortably dismantle this planet, should they wish.’
‘But they wouldn’t use them without reason.’
Sylveste smiled. ‘We’ll find out when they reach Resurgam, I think.’
‘Yes…’ Sluka said this last word on a falling note. ‘Actually, they’re already here. The explosion happened three weeks ago, but the — um — significance of it was not immediately clear. In the meantime they’ve decelerated and assumed orbit around Resurgam. ’
Sylveste took a moment to regulate his breathing, wondering just how deliberate Sluka’s piecewise revelation was. Had she really neglected to mention this detail — or had she spared it, disclosing the facts in a manner calculated to keep him permanently disorientated?
If so, she was succeeding admirably.
‘Wait a minute,’ Sylveste said. ‘Just now you said only a few people knew about this. But how easy would it be to miss a lighthugger orbiting a planet?’
‘Easier than you imagine. Their ship’s the darkest object in the system. It radiates in the infrared, of course — it must do — but it seems able to tune its emissions to the frequencies of our atmospheric vapour bands; the frequencies which don’t penetrate down to the surface. If we hadn’t spent the last twenty years putting so much water into the atmosphere…’ Sluka shook her head ruefully. ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter. Right now, no one’s paying much attention to the sky. They could have arrived lit up in neon and no one would have noticed.’
‘But instead they haven’t even announced their presence.’
‘Worse than that. They’ve done everything possible not to let us know they’re here. Except for that damn weapon blast…’ For a moment she trailed off, looking towards the window, before snapping her attention back to Sylveste. ‘If these people are who you think, you must have an idea what it is they want.’
‘That’s easy enough, I think. What they want is me.’
Volyova listened intently to the rest of Sajaki’s report from the surface. ‘Very little information had reached Yellowstone from Resurgam; even less after the first mutiny. We now know that Sylveste survived the mutiny, but was ousted in a coup ten years later; ten years ago from the present date. He was imprisoned — in some luxury, I might add — at the expense of the new regime, who saw him as a useful political tool. Such a situation would have suited us extremely well, since Sylveste’s whereabouts would have been easy to deduce. We would also have been in the fortunate position of being able to negotiate with people who might have had few qualms about turning him over to us. Now, however, the situation is immeasurably more complex.’
Sajaki paused at this point, and Volyova noticed that he had turned slightly, bringing a new background into view behind him. Their angle of sight was altering as they passed overhead and to the south, but Sajaki was aware of this and was making the necessary adjustments in his position to keep his face in view of the ship at all times. To an observer on one of the other mesas he would have looked strange indeed: a silent figure facing the horizon, whispering unguessable incantations, slowly pivoting on his heels with almost watchlike precision. No one could have guessed that he was engaged in one-way communication with an orbiting spacecraft, rather than lost in the observances of some private madness.
‘As we ascertained as soon as we were in scan range, the capital Cuvier has been gutted by a number of large explosions. As we were also able to deduce by examining the degree of reconstruction, these events happened very recently on the colonial timescale. My investigations here have established that the second coup — when these weapons were used — took place barely eight months ago. However, the coup was not entirely successful. The old regime still control what remains of Cuvier, though their leader — Girardieau — was killed during the disturbance. The True Path Inundationists — those responsible for the attacks — control many of the outlying settlements, but they seem to lack cohesion, and may even have fallen into factional squabbles. In the week in which I have been here there have been nine attacks against the city, and some suspect internal saboteurs: True Path infiltrators working from within the ruins.’ Sajaki collected his thoughts at this point, and Volyova wondered if he felt some distant kinship with the infiltrators he had mentioned. If so, there was not a hint of it in his expression.
‘Concerning my own actions, my first task, of course, was to order the suit to dismantle itself. It would have been tempting to use it to make the journey overland to Cuvier, but the risk would have been excessive. Yet the journey was easier than I had feared, and on the outskirts I hitched a ride with a gang of pipeline technicians returning from the north, using them as cover to enter Cuvier. They were suspicious at first, but the vodka soon persuaded them to take me aboard their vehicle. I told them we distilled it in Phoenix, the settlement where I said I’d come from. They’d never heard of Phoenix, but they were more than happy to drink to it.’
Volyova nodded. The vodka — along with a satchel-full of trinkets — had been manufactured aboard ship shortly before Sajaki’s departure.
‘People mostly live underground now, in catacombs which were dug fifty or sixty years ago. Of course, the air is tolerably adapted for breathing, but you have my assurance that the procedure is not exactly comfortable, and one is never far away from the onset of hypoxia. The exertion which was required to reach this mesa was considerable.’