‘You should be. How are you going to get me to fix the Captain now?’
‘With Calvin’s help, of course. Don’t you remember that I kept a back-up the last time you brought Cal aboard? Granted, it’s slightly out-of-date, but the surgical expertise is all there.’
It was a good bluff, Sylveste thought, but that was all it was. Still, there was a back-up, of sorts… or else he would never have destroyed the sim.
‘Talking of which… is the Captain so grievously unwell that he can’t meet me in person?’
‘You’ll meet him,’ Sajaki said. ‘All in good time.’
The other woman and Sajaki were removing scabs of damaged hide from Volyova’s suit, a process which resembled the shelling of a crab. Eventually Sajaki murmured something to the woman and they halted their work, evidently deciding that it was too delicate to be continued here. Presently a trio of servitors glided into the room. Two of the machines lifted Volyova between them and then left with her, accompanied by Sajaki and the woman. Sylveste had not seen her during his last visit aboard, but she seemed to have assumed a fairly elevated role in the ship’s hierarchy. The third servitor squatted down and observed Sylveste and Pascale with one sullen camera eye.
‘He didn’t even ask me to take off my mask and goggles,’ Sylveste said. ‘It’s like he hardly cares that he has me.’
Pascale nodded. She was fingering her clothes, seemingly convinced that the suit’s gel-air should have left some sticky residue behind on them. ‘Whatever happened down there must have thrown his plans completely. Maybe he’d be more triumphant if things had gone according to plan.’
‘Not Sajaki; triumphant just isn’t his style. But I’d at least have expected him to spend a few minutes gloating.’
‘Maybe the fact that you destroyed the sim…’
‘Yes; that’ll have thrown him.’ As he spoke, he did so in the knowledge that his words were almost certainly being recorded. ‘There may still be some residual functionality in the copy he made of Cal, even allowing for the self-destruct routines, though probably not enough for any kind of channelling, even with one-to-one neural congruency between sim and recipient.’ Sylveste found a pair of storage crates and moved them over to use for chairs. ‘I’m sure he already tried to run the sim in some poor fool’s body, though.’
‘And it must have failed.’
‘Messily, probably. He’s probably hoping now that I can work with the damaged copy without channelling; just relying on my knowledge of Cal’s instincts and methodologies.’
Pascale nodded. She was shrewd enough not to ask the obvious question: what kind of plan would Sajaki have if his own copy was too damaged even for that? Instead, she said, ‘Do you have any idea what happened down there?’
‘No — and I think Sajaki was telling the truth when he said the same thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to plan. Maybe some kind of power-struggle within the crew, acted out on the surface because whoever was involved never got a chance aboard.’ But while the idea sounded halfway plausible to him, that was as far as his thinking took him. Too much time had gone by, even within Sajaki’s reference frame, for Sylveste to trust his usually infallible processes of insight.
He would have to play things very carefully indeed until he understood the dynamics of the current crew. Assuming they gave him the luxury of time…
Pascale knelt down next to her husband. They had both removed their masks now, but only Pascale had removed her dust-goggles. ‘We’re in a lot of danger, aren’t we? If Sajaki decides he can’t use you…’
‘He’ll return us to the surface unharmed.’ Sylveste took Pascale’s hands. Ranks of empty suits towered around them, as if the two of them were unwanted despoilers in an Egyptian tomb and the suits were mummies. ‘Sajaki can’t ever rule out my being useful to him again, in the future.’
‘I hope you’re right… because that was quite a risk you took.’ She looked at him now with an expression he had rarely seen before. It was one of quiet, calm warning. ‘With my life as well.’
‘Sajaki isn’t my master. I just had to remind him of that; to let him know no matter how clever he gets, I’ll always be ahead of him.’
‘But he is your master now, don’t you understand? He may not have the sim, but he’s got you. That still puts him ahead in my book.’
Sylveste smiled and reached for an answer that was both true and exactly what Sajaki would expect of him. ‘But not as far as he thinks.’
Sajaki and the other woman came back less than an hour later, accompanied by a huge chimeric. Sylveste recognised the man from his previous trip aboard as Triumvir Hegazi, but only just. Hegazi had always been an extreme example of his kind — almost as comprehensively cyborgised as his Captain — but in the intervening time, Hegazi had further submerged his core humanity in machine supplements, exchanging various prosthetic parts for newer or more elegant substitutes, and had gained a whole new entourage of entoptics, most of which were designed to interact with the motion of his body parts, creating an off-spilling cascade of rainbow-coloured ghost limbs which lingered in the air for a second or so before fading. Sajaki wore unassuming shipboard clothes devoid of rank or ornamentation, emphasising the lightness of his build. But Sylveste was wise enough not to judge the man by his lack of bulk and absence of obvious weapons prosthetics. Machines undoubtedly seethed beneath his skin, giving him inhuman speed and strength. He was at least as dangerous as Hegazi and a good deal quicker, Sylveste knew.
‘I can’t exactly say it’s entirely a pleasure,’ Sylveste said, addressing Hegazi. ‘But I admit to experiencing a mild frisson of surprise at the fact that you haven’t imploded under the weight of your prosthetics, Triumvir.’
‘I suggest you take that as a compliment,’ Sajaki said to the other Triumvir. ‘It’s the closest you’ll get from Sylveste.’
Hegazi fingered the moustache which he still cultivated, despite the encroaching prosthetics which cased his skull.
‘Let’s see how witty he sounds when you’ve shown him the Captain, Sajaki-san. That’ll wipe the smile off his face.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Sajaki said. ‘And talking of faces, why don’t you show us a little more of yours, Dan?’ Sajaki fingered the haft of a gun resting in a hip-holster.
‘Gladly,’ Sylveste said. He reached up and pulled away the dust-goggles. He let them clatter to the floor, watching the expressions — or what passed for expressions — on the faces of the people who had taken him prisoner. For the first time they were seeing what had become of his eyes. Perhaps they knew already, but the shock of seeing Calvin’s handiwork could never be underestimated. His eyes were not sleek improvements on the originals, but brutalist substitutes which only approximated the functionality of the human eye. There were more sophisticated things in ancient medical textbooks… not far removed from wooden legs. ‘You knew that I lost my sight, of course?’ he said, examining each of them in turn with his blank, eyeless gaze. ‘It’s common knowledge on Resurgam… hardly even worth mentioning.’
‘What kind of resolution do you get out of those?’ Hegazi said, with what sounded like genuine interest. ‘I know they’re not completely state-of-the-art, but I bet you’ve got full EM sensitivity from the IR into the UV, right? Maybe even acoustic imaging? Got a zoom capability?’
Sylveste looked at Hegazi long and hard before answering. ‘You need to understand one thing, Triumvir. In the right light, when she’s not standing too far away, I can just about recognise my wife.’
‘That good…’ Hegazi kept looking at him, fascinated.