Which left Khouri. There was no arguing with her experience; unlike any of the crew, she had demonstrably been born and raised on a planet, and — vitally — had seen action on one. It was probable — nothing she had heard led her to doubt the fact — that the Sky’s Edge war had placed her in situations far graver than any the crew had experienced beyond their ship. Their excursions had been shopping trips, trade missions or simple tourism; coming down to gloat at the compressed lives of ephemerals. Khouri had been in situations where, at times, it had seemed very unlikely that she would survive. Yet — because she had never been anything less than a competent soldier, and she was also lucky — she had come through relatively unscathed.
No one aboard the ship actually argued with this.
‘It’s not that we wouldn’t want you along,’ Volyova had said, not long after the incident with the cache-weapon. ‘Far from it. I’ve no doubt that you’d handle a suit as well as any of us, and you wouldn’t be likely to freeze under fire.’
‘Well, then…’
‘But I can’t risk losing my Gunnery Officer again.’ They had been having the discussion in the spider-room, but Volyova had lowered her voice all the same. ‘Only three people need to go down to Resurgam, and that means we don’t have to use you. Apart from me, Sudjic and Kjarval can handle the suits. In fact we’ve already begun training up.’
‘Then at least let me join in the sessions.’
Volyova had raised an arm, apparently to dimiss this suggestion. But as soon as she had done so she relented. ‘All right, Khouri. You get to train with us. But it doesn’t mean anything, understand?’
Oh yes, she understood. Things were different between Khouri and Volyova now — they had been ever since Khouri had told Volyova the lie about being an infiltrator for another crew. The Mademoiselle had long ago primed her for that particular little chat and it seemed to have worked perfectly, even down to the sly way the Galatea — completely innocent, of course — had deliberately not been mentioned, leaving Volyova to make that deduction herself, and thereby allowing her to feel some quiet satisfaction in the process. It was a red herring, but it mattered only that Volyova found it a plausible one. Volyova had also accepted the story about Sun Stealer being a piece of human-designed infiltration software, and for now her curiosity seemed satisfied. Now they were almost equals, both having something to hide from the rest of the crew, even if what Volyova thought she had on Khouri was not even close to the truth.
‘I understand,’ Khouri said.
‘Still, it’s a shame, though.’ Volyova smiled. ‘I get the impression you always wanted to meet Sylveste. You’ll get your chance, of course, once we bring him aboard…’
Khouri smiled. ‘That’ll have to do then, won’t it?’
Chamber Two was an empty twin of the chamber where the cache-weapons were kept.
Unlike the weapon-filled chamber, it had been pressurised up to one standard atmosphere. This was no mere extravagance; it constituted the largest single pocket of breathable air aboard the lighthugger, and was therefore used as a reservoir for supplying normally vacuum-filled regions of the ship with air when they needed to be entered by unsuited humans.
Usually the drive would have supplied an illusory one-gee of gravity, acting along the long axis of the ship, which was also the long axis of the roughly cylindrical chamber. But now that the drive had been quenched — now that the ship was in orbit around Resurgam — the illusion of gravity came from rotating the whole chamber, which meant that gravity acted at ninety degrees to the long axis, pushing radially outwards from the chamber’s middle. Near the middle, there was almost no gravity at all; objects could free-float there for minutes before their inevitable small initial drift slowly pushed them away from the middle. Thereafter, the increasing wind-pressure of the co-rotating air would tug them faster and lower. But nothing ‘fell’ in straight lines in the chamber, at least not from the point of view of someone standing on the rotating wall.
They entered at one end of the cylinder, via an armoured clamshell door whose inner face was pitted with blast-marks and projectile impact-craters. Every visible surface of the chamber was similarly weathered; as far as Khouri could see (and the suit’s vision-augmentation routines meant she could see as far as she wished) there was no square metre of the chamber’s skin which had not been harried, scarred, gouged, buckled, assaulted, melted or corroded by some kind of weapon. It might once have been silver; now it was purple, like an all-enveloping metallic bruise. Illumination was supplied not from a stationary light source, but from dozens of free-floating drones, each of which picked out a spot on the chamber’s wall with a floodlight of actinic brilliance. The drones were constantly moving around, like a swarm of agitated glow-worms. The result was that no shadow in the chamber stayed still for more than a second or so, and it was impossible to look in any direction for more than a second before a blinding light-source entered it, washing everything else out.
‘You sure you can handle this?’ Sudjic said, as the door locked shut behind them. ‘You wouldn’t want to damage that suit. You break it, you bought it, you know?’
‘Concentrate on not damaging your own,’ Khouri said. Then she switched to the private channel, addressing Sudjic alone. ‘Maybe it’s just my imagination, but do I get the impression you don’t like me very much?’
‘Now why would you think that?’
‘I think it might have something to do with Nagorny.’ Khouri paused. It had occured to her that the private channels might not be private at all, but then again, nothing she was about to say would not already be completely obvious to anyone listening in; most especially not to Volyova. ‘I don’t know exactly what happened with him, except that you were close.’
‘Close isn’t the word for it, Khouri.’
‘Lovers, then. I wasn’t going to say that in case I offended you.’
‘Don’t worry about offending me, kid. It’s way too late for that.’
Volyova’s voice interrupted them. ‘Kick off and descend to the chamber wall, you three.’
They obeyed her, using their suits on mild amplification to jump away from the plate which capped the end of the cylinder. They had been in freefall from the moment they entered the place, but now, as they descended towards the wall/floor, and picked up circumferential speed, their sense of weight mounted. The change was small, cushioned within the gel-air, but it gave enough small cues to engender a sense of up and down.
‘I understand why you resent me,’ Khouri said.
‘Bet you do.’
‘I took his position. Filled his role. After… whatever happened to him, you suddenly had me to deal with.’ Khouri did her best to sound reasonable, as if she was taking none of this personally. ‘If I was in your shoes, I think I’d feel the same. In fact I’m sure of it. But that doesn’t make it right, either. I’m not your enemy, Sudjic.’
‘Don’t delude yourself.’
‘About what?’
‘That you understand one tenth of what this is about.’ Sudjic had positioned her suit close to Khouri’s now: seamless white armour stark against the damaged wall of the chamber. Khouri had seen images of ghostly white whales which lived — or used to live; she wasn’t sure — in Earth’s seas. Belugas, they were called, and they came to mind now. ‘Listen,’ Sudjic said. ‘Do you think I’m simplistic enough that I’d hate you just because you fill the space Boris left? Don’t insult me, Khouri.’