‘It wasn’t Volyova’s fault…’
‘Whatever.’ Sudjic shook her head. ‘That’s not important — just now. But what it means is she needs you for the mission. You and me, Khouri — and maybe the bitch-queen herself — are going down there to retrieve him.’
‘You can’t know that yet.’
Sudjic shook her head. ‘Not officially I can’t. But when you’ve been aboard this ship as long as I have, you’ll know a thing or two about bypassing the usual channels.’
For a moment there was only silence, broken by the distant dripping of a leaking conduit, some distance down the flooded corridor.
‘Sudjic, why are you telling me this? I thought you hated my guts.’
‘Maybe I did,’ the woman said. ‘Once. But now we need all the allies we can get. And I thought you might appreciate forewarning. Especially if you’ve got any sense, and you know who to trust.’
Volyova addressed her bracelet. ‘Infinity, I want you to correlate the voice you’re about to hear against shipboard records of Sylveste. If you can’t confirm a match, let me know immediately via secure readout.’
Sylveste’s voice burst in on them, mid-sentence: ‘… if you are reading me. Repeat, I need to know if you are reading me. I demand that you acknowledge me, bitch. I demand that you fucking acknowledge me!’
‘That’s him all right,’ Volyova said, speaking over the man’s voice. ‘I’d know that petulant tone anywhere. Better put him out of it. I presume we still don’t have a fix on him?’
‘Sorry. You’re going to have to address the colony as a whole and assume he has a means of reading you.’
‘I’m sure he won’t have neglected that detail.’ Volyova consulted her bracelet, observing that the ship could so far not disprove the hypothesis that the voice she was hearing belonged to Sylveste. There was room for error, since the Sylveste who had come aboard the ship once before was a much younger counterpart of the one they were now looking for, and so the voice match was not expected to be perfect. But even allowing for that, it looked increasingly likely that they had found him, and that this was not simply another hapless impersonator coming forward to ‘save’ the colony. ‘All right, patch me through. Sylveste? This is Volyova. Tell me if you’re hearing this.’
His voice was clearer now. ‘About fucking time.’
‘I think we’ll take that as a “yes”,’ Hegazi said.
‘We need to discuss the logistics of picking you up, and I believe it would be very much easier if we could do so on a secure channel. If you give me your current location, we can make a detailed sensor-sweep of that region and pick up your transmission at source, avoiding the relay at Cuvier.’
‘Now why would you need to do that? Is there something you want me to know that the colony as a whole can’t share?’ Sylveste paused, but Volyova mentally inserted a sneer at that point. ‘After all, you haven’t been slow in bringing them into it so far.’ Another pause. ‘Incidentally, it troubles me that I’m dealing with you and not Sajaki.’
‘He’s indisposed,’ Volyova said. ‘Give me your position.’
‘Sorry, but that isn’t possible.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
‘Why should I bother? You’re the ones with all the firepower. You figure out a solution.’
Hegazi waved his hand, signalling Volyova to cut the audio link. ‘Maybe he can’t reveal his position.’
‘Can’t?’
Hegazi tapped a steel forefinger against his steel-bridged nose.
‘His captors might not let him. They’re ready to let him go, but they don’t want to give up their position.’
Volyova nodded, admitting that Hegazi’s suggestion was probably close to the truth. She reinstated the link. ‘All right Sylveste. I think I understand your predicament. I propose the following compromise, assuming that you have the means to move around. Your — uh — hosts can doubtless arrange something at short notice, I presume?’
‘We have transportation, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘You have six more hours, in that case. Enough time to get to a location sufficiently far from where you are now that you won’t compromise it when you reveal your position. But if in six hours we don’t hear from you, we will bring forward the attack against the next target. Is that perfectly clear to all concerned?’
‘Oh yes,’ Sylveste said, tartly. ‘Perfectly clear.’
‘There’s one more thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Bring Calvin with you.’
SIXTEEN
Sylveste felt the aircraft haul itself aloft, at first moving horizontally to clear Mantell’s dugout hangar, then making rapid height and swerving to avoid dashing itself against the stacked strata of the adjacent mesa wall. He made himself a window, but the thickening dust allowed him only a glimpse of the base, the mesa in which it had been tunnelled falling away below the brilliant undercurve of the plasma-wing. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would not be returning. It was not just Mantell that he sensed he was seeing for the last time, but — and he could not have articulated exactly why — the colony itself.
The machine was the smallest and least valuable aircraft that the settlement could muster; barely larger than one of the volantors which he had flown in Chasm City a lifetime earlier. It was also fast enough to make that six hours of grace count; capable of putting a useful distance between itself and the mesa. The aircraft could have carried four, but only Sylveste and Pascale were riding it. Yet — insofar as their freedom of movement went — they were still Sluka’s captives. Her people had programmed the aircraft’s route before it left Mantell, and it would only deviate from that flight-plan if the autopilot judged that the weather conditions merited a different course. Unless ground conditions at the site became intolerable, it would deposit Sylveste and his wife at a pre-agreed location which had still not been revealed to Volyova and her crew. If conditions were bad, another site could be picked in the same area.
The plane would not linger at the delivery point. After Sylveste and Pascale had been let off — with enough provisions to survive in the storm for a few hours at most — the plane would return swiftly to Mantell, evading the few extant radar systems which could have alerted Resurgam City to its trajectory. Sylveste would then contact Volyova and inform her of his location, although, because he would then be broadcasting directly, she would have no difficulty triangulating his position. Thereafter things would be in Volyova’s hands. Sylveste had no real idea how events would proceed, how she would bring him aboard the ship. That was her problem, not his. All he knew was that it was very unlikely that this whole affair was a trap. Although the Ultras wanted access to Calvin, Calvin was essentially useless without Sylveste. They would want to take very good care of him indeed. And if the same logic did not automatically apply to Pascale, Sylveste had taken steps to amend that deficiency.
The aircraft levelled now. It was flying below the average height of the mesas, using their bulk for cover. Every few seconds it would veer, steering through the narrow, canyonlike corridors which spaced the mesas. Visibility was near zero. Sylveste hoped that the terrain map on which the plane was basing its manoeuvres had not been compromised by any recent landfalls, or else the ride would be very much shorter than the six hours Volyova had allocated.
‘Where the hell…’ Calvin, who had just appeared in the cabin, looked around frantically. He was, as usual, reclining in an enormous, fussily upholstered chair. There was not enough room for its bulk in the fuselage, so its extremities had to vanish awkwardly into the walls. ‘Where the hell am I? I’m not getting anything! What the hell’s happened? Tell me!’