Eventually — it could not have been more than a minute after she had first started firing on Khouri — Kjarval dropped to the ground. Her suit, where it was not blackened by the hits it had sustained, was a quilt of mismatched psychedelic colours and rapidly morphing hyper-geometric textures, sprouting half-realised weapons and devices. Her limbs were thrashing crazily. The ends of the limbs had gone berserk, extruding — and then budding off — various manipulators and rough, baby-sized approximations of human hands.
Khouri got to her feet, stifling a scream of pain as her thigh protested against the movement. Her suit was a stiffening deadweight around her, but somehow she managed to walk, or at least totter, to the place where Kjarval lay.
Volyova and another suited figure — she had to be Sudjic — were already there, leaning over what remained of the suit, trying to make some sense of its medical diagnostic readouts.
‘She’s dead,’ Volyova said.
FOURTEEN
On the day that the newcomers announced their presence, Sylveste was woken by a stab of unforgiving white light. He held his arm up in supplication while he waited for his eyes to cycle through their initialisation routines. It was almost useless speaking to him in those moments; Sluka evidently realised this. With so many of their original functions gone, the eyes took longer than ever now to reach functionality. Sylveste experienced a slow rote of errors and warnings, little spectral prickles of pain as the eyes investigated critically impaired modes.
He was half aware of Pascale sitting up in bed next to him, lifting the sheets around her chest.
‘You’d better wake up,’ Sluka said. ‘Both of you. I’ll wait outside while you dress.’
The two of them struggled into clothes. Beyond the room, Sluka stood patiently with two guards, neither conspicuously armed. Sylveste and his wife were escorted towards Mantell’s commons, where the morning shift of True Path Inundationists were gathered around an oblong wallscreen. Flasks of coffee and breakfast rations lay undisturbed on the commons table. Whatever was going on, Sylveste surmised, was enough to kill any normal appetite. And the screen evidently held the key. He could hear a voice speaking, amplified and harsh, as if from a loudspeaker. There was so much background conversation taking place that he could do no more than snatch the odd word from the narrative. Unfortunately, that odd word tended to be his own name, spoken at too-frequent intervals by whoever was booming from the screen.
He pushed to the front, aware that the watchers deferred to him with more respect than he’d felt for several decades. But was it possibly only pity being afforded to a condemned man?
Pascale joined him at his side. ‘Do you recognise that woman?’ she asked.
‘What woman?’
‘On the screen. The one you’re standing in front of.’
What Sylveste saw was only an oblong of pointillist silver-grey pixels.
‘My eyes don’t read video too well,’ he said, addressing Sluka as much as Pascale. ‘And I can’t hear a damned thing. Maybe you’d better tell me what I’m missing.’
Falkender had appeared out of the crowd. ‘I’ll patch you in neurally, if you wish. It’ll only take a moment.’ He shunted Sylveste away from the watchers, towards a private alcove in one corner of the commons, Pascale and Sluka following. There, he opened his toolkit and removed a few glistening instruments.
‘Now you’re going to tell me this won’t hurt at all,’ Sylveste said.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Falkender said. ‘After all, it wouldn’t be the complete truth, would it?’ Then he clicked his fingers, either at an aide or Pascale; Sylveste was unsure, and his visual field was now too restricted to discriminate. ‘Get the man a mug of coffee; that’ll take his mind off it. In any case, when he’s able to read that screen, I think he’ll need something stronger.’
‘That bad?’
‘I’m afraid Falkender isn’t joking,’ Sluka said.
‘My, aren’t you all enjoying yourselves.’ Sylveste bit his lip at the first cascade of pain from Falkender’s probings, although, as the minor operation proceeded, the pain never worsened. ‘Are you going to put me out of my misery? After all, it seemed important enough to wake me.’
‘The Ultras have announced themselves,’ Sluka said.
‘That much I extrapolated for myself. What have they done? Landed a shuttle in the middle of Cuvier?’
‘Nothing so obtrusive. Yet. There may be worse to come.’
Someone pushed a mug of coffee into his hands; Falkender relented in his ministrations long enough for Sylveste to sip a mouthful. It was acrid and not entirely warm, but sufficed to propel him fractionally closer towards alertness. He heard Sluka say, ‘What we’re showing on the screen is a repeating audiovisual message, one that’s been transmitting continuously now for about thirty minutes.’
‘Transmitted from the ship?’
‘No, seems they’ve managed to tap straight into our comsat girdle, piggybacking their message on our routine transmissions.’
Sylveste nodded, then regretted the movement. ‘Then they’re still edgy about being detected.’ Or else, he thought, they merely want to reaffirm their absolute technological superiority over us; their ability to tap into and manipulate our existing data systems. That seemed more likely: it smacked not only of the arrogant Ultra way of doing things, but of one Ultra crew in particular. Why announce your presence in a mundane way, when you can do a full burning bush and impress the natives? But he hardly needed confirmation that he knew these people. He had known ever since the ship had entered the system.
‘Next question,’ he said. ‘Who was the message directed to? Do they still think there’s some kind of planetary authority with whom they can deal?’
‘No,’ Sluka said. ‘The message was addressed to the citizens of Resurgam, irrespective of political or cultural affiliation.’
‘Very democratic,’ Pascale said.
‘Actually,’ Sylveste said, ‘I rather doubt that democracy comes into it. Not if I know who we’re dealing with.’
‘Regarding that,’ Sluka said, ‘you never did quite explain to my total satisfaction why these people might…’
Sylveste cut her off. ‘Before we go into any detailed analysis, do you think I could see the message for myself? Particularly as I seem to hold something of a personal stake in the matter.’
‘There.’ Falkender retreated and closed his toolkit with a decisive snap. ‘I told you it wouldn’t take a moment. Now you can jack straight into the screen.’ The surgeon smiled. ‘Now, do me a favour and be sure not to kill the messenger, won’t you?’
‘Let me see the message,’ Sylveste said. ‘Then I’ll decide.’
It was far worse than he had feared.
He pushed to the front again, though by now the watchers had thinned out, dispersed reluctantly to duties elsewhere in Mantell. It was much easier to hear the speaker now, and he recognised cadences in the woman’s speech as she repeated phrases which had cycled around a few minutes earlier. The message was not a long one, then. Which was ominous in itself. Who crossed light-years of interstellar space, only to announce their arrival around a colony in terms which were, frankly, curt? Only those who had no interest whatsoever in ingratiating themselves, and whose demands were supremely clear. And again that suspicion accorded well with what he already knew of the crew he believed had come for him. They had never been talkative.