‘I don’t like it any more than you do,’ the Ultra said. ‘But you’d better believe me — for your sakes — that things are now very much under control. Now, I’m about to divert my attention to my wounded colleague. At this point I strongly recommend that you resist the temptation to do anything foolhardy. Not that the thought ever crossed your mind, eh, Dan?’
‘You know me better than that.’
‘The problem, Dan, is that I know you only too well. But let’s not dwell on the past.’
‘Let’s not.’
Sajaki moved over to the wounded one. Sylveste had known he was dealing with Triumvir Yuuji Sajaki even before the man had spoken. As soon as his suit hove into view, emerging from the storm, his faceplate had been rendered transparent, the man’s over-familiar features peering intently at the damage he surveyed. Although it was hard to tell, Sajaki looked largely unchanged from their last meeting. For him, only a few years of subjective time would have elapsed. Sylveste by contrast had squeezed the equivalent of two or three old-style human lives into that space. It was a dizzying moment.
But Sylveste could not establish the identities of the other two crew. There had been a third, of course… but he or she was now past the point at which he could ever hope to make acquaintance. And of the two who were not obviously dead, one was perhaps perilously close — this was the one now receiving Sajaki’s ministrations — and one was standing in what looked like shocked silence off to one side. Oddly, the uninjured one was keeping some suit weapons trained on Sylveste, even though he was unarmed and had no intention — no intention whatsoever — of resisting capture.
‘She’ll live,’ Sajaki said, after a moment in which his suit must have communed with the suit of the fallen one. ‘But we need to get her back to the ship fast. Then we can find out what actually happened down here.’
‘It was Sudjic,’ said a voice Sylveste didn’t know; female. ‘Sudjic tried to kill Ilia.’
Then the wounded one was the bitch herself: Triumvir Ilia Volyova.
‘Sudjic?’ Sajaki said. For a moment the word hung between them, and it seemed as if Sajaki could not — or would not — accept what the other, nameless woman was saying. But then, after the wind had torn at them for several more seconds, he said the name again, only this time on a falling note of acceptance. ‘Sudjic. Yes, it would make sense.’
‘I think she planned—’
‘You can tell me later, Khouri,’ Sajaki said. ‘There’ll be plenty of time — and your role in the incident of course will have to be explained to my total satisfaction. But for now we should deal with priorities.’ He nodded down at the injured Volyova. ‘Her suit will keep her alive for a few more hours, but it isn’t capable of reaching the ship.’
‘I take it,’ Sylveste said, ‘that you envisaged a way of getting us off the planet?’
‘A word of advice,’ Sajaki said. ‘Don’t irritate me too much, Dan. I’ve expended a considerable amount of trouble in getting you. But don’t imagine I wouldn’t stretch to killing you just to see how it feels.’
Sylveste had expected something like that from Sajaki — he would have been more worried if the man had said something dissimilar, downplaying the act of finding him. But if Sajaki believed a word of what he said — which was doubtful — then he was a fool. He had come from at least as far away as the Yellowstone system, perhaps even further, in his quest for Sylveste. No guessing what the human costs of it had actually been; quite aside from the sheer number of years which had been consumed.
‘Good for you,’ Sylveste said, injecting as much insincerity into his voice as he could muster. ‘But as a scientific man you must respect my impulse to experiment; to determine the limits of your tolerance.’ He whipped his arm out from under his windcloak, holding something tightly between two fingers of his gloved hand. He had almost expected the one with the guns to fire at him at that point, thinking that he was drawing a weapon. It was, he considered, a reasonable risk to take. But he had not produced a gun. What he held was a smallish sliver of quantum-state memory.
‘You see this?’ he said. ‘This is what you asked me to bring. Calvin’s beta-level simulation. You need it, don’t you? You need it very badly.’
Sajaki watched him without a word.
‘Well fuck you,’ Sylveste said, crushing the simulation, until its dust was blown away into the storm.
EIGHTEEN
They lifted from Resurgam, quickly lancing into the clear skies above the storm. Eventually there was something above Sylveste, small at first and really only visible because it occasionally occluded the stars behind it. It looked no larger than a sliver of coal, but it kept on growing, until its roughly conical shape became obvious, and what had at first seemed like a silhouette of total blackness began to show faint details within its own shape, gloomily underlit by the world around which it was orbiting. The lighthugger grew until it seemed impossibly large, blocking half the sky, and then kept on growing. The ship had not changed greatly since his last trip aboard. Sylveste knew — without being much impressed by the fact — that ships like this were always redesigning themselves, although the changes would usually be subtle modifications of the interior, rather than radical overhauls of the exterior layout (although that did happen as well, perhaps once every century or two). For a moment he worried that it might now lack the capability he wished — but then he remembered what the ship had done to Phoenix. It was hard to forget, in truth, since the evidence of that attack was still glaringly visible below him; a lotus-bloom of grey destruction set into the face of Resurgam.
A door had opened in the dark hull of the ship. The door looked far too small to accept even one of the suited, let alone all of them, but as they neared it became obvious that the door was tens of metres wide and would admit them all with ease. Sylveste, his wife and the other two Ultras from the ship, one of whom held the wounded Volyova, vanished inside, and the door closed on them.
Sajaki brought them to a holding area where they sloughed the suits and breathed normally. There was a taste to the air which slammed him back to his last visit aboard. He had forgotten how the ship smelled.
‘You wait here,’ Sajaki said, while their suits tidied themselves up and moved to one wall. ‘I have to attend to my colleague.’
He knelt down and busied himself with Volyova’s armour. Sylveste toyed with the idea of telling Sajaki not to expend too much effort in helping the other Triumvir, then decided that was possibly not the best course of action. He might have already pushed Sajaki to the edge of his patience when he crushed the Cal sim. ‘What exactly happened down there?’
‘I don’t know.’ That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed. ‘I don’t know and for the moment — for the moment — it doesn’t matter.’ He studied a readout in Volyova’s suit. ‘Her injuries, while serious, don’t seem to be fatal. Given time, she can be healed. Also, I now have you. Everything else is detail.’ Then he cocked his head towards the other woman, who had slipped out of her suit. ‘Still, something troubles me, Khouri…’
‘What?’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter… for the moment.’ He looked back at Sylveste. ‘Incidentally, that little trick you did with the sim — don’t imagine for one instant that I was impressed by that.’